Report reveals special counsel’s 8 “secret” court battles as Trump invokes “imagined privileges”

Special counsel Jack Smith is involved in at least eight secret court battles that could reveal details about former President Donald Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and his handling of classified material, according to documents reviewed by CNN.

The outcome can impact the law around the presidency, separation of powers and attorney-client confidentiality like it hasn’t before, CNN reported. But nearly all of the proceedings remain sealed.

This week, Smith invoked the so-called “crime-fraud exception” to compel Trump’s defense attorney Evan Corcoran to testify in the Justice Department’s classified documents investigation.

Prosecutors argue that Corcoran is not protected by attorney-client privilege since the investigation found evidence of conversations that may have furthered or covered up a crime related to the Mar-a-Lago document boxes.

“Evidence of a crime”: Expert says special counsel filing shows Trump lawyer is “hostile witness”

Other subpoenaed witnesses like former Vice President Mike Pence may pose more challenges, raising questions about the protections around the vice presidency, CNN reported.

“I think we are in extraordinary times,” Neil Eggleston, a former White House counsel told CNN. “Part of it is I think President Trump continues to assert these theories long after they’ve been batted away by the court.”

Several cases are still ongoing in court, before D.C. Chief Judge Beryl Howell or in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Some of the other ongoing cases include an appeal “over whether former Pence chief counsel Greg Jacob and chief of staff Marc Short should have been forced to answer questions about Trump interactions around January 6,” CNN reported.

Both of them testified last July to a federal grand jury investigating the attack on the Capitol and refused to provide answers due to Trump’s attempted claims of confidentiality around the presidency.

However, court orders asked them to testify a second time in October and they both appeared a second time at the grand jury. The Trump team still filed an appeal of Howell’s decisions.

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“Trump and allies are asserting real and imagined privileges, making DOJ fight in court for the evidence,” wrote former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade. “This is why charging a former president takes so long. Just wish DOJ had started these battles sooner. Tick tock.”

After Rep. Scott Perry’s, R-Pa., cell phone was seized in August in regards to the Jan. 6 investigation, his lawyers challenged the DOJ’s ability to access data taken from the phone, citing protection around Congress under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause, according to CNN.

“Howell refused to keep the records from investigators, but an appeals court panel has blocked the DOJ from seeing the records so far, according to indications in the court record,” the report said.

The case is set for oral arguments on February 23 at the appeals court in Washington.

Howell also denied former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark’s attempt to keep a draft of his autobiography from investigators. The draft included his efforts at the DOJ on behalf of Trump before Jan. 6.

Media organizations like The New York Times and Politico are also trying to persuade Howell to release redacted versions of any sealed court fights related to the grand jury where Trump or others have tried to limit the investigation with claims of executive privilege, arguing there’s a “profound national interest” in those legal papers.

about the special counsel probe

Right-wing rings of power: The far-right’s bizarre obsession with Lord of the Rings

For most Lord of the Rings fans, hobbits are the portly little folk of Middle-earth who live in homes carved out of hillsides and spend quiet lives smoking pipe-weed, singing songs and drinking ale.

But some influential hard-right figures in our world see the lives of those endearing “halflings” — free from government intervention and overreach — as close to societal perfection.

Billionaire tech mogul and Trump’s early Silicon Valley ally Peter Thiel spent his teenage years reading and rereading The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy now lives on in his business empire decades later.

Thiel was so shaped by the vision of hobbit life that the Palo Alto offices of his multibillion dollar firm, Palantir Technologies, are informally known as “The Shire.” In Tolkien’s writings, the Shire is a countryside region inhabited by hobbits. Thiel’s version, however, lacks the grassy hills and hobbit holes that have charmed fans for generations.

Thiel’s Shire was Palantir’s brick and glass headquarters — at least until pressure from local activists helped convince the company to move its base of operations to an industrial complex in Colorado. While some of Palantir’s employees have referred to themselves as hobbits, their offices are actually populated by software engineers and machine learning researchers.

Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, is one of many prominent hard-right figures everywhere from Silicon Valley to the Italian political scene who have been profoundly affected by J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. Some such Tolkienites credit that fantasy world with helping to shape their understanding of our own.

It all raises a question: What do their interpretations of The Lord of the Rings and the rest of Tolkien’s legendarium say about them?

Palantir is one of Thiel’s six firms that pull extensively from Middle-earth geek-speak, with names like the demigod inspired Valar Ventures and the elven valley-themed Rivendell One LLC.

Palantir Technologies is named for Tolkien’s palantíri, indestructible “seeing stones” used for fortune telling and observing events across great distances in Middle-earth (palantir is the singular form of the word). Like those interconnected crystal balls, Thiel’s firm specializes in data mining and large-scale surveillance, so the name seems appropriate.

According to Andy Ellis, an information security expert and lifelong Tolkien fan, Palantir’s name may be apt, but it was “not well thought through.”

“I’ve always thought Palantir was the most foolish name for a company,” Ellis says.

In The Lord of the Rings, the palantíri corrupt nearly all who use them. When the good wizard Saruman uses one to spy on the peoples of Middle-earth, he is drawn in by its power and ensnared by the Dark Lord Sauron, who utilizes the seeing stone to get the once-wise man to serve him.

Users of Thiel’s Palantir technology have, critics allege, been similarly lured down a dark path. The company has been accused of facilitating the human rights abuses of some of its biggest clients. Amnesty International says that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used Palantir technology to track undocumented migrant workers in Mississippi and plan raids that led to the separation of children from their parents.

When Amnesty inquired about the company’s partnership with U.S. immigration authorities in 2020, Palantir’s director of privacy & civil liberties stated the way their products were used in immigration enforcement “raises legitimate and important questions for us about our complicity in activities that, while lawful, may nonetheless conflict with norms and values that many of us hold.”

Matt Mahmoudi, an adviser on artificial intelligence and human rights at Amnesty, says the surveillance firm’s projects cross moral lines.

“Palantir has been trying to convince people that they have a privacy and civil liberties council” that ensures the company doesn’t break the law, Mahmoudi says. “But that is not necessarily consistent with the safety and protection of human rights.”

According to Mahmoudi, the mass-surveillance projects that Palantir is involved in, and the lack of transparency surrounding those projects, represent “a slippery slope toward the erosion of basic freedoms.” Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.

The double-edged sword

Billionaire Palmer Luckey, founder of the virtual reality company Oculus (known for its headsets), named his defense company after a powerful artifact of Middle-earth: Andúril, a sword made from the shards of a weapon that defeated the Dark Lord.

In our world, the defense contractor Anduril is a very different military tool. The company, which Thiel’s Founders Fund invested in early on, builds artificial intelligence-focused defense technology and sells its products to government agencies like the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.

Under the Trump administration, the company began building surveillance towers along the Mexico-U.S. border that track undocumented immigrant crossings using object recognition. Computer scientists and human rights groups have accused virtual border wall projects like Anduril’s of increasing migrant death rates by pushing people toward less monitored, more hostile terrain.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection has described the towers as partners that never sleep or blink.

To Tolkien fans, that description might conjure up images of Sauron’s fiery, ocular watchtower rather than the weapon used to defeat his evil forces.

The gold standard

Admiration for Tolkien is more rule than exception in some influential parts of the tech industry according to Ellis, who works at the cloud-security firm Orca Security.

“Tolkien was one of the few things [early tech] geeks had in common growing up, so it was easy to make references to it,” Ellis says. The shared cultural language gave entrepreneurs a reservoir of references to bond over. It also allowed tech world-builders to piggyback off one of the English language’s most prolific world-builders.

For Thiel and Luckey, using Middle-earth terminology in their business dealings is not just some whimsical literary exercise. It is a nod to the libertarian philosophy they perceive in Tolkien’s world.

Patrick James is the author of The International Relations of Middle-earth, an analysis of real-world geopolitics through the lens of Lord of the Rings. Also a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, James says that nearly any ideological group can find something to latch onto in Tolkien’s works.

So, what do conservative libertarians find so appealing about Tolkien’s fantasy world?

“No government tells the free peoples [Elves, Men, Dwarves, and the sentient-tree people called Ents] what to do,” James says. “There really isn’t much government at all.” Instead of a bureaucratic committee, an independent coalition correctly decides to send a fellowship to destroy the One Ring and stop Sauron from establishing a dictatorship over Middle-earth.

Libertarians see that when crisis comes to Middle-earth, good people willingly share resources without explicit government mandates. Public investment largely goes toward defense, so when foreign hordes invade, there are usually enough swords and shields for willing fighters to take up arms against them. Charismatic leaders usually rise to the top thanks to their heroism and overcome immense hardship to fulfill their destinies.

This is, of course, a fantasy world where right and wrong are objective, there is little reference to any complex sexuality, and people hurt in battles either heal quickly or die fast.

In a 1943 letter to his son, Tolkien outlined his political opinions as leaning “more and more to Anarchy,” but emphasized he meant — “abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs.”

While the limited government of Tolkien’s Anarchy seems in line with what many modern libertarians say they support, the Anarchism of Tolkien’s era is a far cry — and 80 years — from Thiel and Luckey’s libertarianism.

Thiel and Luckey seem primarily interested in reducing the tax-collecting capacity of government. Their political contributions and lobbying show that they fund candidates for political office who increase government control over citizens’ personal lives (and bodies). Thiel and Luckey have donated to political candidates who merge Christianity with nationalism, and seek to ban abortion entirely, as well as undermining democracy by falsely claiming that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

Tolkien’s writings do not address those issues, nor do they explore the opposition to economic regulation backed by his conservative fans.

“Where is the economics in Middle-earth?” James asks. There is no Wizard Stock Exchange or Elf supply chain outlined in Lord of the Rings.

Take the Dwarves. Their economy seems to be based around the mining of precious resources. They delve deeper and deeper into the bowels of mountains, until they are punished for their ambition and greed by monstrous forces they awaken.

Dwarf commerce and the exchange of gold and silver coins are as close as Tolkien gets to fleshing out his fantasy world’s economics. And in the Shire, Hobbits “have something that doesn’t even really look like capitalism. They don’t seem to have any sort of economy set up,” James says.

Make the shire great again

Free-market hardliners aren’t the only conservatives with deep admiration for Middle-earth.

Italy’s recently elected hard-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni may be the most devout Tolkienite to ever hold elected office. As a teenager in 1993, Meloni spent time at “Camp Hobbit,” an Italian political fantasy retreat for the country’s far right. On her personal webpage from the ’90s, she called herself Khy-ri the Undernet Dragon and wrote that Lord of the Rings is “of course,” her favorite book.

So, what might a politician who has praised Italy’s World War II-era fascist leader and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini find appealing about a trilogy that offers a searing critique of authoritarianism?

In a conversation with the New York Times last year, Meloni outlined what she sees as antiglobalization messages in Lord of the Rings. Meloni pointed to the fact that each of Tolkien’s races benefit from the “value of specificity,” meaning they had particular cultures and identities that were worth preserving. She extended the same logic to the people of Europe’s sovereign nations. Italians — like hobbits and Elves and Dwarves — are unique and should protect against anything that threatens their identity, she suggests.

James points to another plotline from which Meloni may have taken inspiration. At the end of the trilogy, the quartet of hobbits from the Fellowship return to the Shire to find their idyll overrun by Saruman and his henchmen, who have turned the once-bucolic countryside into an industrialized wasteland and enslaved its residents.

“To someone like Meloni with a romanticized sense of the past,” James says, “it’s easy to say ‘Look at The Lord of the Rings — it was so much better once upon a time. Rapid changes came, others began intruding, and everything got worse.'”

Meloni is the most visible representative of a post-fascist culture whose unifying mythology draws on Tolkien. After the collapse of Mussolini’s government, the remaining fascist movement shifted away from revering strongmen and toward idealizing “the little guy in his rural old-fashioned shire assailed by a vast but faceless far off industrialized evil force,” Mussolini biographer Nicholas Farrell wrote in The Spectator early last year.

For Meloni, the creator of Middle-earth is a genuine traditionalist icon. “I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” Meloni asserted to the Times.

Woke Tolkien?

Tolkien’s politics were at times aligned with those of today’s right wing, but he was born in 1892, and the forces that forged his worldview were radically different from those that shaped the perspective of anyone alive today. Two world wars and industrialization marked him. He lived in a pre-globalized and far less cosmopolitan era than our own.

At Tolkien’s time, Middle-earth offered somewhat forward thinking portrayals of some topics that even today might be mocked as “woke.”

More than a decade before the U.S. Supreme Court enshrined the right to interracial marriage, Tolkien portrayed taboo-breaking relationships between different races in his books. A subversion of gender roles and even cross-dressing made the tide-turning heroism of one woman possible.

As for the hobbits at the center of the story, they are underestimated due partly to their physical attributes — they are less than four feet tall with large and hairy feet — but end up playing crucial roles in defeating evil in a rebuke of what today might be called ableism. There are also plenty of messages about destroying nature at one’s peril in Tolkien’s works, such as the deforestation of important woodland.

Still, Tolkien didn’t intend to explicitly inject his politics into Middle-earth. In a forward written for the 1965 republication of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote: “As for any inner meaning or ‘message,’ it has in the intention of the author none.”

He continued: “The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them.”

Thiel, Luckey and Meloni were clearly moved by Lord of the Rings — moved to the far right. Their interpretations of the text do not reveal a right-wing underbelly to Middle-earth, but they might highlight the vast chasm between what is in front of them and what they want that world to be.

As James puts it, “The amazing thing is that what you see in Lord of the Rings says more about you than it does about the storyline.”

“Stunning”: Reporters who uncovered Matt Gaetz evidence baffled after DOJ drops sex trafficking case

Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., will not be charged in connection with a federal sex trafficking investigation, according to lawyers involved in the case.

Gaetz’s attorney Isabelle Kirshner shared in a statement with CNN and The Daily Beast that the Justice Department informed them of their decision on Wednesday.

“We have just spoken with the DOJ and have been informed that they have concluded their investigation into Congressman Gaetz and allegations related to sex trafficking and obstruction of justice and they have determined not to bring any charges against him,” wrote Kirshner.

The Justice Department initially relied on the testimony of Gaetz’s friend Joel Greenberg, a local Florida tax official who was charged with corruption but agreed to be a cooperating witness in the case.

“Cold feet”: Court filing slams DOJ for sitting on “a mountain of evidence” in Gaetz sex crime probe

As the investigation continued, federal officials found evidence that Gaetz regularly sought out young women for sex, which made their final decision not to press charges frustrating for Greenberg and his lawyer, Fritz Scheller.

“While the decision is troubling, it’s not surprising. After so many years of defense practice, I’ve slowly come to the realization that our country has a two-tier system of justice,” Scheller told The Daily Beast. “To be fair, why expend resources prosecuting the privileged, when there’s undoubtedly a minority out there with a small amount of pot?”

The investigation into Gaetz came after allegations emerged that the congressman had sex with a 17-year-old girl. The Justice Department investigated whether Gaetz had paid or illegally trafficked the girl to have sex. His ex-girlfriend was granted immunity last year for testifying in front of a federal grand jury.

Gaetz denied all the allegations against him, despite Greenberg, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for sex trafficking, sharing a confession letter in 2021 that said he and Gaetz paid to have sex with multiple women including the 17-year-old girl.

The federal probe into the Florida lawmaker began in March 2021, but during the Jan. 6 investigation, details emerged that Gaetz asked multiple aides of former President Donald Trump to issue him a preemptive pardon before the DOJ even launched an official investigation into him.

Trump aide Johnny McEntee testified that Gaetz told him that he didn’t do anything wrong, but “they” were trying to make his life “hell.”

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After the New York Times broke the news that Gaetz was under investigation in 2021, The Daily Beast revealed key evidence supporting the case, including sources who were familiar with the operation describing how Greenberg was a “fixer” for Gaetz.

Other details emerged including private Venmo transactions that showed Gaetz sent Greenberg $900 late one night in May 2018. The next morning, Greenberg sent the exact same amount of money to three young women. In the years when the two men were close, Greenberg sent more than 150 Venmo payments to dozens of young women — including a girl whom Gaetz named in a private message that was just 17 at the time.

Greenberg’s confession letter also detailed the instances in which Gaetz asked him to help him find college students to sleep with, including the underage girl who was at the center of the federal investigation.

“On more than one occasion, this individual was involved in sexual activities with several of the other girls, the congressman from Florida’s 1st Congressional District and myself,” Greenberg wrote in the letter obtained by the Daily Beast, referencing the 17-year-old girl.

“From time to time, gas money or gifts, rent or partial tuition payments were made to several of these girls, including the individual who was not yet 18,” he wrote. “I did see the acts occur firsthand and Venmo transactions, Cash App or other payments were made to these girls on behalf of the Congressman.”

Jose Pagliery, a political investigations reporter for the Daily Beast expressed his frustration with the Justice Department’s decision on Twitter.

“Feds had a confession letter. Private Venmos. Uber receipts. Flight records. Yet they still won’t prosecute Congressman Matt Gaetz,” he wrote. “This is all the more stunning, because [Roger Sollenberger] & I were the ones who exposed the evidence.”

Feds had a confession letter. Private Venmos. Uber receipts. Flight records.

Yet they still won't prosecute Congressman Matt Gaetz.

This is all the more stunning, because @SollenbergerRC & I were the ones who exposed the evidence for @thedailybeast:https://t.co/JqortIYMme

— Jose Pagliery (@Jose_Pagliery) February 15, 2023

It was also reported that Gaetz did cocaine with an escort at a party, a young woman who had a no-show job at a Florida county office at the expense of taxpayers. Another event that was central to the investigation was a 2018 trip to the Bahamas during which Gaetz and his friend spent time with young women, including the underage girl, and allegedly paid for sex. Greenberg was not present at the trip, but Florida state Rep. Halsey Beshears was.

Considering the amount of evidence mounted against Gaetz, Greenberg’s lawyer said he was frustrated that the DOJ dropped the case. “You’ve got multiple witnesses. You’ve got Venmos. You’ve got Uber receipts. You’ve got flight receipts and text messages,” Scheller told The Daily Beast.

Matt Fuller, the Washington Bureau Chief for the outlet, shared his reaction to the decision not to press charges. “I’ve seen just a fraction of the evidence that the DOJ has seen,” he wrote on Twitter. “Truly difficult to comprehend this decision.”

I’ve seen just a fraction of the evidence that the DOJ has seen.

Truly difficult to comprehend this decision. https://t.co/AamEDrstNN

— Matt Fuller (@MEPFuller) February 15, 2023

In August, people familiar with the investigation were told that the feds would be continuing their investigation into Gaetz. However, last fall, several outlets reported that prosecutors recommended against charging Gaetz as the two central witnesses in the case — Greenberg and the 17-year-old girl — were not perceived to be credible. The New York Times reported that the girl “has said she does not believe she was a victim,” which would introduce issues in court.

Roger Sollenberger, a politics reporter at The Daily Beast (formerly at Salon), shared on Twitter that the decision not to charge Gaetz was “remarkable” considering the evidence their team obtained over the years.

“We revealed a whole lot of evidence against Gaetz, including Venmos & a pardon letter Greenberg wrote to Donald Trump directly implicating Gaetz. DOJ also seized his phone in its obstruction probe, but declined to bring charges, reportedly citing possibly problematic witnesses,” he wrote. “Given what we’ve seen, the decision not to charge Gaetz seems pretty f**king remarkable.”

Given what we've seen, the decision not to charge Gaetz seems pretty fucking remarkable. Last month, The New York Times reported that the then 17-year-old at the center of the case—perhaps the most crucial witness against him—“has said she does not believe she was a victim.”

— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) February 15, 2023

about Matt Gaetz

“That’s where I draw the line”: David Cross has words for comics who moan about cancel culture

David Cross, the Emmy Award-winning comedian and “Arrested Development” actor, wants you to know that he’s the “Worst Daddy in the World.” That’s the name of his new national comedy tour that kicks off in March and spans the nation. As we discuss on our “Salon Talks” episode, Cross notes jokingly that he earned the title of “worst daddy” from a small subcommittee of experts who meet in Oslo, after being nominated for the award by his young daughter.

Cross shares that his true passion is stand-up comedy. “Nothing would be as devastating as not being able to do stand-up.” Being on a stage allows him full artistic control, without “notes” from TV executives.

But close connection with the people also comes with a sense of responsibility. Cross candidly shares how when people have raised concerns about material that they found offensive at his past shows, there are times that his attitude was,”F**k that. I’m not changing it, they’re not getting it.” But, then admits to moments when fans have changed his mind. “This really doesn’t happen that often, but I saw her side to it and I saw how it could be offensive.” Cross then dropped that line from his act.

Not all comedians see their art in this way, but Cross believes that comedy can be a vehicle for change. In fact, 10 years ago I interviewed Cross, a well-known atheist, with my co-director Negin Farsad for a comedy documentary we were making titled, “The Muslims are Coming!” designed to use comedy to counter anti-Muslim bigotry. Cross explains he agreed to be in that film because regardless of how he felt about religion, “You have a right in America to practice what you believe as long as you’re not hurting anybody else.”

This tour — which will be a mix of material about everything from family to politics — also has an activist bent in that a portion of ticket sales will be donated to The Innocence Project, which works to free wrongfully convicted people. Watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Cross here or read a Q&A of the conversation below.

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

David, it’s good to see you my friend. How are you? I haven’t seen you in 10 years since I interviewed you in your laundry room. Good to see you.

Yeah, you too. I think I’m going to guess my clothes are done now, by now. I should really head to the dryer. I don’t want to get too wrinkled.

The title of your tour, which starts in March, is “Worst Daddy in the World.” How did you earn that? Was there voting? Did your daughter choose it?

“There’s certainly not a subject matter I won’t talk about.”

Oh yeah, there was the subcommittee, which is done out of Oslo in Norway and they meet quarterly and they just go through everything and then FiveThirtyEight has something to do with it. I know they’re involved. But yeah, it was submitted by my daughter, and it went through all the levels you have to go through, and then I emerged on top.

Well congratulations my friend. Because I know it was close.

A lot of dads who murdered their children, and I was up against them, and somehow without any of that, I managed to eke out the top spot. I mean the final judge and arbiter is my daughter.

David Cross can guess “95%” what kind of David Cross fan you are just by looking at you

How has having a daughter impacted you from a creative point of view? I imagine you talk about her on this tour.

Just so everyone’s clear, it’s not an hour of me talking about my daughter. I would say that encompasses maybe 25% of the set. I also use that to segue into other topics that have nothing to do with her or even raising a kid. It’s part of my life and there’s an endless well of comedy there.

I also am very, very, very hypersensitive to the set feeling like one thing, and I’ve never really done that. I try to embrace a bunch of different types of comedy, types of humor. Some more pointed, some just really goofy and some anecdotal, and I’ve done that again.

So your daughter was born in 2017. I’m not great with math, but I guess that makes her 15. Does she understand what you do?

You are really bad at math. That’s really phenomenally bad. She’s actually been on stage with me. Two tours ago she popped up there. But no, she just knows, as she understands it, daddy tells jokes but she doesn’t know what that means really. She doesn’t have a sense of the performance part of it, she just knows – whereas other kids in her class, “My daddy works in construction, my daddy works for the housing authority. My daddy works as a lawyer” – hers is, “My daddy tells jokes.”

I have nieces and I remember when one of them was like seven or eight and watched me doing stand-up online, and she said to me, “You talk and when you stop talking, people laugh.” That’s how she explained it to me. And I go, “You’re absolutely right. That’s the goal.” I stop talking. People laugh. That’s all she understood. Now they’re older, they sort of get it.

Part of your proceeds from your tour are going to go to the Innocence Project. So while you’re the worst dad, you’re a good person. Tell us why the Innocence Project. What attracted you there? They do great work preventing wrongful convictions and fighting for a fair and compassionate justice system.

Yeah, well that’s it. You’re talking about the innocent people who have been victimized by corrupt people, whether they’re the cops or lawyers or a negligent judicial authority. I mean, I can’t imagine the horror of that, of being innocent and being imprisoned in this country especially and then being lost and just screaming into the void. And so they do very good work and their work will never be done. And anything I can do to help, I will do.

Of course the flip side of injustice is that Donald Trump attempted a coup and incited a terrorist attack over two years ago, and he hasn’t been charged with anything. While people of color who’ve done just about nothing are sitting in a prison cell.

Well a lot of the police have a quota to fill, and if they want to get the free headphones they get at the end of the month for putting enough people in jail, they’ve got to put people in jail. That’s how it works. It’s a capitalist society, and that includes the police and all our authority figures. They also work within a capitalist system.

What’s your reaction to watching Republicans impose their religion as law to ban women from having reproductive freedom at day one of conception? We have 13 states right now where abortion is banned day one of conception with no exception, not rape or incest, the only one is emergency, which isn’t life of the mother, it’s not a life of the woman. It’s literally some undefined emergency. Look, I’m a person of faith. I don’t want my religion imposed as law in this land. What is your reaction as an atheist to what’s going on?

I do mind religion imposed as law. I have a big problem with that, especially under what we all understand, what we grew up to understand was the auspices of the American government and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and all that. And there is the First Amendment, very First Amendment states a separation of church and state, which is important. It was important to the Founding Fathers. I think it’s a smart thing.

I don’t want to live in a Christian theocracy or a Muslim theocracy or any theocracy. I’ll move if it comes to that. And I’m not saying that everybody needs to be atheist. You do what you want to do. Just don’t impose your superstitions on me, what to me is obviously made-up. Please don’t impose that on me.

When you watch news stories about this and consider that the Democrats are timid in saying, “Look, you’re trying to turn your religion into law,” – I don’t hear them saying it like that. I think they don’t want to offend people of faith. Is that dangerous that they don’t call out for what it really is at religious tyranny?

“It’s a capitalist society and that includes the police and all our authority figures.”

Yeah. Look where we are. Talk about your slippery slope that hasn’t leveled out yet. There are people who are, politicians are, almost all of them I feel on either side of the aisle are duplicitous and they have to be by nature.

They want to stay in power. I’m not just their constituency, they’re everybody. So they have to, and have to be disingenuous sometimes to what you believe. And that’s unfortunate. And there’s a handful of people who are like, “This is who I am. This is who you’re electing because I would stand up for this” who are less concerned with getting elected again in two years. And people in the media as well. I mean over the last at least decade, the loss of local newspapers, which range in the thousands, have been a devastating blow. The information you’re getting is filtered through so many biases. And again, it’s capitalism.

I couldn’t agree with you more, especially about local media. It’s something that I’ve written about. The media consolidation actually contributed in a way to George Santos going unvetted in Long Island because Newsday, the big paper out there, is gutted. The little paper found it, but no one picked it up after that.

Look at what’s going on at CNN. It’s just naked capitalism where they’re saying, “OK, we need to appear less biased towards the left.” Which is a joke. I mean they’ve never been. They’ve done a great job, and other people have done a great job, of framing them as some sort of liberal left thing when they’re not even – they weren’t like that 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago. They’re certainly not like that now. The center isn’t a true center.

You’ll see people in the media say things, “Americans don’t want this big liberalism.” And then you go through issue after issue like, “Healthcare for all.” Majority of Americans want it. Free universal pre-K funded by the federal government. Very, very popular. The idea of expending Medicare to include more benefits for our seniors, wildly popular. Medicare itself, social security, wildly popular, all at their essence. You want to argue socialism or not, but it is taking money from others and sharing with other people in this country.

You don’t have to argue it. It’s a definition. A universally understood definition. There’s nothing to argue. You can argue whether you like it or not, but that’s what it is.

It’s also funny how when someone like, let’s say Bernie Sanders, will be called inauthentic. He is authentic. He said the same message for decades. You can’t hit more honest than that. But that should be the standard for everyone. It should be like, “That one guy’s not authentic.” Not the reverse like, “Wow. Someone’s authentic finally.”

Yeah, I agree.

Last year, our mutual friend comedian Lizz Winstead put together a fundraiser in New York for her organization, Abortion Access Front, to raise more awareness before Roe v. Wade got overturned. Are we delusional to think that comedy can change things? Do you think it can change cultural norms, at least contribute to it?

Yeah, I mean ask Jonathan Swift and Voltaire that same question. Of course it can. It can, it does and continues to do so and will. Absolutely. Even if it doesn’t, somebody says a joke, and then 24 hours later everything is good again. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s still contributing in a small way to what the tipping points are and what is allowed and what isn’t allowed. Of course it can be educational too. It can be edifying.

In your last special, “I’m From the Future,” you opened with jokes about people who didn’t want to get a vaccine, and they invoke the Holocaust. But you began with essentially invoking the Holocaust. And later in your special, you talked about people who won’t do COVID safeguards and vaccination, you joke wishing them dead. Which it was a very funny joke, if you watch it. I’m not doing it justice by just saying that’s the end of it. If you watch it, there’s a sense of discomfort, too. The audience is on your side. Do you enjoy making people a little uncomfortable at raising these bigger issues?

“Jokes that hurt people who are victimized, that’s where I draw the line.”

Again, I want to stress that that’s not the entirety of the set. There’s a lot of silly in there, and it’s not an hour of hard stuff and confrontational stuff. There are points that I’ve done in every special I’ve done. If I’m making people uncomfortable, it’s basically through a hard truth or the hypocrisy or absurdity of a thing that exists in a way we might feel about things. The thing about it’s OK to wish them dead has an immediate follow-up that deflates that idea somewhat. If I had just said that, that’s not very funny and it’s more of just a shock thing to say, but I don’t. I continue with that going down a logical path that not necessarily softens the idea of wishing them dead, but puts into a different context.

Are there times you’re writing a joke and you’re like, “This is just too sensitive for too many people, just can’t do it.” Have you ever done that or you don’t care?

There’s certainly some jokes I might either say or laugh at when I’m amongst friends in a private setting – if we’re at a bar and somebody comes up with something, and I know the context and they know the context. Jokes that hurt people who are victimized, that’s where I draw the line.

I don’t have many, there’s a couple of jokes that I’ve done before where I look back at them going, “Ah, that’s really insensitive. I wish I hadn’t said it that way.” Or, “I wish I had qualified it in some way.” That can be seen as hurtful to, not necessarily individuals, but a group of people who are victimized in some way. So that’s kind of where I edit myself. But that’s it. I mean, don’t really . . . there’s certainly not a subject matter I won’t talk about.

Have your own fans come up after and they read something into it that you’ve never even thought about and they’re like, “That hurt me.” Or, “That troubled me?”

Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I was probably putting together the “I’m From the Future” set and working out material and I don’t know what the bit was. I know it was at somebody and I sat down, I talked to them and their partner, and we had a civil discussion about it, and I pushed back initially. I don’t remember what it was, it was something . . . It was where it was talking about the phrase, the N-word or something. And this woman was Black and her partner was not. But she explained why that upset her. I was kind of defending it and the idea behind it. We talked for a while and then ultimately, and this really doesn’t happen that often, but I saw her side to it and I saw how it could be offensive.

And also it was like, I’m going to undermine myself here, but it was also not that important. It was a throwaway line and it was like, “OK, I’ll lose it.” It’s easy. It’s easy to lose. It’s not a difficult thing to do. All the comics who b***h and moan about, “Hey, they’re trying to cancel me for this joke I made.” Most of the time it’s a nothing joke and it doesn’t matter. And now you are positioning yourself as this bulls**t voice of, “They’re not going to cancel me. You can’t silence me.” For what? Your dumb joke about trans people? Who gives a s**t? I mean, is it that important to you? Just move on and not hurt hundreds of thousands of people. It’s a choice people make.

We went back and forth and at the end I was like, “OK.” And it doesn’t hurt me. Doesn’t affect me in any way to not do that line. I wish I could remember what it was, but I obviously had stopped doing it. I know it was for something to do with “I’m From the Future,” but I was like, “OK, there’s no reason to hurt.” And this wasn’t like some kind of like, “Oh, you hurt my feelings when you said.”

I do have a line where I’ll go, “I don’t care. You’re being oversensitive and you’re seeing this thing in it that does not exist. I’ve made my intent clear, and that’s on you.” So I do have my line. But this one didn’t come close to that. We had this long discussion. I was like, “OK, I understand. I get it. I get it now.” That doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s like now that I have that information and I can see her point of view, why would I continue to do it? Just to be some hero of free speech?

Dave Chappelle and the warped self-victimhood of transphobes

It’s interesting when comics will say, “I’m not changing my act.” Why don’t you just write some new jokes?

I’ve had many arguments where I’ve walked away going, “F**k that guy, or f**k her. F**k that. I’m not changing it, they’re not getting it. F**k that. I can’t make it any clearer.” And again, it was a civil discussion, and she was a fan, and it wasn’t like they came up and yelled at me. So we sat down – I remember it was at Union Hall in Brooklyn – and we went back upstairs, and they kind of waited to talk to me, and we talked, and then I was like, “All right, I see your point. I don’t have to do that.”

You’re going on tour starting March 2 in Portland, Oregon. There’s a bunch of cities, 40 cities through May.

There will be a second leg announced at some point too, including Europe and more Canadian dates. If you go to officialdavidcross.com my website has all the stuff on there and where I’m playing and where to get tickets and all that.

How much do you look forward to touring?

That’s the thing that I can’t do without. I’d be disappointed if I could never act again or write, sketch or long form. That’d be disappointing. But nothing would be as devastating as not being able to do stand-up for some reason. And that’s what “I’m From the Future” was about.

That was the longest I’d ever gone without doing stand-up since I started when I was 17, 18 years old because of COVID, there was nothing. There were these kind of outdoor shows, but they weren’t really good. I know people are doing Zoom things, but it was hard. It was difficult. And I even got a little emotional, the first set I did back, which I’ll never forget. I was at the Sultan Room in Bushwick and I started to get very emotional. It had been a year and seven months, I think.

And is your love of stand-up, is it the creative part? Is it the immediacy of their response, as opposed to a TV show or film? What is the passion that draws you?

Yeah, it’s all. It’s me, it’s just me. There’s nothing that has to go through, I don’t have to get notes. I’m not getting notes from anybody, from producers or the network or standards and practices or any of that stuff. It’s me. I love the immediacy of it, as you mentioned. I love the proximity of it. I like being on the stage and the people are right there. And it’s a connection you don’t have in any other setting and you can’t replicate it. There’s no way to replicate that feeling and that work.

I do enjoy it. I do love going out on the road. I don’t like the actual travel kind of grueling, that part is really s**tty and hard. But I love going to different places. I love that I’m going to go back to Omaha and I’ll be all over and I’ll get to go back to Dallas and just places I normally might not be in, but my stand-up takes me there, and I have really fun, memorable shows and you get to meet new people and I enjoy that part of it a lot.

Watch more

“Salon Talks” with comedians

How to prevent millions of violent bird deaths, caused by slamming into window panes

Anyone who has sat near a window may have experienced the startling moment when a bird smacks into it. Like the famous scene when a pelican’s crash startles a dentist into an inadvertent tooth-pull in “Finding Nemo,” it can seem cartoonishly silly when a gracefully soaring red-tailed hawk or empty-eyed dumpy pigeon abruptly stops and plops into a pane of glass. If the bird is lucky, it will wobble in the air for a few seconds before regaining its sense of avian dignity and flying off. Yet when the feathered navigator is less fortunate, it flops to the ground — quite often, dead.

“We also know that not all birds that hit windows die… the survivors may be injured, perhaps even breaking a wing – and it’s likely that many of these individuals don’t survive for long, either dying from their injuries or taken by predators.”

“The U.S. has gone from approximately 10 billon to 7 billion birds in the past 50 years, which is approximately a 30% decline,” explains Dr. John Swaddle, a professor and faculty director at the Institute for Integrative Conservation at William & Mary. In an email to Salon, Swaddle added that hundreds of millions of birds die every year from window collisions.

However, there is a caveat: If you put decals and other conspicuous stickers outside of your windows, the birds are more likely to see the obstruction and therefore avoid it.

The key detail, according to a recent study published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PeerJ, is that the decals must be outside of your window. Never inside your window; always outside of your window.

Headbanging woodpeckers love what they do — and incredibly, haven’t evolved any protective head gear

“Double-glazed windows reflect and scatter a lot of light, especially when you view them from a slight angle, as a flying bird would do,” Swaddle told Salon. He is the corresponding author of a recent study which tried to figure out how this basic reality of physics impacts a bird’s experience as it flies near a standard window. For their experiment, researchers from William & Mary had zebra finches perform repeated and controlled flight trials near windows with film products either in the ultraviolet (shorter wavelength) range or orange (longer wavelength) range — namely, BirdShades film and Haverkamp film, respectively.

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“In our collision avoidance trials, BirdShades increased window avoidance by 47% and the Haverkamp increased avoidance by 39%,” the authors concluded. (The study received funding for its tests by BirdShades Innovation GmbH, although the researchers stipulate, “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”)

The authors emphatically added, “Neither product was effective when the films were applied to the internal surface of windows. Hence, it is imperative that installers apply these products to exterior surfaces of windows to render their protective benefits and reduce the risk of daytime window collision.”

“Installing window films to interior surface of double-glazed windows will rarely render any collision-reduction benefits and should be avoided in most situations.”

When breaking down the problem of avoiding window collisions from a bird’s point of view, Swaddle explained it is basic optics. “The glare and reflected imagery from the external surface of the glass is sufficient to obscure a film or decal (at least the ones we tested) that is stuck to the interior surface from being seen clearly,” he pointed out.

Dr. Christopher Elphick, an ornithologist at the University of Connecticut who was not involved in the study, wrote to Salon that the results are “very interesting” and was encouraged that they could spread awareness about a problem that kills hundreds of millions of birds every year.

“We know that flying into windows kills lots of birds,” Elphick observed. “Homeowners that are paying attention to the birds in their yards often report casualties lying below windows, although many will be hidden by vegetation or soon eaten by scavengers.” Even the birds that do not immediately die may still meet a grim fate.

“We also know that not all birds that hit windows die — often they can fly away immediately, and sometimes they just sit on the ground for a while, stunned, and then fly off,” Elphick explained. “Sometimes, though, the survivors may be injured, perhaps even breaking a wing – and it’s likely that many of these individuals don’t survive for long, either dying from their injuries or taken by predators.”

“What we need is heightened awareness that people can make a positive difference. This is a conservation problem that we can all help to solve.”

If you want to protect birds from easily avoidable deaths without buying window film products, there are other solutions. Swaddle wrote to Salon about “aesthetically pleasing fritted glass that could be installed in new construction and retrofits” and which are also bird-friendly. The American Bird Conservancy notes that screens can be helpful as well, not only by limiting reflectiveness but by providing birds with a cushion if they make impact. It is also possible to use everyday household objects to signal to birds that there are obstructions: Shutters, netting, duct tape, bits of string, colorful stickers, and paint can all be used to this effect.

Yet there is one point the authors of the study seemed unable to emphasize enough, and with good reason: “Installing window films to interior surface of double-glazed windows will rarely render any collision-reduction benefits and should be avoided in most situations.” Indeed, if anything, scientists will need to engage in much more experimentation with window collision testing so they can learn more about which protocols and products are actually best at protecting birds going forward.

“We found much lower estimates of effectiveness when testing for collision avoidance rather than in situations where collisions are forced,” the authors pointed out. “We speculate that many of the published estimates of the effectiveness of window films and decals that used forced collision paradigms render overestimates of how birds will avoid windows in more real-world settings.”

If there is any good news, it is that future birds like Nigel from “Finding Nemo” do not always have to smash into windows. Their plight is complicated, but it is not inherently intractable.

“What we need is heightened awareness that people can make a positive difference,” Swaddle told Salon. “This is a conservation problem that we can all help to solve.”

about birds

Governors say their national group is above partisan politics. It’s corporate sponsors say otherwise

When Gov. Phil Murphy got some pushback from NBC’s Chuck Todd on this past Sunday’s Meet the Press for the Governor’s enthusiastic description of himself as a “progressive” and a “cold blooded capitalist” the former Goldman Sachs executive doubled down.

TODD: You think progressives accept you as a progressive if you call yourself a cold-blooded capitalist?

MURPHY: I don’t know. I don’t mean this literally but I kind of don’t care. That’s who I am. And I would put up both our economic record and progressive record up against any other American state over the last five years.

Perhaps not having to run for re-election has Murphy feeling unfettered, no longer willing to throttle his inner Goldman Sachs world view. That certainly would explain his recent decision to end the New Jersey Corporate Business Tax Surcharge that exacted $600 million from the world’s biggest corporations like Amazon that realized hundreds of billions of dollars in COVID windfall profits.

“This is a tax cut for some of the biggest businesses in the world, plain and simple,” said Nicole Rodriguez, president of the New Jersey Policy Perspective, in a statement. “With corporate profits at record levels and millions of New Jersey families struggling to keep up with rising costs, this represents the absolute worst of trickle-down economics. To be clear, this would not benefit mom-and-pop businesses but corporations like Amazon and Walmart that make billions of dollars every year off the backs of low-paid workers.”

No pendulum swing

What Murphy’s back to business mentality appears to be discounting is just how distorted the American economy has become over the last three years and what that’s meant for tens of millions of American families on the wrong end of the massive wealth slide. And unlike with the tides, there doesn’t appear to be some planetary gravitational pull that’s going to move it back in the other direction.

The Council of Foreign Relations asserts that “income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising” with “large wealth and income gaps across racial groups, which many experts attribute to the country’s legacy of slavery and racist economic policies.”

According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a non-profit advocacy group, when the United States hit one million COVID-19 deaths, the wealth of America’s “cold-blooded” billionaires swelled to $1.7 trillion, a spike of 58 percent just over the first two years the pandemic.

“This troubling juxtaposition underscores the story of unequal loss and sacrifice during the worst pandemic in a century,” observes Inequality.org, an IPS publication. “While billionaires have seen their wealth surge,” millions had lost their livelihoods.

While Murphy’s self-description smacks of the salesman’s hyperbole aimed to connect emotionally to close the deal, it actually displays a complete disconnect with what low regard ‘cold blooded capitalism’ is held in right now. After a mass death event, driven in large measure by scarcity of masks, testing, healthcare workers and even healthcare access, there’s a growing sense it’s exactly Murphy’s brand of “cold blooded capitalism” that’s got the planet’s survival hanging by a thread.

And the hits keep on coming.

There’s the infant baby formula scarcity fiasco, which is ongoing. Then there was the recent near Bhopal like rail disaster in Ohio where a Norfolk Southern train with 150 cars in tow, derailed sparking a conflagration that inundated the area with toxic smoke requiring regional evacuation and air monitoring for carbon monoxide, oxygen hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen cyanide, phosgene, and hydrogen chloride.

Amidst the twisted wreckage of dozens of derailed freight and chemical tank cars the railroad initiated a control explosion followed by the draining of the unstable chemical tanker cars of their toxic cargo into the track bed. Now, after having been ordered to evacuate on penalty of arrest, residents are being told to head back home despite reports of a significant fish die-off and dead chickens in their yards.

Greed off the rails

While the official National Transportation Safety Board probe is underway, preliminary reports indicate the derailment and environmental catastrophe are a consequence of government regulators becoming captive to the industry they were entrusted to hold accountable. Whether it was the government’s not requiring the state-of-the-art braking systems for tanker cars or letting the railroad not classify the Ohio train as hazardous—even though it most certainly was.

“Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds.,” reports the Lever. “The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the ‘high-hazard’ classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

The Lever’s reporting continues. “Amid the lobbying blitz against stronger transportation safety regulations, Norfolk Southern paid executives millions and spent billions on stock buybacks — all while the company shed thousands of employees despite warnings that understaffing is intensifying safety risks. Norfolk Southern officials also fought off a shareholder initiative that could have required company executives to “assess, review, and mitigate risks of hazardous material transportation.”

What the baby formula supply crisis and the Ohio rail disaster have in common is that they are products of what happens when an economy has also become captive to monopoly. Whether it be the handful of baby formula makers or the seven Class One freight railroads, down from almost 50 in the 1980s’, these are the 21^st century trusts that use campaign cash to ward off ANY regulation.

Murphy, who was in Washington D.C. to preside over the winter meeting of the National Governors Association as its chairman, was on with the NGA’s vice chair Gov. Spencer Cox (R-Utah). The conceit of the segment was to portray the nation’s Governors as a more affable and practical species of politician than their beltway counterparts who just bicker and don’t govern.

Murphy contrasted the raucous heckling during President Biden’s State of the Union address with where, as Murphy described, mild-mannered and even keeled deliberation at the NGA.

“I wish the American people could have had a camera inside the National Governor’s meetings these past several days– completely at odds with that sort of craziness we saw Tuesday night, civility, respect, a thirst for common ground—acknowledging we are not going to agree on a whole long list of things but let’s find where we can agree,” Murphy said. “We are the ones that wake up with the responsibility for our residents, we balance the budgets, we run our states.”

Weaponizing migrants

Todd seemed to go along with the bi-partisan gubernatorial love fest and didn’t ask about why

if Governors were all so enamored of each other, did they weaponize undocumented asylum seekers by sending them several states away making them another Governor’s problem?

That’s something Tim Russert would have asked.

The segment ended with Cox lifting up several Republican Governors as potential 2024 Republican nominee Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), Gov. Chris Sununu (R-NH), as well as former Governors Asa Hutchinson (R-ARK) and Nicky Hailey (R-SC). “I prefer Governors, that’s an easy call for me—every day of the week,” Cox said. “I will take a President,” quipped Murphy.

Both Cox and Murphy suggested during their Meet the Press segment there was something inherently more productive going on with the NGA and our state governments than at the national level. Perhaps they want us to believe the states and the NGA are laboratories of innovation, because it’s bipartisan, above the fray of our corrupt national politics awash in corporate campaign donations.

While there’s been some in depth reporting on how the Republican Governors Association and Democrat Governors Association act as fronts for dark corporate money corrupting our politics, the NGA appears to have gotten much less scrutiny because of that bi-partisan cover story.

What a review of the NGA’s website and related IRS tax filings reveals is a non-profit network that solicits large donations from big corporations and gives them access to a national platform. Whether it be at the Platinum, Gold, Silver or Bronze level of support, so-called NGA Partners are given a prominent seat at the table.

On NGA’s related National Governors Association Center for Best Practices IRS 990s there are donations listed from individuals ranging from $2.82 million down to $420,000, with no name or address listed. In the 2018 IRS 990 the top NGA Center for Best Practices salary was $639,834 with an additional $42,825 in other compensation. (Emails and a call to the NGA were not returned.

Notorious labor law scofflaws like Amazon and Starbucks are listed as “partners” as well as behemoths from big pharma and big oil and of course Norfolk Southern that’s doing damage control in Ohio.

Oiling the works

“NGA Partners — founded in 1988 as the NGA Corporate Fellows Program — promotes the exchange of information between the private sector and governors and stimulates discussion on emerging trends and factors affecting both business and government,” the group’s website explains.” Working through NGA’s nonprofit arm, the NGA Center for Best Practices, the program generates a spirit of partnership through meaningful dialogue between leaders of the public and private sectors.”

“Collaboration with our private sector partners is invaluable in helping NGA provide governors with critical information and real-world solutions that work,” the NGA website proclaims. “Partner organizations and their executives are well positioned to contribute business expertise and policy perspectives as well as share state government success stories.”

And there’s more, so much more.

“The NGA Partners program brings the energy of NGA and our governors and their senior staff to your organization’s state government relations efforts. The NGA Partners program offers benefits that meet a variety of needs and delivers a strong return on your organization’s contribution with resources, engagement, collaboration, impact and value by connecting the top leaders and thinkers in public policy, business and innovation.”

Just what the likes of Amazon and Norfolk Southern need, more access.

“Criminal liability”: Meadows faces Jan.6 subpoena — expert says his defense is a “complete loser”

Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith’s team in connection to his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to CNN.

Meadows was served with a subpoena seeking documents and testimony related to Jan. 6 sometime last month, a source told the network. Smith also recently subpoenaed former Vice President Mike Pence.

Smith is investigating former President Donald Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack as well as his handling of classified documents after leaving office. Though the subpoena is related to Jan. 6, prosecutors may also be interested in interviewing Meadows in connection with the documents case since he was one of Trump’s designees to the National Archives and was involved in discussions about turning over government documents that were in the former president’s possession.

Meadows was on the infamous phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president demanded officials “find” enough votes to overturn his loss in the state. Meadows also visited the site of the state’s election audit.

Meadows repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate fringe voter fraud allegations and was involved in numerous discussions surrounding Trump’s efforts to block the certification of his loss on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Our last hope is Marshall Law!”: Leaked Mark Meadows texts reveal secret GOP Jan. 6 plotting

The subpoena could prompt a legal battle between Meadows and the Justice Department over executive privilege. Meadows previously cited executive privilege to fight a subpoena from a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton County investigating the post-election efforts. A judge ultimately ordered Meadows to testify because he is “material and necessary to the investigation.”

The executive privilege argument is a “complete loser, frivolous, and quick to be rejected,” predicted Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law.

“The court already ruled against senior Trump White House officials who tried this in fall 2022,” he tweeted, adding that the Supreme Court also previously rejected executive privilege claims in Trump’s 2022 bid to block National Archives records from going to the House Jan. 6 committee and against former President Richard Nixon in the Watergate case.

“Time to face the music and feel the heat,” tweeted former U.S. attorney Harry Litman, noting that Meadows is “arguably second in culpability” only to Trump.

Litman predicted that Meadows may push for immunity from the DOJ but risks facing criminal charges.

“Look for Meadows to hold out for immunity. But if his culpability is as extensive as it appears, DOJ would be very reticent. They would do it only if it were the only way to get to Trump,” Litman wrote.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, also predicted that Meadows’ executive privilege claim would fail, only leaving him with the option of testifying or invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

“Then Jack Smith must decide if he has enough to indict or whether he immunizes him in spite of his high-level… position and criminal liability,” Weissmann tweeted.

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Pence has also said he plans to challenge his subpoena from Smith, arguing that since he was acting as president of the Senate on Jan. 6, it is “unconstitutional” for the DOJ to subpoena him under the “speech or debate” clause, which protects members of Congress.

Pence said Wednesday that he also expects Trump to try to assert executive privilege to block his testimony.

“That’s not my fight. My fight is on the separation of powers,” Pence said.

Legal experts roundly predicted that Pence’s attempt to fight the subpoena would fail as well, though it could delay proceedings.

“It’s not going to work because there is no absolute speech or debate immunity for a vice president or anyone else from showing up and answering the kinds of questions we have here,” attorney Norm Eisen, who served as Democrats’ co-counsel in Trump’s first impeachment, told CNN. “There is no blanket immunity of this kind for a vice president under the Speech or Debate Clause. This will just prolong this investigation,” he added.

Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig said the latest moves are likely to add to the delays in the investigation while the subpoenas are being litigated and criticized Attorney General Merrick Garland for slow-walking the probe before he appointed Smith last year.

“Garland couldn’t have subpoenaed Mike Pence and Mark Meadows in, say, late 2021… why, exactly?” Honig tweeted. “Jack Smith has subpoenaed both, within weeks of starting. But he’s already way behind because of Garland’s delay.”

about the DOJ’s Jan. 6 probe

We went nuts over a balloon! Thank you for saving us, Rihanna

Scientists cannot explain human consciousness or how we got it.

That explains politics.

Some believe they understand it.

That explains religion.

Who the hell knows how we achieve consciousness?

That explains the rest of us.

We struggle to figure it all out, often with inadequate information and limited time to verify it. Some say the resulting cultural ennui from this predicament has given rise to the popularity of zombie movies, lack of sense of humor, bland pop music and politicians who lack bladder control. But enough about George Santos.

Dystopia seems to be our creative narrative for the future.

We can’t imagine a viable heaven, but we can sure imagine a livable hell. Ask anyone who has survived a mass shooting, a war, cancer, wildfires and a day covering Congress.

Perhaps people have trouble with the “pursuit” of utopia, because it is inconceivable to the human mind. On the one hand, we can see every day what our species, as the world’s apex predator, does to each other, our planet and other species of flora and fauna. We kill, hurt, poison and maim all of it — apparently unaware of the collective consequences we will all share. Some of us find amusement in the ride. Some of us make money from it.

Our biggest problem isn’t Trump or Biden: The media is disconnected from reality

We call ourselves Trumpers, Never-Trumpers, liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, moderates, socialists, racists, misogynists, mother-rapers, father-stabbers, mother-stabbers and father-rapers! There’s mean and nasty father-rapers sitting on the Group W bench. I’m not going to explain that. Just look it up. If you already get it: “You’re our boy.” Step right up, and we will pin a medal on you.

If our unexplained consciousness shows us anything, then it has to be that we are, as a species, entirely delusional about nearly everything we experience.

Nothing is more emblematic of our national delusion than our recent obsession with several things shot out of the sky by fighter jets over the past week. Some have taken joy in the spectacle and some are terrified, but corporate media is just happy to have product to sell. We can’t get enough.

It’s not aliens. It’s not the beginning of World War III (unless we’re really stupid). It’s not my son flying his toy drone.

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The first sighting was easy enough to explain. It was a Chinese spy balloon apparently launched from Hainan island off the South China coast. It was supposed to travel east, but veered northward — apparently, according to recent reports, after high winds aloft associated with a cold front pushed it off course. The U.S. military tracked it for days, and according to national security sources was able to “passively protect” the balloon from collecting any sensitive information as it passed over the U.S. heartland — including a rural area near Millersburg, Missouri, where my in-laws still have a farm. Maybe they got some good shots of the hay field. The alfalfa is spectacular — though not usually in February. Then the military shot the balloon down a few miles off the coast of South Carolina, and has been trying to recover and analyze the 200-foot balloon and its payload (described as the size of three city buses) ever since.

Shortly after that, we shot down three more “craft,” according to John Kirby, the National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications, who spent a long time in the White House briefing room last week answering questions about the incidents from reporters. “We will not dismiss as a possibility,” Kirby told us, that the so-called craft were of commercial origin or from research entities and were therefore “benign.” So maybe it was some kid’s toy drone.

At the end of the day, a huge international crisis began because of a mistake or a gust of wind, and it was exacerbated because of ongoing tensions between China and the U.S.. Some think the whole incident was taken to another level of stupidity by the subsequent shooting down of three unidentified objects that posed no threat to the U.S. or anyone else. Others in government have speculated that the smaller craft could have been sent to test NORAD’s ability to detect smaller objects.

No matter. The world went nuts. Republicans went nuts trying to capitalize on others who went nuts. The comments, many of them insipid and stupid, most inane and some comical, left me shaking my head. The frenzy, in retrospect, was a seminal moment that shows just how damn delusional we are — even as we remain nominally conscious.

The balloon frenzy, in retrospect, was a seminal moment, or at least should have been: It showed us how damn delusional we are, even as we remain nominally conscious.

Millions of people jumped to conclusions, declared themselves experts in downing high-altitude balloons or were too quick to blame Joe Biden for an overblown crisis that would’ve made a great plot point in “Seinfeld.” It was like accidentally tossing a Junior Mint into an open incision during an operation.

Of course others think we’re simply covering the whole thing up and aliens from outside our planet (you pick the point of origin) sent in these craft to test us out. Kirby emphatically threw cold water on that notion, telling the befuddled White House press corps there was no possibility these things were alien. Entire publications dedicated to reporting about potential alien incursions from other planets were quick to slam the “conspiracy” label on that, further muddying the waters.

If there are any aliens in the universe, then they must know by now there’s no intelligent life on this planet, so why bother testing us? And if there were aliens from another planet and we could identify and shoot down their craft with a 40-year-old jet fighter (the F-16 in the Lake Huron incident) then we really have little to worry about — except for those members of the Republican Party who would declare the intruders illegal aliens and demand they be deported so they couldn’t get free health care, unemployment, Social Security and Medicare, take away all our jobs and then vote Democrat in the next election.

Meanwhile, in China (remember China?), the government first denied the balloon existed, then shifted gears and apologized, saying it was a weather balloon. They finally settled on Donald Trump’s favorite tactic, deflection, turning the bad news around and accusing the U.S. of flying surveillance balloons over China. Mind you, none of those balloons (if they exist) have been shot down. Kirby denied that the U.S. has flown anything over Chinese airspace. International waters are another issue.

But by Tuesday the fever had broken — at least enough so that Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show could take up residence, center stage, in the three-ring circus of disharmony that captures most people’s attention. Getting into that ring seems to be the sole focus of attention whores in Congress. You know them as those who scream at the president and strut across the stage with their “Mean Girl” act, bragging about the need for more guns, or who sit in committee hearings making asses of themselves in short-sleeved shirts.

Soon enough, comments about the Chinese balloon and Rihanna from the more extreme members of Congress, with their cocaine eyes and speed-freak jive, will be little more than memes and fodder for banal talk shows. Real issues and critical thinking have about as much chance of surviving in today’s divisive public environment as flatulence in the wind.

Speaking of Ron DeSantis, that’s why many people speculate he will upend Donald Trump and claim the GOP nomination in 2024. In other words, some are betting Ron DeSantis is the flatulence that is actually a bowel movement. He keeps smelling bad and won’t go away, rather like Trump, but he’s a fresher squeeze of the cheeks. Into this open latrine of cesspool politics, former UN ambassador Nikki Haley has now tossed her political Medusa tentacles, hoping to make history as the first woman to become the Republican presidential nominee. She has a better chance of shooting down a high-altitude balloon with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

Several Republicans have told me proudly that Nikki Haley is the first woman of color to run for a major party’s presidential nomination. History is real, guys! Shirley Chisholm in 1972: Look her up.

But it’s no matter. Several Republicans have told me, history be damned, that Haley (who is Indian-American), is the first woman of color to run for president from a major political party. Hell, the GOP can’t even remember its own history. Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine was the first major-party female candidate way back in 1964, as a Republican. You know, in the days when the GOP embraced people who didn’t have a hooded white robe in their closet. In 1972, Rep. Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run as a Democrat and the first woman of color to run in a major party.

But the Republicans love a show, even a bad one, and they’re bound and determined to put one on from now until we enter the voting booth in 2024. Welcome to America Lite. It’s all performance art, at least until the next mass shooting, which no one in American leadership wants to tackle. We’re proud of our guns, or in the case of Rep. Steve Scalise, still fighting gun restrictions even after being seriously injured in a mass shooting.

A fanatic is someone who won’t change their mind and knows but one subject. (Apologies to Winston Churchill for that one.) The GOP knows no other subject. Republicans want power and they want it now. They have no idea what to do with it, other than swim in it the way Scrooge McDuck swims in a vault filled with money, but hey, they want it and want it bad.

They may be conscious, but barely so. Their desire for power has so corrupted them they can no longer feel empathy for other people — either out of ignorance or arrogance. Jennifer Rubin, the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” said on Mary Trump’s podcast this week that lacking empathy is a central problem for those who are conscious, but not conscious enough to know that short-sleeve shirts are a poor fashion choice. “That lack of empathy…. How do you make people care?” Rubin asked.

That is the only question that matters. How do we teach ourselves to care about one another? If you’re only conscious enough to try to remain center stage at all times, then you’ll never be conscious enough to understand empathy — and you don’t have to be a scientist, politician or cleric to understand that problem.

So while some of us wrestle with how our species became conscious, perhaps the rest of us should reconsider what we do with this amazing gift. Or we could just keep on making fun of George Santos.

from Brian Karem on life in a divided America

America’s most enduring myth

Tyre Nichols was killed by the Memphis police in early January. He was unarmed and innocent. They smashed him like a human pinata. His “crime”? Being Black in America and encountering this country’s police.

His family will always remember him. His friends and neighbors will always remember him. The Black community in Memphis will always remember him. Black America will remember him.

The police who brutally beat him will likely remember him as well.

But it has only been several weeks and (white) America has already forgotten Tyre Nichols.

How was Tyre Nichols (and all of the many other innocent Black and brown people who have been murdered by the country’s police and law enforcement) erased so quickly from the (white) public imagination?

Black people’s pain and suffering and death are background noise in America, a type of constant that at a certain point is no longer noticed. Moreover, Black people’s pain, suffering and trauma are a type of social glue that holds together this society.

Black people’s pain, suffering and trauma mark the boundaries of white and Black citizenship. It delineates who can be targeted for violence by the police with general impunity and who is largely protected from the grip of the state. In that way being Black in America means experiencing a type of existential dread, fear, and terror that white people, by definition, will never experience.

The complex simplicity of Black cops and white supremacy

There is an entire political, economic, and cultural machinery in America that is dedicated to laundering, almost quite literally, the reputations of the country’s police and law enforcement. The result— “copaganda” —is to make America’s police and other law enforcement immune as an institution from suffering any substantial and enduring negative consequences when they abuse the public, especially if the people who are being targeted are Black, brown, poor, mentally ill, immigrants, or members of other marginalized groups.

“Culture” consists of all the things that a people in a given society do without thinking or much reflection because it is deemed to be “normal”. In that framework, copaganda is a cultural force that is so omnipresent that most people in America can recite its elements without much effort.

The vast majority of police are good and hardworking and want to “protect and serve” the public.

It is only a few bad apples who abuse the public; most cops are good people.

Most police use violence as a last resort. If you just do what the police tell you then you will not be hurt or killed.

Being a police officer is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country.

In an April 2022 interview, criminology professor Alex Vitale, who is the author of The End of Policing, described the elements of copaganda as follows:

It takes different forms. The most extreme examples are the shows that have historically been essentially co-produced by police departments. This goes back to shows like “Dragnet” in the 1950s and “Adam 12” in the 1960s and ’70s. More recent examples are shows like “Cops” and “Live PD” that work directly with local police departments who also have veto authority over the content. These shows have been essential to producing certain kinds of narratives about the heroic nature of policing and the unquestionable need for policing in all its many forms.

The other distortion is a function of how the entertainment industry works more broadly. There the problem is more an issue of the need to produce weekly shows that are filled with action, adventure and mystery. That formula only works if there are lots of horrible, evil people out there for police to find every week. This distorts reality and creates a narrative where, “Oh my God, the world is so dangerous, and the police are out there catching all the bad guys and also bending and breaking the rules to do it.” If they have to rough some people up, if they have to intimidate people in interrogations, if they violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights, well, that’s just a cost of producing safety.

There is of course the news industry and the whole problem of “If it bleeds, it leads.” Local news has been particularly terrible in terms of crime coverage and exaggerating what is really happening in the community. National crime stories came to dominate local news, because they want some horrific crime to cover and there just weren’t any in their local coverage. Finally, the local news media treats the police as completely unassailable and as the font of all truth. By the time the real facts have come out, the media have moved on to the next set of horrors to cover and the public rarely gets the full story.

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During his recent State of the Union speech, President Biden channeled copaganda’s myths and tenets:

We all want the same thing.

Neighborhoods free of violence.

Law enforcement who earn the community’s trust.

Our children to come home safely.

Equal protection under the law; that’s the covenant we have with each other in America.

And we know police officers put their lives on the line every day, and we ask them to do too much.

To be counselors, social workers, psychologists; responding to drug overdoses, mental health crises, and more.

We ask too much of them.

I know most cops are good, decent people. They risk their lives every time they put on that shield.

But what happened to Tyre in Memphis happens too often.

We have to do better.

Give law enforcement the training they need, hold them to higher standards, and help them succeed in keeping everyone safe.

We also need more first responders and other professionals to address growing mental health and substance abuse challenges.

More resources to reduce violent crime and gun crime; more community intervention programs; more investments in housing, education, and job training.

All this can help prevent violence in the first place.

And when police officers or departments violate the public’s trust, we must hold them accountable.

This was a surreal moment that embodied the absurdities of justice and the color line in America. Tyre Nichols’ mother and stepfather were the personal guests of President Biden at the State of the Union address. Their son was killed by the very system whose tenets the president recited before the nation and the world as they sat there in the audience.

Black people’s pain, suffering and trauma mark the boundaries of white and Black citizenship.

In the last few decades, demands for “reform” have become the immediate talking point summoned up by the country’s political leaders and news media after a police officer kills (another) unarmed Black or brown person. The evidence shows, however, that the types of “reforms” given lip service by the country’s mainstream political leaders and other opinion leaders are ineffective at actually stopping police thuggery and brutality.

The Age of Obama forced new language into the American popular discourse. “Implicit bias” has become a catchall term for “racism” with its promise that racism and white supremacy and other related beliefs and values are mostly subconscious. The implication: if white people were just made aware of these biases, then “racism” would disappear from public and private life. Structural and institutional white supremacy and racism are the main impediments to Black and brown people’s equal life chances, happiness, and literal life and death existence in America. A focus on “implicit bias” is an easier solution – and a way for “diversity” and other consultants to make lots of money – than focusing on the far larger structures and institutions that do the real work of white supremacy and racism in American society and around the world.

The public’s – and the news media’s and pundit class’s — understanding of “implicit bias” and its implications are of course very superficial and mostly incorrect. Predictably, “implicit bias” training is now seen by many well-intentioned people as a way of stopping police thuggery and violence against Black and brown people.

Once again, the research shows that such training is ineffective. To that point, University of Washington St. Louis researchers on their following new findings:

“Our findings suggest that diversity training as it is currently practiced is unlikely to change police behavior,” said study lead author Calvin Lai, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

“Officers who took the training were more knowledgeable about bias and more motivated to address bias at work,” Lai said. “However, these effects were fleeting and appear to have little influence on actual policing behaviors just one month after the training session.”

Published Feb. 3 in the journal Psychological Science, the study evaluates the experiences of 3,764 police officers from departments across the nation who participated in one-day bias training sessions provided by the nonprofit Anti-Defamation League….

While the training produced an immediate and long-lasting understanding of bias, it delivered only a temporary bump in concerns about bias and in the motivation to use strategies to limit bias in law enforcement interactions.

“Educating about implicit bias was effective for durably raising awareness about the existence of subtle or implicit biases, but little else,” Lai said. “Our study indicates that the current generation of diversity training programs are effective at changing minds but less consistent at changing behavior.”

One of the bedrock claims of copaganda is that being a police officer is the most dangerous job in America. New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as compiled by the Agruss Law Firm, shows this, again, to be a lie. In reality, the most dangerous jobs in America are as follows:

1. Logging workers

– 82.2 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $46,330

2. Fishing and hunting workers

– 75.2 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $31,382

3. Roofers

– 59 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $47,110

4. Aircraft pilots and flight engineers

– 48.1 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $134,630

5. Structural iron and steel workers – 36.1 deaths per 100,000 workers

– 36.1 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $58,550

6. Driver/sales workers and truck drivers

– 28.8 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $36,660

7. Refuse and recyclable materials collectors

– 27.9 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $38,500

8. Underground mining machine operators

– 26.7 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $48,651

9. Helpers, construction trades

– 22.9 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $37,357

10. Electrical power-line installers and repairers

– 22 deaths per 100,000 workers

– Median salary – $78,310

America’s police suffer approximately 13 deaths per 100,000 workers. The median salary for a police officer in 2020 was approximately $67,000.

Here is another set of facts that are inconvenient for the copaganda narrative: Most police never shoot their guns.

Being a police officer in America is, for the most part, remarkably mundane and largely involves traffic duty, patrols, mediating disputes, issuing tickets, assisting with health emergencies, and responding to property crimes.

The best way to understand the power of copaganda and its related myths is to ask a basic question: Whose interests are being served? Fulfilling their assigned role, police serve the State and dominant society by enforcing certain rules and norms – “the social order.” As such, police are inherently conservative and authoritarian as an institution, (research also shows that people with more conservative and authoritarian personalities are attracted to police work). In all, police and other law enforcement are one of the primary means through which structural violence by the state (or the threat of it) is enacted on a personal level against the public.

Because of America’s history of the color line and how it intersects all areas of life and society, the above dynamic translates into police targeting Black and brown people, a group that is also more likely to be poor and working class, for violence and abuse. So it is no coincidence that modern policing in America can trace its origins to the antebellum South and slave catching patrols.

America’s police will not stop targeting Black and brown communities for thuggery and violence because that is how the system is designed. (White) America likes it that way. The basic proof: (White) America would never allow the police to treat white people the same way that they routinely treat Black and brown people.

about this topic

“A major injustice is being done”: Biden’s FCC nominee faces dark money, homophobic smears

Senate Republicans have again dug in their heels against President Biden‘s nominee to fill the vacant fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission, reflecting what some Democrats call a smear campaign directed at a lesbian woman with progressive politics. During a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee, FCC nominee Gigi Sohn faced a third round of Republican-led criticism — but embraced the moment to denounce the role of dark money groups in the ongoing smear campaign against her.

Sohn, a board member at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a left-leaning internet advocacy group, would unfreeze the FCC’s current 2-2 partisan deadlock and secure Democrats a 3-2 majority.

Tuesday’s hearing was Sohn’s third before the committee after being nominated in October 2021, and the first since Biden renominated her last month. Her stalled confirmation has so far scuttled Democratic promises to restore the landmark net neutrality rules ended under Donald Trump.

In a prepared statement, Sohn said Tuesday that her appointment has faced significant delays at the hands of telecom and internet service provider lobbying groups.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, foe of net neutrality, resigns his post early

“It is critical for at least one member of the FCC to be a consumer advocate who has spent a career not beholden to any interest but that of the public,” Sohn said.

“Regulated entities should not choose their regulator. Unfortunately, that is the exact intent of the past 15 months of false and misleading attacks on my record and my character. My industry opponents have hidden behind dark money groups and surrogates because they fear a pragmatic, pro-competition, pro-consumer policymaker.”

“There’s a little homophobia going on here. It’s whispered around in the Senate. I like to think as a country we’re past that, but apparently we’re not.”

Telecom lobbying money surged during the 2022 cycle, with more than $117 million spent on candidates — a sum that excludes what may be much larger sums of donor money funneled through dark-money PACs. Comcast, one of the telecom lobby’s biggest spenders, led industry campaign donors with $14.29 million during the 2022 election cycle. From 2019 to 2022, Comcast gave eight of the committee’s 13 Republicans $65,000 in individual campaign donations.

Comcast, a leading voice against net neutrality, has also reportedly fought Sohn’s nomination by way of the One Country Project lobbying group, led by moderate Democrats.

During the Tuesday hearing, Republican committee members cited Sohn’s previous criticism of Fox News (over which the FCC has no jurisdiction), her prior work at a now-shuttered streaming service and a handful of her sharper tweets.

“You would be a very partisan influence on a commission that in my view, deals with issues where you need to try and find some consensus,” Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said Tuesday. Thune received $10,000 in campaign donations from Comcast during the 2022 election cycle.

Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Ark., said Sohn’s criticism of Fox News “certainly shows a lack of judgment and a bias on conservative views.” Sullivan accepted $10,000 from Comcast during the 2020 election cycle.

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But Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., noted the amount of conservative support behind Sohn’s nomination, including previous administration officials appointed by Trump.

“This is a proxy fight for net neutrality,” Cantwell said. “Somehow if affordable broadband gets deployed anywhere, then somehow more affordable broadband might get deployed everywhere. I think there’s probably billions of dollars at stake here, and that is why the vitriol is coming at you.”

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., also sits on the committee. The former Democrat, who was the only senator from that party not to co-sponsor legislation to restore net neutrality, has been linked to Comcast-directed dark money groups, as reported in 2019. Sinema took in nearly $450,000 in campaign donations from broadband-related industry players from 2017 through 2022.

The campaign against Sohn — who would become the FCC’s first openly gay commissioner if confirmed — has been characterized by what at least 21 pro-LGBTQ organizations have described as odious homophobia. Those groups have called on Democrats to stand up for Sohn, and even some notable conservatives have publicly defended her.

Indeed, some telecom industry figures whom Sohn has clashed with in the past have even spoken up on her behalf. Lobbyist Gary Shapiro, president of the Consumer Technology Association, an industry group, called the tactics an “injustice.”

“There’s a little homophobia going on here. It’s whispered around in the Senate.… And that’s a shame. It’s no secret that Gigi would be the first openly gay FCC commissioner. I like to think as a country we’re past that, but apparently we’re not,” Shapiro told NBC News earlier this month. “This smear campaign, it’s been two years already.… I think a major injustice is being done here to a super high-quality person.”

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has expressed support for Sohn’s nomination, as reported by Inside Towers. Asked in late January about Sohn’s confirmation, Rosenworcel said it could take at least a month to seat Sohn, even with full Democratic support.

“I believe this agency was designed to have five commissioners, so I hope that she is able to move through the process,” Rosenworcel said. “She is a nominee who knows this agency well and we wish her the best as she navigates this process on Capitol Hill.”

There are now expectations that Sohn’s nomination will move forward quickly, signaled by the committee’s early-session hearings and Biden’s continued emphasis on digital-divide initiatives.

Cantwell told reporters after the hearing that she hadn’t decided when to hold a vote on Sohn’s nomination, but said she’s only giving committee members until Friday to submit any further material on the matter.

about the battle for the internet

Why aliens wouldn’t spy on humans with balloons

Leave it to balloons to spark alien suspicions.

On Friday, U.S. warplanes shot down a “high-altitude object” off the coast of Alaska, stating that it posed a threat to civilian airliners. On Saturday, an “airborne object” was shot down over Canada. On Sunday, one over Lake Huron in Michigan. The three incidents come after the U.S. shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon over the Atlantic Ocean on February 4. Since then, misinformation about the objects, their origin and purpose have run rampant online.

Alien Twitter is going wild over all of these “objects” being shot down

Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that the Biden administration deployed the aerial objects to distract Americans from more pressing issues happening, like the Ohio chemical spill. Others online have jumped to the conclusion that they’re of extraterrestrial origin. As AP News reported, internet searches for the term “UFO” increased around the world on Sunday, indicating heightened speculation.

When such misinformation reached the White House on Monday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre made a point to extinguish the UFO rumors right away.

“I know there have been questions and concerns about this, but there is no — again no indication — of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns,” Jean-Pierre said. “I wanted to make sure that the American people knew that, all of you knew that and it was important for us to say that from here because we’ve been hearing a lot about it.”

“It’s really not a safe bet to say that the aliens even know we are here.”

Still, with little details about these aerial objects, it’s only a human inclination to scream “ET!” But astronomers like Seth Shostak tell Salon that if aliens were hypothetically going to spy on humans, they wouldn’t do so in the form of balloons.

Aliens “wouldn’t use balloons,” said Shostak, a senior astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). “Putting something into orbit [like satellites] is a lot better than balloons, which can be shot down,” Shostak explained. “But balloons, they just go wherever the wind blows, right? Now, I guess you could put some sort of a rudder on them and steer them or use some other method of steering.”

Shostak added that details about the first balloon suggest it had some maneuverability. The U.S. State Department told reporters that the Feb. 4 balloon had equipment onboard, such as large solar panels, antennas and sensors. “But satellites, you can put them up into orbit just to make sure that they go over the part of the country that you’re interested in,” Shostak said. “Balloons, that sounds like the wrong choice for ET, in my opinion.”

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb agreed.

“It’s not likely because balloons have no propulsion, restricting their maneuvering capabilities,” Loeb said, adding that it’s common for balloons to reported as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP). “In the 2022 report on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, submitted by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the US Congress, there were 366 new sightings in 2022; of these, 163 were balloons and 26 were drones.”

Shostak said that when it comes to alien speculation, what’s often left out of the conversation is the “incentive.” Would extraterrestrial life even know that humans exist on Earth?

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“To find the presence of homosapiens on Earth, it’s not easy, even if you’re the distance of the nearest other star system, which is nearly four and a half light years away,” Shostak said. “You could have a telescope that’s the size of a parking lot, and it still wouldn’t be able to see the Great Wall of China, or something else we built.”

The closest star system to our own is Proxima Centauri, which famously hosts the exoplanet Proxima b. This exoplanet has been thought to be the most likely habitable exoplanet in the system since it’s roughly the size of Earth and located in the star’s habitable zone, meaning it is at an orbital distance where liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. The exoplanet orbits its star every 11 Earth days, and as Shostak mentioned, is nearly 4.2 light years away. Though that is extremely close in astronomy terms, there are 5.88 trillion miles in one light-year. This means it would take thousands of human years to travel such a distance. Shostak said the only way extraterrestrial life would know humans exist on Earth would be if they picked up radio, television or radar signals.

“But for them to do that, they’d have to have large antenna farms, [and] they may, but they also can’t be very far away, because if they’re more than about 75 light years away, no signals from Earth have yet reached them because we weren’t broadcasting any earlier than that,” he said. “It’s really not a safe bet to say that the aliens even know we are here.”

about UFOs

Despite attempts to distance from Trump, critics say “make no mistake: Nikki Haley is no moderate”

Following former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s launch of her 2024 presidential campaign Tuesday, progressives cautioned that while the Republican has spent years cultivating a so-called “moderate” public persona, her policy positions make it abundantly clear that as president, she would promote a right-wing agenda similar to the Trump administration, in which she served for nearly two years.

Haley, who also served as South Carolina’s governor before joining the administration of former President Donald Trump in 2017, has advanced right-wing policies both domestically and abroad, and since leaving public office four years ago, has used her platform to promote “extreme hardline positions on foreign policy,” wrote Daniel Larison at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The Republican has strived to center her response to the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Church shooting in Charleston by a white supremacist as evidence of her moderation, including in her campaign launch video footage of the speech she gave weeks after the massacre when signing a bill to remove the Confederate flag from the grounds of the state capitol.

Progressive strategist Sawyer Hackett noted, however, that moments earlier in the video she denied that the deep history of institutional racism has contributed to persistent inequality in the United States.

“Make no mistake: Nikki Haley is no moderate,” said Christina Harvey, executive director of progressive advocacy group Stand Up America. “From her support of Trump’s policy of putting children in cages and the regressive reproductive health policies she pushed as governor of South Carolina to her opposition to federal voting rights legislation and her unwavering support of Donald Trump—even after he incited the January 6 insurrection—Nikki Haley has shown her true colors.”

During her six years as governor of South Carolina, Haley signed anti-reproductive rights bills including one that banned abortion care after 19 weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.

With anti-abortion rights Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expected to also announce a run for the GOP presidential nomination, NARAL Pro-Choice America president Mini Timmaraju said the primary is already becoming “a race to the bottom.”

“Whether it’s serving in Donald Trump’s Cabinet or signing an extreme abortion ban into law, Nikki Haley’s record is chock full of red flags,” said Timmaraju. “Haley’s views on abortion are just as extreme as others gunning for the Republican nomination, and we look forward to working alongside our members to defeat the Republican nominee, whoever it may be.”

Haley’s campaign launch ad also included a claim that President Joe Biden is promoting a “socialist” agenda, which Poor People’s Campaign co-chair Rev. Dr. William Barber II interpreted as an attack on those who “believe in living wages, voting rights, and healthcare for all.”

Everything Nikki Haley says in her new ad attacking Biden/Harris et al as “socialist” if they believe in living wages, voting rights, & healthcare for all is the same politics of lies & division that Trump used, just in a softer voice.

— Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II (@RevDrBarber) February 14, 2023

During Haley’s two years as U.N. ambassador under the Trump administration, she was a strong proponent of the president’s so-called “zero tolerance” policy under which thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents and guardians, Trump’s push to pull out of the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.

Though she briefly criticized Trump for inciting the mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, Haley soon after defended the former president and called on Democratic lawmakers to “give the man a break” as they impeached Trump for a second time.

“When we needed leaders to stand up for our democracy and our freedoms, Haley fell in line with Donald Trump, again and again,” said Harvey. “That’s exactly the opposite of what our country needs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make her unique. Whether the Republican nominee is Nikki Haley, Donald Trump, or someone else, there will likely be a MAGA Republican with a track record of undermining our democracy on the GOP ticket come November 2024.”

At the Quincy Institute, Larison wrote that Haley’s effort to cast herself as a moderating voice in the Republican Party while also defending the former president has left her “with no obvious base of support” and has likely rendered her a long-shot candidate.

“There is so little daylight between Haley’s own positions and those of Trump that it will be difficult for her to criticize anything he did as president,” Larison wrote. “Haley’s foreign policy record is bound up with Trump’s to such an extent that she will struggle to distinguish herself from him.”

Barber called on voters to focus on “the main message: None of the Republicans planning on running disagree with Trump on policy.”

“The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic” is a thing that exists now

On February 2, The Satanic Temple announced via Twitter that it will be opening an online abortion clinic in New Mexico in an effort to aide those living in the area who seek to end their pregnancies.

The clinic, which saw its grand opening on Valentine’s Day, is named “The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic,” a pointed reference to Alito’s writing the majority opinion that overturned rights established by Roe v. Wade in 1973.

“TST Health is proud to announce the launch of Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic in New Mexico,” the Temple tweeted early this month. “TST Health believes in honoring those, like the clinic’s namesake, who couldn’t choose legal abortion, no matter how much they may have wanted to.”

Why Satanists may be the last, best hope to save abortion rights in Texas

TST Health, which is funded through the support of donors, has also launched a variety of merchandise to go along with the new clinic opening, including teddy bears, t-shirts and magnets.

TST Health Merch is available now! Show your support for the world's first Religious Abortion Clinic! Visit: https://t.co/9Yb1OHYPgN pic.twitter.com/PsBviWaVUJ

— The Satanic Temple (@satanic_temple_) February 2, 2023

Information found on the official website for the clinic describes it as “an online clinic that provides religious medication abortion care” issuing “abortion medication via mail to those in New Mexico who wish to perform The Satanic Temple’s Religious Abortion Ritual.”

The criteria for services stipulate that patients must be at least 17 years old, be in New Mexico at the time of their online screening, have a New Mexico mailing address, and be up to 11 weeks pregnant. The cost of the health services are free, but they estimate the abortion ritual medications as being deliverable at the cost of $90.

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It's essential that those who wield their positions of authority as weapons to take away the rights of others remember that it impacts more than just faceless strangers.

Support SAMSAC at https://t.co/pS2WC1dOxM.

SAMSAC Shop Collection is available now! https://t.co/9Yb1OHZn6l pic.twitter.com/obDAwMD8QZ

— The Satanic Temple (@satanic_temple_) February 14, 2023

“The Satanic Temple, on behalf of its members, objects to government interference with abortion access and contests that laws that impede our faith in bodily autonomy and our ability to perform our Religious Abortion Ritual violate the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” the TST said in a statement.

In a quote pulled from Charisma News, the TST describes the use of the word “ritual” in relation to their abortion services as meaning a “spiritual experience designed to instill confidence and self-worth in accordance to TST’s religious beliefs.”

“In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened,” said Malcolm Jarry, a co-founder of The Satanic Temple. “Prior to 1973, doctors who performed abortions could lose their licenses and go to jail. The clinic’s name serves to remind people just how important it is to have the right to control one’s body and the potential ramifications of losing that right.”

The clinic staffs five registered nurses and a nurse practitioner to prescribe medications.

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

A massive environmental disaster has sent social media into a tailspin for days, following a train derailment in Ohio that leeched toxic chemicals into the ground, water and air.

On Feb. 3, a train of about 150 freight cars — many carrying several loads of hazardous materials — crashed and exploded in the town of East Palestine, Ohio. The tangled knot of boxcars operated by Norfolk Southern Railway shot out flames reaching 100 feet and sent a massive plume of coal-black smog into the air that could be seen for miles. Luckily, no direct injuries or deaths were reported. Five days later, crews ignited a controlled burn of the toxic chemicals in order to prevent a much bigger explosion, but the situation appears to be worsening.

The local motto for East Palestine, which has a population just shy of 5,000 people, is apparently “The Place You Want To Be,” but that sentiment may be less popular right now. Residents and local news agencies have posted viral videos of streams and creeks cluttered with dead fish and frogs, as well as images of the sky darkened with black smoke. Reports have also surfaced that fumes sickened and even killed pets.

The eerie parallels between Netflix’s “White Noise” and the Ohio train derailment disaster

Many are drawing comparisons to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which turned Pripyat, a city of roughly 50,000 people, into a ghost town. “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, told WKBN.

On Feb. 6, Gov. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and Gov. Josh Shapiro, D-Penn., ordered an immediate evacuation in a one-mile by two-mile area surrounding East Palestine, which includes parts of both Ohio and Pennsylvania. Five of the rail cars containing vinyl chloride, a toxic gas, had become unstable, threatening the risk of an explosion that would blast shrapnel and toxic fumes a mile in every direction, according to an analysis by the Ohio National Guard and U.S. Department of Defense.

A controlled burn was seen as the best alternative, but anyone who directly breathed in the smog would be risking their lives.

“Based on current weather patterns and the expected flow of the smoke and fumes, anyone who remains in the red affected area is facing grave danger of death,” DeWine’s office warned in a press release. “Anyone who remains in the yellow impacted area is at a high risk of severe injury, including skin burns and serious lung damage.”

A few days later, on Feb. 8, state officials told residents that they could “safely” return home, and the air was safe to breathe. However, they encouraged residents not to drink well water.

“Air quality samples in the area of the wreckage and in nearby residential neighborhoods have consistently showed readings at points below safety screening levels for contaminants of concern,” DeWine’s office said in a press release. “Based on this information, state and local health officials determined that it is now safe for community members to return to their residences.”

“If it’s safe and habitable, then why does it hurt? Why does it hurt me to breathe?”

But some locals are distrustful of this advice, concerned by lingering odors of chlorine that are reportedly causing some individuals to experience headaches. “If it’s safe and habitable, then why does it hurt?” Nathen Velez, a resident of East Palestine, said to CNN. “Why does it hurt me to breathe?”

“This is why people don’t trust government,” environmental activist Erin Brockovich tweeted on Feb. 13. “You cannot tell people that there has been and continues to be hazardous pollutants contaminating the environment while at the same time saying ‘all is well.’ People aren’t stupid.”

As more details emerge, the gravity of the situation only seems to worsen. In a letter sent to Norfolk Southern Railway on Feb. 11, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said that in addition to vinyl chloride, four additional toxic chemicals were on board the train: ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, butyl acrylate and isobutylene.

While these chemical names may sound like gibberish to most people, experts believe these substances pose critical health risks. Isobutylene, for example, is a flammable gas used to make airtight polymers such as bottle stoppers, O-rings or window seals. If inhaled, isobutylene irritates the lungs; it can also impact the heart and central nervous system.

Then there’s ethylhexyl acrylate, a chemical used in paint binding and stain resistors. Inhalation or skin contact with the liquid can cause respiratory tract irritation and irritate the eyes and skin. Butyl acrylate is a colorless liquid with a sharp odor used in paints, caulks, sealants and adhesives. It can trigger difficulties breathing and irritation of the eyes and skin. On Wednesday, the Ohio city of Steubenville detected butyl acrylate in its water intake, though officials said it would be removed from the river using powder activated carbon.

Finally, there’s ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, sometimes known as 2-butoxyethanol, which is used as a solvent, as well as to make paints and varnish. It can also irritate the eyes and lungs if inhaled, and it has been shown to cause cancer in animals, but data in humans is lacking.

The worst of the bunch, however, is seemingly vinyl chloride. Out of the roughly 150 rail cars, of which 50 derailed, five of them contained the stuff, a highly-flammable toxic gas with a faintly sweet odor that is used in the production of plastics like PVC, also known as polyvinyl chloride. (That poly part of the chemical name makes a big difference.) Vinyl chloride is extremely noxious to inhale. Our bodies readily absorb it, causing significant damage to the respiratory and central nervous systems.

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As the liver metabolizes vinyl chloride, it spits out a chemical called chloroethylene oxide, which subsequently binds to our DNA, essentially vandalizing it and increasing the risk of tumor formation. As such, massive exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with a host of lung, liver, brain and blood cancers.

But when the vinyl chloride was burned, the chemical reaction generates new corrosive chemicals: phosgene gas and hydrogen chloride. The first, which has a history of being used in chemical warfare during World War I, can cause coughing, blurred vision, difficulty breathing, nausea, vomiting and death. The severity of symptoms depends on the level of exposure, but phosgene has also been linked to low blood pressure, heart failure and coughing up white to pink-tinged fluid, which is a sign of pulmonary edema, or fluid buildup in the lungs.

As for hydrogen chloride, the compound is normally stable, but at high temperatures, it bonds to water molecules easily. This creates hydrochloric acid, which is highly corrosive. When it falls from the sky, it creates acid rain, which is known to kill trees and wildlife.

While some of these chemicals will quickly fade from the environment, according to officials, others may linger. As of Tuesday, Feb. 14, the EPA said it had screened 459 homes, with 39 remaining to be screened. “To date, no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride were identified for the completed screened homes,” the EPA said in a statement.

Salon has reached out to the EPA and will update this article if a response is received.

The EPA and other agencies are actively monitoring water for contaminants. So far, the derailment is reportedly far enough away from watersheds and local water supplies that it doesn’t pose a risk to residents. Nonetheless, the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation has urged members to get the water from their local wells tested as soon as possible.

Given that an estimated 100,000 gallons of vinyl chloride was released into the environment, it’s perhaps understandable that some residents are wary of such reassurances. Some residents have vowed to seek independent testing while a flurry of lawsuits are brewing.

No one should have to undertake complex chemistry lessons to figure out if their home is safe or not.

No one should have to undertake complex chemistry lessons to figure out if their home is safe or not. Despite the comparisons to nuclear disasters, the East Palestine train derailment has more in common with a 2012 train derailment in Gloucester County, N.J. Similar to the current incident, a train derailed after hitting a collapsed bridge and released 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride that wafted into nearby Paulsboro, prompting evacuations.

Some, including DeWine, have questioned if these derailments are preventable with better regulation. At a Tuesday press conference, DeWine mentioned Norfolk Southern was not legally required to alert Ohioans regarding the toxic cargo.

“Frankly, if this is true — and I’m told it’s true — this is absurd,” DeWine said. “Congress needs to take a look at how these things are handled.”

In fact, industry lobbyists have invested considerable effort into blocking reforms. Railroad Workers United, a cross-union rail workers’ reform group, told The New Republic that the cause of the wreck “appears to have been a 19th-century style mechanical failure of the axle on one of the cars — an overheated bearing — leading to derailment and then jackknifing tumbling cars.”

This mechanical failure could have been averted with better equipment, but reforms have been blocked. In 2017, rail industry donors shoveled more than $6 million in funds to Republican campaigns, including the Trump administration, which later rescinded rules related to train braking systems, according to The Lever. If the train had brakes from this century, this disaster could potentially have been avoided, but Norfolk Southern’s “lobby group nonetheless pressed for the rule’s repeal, telling regulators that it would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits,” the Lever reported.

Norfolk Southern responded to Salon’s request for comment by referring to a pair of press releases detailing community assistance efforts, such as establishing a $1 million fund to support East Palestine community.

Until more data becomes available, it’s difficult to say exactly how damaging and far-reaching the effects of this disaster will be. Given the scale of the problem and the risks involved, the public is right to demand answers. Clearly, the railroad industry could use more oversight to update trains from obsolete Civil War-era technology. Only time will tell whether the comparisons to Chernobyl or nuclear bombs are accurate, but updating our transportation industry is something that could help us all breathe a little easier.

stories about the environment

Report details “brutal violence” endured by lesbian, bisexual, and queer women

A first-of-its-kind Human Rights Watch report published Tuesday exposes the discrimination and violence that lesbian, bisexual, and queer women and nonbinary people face in over two dozen countries around the world.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) researcher Erin Kilbride interviewed 66 members of the lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ+) community over the past year for her 211-page publication—which, she stressed during a call with journalists, is trans-inclusive.

The report, entitled “This Is Why We Became Activists”: Violence Against Lesbian, Bisexual, and Queer Women and Nonbinary People, looks “beyond the criminalization of same-sex conduct,” Kilbride explained.

The document details violence that LBQ+ people endure from family members, security forces, and others, as well as discrimination, particularly related to employment; healthcare—especially fertility services; housing, land, and property rights; justice systems; and migration.

Kilbride and others on the call highlighted that while the discrimination and violence are often “highly visible,” they are also “historically underdocumented,” including by major human rights groups. The researcher expressed hope that the new report is “a step in the right direction” to fill that “immense gap.”

“Lesbian, bisexual, and queer women are renowned for leading human rights struggles around the world,” Kilbride said in a statement. “But the scale of brutal violence, legal discrimination, and sexualized harassment these communities face is rarely documented.”

The interviewees ranged in age from 21 to 75 and the majority of them are “movement leaders, activists, and human rights defenders working at the local or national level,” the report notes. They include Amani, who told HRW that “I got beaten by police in a protest for an arrested human rights defender Rania Amdouni in 2021.”

According to the report:

Amani is a 27-year-old Lebanese-Tunisian lesbian activist, queer feminist, and woman human rights defender in Tunisia. She leads writing therapy workshops for people who have experienced trauma, human rights violations, and discrimination and for members of the queer community who have depression.

In 2021, police physically assaulted Amani. One of her ribs was broken, and she spent three days in the hospital.

[…]

Since the attack, the police have followed and stopped her three times on the street; each time, she was taken to a police station for questioning. She told Human Rights Watch that because she is a woman, the police have an “easy way” to harass her by asking if she ran away from home and if her family is looking for her, which is a gendered line of questioning that speaks to women’s lack of freedom of movement and the control many families have over women… During those instances of police harassment, police often touched her short hair and arm tattoos, demanding to know why she did not present as more feminine.

“I think one queer woman’s story can change those that come after it,” Amani told Kilbride. “That is why I agreed to talk to you, to tell you what happened.”

Andrea Rivas, a lesbian activist and lawyer in Argentina, said that “the first homophobic attack I suffered was at 12 years old: verbal violence from the father of the girl I was going with. He knew just by how I dressed. I liked pants. Parents tell girls like me if we won’t stop dressing like this, we won’t get to go to school. You are marginalized in the early stages, in primary school and high school.”

After noting how LBQ+ people in Argentina have more limited education and employment opportunities, Rivas added that “the less economic options you have, the more exposed you are to violence. As a lawyer now, I receive so many reports that paint a picture of violence over a lifetime. We need to analyze it from the first moments, because it starts when you are little, when you are building your identity.”

Along with Argentina and Tunisia, the interviewees are from Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Egypt, El Salvador, Germany, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malawi, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Tanzania, Uganda, Ukraine, and the United States.

I spoke to LBQ+ women in 26 countries about legal discrimination, sexual abuse & how they're organizing for justice.

66 interviewees in a row told me they'd never seen a global report on violence against LBQ+ women.

Today @hrw is publishing that report.https://t.co/dVUyj7zxiv pic.twitter.com/ImtjDb0kwj

— Erin Kilbride (@neo_chlo) February 14, 2023

Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, launched nearly a year ago, has forced some Ukrainian parents to decide whether to remain in their war-torn country or flee to Poland, where they fear losing their children, the report states. LBQ+ people in other nations, such as the United States, also face various problems related to parenthood.

The report includes the story of Kris Williams and Rebekah Wilson, who divorced after Wilson gave birth to their child. Williams’ lawyer, Robyn Hopkins, told HRW of the former U.S. couple’s battle over the birth certificate and custody: “Mothers should not have to adopt their own children. My client and her ex-wife decided to have this child while they were married.”

The publication also points out that “in the U.S., three large insurance companies cover fertility treatments for heterosexual couples who demonstrate an inability to get pregnant after a set amount of time, usually approximately a year. For LBQ+ couples, demonstrating that neither partner produces sperm is usually insufficient proof of an ‘inability to get pregnant. Instead, LBQ+ couples are often asked to ‘show receipt of multiple failed rounds of fertility treatments to qualify for insurance coverage,’ meaning the price of proving ‘inability’ can be up to $30,000 higher for LBQ+ couples than for heterosexual ones.”

In addition to sharing the experiences of LBQ+ people from across the globe, the report features policy recommendations for civil society, health departments, judiciaries, national legislatures, and security forces.

“LBQ+ activists are experts in the violence their communities experience,” said Kilbride. “With this report, we provide governments and donors with concrete steps for action, starting with visibility, funding, and protection for LBQ+ movements.”

The eerie parallels between Netflix’s “White Noise” and the Ohio train derailment disaster

I read “White Noise” in San Francisco, miles from home. I was living in the golden state for an all-too brief time, so far from rural Ohio where I was raised and where I would return to raise my child. In the sunshine, the beach a mere drive away, it seemed like a fine place to disappear into Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel about an Ohio college professor and his large family whose lives are upended by a toxic airborne event. I enjoyed the novel at the time. I don’t think I could read it again, not now, not in this world and not knowing what I do about my home’s long history of exploitation by industry and ecological disaster, a legacy that is ongoing.

In the book “White Noise,” winner of the National Book Award, Jack Gladney, his wife Babette and their many children from various marriages are forced to evacuate after a train derails near their pastoral Ohio home, causing an explosion which morphs into a dangerous, toxic cloud. Sound familiar?

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Shortly after Noah Baumbach adapted and directed a film version of “White Noise,” now streaming on Netflix, starring his partner Greta Gerwig and Adam Driver, a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in rural Ohio. The story is still developing, and the environmental impact may not be fully known for years, but the tragedy bears an eerie resemblance to many elements of the film.

“How familiar this all seems to us,” Jack (Driver) says in the movie. Salon unpacks the similarities between “White Noise” and the ecological disaster in Ohio.

The Ohio setting

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Greta Gerwig as Babette and Sam Nivola as Heinrich in “White Noise.” (Netflix)

“White Noise” is set in Ohio, where Jack teaches at a college aptly known as the College-On-The-Hill. He and his family live in the small, picturesque town of Blacksmith, which is fictionalized. The movie was filmed almost entirely in Ohio, a prep school in Willoughby, Ohio, filling in for the College-On-The-Hill. Other classroom, lab and student center scenes were shot at the University of Akron, Baldwin Wallace University and Kent State University while the family home is a real house in the college town of Oberlin.

In real life, the train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, a small town near the Pennsylvania border. Some residents of East Palestine worked as movie extras during the filming of “White Noise” in their home state.

Train derailment

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White Noise (Netflix)

“White Noise” is spilt into parts. The second part, titled “The Airborne Toxic Event” concerns what happens when a tanker truck carrying toxic, flammable material crashes into a passing train, due to the truck driver’s drunk driving. The train derails in the countryside. Cars smash into each other and the tanker is crushed, releasing a viscous substance. A fireball erupts. The rest of the film deals with the aftermath of the crash, in both large and small, personal ways.

In East Palestine, on Feb. 3, a Norfolk Southern train with 20 cars containing hazardous materials derailed and then caught on fire. As Ben Ratner, one of the East Palestine locals who appeared as extras in “White Noise,” told CNN, “The first half of the movie is all almost exactly what’s going on here.”

The cloud

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White Noise (Netflix)

“There’s lots of smoke, and I don’t like the looks of it,” Jack’s teen son (Sam Nivola) says to him in the film, after the child has been studying the site of the train derailment through binoculars via the family’s roof. In the movie, an explosion from the derailment causes a toxic cloud that can be viewed for miles. It looks uncannily like the real scene in East Palestine of the dark, purple-blue cloud witnessed over farmland and pastures (a cloud that emerged after the so-called “controlled release” of the train cars’ chemicals). In the fictional film, the cloud later resembles a massive, purple-tinged storm cloud, which wouldn’t be out of place in “Ghostbusters.”

Conflicting emergency messages

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Chloe Fineman as Simuvac Technician in “White Noise.” (Wilson Webb/Netflix)

In “White Noise,” the family is first told to evacuate. Hours after the incident, believing the derailment and resulting explosion to be far enough away that it doesn’t pose a threat, the family sits down to dinner when air raid sirens go off. Then the fire chief hurries through the neighborhood in his car, blasting a message to evacuate all residents. Jack’s family flees in their battered station wagon. They don’t get far, jammed on the road with all the other escaping families. But then the emergency broadcast on the radio tells them a different message: to stay inside and shelter indoors. No one should be outside, the new messaging says. Or on the roads.

The people in East Palestine — and possibly, in the entire Ohio River Valley area – are dealing with similar mixed messages. Hundreds were forced to evacuate as Norfolk Southern burned carcinogens from the crash. After merely a few days, people were told it was safe to return. But the EPA continues to monitor the air, residents have described burning in their eyes and fish, livestock and pets have all been reported dead or sick.

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Uncertain future

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White Noise (Wilson Webb/Netflix)

In the last part of “White Noise,” the main characters deal with their fear of death in various ways — though, as a seminal postmodernist story, perhaps “deal” is too strong a word. Little is truly resolved or seems certain.

So too East Palestine, Ohio, and multiple states bordering the Ohio River, may be facing an uncertain future. The derailed and burned cars contained dangerous chemicals including butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and especially concerning: vinyl chloride, which NPR describes as “a carcinogen that becomes a gas at room temperature.” It breaks down in the sun, can cause headaches and dizziness, but it has severe long-term risks as well. NPR writes, “People who breathe the chemical over many years may also experience liver damage,” and due to its “tiny atoms,” residents can’t just clean it off.

GoFundMe pages have been set up for East Palestine, with other charities for people and animals impacted by the disaster accepting donations as well.

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Leaked audio: Top Texas official admits Abbott’s voucher-like plan would cut public school funds

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A high-ranking Texas Education Agency official was caught on audio advocating for voucher-like programs on behalf of Gov. Greg Abbott and admitting that funding to public school districts could decrease if such a policy passes this Legislative session.

On the audio, which was secretly recorded and posted on YouTube by Lynn Davenport, a conservative commentator and public school parent, TEA Deputy Commissioner Steve Lecholop is heard on the phone with an unidentified mother who was displeased with the Joshua Independent School District and transferred her child to a parochial school.

Lecholop asked the woman if she wanted to share her story with a speechwriter working for the governor, who wants to allow parents to take the money that would have funded their students’ learning at a public school and spend it instead on alternative schooling options, such as tuition for private school. Abbott has touted such an idea as one of his priorities this session.

Lecholop, a former San Antonio ISD school board member, tells the woman in the call that sharing her story would be “a good way for you to stick it to Joshua ISD.”

“Your tax money should be allowed to go to your child’s education,” Lecholop said on the recording, which was provided to The Texas Tribune. “Instead, you’re paying your property taxes, but you’re also paying tuition and so it’s like double dipping.”

But Lecholop acknowledged that such a program could have a negative financial impact on districts because losing students would also mean losing state funding.

“School districts, what they have to do if they lose a student, [is] be smart about how they allocate their resources, and maybe that’s one less fourth grade teacher,” Lecholop said.

The recording appears to be the first time a top TEA official has spoken explicitly in support of expanding voucher-like programs in the state.

The TEA, which is tasked with overseeing and supporting K-12 schools in the state, tends to shy away from publicly entering political debates and has walked around the question of whether an expansion of voucher-like programs would harm public schools. During a Texas Senate committee hearing earlier this month, when a senator asked TEA Commissioner Mike Morath his thoughts on vouchers possibly taking money away from public schools, he said only that it “potentially depends on how any program like that would be structured.”

[Texas Legislature gears up to tackle long-standing and fresh issues in public education. Here’s what you need to know.]

The call also gives a glimpse into how closely state education officials might be working with the governor’s office to support his agenda. Abbott previously tasked the TEA with developing standards that ban books with “overtly sexual” content in schools and told the agency to find out which schools had “pornographic” books.

Abbott appoints the agency’s commissioner. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, the TEA said Lechelop’s comments during the conversation were meant to “help address concerns raised by a parent and to connect her with an opportunity to share more about her child’s educational experience.”

The TEA did not immediately respond to a question about whether it’s appropriate for an agency employee to help the governor with a political issue. When asked if Lecholop’s comments represent the agency’s view on the expansion of voucher-like programs this session, the TEA said it “is in favor of all students having access to a high-quality education. The Agency supports school systems in this effort to improve outcomes for all public school students in Texas.”

Shannon Holmes, executive director of the Association of Texas Professional Educators, an organization that opposes vouchers, said in a statement that the recording was “reprehensible.”

“The very agency charged with state-level provision of the constitutional and statutory duty to provide access to a free public education to all Texas children shouldn’t actively collude with the governor in rank partisan politics aimed at tearing down the very education system it is the agency’s sole function to support,” Holmes said.

The debate over “school choice” is going to be a hotly debated topic this session as top lawmakers have signaled that expanding such programs is a top priority.

School choice is a term used to describe programs that give parents state money to send their kids to schools outside of the state’s public education system. Texas already practices some forms of school choice, as parents can choose to send their children to free charter schools or transfer them to schools within or outside of their district.

The most common school choice program is vouchers, which are state-sponsored scholarships for private schools. This term has also become shorthand for opponents when talking about measures that would take taxpayer money from public schools.

Education savings accounts have emerged as a top voucher-like option this session, with Abbott voicing his support for legislation that would enact such a program. Other states that have approved savings accounts allow parents to receive the money that the state pays public schools to educate their children and instead use the funds to pay for their children’s private school, online schooling or private tutors.

Lawmakers in the past have tried to pass voucher-like programs but have failed as rural lawmakers have stood in the way. In rural communities, both school officials and lawmakers fear that such programs would hurt their school districts, which act as important community hubs and are usually some of their biggest job creators.

Conservative lawmakers believe the backing from parents and conservative groups displeased with public schools over pandemic response mandates and about how race and history are taught in the classroom will give them the momentum to expand voucher-like programs this Legislative session.

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

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/02/14/texas-education-agency-vouchers/.

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

With “African Queens: Njinga” a previously overlooked history spectacularly springs into action

The 2018 news that “The Woman King” had been greenlit stirred in me a mixture of joy and something between curiosity and confusion. The joy should be obvious. No major studio had ever adapted an action movie based on a chapter from African history, let alone one starring dark-skinned Black women. Casting Viola Davis and (at that time) Lupita Nyong’o meant two very famous actors would provide the faces of that story. This was not the shape of a quiet release but one meant to arrive triumphantly.

That other sensation – let’s call it intrigued bemusement – stems from the subject the film would feature, the Dahomey kingdom’s woman warriors. Those fearsome figures provide one of the major reference points for modern incarnations of Amazons because they were encountered by 18th- and 19th-century Europeans, as major facilitators in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Other histories centering mighty African women don’t directly pick at the gigantic unhealed sore at the heart of American culture. “African Queens: Njinga,” narrated and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, is one of them.

The historic conundrum of “Woman King”

But therein lies the rub. Americans are terrible history students, both of their own country’s lore and European studies. Beyond our section of North America and the countries romanticized by “The Crown,” “Emily in Paris” and “The White Lotus,” forget it.

This queen’s life is a landscape of peaks and psychological canyons that would have made Shakespeare salivate.

Then again, that’s true of all historic and cultural study that deigns to be more complex than the extensively rewritten accounts of the United States’ economic reliance on chattel slavery, its marginalization of Black people, and minimizing of Black contributions to culture and innovation.

Viewed from that perspective – one that mirrors much of its stateside audience, sadly – it’s incredible that “The Woman King” was financed, produced, and distributed, or that it was critically acclaimed and exceeded expectations for its box office earnings.

In the same way that “The Woman King” would not exist if “Black Panther” had not proven there was a market for these tales, we would not be privy to Njinga’s story if those films hadn’t blazed a trail.

(L) Njinga (ADESUWA ONI) in “African Queens: Njinga.” (Joe Alblas/Netflix)

This queen’s life is a landscape of peaks and psychological canyons that would have made Shakespeare salivate . . . if only she had existed a century or two earlier. And had an admiring European biographer.

Adesuwa Oni’s sensitive, fierce performance is an admirable beginning to make up for our collective knowledge gap. The British actor’s portrayal is an artful balance of athleticism with the emotional and psychological dexterity required of Njinga, the favored daughter of a wise, too-trusting king.

Her father died under suspicious circumstances, only to be succeeded by Njinga’s dangerously impetuous and envious brother. He is ill-prepared to confront the Portuguese enslavers making incursions into Ndongo and Matamba, a territory that comprises Angola today. But he’s also the slain king’s male heir. Faced with the choices of annihilation or submission, the young king chooses his sister Njinga to stand up for their kingdom.

Is it appropriate to say “and the rest is history” if that history has been ignored until now?

Hollywood is fine with African queens . . . from Egypt, and only when they’re played by a range of white actors. Sub-Saharan history is tougher to Europeanize without featuring the colonial perspective, relegating the Black Africans who have existed there for generations to background roles.

Njinga was deleted from mainstream accounts of history for the same reason she’s being remembered now: she chose to resist.

There’s also been the often-exploited strategy of drawing inspiration from other cultures’ histories without directing people toward them. One of Africa’s most famous warrior queens, Amina of Zaria, is said to have inspired a certain Warrior Princess who conquered popular culture in the late ’90s.

Meanwhile, the entertainment industry finds dozens of ways to fictionalize European history from multiple angles, the latest being inclusively casting movies and TV series that previously would have solely featured white actors. This is a positive evolution.

But it also makes a person wonder why a series like “African Queens” is a novelty even now. Njinga’s life was rich with reversals and defiance, qualities the producers mentioned in the series’ post-script as inspiring Angola’s modern push for independence. It’s also merely one of many from this part of the world that could speak to an audience craving stories they haven’t experienced.

(Center) Njinga (ADESUWA ONI), Ndambi (ESHE ASANTE), Kambu (CHIPO KUREYA) & Funji (MARILYN NNADABE) walk through the streets and encounter a row of slaves in “African Queens: Njinga.” (Joe Alblas/Netflix)

Cleopatra inspired one of Hollywood’s most ostentatious films and has turned up in many other scripts, but we have yet to see a feature about Egypt’s Hatshepsut, a woman Pharoah who dressed and ruled as a man.

Like her, Njinga’s story has relevance at a time when the public is divided between honestly confronting the role slavery played in Western culture and “moving past” it by erasing it from textbooks. Although America didn’t exist during her lifetime, her dilemma exemplifies the atrocious choice forced on the continent’s people as European colonialism expanded.

She could either allow them to enslave people from neighboring territories or see her people subjugated and enslaved themselves. Njinga was deleted from mainstream accounts of history for the same reason she’s being remembered now: she chose to resist European invaders in every way possible.

“African Queens” is a hybrid docuseries scripted by NneNne Iwuji and Peres Owino, not a purely scripted drama. Oni’s work and that of her co-stars Chipo Kureya and Marilyn Nnadebe validate their ability to carry one if that option were ever available. Of course, most of the audience isn’t familiar with either the cast’s faces or names, or the history they’re portraying. Those factors make the choice to buttress the script’s facts with filmed input from academics sensible, if a bit of a letdown.

Black experts from across the diaspora, including observations from a modern Woman King, Queen Diambi Kabatusuila of the Bakwa Luntu people, assist Oni in bringing Njinga to life. The details drawing her as a leader capable of expansive nobility and grave horror are enthralling, but the actor realizes her as a woman whose family is the source of her strength and a significant military weakness.

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Oni’s finest moments land in the way she wears a formidable smile in the face of Europeans from whom she forces respect and, eventually, fear. One destined to stick in the memory is her first meeting with a Portuguese governor who haughtily believes he can assert a power move over her by inviting her to sit on the floor in front of him. Her reaction is both badass and squeamishly exploitative of her elevated position.

In such moments, however, the series’ specialists provide context to place her actions in context, defying the surefire inclination to judge Njinga differently than they would a man or a European person faced with a similar scenario.

Njinga (ADESUWA ONI) and her entourage approach the Governor’s compound in “African Queens: Njinga.” (Joe Alblas/Netflix)

Nevertheless, storytelling by re-enactment remains the bane of historical purists and arbiters of decent television since basic cable spent many years cheapening that approach. But this production makes a decent argument for embracing it since many people strain to believe excerpts from histories they’ve never heard of. Hell, a distressing percent are more inclined to believe fables than fact-based narratives originating from cultures Westerners have been taught to devalue or ignore.

Njinga’s ledger isn’t spotless. She murders to secure power and makes unthinkable compromises to gain some battlefield advantage in the face of overwhelming colonial forces. Show us the king or queen who hasn’t – indeed, show us more of them from the African continent and other places. A two-season commitment means “African Queens” has a second opportunity to do so . . . although reportedly that run is devoted to that superstar of Egyptian rulers . . . sigh . . . Cleopatra.

“African Queens: Njinga” streams Wednesday, Feb. 15 on Netflix.

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In defense of Grape-Nuts, a cereal for the self-deprecating humorist

For some reason I shouldn’t have bothered deciphering, Post Grape-Nuts cereal was trending on Twitter last week. Once I’d confirmed that this was not due to a recall, I — like most Grape-Nuts loyalists — immediately assumed it had to do with people hating it. And indeed, after a bit of digging I traced the possible culprit to a (lowercase-v) viral tweet on Feb. 6 baiting the Twitterverse with, “What is the worst cereal of all time?”

A barrage of votes for Grape-Nuts predictably followed, featuring such enticing descriptors as gravel, sawdust, pebbles, tree bark, ground-up walnut shells and regret. However, my favorite takedown belongs to comedian and author Rodney Lacroix, who in late January tweeted, “I didn’t have enough cereal for a full bowl, so I mixed Shredded Wheat with Grape Nuts, and it tastes like I’m eating wicker furniture in a sandstorm.”

The restorative power of pozole

As I scrolled through the #grapenuts content, I quickly noticed that even replies in defense of the cereal contained little jabs about its flavor and texture.

“I love Grape Nuts!” my friend Matt told me later that day. “It’s crunchy birdseed for humans.”

The thing is, those of us who’ve chosen to love this tooth-cracking human kibble (made from neither grapes or nuts) are well aware that it’s no Lucky Charms. We accept that our main flex is touting the mind-boggling levels of fiber in a single bowl, which we share with our arms raised in defeat because we know it puts us in the same category as those jerks who like running for fun. Hell, the brand itself embraces its status as the perennial butt of the joke.

“hi (with the intention of defending grape nuts on Twitter),” wrote whatever self-deprecating creative genius oversees the brand’s account, in November 2022.

Developed by C.W. Post in 1897, Grape-Nuts is one of the oldest ready-to-eat breakfast cereals still on the market (alongside corn flakes and that edible wicker furniture, shredded wheat). Originally, Post prepared a batter out of wheat and barley that came out of the oven as a rigid sheet, which he broke into pieces and ran through a coffee grinder to yield the nut-sized nuggets. He named it either for its resemblance to grape seeds or as a portmanteau of “grape sugar” (what he called maltose) that formed during the baking process combined with the cereal’s “nutty” flavor, according to Post Consumer Brands.

Grape-Nuts were marketed as health food pretty much from the outset, but their comedic potential didn’t really flourish until the early 1970s, when the brand recruited quirky naturalist and author Euell Gibbons for a series of commercials that supercharged the cereal’s popularity and provided irresistible fodder for comedians.

The ads followed the author of such edible foraging guides as “Stalking the Wild Asparagus” and “Stalking the Wild Herbs” to fields, shores, and woods, where he’d pick leaves, twigs, berries, and cattails (“yes, they’re edible!”), occasionally popping one into his mouth before sitting down to a bowl of Grape-Nuts.

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“You ever eat a pine tree?” Gibbons drawled in the most famous 30-second spot touting Grape-Nuts as the “back-to-nature” cereal. “Its naturally sweet taste reminds me of wild hickory nuts,” he’d add, parroting the same line he used near the end of each commercial.

The spoofs were quick to follow — and, frankly, required little actual spoofing. In 1973 comedic actor John Byner began parodying Gibbons during regular appearances on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

“Ever eat a pine tree?” he deadpanned, donning a Gibbons-esque flannel shirt, bushy white eyebrows and a flyaway white wig. “Ever lick a river?”

Seemingly as far back as half a century, Grape-Nuts adapted the same tactic of a good comedian to sell its polarizing cereal: laugh at yourself before everyone else does.

“It’s totally okay to like Grape Nuts,” the brand assured me on Twitter in November. (Still got it, I see.)

Turns out, we in the pro camp have another bragging point aside from the increase in regularity from a daily bowl of Grape-Nuts. This is cereal for the self-deprecating humorist.

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Elon Musk forced algorithm change to boost his tweets after Joe Biden got more views: report

After Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl received less engagement than President Joe Biden’s, the billionaire Twitter CEO reportedly introduced major changes to the algorithm to prioritize his own tweets.

Engineers at Twitter were awoken at 2:36 am on Monday when James Musk, the cousin of Elon Musk, sent an urgent message to everyone on the team who was online, according to sources who spoke to Platformer.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” James Musk wrote. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

The “emergency” in question was that Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl received less engagement than Biden’s, who generated nearly 29 million impressions after expressing his support for the Philadelphia Eagles. Musk, who also said he would be rooting for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting his tweet in a fit of frustration.

Musk then flew his private jet back to San Francisco to demand answers from Twitter’s team of engineers. In just 24 hours, Twitter users began to notice that Musk’s posts were inundating their ranked timeline.

“Petulant” Elon Musk fired Twitter engineer for explaining why fewer people are reading his tweets

This was not a coincidence, according to Platformer, which reported that Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers if they did not build a system guaranteeing that only Musk would benefit from a new promotion system that would show his tweets to the entire user base.

Musk’s deputies alerted the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if his engagement wasn’t “fixed” they would all lose their jobs. Late Sunday night, the CEO also addressed a team of 80 people in person, making the engagement issue the number one priority at the company. Employees had to work through the night to determine why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he would like and test possible solutions.

Engineers explained that one possibility for the decline in views might be because many users on the site have blocked and muted him in recent months. They also found technical reasons for the drop in engagement, including a system that has historically promoted tweets from accounts whose posts do better to all users in the For You tab.

According to some engineers and internal estimates, Musk’s tweets should have been promoted through this system, but they showed up only less than about half the time that the engineers thought they should.

On Monday afternoon, Musk’s “problem” had been “fixed,” because Twitter launched a code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets past a filter that is designed to show people the best possible content. The algorithm now artificially boosts the CEO’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, ensuring that his thoughts will rank higher than anyone else’s on the For You tab.

This system is called a “power user multiplier,” but engineers told Platformer that it is exclusively applied to Musk’s tweets. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass an algorithm that would otherwise stop any single account from overpowering the ranked feed.

People who opened the app on Monday found that Musk was drowning out their feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to those who follow him, and millions who do not. According to an internal estimate obtained by Platformer, over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets on their For You page.

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Musk on Tuesday acknowledged the flood of his tweets on the timeline by posting a meme in which one woman labeled “Elon’s tweets” forcibly bottle-feeds another woman labeled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back.

pic.twitter.com/iZUukCVrl5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

Popular technology YouTuber Zack Nelson took to Twitter on Wednesday to highlight the hypocrisy of Musk’s actions since acquiring the social media platform for $44 billion. “Everyone’s free speech is of equal importance… except for mine which is more importanter,” Nelson joked.

"Everyone's free speech is of equal importance… except for mine which is more importanter." https://t.co/FzpTKaGQuU

— JerryRigEverything (@ZacksJerryRig) February 15, 2023

Tara Dublin, a radio personality, also tweeted a sarcastic response to the new flood of Musk tweets on everyone’s timelines. “If only everybody had told everybody else that letting Elon Musk buy Twitter was a bad idea,” she wrote, adding the hashtag “#BlockElon.”

If only everybody had told everybody else that letting Elon Musk buy Twitter was a bad idea#BlockElon https://t.co/T31rCXXwCh

— Tara Dublin, Rock Star Author & Proud Democrat (@taradublinrocks) February 15, 2023

Comedy writer Aaron Gillies also reacted to the new algorithm change, writing “Remember, you may feel lonely, but you’ll never be ‘spend 44 billion to make it seem like people like me’ lonely.”

Remember, you may feel lonely, but you'll never be 'spend 44 billion to make it seem like people like me' lonely. https://t.co/sKX2aiQXS9

— TechnicallyRon (On all the platforms) (@TechnicallyRon) February 15, 2023

Following the mass criticism of Musk spamming the timeline, the CEO appeared to suggest that the changes would be reversed, at least in part. “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,'” he tweeted.

Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

The artificial boosts to Musk’s tweets remain, but engineers told Platformer that they have dropped from the factor of 1,000.

The new algorithm change is the latest consequence of Musk’s recent outbursts regarding his dwindling engagement on the site. Just last week, Platformer revealed that Musk fired one of the company’s principal engineers because the engineer explained that views on the CEO’s tweets were falling in part because general interest in Musk is declining.

While Twitter engineers aren’t thrilled about the system they’re building, they are scared of losing their jobs if they don’t cooperate with Musk’s antics.

“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” a current employee told Platformer. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”

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The relationship between McDonald’s and Black America

For those interested in a more sustainable food system, fast food has long been a bogeyman, thanks to its reliance on industrial food production and its negative impacts on human health — and for how it has created a template for American eating that is then reflected back to us everywhere, from restaurants to homes to school cafeterias.

Fast food has shaped this country in so many ways. As Eric Schlosser deftly laid out in his 2001 book “Fast Food Nation,” the fast food industry “helped transform not only the American diet, but also our landscape, economy, workforce and popular culture” — and not for the better, most would agree. Schlosser described fast food’s ubiquity as “so commonplace that it has acquired an air of inevitability, as though it were somehow unavoidable, a fact of modern life.”

But the fast food industry worked very smartly to make it so. And as historian Dr. Marcia Chatelain explains in the most recent episode of our podcast, “What You’re Eating, “there was nothing inevitable about our relationship to any marketplace. It has to be massaged and nurtured and manipulated.” Fast food companies like McDonald’s have been nurturing and manipulating that relationship very intentionally and focusing especially on certain audiences. So, while it’s true that fast food is everywhere, it is even more prevalent in predominantly non-white communities, where fast food restaurants abound and are sometimes the only dining option. The resulting relationship between those fast food restaurants and the Black community is complex and as Dr. Chatelain details in her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2020 book, “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America,” there are specific historical reasons for this.

We talked to Dr. Chatelain about that history, its intertwinings with the Civil Rights movement and how, for the Black community, “fast food restaurants could symbolize economic possibility or structural perniciousness and bigotry.” The “opportunity” at hand was the economic possibility presented by fast food companies (most often McDonald’s) opening up their franchises to Black ownership at a time when business opportunities for the Black community were few and far between. As Chatelain explains in her book and in the episode, however, that success had hard limits within the company’s corporate structure and the expansion of the franchises within communities of color staked the financial gains of franchise ownership starkly against job opportunities, wage growth and health within the wider community.

As we turn our critical lens on the fast food industry, it is important to look further than the usual complaints about the industry’s environmental footprint and nutritional impact. As Chatelain says in her book, “fast food is about more than just food,” and considering that there are “multiple meanings of place and space,” untangling the complex relationship between fast food chains and the people who work, eat and gather there requires a careful look at the intertwined histories of foodways, race and power in the United States.

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Bernie Sanders bill would give teachers $60K minimum wage — fully funded by taxing rich estates

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced this week that he will soon introduce legislation to set the minimum annual salary for U.S. public school teachers at $60,000, a change the senator said could be fully financed with progressive changes to the estate tax.

At a town hall with educators and union leaders, Sanders called low teacher pay a national “crisis” that has gotten substantially worse during the coronavirus pandemic, which has placed massive additional strain on school staff across the country.

A survey released last year by the National Education Association (NEA) found that 55% of U.S. educators are considering leaving the profession earlier than they had planned, citing pandemic-related stress and burnout as well as inadequate pay.

“In America today, hundreds of thousands of public school teachers are forced to work two or three jobs during the school year. Maybe they are driving an Uber. Maybe they are waiting on tables. Maybe they are parking cars,” Sanders said. “In the richest country in the history of the world, we have got to do better than that. It is time to end the international embarrassment of America ranking 29th out of 30 countries in the pay middle school teachers receive.”

The Vermont senator, who chairs the upper chamber’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said his Pay Teachers Act would “triple” funding for low-income schools, “ensure all starting teachers across the country are paid at least $60,000 a year,” and boost the salaries of those “who have made teaching their profession—working on the job for 10, 20, 30 years.”

As Education Week noted Tuesday, the average starting salary for U.S. teachers is less than $42,000 a year. Sanders said during the town hall that “43% of all teachers in America make less than $60,000 a year.”

Increase teacher pay to a minimum of $60,000 a year. pic.twitter.com/TklJaasZbc

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) February 15, 2023

Sanders estimated that his legislation would cost $450 billion over the next decade, exactly how much his proposed estate tax overhaul would raise. The bill, titled the For the 99.5 Percent Act, would impose a 65% top tax rate on estates worth more than $1 billion and reduce the estate tax exemption to $3.5 million, down from around $13 million.

“If we can provide over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1% and large corporations, please don’t tell me that we cannot afford to make sure that every teacher in America is paid at least $60,000 a year,” the senator said. “If we can spend close to $900 billion last year on the military, more than the next 11 nations combined, please don’t tell me that we cannot make sure that every teacher in America is treated with dignity and respect.”

According to recent research from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), “teachers are paid less (in weekly wages and total compensation) than their nonteacher college-educated counterparts, and the situation has worsened considerably over time”—a gap that has been dubbed the “teacher pay penalty.”

“The average weekly wages of public school teachers (adjusted only for inflation) increased just $29 from 1996 to 2021, from $1,319 to $1,348 (in 2021 dollars),” EPI found. “In contrast, inflation-adjusted weekly wages of other college graduates rose from $1,564 to $2,009 over the same period—a $445 increase.”

EPI stressed that “providing teachers with compensation commensurate with that of other similarly educated professionals is not simply a matter of fairness but is necessary to improve educational outcomes and foster future economic stability of workers, their families, and communities across the U.S.”—a point Sanders echoed during his town hall address.

“Raising teacher salaries to at least $60,000 a year and ensuring competitive pay for all of our teachers,” Sanders argued, “is one of the most important steps we can take to address the teacher shortage in America and to improve the quality of our public school systems.”

“RINO”: Right-wingers freak out after longtime Trump MAGA ally defects to support Nikki Haley

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who encouraged former President Donald Trump to declare martial law in order to remain in power, endorsed former United Nations ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley for president on Wednesday.

“We are at a pivotal point in our nation,” Norman said in a tweet. “While the Republican candidates, values, and messages have done very well here in South Carolina, that hasn’t been the case everywhere across our great nation.”

He added that it’s “time for a reset and a new chapter in national Republican politics” and there’s no better person to take on that responsibility than Haley.

Norman is the first South Carolina lawmaker to publicly back Haley’s bid for presidency. They both served in the South Carolina State House starting in 2005, and Norman was the first public official to endorse her 2010 run for governor.

He has also been a supporter of Trump and voted against certifying the 2020 Electoral College results from Pennsylvania on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Showed her true colors”: Knives out in TrumpWorld after Nikki Haley announces 2024 presidential bid

Three days before President Joe Biden was set to take office, Norman texted White House chief of Staff Mark Meadows encouraging Trump to invoke “Marshall Law” to investigate alleged election fraud as a last-ditch effort to help Trump remain in power, according to text messages reported by Talking Points Memo.

In comments to Fox News, Norman said that Trump was exactly who the Republican Party needed in 2016 because “Republicans had been marginalized” for too long, and Trump “reminded us how to fight what we believe”.

“We’re at a pivotal juncture, and most of the Republicans I know are now looking for new leadership with a new vision at the top of the ticket. Nikki Haley has that vision, and she’s going to be an outstanding President,” Norman told Fox News.

He added that even as governor “everyone knew she was destined for bigger things.”

Norman’s endorsement for Haley comes a day after the former UN ambassador announced she is running for president, seeking the Republican nomination for the 2024 election.

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Some Trump supporters aren’t too happy with Norman’s support for Haley and criticized his endorsement on Twitter.

“The same Nikki Hailey that kowtowed to Trump,” one user responded. “The one that wants to cut Medicare and social security? The one that registered to vote as ‘white’ but now touts her ethnicity? That one?”

Another one accused Haley of turning on Trump.

“I will NEVER VOTE FOR HER!!” the user wrote. “Trump deserves the presidency — IT WAS STOLEN FROM HIM; FROM ME!!! IN 2020!! She is dishonest and has zero integrity!!

One of Norman’s followers even dismissed him as a “RINO” for backing Haley.

Another user poked fun at the way Norman infamously misspelled martial law saying: “Maybe we should just install her now through Marshall Law!! That’s how elections work now, right?”

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A new post-Roe reality: What will medical abortion look like if Trump judge bans mifepristone pill?

A Trump-appointed federal judge is expected to hand down a decision this month that could block access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in the recommended medication abortion regimen. The consequences of such a decision would not only be seen in states with abortion restrictions but in states where abortions still remain legally accessible, too.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mifepristone for the medical termination of pregnancy over two decades ago. But a lawsuit filed last November alleges that the longstanding approval should be revoked because it was allegedly based on incomplete data. The anti-abortion organization Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine claims that the FDA failed to protect women when it approved the drug.

“The lawsuit alleges that the side effects of mifepristone were not reported adequately 23 years ago when they were reported to the FDA, or that there are more side effects,” Seema Mohapatra, a professor of law at SMU Dedman School of Law, told Salon. “That is actually scientifically disputed, there are tons of studies showing how safe and effective mifepristone is.”

The FDA quietly expands access to medication abortions

Indeed, last week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Medical Association and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and nine other prominent medical organizations submitted an amicus brief including a list of evidence that shows mifepristone is safe and effective.

“Medication abortion including mifepristone is safe and effective,” the brief states. “This is not an opinion—it is a fact based on hundreds of medical studies and vast amounts of data amassed over the course of two decades; the FDA based its initial approval on robust evidence which showed mifepristone was extremely safe.”

Medication abortions occur through the brand name drug Mifeprex. In the two-step process, a pregnant person first takes a mifepristone pill, which is the drug at the center of the lawsuit. Either 24 to 48 hours later, a second pill containing misoprostol is taken. Medication abortion works up to 70 days after the first day of a person’s last period — usually when they are 10 weeks pregnant. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, medication abortions account for an estimated 42 percent of all abortions in the United States.

Without the mifepristone pill, the first step in the process, the only drug that will be available for medication abortions is misoprostol. Will this still work?

The short answer is yes.

A misoprostol-only medication abortion, it should be noted, is not FDA-approved, so technically this use is off-label. While mifepristone blocks progesterone, a hormone needed to support pregnancy, misoprostol contracts and dilates the cervix to expel the embryo. Many studies have shown that misoprostol is safe and effective at terminating pregnancy in the first trimester alone. However, some studies have found that the regimen in taking both mifepristone and misoprostol is more effective than taking misoprostol alone. On Feb. 6, University of Texas-Austin researchers published a peer-reviewed study on the use of misoprostol alone for abortion and concluded it was 88% effective. The research was based on data from the telemedicine abortion provider Aid Access. Misoprostol is most commonly sold under the brand name Cytotec.

“Self-managed medication abortion using misoprostol provided by an online telemedicine service has a high rate of effectiveness and a low rate of serious adverse events,” the authors concluded. “As mifepristone continues to be over-regulated and the 2022 US Supreme Court ruling allows states to severely restrict access to in-clinic abortion care, this regimen is a promising option for self-managed abortion in the US.”

Misoprostol is a widely available medication, and its primary use is to treat gastric ulcers. Women in Brazil in the 1980s saw an opportunity with its warning label, which stated that the drug could cause a miscarriage.

“We’ve seen in other countries that have had similar ideological issues, like Brazil, where we’ve seen miso-only abortions be effective,” Mohapatra said. “So it was actually developed for gastric ulcers, and then it was an off-label use in terms of using it for abortion.”

Mohapatra emphasized this is very common.

“Off-label use of FDA-approved drugs is very common, a lot of times it’s the most common way a drug is used,” Mohapatra said. “We’ve seen this in other contexts.”

Pro-abortion advocates anticipate it will be easier for clinics in states where abortion care is still accessible to pivot to misoprostol-only abortions instead of in-clinic procedural ones.

“It would be difficult, if not outright impossible, for providers that only offer medication abortion using mifepristone to switch to offering procedural abortions instead,” Guttmacher Institute said in an updated analysis. “Some of these providers will pivot to offering medication abortion using only misoprostol, while others will be forced to stop offering abortion services entirely.”

Still, a misoprostol-only option isn’t ideal.

“While 98% of medication abortions in the United States in 2020 used a regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol in combination, misoprostol can be used on its own to end a pregnancy,” Guttmacher Institute stated. “If mifepristone becomes unavailable, it is unclear whether all current providers using the two-drug regimen would offer abortion care using only misoprostol and to what extent patients would take up this method.”

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