Countries reach sweeping deal to protect nature

Nearly 200 nations reached a milestone agreement early Monday morning to protect biodiversity, pledging action on more than 20 targets spanning from land conservation to invasive species to pesticide use in an effort to stem the rapid deterioration of nature world-wide.

The global accord, brokered at the latest United Nations’ biodiversity conference in Montreal, Canada, comes at a critical time: A recent U.N. report found that plants, animals, and ecosystems are declining at an “unprecedented” rate due to human activity, and that around 1 million species could go extinct within decades.

The convention’s headline goal — to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and waters by the year 2030 — received the most floor time over the meeting’s two-week run. The target comes from famed biologist E.O. Wilson, who argued that to reverse the extinction crisis, half of the planet must be set aside “for nature.” Some countries, like Colombia and the United States (the only country besides the Vatican that is not an official member of the international Convention on Biological Diversity), had already begun implementing a scaled-down version of the goal, dubbed “30×30,” within their own borders. Now, however, countries have a new global pact, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, for protecting land and sea that some have compared to the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

“It’s a landmark moment to have nearly every country on earth agree to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” Craig Hanson, managing director for programs at the World Resources Institute, said in a press statement. “Yet the agreement is only as strong as countries’ political will to implement it, and countries now face the urgent task of turning these commitments into action.”

Leading up to the international gathering, Indigenous groups had expressed alarm over 30×30 and its potential to remove land and resources from tribal control in the name of conservation. “The prevailing concept of protected areas is ‘fortress conservation,’ exclusionary spaces based on the view of wilderness without people,” said Jennifer Corpuz, a member of the Kankanaey Igorot people from the Northern Philippines and a lead negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, a group of activists, scholars, and representatives from Indigenous governments and NGOs that organize around international environmental meetings. Time and again, studies have shown that Indigenous peoples are the best stewards of biodiversity, yet they are often hampered by protected area expansion and its attendant evictions and livelihood restrictions.

“We saw the negotiation of a new framework as an opportunity to address those problems,” said Corpuz. The final language of the agreement calls for “systems of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, recognizing indigenous [sic] and traditional territories,“ and Indigenous rights are also mentioned with strong language at numerous points throughout the pact, according to Corpuz. While Indigenous groups had called for their territories to be recognized as a distinct pathway to protect biodiversity, Corpuz said “we feel that the language is ambiguous enough to accept.”

The biggest sticking point in the biodiversity negotiations, or the Conference of the Parties or COP15, was over who would fund conservation action in the most species-rich parts of the world, mostly in the Global South. Developing nations called for a $100 billion fund from wealthy nations, similar to the fund established through the U.N.’ s convention on climate change for climate mitigation and adaptation. Last week, delegates staged a walkout over the issue. The final agreement requires wealthy countries to provide $30 billion a year to small island nations and developing countries by 2030, although research has shown that closer to $700 billion per year is necessary to reduce species decline. Objections on Monday morning from the Democratic Republic of Congo and other African nations over insufficient funding were overridden when Huang Runqiu, the president of COP15 and China’s minister of ecology and environment, brought down the gavel to end the conference.

In total, the final agreement contains 23 targets, including commitments to halve risks from pesticides and toxic chemical use in agriculture, halve invasive species introduction rates, and reform government subsidies linked to biodiversity destruction.

Language requiring that companies disclose their impacts on the natural world and their financial risks associated with species extinction was watered down in the final version of the text. Developing nations and Indigenous peoples had also asked that when countries extract genetic resources from their biodiversity-rich ecosystems, like rainforests and peatlands, to make drugs and other products, that the origin countries receive an equitable share of the benefits of the research. While a mechanism was not established, language in the final text sets forth a two-year process to create a way to fund the communities and countries from which biodata is taken; Indigenous communities are calling to be the main beneficiaries.

Countries now have eight years to meet their new targets, which some observers have criticized for prioritizing economic interests and lacking any enforcement mechanism. As it stands, the 30 percent goal is global, not specific to individual countries, and commitments will be voluntary, similar to the Paris Agreement. At the 2002 biodiversity conference in the Netherlands, parties agreed to reduce the rate of species loss by 2010 and failed. The last major wave of biodiversity goal-setting happened in Aichi, Japan, in 2010, and not a single one of the meeting’s targets was met by the 2020 deadline. Given the track record, it remains to be seen if countries will make good on their ambitious new commitments.

“Avatar: The Way of Water,” or how not to make Indigenous futurism movies

If you want to see some examples of actual Indigenous futurism filmmaking, may I suggest you look somewhere besides James Cameron?

There’s the Cree-Metis’ filmmaker Danis Goulet’s recent Night Raiders or the late Mi’kmaw filmmaker Jeff Barnaby’s extremely timely last film, Blood Quantum, released for streaming near the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Both of those films look at and reframe Indigenous history through an Indigenous perspective: boarding school trauma in the case of Night Raiders and the unique relationship Indigenous people have with foreign disease (think smallpox) in the case of Blood Quantum. Both films speak to issues that affect and have affected Indian Country.

If you want to see a white man’s version of an Indigenous futurism film, however, then the local multiplex showing Avatar: The Way of Water is the way to go.

That said, the plot of what some call Avatar 2 is simple enough: the Earth is dying, humans need resources, and this requires a complete takeover of the planet Pandora, which also requires the “taming” of the Indigenous inhabitants, the Na’vi.

Former Avatar and now transformed into a full Na’vi, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and family are driven out of their homelands by Sully’s former military colleague Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who’s also gone full Na’vi and is set on revenge. Sully is intent on protecting his family from further danger. Why is he running? Is it white guilt? He claims it’s to protect his Indigenous clan, yet his wife Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) wants to fight.

The Sully family fly far out to sea where they meet Tonowari (Cliff Curtis), the chief of the Māori-inspired Metkayina clan. The Metkayina are slow to accept them in their territories (the Sullys can’t swim well and their tails are too small) yet eventually take the Sullys in as one of their own and in time will join together in the fight against the approaching earth intruders, the Sky People.

Cameron’s latest is a curious mixture of surface Indigeneity signified from a white man’s perspective: long braids and dreadlocks attached to foreign bodies, the bodies laden with “exotic” ta moko-style tattoos. Ten-feet-tall men and women with large eyes and elfin ears are set in exotic alien locales that bring to mind fantasy artist Frank Frazetta or certain Lakota friends I’ve met. On top of all this is the connection these beings, the Na’vi, have with respect to the land and its inhabitants. It’s fantasy Indigeneity.

It’s hard not to be skeptical of Cameron’s grasp of the Indigenous material he’s appropriating here. Sure, you can make up anything you want in a fantastical tale and even have your left-leaning cake too. There are no rules to filmmaking or art in general, and if you have the funding, the world is your oyster. One can create a world where we can see white men’s myopia in regard to the environment; a story of materialism and colonialism where the consequences of a hunger and thirst for money and resources are displayed from beginning to end. Where’s the fault in that?

The fault is that James Cameron can travel the world, do the “research,” hire Indigenous film legends like Wes Studi (Cherokee) in the first Avatar movie and Cliff Curtis (Maori) and Jermaine Clement (Maori) in Avatar 2, but he can’t escape who he is: a filmmaker who told the Guardian in 2010 that his inspiration in making the first Avatar film was based on the Lakota Sioux.

“I couldn’t help but think that if they [the Lakota Sioux] had had a time-window and they could see the future … and they could see their kids committing suicide at the highest suicide rates in the nation … because they were hopeless and they were a dead-end society — which is what is happening now — they would have fought a lot harder.”

Cameron’s comments are tone-deaf, condescending, and not the kind of ally I want or need to help tell Indigenous stories. It’s one thing to read and research about a culture; it’s quite another to be of it. Perhaps that’s why there’s a boycott of the film currently underway by many Indigenous groups, one of which is led by Asdzáá Tłʼéé honaaʼéí, a Navajo artist and co-chair of Indigenous Pride Los Angeles.

The animation in Avatar: The Way of Water is visually stunning. The animals in particular — I’ll call them sea beasts and air beasts — are very lifelike, with shadows and texture, and many have souls and thoughts of their own and communicate these with the Na’vi. The concept (much like the film) walks a fine line between being corny and magical, and you just have to go with the concept, should you buy into it. One thinks if you paid the ticket to be in the theater, you’re ready to take the ride. I viewed the film as a ride, once in a 3D IMAX theater and once in a regular theater. As someone with glasses, I have to say that I think I enjoyed the film better without the 3D accouterment (also there’s less danger of smearing popcorn butter on your clunky 3D glasses).

The thesis of the film, in the midst of the various subplots, exotic character names, and Pandora versions of whales and sharks and fascinating technology, seems to be: family first. In this case it’s the Sully family fighting against the elements and their enemies to persevere on the frontier.

Sully (a Marine in his former human life) and his sons communicate to each other in military speak and it’s a bit cringey; his sons reply with “yes sir” to their father not as a sign of respect but because that’s just the way they relate to each other; they are sons in their father’s army. It’s a Sully family quirk. Is this wrong? Not necessarily, but it’s certainly jarring to hear in a family supposedly influenced by Indigenous culture.

And while not totally off topic, the poor white kid the Sully family has adopted, Spider (kind of a mix of the feral kid in Mad Max and gas station-era Justin Bieber), is often forgotten or left low on the priority list of the family. The mother practically despises him and he knows it. The lack of respect the Sully clan have for their human adoptee becomes comical as the movie progresses.

At 3 hours and 10 minutes, the film needs a more aggressive editor. Though the time in Metkayina territories provides a nice backstory, we probably don’t need to spend as much time exploring this new Na’vi version of Maoriland. I was intrigued by the updated western movie influences: trains are derailed by Comanche, er, I mean Na’vi, and pillaged for modern weaponry, the Sky people view the Na’vi as hindrances to “progress,” the Sully family is seen as dirty “half-breeds,” half sky people, half Na’vi.

A film like this takes a lot of money to make, and as such is a technological marvel. Still, I’m left wondering, what if a producer just gave a Maori-inspired project like this to an actual Indigenous filmmaker, perhaps an actual Māori filmmaker like Taika Waititi, and we had an actual Indigenous filmmaker tell the story instead of a story told through the lens of a white guy updating colonial western movie tropes? What would that look like? And why are we watching an Indigenous story again through a white man’s (3D) lens? Well, the obvious answer is James Cameron has the money to make it. But when do Indigenous people get to make something like this?

Or maybe the better question is: Is this the type of thing Indigenous people would even want to make?

There are plenty of real-life issues that affect Indigenous people in 2022. The upcoming Supreme Court ICWA decision regarding whether Indigenous adoptees get to stay with Indigenous families or not comes to mind. We have water issues (which this film ironically has nothing to do with), of course colonialism is ever-present and the fight for resources is always in play, but do we need a white guy to dress these issues up in the world of fantasy where 10-foot-tall aliens fight “hard enough” to save the day to prove that we aren’t after all a “dead-end society”? Perhaps Indigenous futurism should be left in the hands of actual Indigenous filmmakers who know and can tell these stories?

When the first Avatar came out in 2009, I actually enjoyed it. The technology was shiny and new, there were fewer Indigenous stories on film, perhaps I even asked less of the type of Indigeneity I saw on the screen; times have changed. In 2022 we had three Indigenous-led TV shows in the United States: Rutherford Falls, Reservation Dogs, and Dark Winds. Reservation Dogs alone had at least half a dozen Indigenous directors in its ranks. The time has come for Indigenous directors to re-make these westerns and continue making our own Indigenous futurism films in our own image, to flip the script, tease the tropes, put Indian before Cowboy. We have enough proven talent at this point and don’t need out-of-touch, privileged directors like James Cameron to appropriate Indigenous culture for his stories. We can tell our own stories. We tell them better.

Jason Asenap is a Comanche and Muscogee Creek writer, critic, and filmmaker based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The GOP elite wants to brand Trump a loser — the humiliating release of his tax returns could help

It’s no secret, among political junkies anyway, that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and much of the Republican elite have been casting around for a way to derail Donald Trump’s bid to be the 2024 GOP presidential nominee. It’s a delicate operation, to be certain. Trump’s allure to the GOP primary voting base isn’t just that he triggers the liberals, but that he ruffles the feathers of the Republican establishment. It makes the deplorables feel powerful, watching people like McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy bow and scrape to the ludicrous reality TV host foisted on them by their own voters. So the strategy is always about trying to find some way to undermine Trump without provoking him to unload personal invective on Truth Social in retaliation.

Some of the maneuvering is behind the scenes. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post documented this week, Senate Republicans helped slip an electoral count reform bill into a larger spending bill. The covert move isn’t just about circumventing Trump’s plan to steal the 2024 election, but to do so in a quiet and highly technical manner that will likely avoid his attention.

The tax returns show that President Drink Bleach is about as good at business as he is at medical science.

But mostly, Trump’s opponents in the GOP are trying to brand him a loser. After Trump-backed candidates took a bath in the 2022 midterms — they fell behind non-Trump Republicans by an average of five points — a number of Republican pundits and politicians stepped forward to declare him an albatross around the party’s neck. McConnell repeatedly shaded Trump by saying someone like him is “unlikely” to win. “What will Democrats do when Donald Trump isn’t around to lose elections?” snarked the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board. “GOP voters should give up on the idea that Trump is a winner,” argued the editors at National Review. Hopeful Republican op-eds predicting Trump has lost his luster have become a cottage industry.

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We’ll see, of course. But there’s no doubt the bad press is getting to Trump, who seems incapable of even leaving his house these days. The announcement of his presidential run was conducted from the safety of the Mar-a-Lago bubble, but even then, it was lackluster at best. As Heather “Digby” Parton noted at Salon, “the former president tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver ‘affirmations’ and cheer him up.” He’s even calling people who won their elections “loser,” in his typical psychological projection.

Calling Trump a criminal and a fascist may be accurate, but both tend to be assets for Trump in the eyes of his base. But, the theory goes, if Trump can be branded a loser, it would finally break the spell he has over his credulous base. The only problem is getting that message through their fact-repelling skulls that have been hardened through years of Fox News propaganda.

Calls for investigation after Trump tax returns expose “audit” lie — and years of “negative income”

Which is why Republican leaders should fall on their hands and knees and thank House Democrats for finally, after years of court battles, releasing Trump’s tax returns from 2015-2020. Not because they reveal that Trump is a massive tax cheat, which only makes the base love him more. What’s great about the tax returns is they show that President Drink Bleach is about as good at business as he is at medical science. Despite his years of dubious claims to be a “billionaire,” the tax returns show that he spent most of his presidency losing money hand over fist. This is a guy who used to brag that he’d “make money” by running for president, after all.

That Trump is a uniquely terrible businessman was known long before this. In 2020, the New York Times successfully obtained years of tax records, mostly from his pre-presidential life. Even those who had long been skeptical that a guy who hawked ringtones was really a “billionaire” were astonished at how very, very bad he is business. Over his lifetime, Trump was handed nearly a billion dollars by benefactors, first his father, then “Apprentice” producer Mark Burnett. Trump promptly flushed it all down the toilet. He didn’t just fritter away at least $834 million in cash — the reporting showed he was at least $421 million in debt. That’s over $1.2 billion lost over the years, and that’s not even counting the many losses he’s been able to use creative accounting to conceal.

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Still, even his biggest detractors tended to feel his fortunes would change in the White House. Surely even a moron like Trump could handle the task of sitting on his tush watching bribes flow in from foreign benefactors, right? He did not even bother to hide that “taking bribes” was a central feature of his presidency. He would speak publicly about the opportunities for memberships at Mar-a-Lago or stays at various Trump hotels, unsubtle reminders that these businesses were excellent ways for those with cash to seek favor with the White House.

To a certain extent, it worked. Diligent reporters documented how the Saudi government would routinely buy out blocks of rooms at Trump hotels. Foreign officials would book not just rooms but events at Trump properties, and make sure Trump knew about it. Domestically, the bribery was just as bad, if not worse. As Citizens for Responsibility & Ethics in Washington (CREW) documented in 2020, government officials, political groups, and special interest groups would curry favor by holding events at Trump properties. Trump and his officials “used their platform to promote Trump businesses 426 times,” driving tourist traffic from the MAGA fanbase. Trump even had a racket going with the Secret Service, where he would routinely book them at Trump properties for about eight times what he claimed he was charging them.

Forget “The Apprentice” — Trump’s taxes show he was really “The Biggest Loser”

But while taking bribes and robbing taxpayers is the easiest work imaginable, Trump was still hilariously bad at it. He had a “negative income” for four out of the six years that were released to the public. Overall, he saw a net loss of $60 million. As the New York Times reports, “the entirety of his core businesses — mostly real estate, golf courses and hotels — continued to report losses every year.” The one year he actually made a decent chunk of money, $24.3 million in 2018, it was only because he sold off a bunch of property that he inherited from his father. Not only is it just another example of money being given to him, but it is a pittance compared to the hundreds of millions he owed going into the presidency, and is dwarfed by his overall losses while president.

All of which is to say that Trump had an elaborate structure of real estate and hospitality holdings that were perfect for laundering bribes. But he is so bad at business, he was losing more than he was taking in. The man’s only real skill is setting money on fire.

These returns were released mere days after Trump’s “MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT” that turned out to be an NFT peddling scheme, a naked grift less suited to a former president than to the has-been reality TV star that he is at heart. Even funnier, he’s not even selling the cards himself but merely licensed his image to a shady company that sells NFTs, so that he only got a cut of the $4.5 million that was made. That’s a lot of money for ordinary people, but for a real billionaire, it wouldn’t be worth getting out of bed. It certainly isn’t enough to start paying down his immense debt. None of this looks like the behavior of a successful businessman but instead looks like the grubby cash grab of someone who is probably broke.

Trump’s voters forgive him for being a liar, a criminal, a whiner and a narcissist, but only because they think he’s a “winner” who owns the liberals. The GOP elite is betting the base can be dissuaded from backing Trump if he’s stripped of that “winner” image, so voters can see the insecure loser underneath all the bluster. The NFTs portray Trump as a big, tough guy, but they are just cheesy and worthless crap. In this, they are the perfect symbol of who he is. The only question is whether Republican voters are ready to accept the Trump everyone else sees, the world-class loser whose “winning” exists only in the realm of lies and delusions.

Putin’s brain and the Ukraine disaster: What does the Russian leader really want?

To this point, the Russian military is losing the war in Ukraine despite overwhelming numerical superiority. Western intelligence agencies believe the Russians have suffered casualties of more than 100,000 killed or wounded and that some of the most elite and best-equipped Russian military units have been destroyed. The collective morale and will of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine — and likely of the Russian military as a whole — has been severely degraded. A significant portion of the territory that the Russians captured during their initial invasion nine or 10 months ago has since been retaken by the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian military is consistently outmaneuvering the Russian military and defeating it on the battlefield for a variety of reasons, including superior leadership and soldiering, a fully mobilized population that is dedicated to resisting the invasion and, of course, a large amount of weapons, supplies, intelligence, training and other support provided by the U.S. and other NATO countries. Recently the Ukrainian military has become so confident it has begun attacking military bases, airfields and other targets well inside Russia.

Military experts have concluded that it will take decades for the Russian military to rebuild, whatever the final outcome of the war may be. Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a fearsome strategist and powerful leader, with an unusual ability to outflank and defeat adversaries has also suffered enormous damage

How do we separate myth from reality in our understanding of Vladimir Putin and the results of this conflict so far? To what extent is the war in Ukraine an extension of Putin’s raw force of will, ego, unquenched ambitions, ego and misguided dreams of recreating the lost Russian Empire — and how difficult does that make it to end this war and bring peace to the region?

Was Putin’s previous image purely a concoction of the Kremlin’s propaganda machine? Has that false image led America and the world to miscalculate in its strategic and tactical approach to Russia on the global stage?

In an attempt to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Andrew Weiss, who is James Family Chair and vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he oversees research on Russia and Eurasia. Prior to joining Carnegie, Weiss was director of the RAND Corporation’s Center for Russia and Eurasia and executive director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum.

Weiss has also served in a range of public policy roles at the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon during both Republican and Democratic administrations. His new book (with art by Brian “Box” Brown) is “Accidental Czar: The Life and Lies of Vladimir Putin.”

In this wide-ranging conversation, Weiss reflects on the successes of the Biden administration in supporting Ukraine, maintaining stability in Europe and countering Russia’s aggression. He counsels against overreacting to Putin’s threats of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine, which he sees as an example of bullying behavior and bluster intended to test the resolve of the U.S. and NATO.

Weiss warns toward the end of this conversation that Putin’s long-term plan — and one of the few ways he could still “win” the war in Ukraine — is to support Donald Trump and other Republican extremists in the United States, in the hope that if Trump or another Trump-like conservative returns to power in 2025, American foreign policy will once again favor Putin and Russia’s interests.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Given the war in Ukraine and the general state of America and the world, how are you feeling?

The past year has been quite an emotional rollercoaster. The war in Ukraine has been a truly wrenching and horrible thing to witness. Of course, my personal situation and feelings are not remotely as bad as what’s happened to people who actually live in Ukraine or who have family over there.

What is it like to have a job where you are most busy under conditions of dangerous conflict?

I am fortunate to work at a truly outstanding think tank in Washington, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I work alongside a team of American and Russian colleagues who are the best analysts of that region anywhere in the world, outside perhaps government circles. I’ve been working on Russia for the better part of my entire career, 30 years or so. Having a job where I can apply my expertise and help policy audiences and the public understand issues like the war in Ukraine is a unique opportunity. I also realize that it’s a privileged position: I don’t envy anyone who is working on these issues on the frontlines inside Ukraine or at places where I used to serve, like the Pentagon. There are no easy solutions or magic bullets for the issues they’re grappling with.

One thing that motivates me is how best to communicate what I know to audiences that are heavily dependent on mainstream news sources and “conventional” wisdom about the war in Ukraine. All of us are being inundated with information in near real time, but much of it is incomplete or misleading. When I have a chance to write op-eds and longer research projects, or to provide comment to a reporter who’s working on Ukraine, I’m conscious of the fact that my views may not be much better, or all that different, from what a dozen other people in my field might say.

All of us are desperate for good news and broadly sympathetic to Ukraine. Images of people celebrating in Kherson are infectious, but they may not tell us much about what’s going to happen next.

I also recognize that it can be very hard, in that format, to capture the nuances of Russia’s complex history or the bigger picture of why the war in Ukraine broke out in the first place. That is precisely why I wrote a graphic novel on Vladimir Putin. How did we end up in a horrible head-on collision with Russia? Who is the real Vladimir Putin? Is he different from the person he presents himself to be on the world stage?

At the core, I am an old-fashioned Russia analyst. I read and speak Russian. I read tons of material and try to determine if there is anything substantive there. Increasingly, the open source data that we all have access to is poor or unreliable. As a result, many Western observers often project their own views onto events in Russia. I do my best not to fall into that trap, but I am far from infallible in that department.

Putin’s massive mistake: Lawrence Freedman on Ukraine and the lessons of history

What are some common misunderstandings or misperceptions about what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, even among members of the public who consider themselves well-informed?

One recent notable example would be the consequences of the very impressive victory by the Ukrainians in recapturing the southern city of Kherson. The Russians had conquered it early in the war. The Ukrainians were then able to take back Kherson, and it did not turn out to be the bloody house-to-house urban battle many of us had feared.

But I trust what Gen. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said in the wake of Kherson. When asked to assess the current state of the war, he said that Ukraine will not be able to achieve its stated military objectives and win the war anytime soon.

All of us, obviously, are desperate for good news and broadly sympathetic to what Ukraine is trying to do on the battlefield. Images of people celebrating the victory in downtown Kherson or elsewhere are infectious. Unfortunately, those images may not tell us all that much about what’s going to happen next.

For people of a certain age and generation the idea of a land war in Europe and these discussions of nuclear weapons summon up fears and memories of the Cold War and those moments where it almost turned “hot.” How does that color our understanding and analyses of the events in Ukraine?

The incident with the missile that landed in Poland is quite revealing in this regard. The stakes of the war expanding outside of Ukraine’s borders are self-evident. When that incident occurred, it wasn’t immediately clear what had actually happened. Was it a Russian missile that had hit a small Polish town and killed a couple of people? Was Putin testing NATO’s resolve? Was it a horrible accident? It was remarkable to see how quickly people began to jump to conclusions. There were even voices on cable news demanding immediate U.S. military action before all the facts were known.

In this case, the Biden administration did precisely the right thing: They let their military and intelligence experts gather the facts about what really happened, and then acted to make sure our allies were lined up alongside us.

All the hysterical talk after the missile strike in Poland was a reflection of how we haven’t had to think about all-out nuclear war for a long time. All this breathless news commentary can be counterproductive.

At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, President Biden made clear that he did not want, in his phrasing, to start World War III as a result of what was happening in Ukraine, nor did he want to see any widening of the conflict. He insisted that the war should be confined within the boundaries of Ukraine and it not be allowed to escalate to a U.S.-Russia nuclear conflict.

All of the hysterical talk right after the incident in Poland really was another reflection of how we haven’t really had to think about all-out nuclear war for a long time. On social media and our 24/7 news culture, not enough people were looking at these fast-moving events with enough sobriety and sufficient caution. It’s simply a fact that the war in Ukraine is nowhere close to ending and that all of this breathless news commentary can be counterproductive.

There is a narrative that the world is actually much safer, in terms of the number of wars and conflicts, than it has been for a long time. Your thoughts?

I think there’s no question that the world is going through a really convulsive and dangerous phase. The Ukraine war shows us that the world is vulnerable to opportunists and other dangerous people such as Vladimir Putin. He believed that he could attack Ukraine without much pushback. That was a huge miscalculation. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that there are other very powerful structural forces at work in the world today. The war in Ukraine is a microcosm of some of those drivers, but it is not the be-all and end-all. For example, the world has shifted to a place where the U.S. is no longer an unchallenged dominant force. This is what the Russians like to call a multipolar world, where powers like China, Russia, India and other countries have started to take on more and more authority. It basically means that the U.S. just can’t dictate to everyone else what to do.

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There is also a broken Middle East, which is spewing out all sorts of instability and challenges. We are experiencing a massive environmental and economic transformation of the energy economy, of which Russia was a prime beneficiary for many years. Nationalism and populism are also ascendant in various parts of the world. There are huge shifts in the ways that technology impacts our lives. All of this is happening on top of a breakdown of order and peace and tranquility in delicate regions of the world like Ukraine.

America and the world are facing challenges that are both immediate — such as the war in Ukraine — and long-term, such as the global climate disaster. How should policymakers balance those priorities and agendas?

It is really hard. My heart goes out to anybody who’s trying to do this type of work at the most senior levels of any government right now. Back in 2021, the Biden administration was eager to try to short-circuit any sense that we were in a spiraling crisis with Russia. That would have allowed the Biden administration to focus on the other challenges you highlighted. The goal was to avoid a situation where Russia found itself in a test of wills with the United States.

But then Afghanistan happened. The world saw a U.S.-supported government crumble when it faced a real threat to its control over the country. Putin took that outcome and incorrectly applied it to Ukraine. Putin also misread how the Europeans would respond to his war against Ukraine. Most importantly, the Russian military has committed horrible crimes and atrocities. By engaging in naked aggression and criminality, Russia’s basically blew up the sense of restraint that the U.S. and other countries had exercised up to that point. It basically propelled us into the world we’re in today, where the U.S. has provided $20 billion in military aid to Ukraine. This is not going to be over anytime soon. The stakes will only grow higher the longer this goes on.

Unfortunately, it is going to be difficult for the United States not to get sucked into this crisis directly and to preserve its ability to effectively manage all the other global challenges we are facing.

Most wars are the result of a failure in signaling between leaders and governments. War is often the result of a series of breakdowns in communication and intent. In terms of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, what signals were being sent and what signals were misunderstood?

The war in Ukraine is not new. It actually started eight years ago. Putin can be very cunning and nimble, but sometimes he overreaches and tries to seize opportunities that blow up in his face. Much of what we are seeing with the war in Ukraine began in 2014, when the biggest thing on Putin’s agenda was having a flashy show at the Olympics to show off all the great things Russia has accomplished. He wanted more respect from the world and then, out of nowhere, a popular uprising began on the streets of Kyiv and upstaged everything.

The Russian leadership truly believes that such events happen only because there are U.S. intelligence operatives who go out and instigate uprisings and protests, and not because average people might want to get rid of an authoritarian leader. As a result, Putin annexed Crimea and started a covert war in Donbas, with the thinnest of deniability that it wasn’t a Russian-orchestrated war. Throughout this whole crisis, the Russians keyed in on Barack Obama’s statements about Ukraine as a good example of a situation where we have to be crystal-clear about where our vital interests are, and where we are and aren’t willing to go to war.

The lesson the Russians took away from that posture was, “OK, if we act really crazy, and do really crazy, dangerous stuff, the United States is going to back off because no one wants to tangle with a nuclear power.” With the war in Ukraine, Putin and Russia unleashed a series of events and outcomes that they thought they would never have to confront. Likewise, I am of the opinion that the U.S. and its allies probably did not think that the Ukrainians would be as successful as they have been so far in pushing the Russians back.

How alarmed should we be at Russia’s repeated statements about the possibility of using nuclear weapons, or other “special weapons” if they deem it necessary to “defend” their territory? Is this just saber-rattling, or a real threat?

What makes it tricky these days is that the Russians deliberately create dangerous situations. They believe that other countries do not want to tangle with them, and they try to exploit that as a tool of intimidation.

Russia is acting like a big drunk guy in a bar who is causing trouble for the other patrons. That person keeps coming closer and closer to you to see what you will do. The challenge is knowing when it’s appropriate to show resolve and to enforce what you believe are vital interests. We saw this during the conflict in Syria, where the Russians were doing similarly dangerous things on purpose and trying to push American forces out of the areas they wanted to control. That culminated in 2018 when a Russian-backed force of “mercenaries” attacked a U.S. Special Forces base in Syria. The U.S. military ended up killing several hundred Russians. The United States warned the Russian government what would happen if they didn’t back off, but they failed to listen to our warnings.

Now we’re in a world where the Russians have made a similar miscalculation. They did not believe that the war would last more than a few weeks or that the U.S. would aid Ukraine to the extent we have been doing. We should not assume that the Russians are always good at reading America’s intentions correctly. Any communication with the Russian government must be very disciplined and carefully managed.

The people of Ukraine are fighting for their very existence in the face of a quasi-genocidal onslaught. The Russians are great at using nuclear threats to unsettle the U.S. and its allies. When Ukraine shifted the momentum in the war through its successful counter-offensive in the autumn, these Russian threats served as an intentional distraction and cause for worry.

Now things are a bit different. Russia is mainly trying to buy time to regroup. The Russians are trying to wait us out and make Ukraine totally unlivable in the meantime by bombing sites like civilian power plants. If there is no heat or electricity, they’re hoping that average people will flee the country and alienate Ukraine’s key European partners. The ultimate bet for Russia is that Donald Trump or someone like him returns to the White House in 2025. They want someone like Trump who will shift U.S. policy onto a trajectory that de-emphasizes support for Ukraine in its moment of need.

The Russians are trying to wait us out and make Ukraine totally unlivable. The ultimate bet for Russia is that Donald Trump or someone like him returns to the White House in 2025.

In the meantime, the Russians will keep doing things, through trial and error, to disrupt our economy and critical infrastructure. While this is happening, Russia’s conventional military is being destroyed on the battlefield. Russia is going to have a very difficult time trying to regenerate those forces. In the end, this means that Russia will become even more dependent on its nuclear forces during the long period it will require to rebuild the conventional military.

How do we separate fact from the fiction about Vladimir Putin? He is an almost legendary figure in American and Western popular culture as some type of super-spy and KGB killer who is always playing 3-D chess and outthinking his opponents. The war in Ukraine has certainly complicated that narrative.

My new book opens with a scene where Putin has already been serving in the KGB for 10 years. For his whole life, Putin has wanted to serve in the KGB. After 10 years in a series of low-end jobs, like the HR department and the counterintelligence department, he was still far from where the action was. At some point in the mid-1980s, Putin was finally invited to join a training program to go to an overseas assignment. Putin went home to Leningrad, but he got into a fight on the subway and broke his arm. In the scene he tells his buddy that there are going to be consequences for what has just happened. Instead of staying in that training program for a couple more years, he was asked to leave after one year.

That seems to explain why Putin ended up being sent to Dresden in East Germany, which was not anyone would have called a prestigious assignment. That episode is a revealing indication of who Vladimir Putin is. Instead of fixating on the familiar iconography of Putin without his shirt on or carrying guns and looking like an action hero, we need to remember that beneath all that artifice he’s a real hothead.

Much of Putin’s original image was artificially created by the Kremlin because they wanted to draw a contrast to Boris Yeltsin, the previous Russian leader, who was frequently incapacitated because of his alcohol abuse. The Kremlin wanted to show the Russian people that they had a young, intelligent, competent, former intelligence officer who was going to make Russia much stronger than Yeltsin did. But now all of that Kremlin image manipulation and propaganda has boomeranged back on to the U.S. and the West, and not everyone is in on the joke. That is dangerous. We have misread Russia and Putin, turning them into a force that is far more powerful than is actually the case, as we see nearly every day in Ukraine.

Was the war in Ukraine the result of Putin’s will, or were other structural and institutional factors at work?

Part of what’s going wrong in this stage of Putin’s tenure is that there aren’t any counterweights to his impulses and whims nowadays. Putin went into self-isolation because of COVID. He retreated into a very small inner circle and spent lots of time reading distorted histories about Russia’s relationship with Ukraine. Putin convinced himself that Ukraine had to be conquered to cement his legacy. There are not many people left in Russian leadership circles who can confront Putin and talk to him straight. No one was around who could tell the boss that invading Ukraine was a really bad idea. The world is suffering because of that lack of counterbalances.

The global right, and in particular the neofascist white right, admire Putin and what they see as his vision for a reborn Holy Roman Empire as a champion of “white Christendom.” What is Putin’s actual vision and intent?

Why is Putin viewed so positively and admiringly by the Trumpists and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party? Part of that is rooted in Putin’s image as someone who embraces “family values” and moral conservatism. That image is largely artificial. In 2011 and 2012 there were a series of street demonstrations in Moscow and other major cities after Putin flamboyantly announced that he was trading places with his friend Dmitry Medvedev and would be Russia’s next president. The Kremlin’s response to the public uproar was to claim that the demonstrations were secretly organized by Hillary Clinton. They were trying to tell their core electorate that these demonstrations are being led by people who are not like you, the “average Russian.”

What happened with the group Pussy Riot around this time is particularly illustrative. The Kremlin claimed that Pussy Riot were outsiders and enemies who would defile the biggest Orthodox cathedral in Moscow and promote LGBTQ equality. They will try to teach your children gay lifestyles, they are American agents, they are henchmen of George Soros.

Putin is viewed so positively by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party because of his image as someone who embraces “family values.” That image is largely artificial, part of a propaganda and influence operation.

During that same time period, people in the Christian right in America and the tea party movement were also being cultivated by Putin and his operatives. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, traveled to Moscow and started saying that Putin was a “real Christian” who was “protecting the family,” unlike Barack Obama. Fox News mainstays like Sheriff David Clarke, a tea party activist, and others in that orbit were flown over to Moscow. NRA representatives were flown to Moscow. This was all part of a propaganda and influence operation where the Russians were able to present Putin as a great leader who would protect “family values” and a “traditional way of life.” These connections, of course, blossomed even more under Donald Trump.

What is Putin’s own internal narrative? How does he imagine himself and his mission?

First and foremost, there is always the need to preserve his regime and power intact, in its current configuration. The second thing is that Putin is fixated on his belief that the U.S. has hurt and embarrassed Russia. Putin wants to knock the U.S. back down to size and get revenge. Finally, Putin believes that the world just shouldn’t be led by the United States anymore, that Russia and China should have much more influence in the world. This shows us how shortsighted Putin’s behavior has been, because the war in Ukraine has actually backfired in that regard. More countries in Russia’s neighborhood now feel totally unsafe and are going to look to the United States for leadership and protection. If Putin were really so smart and such a great strategist, he would not have launched a war against Ukraine. It has set his agenda back by decades.

If you had a private conversation with Vladimir Putin, what would you ask him?

I spent some time with Putin at an earlier stage of his career when I was at the White House, and it made me very skeptical that you can really level with him, or that he will ever level with you. Vladimir Putin has been in power for more than two decades. He generally runs circles around most of his foreign counterparts. Joe Biden is an interesting exception to that, given that he has been in public life for much longer than Putin. Still, Putin is formidable and clearly knows how to conduct himself at a high-level meeting. He’s always well prepared and he gives nothing away. He’s no slouch.

The problem, of course, is that Putin is a product of the Soviet KGB, and you can’t necessarily put much stock in what he says publicly or privately. Trust between Western and Russian leaders has evaporated since the war in Ukraine started in 2014. Throughout this period, Putin has refused to acknowledge basic facts. It’s hard to conduct a dialogue with someone like that, who doesn’t live in the same universe or accept basic principles.

A senior diplomat once explained to me why it’s so maddening to deal with Putin. He said that there are three sections to Putin’s brain. The first section consists of all the garbage that’s poured into him by the Russian intelligence services that are the KGB’s successors, as well as the career bureaucracy. It’s laden with conspiracies, it’s just hall-of-mirrors nonsense. The second hemisphere of his brain consists of all of the things that he has personally been involved with during his 20 or more years in power — making deals and dealing with international issues — as well as all the grievances and anger that have been built up along that journey.

The last part of Putin’s brain is the real world, which consists of what anybody who reads a good newspaper and follows world events would know about. The maddening aspect of dealing with Putin is that he’s constantly toggling between these three hemispheres every time you’re talking to him. You’re just never sure which one he’s in when he’s talking to you.

about Russia, Putin and the Ukraine war

Jan. 6 committee stonewalled DOJ for months. Now it’s “extensively cooperating” with special counsel

A federal investigation into former President Donald Trump appeared to enter a new phase this month, according to reporting Tuesday that the U.S. House panel probing the January 6 attack on the Capitol is “extensively cooperating” with Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed to lead Trump investigations.

Punchbowl News reported that the bipartisan House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol has begun sending Smith’s team documents and transcripts related to a scheme by Trump’s allies to create slates of “fake electors” who supported the Republican in states that were actually won by Democratic President Joe Biden in the 2020 election.

The committee started turning over the documents last week, after months of declining to share investigative materials with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the news outlet noted.

⚡️ New: The Jan. 6 select committee is already turning over materials to the Justice Dept. following a request from special counsel Jack Smith. Much of the material has focused on former WHCOS Mark Meadows & Trump lawyer John Eastman https://t.co/waHBhK75P9

— John Bresnahan (@bresreports) December 20, 2022

After Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign announcement last month, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith to oversee the DOJ investigations into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 attack—in which thousands of his supporters breached the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of the election—and the former president’s retention of highly classified documents after he left office.

The news that the committee is cooperating with Smith’s investigation into the 2021 Capitol attack comes a day after the panel voted to refer Trump to the DOJ for criminal prosecution on four charges and his former lawyer, John Eastman, on two charges.

The committee published an executive summary on Monday but is expected to release its final report on its 18-month investigation on Wednesday.

This school district is ground zero for harsh discipline of Native students in New Mexico

One chilly March afternoon, dozens of Navajo children spilled out of their middle school to play in the snow before heading home. Students in jackets and parkas can be seen on grainy security camera footage chasing and pushing one another to the ground.

The next day, the principal called one of the children into her office. “She said I was expelled,” the child said in an interview, looking at his feet as he sat with his grandmother on their living room couch. “We were just playing around.”

His offense, according to school records, was “assault and battery” for pushing another student down.

The seventh grader, whose middle name is Matthew, said that was the culmination of months of being written up for “everything” — from being off-task in class to playing on the school elevator. (Out of concern that the boy will be stigmatized at school, his grandmother agreed to speak on the condition that she not be identified and that he be identified only by his middle name.)

In New Mexico, Native American students are expelled far more often than any other group and at least four times as often as white students.

Matthew’s school district, Gallup-McKinley County Schools, is responsible for most of that disparity, according to an analysis of state records by New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica. The district has a quarter of New Mexico’s Native students, but it accounted for at least three-quarters of Native student expulsions in the state during the four school years ending in 2020.

Gallup-McKinley is one of the largest school districts in the state by enrollment and geography, but even so, it has just 4% of the state’s students. Twice the size of Delaware, the district sits along the western edge of New Mexico and includes wide swaths of the Navajo Nation. The Chuska Mountains stretch northward, overlooking sandstone cliffs, mesas and canyons, in a landscape dotted with piñon pine, juniper and the fossilized remnants of long-gone oceans.

About three-quarters of Gallup-McKinley’s roughly 12,000 students are Native American, most of them Navajo. It has the largest Native enrollment of any public school district in the United States, according to federal figures.

Gallup and other towns that ring the Navajo Nation have a history of bias and exploitation. In a recent book, University of New Mexico professor David Correia wrote that Gallup’s businesses, including payday lenders, unscrupulous art dealers and liquor stores, have a history of exploiting Native people.

Wendy Greyeyes, who is Navajo and an assistant professor of Native American Studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, said that history plays out today in a more subtle way: through school practices that lead to Native students being disciplined more harshly than others. School policies “are used to justify racist behavior,” she said.

In addition to analyzing statewide discipline data, New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica interviewed 80 people, including 47 parents, grandparents and current and former students, to understand discipline practices in Gallup-McKinley schools. District officials, including Superintendent Mike Hyatt and school board President Christopher Mortenson, did not respond to repeated interview requests.

The state education department requires school districts to report all disciplinary incidents. Those reports track the type of discipline, such as suspensions and expulsions, and note whether police were involved. Gallup-McKinley school officials sometimes called the police or juvenile probation officers over physical altercations, tobacco or drug possession and disorderly conduct, those records show.

Over the past decade or so, the number of expulsions and incidents involving law enforcement has dropped substantially in New Mexico. While Gallup-McKinley’s discipline rate has fluctuated over the past decade, it has remained far higher than the rest of the state.

That has happened under the nose of the state.

Since 2018, New Mexico has been under a state district court order to remedy its failure to provide a sufficient education to Native Americans, students learning English as a second language and other underserved youth. The child of one of the lead plaintiffs in the case that led to the order attended school at Gallup-McKinley. Though most of the court order dealt with state funding and oversight, the judge did address school discipline, noting that high discipline rates are a signal students need more help in school.

The New Mexico Public Education Department uses school districts’ annual reports to track racial disparities among special education students, as required by federal law. Unlike some other states, it doesn’t otherwise track racial disparities in discipline.

The department declined to address the news outlets’ findings. Kelly Pearce, a department spokesperson, said the state could discuss only the “big picture” because school districts are in charge of discipline. If families have complaints about school discipline, she said, they should go to the federal Office for Civil Rights. No one has complained to that office regarding school discipline in Gallup-McKinley from the 2015-16 through the 2020-21 school years.

A spokesperson for New Mexico Attorney General-elect Raúl Torrez called the news outlets’ findings “alarming” but said the office doesn’t have authority to investigate civil rights abuses by school districts or other public bodies. Torrez will advocate for legislation to change that, spokesperson Taylor Bui said.

Daniel Losen, who studies racial disparities in school discipline as director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said someone needs to investigate discipline rates in Gallup-McKinley.

School districts with higher concentrations of students of color often “have higher use of police and just more draconian discipline practices,” Losen said. “Why is what’s happening to kids in Gallup so much worse than what’s happening to kids in the rest of the state?”

Gallup-McKinley’s discipline rates tower above the rest of New Mexico

Students in Gallup-McKinley County Schools were disciplined far more frequently and severely than those in the rest of the state in the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years. The district especially stands out when it comes to expulsions and incidents in which students were referred to police or juvenile probation.

Gallup-McKinley reported at least 211 expulsions over the four school years, an annual rate of 4.6 per 1,000 students. That’s at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state. Students in Gallup-McKinley schools also faced 735 disciplinary incidents involving law enforcement, which amounts to a rate nearly four times as high as the rest of the state. The disparities persisted from elementary through high school.

Native students within the district are subjected to these punishments at roughly twice the rate of their white peers. The district’s Hispanic students face similarly high rates, but because Gallup-McKinley’s Hispanic student population is relatively small, these numbers don’t significantly drive up the state’s discipline rates for Hispanics overall.

Gallup-McKinley’s student behavior handbook states that the rules will be “enforced fairly in an age-appropriate manner” and that the district is committed to providing all students safe school environments “free of discrimination, violence, and bullying.”

Ben Chavez, who directed discipline in the district until earlier this year, told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica he was not given permission to speak about the issue.

Rachel A. Rodriguez, a former Gallup-McKinley County Schools discipline administrator, attributed Native students’ higher disciplinary rates to problems among rural families, like poverty, trauma and substance abuse.

The belief that alcohol abuse is more frequent among Native Americans is widespread, but it’s not borne out by the facts. And neighboring districts with large numbers of Native students and similarly high rates of unemployment and poverty don’t dispense as much harsh discipline as Gallup-McKinley.

For example, Gallup-McKinley reported significantly higher rates of expulsions and incidents involving law enforcement than the Central Consolidated district in neighboring San Juan County. Central Consolidated has an even higher proportion of Native students than Gallup-McKinley and a similar “at-risk index,” which is used by the state to identify school districts that need additional money to educate high-needs kids.

One of the main drivers of Gallup-McKinley’s discipline rates is disorderly conduct — an infraction that until the current school year wasn’t even defined in its or state education department policies, rulebooks, parent handbooks or regulations. The 2022-23 Gallup-McKinley student handbook defines it simply as “action(s) which substantially disrupt(s) the orderly conduct of a school environment.”

“Disorderly conduct,” said former Gallup-McKinley Assistant Principal Ron Triplehorn, “is going to be kind of your catchall, just kind of a generic term for general misbehavior.”

Statewide, Native students were expelled for disorderly conduct at least 76 times and law enforcement was involved in 193 such incidents from 2016-17 to 2019-20. About 90% of these incidents occurred in Gallup-McKinley schools.

Across the United States, students of color tend to be disciplined at higher rates for vaguely defined, catchall minor infractions like disorderly conduct, Losen said. “That’s where the largest racial disparities are usually found,” he said.

Gina Laura Gullo, assistant director of education services at the Pennsylvania State Education Association, did her Ph.D. dissertation on unconscious bias in school discipline. She found that school administrators who scored higher on measures of implicit racial bias assigned harsher discipline to students of color than white pupils.

“Infractions that are more subjective in nature,” she said, “such as disorderly conduct, insubordination, classroom disturbance and the like, are those that are specifically subject to more implicit bias.”

How Matthew got kicked out of school

For 13-year-old Matthew, inattentiveness, playing on an elevator, not following instructions and pouring glue on a desk were all classified as disorderly conduct.

He said his discipline problems started after the principal caught him making fun of her in the hallway. Over the next two months, she suspended him four times and wrote him up four other times.

The first time, Matthew was suspended for a day because a teacher reported that he didn’t follow instructions and poured glue on his desk. Matthew told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica that he was putting glue on his hand when some got on the desk, and that he peeled it off.

Matthew’s grandmother allowed the news outlets to review his school disciplinary records. The principal did not respond to interview requests.

In November, Matthew’s teacher wrote that he objected to Matthew’s “behavior towards learning.” He “is always off-task, disrespectful, and defiant,” his teacher wrote in a note to the principal.

When Matthew wore a blue shirt to school, a dress code violation, the principal wrote him up for “gang-related activity.”

She wrote him up for “bullying” after she used security camera footage to conclude he and another student banged on her office window and ran off. Matthew told the news outlets he didn’t do it; the only evidence in his file is two blurry images taken from the video.

The principal suspended Matthew for a day after confiscating a miniature toy butterfly knife. “Weapons possession,” she wrote. He said he had bought the plastic and tin toy from a vending machine.

Two weeks later, she suspended him for a week for allegedly cutting a classroom chair with the elastic band of his face mask. That, the principal wrote, was “vandalism.” Matthew told the news outlets he slipped the band into an existing cut in the back of the plastic chair, and the teacher saw him pulling it back and forth.

In December, the principal ordered a disciplinary hearing, citing his “multiple misbehaviors.” Matthew and his grandmother signed a behavior contract, agreeing he would stay out of trouble.

“It would have been nice if she had asked why he was acting like this,” Matthew’s grandmother said. She said she would’ve told the principal that Matthew has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Though Matthew once took medication at school, he doesn’t have an individualized education plan, or IEP, which would afford him protections for discipline related to his diagnosis.

Matthew had reason to be distracted at school: His grandmother, who is raising him, was undergoing radiation treatment for breast cancer. A judge awarded her custody of Matthew when he was little, after his father died. He sees his mother only occasionally.

Then came the incident in March, when Matthew was kicked out of school for pushing the student to the ground. In a letter to his grandmother, the principal wrote that a security video showed Matthew “chasing and shoving” a “female student into the snow multiple times” and that when the girl was questioned the next morning, she reported back pain.

Matthew’s grandmother said the principal refused to show her the video or allow her to hear the girl’s version of events. Instead, the principal provided a single picture. It “just showed a girl in the snow with two boys standing there,” the grandmother said. “I didn’t recognize him.”

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reviewed the video, which had no audio. It shows groups of children talking and roughhousing. The student identified in the report as Matthew pushed another student down, possibly twice. Earlier, another student had pushed the same student down but apparently was not disciplined, according to the district’s response to a public records request for other disciplinary reports from that afternoon. All three students appeared to interact afterward.

Matthew’s grandmother told the principal she wanted to appeal the decision to kick Matthew out of school. “She told me, ‘Good luck.'”

Normally the school district must hold a hearing before expelling or suspending a student for more than 10 days. But the behavior contract Matthew and his grandmother had signed said if he broke the rules again, he would be disciplined without a hearing.

Although Matthew said the principal told him he was expelled, her letter to the grandmother called it a long-term suspension. Under the district’s rules at the time, that meant Matthew could have returned to school after 90 days. But when Matthew’s grandmother later tried to enroll him in summer school, which fell outside that time, the principal refused, the grandmother said.

After Matthew was kicked out, his grandmother asked that he be allowed to take online classes or complete homework so he didn’t fall hopelessly behind. Schools allowed both when they were closed during the pandemic. The principal refused, the grandmother said.

Over the following weeks, Matthew became increasingly withdrawn, his grandmother said. “He stopped talking to me very much,” she said. “I worry.”

Delores Greyeyes, director of the Navajo Department of Corrections and mother of Wendy Greyeyes, said some parts of Matthew’s story sounded familiar. When she was a girl, she said, she and her friends poured glue on their hands.

“We let it dry and pulled it off to see our palm and fingerprints,” she said. “So when you tell me this student was disciplined for disorderly conduct because glue got on his desk, I have to wonder: Was that curiosity?”

Greyeyes, a former social worker, interviewed inmates at the state prison in Winslow for her dissertation research. They told her their first encounters with police happened in school. Trouble often started small — missed homework or sleeping in class. Teachers saw them as defiant rather than asking them what was wrong, she said, leading to escalating discipline.

“One of these young men said his school administrator told him he was a ‘no-good Indian’ and put it in his head his destiny would be to be in jail or dead,” she said.

The unintended consequences of harsh discipline

Karl Lohmann, a retired Gallup-McKinley elementary school teacher, remembers when the school district established a “zero tolerance” policy in the early 1990s. Many teachers welcomed it, he said, because they thought it would give them more support and more say in student suspensions.

Several years later, he sent a fifth grade Native American boy to the principal’s office for stealing a handheld electronic spelling game. “I expected the principal to call in the parents and get it back,” Lohmann said.

Instead, the boy was handcuffed and taken away in a patrol car. “That was part of my education about how policies can have unintended consequences,” Lohmann said.

Research has shown that “zero tolerance” or “no excuses” policies, adopted in many school districts around that time, can do more harm than good and even serve as a vehicle for bias. After calls for reform, many school districts have shifted away from zero tolerance in favor of prevention of misbehavior and a focus on students’ emotional needs.

Gallup-McKinley’s current discipline policy doesn’t mention zero tolerance. But neither does it embrace an approach gaining favor in the state: restorative justice practices such as talking circle mediation. The state has announced that it will conduct a pilot study of restorative justice practices to reduce expulsion and suspension rates. Twelve schools across the state will participate; none are in Gallup-McKinley.

Severe discipline practices criminalize student misbehavior, said Regis Pecos, a former governor of Cochiti Pueblo and a leader in efforts to reform education in New Mexico.

Harsh forms of discipline, coupled with a lack of emotional support or restorative justice practices, create a “hostile education environment,” Pecos said. Students become demoralized and come to see themselves as the problem. That fuels high dropout rates, underachievement, poverty, health disparities and high suicide rates, he said, “compounding the challenges for students, parents and communities.”

Gallup-McKinley’s three-year strategic plan, completed in February, says one desired outcome is a reduction in the number of disciplinary referrals that result in charges against students, but district officials did not answer questions about how that would be achieved. The plan was removed from the district’s website after New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica asked about it.

About a dozen students and parents told New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica they supported the district’s strict discipline measures. About twice as many said some students are singled out while others are handled lightly, and punishments can be arbitrary and counterproductive.

This spring, dozens of students, mostly Native, were suspended for a senior prank in which they threw streamers, toilet paper and glitter and sprayed shaving cream throughout the school.

Some of the students’ parents said the district pressured them to waive their right to a hearing in exchange for allowing the students to graduate. Several parents instead sued after their children had been suspended for more than 10 days without a hearing — a violation of the school district’s policies.

A judge ordered Gallup-McKinley to allow the students to return to class. The school district held hearings and suspended the students a week before graduation, although they did graduate.

Students, parents and alumni protested what they saw as a strict response to an annual prank, which the district called “criminal activity.” District officials called police over the incident, although they told police they would handle student discipline and no one was charged.

Rodriguez, the former Gallup-McKinley discipline administrator, said school officials sometimes can’t avoid calling the police. She described one such incident involving a fifth grade boy.

“He was so angry,” she said. “We called the police and three officers had to put him down and put him in handcuffs. When I came home that night, I cried. I said, ‘I never want to see a fifth grade student put in handcuffs again.’ It was traumatizing to me. But we had to.”

Other times, she said, police were called to help retrieve children, including elementary students, who left campus. “They run — take off running from the school and we chase them, but they’re faster than us,” she said. “So we have to call the police to find them.”

McKinley County Sheriff-elect James Maiorano III said his office has been contacted a few times over the years for missing students. The Gallup Police Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Maiorano, who has been with the sheriff’s office for 18 years, said the agency is increasing its presence in Gallup-McKinley schools to deal with fights and drug possession.

Discipline involving police can have profound consequences. Rhonda Goodenough, who once ran the state probation and parole office in Gallup, said even a sealed juvenile record of a minor offense sometimes stops a young person from joining the military. Recruiters would call, asking her to unseal or explain a minor’s criminal record, but she wasn’t allowed to say anything.

“There was nothing I could do,” Goodenough said. “They couldn’t get it off their record.”

By the end of the school year, Matthew had missed close to 100 days of class. In August, he learned he would be forced to repeat seventh grade.

“He’s really quiet. He used to talk with me, but now it’s just ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘I dunno,'” his grandmother said in September. “Before, he used to talk to me about class and what they did, but since he started getting in trouble there, he’s just not interested in school anymore.”

Matthew said his favorite subjects are math and science. In elementary school, he participated in an after-school STEM club. Before his string of suspensions, his grandmother said, he had talked about going to college to become an engineer.

“If we can just get him through high school and into college,” she sighed, “I can die content.”

“It’s the transgender, LGBTQ”: Secret recording catches superintendent ordering removal of books

The U.S. Education Department’s civil rights enforcement arm has launched an investigation into a North Texas school district whose superintendent was secretly recorded ordering librarians to remove LGBTQ-themed library books.

Education and legal experts say the federal probe of the Granbury Independent School District — which stemmed from a complaint by the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas and reporting by NBC News, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune — appears to be the first such investigation explicitly tied to the nationwide movement to ban school library books dealing with sexuality and gender.

The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified Granbury school officials on Dec. 6 that it had opened the investigation following a July complaint by the ACLU, which accused the district of violating a federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender. The ACLU complaint was based largely on an investigation published in March by NBC News, ProPublica and the Tribune that revealed that Granbury’s superintendent, Jeremy Glenn, instructed librarians to remove books dealing with sexual orientation and people who are transgender.

“I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women and there are women that think they’re men,” Glenn told librarians in January, according to a leaked recording of the meeting obtained, verified and published exclusively by the news outlets. “I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

Later in the meeting, Glenn clarified that he was specifically focused on removing books geared toward queer students: “It’s the transgender, LGBTQ and the sex — sexuality — in books,” he said, according to the recording.

The comments, combined with the district’s subsequent decision to remove dozens of library books pending a review, fostered a “pervasively hostile” environment for LGBTQ students, the ACLU wrote in its complaint. Chloe Kempf, an ACLU attorney, said the Education Department’s decision to open the investigation into Granbury ISD signals that the agency is concerned about what she described as “a wave” of anti-LGBTQ policies and book removals nationally.

“In this case it was made very clear, because the superintendent kind of said the quiet part out loud,” Kempf said in an interview. “It’s pretty clear that that kind of motivation is animating a lot of these policies nationwide.”

An Education Department spokesperson confirmed the investigation and said it was related to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex, gender and sexual orientation. The Office for Civil Rights doesn’t comment on pending investigations, the spokesperson said.

If the investigation confirms violations of students’ rights in Granbury schools, the agency can require the district to make policy changes and submit to federal monitoring.

Neither Glenn nor the district responded to messages Monday. In an earlier statement following the news outlets’ reporting in March, the district said it was committed to supporting students of all backgrounds. And the district said that its primary focus is educating students but that “the values of our community will always be reflected in our schools.”

Granbury, a town 40 miles west of Fort Worth, has been embroiled in a heated debate over what types of books children should be allowed to read at school.

Last year, voters in Granbury elected a pair of school board members who campaigned against LGBTQ-affirming school curricula and library books. Afterward, Glenn began asking district administrators about several books that an unnamed school board member had found in the district’s online catalog, according to text messages reviewed by NBC News, ProPublica and The Tribune. The messages from the board member to Glenn included screenshots of eight titles, all of which dealt with LGBTQ topics, with the words “gay,” “trans” and “gender” highlighted in some of the book descriptions.

In January, when Glenn met with librarians, he told them that the new school board was “very, very conservative” and that any employee who holds different political views had “better hide it,” according to the recording of his comments. In the days that followed, the district embarked on one of the largest mass book removals in the state, pulling 130 titles, most of which featured LGBTQ characters or themes.

After a volunteer review committee voted to return all but a few of the titles, two disgruntled members of the committee filed a police report in May accusing district employees of providing “pornography” to children, triggering a monthslong criminal investigation by Hood County Constable Chad Jordan, which remained open as of August. Jordan didn’t respond to messages requesting an update on the investigation.

All of that — including the fact that Glenn has never apologized or walked back his comments — has created an unwelcoming environment for LGBTQ students in the Granbury district, the ACLU argued in its complaint.

“These comments, combined with the book removals, really send a message to LGBTQ students in the districts that: ‘You don’t belong here. Your existence is shameful. It should be censored,'” Kempf said.

In recent months, Granbury parents and voters have continued to pressure the district to remove books with LGBTQ themes or descriptions of sex. Last month, Karen Lowery, one of the women who sought criminal charges against Granbury librarians, won a seat on the school board; she has vowed to purge books that she has deemed inappropriate for children. Of the nearly 80 titles conservative activists want banned, 3 out of 5 feature LGBTQ characters or themes, according to an analysis of books posted on GranburyTexasBooks.org, a website where they have compiled parent reviews.

Lowery didn’t respond to messages requesting comment.

At her first meeting as a school board trustee on Dec. 12 — one week after the Office for Civil Rights notified the district it had opened an investigation — Lowery called for all “obscene” books to be pulled from shelves. In response, Glenn asked her to provide a list of titles so the board could discuss it at a future meeting.

“I think as a district, we do want to resolve this,” Glenn said of the library book controversy. “Speaking on behalf of every administrator in the room, and probably community members because I know there are a few of you that are ready to have this behind you, too.”

Education and legal experts said the Education Department’s decision to open an investigation in Granbury is significant because it sets up a test of a somewhat novel legal argument by the ACLU: the idea that book removals themselves can create a hostile environment for certain classes of students.

“It’s certainly the first investigation I’ve seen by the agency testing that argument in this way,” said W. Scott Lewis, a managing partner at TNG, a consulting firm that advises school districts on complying with federal civil rights laws.

The ACLU of Texas made similar legal arguments in another civil rights complaint filed last month against the Keller Independent School District in North Texas in response to a policy banning any books that mention “gender fluidity.” The Education Department has yet to decide whether to open an investigation in Keller, Kempf said.

Jonathan Friedman, the director of free expression and education at the nonprofit PEN America, which has tracked thousands of school book bans since last year, said the same legal argument could be made in districts across the country where parents, school board members and administrators have expressed anti-LGBTQ motivations.

“It’s not uncommon to see people explicitly saying that they want to remove LGBTQ books because they believe they are indoctrinating students,” said Friedman, who cited a case in Florida in which a teacher called for the removal of a children’s picture book about two male penguins because, she said, it promoted the “LGBTQ agenda.”

Granbury isn’t the only North Texas school district facing federal scrutiny.

The Office for Civil Rights over the past year has opened five investigations into allegations of discrimination at the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, a wealthy Fort Worth suburb that has been at the center of the national political fight over the ways schools address racism, gender and sexuality. If the Education Department finds Carroll students’ rights have been violated, experts said, the federal agency could require the district to implement the same types of diversity and inclusion training programs that conservative activists have fought to block in Southlake.

Carroll Superintendent Lane Ledbetter has said the district has taken steps, including retraining staff members in how to handle bullying complaints, to ensure students from all backgrounds feel safe at school.

“If OCR determines that there are steps that we can take beyond what we have implemented, then we will absolutely comply,” Ledbetter said in a video address to the community after news of the federal civil rights investigation broke last year. “My priorities are kids, and we’re going to keep them safe.”

As in Southlake, some students and parents in Granbury say they’re counting on federal investigators to force changes.

Lou Whiting, 17, a nonbinary senior at Granbury High School, said Glenn’s recorded comments made them feel unsafe and unwelcome at school. Whiting, who helped organize student protests of the book removals, cried when they learned that the federal government had opened an investigation.

“It’s just really good to hear that there are people who are listening to us and actually doing something about it,” Whiting said. “It means a lot to hear that our efforts meant something.”

Disclosure: The ACLU of Texas 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/2022/12/20/granbury-books-investigation-civil-rights/.

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

Climate activists’ new, confrontational tactics aren’t popular. That’s kind of the point.

2022 may be remembered as the year that climate protests got weird. Activists prowled cities in the dead of night, using lentils to deflate the tires of thousands of SUVs. They glued themselves to airport runways. They also glued themselves to priceless artwork in museums, dumped flour on a sports car painted by Andy Warhol, and, infamously, launched a can of Heinz tomato soup at the glass protecting Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.”

Frustrated with the sluggish pace of climate action, protesters turned to disruptive tactics, risking arrest and widespread disapproval. Activists made people late for work; they delayed flights; they were accused of vandalism. Their actions weren’t popular, but they anticipated that.

“We’re going to be noisy. We’re going to be disruptive. We’re going to be unignorable. We’re going to be a pain in the ass until you listen to us,” Emma Brown, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, the coalition behind the museum protests, recently told PBS Newshour. The group hopes to persuade the U.K. government to put a stop to all new fossil fuel projects.

When a pair of activists with Just Stop Oil tossed tomato soup at the van Gogh painting in London’s National Gallery in October, it sparked a widespread debate about the effectiveness of such tactics. In a survey of more than 2,000 Americans conducted within a month of the protest, 46 percent said that “disruptive non-violent actions including shutting down morning commuter traffic and damaging pieces of art” decreased their support for efforts to address climate change. Only 13 percent said such actions increased their support.

The thing is, the public rarely approves of disruptive protests — unless they happened sometime in the past. Suffragettes actually slashed paintings, permanently damaging them, and then were remembered as heroes. Even peaceful marches, as they unfold, are sometimes seen as unhelpful. After Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the iconic “I Have a Dream” speech following the 1963 March on Washington, three-quarters of Americans said they thought mass demonstrations harmed the cause, according to Gallup polling. The following year, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

That doesn’t mean that throwing soup at famous paintings will bring down greenhouse gas emissions, but it does suggest that the public has a poor track record of guessing what makes social movements successful. Experts say that disruptive demonstrations play an important role in gathering attention for a cause and making tamer protests appear more acceptable by comparison.

“Confrontational protests, violent or not, are part of all successful social movements,” said Oscar Berglund, who researches climate activism and civil disobedience at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom.

While climate protests are generally peaceful, fiery ones could raise the risk that things will get violent, depending on the circumstances. “The line between confrontational activism and violence is a very, very fuzzy line, particularly when you have law enforcement who may or may not be empowered to harm protesters,” said Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland who has studied the effectiveness of climate activism for two decades. States have recently passed draconian laws with harsh penalties for blocking fossil fuel infrastructure.

Despite that, there’s a growing appetite for nonviolent climate demonstrations. One-fifth of Americans under 40 say they’d likely participate in civil disobedience — such as sit-ins, blockades, or trespassing — to support action on climate change if a friend asked them to, according to a survey conducted last September by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Fisher says that participation in civil disobedience appears to be on the rise, based on her surveys of AmeriCorps workers and climate organizers.

“There is potential here for a huge disruptive movement to arise quickly,” said Margaret Klein Salamon, the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund, which backs nonviolent climate activism. Confrontational actions haven’t picked up speed in the United States as fast as they have in the United Kingdom, but there are signs that a wave may be starting here as well.

In April this year, climate scientists chained themselves to a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles to protest the bank’s funding of fossil fuel projects. In the summer, drivers of SUVs and pickup trucks in New York, the Bay Area, and Chicago found their vehicles with tires deflated and a leaflet on their windshield: “Your gas guzzler kills.” It was the work of the Tyre Extinguishers, an international group aiming “to make it impossible” to own large personal vehicles in cities. Last month, protesters picketed at private airports in New Jersey, North Carolina, California, and Washington state to highlight the toll that private jets took on the planet.

Disruptive protests are, by their nature, uncomfortable. Salamon, who is also a clinical psychologist, says the public is living in a “state of mass delusion” with regard to the climate crisis, sleepwalking into catastrophe. The role of activists is to shake everyone awake.

“If you think about it from that perspective, it makes all the sense in the world why these activists would be unpopular. You know, they’re making people think about climate — they’re making people feel really painful feelings, because it’s such a tough reality,” Salamon said.

Confrontational tactics can draw criticism, anger, and even death threats. But many activists feel that more conventional means of protesting won’t bring results. A phenomenon called the “activist’s dilemma” illustrates the problem. Protesters often have to choose between moderate actions that are easily ignored or more extreme actions that might alienate the public.

“It isn’t fun: I hate disrupting people’s lives, and it’s upsetting that it’s come to this. But it has come to this,” an anonymous Tyre Extinguisher activist told Vice earlier this year. “We feel that nothing else will work — we don’t have any more time for letters or marches or waiting for more elections. We’ve had those strategies for 30 years and they’re not working. It’s time to shake things up.”

Phoebe Plummer, one of the soup throwers with Just Stop Oil, admitted that their action was, in their own words, “slightly ridiculous,” but argued that the absurdity of the protest was what got the conversation on climate action going. In the months preceding the “Sunflowers” incident, Just Stop Oil had attacked a more logical target: oil terminals. Activists blocked so much oil infrastructure in April that they forced one in three gas stations in southern England to close. But they received little international attention.

Disruptive protests play a role in setting the agenda by opening up space for issues that might otherwise not get discussed. Take Insulate Britain, a group that began blocking roads in the United Kingdom last September, demanding that the government retrofit all U.K. homes to make them more energy-efficient. The group was widely unpopular, with only 16 percent of people surveyed viewing them favorably one month later.

But in the month after the protests began, the number of times that print newspapers in the United Kingdom mentioned “insulation” had doubled (not including references to “Insulate,” part of the group’s name). By June this year, the issue had risen on the policy agenda, with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson drawing up plans to insulate thousands of homes before winter struck. At the time, one official suggested that the policy could be called — wait for it — “insulate Britain.”

It’s hard to draw a straight line from protest to policy change, but experts say disruptive demonstrations may be more helpful than many people believe. “The fact that it’s unpopular doesn’t mean that it’s ineffective,” Berglund said, referring to Insulate Britain. “Ultimately, even if people dislike what protesters do, it doesn’t automatically turn them against the course that those protesters are fighting for.”

Of course, such protests are not great for building broad movements. They’re probably not going to change the minds of the minority of Americans who oppose climate policies. “These activists and the groups that are organizing these kinds of activism are acutely aware that they’re not speaking to those people,” Fisher said. Instead, they’re trying to mobilize people who are already sympathetic. Polarizing the public has the effect of forcing people to take a stance on something they might not be thinking about otherwise.

And by some measures, the strategy might already be working. Fisher said that the soup incident was “through-the-roof effective” by many of the short-term goals activists use to judge effectiveness, such as media coverage, even if it’s unclear what effect the action will have in the long run. According to Just Stop Oil’s organizers, the attention-grabbing protest made it easier to recruit new people.

In the recent past, civil disobedience was seen by climate organizers as “a bad tool,” Fisher said. “But there’s no question that the young generation of climate activists absolutely include that as one of their tools now.”

The case for spending less money on holiday gifts

You are familiar, I’m sure, with the institution of the gift shop: a business that exists entirely to sell useless treats and temptations, an ode to capitalistic superfluousness. During the weekend before Hanukkah, I found myself in such a place, driven into a state of dissociation by twee mugs and balsam-scented candles. This was how I ended up purchasing a felt pocket of catnip in the shape of a pierogi for my brother’s cat, because the package I was sending to his family in California just felt incomplete without a few extra trinkets.

Normally, I am a woman who is familiar — intellectually, professionally, emotionally — with the many problems brought about by rampant holiday shopping. I know that both the copious buying and receiving of presents often constitutes a source of stress for all parties involved, that shiny wrapping paper and ribbon are a landfill nightmare, that the manufacturing and shipping of billions of goods for a few days’ celebration is both a burden on human workers and the polluted atmosphere. Indeed: the entire contemporary ideal of winter holidays is largely perpetuated by corporations to profit off of manufactured emotions.

One obvious solution that evades most of these environmental and societal ills while still showering love and generosity upon your loved ones is to embrace gifts not bought new: homemade, secondhand, even — gasp! — regifted. It is a technique I personally strive to espouse. In the weeks leading up to Hanukkah, I took significant time and care this year to make personalized drawings in vintage frames for my family members, at my dining room table. (They were nice! I promise.)

And yet I still felt the need to buy a few small things, simply to show that I was also willing to spend money on my loved ones — This in spite of being well aware that the gratuitous “just because” trinkets are among the worst offenders of gift-giving, as useless as they are unwanted.

What is this force that compels me and millions of others to partake in the service of one very specific holiday ideal: the heap of shiny new presents, all wrapped up with a bow? Is it the consequence of capitalism, of holiday rom-coms, of deeply ingrained relationship dynamics? And more importantly, is it an ideal simply too powerful to subvert?

According to data from the National Retail Federation, a trade organization whose members range from department stores to multi-level marketing operations, 2021 holiday season spending grew by 13.5 percent compared to the previous year, a greater increase than any in the past 20 years. This year, gift spending is expected to grow by another 6 to 8 percent, even in light of the highest inflation rates in 40 years.

The financial services company Bankrate surveyed consumers on how they would stretch their holiday budgets due to inflation. The most popular response was implementing coupons, discounts, and sales (41 percent), closely followed by simply buying fewer gifts (40 percent). The least popular answers were making handmade gifts and buying secondhand items, reported by only 14 and 11 percent respectively.

The reluctance to go with secondhand gifts boils down to how givers think used items will be received, said Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University. His research suggests that fear is largely unfounded, driven in no small part by relentless messaging by retailers. “When it comes to used products, recipients are more open to them than givers anticipate,” he said.

As it turns out, the person that gives the gift cares much more about how much it cost than the recipient, contrary to the assumption of Drake’s entire oeuvre. In fact, Givi says that “sentimental” gifts — family heirlooms, handmade gifts, even a simple framed photograph — are almost guaranteed to provide more happiness than a $20 tchotchke thrown into a Target cart in a panic.

Even knowing that from his own research, Givi admitted that he — much like myself! — usually succumbs to the pressure to spend a certain amount on new gifts every year. It’s a sort of prisoner’s dilemma of presents: If everyone else in the family gives an expensive gift, how will I look?

An influential anthropological theory published in 1925 by the sociologist Marcel Mauss presents the practice of gift exchange as the foundation of all peaceful relationships among both individuals and communities. On one hand, it’s a nice idea that acts as a counterpoint to a society dependent on capitalistic commerce; on the other, that’s quite a bit of interpersonal pressure come December.

But Mauss’ theory is grounded in the idea that there is no such thing as a selfless gift, as every gift is given in expectation of some form of equivalent reciprocation. This competitive element to gift giving – especially the pressure at the holidays to be the most thoughtful, the most generous, the most caring – drives us to spend, even when we don’t want or have to. After all, there’s no simple scale to measure sentimental value or joy or any other merit a gift might have. Why not let currency do the job instead?

But to make matters even more fraught, the factors guiding contemporary gift giving aren’t just about money. There is also the expectation — particularly in romantic relationships — that the gift in question carry emotional significance. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a rather harsh message for those who simply purchase their gifts in one 1844 essay:

The only gift is a portion of thyself … Therefore the poet brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner, a gem; the sailor, coral and shells; the painter, his picture; the girl, a handkerchief of her own sewing … But it is a cold, lifeless business when you go to the shops to buy me something, which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: Second Series, 1844

Emerson’s musings are a full-throated endorsement of the handmade present, to be sure — but to make such a thing requires significant spare time at the very least. If the two acceptable options to show your great affection for another person are extraordinary effort or extraordinary expenditure, I would guess that most people today will opt for the expenditure, since time is an increasingly precious resource in modern life.

But what would it look like if the monetary or sentimental value of a gift weren’t a proxy for the giver’s own self worth, a way of establishing their place relative to others in a family, community, or society? This is part of the concept behind the Buy Nothing community, in which people in neighborhoods or small regional groups use social media to offer up or ask for goods. In these hyperlocal gift economies, nothing on offer is treated as more valuable than anything else. A diamond ring from a bad relationship should not be seen as worth more than a set of recycled baby food jars. (These are real examples.)

“You have a set of rules in a sharing economy, where you make it abundantly clear that every single gift has the same value,” says Liesl Clark, co-founder of the Buy Nothing Project. “We have had to work really hard at this, working at a flat economy where the true value is the connection between the people, and the wealth is the connections forged between proximal neighbors.”

There are obvious challenges to applying these rules alongside a larger society in which diamond rings and baby food jars do have very different values. But one thing that Clark emphasizes is that the benefits associated with gifts exchanged via Buy Nothing groups often have little to do with those items’ worth in a commerce-based economy. A large pile of firewood from a giver’s property delivered right before a snowstorm cuts all the power to the recipient’s house quickly becomes the most precious thing in the world to that person, but it might have retailed for $19.99 at Kroger.

To that end, we can reread Emerson’s quote with a takeaway other than “Ralph doesn’t want your Gift Cards.” The poet’s words, the miner’s gem, and the seamstress’s handkerchief would all be priced very differently in a store, but they represent the same value: a piece of oneself, given with love.

Allow me, then, to propose a sort of progressive theory of gift-giving: Try not to focus on what you feel you should give. Above all else, a recipient wants to feel loved and cared for. They do not want to feel burdened or indebted. If these principles — and not an arbitrary sense of competition or obligation — guide one’s choices, I am confident that much of the stress of holiday presents will melt like snow on a lit windowpane.

As for the catnip pierogi — well, the cat loved it. But not significantly more than she loved the wrapping paper and ribbon that came with it.

The world’s most sensational single-serving hand pie and potato pocket? All about the knish

The first time I had a knish was a formidable moment. My mother went to a Jewish deli and brought a few home, in addition to a slew of other delights, but my tiny, grubby hands were only attracted to the knish. I was intrigued by its weight, its shape and its size. When she told me its name, though, I was all in. “What a fun word,” I thought! I loved the contrast and oddity of the sharp “kuh” sound that begins the word.

Culinarily, I think my initial assumption was that it was a dessert of sorts, but I could tell that its aroma was by no means sweet. Once I bit into the pastry and it gave way to rich, soft, perfectly seasoned potato, my mind was blown. I ate the rest of it with reckless abandon, flakes from the pastry on my shirt and chin, proudly noting my new favorite food.

How the world’s first all-vegan Jewish deli prepares for Passover

Unfortunately, the potato knish has become my culinary white whale, if you will. For some odd reason — whether my tastes have shifted or sharpened, the knishes in my local area have decreased in quality, or some other amorphous pivot in the realm of knishes — I am incapable of finding a knish that brings me the same gastronomic pleasure as that initial knish. (Same goes for shortbread cookies, but that’s a conversation for another day).

For those who may (unfortunately) be unacquainted, though, let’s talk knishes.

Knishes in the realm of Jewish cuisine

Pronounced “kuh-nish,” this iconic potato pocket is a staple in the world of Jewish fare. From knishes (obviously) and matzoh ball soup to latkes, to hamantaschen and sufganiyot and rugelach, there is such a richness present in these Jewish foods: culturally, culinarily and historically. Beyond the deli, when it comes to Hanukkah spreads, foods like brisket, kugel, roasted chicken, cured fishes, charoset and so much more enter the lexicon. There is no shortage of spectacular food and the sheer breadth is both inspiring for its ingenuity, as well as its downright deliciousness. Furthermore, there is unquestionably always something for everyone, regardless of tastes, allergies or dietary preferences.

What do they taste like?

Essentially a hand pie similar to a handheld dumpling or pierogi, pelmeni or empanadas. The hearty, carb-laden combination of potato and dough is inherently enriching and warming, especially on a cold day or night. There is also usually some type of allium mixed in with the potato, often simply sautéed (or even sometimes caramelized) onion, as well as an occasional herb inclusion.

At its core, there’s a modesty to the knish. There’s a deep, hearty satisfaction when it comes to knishes, the richness of the smooth potato providing a smooth, filling note, almost like a hand-held mashed potato ensconced in buttery, flaky dough. It’s deeply savory and super filling, but also more of an appetizer or side than anything else. It also is sometimes served at brunch.

Spoon University‘s Beatrice Forman differentiates between kasha knishes (“which are round and baked with buckwheat”) versus square knishes (“Which are fried and found in your supermarket’s freezer aisle.)” Of course, if you live in the tri-state area or near any particularly great Jewish delis, you should be able to get your hands on some stellar knishes. Otherwise, you can always make them at home (or perhaps even get them shipped?)

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What is their history?

Alison Ladman writes in Our Coast Magazine that knishes “started as peasant food, later became a 19th century street cart convenience food and now are a staple of Jewish delis.” The knish’s journey is a remarkable one, especially seeing as how there are so any variations of the humble, iconic food: baked, fried, sweet, savory, vegetarian, meat-filled and so on and so forth.

The Jewish Chronicle notes that the knish originated in France — or Ukraine-by-way-of-France (the word knish actually means “a small person” in Ukranian) — where it then contained cabbage and meat. Due to political decrees, the surplus of potatoes soon grew exponentially and soon became the primary ingredient in knishes, as well as many other dishes and recipes. These sorts of hand pies proliferated throughout Europe, but once many Europeans immigrated to the United States (particularly New York City), the knish soon took hold on the region.

In OOLA, conversely, Amanda Huffman alleges that the knish originated in Poland.

Regardless, though, it’s generally agreed upon that the apex of the knish’s life was in the early 1900s in the Lower East Side of New York City.

This Chris Crowley Serious Eats story actually calls the knish “New York’s miss congeniality,” summing up the ethos of the knish beautifully: “a bomb of starchy fillings like nutty kasha groats or mashed potato with caramelized onions, wrapped in a thin sheet of dough and baked, the knish is claimed by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, and came to New York on the backs of Jewish immigrants.” He calls it a “quintessential New York food.”

As Laura Silver, author of “Knish; In Search of the Jewish Soul Food,” tells Serious Eats, “the knish was a conduit to a better life and a different social status.”

Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, “knisheries” began opening up throughout the Lower East Side, during the time when tons of people migrated to NYC in the hopes of a better life, oftentimes living in horribly overcrowded and unsafe tenement buildings and seeking out the “American dream,” sometimes via food. In this capacity, the knish became a lifesaver.

As more and more Jewish people moved to the Lower East Side, more and more knishes began to pop up. Crowley continues, describing the food in a mouth-watering way: “there’s a filling of onions cooked to golden caramel in chicken fat, then painted onto a belly-hugging potato canvas. That carby mass is then wrapped in thin, pliant dough and blistered in the oven.”

Soon enough, though, there was an unfortunate shift: Crowley notes that according to Silver, “as upwardly mobile Jews left poor neighborhoods like the LES, the knisheries that boosted economies a generation ago lost business and eventually closed.”

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the knish was soon relegated to side status, never reaching the heights of success as the bagel.

The future of knishes?

The knish is by no means a “fashionable” food. Aesthetically, it doesn’t immediately jump off the page. Unfortunately, no one is flocking to knisheries or delis to take photos and upload them to Instagram. But its robust flavor and deep comfort should speak for itself.

The Jewish Chronicle also states that “true nostalgic Jewish food has never been elegant. It will never be nouvelle cuisine-style morsels tweezer-decorated with flowers and micro-herbs. It is generous food created by matriarchs — balabostas needing to fill hungry bellies with restricted resources.”

If that doesn’t encapsulate the essence and charm of a knish, though, then I don’t know what does.

In a 2014 discussion with NPR, Silver notes that — perhaps — “knishes are cool again,” connecting them to the “hipster lingo” and predicting a coming renaissance. Unfortunately, we have yet to see that come to fruition — but I still have hope.

We’ll see … maybe 2023 will be the year of the knish? And deservedly so.

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Study: Biology textbooks aren’t keeping up with climate science

With every year that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, the climate crisis deepens — as does the threat it poses to life on Earth. But that increasing urgency isn’t reflected in many of the U.S.’s undergraduate biology textbooks.

According to a new paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE, climate change coverage in college biology textbooks has failed to keep pace with our scientific understanding of the issue or its mounting importance for every living organism on the planet, from single-celled algae to blue whales. Although today’s textbooks contain more sentences on climate change than those from the 1970s, these sentences offer fewer solutions and have been pushed toward the back of the book — where they are likely to be skipped over.

“Why are we still ignoring this issue?” asked Jennifer Landin, a teaching associate professor at North Carolina State University and an author of the paper.

Landin and a coauthor looked at 57 of the most widely used undergraduate biology textbooks published between 1970 and 2019. They analyzed each book’s climate change coverage for length and content — the fraction of sentences used to describe the physical processes of climate change, its impacts on the world’s ecosystems, and ways to address it. They also looked at the textbooks’ changing use of charts and figures.

The good news, Landin said, was that climate coverage has increased since the 1970s and ’80s, when college biology textbooks only dedicated about 11 sentences to the issue. By the 2000s, textbooks were covering climate change with a median of 51 sentences.

However, this number dropped in the 2010s to 45 sentences — “basically two pages of a Harry Potter paperback,” Landin said. This means most of the college biology textbooks published in the past decade have actually shortened their climate coverage since the 2000s, despite a more than three-fold increase in the number of scientific articles published on climate change during that time.

Biology textbook writers also seem to be pushing climate change coverage further toward the back of their books. They were already leaving it for the last 15 percent of pages in the 1970s, but according to the new study, by the 2010s climate coverage had been relegated to the last 3 percent of pages. This fits a long-term trend where publishers stick controversial topics like evolution toward the back of their textbooks. It’s significant, Landin said, because research suggests most professors progress chronologically through their textbooks — so anything at the end may be glossed over or skipped altogether.

Joseph Henderson, an associate professor of environment and society at Paul Smith’s College who wasn’t involved in the research, said the study was interesting but that textbooks are only one piece of the education puzzle. “They could be doing a better job with biology textbooks,” he said, but it’s important to also think about whether and how teachers are actually using them.

“This paper and textbooks are a representation of the broader problem,” Henderson explained, “which is that education has been really slow on the uptake in terms of climate education,” especially when it comes to anything that could be perceived as political. Landin’s paper notes that not one of the textbooks published since 1970 mentioned several politically sensitive but high-impact individual or local actions to address climate change, such as changing one’s diet or building more energy-efficient housing. If individual solutions were mentioned at all, they mostly described relatively ineffective behaviors like recycling and turning off lights.

Large-scale intergovernmental agreements like the 1997 Kyoto Protocol — in which more than 150 countries committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions — got more coverage than individual actions in textbooks across the decades. Henderson called this a good thing, since the sphere of international policy is where the farthest-reaching changes can be made. But students will likely need an education in other fields like political science and history to better understand those agreements and learn how to push for more ambitious ones. “Climate change education has to be interdisciplinary,” Henderson said.

One beacon from Landin’s research came from her figure analysis. She found that, between the 1990s and 2010s, climate-related data visualizations more than doubled, expanding beyond charts that show rising CO2 levels to also include photographic evidence of glacier melt and maps of species migrations.

This is the kind of progress Landin would like to see more of. She wants textbook editors to expand not just the data visualizations, but also the length of textbooks’ climate chapters. Publishers could put climate coverage earlier in textbooks, she suggested, and help students draw connections across all biology topics — like cellular anatomy, by showing how plants’ chloroplasts pull planet-warming carbon out of the atmosphere. And expanding high-impact solutions content could inspire change while combating young people’s climate anxiety.

“We’re seeing all these problems but we’re not given clear actions to take power over them,” Landin said. “There are clear and well-understood solutions that we simply need to educate young people about.”

5 ways climate change made life more expensive in 2022

Inflation dominated news headlines and American psyches in 2022. Overall, consumer prices jumped an average 7.1 percent this year, with the cost of just about everything going up, from cars to coffee and gas to groceries. The trend triggered a bitter midterm election campaign, prompted a series of aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and fears about an impending recession.

The causes were numerous, from the war in Ukraine to the post-pandemic economic recovery. But in many sectors, the specter of climate change was also lurking behind these higher costs. Extreme swings in temperature and precipitation caused shortages and soaring prices for essential utilities like electricity, heat, and water. A series of catastrophic weather disasters scrambled the supply chains for vegetables and staple grains.

Many of us tend to think that we’re still immune to the direct effects of the climate crisis, but make no mistake — those effects are already here, and they’re hitting our wallets. Here is a look at some of the ways warming came back to bite us at the cash register in 2022.

Grocery bills

Food prices rose about 10 percent this year, one of the highest rates in decades. The surge in grocery bills has been spurred by pandemic supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but climate change played a bigger role than many people realize. Searing heat and other extreme weather hurt crops and livestock around the globe, driving up food costs in a phenomenon known as “heatflation.”

This summer, an unprecedented heat wave in China ruined the corn and soy crops used to feed pigs, sending the cost of pork, the country’s staple meat, soaring. Spain and Italy experienced a stretch of 100-degree temperatures and drought conditions that slashed olive harvests; by November, the price of extra-virgin olive oil in Spain, the world’s largest olive oil producer, had risen 45 percent compared to the previous year. Hurricanes hurt Florida’s citrus crop and snapped Puerto Rico’s plantain trees in half; the Western U.S. baked in a drought that threatens to increase food prices for the years to come.

It’s not just anecdotes: One analysis of seasonal temperatures and price indicators in 48 countries found that hot summers had “by far the largest and longest-lasting impact” on food prices, an effect that lasted nearly a year. Experts warn that flooding, drought, wildfires, and other climate-enhanced disasters will continue to leave shoppers paying a premium in the years ahead.

Water bills

Delivering water to homes and businesses is a high-cost operation. Municipalities and utilities have to pump the water from a river or reservoir, treat it so it’s safe to drink, and send it through hundreds of miles of pipes and canals. They also have to keep repairing and upgrading all that infrastructure year after year. The cost of maintaining this delivery system stays more or less the same, but the amount of money these groups earn back depends on how much water they deliver to customers.

In dry years like this one, utilities have to withdraw less water from dwindling reservoirs, which means they have less to sell, and have to raise prices to make up the difference. That’s currently happening in California, where many Central Valley residents are struggling to afford water even as local wells go dry; around 12 percent of state residents are behind on their water bills, owing as much as $1 billion in payments. As municipal supplies fell this year, it meant there was also less excess water available for trading on agricultural spot markets, causing prices to soar for farmers: The Nasdaq Veles California Water index rose by around 56 percent between January and June of this year, reaching an all-time high.

Other climate-driven extreme weather has impacted water prices in other ways. In wetter areas, extreme precipitation events caused unprecedented damage to utility infrastructure and forced costly repairs – a burden most often passed down to ratepayers. And in agricultural areas around the Great Lakes, excessive heat is increasingly causing fertilizer-laden water bodies to form harmful algae blooms. According to an analysis earlier this year, for instance, the cost of treating water in Toledo, Ohio, to eradicate this bacteria is now nearly $20 per resident per year — a cost incorporated into consumers’ water bills.

Insurance premiums

We rely on home insurance to help us recover after a disaster, but policies are getting more expensive and harder to obtain as floods, fires, and hurricanes intensify. These changes were acutely felt this past year. According to Policygenius, an insurance marketplace, 90 percent of U.S. homeowners saw their premiums increase from May 2021 to May 2022, with an average jump of $134 annually.

Homeowners in flood-prone areas all over the country saw huge price hikes in recent months. The National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, which insures more than 5 million properties, is in the process of rolling out a new pricing system, raising rates in many coastal areas to more accurately reflect existing flood risk. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal group that administers the NFIP, estimated that some 66 percent of policyholders would see their premiums jump by up to $10 per month under the new risk scale, 7 percent by up to $20 per month, and 4 percent more than $20. The hikes have been so severe that hundreds of thousands of homeowners have dropped their NFIP policies altogether.

Also this year, half a dozen insurers in Florida collapsed after their financial backers grew too concerned about hurricane risk; the state is now seeing the consequences of this breakdown, with price hikes in the wake of Hurricane Ian. On the opposite coast, several national insurance companies tried dropping customers in fire-risky areas of California to reduce their exposure to future disasters. As these insurers disappear, coverage gets more expensive, putting homeowners in a bind: They must either pay skyrocketing prices or drop their policies and live without a safety net.

Utility bills

Climate change is impacting the frequency and severity of heat and cold spells in different parts of the United States – and in 2022, these periods of extremes made it harder for people to afford their home heating and cooling costs. One in six U.S. households are currently behind on their utility bills.

Let’s start in the winter: Around 90 percent of U.S. households use either electricity or natural gas as their main source of heat. This past January, average household electricity rates soared by 8 percent, the highest increase in over a decade. Parts of the country experienced severe cold that month as warming temperatures in the Arctic destabilized the polar jet stream, sending frigid air southward. This winter, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that average household heating costs for natural gas will increase by 28 percent, in part due to forecasted colder-than-average temperatures.

This past summer, millions of Americans also dealt with stretches of extreme heat, which strained electric grids and caused household energy and air conditioning bills to skyrocket. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association estimated that Americans’ electric bills increased 20 percent due to the heat waves, jumping to an average $540.

Low-income families of color, both in urban and rural settings, are being hit the hardest. Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are more likely than white households to have their power cut off due to unpaid utility bills. “You have to choose between having a normal holiday season or maybe paying this bill or that bill. It’s all about survival,” said Linnea Jackson, General Manager of the Hoopa Valley Tribe’s Public Utilities District in Northern California. “Those increased costs are really impacting tribal communities.”

Jackson says that in addition to higher energy costs from summers and winters with periods of hotter highs and lower lows, also known as weather whiplash, climate-driven disasters like wildfires, drought, and powerful storms all disrupt service and drive up costs. “It’s only getting worse. People are struggling to come up with the cost to afford basic electricity,” Jackson said.

In Bethel, Alaska, Sophie Swope, a Yup’ik environmental activist, says that thawing permafrost is causing houses to shift and crack, forcing people to spend more money on heating. Higher fuel costs also weigh heavily on communities like Swope’s, where many essential supplies have to be shipped in. “Everything is just so much more expensive,” Swope said.

Electricity prices

High energy bills this year weren’t just a result of heat waves and cold fronts. The cost of power itself spiked all over the country. That’s in large part due to Russia’s war in Ukraine, which drove a scarcity in natural gas supply around the world and upped the cost of producing electricity from power plants. The Energy Information Administration estimates that residential customers paid 8 percent more for electricity, on average, than in 2021.

The war may be the primary cause, but some parts of the country also saw rate hikes due to climate-related extreme events like storms, drought, and wildfires. In June, 1 million customers in Louisiana saw fees added to their bills, as much as $25 for some households, to help the electric utility Entergy recover costs related to storm damage from hurricanes Laura, Delta, Zeta, and Ida, as well as Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.

In California, customers of the largest utility in the state, Pacific Gas & Electric, or PG&E, started the year off with a rate increase that was driven in part by the costs of wildfire prevention. It didn’t end there. Just two months later, PG&E bumped its rates again to cover the rising cost of natural gas. The company said it had eaten up a lot of its natural gas supply the previous summer when the drought was limiting hydropower output, and had to buy more.

The Western Area Power Administration, a federal agency that sells power from government-owned hydropower dams to utilities throughout the West, told Grist that reduced hydropower generation this year due to the megadrought put “upward pressure on power rates in some pockets of the West.”

Jake Bittle, Kate Yoder, Joseph Lee, Brett Marsh, and Emily Pontecorvo contributed to this story.

“Ungrateful international welfare queen”: MTG, Don Jr. lead GOP attacks on Zelenskyy’s D.C. visit

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s surprise trip to Washington D.C., calling him a “shadow president” and his country “the 51st state.”

Zelenskyy announced early on Wednesday that he would be making his first overseas trip to Washington since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine 300 days ago. He will meet with President Joe Biden to discuss Ukraine’s request for a Patriot missile defense battery, according to a senior administration official as reported by Axios.

Ukraine has been supplied with various missile defense systems from France, Germany and the U.S. in recent weeks, but the Patriot system would be the most advanced thus far.

Far-right Republicans have been critical of U.S. support for Ukraine, claiming the aid is unnecessary despite reports from Ukraine that claim Russia is planning to launch a massive winter offensive.

What will a GOP majority actually do? Almost nothing — but in the worst possible way

“Of course the shadow president has to come to Congress and explain why he needs billions of American’s taxpayer dollars for the 51st state, Ukraine,” Greene tweeted on Wednesday. “This is absurd. Put America First!!!”

Of course the shadow president has to come to Congress and explain why he needs billions of American’s taxpayer dollars for the 51st state, Ukraine.

This is absurd.

Put America First!!! https://t.co/gkNonOhvDL

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 20, 2022

So far, the U.S. has given Ukraine $19 billion in aid, and the administration official told Axios that Biden will announce an additional $2 billion assistance package that includes the Patriot missile.

While bipartisan support for Ukraine remains relatively strong, many MAGA Republicans have heralded an “America First” foreign policy, with some even expressing their admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump Jr. also took to Twitter to complain about Zelenskyy’s visit to the White House and Republican support for Ukraine’s defense system.

“Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare queen,” he tweeted.

Zelensky is basically an ungrateful international welfare queen. https://t.co/WclnckMoCj

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 21, 2022

Trump Jr. is the son of former President Donald Trump, who along with his wife Melania Trump, paid less than $750 in taxes multiple years in office.

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“Mitch McConnell actually said yesterday that most Republicans #1 priority is … Ukraine,” Trump Jr. wrote. “I have yet to meet a single Republican that thinks that, but I guess the disconnect between actual republicans and DC swamp rats shouldn’t surprise anyone.”

Mitch McConnell actually said yesterday that most Republicans #1 priority is … Ukraine.

I have yet to meet a single Republican that thinks that, but I guess the disconnect between actual republicans and DC swamp rats shouldn’t surprise anyone.

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) December 21, 2022

Greene also targeted McConnell on Twitter.

“Mitch McConnell helps pass a nearly $2 TRILLION Onnimonster so that he can hand a $47 BILLION dollar check to Zelenskyy when he shows up in DC today,” she wrote. “But in my district, many families & seniors can’t afford food & many businesses are struggling bc of Biden policies.”

Mitch McConnell helps pass a nearly $2 TRILLION Onnimonster so that he can hand a $47 BILLION dollar check to Zelenskyy when he shows up in DC today.
But in my district, many families & seniors can’t afford food & many businesses are struggling bc of Biden policies.

🧵1/8

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 21, 2022

Greene then went on to claim that she represents how Americans feel on the subject, which several people online disputed.

“The disconnected & totally oblivious government leaders & sheltered media all live in a bubble & only talk to each other,” the congresswoman tweeted. “They’re so naive & ignorant they think my views are extreme but are totally blind and stupid to the fact that what I am saying is exactly how Americans feel.”

The disconnected & totally oblivious government leaders & sheltered media all live in a bubble & only talk to each other.

They’re so naive & ignorant they think my views are extreme but are totally blind and stupid to the fact that what I am saying is exactly how Americans feel.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 21, 2022

Social media users were quick to slam Greene and Trump Jr. for their comments, especially since they came hours after a report revealed how little former President Trump paid in taxes while in the White House.

“A daddy’s boy who met with a foreign adversary that was attempting to subvert an American election is daring to denigrate a true hero battling Putin & defending his nation from a genocidal war? This may be the dumbest remark ever from Junior. And that’s quite an accomplishment,” wrote MSNBC analyst David Corn.

A daddy’s boy who met with a foreign adversary that was attempting to subvert an American election is daring to denigrate a true hero battling Putin & defending his nation from a genocidal war? This may be the dumbest remark ever from Junior. And that’s quite an accomplishment. https://t.co/oLBZ3BpqTH

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) December 21, 2022

“Your dad doesn’t pay his taxes. Sit this one out, buddy,” wrote the Lincoln Project in response to Trump Jr.

Your dad doesn’t pay his taxes. Sit this one out, buddy. https://t.co/Zj0BDB4lVs pic.twitter.com/EeLnsjIT7s

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) December 21, 2022

GOP attacks on Ukraine

Congress’ 9/11 betrayal: Money for war, none for first responders

The last-minute decision by Congressional leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to take the $3.7 billion in funding for the 9/11 WTC Health Program out of the $1.7 trillion Omnibus spending bill is being blasted as a betrayal by 9/11 WTC civilian survivors and the unions that represent essential workers that continue to lose members to WTC diseases.

The massive end of the year appropriation package that keeps the federal government open until September sets aside $858 billion in military spending including $28 billion to cover Pentagon spending on the ongoing war in the Ukraine.

In the years since 9/11, more people have died from the toxic air in lower Manhattan that officials insisted was “safe to breathe” than the almost 3,000 that died in the attack.

Without congressional action, the World Trade Center Health Program will run out of money starting in FY 2025, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which oversees the effort providing health care to 9/11 WTC first responders and survivors.

“For the fourth time the Congress has let us down and demonstrated they forgot us,” said FDNY Lt. James McCarthy, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. “How can we increase the money for defense and not put money in the budget for the first defenders on 9/11. They see this as New York priority and not a national one even though there are people in practically every Congressional district effected by this.”

The FDNY lost 343 members on the day of the attack. The number who have died because of their occupational exposure is approaching the number that perished on 9/11. More than half of the thousands of FDNY employees that responded to the scene and worked the recovery now have a persistent respiratory condition.

“The negative health consequences and suffering continue to plague the workers who responded to the WTC attack site,” said John Samuelsen, international president of the Transport Workers Union, whose members played a key role in the recovery. “Allowing the fund to go bankrupt is an appalling betrayal of the blue collars heroes who toiled in lower Manhattan at their own peril. [EPA Administrator] Christine Todd-Whitman and the federal government lied about the toxic nature of the air we breathed, and now the federal government is throwing our blue-collar heroes to the wolves, kicking them to the curb.”

“Not renewing this funding is such a slap in the face to all the first responders and it makes me concerned about what’s going to become of all the first responders and healthcare workers who have long COVID and are disabled,” said FDNY EMS Lt. Anthony Almojera, vice-president of DC 37 3621, which represents EMS officers. “We are not like batteries that once they stop working you just don’t throw us out. Evidently, we are only essential when they need us, and non-essential when they don’t.”

In addition to the tens of thousands of first responders and construction workers who worked for several months at the 16-acre site, there were close to 20,000 New York City public school students and thousands of teachers as well as support staff ordered back into dozens of schools in the contaminated zone.

Lila Nordstrom was a senior at Stuyvesant High School which was adjacent to the WTC site and is a 9/11 WTC Health Program participant. In the years since, she started StuyHealth, a non-profit that helps former students navigate the 9/11 WTC Health Program.

“Despite numerous assurances from Leader Schumer, thousands of 9/11 survivors and responders, who are sick because of government lies and are reliant on the WTC Health Program will spend the holidays wondering if the their access to critical, life-saving care is about to disappear, Nordstrom wrote in an email. “After 20 years of advocacy, it’s unconscionable that we’re being forced to drag once again the sick and dying back to Washington to beg our representatives for help. When will we be done re-enacting this chapter in the fight for care?”

“As the towers continued to burn, our government assured us that ‘the air was safe’ and implored us to return to our homes, schools, and workplaces,” said Michael Barasch, a leading 9/11 WTC attorney whose offices are a block away from the WTC. “As a result, hundreds of thousands of responders and non-responders were exposed to WTC toxins which have been linked to 68 cancers and dozens of respiratory illnesses. In fact, more than twice as many people have died of 9/11 related illnesses since 9/11 than the 2,977 people who died on 9/11.”

Barasch continued. “America owes a moral obligation to the 9/11 community to fulfill the promises made by our politicians to ‘never forget.’ The Health Program must get the funding It needs and deserves. If not, more Americans will tragically die.”

According to a CDC fact sheet, the shortfall in the program, which as of last year had 110,000 participants, was partially the result of a “significant” spike in the number of first responders and survivors who have enrolled for the annual screening and health care.

The program’s costs also substantially increased due to “the number of cancer cases it certifies and treats,” according to the CDC.

“Of the approximately 65,000 WTC Health Program members with at least one certification, almost 24,000 (more than 36 percent) have at least one cancer certification,” the agency disclosed. “The complexity of treating cancer, especially with other co-morbidities, and an aging membership in general, has increased the Program’s health-care costs beyond what was previously estimated.”

Under the program, first responders are guaranteed free screening for life, while civilian survivors must exhibit symptoms of a 9/11 disease or condition for enrollment. While close to 90 percent of the tens of thousands of first responders are enrolled in the WTC Health Program, less than 10 percent of the hundreds of thousands or residents, commuters and students signed up.

“At the time the Program was implemented (July 2011), there were approximately 56,000 responders and 5,000 survivors enrolled from prior programs,” according to the CDC. “In the first five years (July 2011 – September 2016), the Program enrolled an additional 9,000 responders and 5,000 survivors; compared to the past 5 years, during which the Program has enrolled approximately 16,000 responders and 20,500 survivors.”

As a result, the program needed to open an additional Clinical Center of Excellence for survivor members in the Metropolitan Area. The uptick also triggered the Zadroga Act requirement that the program notify Congress it was nearing its enrollment cap. “As a result, Congress raised the enrollment numerical limitations in the Zadroga Act in 2019 by an additional 50,000 responders and 50,000 survivors,” the CDC reported.

Ben Chevat, the executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, a non-profit advocacy group supported by the labor movement, said last year that a research paper issued by the FDNY WTC Health Program documented the program’s clinical success.

According to the 20-ear review, participants’ cancer mortality rates were “34 percent lower than demographically similar New York State residents with cancer,” a sign that the thorough screening and treatment—including mental-health counseling—regimen “improves cancer survival.”

“The reduction in cancer-specific mortality was even greater for enrollees diagnosed with prostate cancer and with colon cancer, of which enrollees had nearly half the cancer-related death rate compared with the New York State population,” the program reported.

Referring to Fire Department Chief Medical Officer David Prezant, Mr. Chevat said, “Dr. Prezant’s report is a key indication of why we need the program fully funded. The program is improving the lives of the people who were impacted by 9/11.”

According to the CDC, the program was able in the past to “cover the growing health-care costs associated with increasing enrollment, increasing cancer cases, and an aging population” in part by drawing on unexpended funds from prior years.

“You’re not the best at math”: Lauren Boebert’s attack on Biden over gas prices backfires

An expert on gas prices mocked Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., on Tuesday for launching a nonsensical attack on President Joe Biden’s recent decision to restock the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

A couple of days ago, Boebert attacked Biden for buying up 3 million oil barrels to restock the reserve after he sold off an estimated 180 million barrels earlier this year in an effort to lower spiking gas prices.

“Trump stocked up our reserves at record-low prices,” she wrote on Twitter. “Then, Biden emptied it out to get through the midterms. Now, he’s going to stock it back up at a MUCH higher price.”

But Patrick De Haan, a gas price tracker who in the past has been critical of Biden for not doing enough to boost the gasoline supply, pointed out in response that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now buying back oil barrels at a significantly lower rate than what it sold them for earlier this year.

“Average selling price $96 [at the time of the sales], including some sales close to $120, and the price today is $75,” he wrote in response. “You’re not the best at math.”

He also noted that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve saw a net decline in barrels during Trump’s tenure, dropping from 695 million barrels in 2017 to 634 million by 2021.

Ex-Trump ethics lawyer advised Hutchinson to mislead committee. Now he “could be prosecuted”: report

A Trump-allied attorney who previously represented a key January 6 witness urged her to mislead the January 6 committee about details she recalled, according to CNN.

The committee did not identify the witness or the person they claimed tried to influence the testimony, but CNN reported that Stefan Passantino, the top ethics attorney in the Trump White House who represented former aide Cassidy Hutchinson, was the lawyer.

Passantino advised Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, to tell the committee that she did not recall details that she did, sources told CNN.

The committee suggested that people connected to the former president had attempted to influence at least one witness’ testimony, promising her jobs that never materialized and coaching her to make statements in an attempt to deceive the committee.

Jan. 6 committee discovered Trump witness got offer to make her “financially very comfortable”

Passantino and his law firm Elections LLC were funded by Trump’s Save America political action committee. The PAC also paid for the lawyer’s representation of Hutchinson, which Passantino did not mention to his client, sources told CNN.

Over the summer, Hutchinson emerged as a key witness for the committee, providing bombshell testimony into Trump’s knowledge of the potential for violence on Jan. 6, and his outbursts of anger. Before her public testimony, she dropped Passantino and got a new lawyer.

“I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me,” Passantino told CNN. “I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

He added that it’s not uncommon for people to change lawyers due to their interests or strategies shifting. Passantino also said political committees sometimes cover client fees “at the client’s request.”

Earlier this week, his professional biography was removed from the law firm’s website where he was a partner. Passantino said he was taking a leave of absence from his firm “given the distraction of this matter,” according to CNN.

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In hearings over the summer, the Jan. 6 committee said it was concerned about potential witness tampering and said the “Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances.”

CNN and The New York Times have reported that the witness was Hutchinson.

The committee’s latest report reveals that a lawyer had advised a client, believed to be Hutchinson, to pretend that she could not recall certain facts.

“The lawyer had advised the witness that the witness could, in certain circumstances, tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them,” the report said.

When the witness expressed concerns to her lawyer about an aspect of her testimony not being truthful, the lawyer did not advise her to clarify the specific testimony, the report says. Instead, the lawyer said “they don’t know what you know, [witness]. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”

The lawyer also told the client to avoid discussing facts that portrayed Trump in a negative light.

“The lawyer instructed the client about a particular issue that would cast a bad light on President Trump: ‘No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that,'” the report said.

Committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said the “witness believed this was an effort to affect her testimony, and we are concerned that these efforts may have been a strategy to prevent the Committee from finding the truth.”

Legal expert Elliot Williams told CNN that Passantino’s actions are “bordering on a federal offense”

“If you are urging someone to say they don’t recall a fact that they, in fact, recall, you’re telling them to lie under oath. So he could be prosecuted under that,” Williams said.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe also said that Passantino could be in serious trouble.

“Of course, a potential violation of the attorney code of ethics. Ironic that he’s a former White House ethics lawyer,” McCabe said. “But people were taken aback when they learned that the Trump PACs were paying for the representation of witnesses. That’s not a violation of the ethics laws, but it is, when that attorney starts to advise the client, in a way to protect the payer’s interest and not the client’s interest. That may be what we’re seeing here.”

about the Jan. 6 committee

Kari Lake bragged Katie Hobbs would be forced to testify — then her own lawyers pulled the subpoena

Failed Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake told her supporters on Tuesday that she was “excited” about an upcoming two-day trial ordered in her lawsuit seeking to overturn her election loss.

Lake confidently added that Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs, the current Democratic secretary of state, would not be able to “duck out” of testifying and that she “will have to take the stand.”

However, Lake’s legal team on Tuesday withdrew its subpoena to compel Hobbs’ testimony in the case. The Secretary of State’s Office also confirmed that Hobbs will not be taking the stand.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson threw out eight of the 10 counts in Lake’s lawsuit, which alleges intentional election misconduct in the Arizona midterm election, but permitted two to proceed for a short two-day trial.

“Christmas came early yesterday,” Lake announced to fans at the conservative Turning Point USA rally in Phoenix. “This is so historic.”

Kari Lake declares victory — after judge rejects most of her lawsuit challenging election loss

Thompson turned down Hobbs’ motion to avoid testifying in an order on Monday. Her lawyers proceeded to file an emergency appeal stating that Lake’s remaining claims had nothing “whatsoever” to do with Hobbs or “personal knowledge she may have” because they are only focused on the actions of election officials in Maricopa County. Lake’s attorneys then withdrew the subpoena.

Despite the fact that Hobbs will not testify, Lake and other election deniers are excited about the short trial.

“We’re taking these bastards to trial,” Lake announced to the crowd. “We’re really excited. We have an excellent case.”

State Sen. Wendy Rogers, R-Ariz., a leading conspiracy theorist, was captured on video in the crowd excitedly throwing her hands in the air after Lake announced the judge’s decision.

Hobbs’ campaign manager Nicole Demont told The Arizona Republic that “the voters made their choice clear last month, and we’re confident the will of the voters will prevail when the contest process ends.” She added that the governor-elect is “laser-focused” on preparing for her first days in office.

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Minutes before the trial began in Arizona, Lake spoke to conservative podcaster Steve Bannon about why the subpoena was withdrawn.

“Talk to us about you guys’ strategy going in here because I think last night a couple of three people might have been surprised that Katie Hobbs is off the hook,” Bannon asked. “I know it’s part of a grand total strategy to win here.”

“We had 18 people we were going to be putting on the stand when we had many counts that we were looking at, um, taking to court,” Lake responded. “And the judge kind of narrowed, really narrowed our case to two counts. And so, we have to really prioritize every second of the five hours we have to prove these two counts.”

She said that her legal team would be focusing on Maricopa County officials and their testimony.

“As much fun as it would be to put stuttering, stammering panicky Katie Hobbs on the stand, we would have a ball with that,” she said. “We believe what we’re going to be putting forth today, that any judge across this country would look at this evidence and rule in our favor.”

Lake’s 70-page lawsuit claims that “hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots infected” the election. She has requested that the court declare her the rightful winner or order a new election in Arizona.

In addition to Hobbs, defendants include Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, the five members of the county Board of Supervisors, and Scott Jarrett, county elections director.

The trial is expected to begin on Wednesday morning and continue through to Thursday afternoon. It will be live-streamed through the court’s website.

about Kari Lake’s lawsuit

Progressives call out “giveaway to the rich” tucked inside $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill

Progressive advocacy groups and economic analysts on Tuesday denounced retirement savings-related tax changes embedded in Congress’ end-of-year $1.7 trillion spending package, characterizing the pending reforms taken directly from the SECURE 2.0 Act as a “giveaway to the rich.”

According to Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy tax fairness champions, the must-pass omnibus bill includes “some minor provisions to help low-income earners save for retirement, but the vast majority are designed to allow high earners to avoid paying more taxes.”

Morris Pearl, the group’s chair and a former managing director at BlackRock, said: “I’m tired of tax cuts for the rich being sold as help for the poor. The retirement changes in the omnibus package overwhelmingly benefit wealthy people like me while doing almost nothing for the people who truly struggle to save for retirement. This bill does not make it easier for workers to save for retirement, it just makes it easier for high-income earners to shelter more of their earnings from taxes.”

“This law will make my heirs hundreds of thousands of dollars wealthier,” said Pearl. “It will do virtually nothing for the worker who toasted my bagel this morning. This may be good for the children of some rich people, but in the long run, the increased inequality it creates is bad for everyone, including my own family.”

“This legislation is not what America needs to help workers save for retirement,” he added. “Congress should scrap SECURE 2.0 and start from scratch with something that would help all Americans, not just the rich, save for a comfortable, well-deserved retirement. A multibillion dollar tax cut for the rich should not be the last act of a Democratic Congress.”

Pearl was not alone in criticizing the retirement savings-related tax provisions included in the fiscal year 2023 appropriations bill.

Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that some of the changes “are laudatory, such as creating a savings match for low-income savers and allowing certain kinds of savings to be tapped for emergency purposes and not just retirement.”

“But others expand existing unnecessary and regressive tax subsidies for people nearing or deep into retirement,” she continued. “For example, affluent people will now be able to wait until age 75 before they are required to touch their tax-favored ‘retirement’ account.”

Parrott added that “it is particularly unfortunate that these tax cuts are in the package while a provision to allow very low-income seniors and people with disabilities to have modest savings and still qualify for income assistance through the Supplemental Security Income program was excluded, despite bipartisan efforts to include it.”

In an email to Common Dreams, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) also lamented the omnibus package’s inclusion of bipartisan retirement legislation that “would mainly help the well-off.”

The reforms in question “will exacerbate inequality that is already pervasive in tax benefits for retirement savings,” ITEP warned. “Currently, the wealthiest 40% of taxpayers receive 87% of those benefits.”

“Emily In Paris” star Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu: “It’s so much fun to play a villain”

Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu had been an accomplished actress in Europe for decades before her international breakthrough role as the chic, cigarette-smoking Sylvie Grateau on “Emily In Paris.” But to nail down her steely character, she got a little boost from an unlikely source — the show’s shoe department. “I needed her feet to hurt,” she explained to me during our recent “Salon Talks” conversation. “We never say it, but I needed it as an actor.”

In its brand new third season, “Emily” takes its fish out of water title character — and her acerbic nemesis-mentor Sylvie — in directions that create surprising twists to their professional and personal dynamic. But don’t worry, nobody’s getting too comfortable yet.

Leroy-Beaulieu spoke to us about how she wasn’t what the showrunners initially had in mind for Sylvie, what it took for the skeptical French to eventually warm up to “Emily,” and why, on the cusp of turning 60, she says that “getting older is not a problem.”

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

I don’t want to give anything away about this eventful season, but there are, as always, a lot of changes and surprises along the way. For those who have forgotten from last season, where did we leave off with Sylvie and what do you think some of her challenges are going to be ?

She was doing her French Revolution, leaving Savoir with that white scarf. She was leaving the Savoir office with the whole staff and leaving Madeline alone, poor thing, with Emily. Well, not really with Emily. She was hoping for Emily to come with her.

The challenge at the beginning of the season is building my own company and getting Emily to work with me. We don’t know if she’s going to come or not, and I don’t want to give away too much. Basically, the first three episodes, there’s a feud between Madeline and Sylvie. That’s the big thing at the beginning of the season.

You have said that Sylvie is your favorite character you’ve ever played because she’s so different. She’s not quite a villain, but she’s complicated. What drew you to this darker kind of a character?

“It’s a fairytale. Everything’s supposed to be incredible and beautiful and non-realistic.”

First of all, I love Darren’s writing because his characters are very complex. When you play the villain, obviously you’re not only a villain, you’re just letting your demons out and trying to keep them on a leash. It’s a super nice way of exploring that for an actor. It’s so much fun to play a villain. To be able to say what you think, to take no BS, to just be who you want to be without being scared of people judging you. It’s a freedom that I really love. Darren is having a lot of fun with this character, and I’m so grateful to him.

You are not necessarily what the original vision of Sylvie was. Talk to me about how this came about, and how that changed now that they’re writing for you and the way that you’ve played her?

Sylvie was meant to be for a much younger person. They did make me read. Actually, the casting director said, “OK, you’re not the part, you’re too old, but read it because there’s something about Sylvie that you could totally play.” So I read the part and when I read the scenes that they gave me, I thought, “I know this person so well. It’s ridiculous that I can’t play her.” But it was written for a 35, 40-year-old woman.

I read and then I didn’t hear about them for a month and a half. I thought, “OK, they went for somebody younger.” Then there was a callback, and I was super surprised. I realized that they did have to change a lot of things because a relationship between Emily and somebody a little older than her, but not much older than her, was totally different than Emily and me.

“I need her American way of working. She needs my expertise as a French European person who knows how to deal with mystery a lot more than she does.”

I don’t know how they went from a 35-year-old to a 50-plus-plus-year-old. The rivalry between me and her is totally a different rivalry. It has to do with generations. It has to do with the fact that I’m scared that she’s going to steal my job because obviously she’s younger. It has to do also with a motherly thing. It also has to do with the witches in the fairy tales, especially in Snow White. There’s a little bit of that “Is she more beautiful than me?” kind of thing. That was really present at the beginning of the show. Now it’s morphed into something different. It’s becoming a relationship where we respect each other a lot, but I’m still very wary of her because of what she does in Season 3, especially at the beginning.

I do need her talent. I need her youth. I need her American way of working. And she needs my expertise as a French European person who knows how to deal with mystery a lot more than she does. There’s something that I say in Season 3 about the fact that there’s no more mystery in her generation that I think is very important too. There’s a lot of things that Darren puts in there that I absolutely love because it’s also a message to the world. I sometimes feel that he uses my voice, or Sylvie’s voice I should say, to say these little things here and there, and that’s a lot of fun. I’m really happy to be given that responsibility.

“Emily in Paris” brings all the ugly American tropes to the dining table

You’ve been acting since you were very young. What does it mean to you to have this level of international recognition now, and this breakthrough role of a lifetime at this stage in life?

It’s obviously a lot of fun. I’m super happy. But it’s also a responsibility in a way because of my age and my experience. I feel that if I’m given this platform or this visibility, I have a responsibility in some way to carry the message that getting older is not a problem. You can achieve anything you want. You’re never dead until you’re really dead, so just keep on doing what you like and have faith in what you like.

This is something that I’ve always had. I was very stubborn because many times I thought, “OK, I’m going to stop this.” But that was only talk because I wasn’t ready to stop. Never. There were moments that were really difficult and I thought, “I’m just going to go into the country and just start planting whatever, eggplant, and just do nothing else.” But of course not. I love my job. Being stubborn was my strength, and having faith in the fact that life is really incredibly surprising.

“Emily in Paris” is aging well

You have a huge following on Instagram and so much support from people of different ages, nationalities and genders. What does being an empowered woman look like for you at this point in your life?

It’s being true to yourself. You have to know yourself just as much as possible. I think knowing yourself makes you feel much better in life. It makes you be less judgmental, more confident, more compassionate. All these things that are so important to live in society, to live with each other. If the feminine means something, it also means that. It means being able to be confident, compassionate, strong and courageous. Women are very courageous.

This show is such a breakout hit, and people are excited to have it come back. But especially in the beginning, some of the French did not like it. As a French person, what was your reaction to this? What you were hearing from your friends when the show debuted?

“I have a responsibility to carry the message that getting older is not a problem.”

The French didn’t see how much Darren was making fun of the Americans too. They were only offended about the fact that he was seeing with Emily’s eyes, which is somebody who doesn’t know Paris, comes to Paris for the first time and sees all the things that we as Parisians don’t see anymore. We don’t see how rude we can be. There’s a word in French called râler that means we kind of complain all the time — the French don’t see that anymore. The Parisians don’t see that. They were only offended and thinking it was all stereotypical. That’s a caricature. I was like, “It isn’t. When you’re a foreigner, you come to Paris the first time, that’s what you see.” It’s the bigger picture. Once you start knowing the French, then you see other things.

Obviously, it’s much deeper than that and it’s much more subtle than that, but I thought that they didn’t have a sense of humor. That’s what I told them. I said, “You’re not seeing that Emily embodies this Miss Perfect American girl that Darren is also making fun of.” Lily is playing fantastically because she has that intelligence. They didn’t get it.

Now they absolutely adore the show. It just went from totally black to white, and they love it. Even when they didn’t like it, they were all watching it, and they loved to hate it. You notice that they were all watching and saying, “No, I hate it.” Then why did you watch it? You watched the whole season. Just watch one and say, “OK, I don’t like it.” No, you watched the whole season.

You have been doing comedies since you were young. You were in the original “Three Men and a Baby,” you’ve been doing physical comedy for a really long time. That’s an unusual thing for particularly a beautiful French actress. Who were your role models in comedy?

I was raised in Rome, and the Italians have a huge sense of humor. They laugh at themselves very easily. Also, the Italian culture is all about embodying stuff. They’re very present with their bodies. When I came to Paris it was weird because I found the French kind of stiff. I think that’s what happened. I was in comedies because I needed to go back to my Italian roots, in a way. The Italian comedies of the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s are fantastic. If you think of all these directors, Dino Risi, Ettore Scola, all these people that were doing fantastic comedies, That’s what I was raised with, that culture. And basically, making people happy is great. It’s a great feeling to make people laugh. I love that. You give happiness, you give a lot.

You get to be physical, you get to be acerbic, you get to wear amazing clothes. You are a sartorial role model to so many of us.

“I think knowing yourself makes you feel much better in life. It makes you be less judgmental, more confident, more compassionate.”

I work with the costume designer very closely. We really agree on everything all the time. We try on a lot of stuff. We’re looking for the characters, also looking for clothes. I always needed Sylvie, especially in Season 1 and 2, to be in sort of a corset. I needed her feet to hurt. We never say it, but I needed it as an actor to have feet that hurt. One of the directors, when I come on set every time he says, “OK, do they hurt?” “Yeah.” “Great.” Because it’s part of Sylvie.

She was a beach girl living in the south of France and she had to go to Paris and become Sylvie Grateau, which is a totally different character. She had to have contrived herself. That’s the main thing that we work on. But then there’s fantasy and there’s craziness. We’re overdressing her all the time, which I adore because it’s not realistic at all, and we can do it and Darren loves it. We’re having so much fun with that. Because it’s a fairy tale, it’s nothing realistic. Everything’s supposed to be incredible and beautiful and non-realistic.

As a semi-ambassador for France, what is something that is actually realistic about Paris that you wish that we clueless Americans understood?

It’s something that Sylvie says, I think in Season 2, that I really like. She tells Madeline, “It’s not all about the money.” And it’s true. The French are very relaxed with that.

You are also an ambassador for aging beautifully. You have a big birthday coming up in 2023. What do you want for this next phase of your life, this next decade of your life that you’re entering into?

I never think of my life like that. I never think about decades or I never think of my age as it is. A lot of times I don’t even do anything for my birthday. Not that I refuse it, I say my age with no problem. I just don’t know why. It doesn’t really matter to me. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t think about that at all. So what I wish is to be working with fantastic roles like I’m getting, and more and more, which is great. That’s all.

I’ve been really enjoying this dynamic that has been developing over the seasons between Sylvie and Emily. Have you ever had someone like that in your own life who took you under their wing in a way that challenged, but also taught you?

A lot of different people did that. Not only one person. I always take challenges for an opportunity for growth. There’s that line, “Your enemy is your master,” and I look at life like that.

Watch more

“Salon Talks” with Mary Elizabeth Williams

Furious Alex Jones rants about “self-fulfilling prophecy” of his downfall after bankruptcy hearing

Alex Jones lashed out at his audience on Tuesday for believing what he said was propaganda from the mainstream media following a bankruptcy hearing.

During his Infowars broadcast, Jones faulted media reports that said he had been stripped of some bankruptcy protections. The broadcaster noted that his attorneys agreed to the court order.

“This place is on the edge of insolvency,” he explained. “We are in bankruptcy to try to get through this and to try to minimize the bills. And then a bunch of the audience thinks, ‘Well, he’s going off air; I’m not going to support him.'”

Jones said that even if a judge granted him a $1.3 million salary, he eventually would not be able to afford food.

“It’s a liberating feeling,” he continued. “I kind of feel good in this fight that I’m going to get down to the point where I can’t buy groceries. That makes me feel actually like I’ve done my job. I’m actually liking this in a way.”

His demeanor darkened as he reflected on the bankruptcy hearing.

“I don’t tell lies, you got that?” he exclaimed. “That’s my secret! My brain becomes more powerful every day because I’ve trained myself not to lie to myself, not to lie to my audience and not to lie in front of God!”

Jones also worried that his downfall was a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“All the fake lawsuits couldn’t shut us down, but you decided to believe their propaganda,” he said, “and you believe we’re going under because the lawyers told you we’re going under, the Democrats told you we’re going under. And you’ve decided — some of you — to believe that, so we’ve gotten less support.”

“OK, believe them!” Jones remarked. “It will make it true! Because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“If we were way behind to pay the bills, I could just say, well, it’s time to really shut this down,” he added. “But that fact that it’s just right there! We’re almost where we need to be! And we’re just almost going to beat these people! It just pisses me off!”

Watch the video below via Infowars.

“Stop lying”: MTG unleashes 25-part Twitter rant blasting “friends” Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., published a 25-part Twitter rant on Tuesday to criticize fellow Republicans who oppose Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be Speaker of the House.

Greene’s Twitter thread came a day after she attacked Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., for opposing McCarthy. Greene has also said she disagreed with Rep. Matt Gaetz’s opposition to McCarthy.

“I’m disappointed my friends would mislead the base and that’s a big reason why I’m speaking out,” she wrote. “My friends know this and risking the gavel & delaying everything just bc they don’t like someone is not only selfish, it’s incredibly reckless and dangerous.”

She compared her “friends” to “the Never Trumpers [who] were Never Trump just [because] they didn’t like him, & that bad attitude cost our country so much.”

“Now we have a new Never movement growing, the Never Kevin movement,” she lamented. “Just like Never Trump, the Never Kevin’s [sic] are Never Kevin because they just don’t like him.”

“It’s time for my friends in the Never Kevin Caucus to stop lying to the base just bc they don’t like Kevin McCarthy,” Greene concluded. “They do not have a plan and there is no consensus candidate. Sabotaging the country for personal reasons is not brave or righteous, it’s selfish and foolish.”

I’m disappointed my friends would mislead the base and that’s a big reason why I’m speaking out.

The Speaker is elected inside our conference that unfortunately for us conservatives is filled with too many moderates and it’s IMPOSSIBLE for a conservative to get 218 votes.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 20, 2022

Never Trumper’s bad attitudes produced Republican refusal to work together and accomplish the MAGA agenda that Americans rallied around and voted for in record numbers.

And it cut a deep divide in our party that is ever expanding, sadly.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 20, 2022

It’s time for my friends in the Never Kevin Caucus to stop lying to the base just bc they don’t like Kevin McCarthy.
They do not have a plan and there is no consensus candidate.
Sabotaging the country for personal reasons is not brave or righteous, it’s selfish and foolish.

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) December 20, 2022

Jan. 6 report summary drags Trump — but ignores “extremist ideologies” that inspired Capitol attack

As the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection wraps up its work, there are some troubling indications that it is not going to tell the full story of why an armed and violent mob tried to stop Congress from formally certifying a presidential election.

There’s no question that disgraced ex-President Donald Trump was the proximate cause of the first-ever attack on the peaceful transition of power. Even the Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has admitted as much. But while Trump was the cause of the Capitol Putsch, he did not inspire it.

The thousands of people who stormed the Capitol on a freezing day nearly two years ago didn’t do it because they worshiped Donald Trump. They did it because they worship a multitude of extremist ideologies that have utterly captured the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, pointing out that the Republican Party has become overrun by reactionary activists who want to criminalize birth control and abortion, outlaw homosexuality, and relegate non-Christians to second-class citizenship is still not something that you can say in polite company.

The executive summary of the final report released by the J6 Committee demonstrates this quite clearly. While the document spares no words in its discussion of Trump’s direct role in deliberately lying about his loss of the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden and how he used violent rhetoric to urge supporters to “fight like hell” on Jan. 6, 2021, it does not discuss why his superfans would decide to take the absolutely insane step of breaking into the Capitol to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Some committee members seem to want to have told the complete story, but it appears there was not unanimous consent to make unambiguous statements about Republican radicalization.

“I think it’s clear from all the evidence that we advance that the rioters were operating under Donald Trump’s big lie propaganda,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told TYT Washington correspondent Candice Cole on Monday. “Now, underneath that, you get to a level of sociological analysis that perhaps the whole committee might not agree upon.”

The full committee report is expected to be released on Wednesday so it’s best not to pre-judge it, but the indications from a review of the executive summary are that the committee is not telling the American people the full story. There are no mentions of “Christian,” “Jesus,” or “God,” despite the fact that many Capitol rioters wore Crusader clothing, carried signs with pictures of MAGA Jesus, and shared slogans like “Make America Godly Again.”

As published, the initial report also does not mention the numerous incidents of high-level Trump supporters such as his then-chief of staff Mark Meadows claiming that Jesus supported Trump’s attempts to illegally retain the presidency.

“Evil always looks like the victor until the King of Kings triumphs,” Meadows wrote on Nov. 24, 2020 to Ginni Thomas, a Christianist activist who is married to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. He ended his missive with a Bible quote: “Do not grow weary in well doing.”

This is but one of many similar religious messages and speeches that both elite and grassroots Trump supporters shared with each other as they moved toward trying to overthrow American democracy.

Unfortunately, the summary also contains no discussion of racism, racists, white nationalism, abortion, guns, or any of the other extremist causes that now animate a significant percentage of far-right Republicans. As a result, the public is not getting a complete picture of why thousands of people decided to launch the first domestic insurrection since the Civil War.

“There is no doubt that the entire work of the Committee, the report, and the criminal referrals are an essential step toward holding the planners, perpetrators, funders, and those who inspired the insurrection accountable,” Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told TYT.

She continued: “That said, it’s incumbent upon our leaders to make sure that Jan. 6 never happens again and to make it clear to the American public that the deadly events of that day were never meant to be the end goal for these extremists. There is a movement afoot that has been building for half a century to undermine our democracy and narrow who has basic rights — with a clear target on Black communities, immigrants, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people and women.”

That’s exactly correct. Congress and President Joe Biden need to lead the way to educate regular, non-political Americans about the threat of a far-right movement that is dead-set on ending democracy in this country.

“Yellowjackets” spills Easter eggs for the second season in an ominous Yule log video

With the grand finale of the holiday season right around the corner, the desire to create the perfect festive mood can sometimes feel overwhelming. Just the other day I almost had a nervous breakdown in Target when I saw that they were out of Scotch tape and then, in the midst of the chaos around me – with over-stuffed carts squeezing past and the wail of other emotionally fraught shoppers echoing in the distance – I paused to put things into perspective. I may have to wrap presents with Band-Aids or unsightly duct tape, and will almost certainly sink into a deep depression when it comes time to take down all the decorations I lovingly spent weeks putting up, but there’s still a lot to look forward to and for me, at this moment, the second season of “Yellowjackets” is at the top of the list in terms of pulling me through a looming post-holiday funk.

Now and then: How “Yellowjackets” purposefully reminds Gen Xers of who we thought we’d be

While March 24 may feel like a long wait to see how the surviving members of the Yellowjackets soccer team fare during their first frigid winter after crashing into the Canadian wilderness on their way to nationals, the blessing of this new ominous Yule log video featuring dialogue from the upcoming season (and a familiar symbol for eagle-eyed viewers to look out for) fills me with a peaceful warmth. It also gives me something to watch while I’m drowning my sorrows in my own version of Doomcoming punch, room temp box wine from the gas station. With an exclusive first look at the video below, you can join in on the fun. As Lottie Matthews would say, “Let the darkness set us free.”

A blurb from Showtime on the video:

We may have fond childhood memories of tuning in to a crackling cathode-ray fireplace, but recently everyone from Marvel movies to Sonic The Hedgehog to (checks notes) Cranberry Sauce (?) are getting in on the trend. Thankfully, Yellowjackets is here to finally kill this cliche’ and devour it whole with an anti-yule log as unsettling and hilarious as the series itself. True to form, Showtime’s series bucks the Yule Log trend in a snow-covered campfire without a flicker of flame in sight. Instead, we’re treated to enigmatic audio teasing the show’s signature creep factor we all know and love. But that’s not where the Easter Eggs end. Eagle-eyed citizen detectives who scan the video discover a thumbnail view where the campfire actually roars to life and forms the mysterious sigil from season one. How did they do it? We have no idea, but we’re glad they did.

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

Season 1 of “Yellowjackets” wrapped in January 2022 with the survivors of Flight 2525 going off the rails, and judging by the dialogue heard in the Yule log video we’ll witness them travailing deeper into their winter of discontent in Season 2.

The new season sees the return of the show’s core cast with a few notable plot-driven additions, and one big change. The character Akilah, who was played by Keeya King in the first season, will now be taken over by up-and-comer Nia Sondaya; and Simone Kessell and Lauren Ambrose will join on as adult Lottie Matthews and Van Palmer, respectively. Elijah Wood, best known from the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy, is another new addition described as a “dedicated citizen detective” like Misty Quigley (Christina Ricci and Sammi Hanratty). Variety also announced that Melanie Lynskey’s real-life husband Jason Ritter will also guest star in an as-yet unspecified role.

(L-R): Nuha Jes Izman as Teen Crystal, Samantha Hanratty as Teen Misty, Alexa Barajas as Teen Mari, Sophie Nélisse as Teen Shauna, Courtney Eaton as Teen Lottie, Nia Sondaya as Teen Akilah, Sophie Thatcher as Teen Natalie, Jasmin Savoy Brown as Teen Taissa, Steven Krueger as Ben Scott and Liv Hewson as Teen Van in “Yellowjackets” Season 2. (Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME)In a red carpet interview with E! News during the 2022 Emmy’s pre-show, Melanie Lynskey, who plays adult Shauna Shipman, dropped hints for what we can expect saying that the second episode of the new season is “insane.” And in a separate interview with ET Online, Christina Ricci describes the upcoming season as being “more crazy, more shocking.”

One would think that it would be difficult for a show that kicked off with cults, veiled cannibalism, sacrificial offerings, and a key character dying of hypothermia on the very snowy spot that this Yule log video looks out at couldn’t get much wilder, but I can’t wait to see them do it.

In the meantime, happy holidays, and buzz buzz buzz.

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Trump and the IRS: A massive tax cheat and a hapless, corrupt agency

Back in February of 2019, then-President Donald Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen, testified before the House Oversight Committee that his former employer had once shown him a big refund from the IRS and told him “he could not believe how stupid the government was for giving someone like him that much money back.”

It turns out that the man who once claimed in a presidential debate that not paying any taxes made him “smart” was right about that. The IRS is stupid, or at least lazy and incompetent. It let Donald Trump off the hook for years.

On Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee finally broke its silence and announced that after years of legal battles and delays it would release Trump’s tax returns to the public, as they are authorized to do by the same law Republicans invoked when they investigated the IRS back in 2014. That probe, which was supposed to show that the IRS had targeted conservative organizations, actually made clear that the agency had targeted progressive groups as well. But this investigation looks like it exposed a real scandal. The only question is whether the IRS will take the fall for this entire mess or whether Donald Trump will finally be fully exposed for his egregious pattern of tax evasion.

Trump World is imploding — which could be the start of Trump’s big comeback

The committee released a report on its findings Tuesday night, as did the Joint Committee on Taxation, which delved into some of the details of the returns themselves. The first big takeaway is that the IRS, which is supposed to audit all presidential tax returns under the Mandatory Presidential Audit Program, never even got around to looking at Trump’s. It was only after the committee began its inquiries in 2019 that the IRS finally opened an investigation of Trump’s 2016 returns, even though it had been tasked by that time with auditing him from 2015 through 2018.

That’s very strange, to put it mildly, and it certainly validates the committee’s stated premise for opening the case. Its members are now recommending that the Mandatory Audit Program, which has been in place since the Carter administration, be codified into law.

John Koskinen, who was IRS commissioner during Trump’s first year as president, told the New York Times that he knew nothing about all this. The committee’s report obliquely suggests that it might be a good idea to vet individual agents more carefully, mentioning the “substantial discretion an I.R.S. revenue agent possesses in conducting the audit of presidential returns and the absence of guardrails to ensure that such employee is not subject to undue influence by a president or his representatives.” After all, such an agent might turn out to be a Trump loyalist, like Beverly Hills tax attorney Charles P. Rettig, who defended Trump’s decision not to release his tax returns in a 2016 op-ed — after which Trump appointed him IRS commissioner.

So what we now know is that the IRS did not even begin its mandatory audits of Trump’s taxes until 2019 and has completed none of them. So the returns the committee finally has in its possession are missing the backup information that would routinely have been requested of any return under audit to prove the legitimacy of its claims. So there are many unanswered questions about the validity of Trump’s numbers, although we already about his sleazy tax avoidance schemes through the myriad lawsuits and criminal proceedings he has faced, as well as voluminous reporting by the New York Times and others.

Back in 2018, the Times reported on a trove of Trump family financial documents, including tax returns of Fred Trump, the ex-president’s father. Fred had evidently gone to huge lengths to pass large sums to his children through dubious or outright illegal methods, mostly to evade paying taxes over many years. His son has apparently followed that tradition for many years. That issue has come up both in the investigation of these tax returns and in the recent criminal case against the Trump Organization, in which the family business was found guilty of nine criminal counts including tax fraud. It also features prominently in the New York attorney general’s civil case against Trump and three of his adult children.

In 2020, the Times came into possession of more Trump tax returns, including some of those the committee will be release this week. The story they told was pretty stunning:

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Perhaps the most intriguing detail in that story was that Trump was in fact still embroiled in an audit from 2009, with the IRS questioning the validity of a $72.9 million tax refund he received after declaring huge losses. If the IRS eventually ruled against him, the Times reported, he could end up owing more than $100 million. So here’s one thing we can say for Trump: When he said that his taxes were still under audit throughout his presidency, he was telling the truth, That audit long predated his presidential campaign, however, and he never had any legal reason or legitimate excuse for not releasing his returns to the public.

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But it’s clear enough why he didn’t want to. The story those returns clearly tell is of a man who publicly bragged that his businesses were hugely successful even as he claimed massive losses. He was afraid of being seen as the phony he is and was worried, reasonably enough, that the audit would expose him as a tax cheat who owed the government $100 million that he probably doesn’t have.

For once Trump was telling the truth: He really was under audit the whole time he was president. But that audit went back to 2009, and was never a legitimate excuse for not releasing his tax returns.

This has always been a potential political vulnerability for Trump. Polling in the summer of 2020 showed that 66% of Americans believed he “should release his tax returns from earlier years,” and 68% said that “Americans have a right to see each presidential candidate’s financial records before the election.” Fortunately for Trump, there was so much distraction with the pandemic during the 2020 campaign that the New York Times exposé never really penetrated the public consciousness.

There was a fair bit of hand-wringing among the chattering classes on Tuesday night over the committee’s party-line vote to make Trump’s recent returns public, which is just daft. There should be no question that any president must release their tax returns for the years they serve as president. which accounts for those the committee intends to release. This is the man who refused to divest himself of his businesses the whole time he was in the White House, which is also massively unethical. If Trump was hiding something during his tenure, as he pretty clearly was, the public has a right to know about it. After all, he’s running again. I think we can feel fairly confident that he’ll never come clean voluntarily.

The committee’s report also shows that something is very wrong at the IRS, which appears to be understaffed and unqualified to deal with big-money malefactors’ labyrinthine financial schemes. That can theoretically be fixed by staffing up the agency and recruiting people who know what they are doing and have enough oversight so there’s less chance of corruption and cronyism. Perhaps the bigger problem is with the tax code, which favors rich cheaters like Donald Trump (and many others) who pay next to nothing in income taxes while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet and pay our fair share. We don’t know yet whether Trump actually committed tax fraud on his personal tax returns. But there can be no doubt that much of what he did that was legal was deceitful and unjust.

about the post-presidential adventures of Donald J. Trump