Top Putin lieutenant brags “we are interfering and will continue to interfere” in US elections

A Russian businessman known as Vladimir Putin’s “chef” admitted to ongoing efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose Concord catering firm operates Kremlin contracts, has been formally accused of sponsoring “troll farms” that spread Russian propaganda aimed at influencing American politics, and he is the first such figure to admit to interfering with U.S. elections, reported Reuters.

“We have interfered (in U.S. elections), we are interfering and we will continue to interfere,” Prigozhin said on Russia’s Facebook equivalent VKontakte. “Carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do.”

“During our pinpoint operations, we will remove both kidneys and the liver at once,” Prigozhin added without explanation.

The U.S. State Department offered a $10 million reward for information on Prigozhin’s efforts to interfere in U.S. elections, and he has been sanctioned by the U.S., U.K. and European Union.

Prigozhin admitted in September to founding the Kremlin-aligned Wagner Group mercenary force, which is active in Africa, Syria and Ukraine.

Revisiting Millsberry: The wild rise and fall of General Mill’s virtual cereal-themed town

There’s a Facebook page where you can go back and seemingly watch the implosion of an entire town in real time. It kicked off with a dispatch from the local paper.

“It’s almost December 31st, when we say farewell to Millsberry,” the article began. “Everyone is buzzing about it, so I thought, what a perfect time to catch up with the residents and reminisce about life in this most remarkable town.”

In the comments, there was talk of protest. If enough residents petitioned the powers that be, perhaps Millsberry wouldn’t have to dissolve? Slowly, those calls gave way to bittersweet quotes encapsulating feelings of great loss (“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”) and shared personal remembrances.

On the last day of December, the countdowns started in earnest.

“My price will only go up”: Collectors bet on nostalgia as they resell McDonald’s Adult Happy Meals

“11 Hours. 1 Minute. 56 Seconds,” someone posted. Every few hours, the clock would be updated until the final pronouncement: “Millsberry officially closed at 1:47:14 on January 1st, 2011.”

The intersection of loss and our virtual lives is a thorny, occasionally poignant and often awkward thing. There’s been more than one story, for instance, of someone hacking the Facebook account of a deceased user; friends and family were subsequently messaged as if they were being contacted by a ghost from beyond the grave. People now specify in their wills whom they want to clean out their email accounts, Zoom allows users to virtually attend both business meetings and funerals, while online memorial books are commonplace.

Quickly, that was what the Millsberry town Facebook page became. “Millsberry closing was as if my best friend died,” one group member wrote. “It’s a loss you can’t express in words.”

But through it all, they (nor any members of the page) weren’t grieving the loss of a person — or even a physical place. They were mourning the loss of a cereal-themed advergame created by General Mills. To date, some have never stopped petitioning for its return.

***

In 2004, General Mills launched Millsberry, one of the first child-geared online games of its kind. Players were given a virtual “Buddy,” a grainy, low-res avatar that could be personalized; they were the user’s window into the titular town, which was packed with in-game billboards and grocery store aisles advertising cereals like Corn Chex and Frosted Cheerios. One could test their luck while playing Cinnamon Toast Crunch Swirl, or their skills on the Reese’s Puffs Cereal Snowboard Slalom.

Alongside non-playable characters like Mayor Wright, DJ Too Ray and journalist Audrey Smith-Wei, players were able to decorate their houses, play games at the arcade, compete in special seasonal events, connect with other real-life users and keep up with the news through the “Millsberry Gazette.”

The marketing within the game wasn’t particularly subtle, however “advergames,” or games designed specifically to sell a product, were still relatively new. The day-to-day nature of Millsberry, which revolved around a series of achievable mini-quests and routine activities, has been replicated again and again, perhaps most notably through Club Penguin, the popular multiplayer online kid’s game set in a winter wonderland that was founded in 2005.

Like Millsberry, Club Penguin specifically catered to children between the ages of six and 14. Club Penguin remained online for 12 years, during which time it gained 200 million registered user accounts, according to Variety. While numbers regarding the audience size of Millsberry are a little fuzzier, news articles about online gaming at the time provide valuable context. As The New York Times reported, Nickelodeon had 25 million unique visitors visit its online gaming catalog in February 2008, while Electronic Arts and Disney both had more than 12 million visitors a piece.

Kid-focused online games were a booming business, and Millsberry continued to stand out. But then, in 2010, the “Millsberry Gazette” announced that all the town’s citizens would be “graduating.” Since “everyone in town [had] done so well, exceeding all expectations from game scores to raising money at Grow Good Farm,” their work was done.

Consumers live in a world in which food brands are continuously trying to contort themselves — through bizarre collaborations, spicy social media posts and “shock marketing” — into a shape that will both attract and maintain increasingly fickle attention.

“I never wanted to graduate from Millsberry,” a commenter wrote on the game’s Facebook page. “I wanted to keep playing it because it never got old to me.”

That statement in itself is notable, considering consumers live in a world in which food brands are continuously trying to contort themselves — through bizarre collaborations, spicy social media posts and “shock marketing” — into a shape that will both attract and maintain increasingly fickle attention. Many of those attempts have landed weird or fallen flat. (Think, for instance, of the 1995 commercial Ringo Starr did for Pizza Hut, despite the fact that the Beatles drummer had infamously never eaten pizza due to allergies.) So, how did an early 2000s international cereal conglomerate cultivate such fervent fandom?

The story of Millsberry starts — and ends — with the sugar-coating of child marketing.

***

“Sitting and watching Dora DVDs is quite different from playing Dora in a game,” Michael Cai, a director of broadband and gaming at Parks Associates, told The New York Times in 2008. “It’s definitely more engaging, and the brand affiliation is stronger in an interactive setting.”

This idea that engaging with specific products as an active participant (such as while playing a video game) as opposed to a passive audience (such as while watching a commercial) increases buyer interest and brand loyalty has always been the promise of advergames, a term coined by Anthony Giallourakis in 1999. The first widely-recognized advergame was Tapper, a popular bar arcade game released by Anheuser-Busch, which prominently featured the company’s logos and products during gameplay.

Quickly, however, the genre exploded with kid-focused content. Seventy-three percent of the food product companies surveyed in a 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation report had established dedicated sections of their websites with advergames targeted at children, many of which offered multiple advergames.

Millsberry was, predictably, very cereal-focused. Classic mascots like Lucky the Leprechaun and Chip the Wolf were woven throughout gameplay, as were promotions for new, real-world General Mills products. The July 22, 2010 issue of the “Millsberry Gazette” ran an article recapping how everyone in town had been acting strange. An investigation found that it was simply “because of the latest craze in town — these wacky new Double Dare Fruit Roll-Ups fruit-flavored snacks!”

The act of physically eating cereal made it into gameplay, as well. Players were in charge of monitoring the health of their aforementioned virtual Buddies, which meant helping them eat “healthy” meals (i.e. big bowls of branded cereal) within the game.

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Advergame marketing works specifically because of this level of repetition. As Juliet Schor wrote in her 2004 book “Born to Buy,” these advertising strategies convince kids that products are necessary to their social survival. Ads affect not only what they want to buy, but also who they think they are and how they feel about themselves. Want to be like your Millsberry Buddy, who has exciting, independent adventures and connects with kids from all around the globe? Grab a spoon, because you need to eat like them.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the proliferation of advergames for children, including Millsberry, stoked some controversy.

In the article “The Mixed Health Messages of Millsberry: A Critical Study of Online Child-Targeted Food Advergaming,” which was originally published in 2011 in the journal Health Communication, author Deborah M. Thomson wrote that “Millsberry.com sends players contradictory messages about health by simultaneously promoting nutritional wellness and consumption of high-sugar cereals, essentially conflating the two.”

She continued, “Caloric moderation is contradicted by digital advergames that operate on a logic of maximal consumption, by narratives of branded spokescharacters’ endless appetites for cereal, and by giveaways of ‘free’ boxes of virtual cereal that can be eaten by the Buddy in a single bite.”

As The New York Times reported in 2011, 17 major corporations — including General Mills, McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Burger King — made a voluntary pledge to reduce the marketing of their least nutritious brands to children. Following increased public pressure, they updated the pledge in 2009 to include marketing via games and mobile devices.

“It is our sincere hope that the ideals of our little town will live on in the communities that Millsberry fans will move on to and will create going forward — wherever that may be.”

A year later, General Mills announced that it would be shuttering the Millsberry project.

In a November 2010 message to the game’s fans, the Millsberry team wrote: “To those who wonder whether every option was considered, We can truly say ‘yes.’ We analyzed every alternative. We considered every option.”

“This decision was very difficult, because we very much wanted Millsberry to continue,” they wrote. “Millsberry meant so much to so many — we know — and it definitely means a lot to us. We are very proud of Millsberry’s legacy, and we share your sadness in seeing it come to an end. It is our sincere hope that the ideals of our little town will live on in the communities that Millsberry fans will move on to and will create going forward — wherever that may be.”

***

There’s a moment when memories morph into something both more distant and poignant, and when that moment hits, Reddit’s r/nostalgia is there. The subreddit, which has more than 1 million members, is packed with posts about things that make users nostalgic, ranging from “Hotmail in early 1997 before Microsoft’s acquisition” to “the poo-chi robot dog.”

Every few months, someone inevitably posts about Millsberry.

“I LOVED THIS GAME. Prob would still play today at 27 if I could access my old account,” someone wrote under a screenshot of the game. Another added a string of vivid details about the gameplay: “Yes I remember they had a library. AND you actually have to wait for someone else to return their books to read them LMAO. And also how food would expire. And also how the long orange hair cant be bought from the salon, so I made a new account just to have that hair.”

It may feel easy to cynically dismiss the nostalgia these former players feel for Millsberry as the natural consequence of a well-executed marketing exercise, however many in the community push back against that narrative.

Earlier this year, TikTok user @quesobesos posted a video in which the phrases “It was just a computer game, it was shut down 12 years ago,” and “You played it when you were 7 and it was all an ad for General Mills” float above her head. ABBA’s “Angeleyes” blares as screenshots from “Millsberry” slide by in Powerpoint presentation fashion. The camera lingers on a still image of the Trix Rabbit caught mid-hop as this stanza builds:

Sometimes when I’m lonely, I sit and think about him

And it hurts to remember all the good times

When I thought I could never live without him

And I wonder, does it have to be the same

Every time?

Almost all the virtual ephemera surrounding Millsberry and its discontinuation — from YouTube videos of grainy gameplay to a Facebook page in which every in-game newspaper dispatch was logged — alludes to the small-town conceit of the game. The in-game writing helped emphasize this, including the following description of a Millsberry neighborhood called Golden Valley.

“Old family farms dot the landscape and fields of corn, beans, and other produce can be seen from every road,” it said. “Rolling green forests (which turn red and gold in the fall) and farmsteads are all around. The homes all look like models for paintings: beautiful and quaint. It’s here that Millsberry’s ‘small town’ atmosphere remains.”

This lacquer of wholesomeness is not unlike cereal marketing at its core; companies have spent decades convincing kids (or really, their parents) that marshmallows are a breakfast food by positioning them on a sunlit kitchen table augmented by fresh-squeezed orange juice and a triangle of whole wheat toast. Millsberry — played on boxy PCs in computer rooms and school libraries across the country — was the video game analogue.

“Millsberry has always been a place where kids feel that they belong — a place where kids can connect with other kids, their virtual buddies, play games and most of all – have fun,” Millsberry developers wrote in a goodbye letter posted on the site.

And even if that wholesomeness was largely a facade, the comfort it imparted was intoxicating in retrospect. As one former player wrote in the r/nostalgia subreddit, “I was heartbroken when this was taken away from us… We need it back! I loved it so so much!”

***

There have been multiple attempts to resurrect Millsberry in the dozen years since its closure. These include numerous change.org petitions and message board posts urgently pushing for players to call General Mills and see if the decision could be reversed.

“Hey everyone I spoke with a representative from General Mills,” one such posting reads. “It only took me about 3 minutes to get through. I asked [why Millsberry was closing] and he told me the main reason was because participation and play level had greatly decreased…Finally, he said it would be great if I can tell/get other players to call in, so come on. Let’s flood those phone lines!”

Twitter is still littered with tweets asking General Mills to reconsider. “@GeneralMills, I will start buying your cereal again if you bring Millsberry back,” one user wrote in February. In October, another user added: “I’m a software dev and I’ll work for free. Please bring back Millsberry. The people will pay good money.”

Bringing back Millsberry would be a decision with some precedent. Interest in and nostalgia for early 2000s games, including Club Penguin, surged during the pandemic, resulting in a number of unofficial servers on which people could play recreations of the game. However, one particularly popular server, Club Penguin Rewritten, was issued a cease and desist notice from Disney, who now owns the brand.

Additionally, General Mills is eying the intersection of gaming and its products again, albeit with a lighter hand than with Millsberry. In October, for instance, the company announced the launch of “Magic Gems, a free mobile web-based AR game [that] celebrates the nationwide return of the limited-edition Lucky Charms Magic Gems cereal which quickly sold out on shelves earlier this summer.”

The company hasn’t officially indicated whether it plans to revive Millsberry or not, but requests for a revival continue to come in from would-be players. (Salon Food reached out to General Mills; as of publication, the company hadn’t responded to a request for comment.)

As this article was being written, another popped up via Twitter: “@GeneralMills, I would give anything for the Millsberry game back.”

For now, memories of the town are just that — memories that exist frozen in time. Only occasionally, in a graveyard of grainy screenshots or at the bottom of a bowl of cereal, their full potency is found.

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“This is not about stopping fraud”: GOP sues to throw out thousands of ballots in key swing states

National and state-level Republicans are engaged in a coordinated legal effort to disqualify thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots in key battleground states ahead of Election Day, a mass voter suppression campaign that—if successful—could swing the results of close races.

In states such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, right-wing organizations and Republican groups animated by former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” have filed lawsuits seeking to toss ballots on technical grounds, potentially disenfranchising thousands of voters for failing to put a date on the outer envelope of a ballot or other small mistakes.

Additionally, Republicans in Pennsylvania sued in an unsuccessful attempt to block counties from notifying voters about technical errors on their ballots.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with GOP groups in ruling that mail-in and absentee ballots without a date on the outer envelope cannot be counted. Voting rights organizations are fighting back, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) said in a statement Sunday that “no voter should be disenfranchised simply because they made a minor error in filling out their ballot.”

“This was not a controversial concept in our country or our commonwealth until recently, with the rise of the Big Lie and the efforts to spread mis- and disinformation in the days leading up to the general election,” Wolf added. “I urge counties to continue to ensure that every vote counts.”

In Georgia, home to a razor-close U.S. Senate race that could decide control of the upper chamber, right-wingers have challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of individual voters, making use of a GOP-crafted law allowing state residents to file an unlimited number of challenges.

Republican groups in several states—including Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada—have also filed lawsuits aimed at requiring the appointment of more Republican poll workers.

🆕: There’s been a recent influx in GOP lawsuits over poll watchers. These lawsuits not only burden already busy election offices, but also fuel Republican claims that our election system is rigged and provide a pretext to subvert the results.https://t.co/CqoioJjInT

— Democracy Docket (@DemocracyDocket) November 7, 2022

“They’re looking for every advantage they can get, and they’ve calculated that this is a way that they can win more seats,” Sylvia Albert, director of voting and elections for the democracy watchdog group Common Cause, told The Washington Post, which reported Monday that “the potential for chaos is especially high in Pennsylvania, where the legal fight is ongoing and could influence or postpone the outcome in some of the state’s tightest races.”

Albert went on to note that “research has shown that absentee ballots are more likely to be discarded if they are voted by young people and people of color, which are not generally seen as the Republican base.”

More than 40 million ballots have been cast thus far ahead of Election Day, but Republican candidates and former President Donald Trump have baselessly sowed doubt about mail-in voting and urged their supporters to cast their ballots in person on November 8.

“If enough voters are dissuaded from casting ballots early,” the Associated Press recently noted, “it could lead to long lines on Election Day and would push back processing of those late-arriving mailed ballots. Those ballots likely would not get counted until the next day or later.”

Legal fights could delay ballot counting even further, meaning it could take weeks to determine the final election outcome in every state.

Citing data from Democracy Docket, Bloomberg reported Monday that “more lawsuits have been filed this year than in all of 2020 by Democrats and Republicans challenging everything from who can vote to where ballots are collected and monitored.”

“So far, at least 157 suits were filed by partisans, and more are likely after Election Day,” the outlet noted. “In 2020, there were about 150, including dozens of failed attempts by Republicans to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump.”

While voting rights groups have filed lawsuits designed to preserve the franchise and expand ballot access, Republican legal challenges aim to do the opposite in the name of “election integrity.”

“This is not about stopping fraud,” Clifford Levine, a Pittsburgh-based election lawyer for Democrats, told the Post. “It’s about discounting mail ballots. There’s just no question.”

Experts: These churches violate law by endorsing candidates — should have tax-exempt status revoked

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

The endorsement of political candidates by religious leaders from the pulpit has grown increasingly brazen, aggressive and sophisticated in recent years.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 2 0 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under the law, pastors can endorse candidates in their personal capacities outside of church and weigh in on political issues from the pulpit as long as they don’t veer into support or condemnation of a particular candidate. But the law prohibits pastors from endorsing candidates during official church functions such as sermons.

Violations can lead to the revocation of a church’s tax-exempt status.

Descriptions of the 20 videos we identified are below. ProPublica and the Tribune had three experts review each of them. They agreed that the cases below violate the law. The experts were Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame; Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school; and Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago.

We’re Not Endorsing a Candidate, but…

In these cases, pastors said they were not endorsing candidates, but their actions equated to an endorsement, according to the experts. Some acknowledged that the law did not allow them to endorse before making their statements.

Mercy Culture

Location: Fort Worth, Texas

Pastors: Landon Schott, Heather Schott and Steve Penate

Context: Pastors at Mercy Culture expressed support for political candidates in at least three sermons this year. All three instances violated the Johnson Amendment, according to the experts. During one such instance on Feb. 6, the Schotts and Penate spoke in favor of Nate Schatzline, who is running for a seat in the state House. “Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” Landon Schott said. Schatzline’s appearance ended with Schott stating: “We declare Mercy Culture Church is behind you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is praying for you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is supporting you.” Early voting for the March 1 primary began eight days after the church service. Schatzline qualified for a runoff, which he won on May 24. He will face Democratic nominee KC Chowdhury, a Democrat, in Tuesday’s general election.

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “If it’s part of the religious services, his disclaimer doesn’t work and it’s a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment (albeit an almost clever, and definitely self-aware, attempt to avoid that). Penate saying ‘do something with us’ is absolutely an endorsement. If they’re doing it in their capacity as pastors, this violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Mercy Culture, Landon Schott and Heather Schott did not respond to questions or requests for comment. Both Penate, a church elder who said he was not speaking on behalf of the church, and Schatzline stated in separate interviews that they did not believe any laws were broken. “Mercy Culture has never endorsed anyone,” Penate said. “Mercy Culture has never told anyone to vote a certain way. Never.”

Unite Church

Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Pastor: Josh Tanner

Context: On Jan. 16, Tanner introduced his congregation to Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and let her speak about how she expressed her faith during her career in government. “OK, so I want you to know that we’re not just gonna be doing an endorsement for Kelly today, even though I am endorsing Kelly for U.S. Senate. And you can vote for whoever you want. I’m just letting you know who I’m voting for. It’s gonna be her.”

Tshibaka was among the top candidates to advance to the November general election. She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Patricia Chesbro on Tuesday.

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That the pastor says he personally endorses the candidate at an official function of the church makes the statement campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Unite Church, Tanner and Tshibaka did not respond to requests for comment.

“Uncle Bill”: A New “Family”-Based Strategy

Some churches coordinated with one another to provide their congregations with a list that singled out specific candidates and omitted others.

Gateway Church

Location: Southlake, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Robert Morris

Context: Morris is among a group of Dallas-area pastors who have coordinated to highlight certain candidates running for public office. Since 2021, Morris has shown his congregation the names of specific candidates for office at least three times. In each of those cases, Morris violated the Johnson Amendment, according to experts. (Morris also showed the names during an Oct. 23 service.) During an April 18, 2021, sermon, a day before the start of early voting, Morris displayed the names of nine candidates running in nonpartisan races for school board and City Council on a screen. “And so we’re not endorsing a candidate,” Morris said. “We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running.” All but one of the candidates whose names were shown either won their race or qualified for a runoff.

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a new (at least to me) technique, to join a group of like-minded churches and then identify to the congregation anyone who is a member of any of those churches who is a candidate for elected public office, as opposed to just identifying members of your congregation who are candidates. But this technique, even with the disclaimers made by the pastor here, is still a violation of the Johnson Amendment. While the pastor tries to avoid the violation by making various disclaimers and saying he is just giving the congregation the names and they can do what they want when they vote, those are not sufficient to cure the violation. But they do provide an argument that there is not a violation and so muddies the waters a bit, even though I believe that argument ultimately fails legally.”

Church response: Lawrence Swicegood, Gateway Media executive director, said in an emailed statement:

“At Gateway Church:

We DON’T:

Support any specific political party
Endorse political candidates

We DO:

INFORM our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.
ENCOURAGE our church family to vote as God leads them.
PRAY for our elected officials regardless of their political party, or affiliation.”

First Baptist Grapevine

Location: Grapevine, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Doug Page

Context: On April 18, 2021, Page showed his congregation the same list of candidates as Morris. “This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you,” Page said.

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the Gateway Church violations.”

Church response: “As is clearly stated in the sermon clip you provided, these candidates were named for information only, not for endorsement. First Baptist Grapevine does not and will not endorse candidates for public office. Our primary focus is the gospel of Jesus Christ and seeking to follow His will for our lives,” Page said in an emailed statement.

Dueling Endorsements

For these nonpartisan races in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, pastors from different churches endorsed opposing candidates.

Koinonia Christian Church

Location: Arlington, Texas

Pastor: Ronnie W. Goines

Context: The first race involved candidates for the Mansfield school board. In a May 1 sermon, Goines implored his congregation to vote for Benita Reed in a local nonpartisan race on May 7. He said that Reed was the most qualified candidate in the race because she has worked in education for almost 30 years, but that scare tactics were being used against her. He then showed a mailer targeting Reed that read, “MISD put ‘woke’ politics over the safety of our children.” Then, Goines said, “All we got to do, people, is let’s go make a long line outside the polls and get this woman elected.” He later said: “Koinonia, we need, Dr. Reed needs a thousand votes. She needs a thousand votes. We got right at 10,000 members.”

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a direct campaign intervention. He says, ‘She needs a thousand votes.'”

Church and candidate response: Reached by phone, Goines directed the news organizations to the church’s spokesperson, who did not respond. Reed did not respond to emailed questions.

MoreChurch

Location: Mansfield, Texas, southwest of Dallas

Pastor: Truston Baba

Context: None of the candidates received more than 50% of the vote during the May 7 election, leading to a runoff between Reed and Craig Tipping. During a June 12 sermon, Baba encouraged his congregation to vote in the runoff election. He then praised Tipping. “And so, Craig, thank you for running. Thank you for being obedient to do what God’s called you to do. And I’m gonna support you. And I hope that people from More Church will not just complain but will actually get out and vote. You know, we go to the booth, and we go to get these little stickers. ‘I voted.’ Y’all know you get the ‘I voted’ sticker? Come on. There’s a big one. Get out. Get the sticker. Let’s vote and help make a difference locally. Come on. Give a hand for my friend Craig today.” Tipping, a physical therapist, won on June 18.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Having only one candidate appear is partisan. This pastor states at an official event that he supports the candidate. As noted earlier, that violates the prohibition. Moreover, the pastor’s comments are an endorsement of the candidate generally.”

Church and candidate response: Neither More Church nor Baba responded to requests for an interview or emailed questions. Tipping did not respond to emails requesting comment.

Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship

Location: Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Dono Pelham

Context: The second set of dueling sermons involved two candidates in a nonpartisan race for Frisco City Council. On May 2, 2021, Pelham told his congregation that his wife, Angelia Pelham, had qualified for the runoff. He encouraged them to vote in the June 5, 2021, election in which Pelham faced Jennifer White, a veterinarian who described herself as the only conservative in the race. “I’m not about to endorse, but you’ll get the message,” Pelham said.

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “He’s basically endorsing his wife, and I think it would be hard to argue anything different.”

Church and candidate response: Dono Pelham said in an emailed statement that he did not endorse his wife in the runoff. Angelia Pelham said she and her husband were “very clear and very intentional” about not violating the Johnson Amendment.

KingdomLife Church

Location: Frisco, Texas

Pastor: Brandon Burden

Context: Six days before that runoff election for the Frisco City Council, Burden supported White from the pulpit. Burden told churchgoers that God was working through the congregation to take the country, and particularly North Texas, back to its Christian roots. He framed the race between White and Pelham as one against Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney. Cheney had urged residents to put party politics aside and vote for Pelham because of her experience working for corporations such as PepsiCo Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Cinemark. “I got a candidate that God wants to win,” Burden said. “I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.” Pelham defeated White in the election.

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “It’s pretty obvious, from the context and other things that he has said, that it is clear who he is saying God wants to win.”

Church and candidate response: Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions. White said she wasn’t in attendance during the sermon. She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active. “I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won’t take a political stance,” White said. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

“Vote Her Behind Right Out of Office”: Criticizing the Incumbent, Praising the Challenger

Pulpit criticism of sitting officeholders is permitted, except during campaigns when officeholders are running as candidates. In the cases below, pastors criticized the incumbents while praising their challengers during election season.

Legacy Church

Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Pastor: Steve Smothermon

Context: During a July 10 sermon, Smothermon attacked New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, and praised Republican Mark Ronchetti for seeking to end abortion in New Mexico. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti,” Smotherman said. Later in the sermon, Smotherman said, “You better get registered to vote, and we better vote her behind right out of office.” Grisham and Ronchetti will face each other in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election.

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a campaign intervention. The pastor is endorsing Ronchetti and opposing Ronchetti’s opponent.”

Church and candidate response: Legacy Church, Smothermon and Ronchetti did not respond to requests for comment.

Friendship-West Baptist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Frederick Douglass Haynes III

Context: At the end of the church service on May 8, Haynes criticized state leaders’ response to the deadly February 2021 winter storm and praised Beto O’Rourke for donating $25,000 to the church during that time. Haynes then invited O’Rourke to speak with his congregation. “I just want to say, because I think we need to know this in a very public way, that when there was a crisis February last year and the ineptitude of our state leadership, and then you had (Ted) Cruz going to Cancun. Lord Jesus, so Cruz went to Cancun and then (Greg) Abbott’s friends got paid. And while that was going on, Beto O’Rourke was using resources from his foundation. He was on the ground, serving people, blessing people and just, just, just doing what God wants us to do.” O’Rourke, who announced in November 2021 that he would challenge Greg Abbott in the race for governor, then gave a 10-minute speech about how the faith community played a pivotal role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. O’Rourke was identified as a gubernatorial candidate in a caption on the church’s livestream. He ended his May speech by expressing hope that people of color who were targeted by the restrictive voting laws passed by Republicans last year would provide the margin of victory on Nov. 8.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “Assuming the church is responsible for the caption (that ran under O’Rourke on the church’s livestream), this is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because the church explicitly identifies Beto O’Rourke as a candidate and the pastor expresses support for him.”

Church and candidate response: Haynes did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment. Chris Evans, communication director for O’Rourke’s campaign, said in an emailed statement: “Beto has enjoyed worshiping alongside the congregation at Friendship-West Baptist Church for years and is proud to call Pastor Haynes his friend. Pastor Haynes has long led the on-the-ground work of bringing people together to deliver for his community that Greg Abbott has absolutely failed and to fight for equality, justice, and opportunity across Texas.”

“My Dear Friend”: Hosting a Candidate

Some pastors introduced candidates during their sermons and allowed them to speak, while others interviewed them during church functions. The Johnson Amendment allows candidates to visit churches and speak to parishioners before elections, but it requires that churches maintain a “nonpartisan atmosphere” and give all candidates the same opportunity to visit.

St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Richie Butler

Context: On Oct. 23, a day before early voting began, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke visited the church. Butler introduced him as “the next governor of Texas.” He told parishioners: “We want to encourage him as he continues to run the race that is before him, and he needs us to get him across the finish line.” O’Rourke urged parishioners to vote and then gave a brief speech calling for fixing the state’s electric grid and expressing alarm over the high rate of school shootings and gun violence.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This situation is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment. Beto O’Rourke is introduced as the ‘next governor of Texas,’ which highlights both that he is a candidate and one whom the church supports. And O’Rourke’s comments are a sales pitch for his candidacy. There is no indication that any opposing candidate has been given a similar opportunity and, even if he had been, the favorable introduction of O’Rourke would still be across the line.”

Church and candidate response: In a statement, Butler said: “Black churches have been important hubs for civic engagement and organization in the fight for social justice since Reconstruction. The mixing of faith-based congregations and electoral engagement is not a new concept.” O’Rourke did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

Grace Woodlands

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Steve Riggle

Context: Also on Oct. 23, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican running for reelection, visited Grace Woodlands. During the sermon, Riggle said that Texas needs leaders like Patrick who “will stand for values that are critical to the future of this nation.” Riggle praised Patrick as a “strong person” of faith whom “God has given us at the very top.” Patrick then spoke to the congregation and cast the election in stark terms. “This is not a race between Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “This is a race about darkness and light. This is a race about powers and principalities. And the devil is at full work in this country.”

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This is a clear endorsement of Patrick by the pastor of a church acting in his capacity as pastor in the course of ordinary church meetings. This violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Riggle said that his church did not endorse any candidate and said his introduction was focused on biblical values, not politics. He added that he believes the Johnson Amendment should be overturned.

“The government has no right at any time to, in any way, tell the church who it can have or who it cannot have to speak,” he said. “It can’t tell the church what it can preach on or not preach on. This is America, and we believe in a free church, not one controlled by the government.”

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment or emailed questions.

Sojourn Church

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Chris McRae

Context: During a May 1 sermon, McRae told parishioners that they were being lied to by an “invisible enemy” about issues of race, gender and abortion. He said they needed to “wake up” and confront the lies. McRae then invited Kevin Falconer, the mayor of Carrollton and a Republican candidate for Denton County Commissioner, to the pulpit to speak. “I can’t, as my friends will say, I can’t endorse him. But I do know that God loves Falcons,” McRae said. He also told his congregation he thought Steve Babick would win the upcoming nonpartisan mayoral election to fill the vacancy left by Falconer. Both Falconer and Babick won their elections.

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That is campaign intervention to me, even though the pastor states that he is asking Kevin to speak about communion. Context makes it an indirect campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Sojourn Church, McRae and Falconer did not respond to requests for comment. Babick said he was unaware of any statements McRae made about him or his candidacy. “I’m not necessarily in favor or against it,” Babick said of the Johnson Amendment.

Woodlands Church

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Kerry Shook

Context: On Jan. 16, Shook introduced Christian Collins to his congregation. Collins was campaigning for the Republican nomination for Texas’ 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of Houston and several surrounding cities. “And so, the primaries are coming up in March, and I just wanted y’all to get to know Christian, my dear friend, and his love for Jesus Christ and pray for all of those Christ followers who are doing something that I would never do,” Shook said. The sermon occurred two and a half months before the Republican primary election. Collins lost the race.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Specifically naming the primary and the candidate and saying we need Christ followers makes it campaign intervention to me.”

Church and candidate response: Woodlands Church, Kerry Shook Ministries and Kerry Shook did not respond to requests for comment. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Abundant Life Church

Location: Willis, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Dave Stovall

Context: At the end of his sermon on Dec. 5, 2021, Stovall introduced Collins as a candidate for the 8th Congressional District. He praised Collins for founding the Texas Youth Summit, a two-day conference that promotes conservative political activism among students. “Would you stand in honor of Christian Collins and the leader, servant-leader that he is and what he has done for this community?” Stovall asked. Collins had pledged to join the congressional Freedom Caucus, a voting bloc made up of some of the most conservative members of Congress, in contrast to his chief opponent, former Navy SEAL Morgan Luttrell, who won the Republican primary.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the previous passage from Woodlands Church. (The similarity of this passage and the one from Woodlands Church makes me wonder if the pastors had been given suggested scripts from the same source.)”

Church and candidate response: Abundant Life Church and Stovall did not respond to requests for comment, including the news organizations’ question about whether it had invited Luttrell or any other candidate to speak at the church. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Destiny Christian Church

Location: Rocklin, California, northwest of Sacramento

Pastor: Greg Fairrington

Context: In a conversation with California gubernatorial candidate Anthony Trimino, a Republican, during a May 15 church service, Fairrington told his congregation that the state needs a leader with a “vibrant faith in Jesus Christ.” He praised Trimino for his effort to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and prayed for the Republican candidate. “Lord God, that you would inspire voters here in the state of California to cast their vote for the sanctity of life. Lord God, that they would get behind a conservative Christian candidate,” Fairrington said. Trimino came in sixth in an open party primary election on June 7. He did not advance to the November general election.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it implicitly identifies Anthony as a candidate, specifically mentions voting and calls on the audience to get behind a conservative, pro-life Christian candidate (implicitly, such as Anthony).”

Church and Candidate Response: Destiny Christian Church, Fairrington and Trimino did not respond to requests for comment.

Carver Park Baptist Church

Location: Waco, Texas

Pastor: Gaylon P. Foreman

Context: On April 7, Foreman livestreamed a Q&A at the church with Marlon Jones, a candidate for the Waco Independent School District school board. “Again, I endorse him fully and completely, and I wish that you would prayerfully consider helping support this mighty man of God, so he can help make kingdom impact on the Waco ISD,” Foreman said. Experts said Johnson Amendment violations can occur at any church function, not just during sermons. Jones lost the May 7 election.

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This pastor doesn’t even pretend not to be endorsing the candidate, which is the honest approach. He’s clearly endorsing.”

Church and candidate response: Foreman defended his discussion with Jones. “I told him about the show and he agreed to appear. I didn’t hear from or have any other contact with any other candidates or I would have gladly allowed them to appear as well,” Foreman said. “On the show, I did acknowledge that I personally supported him and that I felt that he was the best candidate. I also asked about how our community could help him. For as long as I’ve been serving as pastor, I’ve always made it clear that I never tell others who to vote for but do encourage everyone to vote.”

Jones said in an interview with the news organizations that he thought Foreman provided information and did not violate the Johnson Amendment. “I think during the broadcast Pastor Foreman was very intentional about encouraging people to vote but not necessarily saying this is who we should vote for.” Jones, who is also a pastor, added: “Saying ‘this is something I am doing’ does not necessarily mean your congregation will do that.”

Praising Trump Before the 2020 Election

In the days leading up to the 2020 election, some pastors extolled the ways in which former President Donald Trump had delivered for Christians.

Cowboy Church of Corsicana

Location: Corsicana, Texas, southeast of Dallas

Pastor: Derek Rogers

Context: On Oct. 14, 2020, Rogers told his congregation that even though pastors aren’t supposed to talk about politics, parishioners needed to support Trump’s reelection bid. “I do not understand how anybody that calls himself a Christian could vote for the agenda and the platform of Joe Biden,” he said. “President Trump, he ain’t the greatest dude in the whole world, but he’s the closest thing that we got to what we need.”

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates by name and explicitly tells the congregation for which of them they should vote.”

Church response: Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.

Beth Sar Shalom

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Steven Ger

Context: Ger explained to congregants why they should support Trump over Biden for president two days before the election. “I like what our president has done. He made his promises. And he kept his promises.” He later called Trump the “most pro-life president ever” and said, “Vice President Biden would be the most pro-abortion president ever.”

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “The passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates, describes their positions and then says which position (and therefore candidate) should be voted for.”

Church response: Executive Pastor Don Jones initially said he was willing to be interviewed, but neither he nor Ger responded to follow-up calls and emailed questions.

Trinity Family Church

Location: Forney, Texas, east of Dallas

Pastor: Marty Reid

Context: In a sermon two days before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Reid told his congregation that even though Trump “doesn’t know much” about Christianity, “I believe God has raised up President Trump for such a time as this”.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Clearly an endorsement of Trump and campaign intervention.”

Church response: Trinity Family Church and Reid did not respond to requests for comment.

“It’s inexcusable”: Right-wingers fume at Trump for sniping at Ron DeSantis with “stupid nickname”

In his speech at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania on Saturday night, Donald Trump couldn’t help but take a shot at Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla, who will likely be his main competition should they both run for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination.

That shot by the former president, who will be holding a rally in Florida on Sunday that DeSantis was not invited to, set off a wave of anger by conservatives who aren’t interested in an internal GOP war several days before the midterms.

Promoting his strong polling numbers for the 2024 nomination, Trump told the crowd, “There it is, Trump at 71. Ron DeSanctimonious at 10 percent. Mike Pence at 7–oh, Mike Pence doing better than I thought.”

Trump’s dubbing DeSantis as “DeSanctimonious, — reminiscent of his calling Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, “Lying Ted” and labeling Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as “Little Marco” — set off a furious backlash against the former president with one prominent critic calling the slur “weak.”

As documented by the Daily Beast’s Zachary Petrizzo, the conservative response was to fire back at Trump for creating more discord.

According to Petrizzo, conservative gadfly Matt Walsh lashed out, calling it a “dumb nickname” and then added, “Trump isn’t going to be able to take this one [DeSantis] down with a dumb nickname. He better have more than that up his sleeve. Also, nice job launching your public attack against the most popular conservative governor in America three days before the midterms when we’re all supposed to be showing a united front.”

Human Event’s publisher Will Chamberlain sneered at the comment (“This is just weak”), before predicting “Calling it now, DeSantis is going to run, and he’s going to beat Trump badly.”

Normally Trump-supporting Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, sided with DeSantis, writing, “Or… Ron De…SaidNoToFauci… that’s another angle.”

According to Petrizzo, the nickname and attack on DeSantis also irritated Red State editor Jennifer Van Larr, who first wrote, “Enough, Trump. Stop. Move on,” with fellow Red State writer Scott Morefield adding, “Other than being an extremely effective governor and taking one leftist scalp after another, what has Ron DeSantis done to earn Trump’s scorn here right before an election? It’s inexcusable and just shows this has always been about him.”

You can read more here.

“Self-incriminating”: Legal experts warn Trump’s admission at rally may be “admissible evidence”

Former President Donald Trump’s comments during a weekend rally about the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago may be “admissible evidence” in court, legal experts say.

Trump lashed out at the FBI during a rally in Miami on Sunday over the “very famous raid on Mar-a-Lago,” which he described as “the document-hoax case.”

Trump claimed the court-approved search “violated my Fourth Amendment rights” and is “something that’s never been done to another president.”

“No other president’s ever done this,” he said. “Presidents leave, they take things, they take documents, they read them. Nobody else has ever gone through this.”

“This will further delay accountability by months”: Experts split as DOJ mulls Trump special counsel

Trump has repeatedly falsely claimed that past presidents have “taken” documents with them after leaving office. The National Archives and Records Administration issued a statement debunking his claim last month, explaining that the National Archives took custody of all presidential records and “securely moved those records to temporary facilities” before moving them to presidential libraries. Claims that “indicate or imply that those Presidential records were in the possession of the former Presidents or their representatives, after they left office… are false and misleading,” the statement said.

New: The National Archives and Records Administration calls Trump's claims about Obama, Clinton, Bush and Bush supposedly taking presidential documents "false and misleading." pic.twitter.com/zxuMskXDRD

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) October 11, 2022

Legal experts said that Trump’s comments may amount to an admission of illegality.

“Here’s Trump apparently admitting to illegally taking top secret documents when he left the White House,” the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said on Twitter.

Here's Trump apparently admitting to illegally taking top secret documents when he left the White House pic.twitter.com/MEdnpPT3Z5

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) November 7, 2022

Conservative attorney George Conway said the comments could be “admissible evidence,” suggesting a drinking game for every time “he says something self-incriminating” at a rally.

“Keep talking. Keep confessing,” wrote national security attorney Bradley Moss, a frequent Trump critic.

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Legal experts also called out another comment from Trump during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday.

“Every other president takes their documents. I’m the only one. I can’t have a document,” Trump complained during a rally in Latrobe before falsely suggesting that other presidents took and kept their documents in unsecure facilities.

“Did Trump just admit to taking top secret documents he was not supposed to have?” CREW said on Twitter.

Did Trump just admit to taking top secret documents he was not allowed to have? pic.twitter.com/ykKt5Nbqnc

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) November 6, 2022

Conway responded to the video of Trump’s comments by posting a photo of Miranda rights, which note that “you have the right to remain silent.”

https://t.co/Rnac6UPB9N pic.twitter.com/xhG5DWDE0s

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) November 6, 2022

Trump has claimed that former President George H.W. Bush “took millions of documents to a… bowling alley/Chinese restaurant” with “no security and a broken front door” and claimed that Bill Clinton “took millions of documents from the White House to a former car dealership in Arkansas.”

“All of these Trump claims are false,” CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale wrote last month, citing a National Archives statement confirming that the agency “securely moved these records to temporary facilities that NARA leased from the General Services Administration near the locations of the future Presidential Libraries that former Presidents built for NARA.”

“All such temporary facilities met strict archival and security standards, and have been managed and staffed exclusively by NARA employees,” the agency said.

Dale added that there is “no equivalence between Trump’s handling of presidential documents and those of his predecessors.”

“In the others’ cases, the presidential documents were in NARA’s possession and stored securely and professionally,” he wrote. “In Trump’s case, the presidential documents found in haphazard amateur storage at Mar-a-Lago were in Trump’s own possession, despite numerous attempts by both NARA and the Justice Department to get them back.”

about Trump’s legal battle

From Karl Rove to the Big Lie: GOP loves to claim victory when they feel insecure

One more day until the voting is done. Hallelujah! When the polls are so tight and the campaigning so intense you reach a point where you almost don’t care who wins anymore and just want it to be over. But of course you do care, as we all must in this age of authoritarian right-wing, lunacy.

I wrote on Friday that nobody really knows anything about this election. It could go either way. It might be a close result or one side could sweep both houses of Congress with big wins. But if you just read the headlines and listen to the pundits and strategists on TV, you’d think the evidence showed clearly that Republicans were running away with it. There’s a reason for that: Republicans plant this notion in the press and the sad-sack Democrats play into it by prematurely assembling the circular firing squad whenever a race is close.

Ignore the polls, and remember to breathe: Nothing about the midterms is carved in stone

You see headlines like “Democrats fear midterm drubbing as party leaders rush to defend blue seats,” but the fact that Donald Trump held big rallies just days before the election in Florida and Pennsylvania, where the GOP is defending numerous seats, isn’t framed the same way. There’s “CNN panelist predicts ‘bad night,’ says Democrats didn’t ‘listen’ to voters throughout the election” while the New Yorker publishes a widely-read article headlined “Why Republican Insiders Think the G.O.P. Is Poised for a Blowout.”

Maybe it’s all true. Maybe it will turn out that Democrats have blown the election (even though all the fundamentals and historical precedents suggest defeat was more or less preordained) and maybe the Republicans played a masterful hand (in winning an election everyone assumed was already in the bag). We will see. But let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. Of course they may win, but this election is close and they’re not soothsayers. It’s a deliberate strategy.

Let’s not kid ourselves about what is going on in these final days. Republicans are playing the press for chumps, as they do every single time. It’s a deliberate strategy.

The most famous purveyor of this strategy was Karl Rove, also known as “Bush’s Brain,” the strategist who eked out a history-changing victory for his guy in 2000. Rove was a big believer in the “bandwagon effect,” which assumed that a significant chunk of the voting public wlli go with those they perceive as winners. So when a race is close you put on a big show to pretend that you’re confident of winning, in the hopes of getting any last-minute wobblers or people who might not otherwise vote to get behind your team. It’s fun to win! In close races, Rove reasoned, this strategy might just make the difference. But it’s not scientific and nobody should take a GOP strategist’s word for anything in the final days of a campaign. They’re just spinning.

Rove even went so far as to send George W. Bush to California in the final days of the 2000 campaign, to convince the press that they were so confident of a blowout that they were hoping to expand the map into deep blue states. The New York Times blared, “A Confident Bush Says He Can Win California’s Vote.” As it turned out, Al Gore won the state by double digits, leading observers to wonder whether Rove should have sent Bush to Florida instead, the state he ended up “winning” by only 537 (disputed) votes. They did the same thing four years later by sending Dick Cheney to Hawaii, and the Los Angeles Times dutifully reported, “Aloha State Has Become a Surprise Campaign Battleground.” Um, no. It hadn’t. Democrats won Hawaii by nine points, as per usual.

Rove didn’t just deploy this strategy for election campaigns. As Bush’s senior adviser, he played the same game with public opinion over the war with Iraq:

In shaping their message, White House officials have drawn on the work of Duke University political scientists Peter D. Feaver and Christopher F. Gelpi, who have examined public opinion on Iraq and previous conflicts. Feaver, who served on the staff of the National Security Council in the early years of the Clinton administration, joined the Bush NSC staff about a month ago as special adviser for strategic planning and institutional reform.

Feaver and Gelpi categorized people on the basis of two questions: “Was the decision to go to war in Iraq right or wrong?” and “Can the United States ultimately win?” In their analysis, the key issue now is how people feel about the prospect of winning. They concluded that many of the questions asked in public opinion polls — such as whether going to war was worth it and whether casualties are at an unacceptable level — are far less relevant now in gauging public tolerance or patience for the road ahead than the question of whether people believe the war is winnable.

That helps explain the infamous 2003 Bush gaffe with “Mission Accomplished.” That didn’t work out in the long run because Republicans couldn’t deny reality forever as the Iraq war began to go south shortly after that. But the press was gullible enough, and the public stayed on board long enough, for the Bush team to win re-election and support the “surge” that prolonged the war. It’s simple enough: If you call yourself a winner, people will believe it (at least for a while) and will act accordingly.

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We’re in a new landscape these days with election denial prominently featured on the menu. (Karl Rove is actually getting booed as a RINO sellout at GOP rallies.) The bandwagon effect is still in play but they now have a back-up: the Big Lie. It’s not overly cynical to suspect that a whole lot of the happy talk coming from Republican strategists whispering in reporters’ ears about how great their private polling looks is just a set-up for the possibility that they won’t do as well as they would like. As we already know, their voters are fully indoctrinated to believe that Democrats can only win if they cheat, and Republicans have created a full-scale election denial operation to challenge any negative results they don’t like. In some instances, they have challenged election systems in counties Trump won by double digits! Election denial has become the party’s primary organizing principle.

All of this has been aided and betted by Republican pollsters flooding the zone this cycle and right-leaning aggregators like Real Clear Politics which have helped to set sky-high Republican expectations. As the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein quipped on Twitter:

RCP is simply a component of the R messaging machine, no more no less https://t.co/4aGcoCak4K

— Ronald Brownstein (@RonBrownstein) November 6, 2022

None of this is accident or coincidence. The strategy is clear: In a close race, pretend you’re winning in hopes of enticing voters to jump on board. If that doesn’t work, claim the election was stolen and deny the legitimacy of your opponent’s victory. This is just what they do. Why the press allows itself to be manipulated this way, year after year, is another question. Media folks can’t possibly fail to understand what’s going on, after all this time. On some level, they fall for it because they like it.

on Republican electoral strategy

These 3 governor’s races could determine whether the Midwest reaches its climate goals

Some Midwest states want to decarbonize by 2050. This year’s midterm elections could throw a wrench into these goals.

Next week, voters in Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin will go to the polls and cast their vote for governor. All three states have incumbent Democratic governors who have enacted clean energy plans for the state within the last three years. They are all facing Republican challengers who have ties to the fossil fuel industry or who have campaigned on extending the life of polluting infrastructure.

Experts say that if Republicans win these races, they have the potential to slow down progress toward decarbonization or even dismantle the states’ climate plans altogether.

Wisconsin, a noted swing state in presidential elections, has plans for all electricity consumed in the state to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2050 in accordance with an executive order Democratic Governor Tony Evers signed in 2019. The state’s gubernatorial race has been extremely tight between incumbent Evers and Republican challenger Tim Michels, CEO of one of the largest infrastructure and construction contracting companies in the nation.

Michels, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment, has strong ties to the oil and gas industry. His company has worked on the Line 5 pipeline, Dakota Access pipeline, and the Keystone XL pipeline, and while Michels claims he will divest from the company if elected, that process is a difficult task.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who signed an executive order in 2020 to make the state’s entire economy carbon-neutral by 2050, is being challenged by Trump-endorsed Republican candidate Tudor Dixon, who has professional experience in the media and steel industries. Energy has been a central topic in the race. Whitmer’s order to shut down the Line 5 pipeline — a petroleum pipeline that stretches across Upper Michigan and Wisconsin, including Great Lakes waters — has been a frequent talking point for Dixon, whose campaign did not respond to written questions.

The challenger has campaigned on keeping Line 5 open and enacting safeguards preventing future interference with its operations. Earlier this year, Dixon told a local publication that the Line 5 pipeline is “too important to our economy for liberal radicals like Gretchen Whitmer to sabotage it. When I defeat her, Line 5 will be safe from her attacks.”

Minnesota already had a climate plan before Democratic incumbent Governor Tim Walz took office, thanks to a 2007 law that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the state 30 percent by 2025 and 80 percent by 2050. But since the state was not on track to achieve those goals, Walz issued an executive order in 2019 to create a new climate change subcabinet to establish new strategies to slash emissions. Walz’s administration also adopted regulations to encourage more electric vehicle sales in the state starting in 2024, modeled after California’s “clean cars” rule.

That rule has been met with strong opposition from both the Minnesota Auto Dealers Association and Walz’s midterm opponent, Scott Jensen. The Republican candidate vehemently opposes Minnesota’s clean car rules and has said he will repeal the regulation if elected. Jensen, whose campaign declined to make the candidate available for an interview, has also advocated for coal-fired power plants that are scheduled to close to remain open, including a facility that’s already being converted into a solar project.

Minnesota’s Walz has enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls, but Michigan’s race has tightened recently, while Evers and Michels have been neck and neck in Wisconsin for weeks. Meanwhile, climate policy experts say that the outcome of this year’s governor’s races will chart the course for these states for years to come.

“These Midwest governors, and the legislatures that are up for reelection in November, are presiding over one of the most pivotal periods of opportunity for action on climate,” Samantha Williams, a senior policy advisor to the NRDC Action Fund and an expert in Midwest climate policy, told Grist.

Williams said that states have an incredible opportunity to clean up their energy mix and create a greener economy, but the clock is ticking. Governors elected this year will be sworn into office in 2023 and hold a four-year term till 2027. That leaves a little over two decades until the 2050 deadline that Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin have set for fully achieving their clean energy plans.

Williams said that governors can exert influence over a state climate action via planning, executive action, and departmental appointments. For instance, governors appoint officials to public service commissions, influential state agencies that regulate energy generation and consumption. Jensen, the challenger in Minnesota’s governor’s race, has said he plans to appoint experts in “base load power” — an industry-friendly euphemism for coal power — to the state Public Utilities Commission and the Minnesota Department of Commerce.

Public service commissions “have a pretty significant amount of control over whether the state will move to clean power fast enough and what that future power generation is going to look like,” Williams said.

The Midwest has already seen a regional shift towards clean energy. Clean energy companies employed more than 714,000 residents of the 12 Midwestern states at the end of last year, according to a report by Clean Jobs Midwest.

“There are some states that are going faster than others, and you see that in the Midwest as a microcosm,” Williams said.

This slow growth is often exacerbated by a political disconnect between the governor’s office and the state legislature. The legislatures in Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin are currently either controlled by Republicans or split between Democratic and Republican control. Divided legislatures can make it difficult to pass climate laws, forcing climate-focused governors to resort to executive orders.

In Wisconsin and Michigan, all of the states’ clean energy goals have been established by executive order. But executive orders are easier for successive administrations to reverse than legislation like Minnesota’s 2007 climate law, or the ambitious climate law that Illinois’ governor signed last year.

Whether Republican governors roll back climate-related executive orders or just undermine them with hostile appointments, the upshot is the same, according to Kerry Schumann, executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of the League of Conservation Voters: “We don’t make the investments we need to make” in clean energy.

Schumann said that another reason this year’s Midwestern governor’s races are so crucial is that governors will have a say in how funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal climate law passed in August, gets distributed. The law allocates money for states to slash pollution, cut greenhouse gas emissions, train clean energy workers, and more.

“If the state of Wisconsin and other local governments aren’t very conscientious and deliberate about taking advantage of that money, we just completely missed this opportunity to invest in clean energy and to reduce pollution,” Schumann said.

Governors also have the power to work to promote clean energy on a regional level, Schumann pointed out. Recently, a coalition of Midwest governors announced plans to establish clean hydrogen infrastructure in the region and create a network of electric vehicle charging stations across five states. Schumann said she’s concerned that Wisconsin and other Midwest states would not continue to work together on these plans if Republicans take office next year.

David Pelikan, a policy associate for nonpartisan political organization Climate Vote Minnesota, agreed that the consequences of electing a Republican governor could reverberate throughout the region. “We see Minnesota as a regional leader on clean energy issues, and I think losing that leadership role is pretty devastating for climate progress across the upper Midwest,” Pelikan said.

This story has been updated to clarify Samantha Williams’ job title.

Archaeologists find a trove of ancient human sacrifices fed psychedelic plants before death

An analysis of mummified heads and cadavers discovered on the Southern coast of Peru has pushed back the earliest known date of psychedelic cactus use and other psychoactive plants. Toxicology reports on five individuals who were ritually executed between 500 to 2100 years ago revealed the use of coca leaves (which contain cocaine), hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and Banisteriopsis caapi, a plant often used in the psychedelic brew ayahuasca.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, sheds new light on religious practices, ancient trade routes and plant-based medicine in the pre-Columbian Andes. The research was led by Dagmara Socha from the Centre for Andean Studies at University of Warsaw, who has previously studied the remains of human sacrifices at volcanoes during the Incan Empire, among other ancient murder mysteries.

“The level of the mescaline in the child’s hair suggested a high consumption of the San Pedro cactus.”

The latest research focused on essentially drug testing the hair of 22 buried cadavers, including four mummified “trophy heads,” individuals that were decapitated and turned into ritualistic objects. Using World Anti-Doping Agency guidelines, the researchers ran these hairs through a mass spectrometer, a machine that can identify the chemical signatures in samples, and found traces of numerous intoxicating plants.

Two hair samples, including one from a child, contained traces of mescaline, a strong psychedelic with hallucinogenic properties similar to psilocybin “magic” mushrooms and MDMA. Mescaline naturally appears in many different cacti, but is especially associated with peyote, a small cactus that has been used for religious purposes for thousands of years before Jesus was born.

Aaron Rodgers fumbles the science on psychedelics. Drugs like ayahuasca can alter the brain—but how?

“The level of the mescaline in the child’s hair suggested a high consumption of the San Pedro cactus,” the researchers reported. They hypothesize that before being sacrificed, the child was fed San Pedro (Echinopsis pachanoi), a tall, column-shaped succulent with the most mescaline content of any cactus. Mescaline was one of the earliest psychedelics identified by Western scientists, first isolated by German chemist Arthur Heffter in 1896 and later popularized by authors like Aldous Huxley.

But archaeological evidence suggests some indigenous peoples were familiar with this drug for around 5,000 years prior, at least through peyote. This analysis is the oldest evidence specifically of San Pedro use, but potentially other psychoactive substances as well.

Two other samples contained traces of harmine and harmaline, drugs that are found in Banisteriopsis caapi, a woody Amazonian vine. It is commonly mixed into ayahuasca, a name which means “vine of the dead,” describing a brew used in many different Central and South American cultures for spiritual practice. Ayahuasca has become popular among Western people, including celebrities like Will Smith and Aaron Rodgers, because it contains a drug called DMT that can have rapid antidepressant effects.

DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is one of the most powerful naturally-occurring psychedelics on the planet. When smoked, it only lasts about 20 minutes, but the experience can be intense and life-changing. Some users report vivid hallucinations like fractal-filled chambers or encounters with “beings” that can feel like a near-death experience. This is why the drug is sometimes called the “spirit molecule.”

But DMT isn’t very active when swallowed because the body metabolizes it too quickly. This can be remedied by taking DMT with another drug, called a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), which prevents the quick metabolism of DMT, allowing for its trippy effects to take hold. Some MAOIs are commonly prescribed as antidepressants, while some occur naturally in plants.

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B. caapi contains many drugs, including harmine, tetrahydroharmine and harmaline, which can act as MAOIs. When B. caapi is combined with another DMT-containing plant like Psychotria viridis, the two work together to create a fierce, other-worldly experience. When combined in this form, an ayahuasca experience can last between three and seven hours.

The analysis of human sacrifices only found traces of B. caapi and no DMT, however, so these two individuals may not have been taking ayahuasca, but harmine, for example can be psychoactive alone. Ayahuasca preparations can also vary from culture to culture, some containing less DMT than others.

Five samples were also positive for cocaine or one of its metabolites, benzoylecgonine, suggesting some victims chewed coca leaves during their lifetime. This is the oldest existing evidence for such a practice on the southern Peruvian coast, but chewing the leaves is a much different effect than snorting raw cocaine powder. The buzz is far more mild, closer to a cup of coffee, while even providing some health benefits, as the leaves are chock full of vitamins and minerals.

However, B. caapi and coca both grow in the jungle, a considerable distance from the arid region where the bodies were found. This indicates that these plants were traded for long distances, signifying their importance in ancient cultures. “The presence of benzoylecgonine and mescaline in the hair of trophy heads belonging to a female and a child suggest that at least some of the victims went through special preparations before being sacrificed,” the authors conclude.

Humans have been using psychoactive plants and fungi since before recorded history, with our penchant for intoxicants likely driving our evolution as primates. As psychedelics re-enter the mainstream, for better or worse, it’s worth examining the roots of these enlightening substances and how they’ve shaped human history.

about psychedelics

The plastics industry says its bags are recyclable. California’s attorney general wants proof.

In California, prosecutors are launching a new front in the fight against deceptive recycling claims.

The Golden State’s Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it had sent letters to seven top plastic bag manufacturers asking them to substantiate claims that their bags are recyclable. They have two weeks to respond or could face a legal injunction and fines.

“Let’s see the evidence,” Attorney General Rob Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco. The probe builds on an ongoing investigation into the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry, which his office says has orchestrated a decades-long “deception campaign” to convince the public that plastics are recyclable.

Single-use, non-recyclable plastic bags have been banned in California since 2016, when Senate Bill 270 went into effect statewide as part of an effort to curb growing plastic pollution. The law allows paper or reusable plastic bags, with the stipulation that reusable plastic bags be able to withstand at least 125 uses and be recyclable in the state. The attorney general’s office is now concerned that plastic bag manufacturers are flouting this law by continuing to produce and sell “reusable” plastic bags that are falsely marketed as recyclable.

“Most Californians are under the impression that plastic bags are recyclable,” Bonta said in a statement, attributing this perception to the “chasing arrows” recycling symbol that’s featured on “most every bag we get from the store.” (A separate California law will ban these symbols on non-recyclable materials starting in 2024.) However, Bonta added, “there’s a good chance that most, if not all, these bags are not actually recyclable in California.”

This is because California has some of the country’s most rigorous regulations around the chasing arrows and the term “recyclable.” Under state law, companies can only claim their products are recyclable if they’re collected by recycling programs that serve at least 60 percent of the state’s population, then sorted and ultimately turned into new products. Environmental advocates say plastic bags fail on all three fronts.

“Bags aren’t being recycled anywhere,” said Jan Dell, an independent chemical engineer and founder of the advocacy group The Last Beach Cleanup. According to an analysis she conducted in 2020, California only has the capacity to sort and recycle 1 percent of its waste from plastic films and bags.

California residents can’t recycle plastic bags through their curbside recycling programs, as virtually none of the state’s material recovery facilities will accept them. Companies have argued around this by adding “store drop-off” to their recycling labels, with the idea that consumers could gather their plastic bags and drop them off at a Wal-Mart or some other participating retailer. In theory, the bags would then be picked up and reprocessed at a more specialized facility.

The reality, Dell said, is that “very, very, very few bags are collected in the very, very, very few bins” that have been set up statewide. She’s contested an industry group’s claim that there are more than 18,000 retail locations offering them; while an online directory lists 52 drop-off bins in Orange County, Dell could only find 18 when she tried to visit them. “There is no store drop-off system,” she told Treehugger last year.

What little plastic may be collected through these programs is unlikely to be turned into new plastic products. Recycled plastics tend not to be price-competitive with virgin plastics, and plastic bags in particular must usually be “downcycled” into lower quality material like drainage pipes.

Meanwhile, more than half of Californians erroneously believe that plastic bags are OK to put in their curbside bins, in part because they feature the misleading chasing arrows symbol. These misplaced bags are known as a recycling “tangler” — they clog machinery in recycling facilities, making it harder to process legitimately recyclable materials and even posing safety hazards to workers.

On Wednesday, Bonta said he would remain open to evidence that plastic bags are recyclable. But if Novolex, Revolution, Inteplast, and the four other manufacturers can’t provide substantiation, his office could file an injunction “preventing the illegal production of plastic bags to be used in California.” It could also charge the companies “multi-millions of dollars” in civil penalties for having broken state law.

Novolex said in a statement to Plastics News that it’s reviewing the AG’s letter. The six other companies and two industry trade groups, the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance and the Plastics Industry Association, did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.

Down-ballot losses could be coming for Democrats — but there’s room for hope

Regardless of the outcomes, this midterm election will be historic. Midterm turnout records are likely to be shattered. Enthusiasm, fueled by abortion restrictions and the Jan. 6 hearings, is high. Several high-profile contests for U.S. Senate and Governor are polling within the margin of error. These factors should give hope to the Democrats, even though the president’s party historically loses ground in midterms.

But it’s critical to remember that other, equally important races are also taking place this year. The future of our democracy is on the line — and it runs through our state legislatures. We know that Republicans plan to use their unearned state legislative majorities to compromise election outcomes. And the Supreme Court is poised to further expand state legislative power through the “independent state legislature” theory with the upcoming case Moore v. Harper. State legislatures are growing in power. It is existentially important for Democrats to build power at this level of government, which the party has overlooked for generations.

Progressives: Take the fight to the states, right now. It’s the only way to win

While the outcomes are not yet set, it is instructive to recall some broader electoral trends that may affect the election landscape and contextualize the results.

Midterm down-ballot “declines” for the president’s party are larger than presidential-year “surges”

The first thing Democrats will need to contend with is the fact that the president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections. While this “surge and decline” pattern is typically observed at the congressional level, our research identifies this same pattern at the state legislative level too. Support surges for the elected president’s party in presidential years and sweeps in co-partisans lower on the ballot, but that support tends to declines in midterm election years, leading to the loss of seats.

Interestingly, it appears that midterm state legislative seat declines are larger in magnitude than the seat gains that happen during presidential surge years. Data from the whole country over the past decade, and from seven battleground states going back to 2002, indicates that this pattern of larger declines than surges is fairly reliable. In fact, the largest presidential surge in this period (Obama in 2012 at 6.32%) was smaller than the smallest decline in this period (Obama in 2014 at 8.16%). The only exception to this steady pattern was the 2002 election, when Republicans won seats in a traditional decline year (almost certainly a reflection of the aftermath of 9/11).

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Since 2004, the presidential party’s midterm declines in battleground state legislatures have ranged from 8.16% to 26.51% in aggregate. Even though we cannot predict how many seats Democrats might lose this year with any real accuracy, these trends indicate that Democrats could lose a significant number of seats in state legislatures.

Democrats struggle with ballot “roll-off” much more than Republicans do

Democrats also have to contend with ballot “roll-off,” the term that describes voting for candidates higher on the ballot, such as those running for president, governor and Senate, but then ignoring candidates lower on the ballot, such as state legislators or local officials. Democratic voters roll off the ballot more than do Republican voters.

In fact, the findings of our recent study exploring down-ballot roll-off at the state legislative level suggest a startling differential: From 2012 to 2020, across 10 battleground states, Democrats in contested state legislative races experienced ballot roll-off almost 80% of the time, whereas Republicans in contested state legislative Republicans only experienced roll-off 37.25% of the time.

This indicates that ballot roll-off has a serious partisan skew. In the short term, voting the whole ballot needs to be a central part of Democrats’ closing argument this year. In the longer term, Democrats need to address this through sustained civic engagement and narrative-building efforts about the power and promise of state and local levels of government.

Down-ballot races, and control of statehouse chambers, will be decided by tiny margins

While this is sobering, there is good news: State seats and chambers are often decided by a comparatively tiny number of votes. It’s truly shocking how close Democrats were to winning majorities in several key chambers in 2020. If Democratic candidates had gotten just 4,451 more votes in the two closest races in the Arizona state House (0.09% of the total 5,028,382 votes cast), they would have flipped the chamber. Just 1,813 votes in the two closest districts would have flipped the Minnesota Senate. A similar story played out in Virginia in 2021, when Democrats lost the majority in the House of Delegates by just 733 votes across the three closest seats. Democrats are often closer to winning power in state chambers than aggregate vote totals suggest, which is a call to arms to keep fighting for every vote.

Just 4,451 more votes in the two closest races in the Arizona state House would have flipped the chamber. Just 1,813 votes would have flipped the Minnesota state Senate.

Clearly, Democrats face challenges to build and maintain state legislative power this year. But there is reason for hope. This is not a traditional midterm year, so the typical presidential-party declines we tend to see in state legislative seats may not bear out, or at least not to the degree often observed in the past. Democrats struggle mightily with roll-off, and must work to combat this through public education and urgent communication about the need to vote the whole ballot. Recent messages from progressive allies such as Robert Reich, Anat Shenker-Osario and Pod Save America have begun to make this pressing case. Finally, state legislative races and control of entire chambers will likely come down to just a handful of votes in key districts. Current polls show Democrats within the margin of error in critical races and states. That means whichever party can engage the most voters in the final days will determine the outcome. Democrats need to act now — as the same time as they build toward a better future.

about the impending midterms

Oath Keepers’ Jan. 6 trial: Why Stewart Rhodes is pushing an “I’m not racist!” defense

In the wake of the break-in and attempted murder at the home of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the threat of right wing political violence is at the top of people’s minds again going into the midterm elections. In his speech last week on the topic, President Joe Biden warned about “the dangerous rise in political violence and voter intimidation,” which really kicked into high gear after Donald Trump incited the riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. New polling by ABC News and the Washington Post shows 88% of Americans worry about political violence. Unfortunately, polling also shows large numbers of Americans don’t understand that the “antifa” violence of Fox News fantasies is largely imaginary, while right wing violence is very real. Still, it’s against this backdrop of concern that Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and four of his militia members are facing trial for seditious conspiracy for their part in the January 6 insurrection.

It might seem a little odd at first that, as the first day of the defense case played out Friday, their argument seems to be that Oath Keepers can’t be guilty because they’re just a bunch of harmless kooks. Also they claim they can’t be racists who rioted to install a fascist leader in the White House because — yep, they went there — they have Black friends.

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On Thursday, in a trial that’s likely to last over a month, the prosecutors for the Justice Department rested their case that the five defendants had conspired to overthrow the government. The case relied heavily on text messages showing the group members and leadership talking, often with far less subtlety than they thought, about their plans to use violence to prevent the peaceful transition of presidential power from Trump to Biden. Throughout this first part of the trial, the defense made it clear that their main goal is to dissuade the jury from convicting on seditious conspiracy, by portraying the Oath Keepers as little more than a bunch of cosplayers who like to imagine they’re providing “security,” and not as people who went to D.C. with a preplanned intent to stop the election certification by force. By spinning insurrectionist activities of the day as a spontaneous reaction, they hope to avoid the most serious conspiracy charges.

“I won’t ask you to agree with Mr. Meggs’ political beliefs,” the defense lawyer for Kelly Meggs of the Florida Oath Keepers said on Friday, but painted the texts about overthrowing the government as mere “hyperbole, political rhetoric,” and not “a plan, a scheme, something nefarious.”

To get there, the defense is taking the big risk of putting Rhodes on the stand. Risky, because Rhodes is every inch the stereotype of an eyepatch-wearing right wing demagogue. But it’s also understandable, because the very weirdness of Rhodes can help underscore the defense’s implicit argument, which is, “Don’t take these guys too seriously.”

The Oath Keepers are using the “we were just kidding” white privilege defense

Throughout much of the morning, the defense line of questioning around Rhodes attempted to paint him as a political iconoclast, which is to say, more of a soapbox ranter than someone capable of substantive plotting against the U.S. government. Much was made of Rhodes’ claims to be opposed to George W. Bush and his supposed opposition to the “prison-industrial complex.” Rhodes testified about his work for former Republican Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, claiming it was due to the politician’s supposed “anti-war” stance. He and his attorney took no pains to hide that Rhodes is an enthusiast of conspiracy theories, highlighting Rhodes’s ridiculous beliefs that the 2020 election was “unconstitutional” and his implausible claim the Oath Keepers needed to be in D.C. on January 6 “to protect the White House” from the supposed anti-fascists that haunt right wing imaginations.

While wearing his absurdity on his sleeve during testimony, Rhodes also went to great lengths to deny that he’s violent or a racist, claiming, “If we found someone that was a racist, we’d kick ’em right out” of the Oath Keepers. Instead, he harped on being “a quarter” Mexican. He insisted he sent the Oath Keepers to Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 not to fight Black Lives Matter protesters but to “protect” Black-owned businesses from rioters. He claimed the Oath Keepers opposed the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters, though there is no evidence they did anything to protect the actual protesters from police violence.

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There is good reason to be skeptical of his claims. Rhodes may say he started Oath Keepers in response to the Bush administration, but in reality, he began the group in March 2009, as part of a larger nationwide tantrum of white conservatives to the election of Barack Obama as president. Claims that his group goes to Black Lives Matter protests to “protect” people are undercut by video footage showing protesters don’t like them, in part because Oath Keepers make snooty, racist comments like “all lives matter” to them. During his live testimony to the January 6 committee over the summer, former Oath Keeper Jason Van Tatenhove spoke of how the group is full of “straight-up racists” who are so violent only luck kept the Capitol riot from being less deadly.

In the even bigger picture, it may seem odd that the defense wants to talk about race and racism at all, when it could be argued that it’s irrelevant to the question of whether the Oath Keepers did plot to overthrow an election on January 6. But the strategy does make a certain amount of sense. The idea is to convince the jury that the group was not a fascist organization meticulously outlining a seditious plot, but rather a rag-tag group of people playing dress-up who just got a little too enthusiastic about Trump that one time and fought some cops over it. It may seem like a ludicrous argument, but as I’ve written before, it’s surprising how much white conservatives can get away with by arguing their violent speech is mere fantasy role-playing. Considering there’s at least a conservative or two on the jury, including the girlfriend of an employee at the white nationalism-friendly Daily Caller, the whole “we’re not violent racists, just middle-aged LARPers who happen to have real guns” argument may very well win the day.

Trump’s legal troubles mount as Oath Keepers plan to throw him under the bus at sedition trial

Still, it all remains to be seen. There is no doubt that Rhodes is an unsavory character, and despite all their constant reminders to speak to each other in code, seditious intentions were easily gleaned from the text messages the prosecution shared with the jury. Rhodes is expected to undergo cross-examination, where it’s likely prosecution will produce evidence poking holes in his image of the Oath Keepers, replacing it with a more accurate picture of a right wing militia that puts its very white membership on the wrong side of struggles over racial equality in America. If Americans are really as opposed to political violence as the polls say they are, the Oath Keepers still face an uphill battle if they want to skate away from justice.

Republicans pointed a weapon at the heart of our democracy — in 1964. We’re feeling it now

Will we be governed by representatives we elect, or people put in office by angry mobs storming capitols?

Nations have to figure out how they are to be governed. Most of recorded history tells the story of kings, popes, priests, lords and barons who ruled through violence and imposed themselves on their people rather than the people selecting them.

That was the great American experiment. Replacing a violent hereditary warlord king with a president and congress elected by the people. Democracy.

But democracy only functions properly when the people trust that its essential mechanism — voting — is honest and true.

And that dependence on trust in elections — that vulnerability of all democracies — is exactly where Donald Trump and his fascist followers are aiming their weapons of mass deception.

But Trump isn’t doing it alone: He’s following a script that has played out in multiple countries over many tragic years and wars, and is now possible in America (and is spreading around the world) because of a decision a Republican campaign made in 1964.

New Republican effort to feed “distrust of elections”: They want to hand-count all ballots

Our country is also experiencing this deep crisis of democracy because, in large part, the media hasn’t been doing their job about this issue of faith in the security of our vote. There’s a hell of a history here.

Republicans have been attacking the heart of our democracy right out in the open since 1964 and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”

It’s a phrase they essentially invented, although it was occasionally used by the Confederacy during its later years when they tried to suppress poor white voters who opposed the oligarchy.

Republicans have been attacking the heart of our democracy right out in the open since 1964 — and covering it up by yelling about “voter fraud.”

No other developed country in the world worries about “voter fraud” because it’s been nonexistent in most modern democracies. It’s not a thing anywhere except in the United States, and now Brazil. And it’s only a thing here because of this strategy that was developed in 1964.

Most countries don’t even have what we call voter registration, because they don’t want a system to try to cut back on the number of people who can vote.

If you’re a citizen, you vote. You show up with your ID and vote at any polling location you choose; in many countries because you’re a citizen they simply mail you the ballot and you vote by mail. Everybody gets one.

After all, what kind of idiot is stupid enough to risk going to prison to cast one vote out of millions? What possible payoff is there to that? And the one time somebody tries to do it at scale — like the Republican scheme a few years ago in North Carolina to buy a few dozen mail-in ballots from low-income people in a trailer park — it gets exposed because it’s almost impossible to cover things like that up for any period of time. After all, it would take thousands of votes in most places, sometimes tens of thousands, to alter election outcomes.

In all the intervening years since Republicans began this continuous and relentless attack claiming that this “voter fraud” was happening in Black and Hispanic communities across America, our media has been totally asleep at the switch.

Remember the hours-long lines to vote we’ve seen on TV ever since the ’60s in minority neighborhoods? Those are no accident: they’re part of a larger program the GOP has used to suppress the vote — to suppress democracy — for 60 years now.

Probably to keep from offending their white audience, and also to prevent Republicans squeals of “liberal media bias,” America’s news media has historically treated those long lines and other barriers to voting that conservatives have thrown up as if they were simply a bizarre force of nature.

“Who could imagine why this is?” they seem to say, sometimes noting that the poll workers in Black districts are also themselves usually Black — even though they have no say over how many voting machines or polling places their precincts get from the white-controlled state.

The media’s message over the past 60 years has been clear: “Black people, apparently, can’t even figure out how to vote right.”

This assault on the democratic system at the heart of our republic has a long history, stretching back to the era when the Republican Party first began trying to cater to the white racist vote.

The GOP made this transition after Lyndon B. Johnson and his Democrats passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act just five months before that year’s November election.

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In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater — who was running for president on the Republican ticket — openly opposed the Civil Rights Act that Johnson had just pushed through Congress. He was doubly opposed to the Voting Rights Act that Johnson had teed up for 1965 if he was re-elected.

At the time:

35.5 percent of the citizens of Mississippi were Black but only 4.3 percent were able to register to vote.
Alabama was 26% Black: 7% could vote.
South Carolina was nearly one-third Black (29.2%) but only 9% of that state’s African Americans could successfully register to vote.
Alabama was 26% Black but the white power structure made sure only 7% could vote.

These were not accidents: From poll taxes to jellybean counting to Constitution-interpreting requirements, most Southern states had erected massive barriers to Black people voting.

These elections where only white people were allowed to vote in large numbers were — by definition — naked attacks on democracy.

After all, it’s not really democracy when a “free and fair” election was held but, in fact, large numbers of people who legally qualified and wanted to vote weren’t allowed their voice.

How can that not be a crisis for a nation that calls itself a democratic republic?

By 1964 people across the country were starting to agree with that assessment, which is why the Civil Rights Act was passed, producing a lot of angry and disaffected Dixiecrats.

Republicans decided it was a great time to pry the Southern racist vote away from the Democrats. Their rallying cry would be that Black people were engaging in “voter fraud.”

But don’t bother looking through newspaper archives to see if the American media exposed this new GOP invention as a fraud itself: They rarely raised the question until the past year or two.

I worked in radio news back in the later 1960s and 1970s and don’t recall a single major-story mention of Goldwater’s racist vote-suppressing positions and the GOP’s sudden use of the phrase “voter fraud” during that era. (And I was paying attention: My dad was an enthusiastic Republican who’d corralled me into going door-to-door with him for Goldwater when I was 13.)

Reported on or not, back in 1964 Goldwater and his Republicans wanted to keep Black people from voting. And the media was fine going along with them: After all, this was a time when the only Black faces on TV were portrayed as criminals, minstrels or buffoons. The advertising money that paid the salaries of television executives was only interested in a white audience.

In 1964 Barry Goldwater and his Republicans wanted to keep Black people from voting. And the media just went along with them: The only Black faces on TV were criminals, minstrels or buffoons.

But Republican efforts in 1964 were complicated by the civil rights movement and its leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. African Americans and their allies were marching across the country for their right to vote, and had acquired a strong affinity for and loyalty to the Democratic Party that had just put civil rights into law.

Panicked, consultants on Goldwater’s team realized they needed a justification for an ongoing and even amped-up campaign to block the Black and Hispanic vote.

So they came up with a story that they started selling during the 1964 election through op-eds and letters to the editor, in political speeches, and on right-wing radio and TV programs like Joe Pyne’s (Buckley would pick it up on his PBS “Firing Line” show three years later and promote it till the day he died).

This 1964 story was simple: There was massive “voter fraud” going on, exclusively in America’s cities, where mostly Black people were voting more than once in different polling places and doing so under different names, often, as Donald Trump said in 2019, “by the busload” after Sunday church services.

In addition, the Republican story went, “illegal aliens” living in the United States were using stolen Social Security numbers to vote by the millions.

None of it was true, but it became the foundation of a nationwide voter suppression campaign that the GOP continues to use to this day: a campaign based on a lie of “voter fraud” that the media was more than happy to amplify. This lie to disenfranchise Black and brown people was the original sin that has brought us to today’s crisis.

After all, “if it bleeds it leads” and this GOP assertion that Black and Hispanic people were voting illegally was a juicy scandal that the white electorate ate up.

For six decades, partisan Republican pundits have shown up on TV news programs at election time to opine about America’s “crisis” of voter fraud.

For six decades, Republican-controlled states have worked to make it more difficult to vote and easier to throw people off the voting rolls in Democratic parts of the state.

William Rehnquist, for example, was a 40-year-old Arizona lawyer and Republican activist in 1964, when his idol, Barry Goldwater, ran against Lyndon Johnson for president.

Rehnquist helped organize a program called Operation Eagle Eye in his state to challenge the vote of Hispanic and Black voters and to dramatically slow down the voting lines in communities of color to discourage people who had to get back to work from waiting what would become hours in line to vote.

Arizona’s attack on voting rights: It’s part of a long and ugly tradition

As Democratic poll watcher Lito Pena observed at the time, Rehnquist showed up at a southern Phoenix polling place to do his part in Operation Eagle Eye:

“He knew the law and applied it with the precision of a swordsman,” Pena told a reporter. “He sat at the table at the Bethune School, a polling place brimming with black citizens, and quizzed voters ad nauseam about where they were from, how long they’d lived there — every question in the book. A passage of the Constitution was read and people … were ordered to interpret it to prove they had the language skills to vote.”

Rehnquist was richly rewarded for his activism; he quickly rose through the GOP ranks to being appointed by President Nixon in 1972 to the U.S. Supreme Court, and was elevated in 1986 by President Reagan to chief justice, a position he used to stop the Florida Supreme Court’s mandated vote recount in 2000, handing the White House to George W. Bush.

(Interestingly, two then little-known lawyers who worked with the Bush legal team to argue before Rehnquist that the Florida recount should be stopped were John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh. Bush rewarded Roberts by putting him on the court as chief justice when Rehnquist died, and gave “Beerbong Brett” a lifetime position as a federal judge in 2006.)

Rehnquist’s Arizona arm of Operation Eagle Eye was one of hundreds of such formal and informal Republican voter suppression operations that exploded across the United States in 1964. As the New York Times noted on Oct. 30, 1964:

Republican officials have begun a massive campaign to prevent vote fraud in the election next Tuesday, a move that has caused Democrats to cry “fraud.”

The Republican plan, Operation Eagle Eye, is designed, according to party officials, to prevent Democrats from “stealing” the 1964 election. Republicans charge that the election was stolen in 1960.

Keep in mind, this was novel back then. Nobody had been talking about “voter fraud” outside of a few Southern states for about a century. Certainly not in national news. The Times article continued:

The Democratic National Chairman, John M. Bailey, has criticized the Republican plan as “a program of voter intimidation.” He has sent a protest to all 50 state Governors and has alerted Democratic party officials throughout the country to be on their guard.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” Mr. Bailey wrote the state chairmen yesterday, “that this program is a serious threat to democracy as well as to a Democratic victory on Nov. 3rd.”

But that was about it for the media taking on this particular Republican lie. In the 58 years since then, with the exception of the past year or two, no major American news media has seriously challenged the Republican excuses for blocking Black voters or purging voting rolls the way, for example, Brian Kemp has just done in Georgia this election and last.

Millions of votes are expected to be challenged this year by the tens of thousands of Republican election volunteers, and in most states those ballots will never be counted.

And now the GOP has extended its campaign against Democrats voting by making it harder for students to vote (allowing, for example, gun licenses as voter IDs but not state college ID cards) and culling huge numbers of mail-in votes through “exact signature match challenges.”

Millions of votes are expected to be challenged this year by the tens of thousands of Republican election volunteers, and in most states those ballots will never be counted unless the voters show up at the secretary of state’s office to prove that their signature is still theirs.

With the blessing of five Republicans on the Supreme Court in 2017, they’ve also doubled down on caging and voter roll purges, stripping the right to vote from millions just this year alone.

And, as I noted in “The Hidden History of the War on Voting,” the GOP has expanded its suppression efforts to women:

Those [Republican controlled] states, specifically, are the places where “exact match” and similar ALEC-type laws have been passed forbidding people to vote if their voter registration, ID, or birth certificate is off by even a comma, period, or single letter. The impact, particularly on married women, has been clear and measurable. As the National Organization for Women (NOW) details in a report on how Republican voter suppression efforts harm women:

“Voter ID laws have a disproportionately negative effect on women. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, one third of all women have citizenship documents that do not identically match their current names primarily because of name changes at marriage. Roughly 90 percent of women who marry adopt their husband’s last name. That means that roughly 90 percent of married female voters have a different name on their ID than the one on their birth certificate. An estimated 34 percent of women could be turned away from the polls unless they have precisely the right documents.”

MSNBC reported in an article titled “The War on Voting Is a War on Women” that “women are among those most affected by voter ID laws. In one survey, [only] 66 percent of women voters had an ID that reflected their current name, according to the Brennan Center. The other 34 percent of women would have to present both a birth certificate and proof of marriage, divorce, or name change in order to vote, a task that is particularly onerous for elderly women and costly for poor women who may have to pay to access these records.” The article added that women make up the majority of student, elderly and minority voters, according to the Census Bureau. In every category, the GOP wins when women can’t vote.

Again, these Republican crimes against our democracy are laying around in plain sight but rarely mentioned in news stories about elections and election outcomes.

The GOP has to do this today for the same reason they did in 1964: Republican positions both then and now are not generally popular.

Who’d vote, after all, for more tax cuts for billionaires, more pollution, banking and media deregulation, privatizing Medicare, gutting Social Security, shipping jobs overseas, keeping drug prices high and preventing workers from forming unions?

On the other hand, corporate America — including the massive corporations that own most of our media — love the GOP for the same reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Which may have something to do with why our media almost never discusses these Republican efforts beyond vaguely quoting Democratic outrage about ambiguous “voter suppression” charges.

This is one dimension of a much larger nationwide campaign of Republican assaults on our democracy executed through the phony excuse of trying to stop “voter fraud.”

This year, and particularly in 2024, they’re reviving Operation Eagle Eye to have armed white militia men and Ron DeSantis’ dystopian “election police” confront people in their own neighborhoods on Election Day, all in a craven attempt to discourage minority voting.

GOP’s new voter suppression tactic is also an old one: “Election police”

Doubling down on that effort, they’re also stepping up the rate at which they close polling places in largely Black communities to further stretch out lines and discourage voters.

And they’re putting up billboards across the dozen or so states with anti-felon voting laws warning that under some circumstances voting is a crime that can land them in prison.

Other states have criminalized registering people to vote; the smallest error can now land you in prison in several Republican-controlled states. These laws have killed multiple voter registration drives in those states; the League of Women Voters recently had to stop their registration efforts in Florida, for example.

When Donald Trump started squealing about the 2020 election being “stolen” after his wipeout 7 million-vote loss and being crushed in the Electoral College, the media treated it like a joke for more than a year.

As a result, it’s now an article of faith among over 70 percent of Republicans, driving one of them to attack Nancy Pelosi’s husband in an attempt to assassinate the speaker of the House; thousands of other people who have believed this Republican lie of voter fraud were whipped into a frenzy by Donald Trump to attack the U.S. Capitol.

This situation has reached today’s crisis point because our media has almost entirely ignored the truth about this Republican scam for almost 60 years. Even today, about the only network that covers the work of people like Marc Elias (disclosure: I donate to Democracy Docket) is MSNBC, and even then only occasionally.

Mark Twain is sometimes quoted (probably apocryphally) as saying, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on.” Social media has given the saying a whole new meaning, but in this case an updated version may be: “When a lie is ignored by the media for decades it becomes a believed ‘truth’ that the liars can then use to pass legislation destructive of democracy itself into law and through the courts.”

No democracy anywhere in the world can work if its citizens don’t believe their votes are legitimately counted, as we can see today in Brazil. This lie that was merely a convenience around the edges in 1964 is now a harpoon pointed right at our elections, what Thomas Paine called “the beating heart” of our republic.

If it’s not debunked and destroyed, it could well signal the end of democracy in America and the beginning of a Putin/Orbán-style fascism.

It’s beyond time for our media to do their damn job and point out the evil lie the Goldwater campaign buried deep in our collective psyche way back in 1964, before it succeeds in killing American democracy altogether.

on the critical 2022 midterms

Voters in Boebert’s district are over her

According to a consortium of Colorado newspapers including the Colorado Sun and the Aspen Times among others, a substantial number of unaffiliated voters they interviewed in Rep. Lauren Boebert’s home district would prefer to see someone else representing them in Congress.

In June 2021 the papers talked with voters in her district before it was revamped, and this week they went back to see where the controversial GOP lawmakers stands with her constituents now as she runs for re-election.

The reviews came back mixed.

According to 70-year-old Marilyn Morris of Pueblo, she voted for Boebert in 2020, but has already cast her 2022 vote for Boebert’s Democratic opponent Adam Frisch.

“I don’t like the way she behaves in Congress. That is not respectful, and I wouldn’t vote for her for that reason alone,” she stated.

The report adds, “In 2020, Morris said Boebert seemed like the lesser of two evils. But she doesn’t like how Boebert has spent her two years in Washington.”

“She’s lying all the time,” Morris asserted, “so I just don’t trust her.”

Richard Hirano, 59, of Craig said he couldn’t remember if he voted for Boebert before and is still not sure if he’ll vote for her now.

“I don’t like anybody now. I think our freedoms are under attack, I don’t like either party,” he stated. “I think Boebert is kind of crazy. But I don’t think the other party has any better options. I’m just tired of them attacking each other. I just wish they would do something for our country.”

“I just think she’s sometimes off the deep end,” he continued. “She sounds like she’s trying to push that we need to be ruled by religious belief.”

Stephanie Cooper, 30, of Durango stated she’s a conservative, but is not a fan of the GOP lawmaker and may sit out the election.

“I just feel like she’s more focused on attention than getting stuff done. And rather than take the time to actually come to the table with her constituents or anyone who opposes her,” she explained. “I don’t plan on voting for many Republicans. There are other people out there and other groups out there that I probably align more with. And if I feel stuck on if it’s just between a Democrat and Republican and I don’t agree … I’m not going to vote.”

Anthony Medved of Durango, believes the GOP lawmaker is an embarrassment, calling her a “terrible right-wing politician.”

“I think she cares more about her persona than she does actually making a difference in this world,” he remarked. “She needs to be removed from her responsibilities and I will be encouraging anyone I talk to to vote against her and her radical thoughts and actions.”

Rick Scott called out for wanting to cut Medicare and Social Security

NBC host Chuck Todd called out Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) for playing political games with programs for seniors.

While speaking to Scott on Sunday, Todd noted that the senator has called for making Social Security and Medicare eligible for cuts every five years.

“Why do that?” Todd wondered. “Why put Social Security into sort of the political arena every five years? Why put seniors through that? Why do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I have no interest in changing the Medicare program,” Scott replied. “I want to make sure we preserve the benefits of Medicare and Social Security. I don’t know one Republican who wants to change that. In my plan, I said that we’ve got to start being honest with the public that — what’s our plan? Medicare is going bankrupt; Social Security is going bankrupt.”

Scott tried to blame Democrats for cutting Medicare benefits.

“You’re playing a math game,” Todd interrupted. “You are playing a math game here, Senator. Senator, you’re playing a math game here. You’re playing a math game. [Democrats] didn’t cut anything on Medicare. It’s cost savings having to do with the prescription drug benefit.”

“Look, I understand you want to call it something else,” the host added.

“If you cut spending on Medicare, it’s probably going to impact the ability of somebody to provide things,” Scott protested.

“I will remember that when you guys claim a Medicare cut isn’t a cut,” Todd shot back.

Watch below:

Six models of successful team leadership from “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon”

As anybody who has been in a leadership position knows, no single style fits every situation. In my book, Management Lessons from Game of Thrones: Organization Theory and Strategy in Westeros, I examine how characters, organisations and situations in that fictional world have surprising parallels to the way business is done in the real world. I also explore how we can learn valuable lessons for our daily working lives from these stories.

I look at how managers can learn from the way some of George RR Martin’s characters tackled and overcame their own leadership and team management problems, using strategies that fit their personalities and situations.

So, if you’re struggling with a team management project, here are six different approaches from Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon that might help you find your perfect leadership style.

1. Daenerys Targaryen

In Game of Thrones, Daenerys is the exiled heir to the Iron Throne. She manages to fight back to Westeros with the aid of dragons and an army of supporters. She is a charismatic leader.

Daenerys is someone who inspires others simply by the force of her personality and vision. However, she finds the day-to-day business of management boring and is always looking for new challenges.

In a team management situation, you would want Daenerys in charge whenever quick and drastic decisions need to be made. She is also good when you need the team to be united and follow a specific plan or vision. Bringing a new and controversial product to market on time, for instance, or carrying out a project with a certain element of risk.

2. Jon Snow

Jon Snow is the heroic youth who brings the forces of the north and the south together to fight the incursion of the monstrous White Walkers.

Jon Snow is a transformational leader. He excels in bringing out the best in the people around him and seeing organisations through a time of change. Transformational leaders don’t generally seek out leadership but are often just what a struggling organisation needs to get back on track.

You’d want Jon Snow in charge when a team is having trouble finding form or purpose, or meeting its established goals. Jon would be the sort of leader who can analyse what the team’s strengths and weaknesses are, can organise it to play to its strengths, and focus it away from the problem areas.

3. Tyrion Lannister

Tyrion is an intellectual who describes himself aptly by saying “I drink, and I know things”. He is a transactional leader, someone who gains the trust of their supporters by making deals and compromises. While he may not be glamorous and exciting, people trust him always to get the job done.

Tyrion would excel in a situation of day-to-day team management, where there is either a project of indefinite duration or where the projects renew cyclically. You could see Tyrion heading up an audit team or a tax consultancy: something that needs to be done consistently, reliably and well, with plenty of challenges but no surprises.

4. Sansa Stark

Sansa is the eldest daughter of House Stark. She eventually becomes Queen of the North in her own right. She is an emergent leader but also a background figure who slowly develops into a leadership role over time. Because of her gender and her personality, Sansa’s talents are not immediately apparent. She struggles to be accepted in a leadership role. But, when in charge she’s focused and willing to do whatever it takes to succeed. She takes a long view of success and it generally pays off.

Sansa is the person you want in charge of a team working on a project with long-term objectives. Sansa is good at taking difficult decisions and sticking by them. She’s also very good at bringing together people with very different interests and getting them to work together. The biggest problem you might have with Sansa is if you underestimate her; then you might lose her to the competition.

5. Corlys Velaryon

Corlys is the seafaring lord of House Velaryon in House of the Dragon. He is a pragmatic leader. He does what it takes to get the job done, even when this means making questionable alliances or difficult compromises. At times when others are concerned about short-term pride and prestige, he is concerned about the longer-term consequences.

Corlys excels in any situation where there is the opportunity to develop a strategy and see it through. He is also strong in situations where difficult, even painful, decisions might need to be made. He can weigh up costs and benefits rationally and choose the most appropriate path – even if it involves accepting the second best option. His decisions are made to pursue strategic success over a more extended period.

6. Rhaenyra Targaryen

Rhaenyra from House of the Dragon is the controversial female heir to the Iron Throne. She provides a good example of what we call “servant leadership”: a leader who puts the needs of the team first and encourages both her followers and her organisation to grow and develops. She accepts that everything she does has to be what’s best for the throne and her house, and tries to find ways of doing so that make herself and the people around her happy.

Rhaenyra is the sort of person you’d want in charge of any team that needs to develop to meet new challenges, while at the same time keeping the team together. On the show, her elevation to Queen of Westeros faces huge opposition. This is ironic because – purely from a managerial point of view – she might just be the most suitable person to lead the kingdom to greater success.

Fiona Moore, Professor of Business Anthropology, Royal Holloway University of London

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

Three essential tales of black vampirism

Anne Rice’s phenomenally popular 1976 tale of bloodlust and bloodshed, “Interview with a Vampire,” transferred to the small screen recently – but with some significant deviations that include shifting the principal character’s story to the narrative of a black man.

In the novel (and the more faithful 1994 film adaptation starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise) Louis de Pointe du Lac owns enslaved African people and a plantation in the antebellum south in the 18th century. The 2022 version sets the storyline in the 1910s, where Louis is a black Creole man made rich by the brothels of New Orleans’ red light district.

While this is a big change, this opens up the story to further explore the relationship between vampirism, race and power. Questions of race and vampirism did not arise with Rice’s novel but vampire narratives have long taken on the bloody discourses of race and prejudice.

There is a long tradition of black vampires that goes back centuries. These stories subvert the vampire mythos traditionally dominated by white men of high social status. The vampire narrative, concerned as it is with dominance, submission, power and exploitation, is the perfect conduit for investigating racial politics over 200 years of literary and cultural history. Here are three groundbreaking tales which explore those politics.

1. “The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St Domingo” (1819)

Around 200 years before the latest TV adaptation of “Interview with a Vampire,” the first black vampire story was published.

“The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St Domingo” was written under the pseudonym Uriah Derick D’Arcy. It is considered “the first black vampire story, the first comedic vampire story, the first story to include a mulatto vampire, the first vampire story by an American author, and perhaps the first anti-slavery short story.”

The story is told by Anthony Gibbons who recalls his descendants being transported on a slave ship. They are sold into slavery but just one boy survives, only to be killed by his captor, Mr Personne.

Personne throws the boy’s body into the sea but it washes ashore and is reanimated by moonlight. Personne tries to kill him again but the boy retaliates and escapes, killing Personne’s son. Many years later he returns to kill Personne and marry his wife. The story’s narrator, Gibbons, is their joint descendent. He may also have inherited the terrible cravings of the vampire.

The story sought to shock and challenge the prevailing ideas and mores of contemporary readers. It makes multiple references to the “mixing” of blood, as Gibbons is both mixed race and part vampire – born of the union between a black vampire and the white widow of the master he killed.

The exchange of blood involved in vampires feeding from humans and in the creation of new vampires (by a human drinking a vampire’s blood) was used to reflect on contemporary racist ideas that emphasised the importance of racial purity. “The Black Vampyre” exposes the racial prejudices at the heart of these inquiries by using the vampire to articulate the horror of the transatlantic slave trade.

2. “The Blood of the Vampire” (1897)

Later in the century, Victorian writer Florence Marryat’s “The Blood of the Vampire” introduced readers to Harriet Brandt, a psychic vampire born of a white “mad scientist” and an enslaved Creole woman. The novel was published in the same year as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”

While Dracula sails from Transylvania to England, Harriet sails from Jamaica to England. Unlike Dracula, Harriet is frightened and confused by her powers. She also drains people of energy rather than blood. She is not aware of her feeding, unlike Dracula who chooses his victims.

Marryat’s book, like “The Black Vampyre,” is concerned with eugenics and inheritance. Eugenicists believe in the racist and scientifically erroneous idea that desired traits can be selected through breeding to eliminate social ills and create a perfect society.

These ideas were gaining traction in the 19th century and, in the book, Harriet is accused by the mother of one of her accidental victims of being cursed with “vampire blood” and “black blood” – it is her genetics that are to blame.

Monstrosity in literature has frequently been used to explore the ways marginalised people are excluded from society. For example, the 1994 adaptation of “Interview with a Vampire” has been read as using vampirism as a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic. Victorian readers would have mapped racist views about people of colour on to the traits of the vampire.

However, Marryat portrays the vampire as a sympathetic figure, showing how upset and confused she is by her powers, challenging the preconceptions of the Victorian audience.

3. “Fledgling” (2005)

Octavia E Butler’s “Fledgling” follows Shori, a girl who appears to be an African-American child but is actually a 53-year-old Ina – a vampire species that have seemingly always coexisted with humans.

In typical vampire fashion, the Ina need to feed on human blood to survive, but instead of killing their victims, the venom they produce hugely extends the human lifespan. So the relationship between vampires and humans is symbiotic rather than parasitic.

Shori can’t remember her life before the story begins. This means she also doesn’t remember why she is different. As the story progresses, she gradually and violently becomes aware that society is hostile to her. The Ina are a species of vampire with white skin. Shori learns that she is black because she was experimented upon and mutated in the quest to help the Ina survive the sun – vampires are killed by sunlight.

This is a metaphor for the erasure of black histories. It is also an allegory for the “forgetting” of colonising powers, the slave trade, eugenics and the historical horrors of science where black people were used for experimentation.

Butler uses speciesism (the idea of treating one species as inherently more important than another) as a way of talking about racism allegorically. Shori’s black skin is a sought-after evolutionary advantage, which could protect her species from the sun, which runs counter to racist constructions of white superiority. Like D’Arcy and Marryat, Butler successfully employs the physicality and blood of the vampire to explore and dismantle the historical and “biological” justifications for racial prejudice.

Joan Passey, Lecturer in Victorian literature and culture, University of Bristol

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

How TikTok is helping spread diet culture myths

Six years ago, a popular reality TV show called “The Biggest Loser” suffered a public blow to its credibility. The premise of the show was that overweight and obese contestants would compete to see who could lose the most weight, and by implication, that the show could provide meaningful weight loss inspiration to its viewers. Yet within months of the show ending, virtually all of the contestants were back in the overweight or obese categories. Sometimes the former contestants were even heavier than they had been before.

“Our advice” to people seeking to become healthier “would be to not turn to most TikTok accounts to get ideas on how to improve one’s health.”

Health experts were not surprised. Despite popular myths, becoming and then staying thin is not solely a matter of will power. Research has shown for decades that long-term weight loss on a large scale is very difficult, and that it is simply untrue that being healthy means you must have a slender body type.

But the same kinds of popular myths that guided “The Biggest Loser” still have a lot of cultural currency, it turns out. A recent study in the medical journal PLOS One found that TikTok — a social media app in which users post short-form videos, and which is so well-trafficked that last year it became more popular than Google — is spreading the same kinds of discredited health premises that the “Biggest Loser” did, to a younger generation.

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In the study, researchers from the University of Vermont, Dr. Marisa Minadeo and Dr. Lizzy Pope, analyzed some of TikTok’s most popular content. They found 10 popular nutrition, food, and weight-related hashtags that each had over 1 billion views, and then within those groups downloaded 1,000 TikTok videos which were analyzed and categorized based on how much they discussed nutrition, food, weight loss and other similar health topics. From there, the 100 most viewed videos were broken down according to their key themes, which as it turned out included “the glorification of weight loss in many posts, the positioning of food to achieve health and thinness, and the lack of expert voices providing nutrition information.”

“The majority of posts presented a weight normative view of health, with less than 3% coded as weight-inclusive,” the study reported. “Most posts were created by white, female adolescents and young adults.”

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The study identifies several key misconceptions among TikTok weight loss proponents. For one thing, they perpetuate the myth of “diet culture,” or “a system of beliefs that worships thinness, promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, demonizes certain ways of eating while encouraging others, and oppresses people who do not match up with the prescribed vision of ‘health.'” While many diet culture assumptions may seem like conventional wisdom, health research has found that weight management and being thin are not automatically essential to health. Instead, bodies have a wide spectrum of natural shapes and sizes, with research indicating that people of all body sizes can be physically and mentally healthy if they pursue proper nutrition and exercise goals in attainable, stigma-free ways.

“Perhaps portraying weight loss would be less harmful if long-term weight loss was generally achievable,” the study’s authors write. “However, as Tylka et. al (2014) discussed in their literature review of weight normativity and weight inclusivity, weight loss interventions almost always fail; only about 20% of individuals who participate in weight loss interventions maintain the weight loss after one year, and this percentage decreases by the second year. The collection of videos glorifying weight loss on TikTok represent a moment in time, but do not show the longer-term effects of weight loss interventions, such as weight-cycling, or repeated dieting and weight loss attempts over many years.”

Since long-term weight loss is usually not achievable, “moralizing food can cause hyper-awareness about food choices, and foster beliefs that certain foods should be avoided because they will cause weight gain or poor health.” Researchers note that such moralizing can lead to the development of eating disorders like orthorexia, or a fixation on eating “correct” foods.

“The majority of posts presented a weight normative view of health, with less than 3% coded as weight-inclusive. Most posts were created by white, female adolescents and young adults.”

The authors also noted that, although there were countless videos offering nutrition advice, a scant number came from those with expertise in diet and health.

“Of all the videos, 1.4% were created by registered dietitians, suggesting very little expert nutrition advice on the app,” the study points out. “Users without professional knowledge are sharing nutrition tips that can be inaccurate, and often for the purposes of weight loss. These types of videos likely spread and encourage harmful dieting interventions to a vulnerable audience that may not have strong media literacy skills.”

Pope, a nutritionist at the University of Vermont and one of the study’s co-authors, told Salon by email that people who want to avoid dietary disinformation need “to pay attention to who is providing the information. What are their qualifications? What do they know about your particular situation? It’s not necessarily productive for most people to get dietary information from social media, so stepping away from that as a source of nutrition information is probably a good idea.” She specifically added that, based on their research, “our advice” to people seeking to become healthier “would be to not turn to most TikTok accounts to get ideas on how to improve one’s health.”

“More broadly, I’d ask them specifically why they believe their health is tied to their appearance, and whether they could focus on implementing health behaviors regardless of impacts to appearance,” Pope added. “I think in general we need to dismantle the system of diet culture that dominates so much of the discourse around food, nutrition, and bodies in this country keeping people focused on the idea that health and appearance are closely linked, we have control over either, and we should quest towards the thin ideal regardless of the harms that may occur.”

Salon reached out to several nutrition experts not involved with the study for their views. One of them was Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. As he told Salon by email, he has noticed that all social media (including TikTok) “glorifies thinness.”

“It perpetuates the myth that weight is the primary marker of health,” Lustig explained. “This is untrue. The issue is that the fat you can see (the subcutaneous fat) is protective for health. It’s the fat you can’t see (the visceral and the liver fat) that is dangerous. But these deposits are not what you measure on the scale.”

Dr. Nicole Avena, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Mount Sinai Medical School and a visiting professor of health psychology at Princeton University, wrote the book “Why Diets Fail: Because You’re Addicted to Sugar.” She observed to Salon by email that “anytime you open TikTok or Instagram, your feed is most likely flooded with viral recipes and food hacks that perpetuate toxic diet culture. From internal showers to eating cloves of garlic as natural antibiotic, most influencers posting about fad diets do not have a background (or degree!) in nutrition or medicine.”

Avena added, “This type of ‘propaganda’ leads the public to think that someone who is genetically thin versus who is genetically not can get results from restriction, crazy trends, and extreme exercise.”

But Avena had advice for people who are concerned about eating and exercising in healthy ways. As she advised, “eat whole foods from the earth, reduce your overall added sugar intake, and do something you enjoy as physical activity. This type of lifestyle gives no hard boundaries, no crazy potions, and is research backed.” She specifically advocated making sure that at least half of your plate has vegetables, unprocessed whole grains and high-quality protein. In addition, she argued that “physical activity comes with time and discovering what you actually like to do, rather than forcing yourself to do the latest spin trend for example will help you stay consistent.” She also urged people to eat sugar in moderation, rather than “restricting so much so that you binge on it later.” The key is to “reduce your sugar over time, as opposed to cold-turkey.”

For his part, Lustig noted that “the most important measure for health is the waist circumference. If you have a waist smaller than your hips, then you have health. If you have a belly larger than your hips, then you need to do something. The best thing to do is to cut the sugar.”

When asked if people focus too much on their weight, Lustig pulled no punches.

“Absolutely,” Lustig told Salon. “In most people’s minds, people think weight and calories are the same. Focus on the food, not on the weight or the calories.”

about weight loss and health

This cheesy, nostalgic stuffed pasta dish is the coziest indulgence for sweater weather

Stuffed shells have always been a cherished food in my household. If there was a desire for an Italian or Italian-American component at Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s in addition to turkey, ham or another centerpiece, stuffed shells were usually my dad’s top request.

For our family, it became an annual occurrence: the mixing of the ricotta, the boiling of the shells, the sneaking off and eating the broken shells as they sat forlornly in the colander while Christmas music filled the air. When my brother and I were little, we’d help my mom stuff the shells; and by that I mean we’d give our best effort but probably not actually do anything productive. Either way, I think she was appreciative.

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There’s something deeply comforting and reassuring about stuffed shells: perfectly cooked, pliable pasta shells filled to the brim with the creamiest ricotta mixture imaginable, doused in sauce and cheese galore and baked until perfectly golden. It doesn’t get much better than that, especially on a holiday.

It should be noted, though, that stuffed shells are just as good on a random Sunday, or perhaps even a harried Tuesday evening. They’re not especially challenging, but they do require a little bit of labor, especially when it comes to stuffing them, which can also be a slightly irritating job. Using a pastry bag (or a Ziploc with a little corner snipped off) is certainly the easiest way, but even that can get tiring, particularly if you’re working through a considerable mound of cooked shells. Tired forearms and ricotta-covered fingers aside, though, this is a reliable, spectacular dish that will always have a place on my table, whether it’s a special holiday meal or a weeknight dinner.

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Our standard stuffed shells were shells + ricotta/egg + my mom’s sauce + maybe a touch of mozzarella, but I’m tweaking that a bit with some autumnal additions: a sauce swap, a textural component . . . and a lot more cheese.

This recipe is layered, to put it lightly, so there are quite a few steps. Thus, it isn’t something that comes together in no time. Set aside an afternoon or so to relax and work through the steps in an unhurried manner. Then have a celebratory, filling meal that will be deeply satisfying.

Herbed Ricotta and Butternut Stuffed Shells with Brown Butter, Pesto Cream and Pepitas

Yields

08 servings

Prep Time

45 minutes

Cook Time

35 minutes

Ingredients

1 pound jumbo shells (See Chef’s Notes)
Kosher salt
1 28-to-32 ounce container ricotta (See Chef’s Notes)
3 cups shredded mozzarella, divided
2 large eggs
2 cups grated Parmesan, divided
1/4 bunch fresh parsley, chopped
1/2 cup grated or shredded Asiago
1 cup heavy cream
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium-sized butternut squash, peeled and diced into large cubes
1/2 cup stock of your choosing
1 1/2 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup pesto of your choosing (homemade, store-bought or specialty: See Chef’s Notes)
1/2 cup pepitas (shelled or hulled pumpkin seeds)
3 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped

Directions

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees.
Set a (very) large pot of water over high heat and bring to a boil. Season with salt, add the shells and cook until tender but not overly mushy. Aim for the firmer side of al dente, as the pasta will continue to cook in the oven. (Note: Use your largest pot here; the shells expand as they cook and take up a ton of room.)
Drain the pasta and let the shells cool slightly in a colander set in the sink. Do not rinse.
In a large skillet over medium heat, heat the oil. Add the butternut cubes and cook for 12 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until they’re browned and starting to become tender. Add stock and cook down entirely, until the squash is tender, about 5 to 7 more minutes.
In a small pan over medium-low heat, melt the butter. Gently, swirl the pan or stir throughout, letting the melted butter begin to take on a darker color and smell very fragrant. Remove from the heat and let it settle, then drizzle over the butternut squash. Transfer the butternut-brown butter mixture to a VitaMix or high-powdered blender and blend until thick, smooth and velvety. Add cream or stock if it’s too thick. Season with salt.
In a large bowl, combine the butternut-brown butter mixture, ricotta, 1/2 cup mozzarella, the eggs, 1/2 cup Parmesan, parsley, Asiago and 1/4 cup heavy cream. Stir well, until just combined. Season with salt and pepper; go slightly lighter on the salt than usual, as the cheeses are pretty salt-forward already.
In another pot over low heat, combine the pesto and remaining cream, just until warmed throughout and homogenous.
Stuff a food storage bag full of the ricotta-butternut mixture, seal tightly, snip off a corner and use this to pipe the filling mixture into the shells. Continue to do so until all of the shells have been filled (and feel free to reward yourself for all of your hard work by nibbling on any broken shells).
In the bottom of a 9×13 baking or casserole dish, spread a layer of the pesto cream. Top with a layer of the shells, packed closely together, then another layer of pesto cream. Repeat until all of the shells have been added to the dish. Drizzle remaining pesto cream over the top, along with all of the remaining cheese.
Transfer to the oven and bake for a half hour. Turn to broil and broil for approximately 3 minutes, or until the top of the shells are super golden and crisp. (Be careful here: Broilers differ exponentially from house to house and can take a dish from perfectly crisp to inedibly burnt in seconds).
As the shells cook, add the remaining butter to a small pan over medium-low heat. Add the pumpkin seeds and cook for no more than 5 minutes, until fragrant and toasted. Season with salt and rosemary.
Remove from the oven, top with the toasted rosemary seeds and let cool for 5 minutes before serving.

Cook’s Notes

When picking out pasta shells, do not reach for orecchiette or Velveeta-type shells, as stuffing them with ricotta would require a Herculean effort.

When it comes to ricotta, I’m especially partial to those white tins wrapped in cellophane with a heaping mound of ricotta peeking out of the top, such as this brand.

Customizations are certainly doable, but I truly can’t speak for them. Because this is the kind of meal I wouldn’t skimp on, I’ve only tried it with full-fat, whole-milk ricotta, standard shells and typical cheeses. I’m sure alternates would be stellar, though.

For this dish, I made a pesto of spinach, hazelnuts, Parmesan, olive oil, salt, pepper and garlic. I put hazelnuts in my pesto and opted for pumpkin seeds for the finishing garnish, but you can use the same nut or seed for both.

If you’re not really a pesto person, I’d aim for a simple bechamel (or even mornay sauce) with a touch of nutmeg. This creamy, enriching sauce would be the perfect match for these shells.

Feel free to omit the rosemary if it isn’t your favorite herb.

My dad was never fond of the extra cheese on top that got browned and melted under the broiler. If you’d prefer to keep the cheese entirely in the shells themselves, don’t add the additional heaps of cheese at the end.

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A “Great British Bake Off” star’s “pantry brownies” are one-bowl comfort food

“Great British Bake Off” veteran Ruby Tandoh sees you. In her newest book, “Cook As You Are,” she acknowledges the humble home cook, “in your ordinary kitchen, with your likes and dislikes, your tastes and aversions and your washing up piled in the sink.” We may not have the same tastes, budgets or schedules, but what we share is a common need, and often, a common hope. We don’t just want to feed ourselves and the people we share the table with, we want to do it well.

“Great British Bake Off” veteran Ruby Tandoh: “I see the show and I feel a pressure from it”

For my money, Tandoh is not just an inventive and exciting recipe developer, she’s one of the most articulate and expansive food writers out there right now. She deeply understands the emotional complexities of eating and the realities of time, ability and budget constraints, and she will actively help you make a great meal whether you’re working with garlic cloves or powder, fresh lemon zest or bottled juice. I love this book like I have loved few others of the past few years, in no small part because Tandoh is so effortlessly judgement-free. I also love that she divides the book into sections like “simple recipes for when you’re low on time or energy,” “making great use of kitchen staples,” and even, for those rare magical moments, “recipes to linger over.”

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Because I believe most cookbooks can be judged first and best by their brownie recipes, the brownie is where I found myself first in “Cook As You Are” — and Tandoh did not disappoint.

Her “pantry brownies” recipe acknowledges a cruel truth — that “by the time your sweet toothed cravings are baying for brownie blood, you’ve probably already eaten all the chocolate in the house.” So in true service journalism fashion, she offers up a strictly cocoa-based brownie for when the cupboard is all but bare. There’s no butter, no melted chocolate and only two eggs, so your wallet will thank you. It comes together in a single bowl. Oh, right, and it’s also really damn good. I may have to find another way of judging cookbooks, because they just might be my forever brownie.

Tandoh suggests any vegetable, olive or coconut oil here, and I have made my brownies with extra virgin oil for a deep, peppery kick. You can scale back to a milder oil if that’s more your speed. I also made mine with a mix of regular and black cocoa, if you feel like experimenting. Feel free to zhush these up and make them your own with whatever toppings or mix-ins you please, but rest assured they are already perfect, just as they are.

* * *

Inspired by “Cook As You Are: Recipes for Real Life, Hungry Cooks and Messy Kitchens” by Ruby Tandoh

Ruby Tandoh’s Pantry Brownies

Yields

8 – 10 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

20 minutes

Ingredients

2/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil (or lighter oil if you prefer)
2/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons of light brown sugar
2 eggs
3 tablespoons of your preferred milk
3/4 cup of all purpose flour
1/2 cup of cocoa powder OR 1/4 cup of cocoa powder and 1/4 cup of black cocoa powder
1 teaspoon of instant coffee (or 1/2 teaspoon of instant espresso)
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon of flaky salt

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line an 8 x 8-inch square or 8-inch round baking pan with parchment and lightly grease it.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the oil and the sugar.
Stir in the eggs and the milk.
Whisk in the flour, cocoa, instant coffee, vanilla and salt. Stir until just smooth.
Bake for roughly 20 minutes, until just set but not jiggly. An ever so slightly underdone brownie is a perfect brownie.

Cook’s Notes

Tandoh says its fine to swap out superfine white sugar for the brown if that’s what you have on hand.

of our favorite chocolate treats

The enduring seduction of “Dangerous Liaisons” — on stage, film, and now TV

“Les Liaisons Dangereuses” author Pierre Choderlos de Laclos‘ daring extended beyond the scandalous content contained within his 1782 novel. If its themes of vengeance, power, lust, duplicity and cruelty went too far, his aspirations for his novel’s legacy reached further still.

Laclos’ epistolary novel spins a web of decadent self-involvement and class warfare through the exchange of letters between the Marquise de Merteuil, a wealthy widow, and her former lover Vicomte de Valmont.

“I resolved to write a book that would be quite outside the ordinary trend,” he’s quoted as saying, “which would make a sensation and echo over the world after I left it.” The career military officer succeeded at his mission in his time, but even more so in ours.

“Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” better known as “Dangerous Liaisons,” has inspired literary retellings, operas, ballets, stage productions, films and as of this month, a luscious eight-episode drama on Starz. Technically this rendition is a prequel that presents the origin stories of Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont before they had wealth, or in Valmont’s case, a title with any coins behind it.

While not innocents by any means, the woman who began as Camille (Alice Englert) and her lover Valmont (Nicholas Denton) come to their grifting game as a matter of survival, although Camille soon realizes she’ll have to rely on her wits and fast thinking to elevate her station and avenge her sex.

“The White Lotus” is an Italian fantasy

Like all versions of these characters, our anti-heroine and Valmont make a sport of manipulating others, and each other, competing to ruin the characters of those deemed challenging enough to ensnare.

Its setting in the years before the French Revolution has led some to view it as a critique of the aristocracy, which ignores what a sensation it was among the rich and influential in Laclos’ time, some of whom were his patrons. Within a month of its publication, it sold a thousand copies and earned a fandom that included Marie Antoinette, who is said to have commissioned a copy for her private library.

Some view the story as a critique of the aristocracy, which ignores what a sensation it was in Laclos’ time.

But if we mainly know “Dangerous Liaisons” through 20th-century interpretation, that probably has something to do with the novel having been banned for decades in the mid-19th century. Only in the early 20th century did it find champions in such notable authors as Aldous Huxley and Virginia Woolf.

It took a few more decades for it to be adapted to film in 1959 for the first time, and controversially, by Roger Vadim, who transplanted the characters to contemporary (by late 1950s standards) France, changed up the French aristocracy for the Parisian bourgeoisie, and plopped Jeanne Moreau and Gérard Philipe into the lead roles.

Although the film was a tremendous box-office success in France, Vadim’s version did not turn out to be the standard for most modern pop culture interpretations.

That honor is ascribed to Christopher Hampton’s 1985 London stage hit “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” which made it to Broadway in 1987 and starred Alan Rickman as the cunning Valmont. Oh, to have seen that!

Then again, John Malkovich famously, sexily killed the role in Stephen Frears’ 1988 adaptation, with Glenn Close giving as good a performance or better as the Marquise alongside Michelle Pfeiffer as Valmont’s prey Madame de Tourvel.

Milos Forman brought his spin to the tale in 1989’s “Valmont,” starring Colin Firth and Annette Bening, but Frears’ worked from Hampton’s script and expertly directed Malkovich and Close to capture their characters’ intimate unknowability.

You can see echoes of their performances, along with Frears’ highly stylized depiction of Parisian high society’s opulence and the production’s restrained humor, in nearly every worthwhile adaptation of Laclos’ tale since.

In 1999’s “Cruel Intentions” Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe play the elegant, perilously bored fiends bent on sullying the reputations of Selma Blair and Reese Witherspoon, this time in Manhattan instead of Paris. It is in many respects the prelude to the original “Gossip Girl,” right down to the prying, flying texts and blog posts taking the place of Laclos’ flurry of letters.

This update is executed with style and aplomb that far exceeds 2022’s “Dangerous Liaisons” – courtesy of French Netflix, where the action takes place in Biarritz and where power isn’t measured in mere wealth but in the size of one’s social media following. It’s among the weakest contribution to the catalog, partiuclarly compared to 2003’s “Untold Scandal,” which translates the story into 18th century Korea seamlessly.

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What is it about Laclos’ ruthless high-society predators that keeps us wanting to see more of them? Academics and fans have considered that question for ages. But from a TV or filmgoer’s point of view, Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil are fascinating diviners of human weakness and strategists on how best to exploit them.

What is it about Laclos’ ruthless high-society predators that keeps us wanting to see more of them?

Hence, the appeal of the Marquise de Merteuil and Valmont is eternal. Separately and together, they are as seductive as they are contemptible, and experts at revealing only what they want the beholder to see.

They are the fictional forbears of Anna Delvey and every other libertine upper-class grifter one can conceive of. That they’re also wealthy people held in high esteem in Parisian society makes them enviable. Who wouldn’t want to be them and get away with their crimes against other people’s good names and reputations?

What Starz’s series is on the verge of figuring out is whether the audience desires to know how they became so fabulously merciless, and whether that will make people understand them better…or better value the mystery surrounding their motivations.

“Dangerous Liaisons” premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday, November 6 on Starz.

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How to cut every type of cheese, according to an expert

Cutting cheese is an art form in itself. Depending on the way you slice and dice your dairy, the texture and taste of each piece can make a big impact. Take soft-ripened goat cheese, for example. The interior is fresh and tangy while the outer creamline has buttery notes of earth and mushrooms. You want to ensure the cheese cut captures both of those flavor elements and textures in one bite — using the right type of cheese knife can help with that.

It’s also important to consider the age of your cheese, the type of milk it’s made with, the cheesemaking style, and the rind when deciding what knife to use to cut it and how to shape it. Cheese knives can range in size, so keep a few different styles on hand for cutting multiple varieties of cheese. The type of knife you need depends on the type of cheese and how it’s served. Are you cutting a large wedge of cheese into smaller pieces for guests, or are you leaving it whole so guests can cut however much they want themselves? From slim-blade knives for soft cheeses to a fork-tipped spear, here are some of our favorite cheese knives for cutting and serving.

Prep knives

Soft cheese knife/Slim blade knife

You’ll save a lot of time and stress by prepping bloomy-rind and soft cheeses with this knife. Ever cut into a creamy camembert and have the entire cheese stick to your knife? That’s the result of using the wrong type of knife. For most bloomy rinded cheeses, such as brie or camembert, I suggest using a soft cheese knife or a slim blade knife. A soft cheese knife has holes in the blade, which leaves gaps in the knife’s surface area to prevent cheese from sticking. A slim blade knife has a long and narrow sharp blade, which achieves the same purpose.

Once sliced, soft cheeses like brie, camembert, triple creme, and taleggio tend to turn ooey-gooey at room temperature, so don’t pre-cut a wheel far in advance of serving. To avoid this altogether, leave soft cheeses whole for guests to cut.

Cheese wire

Another tool to cut cheese with is a cheese wire, which is perfect for creating clean slices of semi-soft such as mozzarella and blue to semi-hard cheese, such as young gouda and young manchego. With a cheese wire, you can slice a variety of shapes depending on the type cheese — disks, cubes, rectangles, and triangles. With long, round logs like Bucheron, disks are a great cutting method. If the wedge is triangular shaped, cutting it into smaller triangles with the wire works just as well as a sharp chef’s knife.

This tool is also great for breaking down larger cheese formats into smaller, more palatable wedges, such as large wheels of gouda, blocks of Comté, and wheels of Gruyère.

Chef’s knife

A large, sharp knife is great for slicing semi-hard cheeses like Gruyère, aged gouda, cheddar, and Comté. The slicing technique, however, depends on the cheese. Sometimes with an aged gouda, you may run into cheese crystals, or natural breaks in the cheese. This will make it difficult to slice it into uniform triangles, so I like to follow the breaks to make uneven rectangular slices. Similarly with cheddar, the curds tend to fall apart easily while slicing, so I’ll create “rustic crumbles” with my knife by sticking it vertically into the cheese block and twisting my wrist to create small bite-sized pieces for serving.

Serving knives

The cheese spreader

This is a dull knife with a rounded tip and wide face, making it easy to serve, smear, and spread soft cheeses with bloomy rinds (like brie, triple creme, camembert), soft-ripened goat cheese, and fresh chèvre.

The fork-tipped spear

Look familiar? This knife is great for cutting semi-hard cheeses like gouda, cheddar, Gruyère, and Emmental. The blade is sharp enough to cut through dense cheeses, while the pronged tip can be used to pick up individual pieces.

The spade knife

A spade knife is used for hard, aged cheese, like Parmigiano-Reggiano, Grana Padano, and pecorino Romano. The small sharp, pointed edge is great for chipping away at firmer cheeses, making for bite-sized pieces.

The flat knife

If you’re serving semi-hard cheese whole, the flat knife makes it easy for guests to create clean, rectangular cuts. I also love cutting and spreading a creamy blue cheese, since the wide blade covers a large surface area.

When serving a cheese plate, lay the knives near the cheese they’re meant to cut. You can even stick them directly in their designated cheese to get your guests started. If you don’t have these types of knives, use butter knives for soft cheese and steak knives for harder cheeses.

Cash for colonoscopies: Colorado tries to lower health costs through incentives

State employees in Colorado are being asked to be better consumers when shopping for health care services. And if they choose lower-cost and higher-quality providers, they could get a check in the mail for a portion of the savings.

It’s part of an initiative known as the Colorado Purchasing Alliance, through which employers in the state are banding together to negotiate lower prices for health care services. The state government is one of 12 employers that have agreed to join the alliance and will be the first to use the newly negotiated rates and consumer incentives.

The goal is to disrupt what’s considered a dysfunctional market for health care by encouraging employers and employees to make better choices and forcing health systems in the state — which have some of the highest prices and profits in the country — to cut their rates.

Since July 1, state employees have had access to the Healthcare Bluebook, which is an online tool, owned by a health data company of the same name, that ranks health providers by both costs and quality. Providers in the top 25% for quality are designated in green, the bottom 25% in red, and anyone in between in yellow. The same color scale is used for costs.

“If you go to a green-green provider, then we’ll send you a check,” said Josh Benn, director of employee benefits contracts for the Colorado government.

The checks can range from less than $50 for something like a mammogram to thousands of dollars for surgery. In most cases, the money helps offset the employee’s copayments, coinsurance, or deductible. But for preventive services like colonoscopies, which have no copay, it’s extra cash in the employee’s pocket.

The reward program is available only to employees who choose the state’s self-funded health plan, which is administered through Cigna, not the Kaiser Permanente option, which has a closed network of providers. Of the nearly 20,000 people, both employees and family members, on the Cigna plan, more than 1,200 used the tool in the first six weeks, conducting 4,500 searches.

“We could cut the network to the bone and really limit choice, but part of what I want to do is encourage people to make better decisions,” Benn said. “There are ways to curb health care spending without harming employees.”

Although it’s too early to tell how much the state will save through the program, Healthcare Bluebook estimates that employers save an average of $1,500 every time an enrolled member uses the online tool to choose a provider.

“And you wind up with fewer complications and sick days,” Benn said.

Larimer County, in northern Colorado, has been using Healthcare Bluebook since 2018 in its incentive program to counteract the high prices it was paying for employees’ care under its self-funded plan. With little competition, the local health systems were charging county employees nearly double the prices in Denver, just two hours to the south.

“We have one particularly dominant health care system here that knows they are the system of choice, just based on market reputation, and they are willing and able to charge accordingly,” said Jennifer Whitener, benefits manager for the county.

Whitener recalled one employee who needed a hip replacement and found a free-standing orthopedic surgery center that cost $20,000 less than a hospital-owned facility and had higher quality ratings.

“Being able to share information in terms of how you can shop for health care and that not everyone is charging the same price for everything, and — oh, there’s actually a difference in quality depending on where you go — has been eye-opening,” she said.

Over the first four years, the county paid out an average of $15,000 in rewards per year. The county calculated that for every $1 it spends to offer Healthcare Bluebook to its employees, it saves $3.50.

Andrea Bilderback, a health promotion and outreach specialist with the county, used the tool when deciding where to have a mammogram and a colonoscopy after recently turning 40. She wound up getting a check for $100 for the colonoscopy and $35 for the mammogram, neither of which had any out-of-pocket costs. She and her husband used the funds for a date night, a welcome respite for the parents of a 1½-year-old boy.

“It was like free money,” Bilderback said.

Such incentives have been used with varying degrees of success across the country. Self-Insured Schools of California, a purchasing alliance that represents 450 school districts in the Golden State, implemented a similar system years ago. Officials compared the prices they paid for five common procedures — arthroscopies, cataract surgeries, colonoscopies, upper GIs, and endoscopies — at hospitals versus free-standing surgery centers. They found that surgery centers were generally much cheaper and the care was often rated as better. The group capped the amount of money it would pay hospitals, leaving employees on the hook for any balance. If they went to a surgery center, there would be no cap.

For example, arthroscopies were capped at $4,500, so if a hospital charged $6,000, the patient could be billed for the remaining $1,500. But if that patient went to a surgery center, the plan would cover the entire cost, no matter the amount.

In the first year, starting Oct. 1, 2018, the new approach had shifted 54% of procedures from high-cost hospitals to lower-cost surgery centers, saving the school districts $3.1 million in health care costs.

“If you could pay $25,000 for a car or $75,000 and the only difference was the overhead of the dealership, why would you pay $75,000?” said John Stenerson, Self-Insured Schools of California’s deputy executive officer. “That’s kind of like what we do with medical pricing all the time.”

The Colorado alliance did a similar analysis of the 10 most frequent outpatient procedures paid for by its employer members. Even before negotiating any rates, those employers could cut their costs for those procedures in half by sending employees to surgery centers instead of hospitals. Surgery centers tend to charge less than hospitals for the same procedures, and hospitals often tack on a facility fee that increases costs for consumers and employers. A recent study found that costs for a range of orthopedic surgeries were an average of 26% lower at ambulatory surgery centers than at hospitals.

The cash-back incentive program is part of a broader effort by the Colorado alliance to lower health care costs for state employees and 12 other employers, mostly school districts and local governments. But the state employees are what give the alliance a sizable block of covered lives and greater negotiating power with doctors, hospitals, and other health providers.

Robert Smith, head of the Colorado Business Group on Health, which is spearheading the alliance, believes the purchasing-alliance model can revolutionize the health care market and use the power of the employers to drive down costs. Most companies, he explained, pay premiums to a health plan to cover their employees but allow those health plans to negotiate rates with hospitals, doctors, and other providers. It would be too complicated and time-consuming for most businesses to take on that role themselves.

Health-purchasing alliances, on the other hand, allow employers to band together and negotiate rates for a much larger group of employees, giving them greater market power to negotiate lower rates.

“Health care outcomes are not related to the price,” Smith said. “You can pay twice as much for some of the worst health care at one facility, and then you can get some of the best health care at half the price at another facility 10 miles away.”

But if employers changed the way they buy health care, it could create a competitive market, Smith said.

So far, most of the negotiated rates have been limited to providers in the populous Front Range region of Colorado that includes Denver, Fort Collins, and Colorado Springs. The alliance is trying to sign up providers in other areas, particularly in the western part of the state, but it might take three years or more to fully transition to the new model.

Purchasing alliances have been tried in other parts of the country with limited success. A report by the nonprofit Catalyst for Payment Reform found that such alliances often had early success but couldn’t survive, in part because of the reactions of the large health care systems. Those systems often undercut the pricing of purchasing alliances to drive them out of business.

So far, Smith has negotiated with free-standing ambulatory surgery centers, imaging facilities, and physician-owned clinics. But he has had little luck getting the larger health systems to play ball.

“If it’s disruptive enough that it affects their bottom line and they notice it,” said Benn, the state employee benefits director, “then, yeah, I think they’ll come to the table.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Bake fails: Is this the most disappointing season of “The Great British Baking Show”?

Following in the footsteps of his seafaring predecessors in the Plymouth Company and London Company, Paul Hollywood journeyed to North America, tasted the fruit of the land, and announced, “Yeah, OK, I am now an expert in this.”

And lo, in the tradition of the shocked people who received those uninvited English travelers hundreds of years ago and wondered what in the heck they thought they were doing, the North American audiences of “The Great British Baking Show” have generally reacted to his declaration of expertise with statements along the lines of, “Oh, hell no.”

Perhaps you’ve seen or heard of the cringe-tastic debacle that was “Mexican Week,” an episode in which Hollywood deemed tacos an example of that nation’s traditional baking style. Yes, according to Hollywood, tacos qualify as baking, and creamy tres leches cakes, usually a single-decker sweet, can be layered and tiered.

Hollywood was equally authoritative about s’mores, the gooey campfire goody interpreted as a one-story building-sized marshmallow sandwiched between a smear of chocolate ganache and two digestive biscuits (huh?), gently singed with a culinary torch (what?).

At least the tres leches cake is a baked good. Up for furious debate is whether ice cream belongs in the hallowed tent — or spring rolls, the Pastry Week episode’s 29-ingredient technical dish. Tacos? Spring rolls? Aren’t those considered to be products of … cooking, not baking?

“The Great British Bake-Off” adds an attention-grabbing ingredient in the mix this season

Welcome to what many fear is the nadir of “GBBO” (an acronym of the competition series’ U.K. title “Great British Bake Off”), where the contestant pool is stellar as always, and at least one of the tasks placed before them each week range from baffling to infuriating. Every competition reality series shows its wear as it ages.

Tacos? Spring rolls? Aren’t those … cooking, not baking?

Apparently, the threshold for this show is Season 13, in which its heralded tradition of featuring inclusive casts is wrecking itself against old-school colonialist cluelessness. Have you heard this one, elbow jab, elbow jab? Sporting sombreros and cheap serapes, co-hosts, and comedians Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas open Mexican Week, the fourth episode, with Fielding saying they shouldn’t make any Mexican jokes.

“What? No Mexican jokes at all?” Lucas replies. “What, not even Juan?”

Later they’d wonder aloud if Mexico is a real place or a fantasy land, like Xanadu.

Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, Matt Lucas and Noel Fielding (Photo courtesy of Netflix)

One could write off these gaffes as a one-time example of ignorant overreach by lovely people who mean well, as Hollywood’s fellow judge Prue Leith assured several outlets in interviews conducted in the episode’s wake.

But this forgets the two-seasons-ago mess that was Japanese Week and its various offenses against cuisine and culture. Most of those probably flew over the heads of the show’s United States-based audience. Not every city has stores that feature Asian-style baking or bakeries, or could tell that the episode’s steamed bun challenge featured preparations considered to be distinctly Chinese.

As far as the Mexican Week mess-ups go, the average Taco Bell employee could school Hollywood on the correct pronunciation of pico de gallo and guacamole.

Anyway, following both episodes professional bakers and specialists were kinder in their assessments than culinary enthusiasts slamming the show on social media. A few still wondered why Hollywood and Leith didn’t seek inspiration from bakes considered to be more distinctly traditional in Mexico, or Japan before it.

For example, San Francisco bakery owner Raquel Goldman shared her confusion about the tacos with SFGate.com, citing the plethora of options. “There’s conchas, but there’s also the salty bread, like bolillos and teleras,” she said, later adding, “They didn’t do their due diligence. And that’s not that hard to do.”

She’s right. For a series that’s interested in authenticity, research isn’t that ponderous of an undertaking. One may expect “GBBO” to be that type of show. This overlooks the fact that “The Great British Baking Show” is a commodity, not simply a TV comfort.

Competition reality in every form involves a level of play-acting.

Mexican Week, and Japanese Week before it, tie in with Hollywood’s other TV venture, a culinary travel series called “Paul Hollywood Eats.” His Mexican adventure for that show aired in July of this year and includes him eating “the best taco he’s ever had” and sampling pan dulce, which corresponds to the Mexican-themed episode’s signature bake.

According to that show’s episode descriptions, Hollywood also tried to eat a tarantula and other insects…all of which is to confirm that, indeed, there probably “wasn’t enough time” for a meaningful exploration of the variety of Mexico’s regional doughs and preparations.

Group Photo of Bakers, Presenters and Judges on “The Great British Baking Show” (Photo courtesy of Netflix/Mark Bourdillon)

Hollywood and Leith also frequently remind prickly viewers and contestants that they are the ultimate authority.

If they over-complicate or even exoticize dishes that aren’t British or distinctly European, why wouldn’t they? Competition reality in every form involves a level of play-acting. It’s their job as TV judges to declare they know the right way of doing things. In terms of the s’mores, Hollywood probably went glamping and thought whatever was served to him was authentic. Hence the show’s extremely mockable take on a treat traditionally prepared using pre-packaged ingredients and a found stick that isn’t too dirty.

S’mores require some version of a graham cracker — which, again, requires an oven. How does one defend ice cream as the “hero” challenge on a baking show? The answer is in the episode: it was part of Custard Week, a typical component of baked goods, desserts, and decadent scoops. Plus, ice cream looks pretty on TV.

It also gave production an opportunity to change things up a bit, staggering the contestants’ prep and finish times to place a different type of mouth-watering pressure on the contestants. This afforded the judges the opportunity to evaluate each submission at its best, ideally before it melted — although most of the attempts never froze correctly to start with.

Some of the ire is a matter of justifiable sensitivity, too; this season of “GBBO” comes to us in the wake of a sustained focus on Britain related to Queen Elizabeth II’s death, after all. Part of processing that major event involved passionate discussions about the horrors and injustices British colonialism inflicted on cultures around the globe.

On the grand scale of crimes, those committed by “GBBO” are mainly matters of “they either know not or care not what they do” tastelessness. That’s still no excuse to call katsu curry “cat-poo curry,” as Lucas does in the Japanese episode, but it explains how that flatulence made it into the final edit. We’re right to want a show that sets a standard for celebrating collegiality and skill to be more thoughtful about what it’s stirring up on the production side of the recipe. The fact that it’s falling short of that in the latest season is irritating.

Nevertheless, the contestant mix and their inspiring originality still make “The Great British Baking Show” worth consuming — with fingers crossed that future seasons will learn from the unnecessary additions that made this one fail to satisfactorily rise.

about “GBBO”