“Patriotic education”: Experts say Texas GOP’s new “1836 Project” airbrushes oppression and poverty

A committee charged with producing a “patriotic” telling of Texas history approved a 15-page pamphlet last month that will now be distributed to new Texas drivers.

The advisory committee — named the 1836 Project after the year Texas gained its independence from Mexico — was created last year with the passing of House Bill 2497. The legislation required the committee to tell a story of “a legacy of economic prosperity” and the “abundant opportunities for businesses and families, among other requirements.”

“We must never forget why Texas became so exceptional in the first place,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when he signed the bill. Abbott, along with Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and House Speaker Dade Phelan, later selected a nine-member, largely conservative group to head the 1836 Project.

The creation of the committee was largely a conservative backlash to The New York Times’ publication of “The 1619 Project,” which was named after the year enslaved people first arrived on American soil and aimed to center slavery in conversations about U.S. history. The pamphlet, which will be distributed at driver’s license offices, comes at a time when the state is increasingly trying to regulate how race, sexuality and history are taught in public schools.

The Texas Tribune reviewed the 1836 Project committee’s final pamphlet and asked historians to comment on how accurately and thoroughly the document chronicles the state’s history.

The historians acknowledged that the committee had a difficult assignment; Donald Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, called squeezing the entirety of the state’s history into little more than a dozen pages a “herculean task.”

But the historians also noted that condensing the state’s history and painting it in a mostly celebratory light came at a cost. The pamphlet, they said, fails to fully hold institutions accountable for slavery and other forms of oppression and shortchanged Indigenous Texans, Tejanos, Black Texans and women.

The pamphlet engages with contemporary research — like literature about the lasting impact of the Confederacy — but also tries to fulfill state lawmakers’ wish to promote “patriotic education” and avoid disturbing Texas’ myths, said Raúl A. Ramos, a history professor at the University of Houston.

“The traditional mythic version of Texas history, it’s about the heroes of the Alamo having pure intentions of liberty and freedom in the abstract rather than the liberty to conquer Indigenous and Mexican lands and freedom to own enslaved people,” Ramos said. “It’s that abstract idea that is attractive and powerful and [that’s what] people gravitate towards, and I think that’s what people associate with patriotism.”

Below is a look at how the Project 1836 advisory committee’s pamphlet discusses four areas of Texas’ history — early settlements, the oil and cotton industries, the Alamo and slavery — and the historians’ notes on what the document’s authors chose to play up, play down or omit.

Early settlements

Trinidad Gonzales, a history professor at South Texas College, said the pamphlet aggrandizes Manifest Destiny, the belief that American settlers had the God-given right to expand across North America. It’s an idea about early settlements that was driven by 19th century nationalism and exceptionalism.

In the opening paragraph, the pamphlet says the land of Texas seemed like “an inhospitable zone to many,” but Americans “with fortitude and nerve” saw the opportunities and made the region productive.

“It wasn’t just the Americans who thought it was boundless opportunities. [The pamphlet’s authors] are trying to create the simplified Manifest Destiny story that fits this older myth of white Americans coming in and basically building Texas,” Gonzales said. “And when you do that, then you silence everybody else that participated in the history of Texas.”

Historians told the Tribune that the pamphlet glosses over the Indigenous, Spanish and Mexican populations that resided before, saying Texas was “nearly depopulated” before American settlers migrated to the land.

However, the Indigenous population significantly outnumbered American settlers in 1836, Gonzales said. The stretch of land from the Rio Grande Valley to Laredo was also once one of the most economically successful Spanish settlements, he added.

Emilio Zamora, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, called the pamphlet’s interpretation of early settlements in Texas “very unsettling.”

The document “speaks very negatively about the Mexicans and the colonial settlers that preceded them,” Zamora said.

Oil, not cotton

When it comes to the state’s economy, the pamphlet zeros in on the oil industry. The discovery of oil “ushered in a period of remarkable transformation,” the pamphlet says. It characterizes the wildcatter and oil derrick as “Texas icons.”

Nowadays, West Texas’ Permian Basin is the nation’s most productive oil region. The Permian produces more than 5 million barrels of the nation’s daily output of 11.6 million barrels of oil per day.

But before oil, there was cotton. Texas still leads the nation in cotton production. Cotton continues to be the state’s largest agricultural export and is responsible for thousands of jobs across sectors, such as ginning companies, warehouses and oil mill processing plants.

The 1836 Project pamphlet mentions oil five times. It never mentions cotton.

The pamphlet highlights Houston’s title as “energy capital of the world,” but cotton used to be so essential to the city that it would celebrate the crop with festivals, naming a symbolic leader for the carnival King Nottoc (“cotton” spelled backwards).

The pamphlet “ignores the reality that cotton production and poverty long characterized much of the Texas economy after the Civil War and through 1940. Instead it glamorizes the oil industry,” said Walter Buenger, a history professor at UT-Austin.

Buenger said that the state’s dependence on cotton made Texas one of the poorest states in the country.

The cotton market had globalized and become increasingly competitive, but the state delayed mechanizing cotton production to continue offering low-skilled jobs that had low returns. It resulted in an unequal distribution of income: While a handful of cotton traders got “fabulously wealthy,” most Texans struggled to survive, Buenger said.

“Through 1940, Texas was, for the most part, very poor. And they were poor because they were wrapped up in this cotton production business,” Buenger explained.

The Alamo

The Alamo, the Spanish mission founded in the 18th century in what is now San Antonio, has long been enshrined as “the cradle of Texas liberty.” The men who died as Mexican troops laid siege on the Alamo are often remembered as heroic martyrs who valued liberty over their lives.

“Only Texas could turn defeat into a legend — and a song, and a tourist attraction, and a major motion picture,” author Rosemary Kent famously said of the Alamo.

But the 1836 Project pamphlet does not dwell on the Alamo. Of the document’s 4,517 words, just 87 are spent on the siege.

Gene Preuss, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston-Downtown, called that a notable move away from traditionalist history in a state where the Alamo has often been at the center of Texas politics and history.

“There really isn’t much discussion of the Alamo in the pamphlet,” he said. “And I find that interesting because a lot of traditional histories would focus on the Alamo.”

In fitting the Battle of the Alamo into one abridged paragraph, the pamphlet’s authors appear to acknowledge the recent efforts to reexamine the historic event.

“For a long time, Texas history has been taught from one perspective,” Preuss said. “I think [the pamphlet] does enough to open some cracks, which I as a professor can open further for my students so that when they come into class, they don’t say things like ‘I didn’t know [Black Texans] participated in the Texas revolution’ [or] ‘I didn’t know Tejanos were on the side of Texians and died at the Alamo.'”

But the pamphlet also avoids going into that reexamination. It doesn’t mention, for instance, the issues brought up in the book “Forget the Alamo,” which was published last year and prompted the lieutenant governor to push for the cancellation of an event featuring the title at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. The book highlights how the defense of slavery played a key role in the conflict with Mexico and questions the garrison defenders’ military strategy.

Slavery

When the 1836 Project committee was established, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of “The 1619 Project,” feared that the 1836 Project was another attempt to veil the nation’s history of slavery.

“When it comes to slavery, some people have never wanted open debate and honesty. They seek to bury and prohibit instead,” Hannah-Jones said on Twitter.

The pamphlet does mention slavery, acknowledging that it became an economic engine for the state. Republican lawmakers also required that the document mention how on June 19, 1865, the date that became the basis for Juneteenth, Union soldiers in Galveston announced the liberation of all enslaved people.

“We wanted to reemphasize and make dang true that everybody understands that slavery was a bad thing and Texas participated,” Frazier, the chair of the subcommittee in charge of drafting the pamphlet, said at the August committee meeting.

But many of the historians the Tribune spoke with said the pamphlet doesn’t go far enough, noting that it omits how central defending slavery was in the Texas war of secession from Mexico and the Civil War. They say it airbrushes gruesome accounts of how enslaved people were treated.

“Slavery is mentioned only as a complication that delayed annexation by the United States. The pamphlet never names any enslaved individuals, nor does it describe their fight for freedom,” historians Leah LaGrone and Michael Phillips wrote in a Texas Monthly column.

Ramos, the history professor at the University of Houston, said the pamphlet’s treatment of slavery is an example of how the document takes a passive, ambiguous approach to inequity and oppression that doesn’t hold Americans who participated in institutions accountable.

The pamphlet, he said, is a document birthed out of a political process and should be read as such.

“Sometimes people interpret history as being political, as being a way people might signal their politics,” Ramos said. “But it’s also political in that way that is part of how we view ourselves as people, as a community, and how we continue to either build community or divide community.”

Yuriko Schumacher contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Bullock Texas State History Museum, Texas Monthly, The New York Times, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Houston and the University of Houston-Downtown have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/09/26/texas-1836-project-pamphlet/.

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

The rise of “QMaga”: Conspiracy theorists, Christian nationalists unite as MAGA movement gets darker

During his 2020 campaign, former President Donald Trump made a point of being vague when discussing the far-right QAnon movement. Trump refrained from overtly promoting QAnon and its conspiracy theories, but he wouldn’t say anything critical of them either and claimed that he “didn’t know much about” their movement.

Times have changed. Trump is now openly promoting QAnon and is using exact phrases associated with the group, including “the storm” and their slogan “where we go one, we go all.” And Trump is hardly the only MAGA Republican who is embracing QAnon.

Mother Jones’ David Corn describes the intersection of QAnon, MAGA and “Christian nationalism” as “QMaga,” attacking it as an authoritarian threat to U.S. democracy in an article that was originally published in his Our Land newsletter and was republished by Mother Jones on September 23. Extremism in the GOP is a subject that Corn also tackles in his new book, “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.”

“For years, Trump had played footsie with QAnon, claiming he didn’t know much about it but praising its adherents’ supposed patriotism, their opposition to pedophilia and, naturally, their cultish love of him,” Corn explains in his Mother Jones/Our Land article. “Offered the chance to denounce this perverse craziness, he bobbed and weaved…. No more. He went full QAnon the other day when he posted online a photoshopped image of him wearing a Q pin. To make the message clear, this picture proclaimed, ‘The Storm Is Coming’ — a QAnon catchphrase referring to that ultimate showdown between Trump and the evildoers. And it contained the abbreviation for the QAnon slogan, ‘where we go one, we go all.'”

The fictional “evildoers” that Corn is referring to are, according to QAnon’s outlandish conspiracy theory, an international cabal of child sex traffickers, pedophiles, Satanists and cannibals who have hijacked the United States’ federal government. Trump, as QAnon sees it, was elected president in 2016 to fight the cabal — and QAnon believes that Trump’s battle against the forces of darkness didn’t end when he lost the 2020 election. Members of QAnon were among the far-right Trump supporters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021.

“The insanity of a former, and possibly future, president bear-hugging QAnon cannot be overstated,” Corn warns. “And this was no one-off, late-in-the-night s****posting from the former guy. He zapped out other posts with QAnon references. Then four days later, at a rally in Ohio, he delivered an apocalyptic speech against the backdrop of music resembling the QAnon theme song. It was here that Trump supporters raised their hands and pointed a finger — possibly signaling ‘one,’ in an allusion to that QAnon slogan.”

Corn continues, “The supposed purpose of the event was to whip up support for GOP Senate candidate J.D. Vance. But the gathering demonstrated the fusion of MAGA extremism with QAnon and Christian nationalism. The crowd cheered as Trump proclaimed the country had become a hellhole with a crumbling economy, rampant crime, and no freedom of speech. It was all lies, but the fervor of the crowd and the arm waving were reminiscent of a religious revival meeting.”

According to Corn, the MAGA movement “has morphed into QMaga.”

“The irrationality has spread from the evidence-free belief that sinister players — China, Venezuela, the CIA, the media, Democrats, voting machine companies — conspired to steal the election from Trump to the conviction that American politics has become a clash between patriotic Christians and cannibalistic Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” Corn explains. “The Ohio arena was not full, and the empty seats indicated that Trump’s mix of conspiracism, cult of personality, end-times ravings, and fundamentalism may not be a bestseller. But many of the GOP election denialists running in state elections this year — including gubernatorial candidates Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, Arizona — have ties to QAnon.”

Corn continues, “Both Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert were QAnoners before they were elected to Congress in the last election. But perhaps of greater concern is that the entire GOP, which has supported Trump’s authoritarian Big Lie crusade, is now willing to follow Trump further into the depths of fearmongering and madness.”

“A magical moment”: NASA pulls a “Deep Impact” as its spacecraft successfully collides with asteroid

Buried in the dirt across the globe is a thin layer of dust sprinkled with iridium, a silvery-white metal abundantly found in asteroids. This is the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundary, which is some of the most solid evidence we have that a giant space rock wiped out all of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The impact was so massive and deadly, it killed off 75% of all animals and plants on Earth, leaving behind a scar that persists today.

Such a devastating collision could happen again — and with equally catastrophic extinction. Would humans be prepared if a comet or meteor was suddenly aimed right at us? We can’t know until it happens.

In fact, the president of the B612 Foundation, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to planetary defense, has said there’s a 100% chance of Earth getting hit by an asteroid at some point. We just don’t know when.

NASA is pulling a “Deep Impact”: New spacecraft will test asteroid deflection methods

Thankfully, some smart individuals have been trying to prepare for this scenario, which could one day save humans from joining the dinosaurs in the dustbin of history.

As Salon’s Matthew Rozsa previously reported, real-life NASA engineers were “acutely concerned about the threat of space rocks ending life as we know it.” To that end, NASA launched the spacecraft “to test means of neutralizing such a threat, using methods similar to (but not exactly like) those seen in the 1998 big-budget asteroid disaster movies ‘Armageddon‘ and ‘Deep Impact.'”

Today, we got the first glimpse of what a future planetary defense program would look like in real life. At 7:14 p.m. ET on Sept. 26, a space probe called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) crashed into an asteroid at 14,000 mph, or just under four miles per second.

Its target was Dimorphos, a small asteroid that is a moonlet of 65803 Didymos, a slightly larger asteroid half a mile wide. With a diameter of 160 meters (530 feet), Dimorphos is about the height of the Washington Monument. Though it was chosen for this test run, the asteroid currently poses no threat to Earth. It’s the unknown asteroids we have to worry about.

This strategy — sort of like a game of billiards — is believed by experts to be the best defense against space rocks.

But by hitting Dimorphos with DART, causing what’s known as a “kinetic impact,” scientists hoped they could shift its orbit. This strategy — sort of like a game of billiards — is believed by experts to be the best defense against space rocks. Blowing them up with nukes, like in “Armageddon,” would almost certainly backfire, so it’s not recommended to get astronomy advice from Michael Bay.

Like a Bay film, the DART program cost hundreds of millions of dollars ($324.5 million, to be precise) and involved at least one explosion. Only, after watching this event, you feel smarter, whereas viewing something from the “Transformers” franchise may make your brain feel like a deflated balloon.

For the first hour or so of a NASA livestream, Didymos and Dimorphos appeared as nothing more than a white blip just a few pixels wide against a sea of black. Slowly, asteroids began to fill the screen, and their features gained definition. About five minutes from impact, DART was traveling too fast and too far away for a human to be behind the controls, so it flew on autopilot. The probe precision locked onto Dimorphos and charged ahead.

ATLAS observations of the DART spacecraft impact at Didymos! pic.twitter.com/26IKwB9VSo

— ATLAS Project (@fallingstarIfA) September 27, 2022

Soon, the rocky textures of the asteroid became bigger and bigger, resembling shale gravel on a beach. Then, the feed went dark. That’s when a room full of engineers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) cheered and clapped at their desks. The mission was a huge success.

“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind, an era in which we potentially have the capability to protect ourselves from something like a dangerous, hazardous asteroid impact,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said. “What an amazing thing. We’ve never had that capability before.”

This wasn’t the first time that a spacecraft had been intentionally crashed into an object in space. In 2005, the Deep Impact spacecraft (no relation to the aforementioned 1998 movie) shot 100 kilograms of copper at the comet Tempel 1 to learn more about what comets contain on the inside. And in 2014, the Rosetta space probe dropped a robotic module named Philae on the comet called 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko — the first controlled touchdown on a comet nucleus. Two years later, Rosetta ended its run by crashing directly into the comet.

In fact, deliberately crashing spacecraft is a relatively common practice. But DART’s suicide mission is the first time that a probe has ever been used to move a space rock in a different direction.

NASA previously described the operation as “the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazard.”

The DART program, a joint operation between NASA and the APL, began late last year. They launched DART, a 600 kilogram (1,320 pound) spacecraft aboard a SpaceX rocket, eventually arriving at Dimorphos, about 6.8 million miles from Earth. NASA previously described the operation as “the world’s first full-scale mission to test technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid or comet hazard.”

This impact could have generated a massive crater, spewing plumes of dust into space, which could then be measured and compared to computer models, informing the design of future anti-asteroid weaponry. It will still be a while before we know exactly what happened.

To see this collision in action, astronomers pointed ground telescopes at Dimorphos, but they also used the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Telescope to catch a peek of the impact. DART brought along its own webcam, the LICIACube, a tiny satellite developed by the Italian Space Agency that will give us some of the closest images of the spacecraft’s suicide mission. The initial photos were courtesy of the Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical Navigation aka the DRACO camera.

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While the DART mission was historic, will it be enough to inform us of what to do should an asteroid be headed directly for Earth? Unfortunately, we actually won’t know for several weeks or months. It will take time for enough data to be collected to see exactly how the orbit of Dimorphos changed.

As soon as we know more, DART’s crash can be used to refine strategies for deflecting asteroids and comets to better inform future missions.

We may not even use this collision-avoidance strategy in the future. Other options on the table include ion beams and gravity tractors to push incoming objects away from us. Scientists will try anything to prevent our planet from being smushed, but the biggest factor will always be time. If we detect an incoming space rock, it could require several years to develop and send off the deflecting probe.

“The risk of impact from asteroids and other hazardous space objects is low, but the damage would be immense; developing the capability to prevent impact is a key long term objective,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., tweeted on Monday. It feels like Glaze is right — we may be moving into a new era for humanity, one where extinction-level events from space rocks are a little less likely.

You can watch NASA’s official broadcast of DART’s impact with Dimorphos below via YouTube:

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“House of the Dragon” reminds us that hell hath no fury like an ex-best friend scorned

Ten years after “House of the Dragon” established where George R.R. Martin’s tradition of terrible wedding feasts likely began, Rhaenyra and Alicent have matured into their roles as adult royals – except where it comes to the latter’s ability to forgive youthful transgressions. The sixth episode demonstrates this when Alicent (now played by Olivia Cooke) demands an audience with Rhaenyra (Emma D’Arcy) moments after she’s given birth to her youngest son. Rhaenyra remains the named heir to the Iron Throne, but Alicent is the queen, giving her the higher hand in this card game.

Alicent also has experienced the enormous pain and distress of childbirth, which means she knows precisely what she’s asking of Rhaenyra, who can neither refuse her queen’s command nor show frailty while walking the long distance between her bed chamber and that of Alicent and Rhaenyra’s father King Viserys (Paddy Considine).

Rhaenyra stands, painfully passing the afterbirth moments after their handmaids tie her into her gown, and leans heavily on her husband, Ser Laenor Velayron (John Macmillan), as she limps her way to the queen and king, clenching her teeth even harder than she holds her newborn. When she finally gets to her destination, the queen pretends to be shocked to see Rhaenyra out of bed so soon after her labors, but both women know what’s going on here.

Alicent wants to confirm a suspicion she has about Rhaenyra’s children, which she does by sneaking a peek at the dark down covering the baby’s head and noticing its similar coloring to that of Ser Harwin Strong (Ryan Corr), heir to Harrenhal. Rhaenyra knows this is also Alicent’s version of imposing a Walk of Atonement on her rival, only no absolution is guaranteed upon completion.

The trail of blood on the floor behind her as she leaves the royal chambers leaves no mistake as to what Alicent’s move signals. In the coming conflict, Rhaenyra should expect no mercy, because Alicent knows none will be given.

But it also punches home what is shaping up to be one of the core lessons of this series, along with a major reason for the decline of the Targaryen dynasty: Nobody knows how to hurt you like an ex-best friend.

All is not right with “Dragon’s” Alicent

“Game of Thrones” left in its wake many sins that “House of the Dragon” is attempting to ameliorate, not the least of which is the way its women were written and presented onscreen. That likely has a lot to do with the fact that in the entirety of its run, only two women received writing credits on episodes, with one woman eking out a director’s credit.

The absence of women behind the scenes in “Game of Thrones” showed in ways that were both extreme – as in, the ways women’s bodies were objectified through so-called “sexposition” and lurid onscreen portrayals of rape – and simply disappointing, like Brienne’s weeping over Jaime and Daenerys’ fastforward from problematic savior into Lady Hitler.

“The Princess and the Queen” is an early example of the ways that “House of the Dragon” is trying to learn from and improve upon the sins of its predecessor by the simple fact that it calls on a woman, Sara Hess, to tell a painfully difficult story about female friends who become enemies.

Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower and Paddy Considine as Viserys Targaryen in “House of the Dragon” (Ollie Upton / HBO)

Martin wrote Alicent and Rhaenyra as rivals from the start; on the page, they are a decade apart in age. In the show, they’re both teenagers as well as fast friends by the time Rhaenyra’s mother Aemma dies in childbirth, and Viserys names Rhaenyra his heir. They share a common emotional history, in that both women lost their mothers at young ages and are the only daughters of demanding, duty-obsessed fathers.

Pitting women against each other is a common lazy trope in TV, even ones made for female audiences. Not surprisingly, over years you’ll find that sin is most frequently indulged in by male writers. But Hess, along with Charmaine DeGraté, who wrote the prior episode “We Light the Way,” takes care to steer around that cliché’s common traps by spelling out the ways these women have been played against each other by their fathers, and the demands of a patriarchal system.

In a way, this pays homage to Martin’s usage of shifting points of view throughout “A Song of Ice and Fire,” which prevents the reader from drawing easy conclusions as to the heroism or villainy of its principal characters.

“Fire & Blood,” the basis for “House of the Dragon,” establishes from its opening pages that much of what’s to follow comes from a variety of sources, some of them unreliable. The drama’s writers extensively take advantage of this narrative malleability when it comes to two of Rhaenyra’s most significant relationships, the queasy sexual attraction she has with her uncle Daemon (Matt Smith) and the dissolution of the sisterly bond she once shared with Alicent.

“House of the Dragon” establishes in its opening moments that this season is being told from Rhaenyra’s viewpoint through a brief voiceover narration by D’Arcy. It’s difficult to discern any emotion in her voice on the first viewing of that scene, but considering what comes after, and especially the events of the sixth episode, perhaps what we’re hearing is bitterness and regret.

Over what? There are many ways to answer that, starting with Rhaenyra’s choice to abruptly freeze out Alicent after Viserys announced he would marry her.

Emma D’Arcy as Rhaenyra Targaryen and Paddy Considine as Viserys Targaryen in “House of the Dragon” (Ollie Upton/HBO)

Before that, Rhaenyra and Alicent act like sisters – sharing confidences, spending every spare moment together, and behaving toward one another with such closeness that some fans speculate they might have been in love. In their youth, Rhaenyra is the typical “dangerous” best friend to Alicent’s dutiful daughter. When Alicent’s father Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) tells her to woo the king, she complies. Rhaenyra, in contrast, refuses her father’s commands to marry until he forces her, to salvage her reputation and his own.

But women’s relationships are typically depicted with a level of intimacy not shared or displayed by most men. That explains why, for example, Rhaenyra is seen resting her head in Alicent’s lap when they’re young.

Friends that close don’t take it well when one keeps a secret from another, which is what Otto, as the Hand of the King, orders his daughter to do when she begins to secretly spend time with Viserys while he’s in mourning. But, as my colleague Alison Stine points out, she’s also genuinely compassionate, which ends up unraveling her relationship with Rhaenyra.

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When rumors about Rhaenyra visiting a pleasure house with Daemon begin circulating, and Otto brings whispers about Rhaenyra’s compromised honor to Viserys, Alicent asks her former friend for the truth, believing Rhaenyra wouldn’t lie to her. But she does, leading to Alicent taking her side against her father – which gets him fired, disgracing his house.

And Alicent learns the truth in the worst way possible, finding out that Rhaenyra has seduced Ser Criston Cole (Fabien Frankel), a knight so bound to his honor that the thought of it being publicly besmirched leads him to beat a man to death. (Which, by the way, feeds into a separate trope: Bury Your Gays.) Instead of punishing Ser Criston with a gelding or death, she takes him to her side, acknowledging they have a common enemy in the form of an old love who betrayed them.

Hess writes “The Princess and the Queen” as a stretch of petty paybacks from Alicent’s side of the castle, beginning with Rhaenyra’s bloody march of duty and leading to Ser Criston goading Ser Harwin into an emotional confrontation during a royal training exercise between Alicent and Viserys’ silver-haired children, and Rhaenyra’s dark-haired sons.

It is strongly insinuated that Ser Harwin fathered the princess’ boys, which aligns with what we know about how dominant genes work and the fact that Laenor is not interested in her or any other woman. One may also surmise that Ser Criston sees Ser Harwin, leader of the City Watch, as the off-brand version of himself.

Olivia Cooke as Alicent Hightower and Fabien Frankel as Ser Criston Cole in “House of the Dragon” (Ollie Upton / HBO)

Spurned love is a real humdinger, and one can imagine the fury a man with existing rage issues must have felt by seeing his Kirkland version sire a bunch of rugrats with the woman he once would have died for. Never mind that Rhaenyra had to turn him down to fulfill her father’s plan for her and, not only that, marry and give birth to male heirs “for the realm,” even though she never wanted that life.

Thinking of those children, however, is not enough to move the queen and the princess to put aside their ancient quarrel. Before her father and the council, Rhaenyra acknowledges the strife between their families and apologizes for her role in that, suggesting Alicent recall that they used to be BFFs. This wins her nothing. So Rhaenyra turns to strategy, suggesting that along with a betrothal between her eldest son and Alicent’s daughter to squash any potential succession beef, Alicent’s dragonless child would receive his choice of the next clutch of her dragon’s eggs.

In response, and before a room full of men, Alicent calls attention to the fact that Rhaenyra’s breast milk is staining her dress.

Sometimes 10 years is enough time for angry wounds to mend and enmities to soften – sometimes. Generally, human sentiment veers the other way, as we carry and nourish old slights against each other across the years and, here’s the important part, for no good reason.

Heading into the second half of the first season, “House of the Dragon” is beginning to firm up the motivations of an array of players in this series’ coming war for the throne. The book describes the factions as the Greens – Alicent’s side – versus the Blacks, referring to Rhaenyra’s bewilderingly (but not really) midnight-maned children. Their clash is not the only one that is staged in this episode. Indeed, the villain who emerged takes advantage of the conflict between Alicent and Rhaenyra to his benefit.

But this is one example of what will surely be many that will stretch back to the simple fact that most of these deaths could have been avoided … if two young women at the center of a world run by men remembered that all they had was each other, and trusted in that truth.

“House of the Dragon” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.

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The princess and the tea: Why Buckingham Palace is worried about “The Crown”

Less than a month after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Buckingham Palace is bracing itself for potential fallout due to a popular television program. The show is “The Crown,” and the palace? Apparently, they’re worried. This, according to a “senior royal insider” who told The Telegraph that the Netflix show is “exploitative” and wanted to stress to fans that the show, which chronicles the life of the queen and other royals starting in 1947, is “a drama not a documentary.”

What could have the palace up in arms? Season 5 of “The Crown” is set to premiere on Netflix on Nov. 9. Production on the show stopped briefly as a sign of respect for the late monarch, but what remains unchanged is the date for the upcoming season, which moves the story forward to 1992. Not the best year for the royal family. Salon examines what could be alarming the palace and what to expect from the blockbuster show.

The queen was apparently a fan of “The Crown.” Where does the Netflix series go from here?

Season 4 of “The Crown” ends with trouble. In the finale, titled appropriately with the double-meaning “War,” Princess Diana and then-Prince Charles want out of their marriage (Charles to be with the object of his long-term affair, Camilla; Diana to be free), but the queen is resistant. Left awkwardly and alone off to the side at a royal family Christmas photo, Diana’s eyes fill with tears in the last shot.

The next season will pick up the tension and then some. Similiar to HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” the actors change at “The Crown” as the real-life people they’re portraying age. Olivia Colman is replaced by Imelda Staunton as the queen. Elizabeth Debicki takes over from Emma Corrin, who won a Golden Globe playing Diana, while Dominic West has stepped into Josh O’Connor’s shoes as Charles. It’s apparently a teaser trailer for the new season that has so alarmed the palace.

THE CROWN NATION WAKE UUUUUP pic.twitter.com/ECnd6ZpbVF

— s (@colmansfilm) September 24, 2022

In that 30-second trailer, Diana and Charles are seen getting ready for respective television interviews while a barrage of journalists read headlines about the end of the royal couple’s marriage. “This is becoming all-out war,” says one voiceover, tying in nicely to the last episode’s title.

That interview

An interview with Charles where he admits to cheating will be dramatized.

Perhaps the show chose a montage of interviews for the teaser as interviews will play a part in the next season as well. A big part. An interview with Charles where he admits to cheating will be dramatized along with an episode of the BBC documentary “Panorama.”

Titled “An Interview with HRH The Princess of Wales” Diana was interviewed by Martin Bashir for nearly an hour on “Panorama,” during which time she openly discussed depression, her marriage, and her relationship with the royal family, who she believed saw her as a “threat of some kind.” In the interview, she also famously said she didn’t feel many people wanted her to be queen, but she hoped she could someday be the “queen of people’s hearts, in people’s hearts.”

In 2022, the BBC formally apologized for that interview, which was obtained unethically after Bashir fabricated allegations against the nanny of Diana’s young children in order to convince Diana to talk, providing falsified bank statements as so-called evidence. Not only did the BBC swear never to air the interview again, according to TalkTV, they also vowed “never to provide the rights to other broadcasters.” But that doesn’t appear to cover dramatizations, like “The Crown.”

The royal source told The Telegraph, “What people forget is that there are real human beings and real lives at the heart of this.”

The end of marriages

The dissolution of Charles and Diana will obviously make up a large component of the next season of “The Crown.” But it’s not the only royal marriage that combusted during that time. Princess Anne divorced her then-husband Mark Phillips and Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah, Duchess of York, also ended.

It seems unlikely that Season 5 of “The Crown” will be a love letter to Charles.

Famously, Prince Andrew resigned from public roles in May 2020 following allegations of sexual abuse and suspicion over his association with the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In 2022, Andrew paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual assaulting her when she was 17. Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah, known as Fergie, less famously inherited the queen’s beloved corgis upon her passing.

Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth II in “The Crown” (Netflix/Alex Bailey)Less about the queen

The source also reported to The Telegraph that the upcoming season of “The Crown” may create tension because the era it’s dramatizing is so recent. Real-life footage already exists of some of the show’s events and characters that will allow viewers to draw comparisons. Along with the well-known interviews of Diana and Charles, there are countless reels of news footage. “People will have more of an opportunity to compare the real people with the fiction they see in ‘The Crown’,” the source told The Telegraph. “In the past they didn’t get so much coverage, so in that sense it was harder for people to be able to compare and contrast the drama with the reality.”

Will the drama live up to the reality, or vice versa? In the previous season, Philip, counseling Diana, reminds her the queen is “the only person that matters. She’s the oxygen we all breathe.” And in the wake of the real queen’s death, “The Crown” creator Peter Morgan in a statement called the show “a love letter” to her.

But the upcoming season may be less about her, and more about the young woman who was the “people’s princess,” if not the queen of their hearts. As Forbes wrote, “‘The Crown’ is just going to be an entirely different experience in the wake of Elizabeth’s death and the fact that its new primary focus, Charles, is the actual king now.”

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It seems unlikely that Season 5 of “The Crown” will be a love letter to Charles, but perhaps it is to Diana. And one thing is certain; viewership of the hit show shows no sign of slowing. After the queen’s passing, viewing hours shot up by 800% in the United Kingdom alone.

This new season is purported to be the second to last, which may also increase interest. As for Season 6? Hang on to your fascinators. West, who plays Charles, told Deadline that the final season “will be as tumultuous as it gets.”

about “The Crown”

9 new fall items already spotted on Trader Joe’s shelves

Fall has officially arrived and that’s super apparent at Trader Joe’s.

In celebration of pumpkin spice season and sweater weather, the California-based retailer has begun rolling out its roster of seasonal, autumnal-themed goodies. The specific products were first teased by food blogger and internet personality Markie Devo, who took to Instagram to share a detailed list back in August 26. And on Sept. 12, Trader Joe’s released a podcast episode that outlined all the new and returning items coming to stores. Pumpkin Spiced Joe-Joe’s Sandwich Cookies, Salted Maple Ice Cream and Mexican Style Hot Cocoa Melts are just a few items to keep an eye out for!

6 items discontinued by Trader Joe’s this summer

Here are nine new fall items that have already been spotted in TJ’s shelves. The fall products are being introduced in waves and may vary from region to region.

This list adds to Salon Food’s growing library of supermarket guides. If you’re looking to enjoy a simple yet nutritious fall comfort meal, check out the 4 best soups that are available at TJ’s right now.

Honey Crisp Apple Cinnamon Greek Yogurt

Featuring an apple and cinnamon yogurt base with bits of fresh apple chunks, this seasonal yogurt celebrates two of fall’s most revered flavors. The yogurt is on the sweeter side, making it perfect as a snack or post-dinner dessert, but it can also be enjoyed for breakfast alongside granola, nuts and fresh fruit.

Per a handful of TJ’s shoppers on Reddit, the Honey Crisp Apple Cinnamon Greek Yogurt was introduced to their local stores in early September. Many users raved about the yogurt’s taste, which is also heavy on cinnamon.

“Just tried this and YUM,” wrote user u/btrd_toast. “Thumbs up from me… It is sweet but not too sweet for me. Similar level to the guava passionfruit and apricot mango flavors of this yogurt style, which I’m also a fan of.”

Pumpkin Gnocchi

Pumpkin Gnocchi (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

This new variation of gnocchi is a pillowy delicacy made with potato and pumpkin. The gnocchi tastes great on its own, coated in your favorite store-bought pasta sauce or a homemade rendition, like this brown butter and sage cream sauce shared on Reddit. It can also be used as a topping on salads alongside pancetta and crumbled feta.

TJ’s is also introducing another pumpkin-flavored pasta — the Honey Roasted Pumpkin Ravioli. The filling for each ravioli is made with roasted and pureed sweet pumpkin that’s then blended with ricotta and mozzarella cheeses. And according to the grocery chain, the ravioli tastes great with their Autumnal Harvest Pasta Sauce or with melted & browned butter or extra virgin olive oil.

Pumpkin Spiced Joe-Joe’s Sandwich Cookies

TJ’s fan-favorite rendition of Oreos is taking the original Pumpkin Joe-Joe’s one step further by coating the cookies in a sweet pumpkin spice-flavored yogurt that’s topped with specks of sea salt.

“All-dressed-up Pumpkin Spiced Joe-Joe’s are an excellent anytime indulgence and are equally well-suited as a gift for all the pumpkin spice devotees in your life,” the chain wrote on their website. “They make a splendidly sweet way to celebrate the season, offered at a splendidly sweet price.”

Caramel Apple Dipping Kit

Caramel Apple Dipping Kit (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

TJ’s Caramel Apple Dipping Kit doesn’t come with any apples, just the accessories, which includes caramel, peanuts, sprinkles and six sticks. This build-your-own treat is fun to enjoy with family and friends, especially after an apple-picking party or a fall-themed dinner party.

When it comes to choosing what kind of apples to use for the kit, the possibilities are endless. A few great options are Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith and Pink Lady apples which are all crisp, juicy and slightly tart.

Pumpkin Chipotle Roasting Sauce

Pumpkin Chipotle Roasting Sauce (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

This limited-time-only product will encourage you to turn on your dormant (but not forgotten) oven and cook up a variety of baked and slow roasted dishes! Per TJ’s, their Pumpkin Chipotle Roasting Sauce flaunts a strong, savory pumpkin flavor with hints of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, allspice and clove. There’s also apple cider vinegar, which adds a bit of acidity, and sweet molasses along with Chipotle peppers and adobo sauce. Our mouths are already watering after reading the ingredient list!

TJ’s recommends using this sauce on top of cauliflower or sweet peppers before roasting them in the oven. It can also be used as a marinade for chicken, pork or any other cuts of meat and, even, as a pasta sauce with a splash of cream.

Pumpkin Sticky Toffee Cakes

Pumpkin Sticky Toffee Cakes (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

Priced at $3.99 for a box of 2, Trader Joe’s Pumpkin Sticky Toffee Cakes are mini Bundt cakes flavored with pumpkin, dates, and brown sugar and coated in a deliciously sticky caramel sauce. Simply pop a cake into the microwave and once warm, top it with a dollop (or two) of vanilla ice cream or fresh whipped cream!

“From the soft, moist texture of the Cake to the rich sweetness of the Sticky Toffee sauce and unmistakably autumnal pumpkin, cinnamon, and clove notes throughout, everything about this dessert conjures coziness,” TJ’s states. “And its price conjures value.”

Brussel Sprouts and Uncured Bacon Ravioli

Brussel Sprouts and Uncured Bacon Ravioli (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

Stuffed with brussels sprouts, uncured bacon, cheese and caramelized onion, TJ’s Brussel Sprouts and Uncured Bacon Ravioli is a rich yet simple meal to enjoy for weeknight fall dinners. Per a few Redditors, the pasta is best enjoyed with just butter, salt & pepper or white sauce or TJ’s signature Autumnal Pasta Sauce.

“This was delicious with olive oil and grated Parmesan,” wrote user u/kajacana. “I also added some of the sweet Italian chicken sausage.”

Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants

Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

Two desserts — cheesecake and croissants — come together as one in TJ’s all new Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants. Per the grocery chain, the sweet treat is made with a four-inch square of all-butter dough that’s topped with a scoop of “impossibly creamy, cheesecake-inspired filling of cream cheese, pastry cream, velvety pumpkin purée, and a warming blend of cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger.”

To prepare the croissants, bake them in a 350-degree oven for 25 to 30 minutes. For an extra touch of sweetness, finish them off with a dollop of fresh whipped cream or a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Cinnamon Roll Blondie Bar Baking Mix

Cinnamon Roll Blondie Bar Baking Mix (Photo courtesy of Joseph Neese)

In the same vein as TJ’s Pumpkin Cheesecake Croissants, the retailer’s Cinnamon Roll Blondie Bar Baking Mix also combines two desserts into one! Each box contains the necessary ingredients to whip up chewy Blondie Bars that are bespeckled with sweet and gooey Cinnamon Roll filling. There’s also powdered-sugar icing which compliments the finished baked dessert.

According to TJ’s official website, “The end result of this cinnamony-sweet baking adventure is a batch of Blondie Bars that’s sure to please, morning or night.”

Here are the remaining new fall items to keep an eye out for during your next TJ’s grocery run:

Spatchcocked Sweet & Savory Chicken
Gluten-Free Pumpkin Streusel Muffins
Cut Stripey Joe
Mexican Style Hot Cocoa Melts
Turkey & Cranberry Recipe Cat Treats
Organic Maple Vinaigrette Dressing
Caramel Apple Mochi
Salted Maple Ice Cream
Apple Caramels

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Trader Joe’s shopping guides:

Salon Food writes about stuff we think you’ll like. While our editorial team independently selected these products, Salon has affiliate partnerships, so making a purchase through our links may earn us a commission.

These cheesy, mushroom-topped white pie pizza bagels are the grown-up snack you deserve

People have a lot of opinions about pizza. There are certain toppings that seem to invite controversy — anchovies, black olives, pineapple — and certain preparations that stoke the ire of entire swaths of the country. Being back in Chicago, for example, I’m used to jokes about how our deep-dish pizza is really just a casserole.

But I’ve never met someone who doesn’t like a good pizza bagel now and again. After all, as the preeminent pizza bagel company, Bagel Bites, writes, “when pizza and a bagel come together, snack time can be any time.”

Homemade pizza in under an hour is entirely possible — and entirely delicious

While growing up, my family only ever bought the pepperoni variety — and that was pretty sparingly. However, I recently found out — about a decade too late — that the Bagel Bites roster of flavors also includes sausage and pepperoni, supreme, cheesy garlic bread and “extreme nacho.” Plus, there’s an entire line of “breakfast bites,” so I figured, why not expand the pizza bagel universe even further? Why not make a white pie bagel bite?

As the name suggests, a white pie, or pizza bianca, has a white cheese and olive oil base in place of the traditional tomato sauce. And while a cheese-heavy pizza may sound difficult to adapt for a plant-based diet, it’s actually a snap thanks to the ever-growing selection of vegan cheeses. Here, we’ll use tangy, creamy almond milk ricotta — which adds a tremendously luxe texture to the pizza bagels — and plant-based mozzarella. A few sprinkles of nutritional yeast really enhance the “cheesy” flavor, as well.

From there, the topping options are endless, though my favorite combination includes spinach, sautéed mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. Finally, there are numerous vegan bagels on the market, but I’m partial to the Thomas’ Everything Bagel Thins.

White Pie Pizza Bagels

Yields

4 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

35 minutes

Ingredients

2 bagel thins
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup mushrooms of choice, finely chopped
1/4 cup fresh spinach, chopped
2 teaspoons red pepper flakes
2 tablespoons sun-dried tomatoes, drained and finely chopped
4 tablespoons almond milk ricotta
4 teaspoons nutritional yeast
4 teaspoons lemon zest
4 tablespoons vegan mozzarella
Salt to taste

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Split the bagel thins in half. Place the four halves upright on a baking sheet. Brush with 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil and sprinkle with a little salt.
In a medium-sized pan, add the remaining 1/2 tablespoon of olive oil and the garlic. Stir over medium heat until the garlic begins to soften and becomes aromatic, about 2 minutes. Add the mushrooms and spinach to the pan. Sauté until the mushrooms have softened and the spinach has wilted. Add salt to taste and remove from the heat.
In a small bowl, mix the ricotta, nutritional yeast and lemon zest. Add salt to taste.
Divide the ricotta mixture among the four bagel halves and spread it evenly across the surface of the bagels. Next, sprinkle the vegan mozzarella evenly among the bagels. Divide the mushroom and spinach across the bagels, followed by the chopped sun-dried tomatoes.
Place the sheet pan in the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Then remove the pizza bagels and allow them to cool before eating.

about why we love pizza

“The Monster”: Ex-Jan. 6 investigator sounds alarm over mysterious WH call — here’s what we know

Former Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., who served as a senior technical adviser to the House Jan. 6 committee, sounded the alarm over a phone call between a Capitol rioter and the White House on the day of the attack.

Riggleman, who served as an adviser to the committee until April, in an interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes provided a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation and warned that the White House link to the insurrection needed to be “explored more.”

Riggleman said he had a “real a-ha moment” when he saw “that the White House switchboard had connected to a rioter’s phone” while the Capitol attack took place.

Insider urges DOJ to further explore who phoned Jan. 6 rioter from White House

Coming from a background in national security and intelligence matters, Riggleman assembled a group of data miners and analysts to sift through 20 million lines of data including emails, texts, phone records, and social media posts tied to the attack on the Capitol.

His team looked closely at six groups, which included the Trump team, Trump family, rally goers, unaffiliated DOJ-charged defendants, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. He called the data visualization his team created “The Monster,” which reveals connections between Jan. 6 attackers and the White House.

Riggleman called for a closer investigation into links between the White House and those involved in the attack.

“The thread that needs to be pulled identifying all the White House numbers and why we have certain specific people, why they were talking to the White House,” he told 60 Minutes.

But the committee pushed back on Riggleman’s claims. The panel said in a statement to 60 Minutes that Riggleman “had limited knowledge of the committee’s investigation” and departed before the committee’s “most important investigative work.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a member of the committee, told CNN that Riggleman’s claim about the mysterious call did not “pan out.”

“He does not know what happened after April and a lot has happened in our investigation,” she said. “Everything that he was able to relay prior to his departure has been followed up on and in some cases didn’t really peter out (sic), or there might have been a decision that suggested there was a connection between one number and one e-mail and a person that turned out not to pan out. So we follow up on everything, and, you know, I don’t know what Mr. Riggleman is doing really.”

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CNN reported that the phone that connected to the White House belonged to Anton Lunyk, a Trump supporter from Brooklyn, New York, who traveled to Washington DC the night before the attack on the Capitol, according to the report.

The call came from the publicly available number for the White House and lasted only nine seconds. It’s unclear whether the call was made by mistake or whether it was sent to voicemail, but the call came after former President Donald Trump posted a video message on Twitter telling the rioters at the Capitol, “go home, we love you, you’re very special,” at 4:17pm.

Multiple sources with knowledge of the probe told CNN that “Lunyk says he doesn’t remember receiving the nine-second call and claims he doesn’t know anyone who worked in the Trump White House.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who also sits on the committee, criticized Riggleman for publicly floating his warning.

“One of the things that has given our committee credibility is we’ve been very careful about what we say; not to overstate matters, not to understate matters. And without the advantage of the additional information we’ve gathered since he left the committee, it poses real risk to be suggesting things,” he told CNN.

The 60 Minutes interview came ahead of the release of Riggleman’s unauthorized book “The Breach,” a behind-the-scenes look at the Jan. 6 probe, that is scheduled for release a day before the panel’s final announced hearing. Committee members and staff were largely caught by surprise by the book, according to The Washington Post, and senior staff confronted him when they heard rumors that he was writing it. Committee staff members were also “infuriated” by Riggleman’s disclosure of details about the committee’s work in media interviews.

But Riggleman has continued to raise warnings about what he saw during his time assisting the panel, highlighting text messages exchanged with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, which Riggleman described as a “roadmap to an attempted coup.”

“The Meadows text messages show you an administration that was completely eaten up with a digital virus called QAnon conspiracy theories,” Riggleman told 60 Minutes. “You can look at text messages as a roadmap, but it’s also a look into the psyche of the Republican Party today.”

Riggleman’s team traced a phone number in Meadows’ texts belonging to Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Riggleman said what “shook me was the fact that if Clarence agreed with or was even aware of his wife’s efforts, all three branches of government would be tied to the stop the steal movement.”

about the Jan. 6 probe

“Coming soon”: Lauren Boebert, MTG lead GOP celebrations over the rise of fascism in Europe

As much of the world watched with alarm as the fascist Fratelli d’Italia party led a far-right coalition to victory in Italy on Sunday, Republican lawmakers in the United States had a much different reaction: Open glee.

Pointing happily to the far-right’s recent electoral surge in Sweden, U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., tweeted that “the entire world is beginning to understand that the Woke Left does nothing but destroy.”

“Nov. 8 is coming soon and the USA will fix our House and Senate!” added Boebert, a loyalist to former U.S. President Donald Trump. “Let freedom reign!”

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., a far-right ally of Boebert’s in the U.S. House, also applauded Sunday’s results, which position Fratelli d’Italia leader Giorgia Meloni to become Italy’s next prime minister even though her party won just around 25% of the vote in a low-turnout contest.

“Congratulations to Giorgio Meloni and to the people of Italy,” Greene wrote on Twitter, misspelling the right-wing leader’s first name.

In her post, Greene linked to a 2019 speech in which Meloni—who was a youth member of the fascist Italian Social Movement—railed against supposed attacks on “national identity” and “religious identity” and vowed to “defend God, country, and family.”

Rank-and-file House Republicans were hardly alone in applauding what’s likely to be the most right-wing government in Italy since the death of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., the House minority whip, said in a Fox News appearance Sunday that “it’s interesting to see that Europe is leading the way by throwing out socialists with conservatives—and great bold conservative women like Meloni and [U.K. Prime Minister Liz] Truss.”

“We need to bring that kind of conservatism to the United States,” Scalise added.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, for his part, hailed as “spectacular” Meloni’s 2019 address to the World Congress of Families, a far-right Christian fundamentalist organization that campaigns against LGBTQ+ rights globally.

Meloni is well-known to the right wing in the U.S., having spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference and met with former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, a far-right provocateur who has correctly described Meloni’s party—also known as Brothers of Italy—as “one of the old fascist parties.”

“You put a reasonable face on right-wing populism, you get elected,” Bannon said of Meloni in an interview in 2018, a year in which Brothers of Italy garnered just 4% of the vote.

Italy’s election of Meloni, who is also president of the European Conservatives and Reformists party, marks a continuation of the worrying trend of rising far-right, xenophobic, and anti-democratic parties across Europe. In Hungary and Poland, far-right parties are already in power, a situation that has proven to be a nightmare for migrants and other vulnerable populations that have seen basic rights stripped away.

Meloni has voiced admiration for the U.S. GOP and right-wing parties in the United Kingdom and Israel, noting in a recent speech that she “shares values and experiences” with them.

“Hungary has a fascist leader. Sweden’s far-right party just won. And Italy has now elected a fascist leader,” Qasim Rashid, a human rights attorney, wrote on social media late Sunday. “Eighty years after WW2, fascism is rising across Europe. And if Americans aren’t careful, the MAGA GOP will usher in that same fascism here. We cannot let that happen.”

Kushner company to pay $3 million settlement after Maryland AG alleged “miserable living conditions”

The property management subsidiary of Jared Kushner’s family real estate company has agreed to pay a $3.25 million fine to the state of Maryland and to reimburse many of the tens of thousands of tenants in the Kushners’ Baltimore-area apartment complexes for excessive fees and for rent they were forced to pay over the past decade despite serious maintenance problems in the units.

The agreement represents the settlement of a 2019 lawsuit brought against the subsidiary, Westminster Management, by the Maryland attorney general. The state alleged that the company’s “unfair or deceptive” rental practices violated Maryland’s consumer protection laws and “victimized” people, “many of whom are financially vulnerable, at all stages of offering and leasing.”

“This is a case in which landlords deceived and cheated tenants and subjected them to miserable living conditions,” said Attorney General Brian Frosh, a Democrat, at a press conference announcing the settlement Friday morning in Baltimore. “These were not wealthy people. Many struggled to pay the rent, to put food on the table, to take care of their kids, to keep everybody healthy, and Westminster used its vastly superior economic power to take advantage of them.”

Kushner Companies, which has since sold off most of the complexes, did not respond to requests for comment, but in a statement to the Baltimore Banner, it said: “Westminster is pleased to have settled this litigation with no admission of liability or wrongdoing. We look forward to moving past this matter so that we can focus on our ever-expanding real estate portfolio.”

Frosh took issue with that characterization. “You don’t pay three million two hundred and fifty thousand bucks if you’re not liable,” he said. “They may not have formally signed a piece of paper saying that they did it, but they did.”

The state lawsuit followed on the heels of a May 2017 article co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine describing the Kushner Companies’ highly litigious treatment of tenants at the apartment complexes it started buying in the Baltimore suburbs in 2012. The 17 complexes contained a total of about 9,000 units and provided a strong cash-flow ballast for a real estate company better known for trophy properties in New York.

The article reported that the company had brought hundreds of cases against current and former tenants over unpaid rent and broken leases, including people who had moved out of the complexes before the Kushner Companies even purchased them. The company also pursued tenants who possessed evidence that they did not owe the money claimed, with all manner of court and late fees piling on top of the original claims.

The article also described the shoddy conditions that many tenants had to contend with at the complexes, including mice, leaky roofs and rampant mold.

At Friday’s press conference, Frosh and two former tenants elaborated on the deplorable conditions. Frosh showed images from squalid units, including one of a large cluster of mushrooms growing beside a toilet. Tiffany Dixon described the floor and wall damage in her family’s unit at a Kushner complex called Commons of White Marsh that she said was caused by a large hole under the kitchen sink of an adjacent unit. Dixon recounted the horrifying discovery, after her kitchen stove stopped working, of mice remains inside the oven. Vaughn Phillips described living in a unit in another complex, Fontana Village, that had water pouring out of the kitchen wall for months “to the point where there was a small pond in my kitchen and living area.” Phillips also said that gas leaked from the unit’s kitchen stove and that “mice that would come out and watch TV with me.”

Frosh displayed one of the many internal company emails that his office obtained during its investigation, showing that officials were well aware of the problems. “We desperately need your help at the Commons of White Marsh with the number of roof leaks that are still occurring due to the damage of the storm that was caused from the storm back in March,” the community manager at the complex wrote to the director of construction at Kushner Companies, in September 2018. “I am receiving at least 30 complaints per day and residents coming [in] and screaming in office. We have a large amount of drywall damage and potential for mold is becoming an issue.”

Before the state’s lawsuit in 2019, a group of tenants filed a class-action lawsuit in late 2017, alleging that the company was improperly inflating payments owed by tenants by charging them late fees that are often unfounded and court fees that are not actually approved by any court. That case made its way to the state Court of Special Appeals in early 2021, but a ruling has not yet been issued. (The Kushner entities have denied wrongdoing in that suit.)

The state case against the company won a major victory in April 2021, when an administrative law judge found that Westminster violated consumer laws in several areas, including by not showing tenants the actual units they were going to be assigned to before signing a lease, and by assessing them a range of “spurious” fees. The ruling came after a 31-day hearing in which about 100 current and former tenants testified.

The company had initially downplayed the lawsuit as a politically motivated stunt to embarrass Kushner, the highly influential son-in-law of then-President Donald Trump. But after the ruling by the administrative law judge, the company entered into negotiations with the state. “It became very clear that they had done wrong and we were not going to let them off the hook,” Frosh said.

Frosh said that the state was looking into whether other large landlords in Maryland have been engaging in practices similar to those employed by Westminster. The Baltimore Banner recently reported that Maryland landlords are far more aggressive in using the courts to threaten eviction as a routine practice for collecting rent than are landlords in other states.

Under the terms of the settlement, Westminster must make an effort to reach all of the estimated 30,000 tenants who resided in its Baltimore-area complexes to alert them that they may submit claims of restitution for rent they were forced to pay despite substandard conditions. Former tenants will be able to start submitting claims in three months and will then have a year to do so. The claims will then be assessed by a special master selected by the company with the approval of the state. Separately, the company will automatically reimburse former tenants for excessive court fees and late fees, based on its records; former tenants will not need to file claims for that restitution.

Westminster may end up paying considerably more than $3.25 million, since there is no limit on the amount of restitution the special master can order. (Of the $3.25 million fine, $800,000 will be treated as a down payment on the restitution.)

The former tenants at the press conference expressed satisfaction with the settlement. “I wasn’t looking for financial gain,” Dixon said. “I was just looking for justice. I was looking for someone to acknowledge the negligence so that other people didn’t have to endure what we did.”

Back to petticoats: Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban shows GOP longs to force women into the past

For some time, Arizona has been near the front of the pack of Republican-controlled states itching to ban abortion. Gov. Doug Ducey didn’t wait for the June overturn of Roe v. Wade or even for the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health ruling in May. Merely anticipating such a decision was enough for the Republican governor to sign a 15-week abortion ban in March. But even that didn’t go far enough for the state’s Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich, or Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson, a Ducey appointee.

On Friday, Johnson upheld Brnovich’s request to reinstate a draconian abortion ban that dates back to 1864. That was 48 years before Arizona became a state (and women got the right to vote there) and 56 years before women’s suffrage was nationalized in the 19th Amendment. Under this law, which was enacted in the Arizona Territory shortly after the Union had reconquered it from the Confederacy (to truncate the history a little), doctors or anyone else convicted of helping a woman abort a pregnancy could face up to five years in prison.

“Yesterday’s ruling in Arizona is dangerous and will set Arizona women back more than a century,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement on Saturday. Which is more or less the goal, honestly.

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College who specializes in 19th-century American history, posted an article over the weekend putting Arizona’s ban in context by noting what other statutes were passed by the territorial legislature at the same time. Along with banning abortion, the legislature set the age of sexual consent at 10 years old and also passed a law stating that “No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person” and invalidating any marriages between a white person and a Black person.

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When feminists and abortion-rights advocates say that Republicans intend to turn the clock back to the 19th century, they really aren’t exaggerating. This intention has never been far below the surface. In his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the Supreme Court should consider overturning various decisions going back to the 1960s that legalized contraception, the right of adults to have consensual sex in private and the right to same-sex marriage. He did not mention the court’s decision that legalized interracial marriage, but he is known to have objected to that in the past, at least before he married a white woman.

This sort of all-out attack wouldn’t stop with rolling back rights gained in the late 20th century. Repealing Roe and other decisions like it should also be understood as a rejection of the “Reconstruction amendments” passed between 1865 and 1870. As NYU law professor Peggy Cooper Davis explains in a Washington Post article, the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment was “designed to extend to all people the right to have autonomous life choices.” Taking away privacy rights is about erasing the plain meaning of these amendments.

The end of Roe v. Wade: American democracy is collapsing

While Republicans often like to fashion themselves as feminists in the style of the suffragists — mostly in order reject the 20th-century feminism that fought for reproductive rights — their contempt for the goals of even the first wave of feminism has been peeking out more and more often.

When Marjorie Taylor Greene says, “We are the weaker sex,” it’s a mistake to write that off as a fringe opinion. Increasingly, she speaks for the Republican base.

“We are the weaker sex,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said in a speech in April, where she argued that women’s inferiority was God-given, since “We came from Adam’s rib.” Greene has hit this this “weaker sex” talking point more than once, and should not be written off as “fringe.” Asawin Suebsaeng and Sam Brodey report for the Daily Beast, Greene’s endorsement was “actively courted” in Republican primaries, given her “popularity among much of the base and what she brings to a campaign.” As Alex Shephard writes in the New Republic, formerly marginal “figures like Greene are arguably more central to the party than ever before.”

As CNN reported last week, John Gibbs, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for Congress in Michigan, once ran a one-man “think tank” that called for the repeal of women’s right to vote. Women, he wrote, do not “posess [sic] the characteristics necessary to govern,” because they cannot “think logically about broad and abstract ideas.”

Gibbs has tried to distance himself from these writings of the 2000s, claiming it was “satire” and an attempt to “draw attention to the hypocrisy of some modern-day feminists.” But if you actually read what he posted at the time, those excuses seem like lies. His essays are straightforward rebuttals to feminist claims that “women have been historically oppressed,” with no evident attempt at humor satire and no references to supposed feminist “hypocrisy.” Honestly, his take was simple and clear: Feminists claim women are equal; Gibbs disagreed.

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It’s tempting to view Gibbs as a lone weirdo who slipped through the GOP’s cracks: He won his primary mostly because incumbent Rep. Peter Meijer had voted to impeach Donald Trump over the Jan. 6 attempted coup, while Gibbs has described the insurrectionists now in custody as “political prisoners.” But that kind of radical sexism is nowhere near as “fringe” as it used to be in the Republican Party.

Gibb’s arguments against women voting, in fact, sound a lot like the infamous 2009 essay by tech billionaire Peter Thiel arguing that women’s suffrage destroyed democracy. “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he wrote. After the fact, Thiel tried to claim that he was somehow not arguing against voting rights for women. Once again, reading his actual words renders this unpersuasive, since much of his essay is dedicated to a fantasy about starting new nations in spaces where this supposed mistake cannot be made again.

Samuel Alito’s leaked anti-abortion decision: Supreme Court doesn’t plan to stop at Roe

Thiel spent the early parts of this election cycle aggressively funding candidates to remake the GOP in his image, with considerable success. He was able to make Blake Masters the Republican Senate nominee in Arizona, where he’s been running on lightly laundered ideas from the white nationalist fringe. Masters has previously described legal abortion as “demonic” — even if he’s disingenuously trying to cover that up now — and backed a nationwide “personhood” law that would almost certainly be used to ban not just abortion, but most forms of birth control.

Thiel also financed the GOP primary campaign of “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance in Ohio. Vance has publicly argued against divorce, even in cases of domestic violence. When confronted by Vice News about this view, Vance falsely claimed that “domestic violence has skyrocketed in recent years,” implying that the “sexual revolution” is to blame.” In reality, while there was a relatively minor uptick during the pandemic, domestic violence rates have plummeted over the past few decades, as both law and custom have made it substantially easier for women to leave abusive men.

Birth control access could be next for SCOTUS to roll back: “There’s no doubt Griswold is at risk”

The Arizona decision is right in line with other Republican abortion-ban proposals and laws that take a dim view of obstetric care — which has improved greatly since the era when doctors who delivered babies refused to even wash their hands. In states where abortion has been banned, doctors are being forced to wait until miscarrying patients go septic before they’re allowed to treat them. Patients are losing ovaries or enduring hysterectomies because of abortion bans that also restrict many forms of basic gynecological care. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has proposed a 15-week national abortion ban that supposedly has “exceptions” for rape and incest. In reality, doctors would be required to forgo surgical abortion with rape victims, instead inducing labor and then going through the sadistic farce of attempting to “revive” a fetus that has no chance of surviving outside the womb. Taken together, all this adds up to a level of misogyny and sadism reminiscent of 19th-century doctors who argued it was “unbiblical” to offer pain relief to women during labor.

The past few years have seen a real surge in right-wing romanticization of the 18th and 19th centuries. Justice Samuel Alito’s Dobbs opinion not only holds out 19th-century attitudes about women’s health care as the gold standard, but literally cites a medieval witch-burner as the moral authority on the issue. (Alito belonged to an alumni group from Princeton that objected to admitting female students and argued that women should be required to notify their husbands to get an abortion, so perhaps this is no surprise.) Still, the revival of a law literally passed during the Civil War gives the game away: Republicans really and truly want to return women to the 19th century.

Led by Giorgia Meloni, fascists set to take power in Italy for first time since Mussolini

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the fascist Brothers of Italy party, is set to become the country’s prime minister after her far-right coalition emerged victorious in Sunday’s snap election, defeating a fragmented center-left and setting the stage for a viciously xenophobic and anti-democratic Italian government.

The alliance of Meloni’s party, Matteo Salvini’s The League, and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won roughly 43% of the vote in early tallies, with Brothers of Italy winning around 25% in the low-turnout contest. Results counted thus far indicate that the right-wing coalition failed to garner enough support to amend Italy’s constitution.

Italy’s centrist Democratic Party is poised to lead the opposition.

“This is a sad day for the country,” Debora Serracchiani, a Democratic Party leader, said of Meloni’s win.

Meloni has rejected the fascist label, but her party has its roots in the neofascist movement that emerged following the death of dictator Benito Mussolini. Meloni was a youth member of the Italian Social Movement, which was created by former members of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party.

Brothers of Italy’s fascist heritage can be seen on its flag, which features a tricolor flame that served as the Italian Social Movement’s symbol.

Last month, in an address aimed at distancing herself from her past involvement with fascist organizations, Meloni said that she has in recent years “had the honor of leading the European Conservative Party,” which “shares values and experiences with the British Tories, the U.S. Republicans, and the Israeli Likud.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of history and Italian studies at New York University, wrote for The Atlantic last week that “Meloni’s enemies list is familiar: ‘LGBT lobbies’ that are out to harm women and the family by destroying ‘gender identity’; George Soros, an ‘international speculator,’ she has said, who finances global ‘mass immigration’ that threatens a Great Replacement of white, native-born Italians.”

“Meloni seems unlikely to tone down her extremism or change her alignment with illiberal parties in Europe, such as Hungary’s Fidesz,” Ben-Ghiat argued. “After all, pursuing hard-line anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ policies in the name of defending white Christian civilization has worked well for them. Like [Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor] Orbán, Meloni has made common cause with U.S. Republicans, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference and the National Prayer Breakfast.”

Italy has seen 11 governments in 20 years, and Sunday’s snap contest came after unelected Prime Minister Mario Draghi, a former central banker, announced his resignation in July following the collapse of his unity government amid a worsening cost-of-living crisis.

“For too many years, Italy has been stuck in a cycle: a merry-go-round in which power is passed up between failed career politicians, unelected technocrats, and opportunistic populists,” said DiEM25, a pan-European progressive movement co-founded by former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. “One of these populists—an openly fascist one—is now set to become the country’s new leader.”

“To break with this cycle, Italians must now repeat what their ancestors once did: defeat fascism,” the group added. “But not for the return of the politics-as-usual that brought the fascists to power in the first place.”

Varoufakis argued Monday that the far-right’s surge to power in Italy represents another “colossal failure” by the European establishment and its disastrous economic policies that have worsened inequality for the benefit of elites.

“Yesterday’s Italian elections signal the absorption by the European and NATO establishment of Italian neo-fascism,” said Varoufakis. “The specter of fascism may once again be hovering over Europe. But, as in Greece, it is now fully integrated—and continues its misanthropic work—within the oligarchic European establishment.”

Fox News host wants new slavery monument to “celebrate all the white people who died”

Former “Real World” cast member Rachel Campos-Duffy lamented that a new monument to enslaved people kidnapped from Africa and the Caribbean islands and brought to the United States should highlight the awesomeness of White people.

The Gen. X conservative is married to conservative former tea party Congressman Sean Duffy, who has his own history of racist comments, particularly about Native Americans, who he and his spouse called alcoholics.

The proposal is a monument that would be placed at James Madison’s Virginia plantation.

“We want to make this a national monument to the ‘Invisible Founders,'” said trustee Rev. Larry Walker. He believes that slaves deserve equal credit for things like the Constitution and Bill of Rights because they were also building the country’s structures and running the businesses and labor of the founding fathers. Madison owned 38 African American slaves when he died in 1836. None were freed when he died, which is something George Washington did.

“I wonder if this monument’s gonna have this big giant sign explaining that it was the Democrats who were for, you know, keeping slaves and it was the Republicans not,” Campos-Duffy said. “Or if it will celebrate all of the white Americans who died on behalf of freedom of slaves.”

Since the mid-1900s, the Republican Party used racism in their “Southern Strategy” to co-opt racist voters and move them into their party. Democrats have since embraced equality for all people, while Republicans have continued to use that “Southern Strategy” up until the 2020 campaign for former President Donald Trump.

There were many founding fathers who didn’t own slaves like Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine and John Adams, but the majority of those founders did own people.

Campos Duffy previously claimed that some Black people are saying immigrant detention camps are better than housing projects.

See the discussion below:

Greg Abbott fumes at Ron DeSantis for stealing “political spotlight” with migrant stunt: report

When far-right Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis arranged for two planes of migrants to be flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, he made sure that Fox News was the first media outlet to know what he was up to. DeSantis wanted to make sure that his political stunt and effort to anger northern liberals would receive as much publicity as possible in right-wing media, and he has been drawing a great deal of criticism from Democrats as well as from Never Trump conservatives.

Another group that has been “annoyed” by DeSantis’ stunt, according to New York Times reporters Michael C. Bender and J. David Goodman, are Republicans in Texas’ state government — including allies of Gov. Greg Abbott.

“Publicly, Mr. Abbott has not criticized Mr. DeSantis’ migrant flights from his state,” Bender and Goodman report in an article published by the Times on September 26. “‘Every state that wants to help, I’m happy for it,’ said Dave Carney, Mr. Abbott’s top campaign strategist. But privately, the Florida governor’s gambit stung Mr. Abbott’s team. No one in the Texas governor’s office was given a heads-up that Mr. DeSantis planned to round up migrants in San Antonio, according to people familiar with the matter.”

According to the Times’ sources, however, this resentment on the part of the Abbott camp isn’t because they view what DeSantis did as morally wrong, but because he took the political spotlight off of them.

“Mr. DeSantis’ instinct for political theater has helped him quickly turn into Republicans’ leading alternative to former President Donald J. Trump,” Bender and Goodman explain. “Even Texas Republicans tell pollsters that they prefer Mr. DeSantis over Mr. Abbott for president in 2024. The two Republican governors have been locked in an increasingly high-stakes contest of one-upmanship, wielding their own unique brands of conservatism and pushing boundaries by using desperate migrants for political gain. In Florida, Mr. DeSantis mused to donors last year about Mr. Abbott’s good political fortune to share 1254 miles of border with Mexico and complained that he didn’t have the same to use as a backdrop, according to one person familiar with the conversation.”

The reporters add, “For all the bluster, the war between Austin and Tallahassee is decidedly more cold than hot. Yet, the two governors’ policy moves antagonizing the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party as a whole have been unfolding as an interstate call and response, with national repercussions.”

According to Bender and Goodman, the “competition between Mr. DeSantis and Mr. Abbott has more to do with their job descriptions than any personal animosity.”

Chris Wilson, a pollster who has worked with both DeSantis and Abbott, told the Times, “No one has ever been elected governor of even a small state who didn’t, somewhere deep in their heart, start dreaming about being president,” said Chris Wilson, a pollster who has worked for both men. “So, it’s not shocking to see both Abbott and DeSantis jockeying at least a little toward 2024 or beyond.”

“I love being with her”: Trump gushes about NY Times’ Maggie Haberman in new book — and it’s a doozy

Former President Donald Trump gushed about New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman while dishing out dirt on just about everyone for her new book.

“I love being with her, she’s like my psychiatrist,” Trump told two aides while sitting for one of three interviews for Haberman’s new book “Confidence Man,” according to an excerpt published by The Atlantic.

Haberman, a veteran New York reporter who has covered Trump for years, wrote extensively about Trump’s time in the White House as well as his origins as a real estate developer.

“I have found myself on the receiving end of the two types of behavior Donald Trump exhibits toward reporters: his relentless desire to hold the media’s gaze, and his poison-pen notes and angry statements in response to coverage,” Haberman wrote.

“The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists — reporters, government aides, and members of Congress, friends and pseudo-friends and rally attendees and White House staff and customers,” she explained. “All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling. He works things out in real time in front of all of us.”

Why did he steal the documents? Maggie Haberman’s book may hold the answer

Haberman wrote that despite Trump’s constant attacks on reporters, he has met with nearly every prominent author that has written a book about him.

“His impulse to try to sell his preferred version of himself was undeterred by the stain that January 6 left on his legacy and on the democratic foundations of the country — if anything, it grew stronger,” Haberman wrote.

At one point during an interview in September 2021, Haberman asked Trump whether he had “taken any documents of note upon departing the White House.”

“Nothing of great urgency,” Trump said, before mentioning letters that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un had sent him, which he previously described as “love letters.”

“You were able to take those with you?” Haberman pressed.

“He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, ‘No, I think that’s in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things,’ Haberman wrote. “In fact, Trump did not return the letters — which were included in boxes he had brought to Mar-a-Lago — to the National Archives until months later.”

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Haberman also questioned Trump about whether he had stayed in touch with world leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, which Trump denied. But when she brought up Kim, Trump “responded, ‘well, I don’t want to say exactly” before trailing off.

“I learned after the interview that he had been telling people at Mar-a-Lago that he was still in contact with North Korea’s supreme leader, whose picture with Trump hung on the wall of his new office at his club,” Haberman wrote.

Trump also discussed his time at the White House, including his thoughts on his son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“I asked why he had given Jared Kushner expansive power,” Haberman wrote. “‘I didn’t,’ Trump said, although he had done exactly that. When I pressed, Trump said, ‘Look, my daughter has a great relationship with him and that’s very important.'”

Trump lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., saying “the Old Crow’s a piece of shit,” and mocked Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over his efforts to ingratiate himself to Trump.

“‘You know why Lindsey kisses my ass?’ he asked, with Graham standing nearby. “So I’ll endorse his friends.'”

During another portion, Trump discussed the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“I said, ‘Mike, you have a chance to be Thomas Jefferson, or you can be Mike Pence,'” Trump said he told Pence before the Jan. 6 congressional session to certify election results. “He chose to be Mike Pence.”

Haberman reported that Trump has also privately lashed out at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential rival, calling him “fat,” “phony,” and “whiny.”

At one point, Trump made a “candid admission that was as jarring as it was ultimately unsurprising,” Haberman wrote.

“The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?'” Trump told Haberman of running for president. “The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”

Haberman noted that Trump’s first impulse was not to mention public service or any of his accomplishments but “only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame, and that many experiences were only worth having if someone else envied them.”

about Haberman’s book

Why did he steal the documents? Maggie Haberman’s book may hold the answer

The latest Trump tell-all book is New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” to be published next week. An article adapted from the book appeared in the Atlantic over the weekend, dropping least one major hint at the answer to one of the great questions hovering over the former president since the FBI executed that search warrant at Mar-a-Lago early in August: Why did Donald Trump take all those classified documents from the White House?

Speculation so far basically boils down to three main possibilities. The first is that Trump is a hoarder who can’t throw anything away. He just throws stuff into boxes with the idea that he’ll get back to it later and he never does. So they just taped up the boxes and sent them off to Mar-a-Lago without even looking at the contents. This sounds like a reasonable guess. Trump had no idea how to do the job of president. Throwing stuff in boxes “for later” is exactly how someone who’s in way over his head might deal with his inability to understand whatever he’s looking at in the moment. Adding in random unrelated items — golf balls, newspaper clippings, knickknacks — would be an accurate reflection of his chaotic mind.

But come on. There’s more to this than that.

“Embarrassed” Trump acknowledged loss before declaring “I’m just not going to leave”: Haberman book

The second speculation is that he took the items with the intention of selling them, to someone, somewhere down the line. Considering that Trump considers himself the greatest dealmaker the world has ever known, this is also a plausible explanation. While it’s hard to imagine that he would sell classified intelligence to an adversary outright, it’s not out of the question that he might have thought they’d be worth hanging on to as a sweetener in some future transaction.

The last speculation is the one that seems most likely, considering his known penchant for blackmail. Haberman’s piece in the Atlantic focuses on three interviews she had with Trump after he had left office but before the Mar-a-Lago search. In one of them she asked him about his promise to declassify and release the texts between former FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page on the night before Biden’s inauguration, which he had not done. He told Haberman that Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, had the texts in his possession and offered to put her in touch with him.

If we’re looking for the most plausible explanation for why Trump kept all those documents, we have to consider his known penchant for blackmail.

Trump’s last-ditch promise to release the Strzok and Page material wasn’t the first or last time that he or one of his associates have suggested that he planned to publicly dump a load of classified documents pertaining to the Russia investigation, the impeachments and various other intelligence secrets that the very stable genius believed the world should see. From last May through August, as the FBI investigation into Trump’s theft of government documents was heating up, his top lieutenant in this matter, Kash Patel — a former White House aide and acting Pentagon official in the waning days of the Trump administration — was telling anyone who would listen that Trump planned to release a huge cache of classified information to the public. Patel claimed that in October of 2020, Trump had “issued a sweeping declassification order for every Russiagate document and every single Hillary Clinton document,” and then, on the way out the White House door, had “issued further declassification orders declassifying whole sets of documents.”

Patel had been selected as Trump’s personal envoy to the National Archives and states said in those interviews that he would obtain the alleged declassified documents from the archives and then release them. He didn’t say that Trump had a bunch of classified documents in his desk or in cardboard boxes at Mar-a-Lago, but in all these interviews Patel sends a clear, unambiguous threat that sooner or later Trump was going to release government secrets that he had declassified (whether through normal means or his special presidential Jedi powers).

Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen, who was right on the money when he told the House Oversight Committee that Trump would never leave office peacefully was asked last August what he thought all this was about:

He’s gonna use it as a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s a way to extort America, turn around to say, if you put me in jail, if you go after me — he’ll even say his children — I will have my loyal supporters who you do not know who [have] copies of information … again this is my conjecture, that I would take those documents, I will release them to Iran, to China, to North Korea, to Russia.

I don’t know if Trump would really go that far but I can easily see how Trump might believe that having those documents in his possession gave him an advantage in dealing with a possible prosecution.

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Think about how he operates. He tried to extort false information on Joe Biden from the president of a foreign country. He reportedly “devoured intelligence briefings about his foreign counterparts,” especially to get leverage over allies he personally disliked, such as French President Emmanuel Macron. (Documents relating to Macron’s personal life were reportedly seized by the FBI.) According to Andrea Bernstein of ProPublica, this goes way back:

I’ve covered Trump and his business for decades and people around him have told me over and over again: Trump knows the value of hoarding sensitive, secret information and wielding it regularly and precisely for his own ends. If people’s gambling and hotel habits can be valuable, top secret intelligence has the potential to be even more so.

It’s very likely that Trump took classified documents he thought would be valuable as leverage against specific individuals. The reported Macron documents certainly might fall into that category. But it also seems to me that his claims that Meadows had custody of the Strzok/Page texts and Patel’s wild talk about Trump declassifying a huge pile of documents with the intention of releasing them also serves as a form of blackmail against the U.S. government. After all, until recently the FBI and other executive agencies had no idea what documents Trump might have and obviously couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t already given them to someone else. As president, he had access to everything and he clearly has no sense of responsibility for national security.

Trump’s weird message to Merrick Garland in the days after the Mar-a-Lago raid sounds even more sinister when seen in that light:

President Trump wants the Attorney General to know that he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is “angry.” The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.

We all assumed he was talking about his rabid following getting violent, which certainly seemed like a possibility. But could Michael Cohen be right once again? Was that a threat to release national security secrets if Garland and the FBI didn’t back off?

about Trump and the Mar-a-Lago documents

Putin’s doom: Russia expert Mark Galeotti on how a once-feared leader threw it all away

Seven months ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. By all accounts, he expected victory to be rapid and relatively easy. That has not been the case. Russia’s invasion forces have suffered heavy casualties. The British ministry of defense estimates that at least 25,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, and several times that number wounded. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that the number is likely much higher. Russia’s best units, in some cases, have been so depleted they are combat-ineffective.

Russia has also suffered great losses in equipment and material more generally.

The Russians are literally running out of trained soldiers to engage in sustained offensive operations, leading to Putin’s recent order to call up 300,000 reserves. There are indications that the Russian military now lacks the ability to hold the Ukrainian territory it still controls. After the Ukrainian military’s successful offensive in the Kharkiv region and incremental successes elsewhere, Russia’s military has been exposed as a hollow force. At almost every key juncture, the Ukrainians have demonstrated superior mastery of the operational art of war, although that has clearly been facilitated by the technical and logistical assistance provided by the U.S. and other Western allies.

No leader launches an armed conflict with the assumption that it will be a disastrous error. Seven months after the invasion of Ukraine, it is clear that Putin and his generals made a number of huge miscalculations. Putin imagined himself as a force of destiny, the leader of a new Russian empire informed by Christianity and “traditional values” such as nationalism, patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia. Liberal democracy and pluralism, in his view, were obsolete — symptoms of the Western world’s moral weakness.

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

That reactionary vision made Putin into a hero and role model for many neofascists and members of the global right, at least for a while. Too many Republicans and conservatives, especially the right-wing Christian evangelicals and other enemies of democracy have viewed Putin (and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán) as exemplifying the type of authoritarian ruler they long for to help fulfill their plan to end multiracial secular democracy.

Putin looks less attractive to many such right-wing figures now. After the debacle in Ukraine, what comes next for Russia and its president? I recently spoke with Mark Galeotti, one of the world’s leading experts on Russia, transnational crime and military affairs. He is the author of many books, including “The Weaponisation of Everything,” “A Short History of Russia” and “We Need to Talk About Putin.” His forthcoming book, to be published in November, is “Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine.”

In this conversation, Galeotti explains how Vladimir Putin has put himself inside an information echo chamber that encourages his worst impulses, which includes a delusional belief that he can shape the world through the force of his own will. Moreover, Galeotti says, the failed war in Ukraine could bring an end to Putin’s rule over Russia.

Galeotti also offers his analysis of why the Russian military has failed in Ukraine and why so many military experts were so deeply wrong in their initial assessments. He shares his thoughts on the early lessons to be taken from the war in Ukraine about the future of conventional warfare and other high-intensity conflicts. Although victory appears to be in sight for the Ukrainians, Galeotti cautions that the U.S. and Western allies cannot take such an outcome as a given. He argues that the Ukrainians must receive more support and not less in order to ensure a final victory.

In the end, Galeotti warns that the endgame of the Ukraine conflict will be critical for global security and peace. If the Russian people feel humiliated by the U.S. and the West that may lead to even more aggressive nationalist forces taking control of their county in the future.

Given the war in Ukraine and all of the other global crises, how are you feeling? How do you make sense of all this?

On a personal level, I’m deeply depressed by what happened. As of June, I was actually banned from entry indefinitely by the Russian government. I like Russia as a place to visit. I have friends and colleagues there. Putin has obviously been terrible for 40 million or so Ukrainians. He has been pretty terrible for the Russians too. But for those of us who study Russia, he has been very good for business. There is a sense at times of being some type of hyena, feasting on the entrails of the global body politic. But I try to put such feelings aside. I’m very busy and am just trying to keep some perspective amidst all this extraordinary madness.

How do you maintain perspective? Pundits and commentators are often rewarded for sensationalism and “hot takes.” But most such claims will mostly be disproved by history — and may even be disproven in the present by more serious and careful thinkers. Do such people simply not care? Is it all about making an impact and getting paid, and only secondarily the truth?

This is one of the problems caused by Twitter and other forms of social media and 21st-century media more generally. People can make a name for themselves by delivering “hot takes” that are a bit more exciting, a bit more strident and frankly a bit more lunatic than even the ones that came before. It would be nice to believe that there was some kind of grand karma at work, where at the end such people who are playing that game would be found out.

There was a period when Putin seemed to be, in his own brutal and ugly way, doing good for Russia and the world.

It’s a very depressing aspect of modern society because we now get to curate our own individual information bubbles, an echo chamber where we just hear the same things that confirm our beliefs. That means delusions can be maintained quite successfully, independent of reality on the ground. I predate the real internet age. I started studying Russia when it was still the Soviet Union. So from the phenomenal upwelling of optimism of the Gorbachev years, I saw the system collapse amidst chaos and recrimination. There was the gangster 1990s, and then the period in which Putin did seem to be, in his own brutal and ugly way, doing good for Russia and the world. He brought stability to that chaos.

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I’m a historian by training, which means that I try to look at things from a longer-term perspective. Today Putin is this bloody-handed despot; he’s going to be either a prisoner in a war crimes tribunal or more likely dead at some point. Then the historians will be ripping his historical legacy to shreds. And there will be another chance for Russia. We must step outside the fury of the moment and try to look at the big picture.

We have seen a major land war in Europe: So much of this is surreal. I say that as someone who came of age during the end of the Cold War. It almost feels like we are witnessing a bad novel or movie made real.

I didn’t think that Putin was going to invade. I put the chances at 30 to 40%. It just didn’t make sense. Sometimes it is very difficult to get your head around what makes sense to someone who has completely enclosed himself and surrounded himself with yes-men. How to make sense of the surrealism?

I take comfort in the fact that there are cycles and pulses to history. History never ends. It just reverberates and echoes. Putin represents the last gasp of a particular generation. He is going to be 70 in October. His closest allies are in that same age range. They’re all very much of that generation that went through the trauma of the collapse of an empire around them.

On one level, a huge land war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine is extraordinary. But on another level, historically what’s extraordinary is that we’re so surprised by it. What Putin is doing is actually something that a Bismarck or a Napoleon, any of the 19th-century statesmen, would have regarded as perfectly normal. It’s actually a sign of how far we’ve moved as a global society to think of the war in Ukraine as something amazing and anomalous.

How did Putin convince himself to invade Ukraine? And more specifically, that he could win?

Putin is a rational actor who happens to believe a lot of deeply bizarre things. It’s a prime example of a “garbage in, garbage out” problem. Putin has increasingly become cut off from reality. He’s pushed those people who would challenge his views out of his inner circle. Putin has become addicted to the heady sense of always being right. As such, he has surrounded himself with people who share his views. That even applies to the spies.

A retired Russian intelligence officer told me, “We’ve learned that you do not bring bad news to the czar’s table.”

In 2015, I was talking to a retired Russian intelligence officer who told me, “We’ve learned that you do not bring bad news to the czar’s table.” In other words, you tell Putin what he wants to hear, not what he needs to know. Putin clearly has this sense of himself as a figure in the tradition of the grand Russian state-building heroes. He convinced himself that Ukraine wasn’t a real country and that it is really a part of the Russian Slavic heartland. In Putin’s mind, Ukraine would have just gone along with his invasion.

He really did convince himself that the war would last two weeks, and it would all be over. Putin imagined that he would be Vladimir the Great, the man who reunited the Slavic heartlands.

He’s getting older. In 2024, Putin is due to stand for re-election. Obviously, he will win. But I think he’s showing signs of being tired and bored with the job. His problem is that, like any kind of mafia boss, when you are in a system where the law always takes second place to politics, it does not matter what guarantees you get from a successor. The moment you hand over power to a successor you are basically handing him or her complete control over your fortune — and your life.

How are the Russian people going to deal with this national humiliation?

Most Russians don’t really know what’s going on, and quite frankly, are happy to keep their heads in the sand. It’s an old Soviet practice. When you think there are some dangerous truths out there, you make sure that you aren’t aware of them for as long as possible. The war in Ukraine is going to define Putin’s legacy. Everything that was built up over his earlier terms is being squandered, be it the economy, Russia’s place in the world or a military that he spent 20 years dumping huge amounts of money into that is now being ripped apart.

If we are hostile to the Russian people and treat them all like they’re in league with Putin, we may force them into a very aggressive position.

One of the biggest challenges facing us now is to think about what comes next after victory for Ukraine. I’m worried about some of the very anti-Russian rhetoric that is now commonplace across the U.S. and Europe. I think of that as dangerous, because this is Putin’s war. This is not a war that most Russians are enthusiastic about. If we are hostile to the Russian people and treat them all like they are in league with Putin and the Kremlin, then we have forced them into a very aggressive position. My concern is that if the West is not careful, the outcome will be something like what happened after the Versailles Treaty at the end of the First World War. A hostile deal will make the Russian people very angry, and in the future there may likely be a more aggressive Russia on the global scene.

It was generally agreed among military experts that Russia could invade and defeat Ukraine in several weeks. We are now at the seven-month mark. How did this go so wrong for Russia so fast?

We have to give the Ukrainians full credit. That is particularly so because they have spent the last eight years since 2014 and the annexation of Crimea thinking very carefully about how the Russians fight — and therefore how they would resist them. Second, Russia’s military reforms have not been anything like as successful as they looked from the outside. Sure, the Russian military parades really nicely through Red Square. But they still hadn’t solved fundamental issues about logistics, personnel training, having a proper NCO corps and all their other infrastructure and leadership problems.

Even more important than any of these issues is that the Russian military was not sent to fight the way it trains and prepares to fight. If the world had been as Putin believed it to be, we would probably now be talking about his extraordinary strategic brilliance. It is precisely because Putin believed that Ukraine would be an easy victory that he didn’t share his plans with anyone, including the generals and other officers who would be carrying out the operation. They may have found out a week before the attack, which is nothing like the kind of time you need to properly prepare. They only had supplies for maybe a two-week operation.

The ordinary soldiers weren’t even told what the real mission was. Russia did not fight according to their own doctrine, which is very bureaucratic and carefully structured, where there is a massive air and missile bombardment and then a big combined arms operation on just two or three axes of advance.

What Russia’s military did instead was to conduct an extraordinarily amateurish, halfhearted attempt where Putin really seemed to believe that a couple of companies of paratroopers could just motor into the middle of Kyiv and arrest the government. Putin said the attack on Ukraine was a “special military operation” instead of a war. True, that was propaganda for domestic purposes. But that language also reflected the fact that Putin simply didn’t think it was going to be a real war. The consequence was that in the first couple of weeks, the best of the Russian military was ripped apart because it was stuck in a conflict that it was not ready to fight.

Leaders need accurate information to make correct decisions in wartime. Putin does not want this information. We can assume that the intelligence officers know the truth and the military leadership knows the truth. How are they balancing the reality of the situation with what Putin wants to hear? What does that look like, day to day?

On a practical level, there are so many filters between the people who know what is really going on and the people who brief Putin. It all gets carefully sanitized and rewritten. The Russians still have excellent intelligence-gathering capabilities; the spies have very good analytic capabilities.

The failure is at the briefing level where that intelligence gets fed into policy. Putin is getting, at best, half the truth. Putin created this system, it’s not something that was foisted upon him. For years, he has made it clear that he is very intolerant of people telling him things that are counter to his worldview. A lot of people just basically play along and hope things work out, or at the very least hope that someone else gets the blame when they don’t.

What is going on with the oligarchs and organized crime right now in Russia?

Everything’s moved on to a kind of wartime footing. Once upon a time, the oligarchs were powerful. Now they are rich — but only so long as Putin lets them be. This is one of the perverse effects of the sanctions regime, where many of the oligarchs basically lost all their assets outside the country. This means that everything depends on staying in Putin’s good graces.

The oligarchs are grumbling. On the whole they’re clearly not happy with this war, even the ones who were actually close to Putin. But they have to be careful about being viewed as not “patriotic.”

These types of situations create new markets and new pressures. Sometimes it is all kind of silly. So of course, now there is a thriving organized crime trade in luxury Italian handbags, which are under sanction and cannot legally be exported to Russia. More significantly, I think we are beginning to see organized crime getting into areas that are adjacent to the state’s interests, such as obtaining microelectronics that are needed for the war effort.

Ukraine is being flooded with weapons. This is a potential bonanza for criminals, terrorists and other malign actors. What do we know about this situation?

There is a small illegal market. There is an organization I’m involved with, the Global Initiative on Transnational Organized Crime, that has been doing a lot of research on the ground in Ukraine. I was talking to one of their researchers who was talking to a weapons trafficker. He told my contact that he could get Javelin missiles. Anything that is man-portable is basically man-stealable. I’m not really worried about the high-end military kit that’s been provided, though. I don’t think there’s much of a trade because, if nothing else, it’s hard to get the stuff out. Western law enforcement and intelligence is aware of the potential problem. There are attempts to try and get ahead of this before it becomes a real crisis.

What are some of the early lessons learned from the war in Ukraine?

I think it is precisely about the degree to which big wars are increasingly hard to win. We have to realize that this was not what Putin intended or was looking for. The irony is that right up to the point when Putin invaded Ukraine, he was winning. He had this huge force on Ukraine’s borders, but it was all on the Russian side of the border and therefore entirely acceptable under international law.

Right up to the point when Putin invaded Ukraine, he was winning. If he were really a grand Machiavellian mastermind, he would have just allowed the situation to continue.

Under the shadow of the Russian guns, who wanted to invest in Ukraine? No one. The Ukrainian economy was tanking. And because of the danger of war there was a constant stream of Western dignitaries going to Moscow. That put Putin exactly in the position he likes to be in. He was at the center of attention and had all that leverage with everyone coming to petition him, more or less begging him not to start a war.

Because of concerns about a possible war, certain Western governments were trying to bring pressure on Zelenskyy to make concessions to the Russians. If Putin really had been this grand Machiavellian geopolitical mastermind, he would have just allowed the situation to continue. It was when Putin resorted to the crude instruments of force that he actually began to lose.

As for war and warfare, we are heading into an age in which conflict will take many different forms. The shooting war will never go away. What the war in Ukraine has shown is that it is vastly less predictable than we might have thought previously. This means that war is much less safely used by any potential aggressor in the future. No one starts a war that they think they are going to lose. The corollary of that is the aggressor must feel pretty confident that they can win. One big lesson is that the Ukrainians have shown that modern war has so many variables, which makes any prediction of success not so easy.

How do you make sense of this cult of personality among some Republicans and other members of the American and global right toward Putin?

It reflects a desire for a reality that never really was, where the heroic force of the individual can change the world. Reality is much more complex than that at present. Putin exemplifies personalistic rule, and for those attracted to such leaders and politics he embodies that idea of a ruler who can make the trains run on time. Polarization is so extreme now in America, where if Biden is against Putin the right wing then responds by saying that since Joe Biden is an untrustworthy and senile old fool who represents vested interests, then Putin obviously must have something going for him.

What about this narrative in the West where Ukraine is depicted as on the front lines of a struggle for global democracy against Russia and Putin?

We always have to put ourselves into everything. We can’t just simply accept that this is about Ukraine and the Ukrainian people genuinely struggling for their own sovereignty. Are the Ukrainians fighting for America’s or the West’s freedoms and democracy? No, of course not. They’re fighting for their own freedom. We should support that struggle on its own terms.

With Ukraine’s recent victories, is the war near its end? What do you think is a reasonable timeline?

We are not near the end yet. That’s a dangerous assumption. If people start thinking, “Oh, it’s all but over now,” then when it doesn’t end that’s when we run the risk of Ukraine fatigue. The Ukrainians are going to fight as long as they possibly can. The weak link for Ukraine is us. They need more than just military equipment and ammunition. The Ukrainian economy is basically on life support. It’s being kept alive by Western financial assistance. Without that, Ukraine won’t be able to sustain itself.

The recent offensive by the Ukrainian forces is a major victory. There’s no question about it. It gives the Ukrainians momentum. It also imposes a whole series of dilemmas on the Russians: Where might the Ukrainians attack next? Ukraine is not yet within reach of winning the war, but the offensive does show that Ukraine is not going to lose the war either. Unless something happens to Putin, in terms of his mortality or a coup or the like, the war is going to go on for a while.

Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth II both passed away within weeks of one another. How do you make sense of their legacy, relative to Putin and Ukraine?

They represented restraint. Both Queen Elizabeth II and Gorbachev were willing to accept that there are some things you shouldn’t do. There is a great problem with the modern personalistic age of leaders, whether it’s Trump or Putin or even Xi Jinping, where they are committed to a mythology in which people like them can grab the world and shift it on its axis through the sheer force of personality and will. Too many people actually believe in that dangerous mythology.

What are some lessons Vladimir Putin should learn from this moment?

Frankly, it is too late for Putin to learn a lesson about the danger of overreach. Putin has reached so far that he is beyond bringing back from the precipice. The only question is when he falls.

about Putin and the Ukraine war

Russia faces severe consequences if nuclear weapons are used against Ukraine

United States National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday that Russian President Vladimir Putin will face “catastrophic consequences” if he follows through with this threat of using nuclear weapons in Ukraine once Russia’s anticipated annexation of Eastern Ukrainian territories is completed this week.

The conversation took place shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed to correspondent Margaret Brennan that Putin’s warnings should be taken seriously.

“We have communicated directly, privately and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the US and our allies will respond decisively, and we have been clear and specific about what that will entail,” Sullivan explained to Brennan.

“We have, in public, been equally clear, as a matter of principle, that the United States will respond decisively if Russia uses nuclear weapons and that we will continue to support Ukraine in its efforts to defend its country and defend its democracy,” Sullivan added.

Sullivan also reflected upon the ongoing crisis at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, Ukraine, where shelling has damaged parts of Europe’s largest fission station. Officials in Kyiv and Moscow have exchanged blame for the bombardments, which have forced a shutdown to avert a potential radioactive disaster that could dwarf the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl.

“It is actually still being operated by the Ukrainian operators who are essentially at gunpoint from the Russian occupying forces. And the Russians have been consistently implying that there may be some kind of accident at this plant,” Sullivan explained.

“We’ve been working with the International Atomic Energy Agency and with Ukrainian energy regulators to try to make sure that there is no threat posed by a meltdown or something else from the plant. We will continue to do that,” Sullivan stressed, “but it’s something we all have to keep a close eye on.”

Federal judge in Louisiana re-locates juvenile inmates to Angola Prison

Critics of mass incarceration are condemning a ruling handed down late Friday by a federal judge in Louisiana, who admitted the state’s plan to send teenage inmates at a juvenile detention center to the notorious state penitentiary at Angola was “disturbing” even as she decided the plan could move forward.

Chief U.S. District Judge Shelly Dick ruled that the Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) can send two dozen children under the age of 18 from Bridge City Center for Youth, located outside New Orleans, to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, denying a motion brought by several law firms and the ACLU to halt the plan.

The plan was proposed by the OJJ after a series of escapes from the Bridge City Center, which were also used as the reasoning behind subjecting youths in the facility to solitary confinement earlier this year.

Dick said in her ruling that “locking children in cells at night at Angola is untenable” but that the state cannot tolerate “the threat of harm these youngsters present to themselves, and others.”

A federal judge has ruled that children in Louisiana's juvenile detention facilities, some as young as 12-years-old, can be moved to Angola's former death row unit even though, the judge wrote, it "will likely have deleterious psychological ramifications." https://t.co/wQtR4AQAgO pic.twitter.com/44xXsPU8MS

— Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg 🇵🇸 (@elizabethweill) September 24, 2022

She also noted that some of the youths who may be sent to Angola are “traumatized and emotionally and psychologically disturbed” but suggested that the state prison, the largest maximum security prison in the U.S., can provide a more “secure care environment” for them.

Ahead of the ruling, the ACLU warned on Thursday that the plan is “unprecedented and dangerous.”

Moving kids to the grounds of a maximum-security, adult prison is unprecedented and dangerous.

Governor Edwards must abandon this plan.https://t.co/D9nLgNyhoM

— ACLU (@ACLU) September 22, 2022

Plaintiffs in the case have accused the state of failing to take “ample opportunity to enact meaningful reforms that act in the best interest of our young people.”

“Instead the state has continued to push forward unjust policies and actions that only further traumatize incarcerated youth, their families, and communities,” said Gina Womack, co-founder and executive director of Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), last month. “The move defies all common sense and best practices, and it will cause irrevocable damage to our youth and families.”

We must continue to demand justice for our youth. Punitive approaches harm our youth and do not make communities safer. We must invest in the solutions we know work: prevention, rehabilitation, and supports. #nokidsinangola https://t.co/NlCIFTSxe9

— FFLIC (@fflicla) September 20, 2022

According to a court filing by the ACLU, youths transferred to Angola will be held “in windowless cells with floor to ceiling metal bars.”

Children at the Bridge City Center have been distraught over the possibility of being sent to Angola, The Appeal reported this week, with one 17-year-old suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder starting to “tear out his hair and to not be able to sleep,” according to a statement filed in court by his mother.

“Louisiana is failing to protect youth in [its] juvenile justice system!” said Chelsea Maldonado, an investigative researcher for the podcast “Trapped in Treatment.”

It was unclear Saturday when the transfers may take place.

Stop using “Latinx” if you really want to be inclusive

Most of the debates on the usage of “Latinx” — pronounced “la-teen-ex” — have taken place in the U.S. But the word has begun to spread into Spanish-speaking countries — where it hasn’t exactly been embraced.

In July 2022, Argentina and Spain released public statements banning the use of Latinx, or any gender-neutral variant. Both governments reasoned that these new terms are violations of the rules of the Spanish language.

Latinx is used as an individual identity for those who are gender-nonconforming, and it can also describe an entire population without using “Latinos,” which is currently the default in Spanish for a group of men and women.

As a Mexican-born, U.S.-raised scholar, I agree with the official Argentine and Spanish stance on banning Latinx from the Spanish language — English, too.

When I first heard Latinx in 2017, I thought it was progressive and inclusive, but I quickly realized how problematic it was. Five years later, Latinx is not commonly used in Spanish-speaking countries, nor is it used by the majority of those identifying as Hispanic or Latino in the U.S.

In fact, there’s a gender-inclusive term that’s already being used by Spanish-speaking activists that works as a far more natural replacement.

Low usage

Though the exact origins of Latinx are unclear, it emerged sometime around 2004 and gained popularity around 2014. Merriam-Webster added it to its dictionary in 2018.

However, a 2019 Pew research study and 2021 Gallup poll indicated that less than 5% of the U.S. population used “Latinx” as a racial or ethnic identity.

Nonetheless, Latinx is becoming commonplace among academics; it’s used at conferences, in communication and especially in publications.

But is it inclusive to use Latinx when most of the population does not?

Perpetuating elitism

The distinct demographic differences of those who are aware of or use Latinx calls into question whether the term is inclusive or just elitist.

Individuals who self-identiy as Latinx or are aware of the term are most likely to be U.S.-born, young adults from 18 to 29 years old. They are predominately English-speakers and have some college education. In other words, the most marginalized communities do not use Latinx.

Scholars, in my view, should never impose social identities onto groups that do not self-identify that way.

I once had a reviewer for an academic journal article I submitted about women’s experiences with catcalling tell me to replace my use of “Latino” and “Latina” with “Latinx.” However, they had no issue with me using “man” or “woman” when it came to my white participants.

I was annoyed at the audacity of this reviewer. The goal of the study was to show catcalling, a gendered interaction, as an everyday form of sexism.

How was I supposed to differentiate my participants’ sexism experiences by gender and race if I labeled them all as Latinx?

The “x” factor

If a term is truly inclusive, it gives equitable weight to vastly diverse experiences and knowledge; it is not meant to be a blanket identity.

Women of color, in general, are severely underrepresented in leadership positions and STEM fields. Using “Latinx” for women further obscures their contributions and identity. I have even seen some academics try to get around the nebulous nature of Latinx by writing “Latinx mothers” or “Latinx women” instead of “Latinas.”

Furthermore, if the goal is to be inclusive, the “x” would be easily pronounceable and naturally applied to other parts of the Spanish language.

Some Spanish speakers would rather identify by nationality — say, “Mexicano” or “Argentino” — instead of using umbrella terms like Hispanic or Latino. But the “x” can’t be easily applied to nationalities. Like Latinx, “Mexicanx” and “Argentinx” don’t exactly roll off the tongue in any language. Meanwhile, gendered articles in Spanish — “los” and “las” for the plural “the” — become “lxs,” while gendered pronouns -“el” and “ella” becomes “ellx.”

The utility and logic of it quickly falls apart.

“Latine” as an alternative

Many academics might feel compelled to continue to use Latinx because they fought hard to have it recognized by their institutions or have already published the term in an academic journal. But there is a much better gender-inclusive alternative, one that’s been largely overlooked by the U.S. academic community and is already being used in Spanish-speaking parts of Latin America, especially among young social activists in those countries.

It’s “Latine” — pronounced “lah-teen-eh” — and it’s far more adaptable to the Spanish language. It can be implemented as articles — “les” instead of “los” or “las,” the words for “the.” When it comes to pronouns, “elle” can become a singular form of “they” and used in place of the masculine “él” or feminine “ella,” which translate to “he” and “she.” It can also be readily applied to most nationalities, such as “Mexicane” or “Argentine.”

Because language shapes the way we think, it’s important to note that gendered languages like Spanish, German and French do facilitate gender stereotypes and discrimination. For example, in German, the word for bridge is feminine, and in Spanish, the word for bridge is masculine. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky had German speakers and Spanish speakers describe a bridge. The German speakers were more likely to describe it using adjectives like “beautiful” or “elegant,” while the Spanish speakers were more likely to describe it in masculine ways — “tall” and “strong.”

Moreover, the existing gender rules in Spanish are not perfect. Usually words ending in “-o” are masculine and those ending in “-a” are feminine, but there are many common words that break those gender rules, like “la mano,” the word for “hand.” And, of course, Spanish already uses an “e” for gender-neutral words, such as “estudiante,” or “student.”

I believe Latine accomplishes what Latinx originally meant to and more. Similarly, it eliminates the gender binary in its singular and plural form. However, Latine is not confined to an elite, English-speaking population within the U.S. It is inclusive.

Nevertheless, problems can still arise when the word “Latine” is imposed onto others. “Latina” and “Latino” may still be preferable for many individuals. I don’t think the “-e” should eliminate the existing “-o” and the “-a.” Instead, it could be a grammatically acceptable addition to the Spanish language.

Yes, Argentina and Spain’s ban of Latinx also included a ban on the use of Latine. Here is where I diverge from their directive. To me, the idea that language can be purist is nonsensical; language always evolves, whether it’s through technology — think emojis and textspeak — or increased social awareness, such as the evolution from “wife beating” to “intimate partner violence.“

Linguistic theory posits that language shapes reality, so cultures and communities can create words that shape the inclusive world they want to inhabit.

Language matters. Latine embodies that inclusivity — across socioeconomic status, citizenship, education, gender identity, age groups and nations, while honoring the Spanish language in the process.

Melissa K. Ochoa, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Saint Louis University

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

Who was Catherine de’ Medici? “The Serpent Queen” gives us a clever, powerful and dangerous woman

In the last week, I’ve been contacted by several friends and colleagues telling me if you type #catherinedemedici in Twitter, a snake emoji automatically appears. Designed to sync with “The Serpent Queen,” the serpent now appears even with hashtags made in tweets years ago.

This new Catherine is now the old Catherine.

In a life lived across most of the 16th century, Catherine de’ Medici was Queen of France, the mother of three kings and two queens, and the mother-in-law of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Anyone with that degree and longevity of access to influence across Europe was bound to attract attention.

In “The Serpent Queen,” we get a clever and powerful Catherine (played by Liv Hill as a teenager and Samantha Morton as the woman in her 40s), beguiling and dangerous, forged in the violence of her childhood and as an emotional response to the rejection of her love by her husband Henri (Alex Heath as the young Henri and Lee Ingleby in adulthood).

This Catherine decides to govern aided by the dark arts, determined to teach her enemies a lesson. She is also playful, musing “it feels good to be bad,” to a backing track of rock guitar.

But do we actually have a new interpretation? Here, a familiar story of one of history’s favorite bad girls strikes again. And in the process, Catherine de’ Medici is again diminished.

It seems the well-crafted propaganda of her own century – and additions of those since – remain as compelling as ever.

A woman of power

Catherine was never the ruler of France, but she was intimately acquainted with politics at the highest level.

She was an assiduous networker. Her remaining letters (some 6,000 survive) give us just a sense of the enormous reach of the relationships she maintained over a long and well watched life.

Hers was a remarkable trajectory. The Medici were not a dynasty of royal blood, but she nonetheless became queen of France, served as regent for her husband and was governess and advisor to her sons.

Her access to influence as a wife and mother, while conventional, was perceived by political men and commentators beyond the court as dangerous because it sat outside formal mechanisms for regulating power.

Multiple versions of Catherine

Catherine was at the height of power when the French kingdom was at war with itself. The French Wars of Religion, lasting from 1562 to 1598, pitted Catholics and Huguenots against each other, fighting for the soul of France.

Widowed in 1559, Catherine remained close to the throne as the advisor to her three sons who became king.

Although Catholic, Catherine’s recommendations for her sons generally favored a middle course that aimed to maintain the integrity of the realm, and the reputation of the dynasty she had married into.

This pleased few among the ardent on either side, who turned to the pen to respond, creating multiple versions of Catherine as suited their cause.

Sexualized tropes presented Catherine as a danger to men of either side in this conflict. A pamphlet of 1575 versified:

She unmans cocks, tearing off their crests and testicles, a virago holds sway over the French. An unbridled woman dines on the testicles of cocks, and as she devours this food, she smacks her lips and says: ‘Thus, I castrate Gallic courage, thus I unman the French, thus I subdue them!’

This version of Catherine was catchy.

There were many versions of Catherine. Some were the versions she made with her allies for public consumption: versions made in art, ceremony, palaces and acts.

Others had their own ideas about who Catherine was, or what version of Catherine best suited their objectives. Not all had the same reach and not all have been reproduced through to the present day.

Catherine knew the high stakes for women. She had a fraught and complex relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots, but she defended her to Elizabeth I’s courtier Francis Walsingham, telling Walshingham she “knew very well how often people said things of a poor afflicted princess that did not always turn out to be true.”

After her death, dozens of Catherines took free flight in novels. Alexandre Dumas’ “Queen Margot” (1845) has Catherine dissecting the brains of a chicken whose head she has severed with a single blow, for prophetic analysis. She conducts herself with a “malignant smile.”

She fared little better among 19th century scholars. The influential historian Jules Michelet, a Huguenot, famously termed Catherine “the maggot from Italy’s tomb.”

This version of Catherine was also catchy.

Women in the public eye

Catherine’s treatment throughout history reflects our problematic relationship with women’s roles in public life. There has been a long history of hostility to women of power and women in power.

“The Serpent Queen” traces Catherine’s life from the trials of her childhood to the beginning of what would become almost 30 years as a central figure in the reigns of her sons. Here we have an engaging Catherine with agency, narrated by Catherine herself. Her lines even echo speeches recorded by contemporary ambassadors.

Does Catherine at last have the final word?

This Catherine seems to seek our sympathy. She looks and speaks directly to us, seemingly eliciting our understanding of her decisions. “Tell me what you would have done differently?” she asks us.

But it is perhaps our collusion in the making of a familiar version of Catherine the series seeks to elicit.

Is this a new Catherine for new times, complex, contextualized, freed from the “bad girl” reputation that has followed her through time? Or a dangerously attractive, lavish rehash of Catherine as “bad girl” all over again?

Susan Broomhall, Director, Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University

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

Why are our lady fluids so often depicted as blue?

Here’s an interesting fact about women — none of our bodily fluids have ever resembled Windex. Not our periods, not our pee, not our amniotic fluid, not our saliva, none of it. It seemed for a moment there that this information had begun to take root into the public consciousness. But while a new study on female sexuality has brought new insights into a unique orgasmic phenomenon, it has also brought back a reminder of a familiar trope from the maxi pads ads of your youth — blue lady liquid.

A 2022 report out of Japan and published in the International Journal of Urology on the “Enhanced visualization of female squirting” sought to answer elusive question surrounding the phenomenon — what exactly people who squirt are squirting. In order to identify the source of the fluid, “A urethral catheter was inserted before sexual stimulation and the bladder was emptied. Then, a mixture of indigo carmine (10 ml) and saline (40 ml) was injected into the bladder.” When the subjects were then sexually stimulated to the point of squirting, they squirted blue, confirming that most, if not all, of their fluid was urine. “This is the first report,” the authors wrote, “in which visualization of squirting was enhanced.”

Enhanced like an Yves Klein painting. Like a Delft tile. Like a Smurf. Blue.

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The use of dye as a means of visualization is commonplace in routine medical diagnostics like CT scans or X-rays. And indigo carmine in particular is a common agent in tests involving the kidneys and bladder. If you’re hydrating, your pee should be pretty clear, which is good for your health but challenging for informational purposes. A vibrant blue, in contrast, says, “Look at me!” I have watched the video from that International Journal of Urology report and let’s just say that the evidence is impossible to miss. It’s like your favorite colored Paas Easter egg dye in a context you never imagined.

“If an advertiser wanted to explain the absorbency of a pad, they’d do so with a tranquil pour of swimming pool blue liquid.”

Yet that same shade has also long been synonymous with a kind of delicate discretion around other female discharge. For decades, if an advertiser wanted to explain the comfort and absorbency of a tampon or, more likely, a pad, they’d do so with a tranquil pour of swimming pool blue liquid.

Menstruation has long been framed in terms of managing it with the greatest possible degree of obfuscation. The earliest modern maxi pads were marketed with “silent purchase coupons” so ladies didn’t have endure the shame of uttering a word. For thirty years, the Modess brand ran on an enigmatic yet glamorous campaign of “Modess… because.” Tampons ads only started appearing on television in the mid 1970’s, and it took a few more years for a young Courtney Cox to become one of the first people ever to say the word “period” on TV. (Just this week, Cox cheekily posted a menopause-themed riff on her iconic Tampax ad on her Instagram.)

Scientists using dye to study female squirting say that it is mostly — but not entirely — urine

All of this is to say that it has taken a long time for the mere fact of female emissions to be acknowledged at all. And somewhere along the way, blue liquid entered the chat — and stayed there. As design lecturer Jane Connory explained to Australian Broadcast News in 2021, blue is regarded as “fresh [and] clean,” distinct “from red and the reality of blood.” It was precisely because it’s an unmistakably inhuman color that it was acceptable for advertisers.

“Always Ultra is much better at holding wetness inside,” purrs a woman in a television ad from the eighties, as test tubes pour blue liquid on pads. Two decades later, “The Always extra absorbent layer helps lock wetness, even in the middle!” a strikingly similar ad involving blue fluids and, this time, eyedroppers, explains. My favorite Always ad from the nineties includes an animation of a single, elegantly falling blue drop.

Over the past several years, the blue tide has, however, been turning. A groundbreaking 2010 Kotex ad poked fun at the stereotype, with a down to earth looking girl saying, “Ads on TV are so helpful, because they use that blue liquid. And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s supposed to happen.'” A 2012 ad from the UK company Bodyform similarly mocked the convention, with a witty “apology” revealing “the truth” of menstruation from a woman sipping from a glass of bright blue water.

Yet blue dies hard. When the period care company Cora started using red liquid in its ads in 2018, they were flagged and initially removed on Facebook and Instagram. The color red only started showing up on Australian period product television ads in 2019. When they did, a vividly scarlet hued initial campaign from the company Libra prompted hundreds of complaints, calling the imagery “distasteful” and “unnecessary,” to the nation’s Ad Standards department. In 2020, Kotex unleashed a new advertisement featuring a deep red fluid falling as if from the heavens above upon a waiting, “ultra thin” pad. The Indian period product company Whisper just started employing red in its advertising in 2021. Even Always has for the past few years embraced red, now poured from a tiny cup.

But the taboos around female fluids persist. Just two years ago, Tampax was boasting — to hoots on social media — of its Pearl Compak tampons that “open silently for full discretion.” The brand’s Radiant line, meanwhile, “features our quietest, resealable wrapper to make changing your tampon quiet, easy, and discreet.” Our fluids may today be less blue, but dammit, they’re still so troublingly noisy.

The Japanese squirting visualization research was surely not an intentional nod to our globally and persistent squeamishness around the normal and natural reality of our bodily fluids. It represents the consistent application of a dye commonly used for urinary tests. But it also inevitably evokes an image long held, that our functions are somehow overwhelming and discomfiting, that they are somehow rendered more wholesome in the hues of laundry detergent and toilet bowl cleanser.

on women’s health

A specialty food shop owner’s guide to stocking your pantry

Charles de Viel Castel didn’t ever see himself as the owner of a gourmet food shop. However, when the financier-turned-jewelry designer decamped with his family to the Hamptons amid the pandemic, he was unable to find certain key, quality ingredients that were more readily available in the city.

This realization launched a flurry of planning and purchasing, which resulted in the opening of L’Épicuriste, a high-end specialty food store catering to chefs, guests, hosts and everyone in between. On the shelves, there’s a mix of local and global products, ranging from Moroccan spices to knives from Japan. Oh, and don’t forget the French-imported macarons and chocolate.

Here are 5 delicious meals you can make with what’s in your pantry

While it may seem like there’s a disconnect between the kind of “shopping” de Viel Castel does to identify merchandise for L’Epicuriste and the shopping one does at an everyday supermarket, I believe there are lessons to be learned about better stocking your home kitchen.

Salon Food spoke with de Viel Castel about his big tips for those who want to feel a little more excitement and fulfillment the next time they open their pantry.

How products look matters

Let’s face it: Cooking night after night — even if you love to cook! — can be a bit of a slog. That’s why it’s important to find ways to imbue the process with little jolts of joy. For de Viel Castel, that means paying attention to the packaging.

“I think the ‘designer side’ of me believes that the way a product looks matters, right?” he says. “It has to be delicious — that goes without saying. But when I see beautiful Italian artichokes packed in a good jar of olive oil, all in beautiful packaging, that does have meaning to me — and it impacts my decision-making.”

So, whether you’re shopping for ingredients or cookware (like, say, this enamel butter warmer by which I’m completely enchanted), don’t be afraid to reach for something simply because it’s beautiful. If it makes you smile in the aisles, it will likely do the same in your home kitchen.

Blend local and international flavors

While it may sound counterintuitive, one of de Viel Castel’s favorite feelings is actually when he sees a customer leave the shop with just one ingredient. “It means they were looking for something very specific, and we filled a need,” he says.

Most often, this is the case with specialty international specialties — like tinned octopus in marinara or white soy sauce — but it’s also true for domestic ingredients, such as locally-roasted coffee beans or farm-fresh produce.

Try this approach in your home kitchen. Blend unique, globally-inspired finds with good stuff from local producers, and you’ll have plenty of options for quick dinner inspiration. Speaking of which . . .

Have a few things on hand to make special dinners in a snap

Since the Hamptons is an area that has a fair amount of people coming and going — whether because they’re vacationing or simply part-time residents — L’Épicuriste is stocked with several options for gourmet, pantry-safe meals that come together quickly. One of de Viel Castel’s favorites is a pre-made risotto that is ready in 10 minutes, using just four quarts of boiling water.

Keep an eye out next time you’re shopping for pre-made dinners that speak to you. Frontier Soup kits, Jain Family Foods classic daal and Momofuku’s spicy soy noodles are all good options.

Classics never go out of style

While L’Épicuriste will absolutely add some seasonal items to their shelves, like pumpkin seeds and apple-based ingredients, De Viel Castel says they really specialize in classic staples that will never go out of style.

“Everyone wants a good pasta, a good olive oil or a good French mustard,” he says.

Figure out what the classics of your kitchen look like — which may mean canned San Marzanos, miso paste, smoked paprika or soy sauce — and ensure you always have good versions of those on hand.

Indulge your sweet tooth, too

L’Épicuriste also has options for those with sweet tooths, from orange slices dipped in delectable French chocolate to macarons imported from Paris. There’s nothing like opening your own pantry at home and finding a small, shelf-stable sweet. Keep a sleeve of tasty shortbread or candied fruit as a treat for you or any company who might stop by.

about pantry organization

A New Orleans chef finds a place for fusion in the Black diaspora’s cuisine

In a quaint, restored house in the New Orleans Uptown neighborhood, the scent of spices like clove, paprika, cayenne, and garlic wafts through the windows. Those walking by can, at once, catch a scent of briny, freshly caught blue crab and the piquant smell of scotch bonnet. The confluence of flavors isn’t accidental. It’s the creation of Serigne Mbaye, a young, Senegalese chef bringing his culinary vision to life.

For Mbaye, fusing flavors to create a West African-Creole fusion cuisine is a craft and an opportunity for Black chefs like him to explore the creative lanes they’ve long been kept from venturing. The child of Senegalese immigrants — including Khady Kante, a highly revered Senegalese chef in her own right (she operated Touba Taif, one of NYC’s only Senegalese restaurants, from 1989 to 1991, and ran a restaurant in her home country of Senegal) — Mbaye remembers preparing one pot dishes with his mom. Dishes like domoda — which Mbaye described as a gumbo — or maybe jollof with chicken, fish, or shrimp, and sometimes, a beef stew with peanut butter. The one-pot characteristic of the food in Mbaye’s upbringing would parallel with what he found in an area influenced by enslaved Africans who came from his homeland. Here, Mbaye said, was an opportunity to tell a new story.

“So much of our story has been told to us, and I think preparing food with our own, new narratives allows us to offer a new, more truthful story about where we’ve been and where we can go.”

Mbaye is intrigued by the historic dismissal of West African food within food media and the food establishment and is hopeful at what’s possible when chefs like him study the culinary lessons imparted from their Black American peers. Working in kitchens from Harlem to London, Mbaye’s background includes professional work with esteemed family members, such as his aunt Ndoumbe Kante, who taught Mbaye how to make Senegal’s national dish, thieboudienne, and of course, his mother.

“When my mom makes good food, she focuses on the food that she can get in that pot, not about what’s going on somewhere else,” Mbaye recalls of his mother’s cooking. “I’m learning from that by heading more towards more rustic food and focusing on telling the story. I think that people might consider food to be art, but I think it’s a craft.”

Mbaye’s journey toward refining his craft has been anything but linear: Born in the U.S., Mbaye went to Muslim boarding school in Senegal, where he immediately gained recognition for his culinary aptitude (at one point, Mbaye was cooking for hundreds of his teachers and classmates). The school was more focused on religious teachings, so when he returned to the U.S. as a teen, he had no English skills and no proper training in math, history, or science.

He quickly learned all subjects while working at Le Baobab, an iconic Senegalese restaurant in Harlem, under his aunt Ndoumbe, who was the restaurant’s longtime head chef. After a long bout with New York State testing, he graduated high school and went to culinary school. Mbaye’s career led him to meetings with fellow Senegalese chef Peter Thiam, back to Senegal to learn more about his foodways, and to work in places such as San Francisco, Barcelona, and of course, New Orleans.

“I was so inspired during these experiences because, here I am one moment learning something in a place that’s completely new, and now here I am going to the heart of the history of our ancestors. I think it set me up for what I was eventually going to do in New Orleans.”

At first glance, New Orleans may not appear to be the obvious setting for a thriving West African restaurant. New Orleans’ Cajun and Creole cuisine has become so representative of the area that many forget the indigenous, immigrant, and African roots behind the cuisine. Mbaye’s former boss, Melissa Martin, writes about this history in her award-winning supper book, Mosquito Supper Club.

“These settlers built communities alongside the American Indian tribes who had been inhabiting Louisisna since at least 700 BCE,” Martin writes of the Spanish and French settlers who’d colonized Louisiana. “Together, these groups — as well as people of Spanish, Basque, Croatia, German, Irish, Portuguese, African, Creolo, Cuban, and Pacific Island descent, among others, who also migrated to the area — lived along the bayous and waterways in semi-isolation for more than 175 years, sharing their respective skills and practices and intermarrying. Cajun folks and what we know as the Cajun way of life are the result of this intermingling of nations and peoples and the cultures and traditions they brought to South Louisiana and shared with their new neighbors.”

It’s at Mosquito Supper Club where Mbaye became a nationally-recognized name. Though the young chef came to the restaurant with his own talent and perspective, his role as chef de cuisine allowed him to learn more about managing a kitchen, and responding to the flavor profiles of a community. Mosquito Supper Club also allowed for experimentation: Mbaye kicked off her near quarterly pop-ups, Dakar Nola, which Mbaye sometimes hosted at the Mosquito Supper Club building. Wherever the pop ups are located, Mbaye remains committed to the communal dining method he learned at Mosquito Supper Club, and integrates the Cajun and Creole flavors he became exposed to into his Senegalese cooking.

“As I continue learning more about the connection between the two, I’m realizing the fact I need to tell this story about the between Senegal and New Orleans, because knowing these connections is how we understand more about our diaspora’s cuisine, and what we’ve been able to create under what were oftentimes oppressive conditions.”

Mbaye spent so much time studying New Orleans dining and refining his own Senegalese dishes, the fusion cuisine that emerged seemed almost inevitable. At one of Mbaye’s dinners, he started his meal with a creamy, earthy Black-eyed pea soup with locust bean, crab, and a drizzle of palm oil.

Called “The Last Meal,” Mbaye told guests a harrowing story: Enslaved Africans were forced to eat black-eyed peas ahead of their forced journeys across the Atlantic. Known as a legume that could fatten the body, slave owners force-fed the kidnapped Africans a food that had a rich, near-spiritual meaning in West African homes.

His dinner, Mbaye said, was an opportunity to reclaim black-eyed peas, treating them with the flavor of the Senegalese and Louisiana Black diaspora, and demonstrating the continued possibilities of Black food. For Mbaye, this is following the direction of one of his mentors, revered food historian Dr. Jessica B. Harris. “Dr. Jessica B. Harris told me that I just need to tell my story, and mine is one of possibility, so that’s what I’m doing.”

Mbaye is attempting to create something new in a place that takes food more seriously than most cities. But Mbaye sees no problem with using the fundamentals of Creole and Cajun cooking to construct his harmoniously seasoned grouper and vegetables; he is acutely aware of the similarities between jambalaya and jollof rice, and he sees no reason why a beignet can’t be infused with a fresh strawberry jam.

“Serigne is the son and nephew of two Senegalese women who made their mark on the New York food scene years ago,” wrote food and television writer Lolis Eric Elie in an email. “Like many children of immigrants before him, he’s taking the flavors and techniques of his ancestral homeland, combined them with the techniques and flavors of American restaurants and created an amazing new cuisine.”

New Orleanians seem to be intrigued by Mbaye’s flavor of fusion. Seats for a Dakar Nola dinner regularly sell out and Mbaye was just nominated for the prestigious James Beard Award. The young chef recently announced that he’s moving on from his role as Mosquito Supper Club’s chef de cuisine, and is planning to open a brick and mortar location of Dakar NOLA. Elie says it may be because Mbaye’s fusion cuisine manages to tell stories, both old and new.

“Americans know West African cuisine largely because of its echoes in Creole and Southern food,” wrote Elie. “So when people taste Serigne’s food, it’s at once new and familiar.” As the young chef finds new ways to pair West African millet and Gulf Coast seafood, it’s clear that, in Louisiana, there’s a place for Black food that is at once old, new, and wholly inspired.

“This is the time to reclaim our foodways and tell our stories,” said Mbaye. “I’m so grateful to be part of that sort of change in the dining world.”