From book stacks to psychosis and food stamps, librarians confront a new workplace

For nearly two decades, Lisa Dunseth loved her job at San Francisco’s main public library, particularly her final seven years in the rare books department.

But like many librarians, she saw plenty of chaos. Patrons racked by untreated mental illness or high on drugs sometimes spit on library staffers or overdosed in the bathrooms. She remembers a co-worker being punched in the face on his way back from a lunch break. One afternoon in 2017, a man jumped to his death from the library’s fifth-floor balcony.

Dunseth retired the following year at age 61, making an early exit from a nearly 40-year career.

“The public library should be a sanctuary for everyone,” she said. The problem was she and many of her colleagues no longer felt safe doing their jobs.

Libraries have long been one of society’s great equalizers, offering knowledge to anyone who craves it. As public buildings, often with long hours, they also have become orderly havens for people with nowhere else to go. In recent years, amid unrelenting demand for safety-net services, libraries have been asked by community leaders to formalize that role, expanding beyond books and computers to providing on-site outreach and support for people living on the streets. In big cities and small towns, many now offer help accessing housing, food stamps, medical care, and sometimes even showers or haircuts. Librarians, in turn, have been called on to play the role of welfare workers, first responders, therapists, and security guards.

Librarians are divided about those evolving duties. Although many embrace the new role — some voluntarily carry the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone — others feel overwhelmed and unprepared for regular run-ins with aggressive or unstable patrons.

“Some of my co-workers are very engaged with helping people, and they’re able to do the work,” said Elissa Hardy, a trained social worker who until recently supervised a small team of caseworkers providing services in the Denver Public Library system. The city boasts that some 50 lives have been saved since library staffers five years ago began volunteering for training to respond to drug overdoses. Others, Hardy said, simply aren’t informed about the realities of the job. They enter the profession envisioning the cozy, hushed neighborhood libraries of their youth.

“And that’s what they think they’re walking into,” she said.

Across the U.S., more than 160,000 librarians are employed in public libraries and schools, universities, museums, government archives, and the private sector, charged with managing inventory, helping visitors track down resources, and creating educational programs. Often, the post requires they hold a master’s degree or teaching credential.

But many were ill prepared for the transformation in clientele as drug addiction, untreated psychosis, and a lack of affordable housing have swelled homeless populations in a broad array of U.S. cities and suburbs, particularly on the West Coast.

Amanda Oliver, author of “Overdue: Reckoning With the Public Library,” which recounted nine months she worked at a Washington, D.C., branch, said that while an employee of the library, she was legally forbidden to talk publicly about frequent incidents such as patrons passing out drunk, screaming at invisible adversaries, and carrying bed bug-infested luggage into the library. This widespread “denial of how things are” among library managers was a complaint Oliver said she heard echoed by many staffers.

The 2022 Urban Trauma Library Study, spearheaded by a group of New York City-based librarians, surveyed urban library workers and found nearly 70% said they had dealt with patrons whose behavior was violent or aggressive, from intimidating rants and sexual harassment to people pulling guns and knives or hurling staplers at them. Few of the workers felt supported by their bosses.

“As the social safety net has been dismantled and underfunded, libraries have been left to pick up the slack,” wrote the authors, adding that most institutions lack practical guidelines for treating traumatic incidents that over time can lead to “compassion fatigue.”

Library administrators have begun to acknowledge the problem by providing training and hiring staff members experienced in social services. Ensuring library staffers did not feel traumatized was a large part of her focus during her years with the Denver libraries, said Hardy. She and other library social workers in cities such as San Francisco and Washington have worked in recent years to organize training programs for librarians on topics from self-care to strategies for defusing conflict.

About 80% of librarians are women, and the library workforce skews older, with nearly a third of staff members over 55. As in many professions, salaries have failed to keep pace with rising costs. According to the American Library Association-Allied Professional Association, the average salary for a public librarian in the U.S. was $65,339 in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available.

Studies confirm that many librarians experience burnout.

In Los Angeles County, with more than 60,000 people who are homeless, the past few years have tested the limits of a public library system with more than 80 sites.

“The challenge is that the level of need is off the charts,” said L.A. city librarian John Szabo. “Unfortunately, we are not fully and effectively trained to deal with these issues.”

Libraries began their transition more than a decade ago in response to the number of patrons seeking bathrooms and temporary respite from life on the streets. In 2009, San Francisco decided to formally address the situation by hiring a full-time library social worker.

Leah Esguerra leads a team of formerly homeless “health and safety associates” who patrol San Francisco’s 28 library sites looking to connect sick or needy patrons with services big and small, from shelter beds and substance use treatment to public showers, a model that has been copied in cities around the world.

“The library is a safe place, even for those who no longer trust the system,” said Esguerra, who worked at a community mental health clinic before becoming the “library lady,” as she’s sometimes called on the streets.

But hiring a lead social worker hasn’t erased the many challenges San Francisco’s librarians face. So the city has become more aggressive in setting standards of behavior for patrons.

In 2014, then-Mayor Ed Lee called for library officials to impose tougher policies in response to rampant complaints about inappropriate conduct, including indecent exposure and urinating in the stacks. Soon after, officials released an amended code of conduct that explicitly spelled out the penalties for violations such as sleeping, fighting, and “depositing bodily fluids on SFPL property.”

The city has installed extra security and taken other steps, like lowering bathroom stall doors to discourage drug use and sex and installing disposal boxes for used needles, although people still complain about conditions at the main library.

Some rural libraries have sought to make social services more accessible, as well. In Butte County, along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California, library workers used a $25,000 state grant to host informational sessions on mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia, as well as how to help people access treatment. Books on these topics were marked with green tags to make them easier to find, said librarian Sarah Vantrease, who helped build the program. She now works as a library administrator in Sonoma County.

“The library,” said Vantrease, “shouldn’t just be for people who are really good at reading.”

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

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

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“New America”: Avowed white nationalist, LGBTQ-hater pushes vision to Catholic right

On Aug. 18, the Catholic-right media outlet Church Militant featured a half-hour interview with John Doyle, a young YouTube streamer who drew national attention this June for helping to lead a uniquely ugly protest against an LGBTQ Pride Month event in downtown Dallas. The 22-year-old Doyle, whose YouTube show “Heck Off, Commie!” has an audience of some 300,000 subscribers, has openly referred to himself as both a “white nationalist” and “Christian fascist.” But to his interviewer, Church Militant founder and president Michael Voris, he was a “saint in the making.” And as the conversation brought Doyle’s message to a new and different audience, the alignment of right-wing Catholicism with some of the most extreme voices on today’s far right only grew.

For years, Church Militant has served as an angry gadfly within the world of right-wing Catholicism, objecting not just to moderate and progressive Catholics and Pope Francis, whom the outlet sees as a heretical liberal, but also to more mainstream conservative Catholic outlets it views as insufficiently critical of church hierarchy.

For his part, Doyle is a prominent member of online far-right youth circles aligned with the white nationalist America First/groyper movement and its leader, the gleefully racist and antisemitic livestreamer Nick Fuentes, with whom Doyle led a “Stop the Steal” protest in 2020. On his livestream show, where Doyle promotes an authoritarian form of Christian nationalism, he has attacked figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., claiming that “being assassinated was like the best thing that could happen to him” and said that “the destruction of white racism is ultimately code for the destruction of American society.” Last October, Doyle taunted students at the University of North Texas by asking, “What is wrong with Christian fascism?” and warning that “when we and all my friends take power, bad things are going to happen to you.”

Lone Star hate: Right-wing activists in Texas drive a new wave of anti-LGBTQ bigotry

In February, Doyle appeared as a special guest at Fuentes’ third America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC III) in Orlando, alongside far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who called for hanging the movement’s political enemies. In April, after keynoting an event hosted by the University of California, Santa Barbara, chapter of Turning Point USA, Doyle praised the group for being brave enough to invite “white nationalists” like “yours truly” to speak.

And this June, as Salon reported, Doyle attacked a family-friendly drag queen brunch at a Dallas gay bar, declaring that LGBTQ people are “the symptom of a dying society,” that he aimed to take away “every single one” of their rights and that Texas sheriffs should enter the bar “and put bullets in all their heads” because “That’s what the badge is for.”

That protest is what Doyle recalled when Voris asked him what Church Militant’s right-wing Catholic audience should be paying attention to in the cultural arena. Describing transgenderism as “deeply disturbed and satanic,” Doyle went on to claim that when some of his fellow protesters prayed the rosary, it had sparked a “demonic” response from the counter-protesters who were there to protect the bar and its patrons.

“There were people next to us who weren’t exactly Catholic,” Doyle said, but who nonetheless later told him that “at that moment, the sort of spiritual conflict we’re in became very real to them.” While LGBTQ advocates and allies might dismiss other forms of protests, Doyle continued, “hearing the word of God and something that powerful made these people who look as though they were probably demonically influenced screech. They weren’t yelling their counterargument … they were literally screeching at us exactly as you would expect if you believe in spiritual warfare.”

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During that event, as local activists’ and filmmakers’ videos document, anti-LGBTQ protesters screamed at parents and their children, followed some families and performers back to their cars, called attendees and counterprotesters “faggots” and “groomers” and even taunted police there to separate the camps by saying, “Your dad probably dragged you to a lot of gay bars.”

Doyle also suggested, without evidence, that the parents who had brought their children to the event were all “single mothers” who had “been failed by the men around them and they’re taking it out on the children. You know, oftentimes these are little boys who are being brought to these events by their single mothers, and you have to assume that the single mother is basically viewing that boy as like his father, and getting revenge on him by destroying them.”

Doyle went on to claim that American men have been feminized by “residual estrogen in our tap water”; that the behavior of women politicians shows “that they really were supposed to be like mothers or nurturers”; and that, should his side “win,” it should erect statues of all the “Satanic Panic evangelical right-wing leaders [of the 1980s and early ’90s], just as an apology to them, because everything they predicted turned out to be true.” (As with baseless QAnon conspiracy theories today, the Satanic Panic involved elaborate but utterly unfounded accusations that American day care centers were part of a widespread network of organized ritual pedophilia rings.)

Doyle claimed American men have been feminized by “residual estrogen” in tap water and suggested erecting statues of the “Satanic Panic evangelical right-wing leaders” of the ’80s and ’90s, because their predictions “turned out to be true.”

Doyle’s racist ideas were also hinted at during the interview. When Voris asked Doyle why he thought he hadn’t yet been censored by “big media,” Doyle responded that he believed his “intellectual approach” disarms content moderators who are on the lookout for more obvious hate speech. “If I do an hour-and-a-half-long video, for example, basically preaching against the civil rights movement in every aspect, that has been able to survive on YouTube and get a few hundred thousand views,” he said. “Whereas someone who will say, ‘Oh, MLK is a bad guy because of XYZ cheesy joke,’ they’ll get censored.” He went on to suggest that today’s United States is “definitely unsustainable” because America’s government was constructed “by people who were much more intelligent and educated than the people who currently run it,” thanks to both “exponentially accumulating degeneracy” and “affirmative action.”

In response to that threat, Doyle continued, the “authoritarian right wing” was growing as “an immune response to Communism.” While he said he and his fellow travelers weren’t calling for “a Mussolini-style state,” they “just know that what is happening is wrong and we’re going to stop it eventually.” Within the course of the next decade, he went on, “It will be more obvious that pillars are being put into place that could really cause a serious change. …We’re seeing a lot of these people emerge and I think they’re going to be very useful in orchestrating what will be, like, the New America, so to speak.”

Part of that New America, he suggested, would come about through the increasing mobilization of young right-wing men. “I think it is going to be as we see throughout history: Men, in particular young men, finally get together and organize and take the country back in whatever capacity that means.”

During the interview, Voris called Doyle “a saint in the making” and Doyle credited Church Militant with helping shape his faith, saying that after he’d “come out” as Catholic during one livestream, “without really knowing what that meant,” members of Church Militant “reached out to me” and had become his “sherpa, leading me into becoming a good Catholic.”

Doyle’s New America will come about, he suggested, through the mobilization of young right-wing men, who will “finally get together and organize and take the country back.”

Church Militant isn’t the only outlet helping to mainstream Doyle’s views. In addition to the welcome he’s found with Turning Point USA — which is currently bringing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on a national tour to support far-right candidates such as Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and Pennsylvania’s would-be Christian nationalist governor Doug Mastriano — Doyle also regularly appears on, and even guest hosts, a show on Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV network.

Furthermore, Doyle also isn’t the only far-right activist affiliated with white nationalism that Church Militant has helped elevate to a new audience. The outlet made waves in 2021 for hiring disgraced alt-right star Milo Yiannopoulos as a contributor. (Yiannopoulos in turn likely helped Church Militant score a major sit-down interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene this April, in which Greene declared that the existence of Catholic immigrant aid groups suggested that Satan was controlling the Catholic Church.) Last November, the outlet invited self-declared “groyper Mommy” Michelle Malkin to address its daylong protest rally outside the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where Malkin invoked “replacement theory” rhetoric to charge that the church’s hierarchy was using immigration to destroy “the historic American nation.”

More recently, as Salon reported in a series this spring, Church Militant has made a number of efforts to align itself with and recruit members of the America First/groyper movement, at least one of whose members is also on the outlet’s staff. Those efforts have included buying social media ads that use groyper imagery in appeals for “based straight Zoomer[s]” to join Church Militant’s activist arm, Resistance, and “fight for authentic Catholicism.”

In a video last February, Voris praised AFPAC III as the place “where all the youthful (read: future) energy is,” predicting that, between Fuentes’ AFPAC and the more mainstream Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “Whoever wins this struggle will dictate the future of the [Republican] party and, to a large extent, the nation.”

In May, the head of Church Militant’s Resistance group interviewed groyper leader Dalton Clodfelter, promoting a groyper website as an exciting platform “for a lot of awesome younger conservatives.” Clodfelter, who described the America First movement as “not like normie neocon conservatism” but rather actively “Christian nationalist” and dedicated to “spreading Christianity through our nation where it’s lacking,” in turn promoted a series of Resistance-organized anti-abortion protests to his followers on the social media site Telegram in the days after the leaked Supreme Court opinion that eventually overturned Roe v. Wade.

In the past week, as Right Wing Watch has reported, Clodfelter has declared that “every homosexual is a child molester; every child molester creates a gay”; called someone he was feuding with online a “fucking k*ke” and promoted a vision of America’s future in which Christianity will become the official religion, pornography and LGBTQ people will be illegal and all schools will “promote what it means to be a Christian to the youth of America.”

“I believe in a far-right authoritarian government,” Clodfelter continued. “Once we take control, we will identify our enemies and we will stomp them into the dirt. They will not be able to return to power. We will rip them from their offices. We will rip them from their homes for being degenerate liars, degenerate, treasonous domestic terrorists, because that is what they are.”

Back at Church Militant last week, viewers were ecstatic about the outlet hosting Doyle, calling him an “Absolutely based Catholic man,” declaring the interview “in the top ten crossovers in modern Catholic history,” and urging Church Militant, “Please have Nick Fuentes on” next.

from Kathryn Joyce on the far right

Rep. Adam Schiff on Jan. 6, Trump’s coup and the “worst-case scenario” for America’s future

Rep. Adam Schiff has repeatedly warned the American people and the world that Donald Trump and his movement represent an existential threat to democracy and freedom. In May of 2019, Schiff appeared on “ABC This Week” and said this:

I don’t think this country could survive another four years of a president like this, who gets up every day trying to find new and inventive ways to divide us. He doesn’t seem to understand that a fundamental aspect of his job is to try to make us a more perfect union. But that’s not at all where he’s coming from…. He’s going to be defeated, he has to be defeated.

He was not sure, Schiff cautioned, “how much more our democratic institutions can take of this kind of attack on the rule of law.”

Those warnings would prove to be all too true, in ways that too many Americans were afraid to admit. This denial of the extreme danger embodied by Trump, the Republican-fascist movement and the larger white right left the American people and the country’s political class unprepared for the full-spectrum assault on democracy, freedom, decency, truth and even reality itself that would soon be summoned up.

During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Rep. Schiff, in his role as the lead House manager, offered this prophetic moment of truth-telling:

We must say enough — enough! He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all…. Can we be confident that he will not continue to try to cheat in [this] very election? Can we be confident that Americans and not foreign powers will get to decide, and that the president will shun any further foreign interference in our democratic affairs? The short, plain, sad, incontestable answer is no, you can’t. You can’t trust this president to do the right thing. Not for one minute, not for one election, not for the sake of our country. You just can’t. He will not change and you know it.

What are the odds, if left in office, that he will continue trying to cheat? I will tell you: 100 percent. A man without character or ethical compass will never find his way.

Those warnings came true in dramatic fashion on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of Donald Trump’s followers, under his malignant influence, launched a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol as part of his coup attempt.

Alexander Vindman on Trump as “cult leader” and the line from Jan. 6 to Putin’s war on Ukraine

Undeterred by their failure to end American democracy on that day, Trump and the Republican fascists have only escalated their assaults. The future of America’s democracy hangs in the balance; matters are dire. Ultimately, the American people must decide whether they want to save their democracy or surrender it to neofascism.

Adam Schiff has served in the House of Representatives since 2001, and now represents California’s 28th congressional district, which includes parts of the city of Los Angeles and its northern suburbs. He is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and led the first impeachment of Donald Trump.

Schiff is also currently a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol. Before his election to Congress, he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles and served in the California State Senate. His new book is “Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could.”

In this conversation, Schiff explains what the average American can do to protect their democracy and the types of tangible actions and sacrifices that requires. He counsels that given the threats of violence from the Republicans and the larger neofascist movement against poll workers, civil rights activists and local election officials, some degree of fear is reasonable — but that saving American democracy will require courage and fortitude. Schiff also reflects on what it was like to be under siege at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and how that moment made it clear that Trumpism had fully conquered the Republican Party and the “conservative” movement.

Toward the end of this conversation Schiff responds to concerns that the American people will never learn the full truth about Donald Trump and his confederates’ coup attempt.

Schiff also shares his belief and expectation that Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice will fully investigate Donald Trump for his apparent or alleged crimes — and then hold him fully accountable.

Given all the challenges and crises we face in America right now, and around the world, how are you feeling? How do you sleep?

I sleep very well. My problem is, I don’t have enough time for all of my tasks. But when I do go to sleep, I usually fall asleep before my head hits the pillow.

I’m more worried about the health of our democracy today than I was a year and a half ago. We were not at the darkest point a year and a half ago. When I was leaving the House floor after the events of Jan. 6, I truly thought that the country had reached the terrible end to which Donald Trump and Trumpism had brought us.

When I was leaving the House floor after Jan. 6, I thought that would be the moment when the Republican Party would repudiate Donald Trump and everything he stood for. But that didn’t happen.

Surely that would be the moment when the Republican Party would repudiate Donald Trump and everything he stood for. But that didn’t happen. They have really clung ever more desperately to the Big Lie, and they’ve used that Big Lie to usher in a new generation of Jim Crow laws around the country to disenfranchise people of color, and voters more generally, as a way of attacking the infrastructure of our elections.

How are you maintaining your focus? What are you prioritizing? What advice do you have for folks who are feeling overwhelmed right now?

There are a great many people who do feel overwhelmed and who are at the point of despair. But the American people do not have the luxury of despair right now. We have a unique responsibility in this moment to defend democracy when it’s at its greatest peril. This is truly a history-making moment.

But don’t try to fix everything. Don’t try to focus on every problem. Just decide, “This is what I’m going to do in the next few weeks, and then the next few months, to help serve my country.” We can all influence the people around us, our peer group and larger social circle. The circle may be large or may be small, but it is something all of us can do. The key is to do something. There’s nothing more debilitating than to feel that you’re powerless to impact your circumstances.

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The reality is that none of us are powerless. We can all change the course of our country in ways both large and small. In terms of my own work and responsibilities, I take it one day at a time. There are certainly days when I get up and I think, “I’ve just got to make it through the day.” And at the end of the day, I say to myself, “I’m surprised I’m still standing.” But I’m going to keep at my post until we get through this storm.

Democracy is something we do — it’s not an abstract idea. To that end, what are some tangible things that people can do in this moment of crisis?

I think the paramount need right now is to protect the infrastructure of our elections. Be a poll watcher. If you have legal skills, volunteer your time to one of the legal organizations that are fighting voter disenfranchisement. Or if you have personal means and resources, contribute to one of the many wonderful groups that are protecting the vote and ensuring access to the franchise.

People should follow their passions and interests because they’ll enjoy the work more. They’ll derive more satisfaction from it and they’ll get more accomplished. Nobody has to reinvent the wheel now. There are lots of great organizations they can identify online.

Republicans and their allies are attacking civil society on every level. They are literally threatening the lives and safety of poll workers and people doing voter registration drives and voter mobilization. They are even attacking librarians. What do you tell those Americans who want to do this important work but are afraid for their lives and families? Is that fear reasonable?

I certainly understand the fear. And I thought that among the most powerful testimony we had during the Jan. 6 hearings was that of Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman. Ruby Freeman testified about what it was like when the most powerful person in the world, Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, targeted an American citizen. She made the important point that the president is supposed to protect American citizens, not target them. Ruby Freeman’s daughter and mother were also targeted.

Yes, those threats are very real. That is a very sad and unfortunate reality. But we cannot allow those threats to intimidate us from doing our jobs and defending our democracy. Right now, from the depths of Mar-a-Lago, the former president is lashing out at the FBI, and his words are an incitement to violence. We see people acting on them, putting on a bulletproof vest and picking up a military style assault weapon and going to an FBI office in Cincinnati to shoot people. Again, the danger is real. People have to decide what they’re comfortable with when every role or job is dangerous. There are a great many things that people could do to help from the privacy of their own home.

What do we mean by democracy? Why do Donald Trump and today’s Republicans and “conservatives” hate true democracy, meaning multiracial, pluralistic “We the People” democracy?

We need to make democracy into something very tangible, very concrete, and not an abstract idea. In its broadest terms, democracy means that we, the American people, through our franchise, our right to vote, get to decide who should govern and therefore the direction of the country. The Republican Party has been moving away from that idea and toward autocracy.

They believe that an authoritarian strongman figure like Donald Trump should decide what is best for the American people. He summarized that view when he said, “I alone can fix it.”

The Republican Party’s move toward authoritarianism began several years ago. One of the canaries in the coal mine was in North Carolina, after a Democrat was elected governor.

The Republican Party’s move toward authoritarianism began several years ago. One of the canaries in the coal mine was in North Carolina, after a Democrat [current Gov. Roy Cooper] was elected governor. The Republican Party in North Carolina responded not how the parties in this country have historically responded, which is by saying, “Next time we’ll do better. And next time we’ll come up with better ideas or better policies or a better way to message our ideas.” Instead, the Republicans decided to strip the governor of many of his powers and responsibilities. That represented an attitude that said, “If we lose, we’re going to change the rules of the game, so we don’t lose again,” rather than trying to win over people through democratic means and appealing to their intellect, their intelligence, their passion and their ideas.

There were other canaries in the coal mine as well. Mitch McConnell decided he would not even give President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court a hearing. That was a decision by McConnell that American democracy wasn’t as important as his desire to gain and keep power. He would tear down these institutions little by little for more power.

Another example was when Donald Trump attacked democracy by using the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Trump also tried to use the federal workforce as an arm of his campaign. If a president can keep themselves in power by forcing federal employees into essentially supporting his campaign, that is another body blow to our democracy.

You were in the Capitol on Jan. 6. What was going through your mind during that ordeal?

I wrote about this in “Midnight in Washington.” I was on the House floor. I had suggested to the speaker that we establish a small group to try to anticipate all that might go wrong with the 2020 election or its aftermath. As a result, I was one of the House managers opposing the effort to decertify the election.

I really wasn’t paying attention to what was going on down at the Mall until I looked up. I noticed that the speaker was no longer presiding. Then Capitol Police came on the floor, and they rushed away our No. 2, Steny Hoyer [the majority leader], and came back and made a series of increasingly severe announcements about rioters being in the building and the need to get out gas masks, the need to be prepared to get down on the ground and then, ultimately, that we needed to evacuate.

I remember waiting by the exit to let other people go ahead. A couple of Republicans came up to me and one said, “You can’t let them see you,” meaning the insurrectionists. And the other said, “He’s right. I know these people. I can talk to them. I can talk my way through them. You’re in a whole different category.” At first I was touched by their evident concern for my safety, but my next impulse was to think, if these SOBs hadn’t been lying about the election, I wouldn’t need to worry about my safety and nobody else would either.

I was also horrified by how the rest of the world must be perceiving this. To see these images of insurrectionists climbing up the Capitol, breaking through the glass, desecrating the Capitol, defecating on the floors. The great injury that our country and its image suffered from this, and more generally what the Trump years did to the country’s prestige and standing in the world, was heartbreaking to me.

The great injury that our country and its image suffered from [Jan. 6], and from what the Trump years did to the country’s prestige and standing in the world, was heartbreaking to me.

The hardest thing to see were these Confederate flags and “Camp Auschwitz” T-shirts and other such horrible things. That told me that this was more than a Trumpist insurrection. Jan. 6 was also a white nationalist insurrection, and the road to recovery for our country was going to be much longer and much harder than I would have thought originally.

I have a lot of questions about what happened on Jan. 6. The role of the Secret Service, for instance, is an obvious unanswered question. It looked like a stand-down order had been given to the military and law enforcement. There’s the question of the role of Republicans in Congress in the coup attempt and the Capitol attack. There are so many questions to be asked and answered. Will the American people ever get the full picture of what happened that day?

It’s very difficult to say how much we have not been able to uncover. We learned a tremendous amount. I thought I understood the insurrection well because I’d been there that day. I’d witnessed what happened. I followed the events thereafter very carefully. But during the course of our investigation, we’ve interviewed over 1,000 people. We’ve gathered tens of thousands of documents, and we’ve learned so much more about the multiple lines of effort that went into overturning the election.

One of the most important takeaways of the investigation is that it wasn’t just the 6th of January. Moreover, it wasn’t just a violent attack on the Capitol. This attack on American democracy involved a pressure campaign against state and local officials to try to get them to overturn the results. There was bogus litigation filed all over the country. There was an effort to decapitate the leadership in the Justice Department. There was an effort to force the vice president into ignoring his constitutional duty. There was a fake elector scheme.

It was only when all of these things and more failed to achieve Trump’s desired outcome of overturning the election that they resorted to a violent attack on the Capitol. Some of the evidence of that has been so graphic, so disturbing. One of the things that stands out to me from the hearings was the testimony of top Justice Department people, people that Trump appointed, sitting with him in the Oval Office. They were going through his bogus claims of fraud and telling him, “That’s nonsense. That’s BS. That’s not true. There’s nothing there.” What’s Trump’s response? “Just say the election is corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republicans.”

I’m a former prosecutor. That’s the kind of clear evidence of malign and criminal intent that you look for in an investigation. He demonstrated a recognition that the claims of fraud are bogus and a willingness to ask people just to lie about it and leave the rest to him.

This is in the same vein as the testimony we had about Donald Trump on the Mall on Jan. 6, being told by the Secret Service that his supporters wouldn’t go through the metal detectors because they were armed, and they didn’t want up to give up their arms. What’s his answer? “Take down the magnetometers. They’re not here to hurt me.”

Are there other things where, because of the unwillingness of the people closest to the president to cooperate, we don’t know and may not find out? I’m sure there are. But we have learned enough.

The public would have never known these things if not for our investigation. Are there other things like that, where because of the unwillingness of the people closest to the president to cooperate, we don’t know and may not find out? I’m sure there are. But we have learned enough to know what a terrible danger to the country Donald Trump represents. We hope that the Justice Department will do its part, and do a vigorous investigation of its own, so that the country can learn more and all the wrongdoers can be brought to justice.

As a former prosecutor and a public servant, what does justice and accountability look like for Trump and his confederates, both for Jan. 6 but also more generally? My concern is that if Donald Trump is repeatedly accused of breaking the law and is never convicted and punished, he will become more powerful because his claims of victimhood will appear more legitimate.

Our responsibility is to conduct vigorous oversight and propose reforms to protect the country going forward. It really will fall on the Justice Department to bring about the other forms of accountability, which means prosecuting those people who have violated the law and to seek the appropriate sentence. The Justice Department needs to be held to the standard they established at the beginning, which is that they would follow the evidence wherever it leads, because the evidence has been leading to the former president. There can only be one standard for the rule of law.

If Donald Trump and this version of the Republican Party get their way, what will happen to America? What will the country’s democracy look like?

It won’t be a democracy anymore. The worst-case scenario is not that Donald Trump runs again and wins but rather that he runs again and loses, and they succeed in overturning the election. Then you no longer have a democracy. You have a political strongman making the decisions. It is one-man, one-party rule.

What will that mean on a practical level for people’s everyday lives?

It means they don’t get to decide anymore. They don’t get to decide through their representatives if they want lower prescription drug prices, like the bill we just passed. They don’t get to decide whether we invest in attacking the problem of climate change or whether we just continue to burn fossil fuels until the earth is destroyed, because that decision is now made by an autocrat.

It means that people do not have reproductive freedoms and control over their own bodies. It’s all being decided by the occupant of the Oval Office. Ultimately, if the Republicans and Donald Trump and others like him get their way, then the American people will lose any say in their personal futures and the future of our country.

about Trump, Jan. 6 and the future

Democrats have seized the momentum — now that needs to flow down-ballot

Reports of Democrats’ midterm death may be greatly exaggerated. In fact, Democrats have momentum. Public reaction to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision has demonstrated the deep unpopularity of Republican abortion restrictions, including Kansas voters’ recent and resounding rejection of a change to the state constitution that would have made an abortion ban possible. And a summer of explosive Jan. 6 hearings has shown the depths to which MAGA Republicans aim to go in dismantling democracy. Meanwhile, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has been a tremendous victory. FiveThirtyEight now has Democrats ahead on the generic ballot.

Democrats have a path to retain control in Washington. But the fight must be for much more than that. From abortion access to fair elections, state legislatures are increasingly the venues that control ever-broader swaths of our social, economic, and personal lives. Building progressive power in state legislatures is a key to securing the very future of our civil rights and democracy. Remember: whoever we elect to legislatures this year will be in office during the critical post-2024 election period.

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

The good news is that control of legislative chambers is not wildly out of reach. Our recent analysis shows that Democrats have been much closer to controlling chambers than has been commonly understood. Follow the data: Legislative majorities often hinge on the outcomes in a handful of competitive seats. With so much on the line, Democrats must use their newfound momentum to fight hard for control of critically important state legislative seats.

In 2020 and 2021, Democrats lost by tiny margins

In 2020, tiny margins in a small number of races kept Democrats from power in numerous battleground state chambers. If Democratic candidates had gotten just 4,451 more votes in the two closest races in the Arizona state House (0.09% of the total 5,028,382 votes cast), they would have flipped the chamber. That would have broken a Republican trifecta and kept the state from passing a 15-week abortion ban in March.

Similarly, Democrats would have flipped the North Carolina state House with just 20,671 more votes in the 10 most competitive legislative districts (0.39% of the 5,266,692 votes cast). That would have prevented Republicans from gerrymandering the state and federal redistricting maps, which Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper has no ability to veto.

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Just 8,611 more votes for state legislative Democrats in the four districts with the closest margins in Michigan (out of 5,349,675 total votes), and 22,356 more votes in the 12 closest races in Pennsylvania (out of 6,479,724 total votes), would have flipped both houses in those crucial swing states as well. That would have prevented the Pennsylvania legislature from pursuing voter suppression measures, and unblocked legislative Democrats from enacting gun safety measures following the Oxford shooting.

We saw this again in 2021. After two productive trifecta years, Virginia Democrats lost the governorship and the House of Delegates. But it was an extremely narrow loss: Democrats were just 733 votes shy of holding the three Democratic incumbent seats that decided the majority, out of 3.2 million total votes cast in state legislative races. In those three races, Democrats lost by margins of 94, 127 and 512 votes.

Changing those outcomes would have required turning out more Democratic voters at the bottom of the ticket. An alternative approach shows we might have needed fewer votes — if we had successfully persuaded a few people to vote for Democratic rather than Republican state legislative candidates. For instance, flipping just 2,226 votes from Republican to Democratic state legislative candidates in the two Arizona house districts with the closest margins would have delivered Democrats control of the chamber. And flipping just 370 votes in the three closest districts in Virginia would have kept Democrats in control of the House of Delegates.

In 2021, after two years of trifecta control in Virginia, Democrats fell just 733 votes shy of holding the three seats that decided the majority in the House of Delegates.

Some combination of persuading more swing voters and mobilizing more base voters could have bridged the relatively narrow gap between 2020’s down-ballot losses and flipping state chambers, or retaining the Virginia House in 2021. This observation coincides with what organizers already know: Expanding and engaging the electorate are both important functions. It’s a false choice for Democrats to pursue either persuasion or expanding the electorate – we must do both.

Beware ballot “drop-off” — and keep fighting

Of course, this analysis doesn’t mean the road ahead is easy. Every vote must be earned, especially for down-ballot Democrats. The votes earned will need to be concentrated in the competitive districts that will decide legislative majorities. And you can’t out-organize gerrymandering and voter suppression.

But what this analysis shows is that the fight for control of our states is not insurmountable. Furthermore, it may well be the case that Democrats already have enough voters showing up, but too many of them simply “drop off” the ballot when it comes to voting for state legislators. In a 2020 analysis looking at 11 battleground chambers, we found that state legislative Republicans outperformed Donald Trump in terms of vote share in every single chamber, while state legislative Democrats almost always underperformed Joe Biden in vote share. This trend was echoed in Virginia’s 2021 elections, where we saw down-ballot Democrats underperform their gubernatorial candidate, Terry McAuliffe, in terms of both number of votes and vote share, while down-ballot Republicans outperformed now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin on both measures. It appears that Democratic top-of-ticket voters are dropping off the ballot in a way that Republican top-of-ticket voters are not.

So this is going to be work. Electorally, Democrats must support inspiring candidates with resonant messages, and ensure those candidates have the resources to run strong campaigns. Structurally, we must recognize that success requires year-round civic engagement. Progressives can’t just engage people during election season — we need to build power through organizations that have the resources to focus on advocacy, accountability and community-building, as well as election campaigns.

And finally, to combat ballot drop-off, Democrats need to make sure that our voters understand the importance of state legislatures, policy and power. Unlike Republicans, Democrats do not have an embedded, emotional connection to state-level power. But we can build one. We can shift the narrative to embrace the value of state power as necessary for a free future, we can celebrate progressive federalism, and we can commit to building and maintaining progressive state power.

from Gaby Goldstein on state-level power

Texas school district may let teachers reject children’s pronouns — even if parents approve of them

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Teachers will not be forced to address students by the pronouns that match their gender identity even if a parent asks them to and transgender students will be barred from playing sports after two new policies targeting gender identity were approved Monday night by the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District board.

The new policy also stipulates that individuals in district schools can only use the bathroom that aligns with their biological sex. It’s the latest move by a school board to more formally exclude transgender youth in schools. The board voted ended 4-3 in favor of these policies and several others. Board members Casey Ford, Shannon Braun, Tammy Nakamura, and Kathy Florence Spradley voted for it. Members Jorge Rodríguez, Coley Canter and Becky St. John voted against.

The meeting lasted nearly eight hours and more than 150 parents and North Texas residents signed up to speak about the proposals before the board was expected to vote.

Ford said the policies were what the school district’s community wanted and in accordance with state law.

“These policies are the product of input from several groups — the board’s policy committee, the district’s attorneys, the board’s attorneys, a committee of administrators and principals and most importantly — community members,” Ford said. “But, one group that’s had the most input and influence: the Texas State Legislature.”

St. John, who voted against it, disagreed.

“This policy is going to harm students in the classroom [and] overburden our teachers for a political agenda,” St. John said.

The Grapevine-Colleyville district, located between Dallas and Fort Worth, just added Nakamura and Spradley to its seven-member school board in May. Both received donations from the Christian cell phone company Patriot Mobile, which has targeted the defeat of any school board candidate who endorses what they call “critical race theory” and ones who support books about LGBTQ identities, saying that kids were exposed to “explicit, ‘woke’ books.”

None of the seven school board members immediately responded to a request for comment.

The pronoun measure before Grapeville-Colleyville ISD states that “the district will not promote, require, or encourage the use of titles or pronoun identifiers for students, teachers or any other persons in any manner that is inconsistent with the biological sex of such person” as listed on a person’s birth certificate.

And if a student, parent or legal guardian asks the teacher to address the student with pronouns that match their gender identity, the district policy — if approved — will leave it to the teacher’s “discretion” as to whether a teacher will do soThe pronoun policy is one of several proposals under consideration involving how race and gender will be addressed in this school district.

Mike Sexton, whose children attend schools in the district, told board members he opposed the proposal targeting LGBTQ students.

“You can talk about Santa Claus, but you can’t talk about gay people to fifth graders,” Sexton said. “This is incredible — you’re acting like people don’t exist. There’s thousands of people in this district that are LGBTQ, that live here, that are taxpayers.”

A separate proposal also would prohibit students from participating or competing in athletic events that are “designated for the biological sex opposite to the student’s biological sex.”

One woman, whose grandchildren attend schools in the district, spoke in favor of the sports policy Monday night.

“The policy on the agenda tonight that keeps girls competing against biological girls is very important to me,” the grandmother said. “I want to make sure that my granddaughters can enjoy the fruits and labor of my generation by participating in fair competitive sports.”

As proposed, district staff also cannot teach or promote “gender fluidity,” which is the idea that one’s gender identity is not fixed and can extend beyond male and female, and staff also cannot teach or talk about sexual orientation and gender identity until kids are in the sixth grade.

And a third proposal before the Grapevine-Colleyville board Monday night relates to incorporating Senate Bill 3, the state’s so-called “critical race theory” law into a districtwide policy.

This is seemingly the first school district to take this formal step. Since the bill was passed last year, there has been confusion about how the law should be applied. School administrators across the state have asked the Texas Education Agency for guidance on the law. The agency’s response is for school districts to just continue teaching the current social studies curriculum.

SB 3 was crafted to keep “critical race theory” out of schools, with restrictions on how to talk about slavery and eventually sending teachers to civics training. Critical race theory is the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals. It’s an academic discipline taught at the university level. But it has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

The Grapevine-Colleyville board proposal states that teachers and administrators cannot discuss critical race theory or what they have called “systemic discrimination ideologies.” The board proposal, like the state law, would prohibit requiring students to read the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Project, a collection of essays that centered on how slavery and the contributions of Black Americans shaped the United States.

The discussion of such policies comes almost a year after James Whitfield, a Black principal in the district, was put on leave and then eventually resigned after being accused of teaching “critical race theory.” In 2020, Whitfield emailed a letter to parents and staff in which he wrote that systemic racism is “alive and well” after the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Protect Texas Kids, a conservative nonprofit organization, is rallied support for the school board meeting, posting on Facebook that conservatives must come out as they expect Democrats to pack the meeting.

“They will be voting on great new conservative policies that will set precedent for other districts,” the organization posted.

The ACLU of Texas criticized the proposals, saying they would restrict education on the country’s history of racism and lessons that incorporate “social-emotional” learning.

“In order to thrive in a democratic society, students require an accurate and inclusive education so that they better understand the lives, cultures, and experiences of different people,” the organization said in a statement. “This includes learning about the history of and discussing race, gender, and systemic inequity.”

Jesus Vidales contributed to this story.

Disclosure: The New York Times and ACLU Texas 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.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/22/grapevine-colleyville-isd-transgender-critical-race-theory/.

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“We can take on the billionaires”: Sanders joins striking Starbucks workers on Boston picket line

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday joined striking Starbucks workers in Boston to express solidarity with them and other employees of the coffee chain who have so far organized over 200 U.S. locations in less than a year.

“What you are doing is what people all over this country are beginning to do,” the Vermont Independent said through a megaphone.

“You at Starbucks all across this country are inspiring working people who are sick and tired of getting screwed over and who want decent wages, decent working conditions, and they want not to be treated as cogs in a machine,” he continued. “You know, guess what? You’re human beings.”

“And the only way we’re gonna be successful is when we build a mass grassroots movement and at the center of that movement is a strong trade union movement,” he added. “That’s what you guys are doing. So thank you very much for what you’re doing.”

Proud to be back on the line. This time with labor champions @BernieSanders & @FlyingWithSara.

36 days on strike and counting – join the picket or give what you can so these @BostonSBWU members can focus on the fight! #874onStrike https://t.co/Ex6xQSCJt6 pic.twitter.com/OWKOkLlEhy

— Raul Fernandez (@raulspeaks) August 21, 2022

More pics of @BernieSanders and @FlyingWithSara on @BostonSBWU picket line. pic.twitter.com/5cSOYIL7F9

— Working Mass (@DSAWorkingMass) August 21, 2022

The Boston Globe last week reported from 874 Commonwealth Avenue on the longest strike in Starbucks history:

The Starbucks workers, who voted to unionize in June, say they’re fighting for a fairer workplace and the termination of their interim store manager, Tomi Chorlian. In just a month on the job, workers say, she engaged in union-busting efforts and discriminated against LGBTQ and minority employees.

A Starbucks representative directed the Globe to a July 23 statement, where company said it “respect the rights of workers to participate in a legally protected strike.” (Chorlian did not respond to requests for comment.)

Sanders was in Boston on Sunday for a rally—titled “The Working Class: Fighting Back Against Corporate Greed”—with two union leaders: Sean O’Brien of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and Sara Nelson of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO.

Nelson, who joined the senator at the Starbucks location, led a chant: “Hey hey, ho ho, corporate greed has got to go.”

"Capitalists can't feel shame, but we can hit them where it hurts: financially" @FlyingWithSara says pic.twitter.com/ys0x696qlf

— Tori Bedford (@Tori_Bedford) August 21, 2022

The trio delivered similar messages at their Boston rally, where O’Brien referred to CEOs of major corporations as “white collar criminals” and called out politicians who refuse to support working people. The Teamsters leader also celebrated the nation’s current unionization wave.

“We need people to engage. We need people to be involved,” O’Brien also stressed. “Being a union member, being a leader, being a worker, trying to organize, is not a spectator sport. You can’t sit on the sidelines and hope and pray someone scores that touchdown for you. You’ve got to engage. Get in the fight. “

As Sanders put it in a tweet thanking the 1,500 rally attendees: “Together, we can take on the billionaires and win.”

The events in Boston followed a rally in Philadelphia on Saturday that also featured remarks from Nelson, O’Brien, and Sanders.

“This is the richest country in the history of the world. It is not acceptable to me, to Sean, to Sara, or to you, that working people are falling further and further behind while the billionaires get richer,” Sanders told the cheering crowd in Philly.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that Sanders “wore a baseball cap of the area’s Teamsters Local 107 for shade during the hot afternoon.”

We need to fight with and for workers at all levels: in Philly, in PA, and at the federal level.

It’s time billionaires pay their fair share and workers get the dignity and compensation they deserve. Thank you @FlyingWithSara, @SenSanders, & @SeanOBrien1987! pic.twitter.com/SSmsKwOyU9

— Councilmember Kendra Brooks (@KendraPHL) August 20, 2022

“We are in the fight of our lifetimes,” Sanders reportedly said. “We are fighting incredible wealth and incredible power. We’re going to create an economy that works for us, and not just the 1%.”

“You are not just a cog in a machine. You’re a human being with some rights,” he told the crowd. “If we are going to save the middle class in this country, we are going to have to grow the union movement.”

After the event in Philly, Sanders tweeted: “Let me thank the more than 1,000 people who joined us today to stand together in the fight against corporate greed. In solidarity, we can build an economy that works for all of us, not just billionaires and corporations.”

Meanwhile, on the opposite side of Pennsylvania, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) on Saturday also highlighted the resurgent U.S. labor movement during a speech at the Netroots Nation convention in Pittsburgh.

“Across the country young people are reviving the labor movement,” she said, pointing to union drives by Amazon, Google, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s workers. “We have taken on some of the biggest, wealthiest multinational corporations in the world—and we are winning.”

Secretive billionaire handed his fortune to architect of the right-wing takeover of the courts

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

This story was co-published with The Lever.

An elderly, ultra-secretive Chicago businessman has given the largest known donation to a political advocacy group in U.S. history — worth $1.6 billion — and the recipient is one of the prime architects of conservatives’ efforts to reshape the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court.

Through a series of opaque transactions over the past two years, Barre Seid, a 90-year-old manufacturing magnate, gave the massive sum to a nonprofit run by Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the conservative legal group the Federalist Society.

The donation was first reported by The New York Times on Monday. The Lever and ProPublica confirmed the information from documents received independently by the news organizations.

Our reporting sheds additional light on how the two men, one a judicial kingmaker and the other a mysterious but prolific donor to conservative causes, came together to create a political war chest that will likely supercharge efforts to further shift American politics to the right.

As President Donald Trump’s adviser on judicial nominations, Leo helped build the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which recently eliminated Constitutional protections for abortion rights and has made a series of sweeping pro-business decisions. Leo, a conservative Catholic, has both helped select judges to nominate to the Supreme Court and directed multimillion dollar media campaigns to confirm them.

Leo derives immense political power through his ability to raise huge sums of money and distribute those funds throughout the conservative movement to influence elections, judicial appointments and policy battles. Yet the biggest funders of Leo’s operation have long been a mystery.

Seid, who led the surge protector and data-center equipment maker Tripp Lite for more than half a century, has been almost unknown outside a small circle of political and cultural recipients. The gift immediately vaults him into the ranks of major funders like the Koch brothers and George Soros.

In practical terms, there are few limitations on how Leo’s new group, the Marble Freedom Trust, can spend the enormous donation. The structure of the donation allowed Seid to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. Thus, he maximized the amount of money at Leo’s disposal.

Now, Leo, 56, is positioned to finance his already sprawling network with one of the largest pools of political capital in American history. Seid has left his legacy to Leo.

“To my knowledge, it is entirely without precedent for a political operative to be given control of such an astonishing amount of money,” said Brendan Fischer, a campaign finance lawyer at the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented. “Leonard Leo is already incredibly powerful, and now he is going to have over a billion dollars at his disposal to continue upending our country’s institutions.”

In a statement to the Times, Leo said it was “high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals.” Leo and representatives for Seid did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The Marble Freedom Trust is a so-called dark money group that is not required to publicly disclose its donors. It has wide latitude to spend directly on elections as well as on ideological projects such as funding issue-advocacy groups, think tanks, universities, religious institutions and organizing efforts.

The creators of the Marble Freedom Trust shrouded their project in secrecy for more than two years.

The group’s name does not appear in any public database of business, tax or securities records. The Marble Freedom Trust is organized for legal purposes as a trust, rather than as a corporation. That means it did not have to publicly disclose basic details like its name, directors and address.

The trust was formed in Utah. Its address is a house in North Salt Lake owned by Tyler Green, a lawyer who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Green is listed in the trust’s tax return as an administrative trustee. The donation does not appear to violate any laws.

Seid’s $1.6 billion donation is a landmark in the era of deregulated political spending ushered in by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That case, along with subsequent changes and weak federal oversight, empowered a tiny group of the super rich in both parties to fund groups that can spend unlimited sums to support candidates and political causes. In the last decade, donations in the millions and sometimes tens of millions of dollars have become common.

Individuals could give unlimited amounts of money to nonprofit groups prior to Citizens United, but the decision allowed those nonprofits to more directly influence elections. A handful of billionaires such as the Koch family and Soros have spent billions to achieve epochal political influence by bankrolling networks of nonprofits.

Even in this money-drenched world, Seid’s $1.6 billion gift exceeds all publicly known one-time donations to a politically oriented group.

The Silent Donor

One day in November 2015, the employees of Tripp Lite, a manufacturer of power strips and other electrical equipment, gathered for a celebration at the company’s headquarters on the South Side of Chicago. Cupcakes frosted in blue and white spelled out the numbers “56.” An easel held up a sign hailing Tripp Lite’s longtime leader: “Congratulations Barre!”

A small, balding man with a white goatee and a ruddy complexion took the microphone. Barre Seid was known as someone who preferred to keep a low profile, but on the 56th anniversary of his leadership of Tripp Lite, he couldn’t resist the chance to address his employees. Later, as he bit into a cupcake, Seid posed for a company photographer, who later uploaded the photo to the company’s Facebook page.

Even this semipublic glimpse of Seid was rare.

For several decades, a select group of political activists, academics and fundraisers was ushered to Tripp Lite headquarters to pitch Seid at his office. Despite his status as one of the country’s most prolific funders of conservative causes, and despite his decades as the president and sole owner of one of the country’s most successful electronics makers, Seid has spent most of his 90 years painstakingly guarding his privacy.

There are no art galleries, opera companies, or theaters or university buildings emblazoned with his name in his hometown of Chicago. There’s even some confusion over how to pronounce his last name. (People who’ve dealt with him say it’s “side.”)

The Lever and ProPublica pieced together the details of his life and his motivations for his extensive donations through interviews, court records and other documents obtained through public-records requests.

One of the only photos of Seid that The Lever and ProPublica could find shows him as a 14-year-old walking in a small group across a college campus. Born in 1932 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Seid grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the oldest of two brothers, according to Census records. A precocious child, he was chosen for a special bachelor’s degree program at the University of Chicago, not far from his childhood home.

Seid attended the University of Chicago in the early years of the “Chicago school,” a group of professors and researchers who would reimagine the field of economics, assailing massive government interventions in the economy and emphasizing the importance of human liberty and free markets. After college, Seid served two years in the Army and eventually returned home to Chicago, according to testimony given decades later in a court case. He took a job as an assistant to an investor and businessman named Graham Trippe, whose company made headlights and would produce the rotating warning lights used by police cars, tow trucks and other emergency response vehicles.

By the mid-1960s, Seid had taken over as Trippe Manufacturing’s president. In the decades to come, the company, now called Tripp Lite, became a pick-and-shovel business of the digital gold rush. The company sells the power strips that supply electricity to computers and the server racks, cooling equipment and network switches that make data centers run. Business surged with the shift to cloud computing and the proliferation of vast data centers.

That boom vaulted him from the ranks of merely rich to the superrich. Seid was making around $30 million per year by the mid-1990s, tax records obtained by ProPublica show. His annual income, the vast majority of which came from Tripp Lite’s profits, took off in the mid-2000s and steadily rose, hitting around $157 million in 2018. Tripp Lite, which was 100% owned by Seid, contributed $136 million to his total income that year.

Even as Seid built a billion-plus dollar business, he drew scant public attention; Forbes never put him on its list of the wealthiest Americans, and business and political press rarely mentioned him.

Yet he was becoming a major donor. He gave at least $775 million in charitable donations between 1996 and 2018, a period in which he reported $1.7 billion in income, according to his tax records. Seid parceled out a small portion of those donations to Chicago-area universities, religious organizations, medical research and dozens of civic-focused groups.

While Seid has never spoken to the press about his ideology, evidence of his worldview has emerged here and there. His family foundation has supported the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, named after two of the Chicago school’s intellectual leaders, Gary Becker and Milton Friedman. He has also donated to the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit that has a history of using inflammatory rhetoric and misleading tactics to undermine climate science.

Seid appeared to be the donor (listed as “Barry Seid”) who gave $17 million to fund the distribution during the 2008 presidential campaign of millions of copies of a DVD of the film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War With the West.” The DVDs, which were sent specifically to households in presidential election battleground states, were criticized as virulently anti-Muslim.

Seid’s personality can be glimpsed in exchanges with George Mason University officials from the late 2000s to mid-2010s that came out in response to a public-records request by the activist group UnKoch My Campus. In the emails, Seid comes across as an intellectually probing figure, asking the dean of the law school to respond to news stories about the value of a law-school degree or the workings of higher education’s accreditation system. Seid drily addressed several administrators for the university, whose law school and economics department are known for their alignment with conservative, free-market principles, as “Fellow Members of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”

Seid appears to have continually sought new vehicles for dispensing his money and maintaining as much anonymity as possible. The GMU emails also show a redacted donor — who activists believed to be Seid based on other unredacted materials — routing donations to the school through DonorsTrust or the Donors Capital Fund, two donor-advised funds that provide an additional level of anonymity.

While the roots of Seid and Leo’s professional relationship aren’t clear, the two worked together at a small foundation Seid formed in 2009 called the Chicago Freedom Trust, a charity that gave out small grants to nonpolitical groups. Leo later joined the foundation’s board.

The GMU emails provide an inkling of the relationship between the two men. In early 2016, Seid emailed the dean of GMU’s law school and the head of a prominent American Jewish organization to urge them to work together. The dean, Henry Butler, forwarded Seid’s message to Leo seeking to better understand Seid’s intentions.

“Do you have any insight?” Butler wrote.

“I do not, but will find out,” Leo replied.

The Money

Billionaires tend to craft intricate estate plans to pass the family business to the next generation, fortified from taxation and protective of their vision. The apparently childless Seid didn’t have that option, but starting in April 2020, he set in motion a plan to make sure his fortune would go toward his favored causes.

That month, the Marble Freedom Trust was created, and Seid subsequently transferred his 100% ownership stake in Tripp Lite to the trust, according to the documents reviewed by The Lever and ProPublica.

In February 2021, Tripp Lite filed its annual reports with the state of Illinois as it had done for decades. But this time, Seid’s typewritten name had been crossed out as an officer of the company. Added as an officer, written in by hand, was Leonard Leo.

A Tripp Lite subsidiary in Nova Scotia, Canada, similarly removed Seid as a director and added Leo as a director in March 2021, according to disclosure filings.

Then, later that same month, Eaton Corporation, a large publicly traded company, acquired Tripp Lite for $1.65 billion.

The transactions appear to have been carefully sequenced to reap massive tax savings. Selling a company that has grown in value after decades of ownership is treated the same way for tax purposes as a person selling a share of stock. If the property has grown in value, capital gains taxes are due when it is sold.

But Seid transferred Tripp Lite to the Marble Freedom Trust, a nonprofit that is exempt from income tax, before the electronics company was sold. As a result, lawyers say, Seid avoided up to $400 million in state and federal income tax, preserving those funds for Leo’s operation.

“If the person who had owned the stock had sold the stock himself, he would’ve been taxed on the appreciation in the stock,” said Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “Whereas if you give it to the 501(c)(4), there’s no charitable deduction for giving the money, but you avoid the tax on all of that appreciation.”

Political advocacy nonprofits like the Marble Freedom Trust are formally called 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations, after the section of the tax code. Informally, they are known as dark-money groups because donors can remain secret, in contrast to the public disclosures required of gifts to political campaigns or super PACs. While they can spend money directly advocating for or against candidates in political campaigns, such spending cannot be their primary purpose.

In giving to such a dark money group, Seid also avoided another federal levy, the gift tax, thanks to a change signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2015.

There’s a reason why giving money specifically to a trust might have been attractive for an older and ideological donor such as Seid. The founding documents that lay out how the trust will spend money can be harder to change than the governing documents of a corporation, according to Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

Mayer added that while corporations usually have at least three directors, trusts can have just a single trustee in charge of the organization’s activities.

Leo is the trustee and chairman of the Marble Freedom Trust. In other words, Leo is now in charge of the massive sum of money.

The Rainmaker

For decades, Leo had served as a top executive at the Federalist Society, helping lead the influential Washington-based conservative lawyers group that serves as a launching pad for careers on the right.

But in early 2020, Leo made an announcement that suggested he was taking his successful model for reshaping the courts to remake American politics at every level: local, state and federal. In an interview with Axios, Leo said he was stepping away from his day-to-day role with the Federalist Society to take a more active role steering a network of conservative dark money groups.

The plan was to expand the network’s scope to “funnel tens of millions of dollars into conservative fights around the country,” according to Axios. What Leo did not mention in the interview was the imminent creation of the Marble Freedom Trust, his biggest-ever war chest.

Leo’s long career as both a legal activist and a prodigious fundraiser for conservative causes shows a steady march toward becoming a central figure in the Republican Party’s successful strategy to fill as many judicial vacancies as possible with young, conservative judges skeptical of the federal government’s power. He served as an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, helping the candidate take a step no other major presidential candidate had ever taken: releasing a list of names he would draw on to nominate to the Supreme Court.

Coming at a moment when conservatives were wary of Trump’s past leanings, the move bolstered his support among social conservatives. Leo stayed on as a judicial adviser during Trump’s four years in office. During that time, Leo helped the president appoint and confirm more than 200 nominees to the federal bench, most famously Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Leo’s efforts to reshape the country’s judicial system began long before Trump’s political ascent. In 1991, he joined the Federalist Society, which was then in its early years and only beginning to build a pipeline for conservative jurists.

In the view of Leo and his allies, the U.S. legal system had drifted dangerously far from its roots, establishing privileged classes and doctrines that were not enumerated in the Constitution and would be unrecognizable to the Founders. Those same courts had also empowered a class of unelected bureaucrats dubbed the “administrative state” to impose needless regulations and to endow the federal government with too much power. Like his close friend Justice Antonin Scalia, Leo argued for an originalist view of the Constitution — namely, that the country’s founding document should be interpreted strictly based on how its 18th century authors understood its words at the time.

In 2005, Leo and his allies formed a dark money network to rally support for George W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominees, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. But if Leo wanted to turn back the tide of what he saw as unchecked judicial activism, he needed to build something bigger, more lasting.

Leo set out to create a network of interlocking groups that could each play a part in returning the country to what he saw as its roots, whether by training future generations of Scalias, funding scholarship that made the case for originalism or bankrolling efforts to install conservative judges on the bench.

Between 2005 and mid-2021, Leo and his associates raised at least $460 million (not including the Marble Freedom Trust’s funds).

According to tax records, Leo’s network has funneled those hundreds of millions into ad campaigns and right-leaning groups. The Judicial Crisis Network — which is now called the Concord Fund and is headed by a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas and Leo associate named Carrie Severino — has spent tens of millions airing ads during Supreme Court confirmation fights.

The group’s fundraising took off in 2016, when it led a campaign to block Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland’s confirmation. That year, Leo’s network received a $28 million infusion from a single anonymous donor. Leo and his network long refused to say who is paying for their advocacy campaigns.

Leo’s network has worked closely with Senate Republicans and has showered them with cash as well, recently donating $9 million to a dark money group affiliated with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

While Leo is best known for his influence on the Supreme Court, he and his network have also worked to shift the balance of power throughout the judiciary — in federal district and appellate courts, and state supreme courts, too.

At the state level, the network funds groups supporting conservative gubernatorial and legislative candidates. Leo’s nonprofits and their subsidiaries have recently pushed states to tighten voting laws, opposed the teaching of critical race theory in schools and financed organizations pressing states to remove millions of Americans from the Medicaid rolls.

But now, with Seid’s largesse, Leo has nearly four times the amount he raised over 16 years at his disposal and ambitions to match.

“I have a very simple rule, which is, I’m engaged in the battle of ideas, and I care very deeply about our Constitution and the role of courts in our society,” Leo told The Washington Post in 2019 when asked about his donors. “And I don’t waste my time on stories that involve money and politics because what I care about is ideas.”

“Only Murders in the Building” boss on that killer party, other possible suspects and next season

In the second season premiere of “Only Murders in the Building” series creator John Hoffman enlists Steve Martin’s Charles Haden-Savage to speak aloud a widely held concern about the show’s likelihood of recapturing its freshman year magic.

“It’s very rare for a true crime podcast to do a sequel,” Charles tells his sleuthing partners Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short). “They usually move on to a new case that never hits like the original.”

Charles line proved true in some respects, because Season 2 does hit differently than the first by expanding our view into the personal lives of these three and their neighbors in the Arconia, a stately New York apartment that became the scene of two murders, back to back.

While our trio never lost sight of their goal to find who murdered their building board president, Bunny Folger (Jayne Houdyshell), their road to that discovery wound through their separate but related family histories, each tied to their fathers. Charles long believed his father was a terrible man. Figuring out how his dad’s role in a sought-after rare painting at the heart of the main mystery brought him peace.

Oliver’s son hit him with news related to a DNA test that made both men question everything. Mabel dispelled the coping mechanism that made her black out unpleasant events from her memory, like what happened the night of Bunny’s murder . . . and the real reason she felt her father abandoned her.

“Only Murders” honors Arconia’s grand dame

Throwing a killer reveal party is a great way to pull a motley group of ideas, and people, into one space to solve a lot of problems in one pass. That was the trio’s thinking in “I Know Who Did It,” the second season finale Hoffman co-wrote with Robb Turosky and Matteo Borghese.

In a very Agatha Christie move, the three gather an assortment of suspects in Bunny’s apartment to stage a livestream reveal doubling as overly theatrical immersive theater, in order to trick their lead suspect and podcasting rival Cinda Canning (Tina Fey) into confessing.

But a very Oliver-esque twist revealed the real killer: Cinda’s meek assistant Poppy (Adina Verson), who outed herself as the very alive Becky Butler, the supposed murder victim at the center of Cinda’s award-winning podcast “All Is Not OK in Oklahoma” – and the reason Charles, Oliver and Mabel became friends in the first place. Becky was done in by DNA testing and an unusual sandwich order from the neighborhood diner. Catching her changed the trio’s fortunes for the better.

If all the world’s a stage, returning Oliver to the director’s seat with Charles as his lead was inevitable. The finale leaps ahead one year to show just that, while introducing a new key character, Ben Glenroy, played by one of the most popular actors in Hollywood. Everyone seems to be doing well until, you guessed it, another body drops, albeit in a different building.

Continuing what we hope is now an annual tradition, we snagged Hoffman on the phone to break down what went into selecting the second season’s perpetrator, along with getting a few details about Season 3, and finding out whether one gasp-out-loud, party-killing moment was intentionally coordinated with one of the star’s real-world career intentions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Poppy (Adina Verson) in “Only Murders In The Building” (Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

The last time that we spoke, “Only Murders In the Building” had already been picked up for a second season. And if I recall that conversation correctly, you also said that you had an idea of what would happen in the second season. How long did you know that it would all link back to “All Is Not OK in Oklahoma”?

I had a feeling about a few candidates for who would have killed, or might have killed Bunny, who might be up to framing the trio at the end of Season 1. And I was leaning toward the Cinda-Poppy world, and more leaning toward Poppy.

First of all, I love Tina Fey as Cinda. But I also knew there were riches to be found and discovered for Adina Verson playing Poppy. I think she’s just brilliant. And so I was excited to give Adina something fantastic. But more importantly, in the narrative, it was just very clear to me that from the end of Season 1 into Season 2, there’s the clear direct links: careful what you step into if you’re going to start poking around a murder investigation and doing a podcast as amateurs, because it’s not a non-threatening situation potentially.

And so that made it necessary to look at connections from Season 1 into Season 2 and think of the two seasons’ mysteries. So I went back to the very beginning and thought, OK, if I’m looking at Poppy, what is that story? And I do remember the day it hit, and it was like, “Oh my God, what if she’s Becky Butler? Let’s look at that.” Then the whole thing just felt like an unveiling in our minds for what we could do.

Can you share who your other candidates for the killer might have been?

” [Be] careful what you step into if you’re going to start poking around a murder investigation…”

Yeah. I mean, we always like to keep it pretty open just to be able to surprise or make real sense of it. But the main ones were Teddy [Dimas, played by Nathan Lane]. Obviously, he had the most against them. Could Jan (Amy Ryan) have been doing something? Could she have had cohorts that are trying to set them up now ,extending her diabolical side? We played with so many. For a moment there it was Arnav (Maulik Pancholy) from across the hall. I always love to make a suspect out of Howard . . .

Aw.

. . . always. And now we love him from Episode 8, but he still has that dark side. And it’s the way Michael Creighton brilliantly plays Howard. He can’t help the darkness underneath Howard.

Oh no. Not Howard.

I know, right? I mean, he did put his cat in the freezer.

. . . But ultimately, stepping back and looking at the show itself, if we were thinking of these first two seasons, as comrades and connective tissue, that the show itself talking about telling a story, manipulating a story – taking a true story with a tragedy at the center of it, making a success off of a story like this. The nature of notoriety and infamy in New York City became one of the major themes, and how all of that could be magnified as our trio was put in the center of a new case.

There’s something wonderful about the way that you used celebrity as a misdirect this season, especially after Season 1 when Sting, for a hot minute, was a suspect. This season we had Amy Schumer, we had Cara Delevingne, we had Shirley MacLaine, which is great, and Michael Rapaport. And to top it off, your big celebrity Paul Rudd at the end of the finale setting up the next season. Did you have a lot of people coming to you and asking to be part of the show? Or did you have these name in mind?

It’s always a balancing act, right? And I recognize there were aspects of riding the line with the meta in our show, so that it doesn’t feel like it takes you out, or we’re commenting too much. I’ve always been very conscious that it has to be a blend.

In the world of New York City and apartment buildings, it’s very believable that Cyndi Lauper lives at the Apthorp or in the Ansonia or wherever. Or Sting lives in the Belnord. That is not too far of a reach. As long as it’s in the fabric of what’s real in New York, that’s good.

I love the notion of that rotating penthouse that Sting has, of what friend got it now for a six-month lease or a year sublet. And Amy Schumer moving in and redesigning and taking over, that was planned. But that went through a few permutations.

We had one gigantic star who for a moment was going to do it. And then another very big star who reached out to us and wanted to do it, but a COVID situation kept that from happening at the last minute — really, at the last minute, I’ll be honest. And then it was this lovely thing of, “Oh God, we’re up against it.” Amy happily jumped in and saved our asses and was absolutely stone-cold brilliant.

And I will tell you, just as a little bit of a tease, that beyond the surprise at the end of the season, or where we might be going next season with our guest star, it’s only gotten crazier for Season 3 . And there’s quite an amazing development coming.

Oliver (Martin Short) in “Only Murders In The Building” (Craig Blankenhorn/Hulu)

Let’s talk about the Paul Rudd of at all. Does this mean that he’s not the person who is in the penthouse?

That you’ll have to wait to see.

OK, fair enough. I’m not going ask too much the specifics of what to expect. But I just want to make a couple of observations and, before that, seek one clarification. What does the site of the body dropping mean for the title?

Yeah, hello. Perfect question. And I only want to say, “Hang tight.”

So it’s not necessarily, “This is ‘Only Murders in the Building,’ which now means any building. If it happens on a sidewalk, it doesn’t qualify”?

Well, let’s just put it this way. We’re very conscious of that question coming up. And in our development of Season 3, it’s very much a part of the discussion within the writing and within the movements of what could possibly happen.

OK. Here’s my observation as a TV nerd. I deeply appreciate having Paul, as playing this character, but also as the body. And it comes back to the New York-ness of the show.

If you talk to many, if not all, New York-based actors who make it to television, one of the shows they reference as a rite of passage of being a working professional New York actor is “Law & Order.”

Among viewers, there’s almost this running joke of like, OK, there’s the regular cast of cops and attorneys, but if there’s somebody who is a vaguely recognizable actor, among the suspects, that person probably did the crime.

Casting Paul makes me appreciate, first of all, how “Only Murders in the Building” uses celebrities to misdirect. We were primed to think that of course, it was Cinda Canning, right up to the end. But secondly, you’re presenting Paul Rudd as the body, the victim, in Season 3. Famous people don’t typically sign up for a show to play the body. Of course, I understand that’s not quite it, since we have a year to examine. How did that play into your decision of who would be assuming these roles both for Season 2 and for Season 3?

“You never know if anything’s gonna work.”

Absolutely. And the famous person, well, it hit me that God, they’re really plum roles. Look at what we did for Bunny and for Jayne Houdyshell, as a victim. Same with Tim Kono. Julian Cihi had great, great scenes and great stuff to do. So there’s a little bit of a feast for Paul Rudd, I’m hoping, yet to come that illuminates a lot about what position he might hold in Season 3.

In that way, it feels not too diminishing in that way or surprising, in some ways, for the world of our show. But yes, I get what you’re saying about the “Law & Order” thing.

Now let me ask about an inanimate character that played a major role in this season, which is the Arconia’s secret passageways. Now that their existence has bene established, and there’s a new building manager who’s going to be doing construction, what does that mean for the fate of those secret passageways?

Oh, it’s just . . . your questions are killing me. Yes, these are considerations that we’re attending to, let’s put it that way, regarding the passageways and the untenable nature of people knowing these are here. And certainly a pretty stern taskmaster of a board president, who upon hearing that, I think, in general would say there’s some work to be done in the Arconia. Potentially, I think the conversation between Nina and Lester opened up a new view for Nina, and a lovely bit of humanity there in Episode 8 of Season 2 during the blackout, that that allowed her to sort of potentially regard the Arconia anew within the year that we jump. But yes, there will be an addressing of those passageways and an addressing a few other things specific to the Arconia and its structure.

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Let’s talk about the whole Steve Martin moment during the “Killer Party” where we were made to think, “Oh, my God, is that it for Charles?”

Did that sell for you? Did it?

Well, here’s the thing: Since Charles is an actor, and it was the “Killer Party,” I suspected that it was staged. But there’s also that huge profile of Steve circulating with him saying, “After this, I’m retiring from acting.” So there was that moment of fear where I did think, “Wait a minute, they’re not actually doing this, right? The show is already cleared for Season 3!”

We really have been talking about this in the room over the last few days since that story dropped. I was like, “Oh, I forgot! We just added a new dimension, maybe, to the believability for that moment in Episode 10,” which we were happy to do.

And that was my question. Obviously Hulu’s PR department works very closely with its shows, but Steve’s story was a surprise for you as well?

Totally! I’m kind of obsessed with the PR team, only all I care about is protecting as much as we can about the reveals, you know, that are essential. So I’m looking at every picture that we’re putting up to make sure that the picture doesn’t give away too much. But they’re so good.

That’s a little bit of the dance with a mystery show like this. But then you have those moments that are just happenstance. And that was one of them. Steve’s interview was completely on his own, and we didn’t know what he was gonna say and didn’t know that frankly, that he’d been thinking that way about the show and about his time on it as an actor and that potentially this might be it.

Cinda (Tina Fey) and Poppy (Adina Verson) in “Only Murders In The Building” (Patrick Harbron/Hulu)

Before we end, I want to return to something to told me at the end of the first season, that you were kind of new at writing a mystery series. Now that you’ve complete a second season, how are you feeling about the art of writing a mystery?

Truthfully, you never know if anything’s gonna work. I didn’t. You take these leaps and you do everything you can to make them the best you can. And you get incredible people around you to collaborate with and hope that they’re ready to step up in that way that you crave and kind of need.

Now that you’ve seen Episode 10, I feel really proud of the puzzled storytelling, the dazzling unfurling that happens there. We’re also leaning back into our trio to say, we’re going to hand this off to them now at the end of all of this insanity that they’ve been dealing with their personal traumas and their storylines that are deeper and more challenging and really, let them be kind of brilliant and sort of making them a bit heroic in that moment. All of that was the wish, but you never know who’s gonna pull it off.

I have felt a little more confident as we’ve gone along to get a little more flashy, add some flourishes as much as possible. And I feel that’s a perfectly apt question because I feel that now for Season 3 feels like we’re swinging in the same way that’s very big for the show. But also, we have a little more guts behind us as far as we know how to do this now.

All episodes of “Only Murders in the Building” are streaming on Hulu.

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Harry Styles has attracted more male fans, but will they be less toxic than his original stans?

Harry Styles has always had a rabid fanbase, and now he’s attracted even more. But dealing with his fandom hasn’t been so simple for the musician-turned-actor.

“As It Was” is Styles’ biggest song to date, including 10 consecutive weeks of topping the charts in the United States. It’s also the song that has seemingly attracted more male fans to Styles, according to the musician.

In a new interview, Styles tells Rolling Stone the song has brought “definitely the highest volume of men that I would get stopping me to say something about it.”

Closing a recent concert in New York with “As It Was” brought the stadium crowd to their feet. The thunderous reaction surprised even the famous One Direction member. Styles explains to Rolling Stone, “There was something about it where I was . . . not terrified, but I just needed a minute. Because I wasn’t sure what it was. Just that the energy felt insane.”

Candace Owens’ attack on Harry Styles’ masculinity reveals itself in that Marxist red herring

“As It Was” is a melodic goodbye to summer, with the bittersweet chorus “You know it’s not the same as it was” and a synth hook reminiscent of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven.” The track begins with the sample of a tiny voice: Styles’ own goddaughter saying “Come on, Harry. We want to say goodnight to you.” As American Songwriter puts it, the sample “puts a warm feeling in your heart as you are invited into ‘Harry’s House.'”

The song itself – the first single from “Harry’s House” – might not be the lure for new male fans; rather it could be its omnipresence. The catchy song is receiving a lot of radio play, the perfect soundtrack for the nostalgia of the end of summer as well as perhaps for present pandemic times. We aren’t the same, whatever happens moving forward, and Styles sings it.

Fandom beyond the music

But with multiple movie roles coming out soon, Styles is everywhere himself too, as he’s making the publicity rounds in advance of their premieres.

First up is the Olivia Wilde-directed psychological thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” out Sept. 23. In it, Styles stars alongside Florence Pugh as a young 1950s couple who moves to company town Victrory, California, where something possibly more sinister lies beneath its picture-perfect veneer.

After meeting on the set of “Don’t Worry Darling,” Wilde and Styles began a relationship, which the latter has addressed in various interviews. In particular, he’s expressed disappointment over the way some fans have reacted, particularly on social media, which Styles calls a “s***storm of people trying to be awful,” where Wilde has been the subject of vitriol.

Rolling Stone writes, “Anonymous tweeters acted appalled at their age difference (as if a 28-year-old man dating a 38-year-old woman isn’t completely normal) and criticized the director-actor dating dynamic (as if there isn’t a long history of beloved Hollywood couples meeting the same way).”

Wilde isn’t the first romantic partner who’s been on the receiving end of toxic treatment from Styles stans, who for some reason can’t bear to see anyone with him. It’s a parasocial fallout to his fandom, one that seems to want to dictate who he dates . . . and what art he puts out.

Case in point is Styles’ second movie coming this fall. “My Policeman,” the historical drama based on Bethan Roberts’ novel, is set in the 1950s and stars Styles as a man who falls in love with another man and is forced to keep their relationship secret.

The premise of this film, along with Styles’ gender-nonconforming fashions, has led much of the public – including Candace Owens – to become fixated on his sexuality, and what they feel that entails. And it’s those assumptions that have sparked additional criticisms.

“I think everyone, including myself, has your own journey with figuring out sexuality and getting more comfortable with it,” Styles tells Rolling Stone. The musician has never been explicit about his sexuality, which has led to some to accuse him of queerbaiting: the hinting of queerness as a marketing tactic. “Sometimes people say, ‘You’ve only publicly been with women,’ and I don’t think I’ve publicly been with anyone,” Styles says. “If someone takes a picture of you with someone, it doesn’t mean you’re choosing to have a public relationship.”

Known for his close and protective relationship to fans, it hasn’t exactly been reciprocal, at least not when it comes to letting Styles have his own personal life. His romantic partners in the past, including famous women like Taylor Swift and Kendall Jenner, have been the target of harassment by fans, even receiving death threats.

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Coming to prominence initially as part of the boy band One Direction, perhaps it’s understandable that Styles’ first fans were teenage girls, a group he has stalwartly defended. He told Billboard in 2017, “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music — short for popular, right? — have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy . . . That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious?”

As Styles has broken away from his earliest image, his fan base is shifting too. Styles tells Rolling Stone, just because he seems to be getting more fans at his concerts who are men now, it isn’t a value judgement. “[I]t’s not like men was the goal,” he says. “It’s just something I noticed.”

Let’s hope these new fans are not quite angry about Styles’ personal life and artistic choices as many of his current ones are.

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Looking for love and finding elote: A meditation on Mexican street corn

The first time I had elote was in New York City with a man several years my senior — not old enough to be my father, but enough to elicit the occasional curious or knowing glance. I let him believe he introduced me to The Cure and XTC. In exchange, I felt free in a way that’s probably craved by most listless suburban church kids who finally grow up.

While he worked, I slipped into bookstores and thrift shops, where I rifled through discarded photographs and bought some for 99 cents. I looked into the strangers’ faces, which were frozen in time on film — at a retirement party, on an Alaskan cruise, perched on a threadbare floral couch on a shoreside patio — and journaled about what I imagined their lives were like.

The healing power of the peach

I bought cheap coffee in those blue and white Anthora cups (“We are happy to serve you!“) and sat on park benches, where I watched pigeons bully each other over dropped breadcrumbs and popcorn kernels. I watched people pass — laughing until Coke sprayed out of their noses, shouting into their cell phones, crying into their sleeves — and journaled about what I imagined their lives were like.

I wrote in a notebook and thought about a poetry professor of mine who had made me feel like words were magic and convinced me that I could make a living crafting them. It was a relatively radical thought to consider when I’d grown up in a religious tradition where it was taught that women should be seen and not heard, let alone read. When I would occasionally fret about finding a job, as a student in his subterranean office and then eventually as a young freelancer sitting on his front porch, he’d laugh quietly and give me the same line.

“Don’t be afraid of a few lost years,” the professor would say.

“Don’t be afraid of a few lost years.”

For that reason, I carefully labeled the first page of my notebook with the phrase “Lost Years?” and journaled about what I imagined my life would be like. I didn’t know yet that years could in no way be the “lost” ones, as I was still so blissfully curious about everything.

At night, we’d eat. I discovered that I loved oaky Malbec that left my tongue dry and my lips tinged purple; I loved the punchy, vinegary white sauce kept in squeeze bottles on halal carts; I loved thin-sliced pulpo and how, no matter what, one’s lips looked like they wanted to be kissed when they read it off the menu; and I loved elote.

We’d stop at vendors who were just far enough away from the subway station that we were no longer trapped in the hot, stifling throngs of people pushing their way to the street level. About a block or so from the 82nd Street–Jackson Heights station, a woman had built a mobile grill using a shopping cart and a grate wrapped in aluminum foil. She’d use a thick brush to slather an entire row of freshly-peeled, charred corn on sticks with thin mayonnaise in a motion that looked like she was painting a fence. She’d give it a sprinkle of Tajin, then roll it in salty, crumbled cotija.

It piqued all my taste buds, and I liked that I could be on the move while eating. We’d slowly walk up and down the city blocks without any real purpose other than just being out, occasionally stopping on a random corner when we fell deep into conversation. He’d tell me about the eloteros in the Mexican border town where he grew up.

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Each of them had a slightly different method for making elote. Some used crema instead of mayonnaise. Some swore by two squeezes of lime per ear of corn. Some used enough chipotle or chili powder that, in the end, the corn looked more red than pale yellow. “You find who you like best,” he said, “And then you just keep on going back.”

He then explained that many eloteros find a spot, such as a parking lot or street corner, where they’ll just stay put for decades. It becomes their spot. Even if they wheel their cart home for the night, you know that they’ll be back the next day, or at the latest, the day after that.

For so long, I’d dreamed of drifting away in that romantic way that only seems possible when you’re 20, where you think that if you go to a new town or a new city, all the things you disliked about yourself growing up suddenly fade. The idea of that kind of steadfastness was thus both daunting and romantic in a wholly different kind of way.

When the love between that man and I finally faded, his stories of the steadfast eloteros didn’t.

Though the love between that man and I finally faded, his stories of the steadfast eloteros didn’t. In each new city I visited, I found myself drawn toward the unmistakable smell of char-grilled street corn and the stories of the people who worked there.

Chicago, where I live now, is full of these stories.

In 2000, 50 eloteros and a number of the city’s Latino aldermen rallied in favor of an ordinance that would finally make their trade officially legal after existing in a gray area where vendors often found themselves up against hefty fines. It would take more than a decade for the city to acquiesce. Still, the eloteros persevered. (During that time, someone even made a Facebook page called “Chicago’s Cutest Eloteros,” which captured snapshots of vendors all around the city, showcasing, likely unintentionally, how integral to the fabric of Chicago they are.)

I recently read a story about a couple of eloteros in Rogers Park, the neighborhood directly north of my apartment. They had been married for 23 years and worked together daily, selling styrofoam cups of corn, mayonnaise, cayenne and cotija seven days a week from 8 a.m. until just after midnight.

Felipe Vallarta, the husband, passed away in 2021. A few years before he died, he told the local paper: “The truth is, it’s difficult, but when you love the work, it’s beautiful.”

The unchanging schedule, the slog, the schlep — all the things I had feared for so long would deaden me to really living — are the things that can actually make life beautiful. Whether it’s the routine of cleanly slicing boiled corn off the cob in 20 seconds flat, or just trying to survive. Maybe there are no lost years. Maybe they all are, in some way. Maybe we just need to embrace them.

about relationships to food

As Anthony Fauci announces retirement, experts weigh in on how history will remember him

Several months after the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci shared an observation that proved to be oddly prescient. Speaking before the Aspen Ideas Festival, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases pointed out that “there is a general anti-science, anti-authority, anti-vaccine feeling among some people in this country — an alarmingly large percentage of people, relatively speaking.”

Two years have passed since Fauci uttered those remarks. Now Fauci has announced that — after a career spanning back to the 1980s and including service under seven presidents — he is going to retire. Few physicians in the United States become household names; fewer still are remembered by historians, whether for positive or negative reasons. Regardless of one’s opinion of the headline-making public health official, “Anthony Fauci” is a name that will be uttered for centuries by future historians of United States politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Yet how history will remember Fauci is still not entirely clear. His legacy is multifaceted because it spanned different pandemics and epidemics (HIV/AIDS, COVID-19, and now monkeypox). History is still being written for many of those outbreaks, and decades may pass while data is collected and unintended consequences are inventoried. Until all of that work has happened, the full breadth of Fauci’s legacy will not be etched in stone.

You may have been spreading the omicron variant without knowing it

Salon reached out to a number of experts, both historians and fellow medical professionals, to gauge how history might remember the retiring physician. Intriguingly, two responses prevailed: First, that Fauci is a ubiquitous figure, with many top minds from the public health world recalling direct interactions with him; and second, that his leading role in shaping America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic — a task almost certainly made more challenging by the politically-charged backlash to which he alluded in Aspen — saved countless lives.

Whatever your opinion on Fauci’s tenure, experts attested that the United States would be a very different place right now if Fauci hadn’t been in power during the early years of the 2020s.

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“The most important priority for the National Institute of Health [NIH], and especially the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, led by Dr. Fauci was the creation of a vaccine,” said Dr. William Haseltine, the chair and president of the global health think tank Access Health International and a biologist renowned for his work in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “Nobody could have imagined it could have been done so rapidly, so fast. And so well in addition to that, not only did they develop the [COVID] vaccine — from a scientific point of view, they managed and conducted a global trial of the COVID-19 vaccine in, what I would say, is unimaginably rapid time.”

Haseltine pointed to the years of foundational research done to develop HIV vaccines — research that was absolutely essential to developing the COVID-19 vaccines, and which was also led by Fauci.

Sommer described Fauci as having “acted exceedingly thoughtfully, and appropriately on multiple fronts: supporting the science as it evolved in his own NIAID division; and providing us with state-of-the-art health recommendations at every stage despite the political interference by the administration.”

Though he was not a household name until the COVID pandemic, Fauci was a notable public health figure within the political and medical establishment long before that. Appointed by Ronald Reagan to lead the NIH in 1984, historians studying Fauci’s legacy will have a lot of material to comb through before they focus on the last few years, when he had to take charge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet during that conflict, all agree that Fauci’s most important job was to save lives — and all of the experts who spoke to Salon described those efforts as successful.

Perhaps that is why Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, was bullish on how Fauci will be remembered by future historians. Gandhi told Salon by email that “the vaccination program in the US likely saved many lives, in the US and around the world. Dr. Fauci, the FDA [Food and Drug Administration], the White House Task Force, and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] oversaw the biggest mass vaccination program in the shortest period of time in the US with the COVID-19 vaccines and should all be commended for their incredible efforts.”

On a personal note, Gandhi mentioned that she knows Fauci through her work “on the Advisory Council of [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], the organization he leads at the NIH,” and described him as “a kind individual with a great interest in public health and doing the right thing when it comes to infectious diseases control.”

Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also told Salon that he knows “Tony” personally, including by chairing his periodic review for the NIH several years ago. Like Gandhi, Sommer highlighted how Fauci faced an extraordinarily difficult task when COVID-19 hit the United States.

“As you know, COVID arrived with little understanding from the medical, public health, and scientific community beyond what was learned during SARS-1,” the preceding epidemic of related virus SARS in 2003, Sommer wrote to Salon. “That occurred over a decade ago and a version of the virus that was very different from this one.”

Sommer described Fauci as having “acted exceedingly thoughtfully, and appropriately on multiple fronts: supporting the science as it evolved in his own NIAID division (which gave us one of the most effective and earliest vaccines); and providing us with state-of-the-art health recommendations at every stage, despite the political interference by the administration.”

Not that Fauci didn’t have his struggles.

Sommer noted that the Trump administration “often interjected and recommended absurd suggestions, which he was forced to deride despite the potential political attacks, and very personal threats of harm to him and his family.” It was clear that this was an unusual dynamic, one that would make any responsible public health official’s job more difficult, and yet Sommer notes that “as the virus changed, and the pandemic with it, [Fauci] kept us all informed about the implications and best advice for dealing with the changing nature of the pandemic as it was most rationally understood at the time.”

“In many ways he emulated a role he has played throughout his career, at least at NIH where he has often been the person that we call ‘the explainer of things,'” Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told Salon. (Benjamin also personally knows Fauci.) “He would be the guy that would go out and explain to the public very complex scientific things.” Benjamin observed that these skills, which Fauci began to hone in the 1980s, proved extremely useful by the 2020s. “I think at the end of the day his work both behind the scenes in terms of helping promote Operation Warp Speed, which got us a vaccine that was safe and effective in record time to save lives, and his ability to explain to people what was going on in a frank manner saved lives.”

According to Dr. Joshua S. Loomis (who has not met Fauci personally), an assistant professor of biology at East Stroudsburg University and author of “Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity,” Fauci was given a tough hand and played it about as well as could be reasonably be expected.

“Considering the enormous political pressure he was facing and the fact that he had no power to force individual state governors to abide by NIH/CDC recommendations, I think Fauci handled the COVID-19 pandemic as well as anyone could have in his position,” Loomis wrote to Salon. “He shared up-to-date, complex scientific information with the public in a way that was clear and understandable. As new information about COVID-19 transmission and pathogenesis became available, he adjusted recommendations to fit that new data.”

This was not always easy, as detractors would often criticize Fauci — out of ignorance if they were unaware of how science works, out of bad faith if they did — for supposedly “changing his mind” about public health recommendations.

“New studies are constantly yielding new data and fundamentally changing our understanding about individual infectious diseases,” Loomis explained. “Fauci should have been praised for modifying protocols and recommendations to fit the most up-to-date information about COVID-19. Overall, I think he did an amazing job in his role as the public face of the COVID response, especially considering that his boss (Donald Trump) and several other politicians (e.g. Ron DeSantis, Rand Paul) constantly downplayed the severity of the pandemic and levied attacks against him personally and professionally.”

Those personal and professional attacks didn’t land, in large part, because Fauci had a long career of achievement in his field. If Fauci had retired in 2019 (before the pandemic reached America’s shores), he still would have had an impressive legacy. Stewart Simonson, the Assistant Director-General of the World Health Organization, spoke to Salon by email about his work with Fauci during the crucial years after the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks.

“He was integral to every element of our biodefense and public health preparedness initiative,” Simonson explained. “There is not a single success from that period—and there were many successes—that was not positively and significantly influenced by Tony. Actually, this is a bit of an understatement.”

“We would not have MVA, the vaccine approved by the FDA to protect against monkeypox, without Project BioShield — and we would not have had Project BioShield without Tony Fauci. It is as simple as that.”

Simonson pointed to the Project BioShield Act, passed in 2004, which included $5.6 billion in funding for countermeasures against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear agents and special provisions like the Emergency Use Authorization, “which has been used extensively during the pandemic,” Simonson noted. Simonson characterized Project BioShield as a forerunner to BARDA (the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which was created in 2006 primarily to counter bioterrorism).

“I was part of the small group that drafted and lobbied the bill through Congress,” Simonson explained. “But I honestly do not believe it would have happened without Tony’s leadership. It would never have made it into the 2003 State of the Union speech let alone passed both houses of Congress had Tony not deployed his technical expertise, political capital and considerable powers of persuasion—many, many, many times.”

Because of BioShield, Simonson told Salon, America is better prepared for biological threats like monkeypox; “indeed, we would not have MVA, the vaccine approved by the FDA to protect against monkeypox, without Project BioShield — and we would not have had Project BioShield without Tony Fauci. It is as simple as that. And that is but one relatively small element of his legacy.”

Simonson also pointed to Fauci’s crucial role in implementing PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a global program to fight HIV/AIDS launched by President George W. Bush). Simonson called PEPFAR “the greatest foreign assistance program since the Marshall Plan,” and said that it “became the inflection point in the global fight against HIV because of Tony Fauci.”

“He was intimately involved in it at every stage and the the very earliest discussions with Pres. Bush, Secs. Thompson and Powell—and then HHS, State, USAID and NSC staffs,” Simonson said.. Fauci brought in international experts who could make sure that PEPFAR was effective once it began to be implemented on the ground, as well as used his credibility and persuasive powers to convince political leaders to support the program.

“The PEPFAR we know today — the program that has saved countless lives, alleviated suffering at the far corners of the earth and advanced our country’s interests in so many ways — would not exist but for Tony Fauci.”

Haseltine talked to Salon about his own experience with Fauci — which actually traces back to the start of Fauci’s career in Washington.

“Since he was appointed in 1984, I was a member of his council,” Haseltine told Salon. “I worked with him in lobbying Congress. I worked with him on strategies for the treatment prevention of HIV/AIDS and many other diseases. Tony was a very active and involved as a leader, both as a researcher and as a global leader for control of pandemic diseases.”

Like Simonson, Haseltine pointed to Fauci’s work with George W. Bush in fighting the HIV pandemic in Africa, stating that “Tony was instrumental in saving tens of millions of lives throughout the world, most predominantly in Africa where the HIV pandemic was most pronounced.”

While Fauci’s AIDS work through PEPFAR is widely praised, he was a focal point of criticism from the LGBTQ movement during the ’80s because he oversaw the NIH during the AIDS epidemic of that decade. Yet even there, many of Fauci’s contemporaries feel he did a good job.

“This was Tony’s first real trial by fire. My short answer: he did a remarkable job!!” Sommer wrote to Salon. He praised Fauci by noting that although “a lesser person would have both been angry, recalcitrant, and quit” by the criticism from the LGBTQ community and other activists invested in drawing more attention to the HIV/AIDS crisis; he argued that Fauci did the best he could with the resources he had. Fauci “listened, heard and understood their ‘pain’ (even as they made him the whipping boy for their own fears and frustrations), and actively embraced and worked with them.”

Gandhi also praised Fauci’s handling of the AIDS crisis. “I think he managed the AIDS pandemic extremely well and so much happened under his watch. He was always willing to learn from activists – like Larry Kramer — and oversaw a highly successful campaign on HIV.”

Yet Gandhi was not reluctant to criticize Fauci on other issues.

“Our vaccine uptake in the United States was not as high as other high-income countries, leading to avoidable deaths in the U.S,” Gandhi wrote to Salon, citing a piece she wrote in February 2021 for Leaps Magazine advocating optimistic messaging about vaccines early on to promote uptake.

“I think the White House’s confusing messaging on the need to mask after vaccination and that life does not go back to normal negatively affected vaccine uptake,” Gandhi argued. She pointed to countries like Denmark and Switzerland that had messaged more optimism regarding vaccines, in particular stressing that they could bring people back to their normal pre-pandemic lives more quickly.

“Although I was an early supporter of masks, mask mandates didn’t seem to make much of a difference in the US,” Gandhi told Salon. “I think Dr. Fauci and other public health officials should have been more motivating about the power of the vaccines to restore normalcy, and that is my main criticism of the response.”

One might wonder if these so-called errors — if one perceives them this way — would have happened regardless of who was in charge. Even among scientists who are all acting in the best of faith, there will always be sincere and unavoidable disagreements. No public health official can avoid entirely controversy, and perhaps it would be unwise for them to even try. Yet the bottom line is that, whatever mistakes he made, Fauci was never incompetent, malicious or corrupt. The consensus view is that he was a doctor who genuinely tried his best to help people — whether it was an entire nation under siege by a virus, or a single patient that desperately needed compassion.

Simonson shared an anecdote that captured the flavor of the rest.

“Several years ago, I was at the NIH Clinical Center (the research hospital in Bethesda) working on a project, and I bumped into Tony on rounds,” Simonson recalled. “He was outside the room of [a] patient with some awful undiagnosed condition that had destroyed his immune system. It wasn’t HIV or anything they had seen before. And the poor soul was just mutilated — or so I was told. I did not go into the room for obvious reasons.”

At that point, Fauci decided that the patient’s final hours of life should be spent with as much dignity as possible.

“The total focus of the consultation that morning was how to give this patient some quality of life for the time he had left,” Simonson recalled about Fauci. “There was no longer any talk of the research protocol or what could be learned from him or his disease. It was all about giving him some dignity and something to make his life worth living. This consultation went on for a long time — someone would come-up with something, and Tony would send for the expert if the person was on campus or, if not, arrange a call. It was more like a meeting of GPs, social workers and chaplains than biomedical researchers. It moved me then as it does now.”

“And that is his legacy to my way of thinking,” Simonson concluded. “Whether on the wards, at HHS [Health and Human Services], the White House or on the Hill, Tony has devoted his life as a physician-scientist to easing suffering, saving lives and advancing the frontiers of knowledge. And no one has done it better.”

about COVID-19

Judge in Greg Abbott’s Texas border crackdown accused of using racist slur against migrants

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Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.

A prominent judge in Texas Gov. Greg Abbott‘s border security operation to arrest and jail migrants on trespassing charges has been accused of using a racist slur against Latino defendants.

A defense attorney told the State Commission on Judicial Conduct last week that Judge Allen Amos told her the trespassing defendants weren’t “your regular wetbacks,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Texas Tribune.

“They have phones and clothes and all kinds of other things,” Amos reportedly said in July to defense attorney Emily Miller, whose complaint was first reported by The Daily Beast.

Miller is asking the commission to consider whether Amos’ alleged comment violates the Texas Judicial Code of Conduct. On Monday, Amos told the Tribune he would not comment on the complaint but would “have to wait for the judicial ethics people.”

It’s unknown if he will continue serving as a visiting judge for migrant trespassing cases in the meantime.

Aside from being racist, Miller told the commission she interpreted Amos’ comment to mean he believed the migrant defendants weren’t poor, potentially influencing his bond decisions for men held in a state prison on low-level misdemeanor charges.

“I have had several indigent clients of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican descent whose bonds have recently been revoked by Judge Amos, and his presumed bias against my clients by calling them ‘wetbacks’ and mentioning their supposed affluence leads me to question whether he made an unbiased decision in their hearings,” she wrote in her complaint.

Amos has often refused to lower bond amounts for migrant trespassing defendants. In December, he told one man, who had been imprisoned for more than 100 days and could not afford to post bond to be released and sent back to Mexico, that the $2,500 in cash the migrant would have to front was “not that much money.”

A former Concho County judge, 80-year-old Amos was tapped by the Kinney County judge to oversee a large group of the migrant trespassing cases in the county that has most zealously prosecuted them. Kinney County, a rural border county with conservative leadership, has imprisoned thousands of men on trespassing charges under Abbott’s border security initiative, Operation Lone Star.

The county’s leaders are staunchly conservative, labeling the immigration crisis an invasion and often publicly slamming President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. The county’s government website prominently links to a “defend our borders” fundraising site featuring the county judge, sheriff and misdemeanor prosecutor. The previously sleepy region has reported more break-ins with the increase in immigration, and state police often speed through town chasing suspected smugglers.

Last summer, the Republican governor flooded several border counties with state police to arrest and imprison single male migrants for allegedly trespassing on private property in an effort to push back against a sharp rise in illegal immigration. The number of people crossing the border, many of whom are seeking asylum, has continued at record levels.

The arrest practice has been marred by controversy from the start. Continual mistakes by police, prosecutors and judges led to wrongful arrests and hundreds of men being illegally imprisoned, in violation of state due-process laws. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the trespassing arrest initiative after complaints of discriminatory arrest practices.

After their arrests in Kinney County, migrants have spent weeks or months in state prisons converted into jails for immigration-related crimes. Those men are unable to post bond to be released — typically to be deported — before they can get before a judge to plead guilty or ask for a reduced bond in the backlogged courts.

Originally, the region’s administrative judge, Stephen Ables, had assigned three visiting judges — two Republicans and a Democrat — to help the county, which has only one misdemeanor judge and prosecutor and is used to handling dozens of cases a year, not thousands. But in December, Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan dismissed the three judges and asked Ables to instead assign five that he selected, including Amos, Ables told the Tribune at the time.

Shahan did not respond to questions Monday from the Tribune on whether he would call for Amos’ removal from his county’s bench. Ables’ office said he could not be reached because he is on vacation.

Shahan has previously argued that the decision to remove and reassign judges was up to Ables.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/08/22/texas-migrant-judge-racist-slur/.

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

When climate-related weather events damage crops, what options do farmers have?

In recent years, an increase in extreme weather events is making it a uniquely challenging time to be a farmer. Historically, crop insurance and disaster relief programs have been instrumental in protecting farmers from financial loss because of natural causes. But some argue that the federal crop insurance program does not encourage farmers to adapt. Recent research by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has highlighted this issue, pointing out that adaptation will be essential for responding to climate change in the long term.

The role of emergency relief

Many specialty crops — a technical label that includes fruits, vegetables and other non-grain crops — are not eligible for crop insurance through the USDA. For farmers who do not have federally subsidized USDA crop insurance, losses can be catastrophic. In the summer of 2021, some Oregon raspberry and blackberry farmers suffered a disastrous season, with major crop losses when temperatures soared to unprecedented levels in June. Darcy Kochis of the Oregon Raspberry & Blackberry Commission was among those working to secure support for growers who faced extreme loss. After the worst of the heat, the Commission began contacting the state government. “We brought people out to the fields,” Kochis says. Representatives saw the damage firsthand and, after much work, the Disaster Assistance Program for crops affected by the extreme weather was established. The program is structured as a forgivable loan.

The Oregon Disaster Assistance Program fills gaps in federal disaster programs and following an extraordinary season, it was a godsend for farmers. But even though the plants survived, cautious optimism for this year might be an overstatement. “You can never be sure,” Kochis says. “You can never be confident that the year is going to be great, because last year 50% of the crop was burned at the last minute.”

While disaster relief programs might help growers survive an especially tough season, they’re less useful in a future where climate-related disruptions become more common. That’s where other adaptations come in.

Adaptation and strategies for resiliency

Adopting different varieties could be a long-term solution for some field farmers. “There are drought tolerant varieties, on the other side there are varieties of corn and soybeans that do better in wetter soils,” says EWG Midwest Director Anne Schechinger, though she acknowledges that replacing crops with alternatives is trickier. “In the corn belt, farmers really have all of their equipment set up for one or two crops,” she says.

For farmers of perennial crops — like the berry farmers in Oregon — changing strategy can be an even more complex and time-consuming endeavor.

Higher summer temperatures in the Pacific Northwest could become a pattern, and there’s research going on to develop new varieties of berries, some of which could prove to be more heat tolerant. For example, the Columbia Star blackberry is one of the newer varieties, and it seems to be less susceptible to ultraviolet light and heat damage. But Kochis explains that these longer-term solutions are very slow to come to fruition. “The breeding program has to do on-farm trials, they have to do variety selection,” she says. It’s a process that can take years. Meanwhile, the weather that berry farmers must contend with could become ever more erratic.

Andrew Byers is the head cidermaker and co-owner at Finnriver Farm and Cidery, which grows its own apples on 80 acres of certified organic farmland on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. He explains that they have started making changes to the way they farm, with long term water predictions in mind. “It kind of led us to look at the fragility of high-density monocropping,” Byers says. The farm is transitioning away from high production dwarfing trees in favor of larger trees with deeper roots. “We frame them as resiliency strategies,” Byers says. He explains that the larger trees will be much better equipped to survive heat events. “They are much more likely to be able to tap into the water table on their own terms,” he says. “They will need less irrigation.”

While the Finnriver team is already working towards a more robust orchard based on long-term plans, it could be challenging for farmers responding directly to weather events to make changes in time, whilst also contending with more frequent disastrous harvests.

Survival alone isn’t enough

Even with adaptation strategies, farming in some areas might need a major overhaul. In cases where land and resources have become dramatically stressed, some ecologists believe it is no longer wise to grow some crops in the areas that they have been grown previously.

In regions where resources such as water are scarce, existing crops must be grown differently, and scientists are working to provide the insight that will help farmers to make critical decisions. For example, at UC Davis, the ‘Torture Orchard’ project is designed to find improved genetics for farmers. The team tested how much ‘torture’ pistachio and walnut rootstock can withstand by placing them under drought stress. While none of the pistachio trees died, as Associate Professor Pat Brown points out, “just surviving isn’t enough. What we really need to look at is how much food can we produce under water limitations.”

The western US is currently experiencing a multi-year drought that is the most extensive and intense in the 22-year history of the US Drought Monitor. What must be considered in California Brown says, is the economic value of the crops versus water applied. Sometimes it’s a bad bargain. Brown points out that in Sicily, farmers can grow pistachios with ten times less water than in California. “They don’t get 10% of the yield, they get 50% of the yield,” he says. “They are five times as water use efficient.” Asking California farmers to try using less water could be tough. “It’s always a hard sell to get someone to do something that might impact their livelihood,” Brown says, but adds that it is clear what is coming down the road in terms of water limitation in California. “It might be, in the not-too-distant future, that they don’t have a choice on whether they cut down water or not,” he says. “There’s not going to be enough water to go around.”

Growers across the country are reckoning with this harsh new climate reality. Byers points to one blackcurrant farm in Oregon that supplies additional product to his cidery; it was nearly burned down by wildfires two years ago and had a crop cut in half last year due to heat damage. “It certainly feels unstable,” he says. “If I was going to make a climate-inspired decision about what to grow, I would choose to put in things that were more adaptable, meaning less commitment, and easier to change away from. And I don’t know if that would be trees.”

Eliminating barriers to climate adaptation

Where resources are stretched too thin or disasters become too frequent, some agronomists believe it is no longer wise to grow some crops in the areas that they have been previously grown. But even when changing crops becomes a financial and environmental necessity, it can be financially and culturally difficult. Overcoming these barriers may take policies that help farmers manage that potentially expensive transition.

But some existing crop insurance policies could be a barrier to that change. Schechinger points out that crop insurance could encourage farmers to keep planting crops in areas where they’re increasingly unsuitable, by financially insulating the farmers from growing rates of crop failure. “We know that crop insurance impacts the crops that farmers plant,” says Schechinger. “It’s really, really important to adjust crop insurance so that it helps farmers adapt to climate change.”

EWG crop insurance data shows that between 1995 and 2020, $143.5 billion in federal crop insurance payments was paid out to farmers, and a majority of the payments were for crop damage due to drought and excess moisture, both factors that have worsened as a result of the climate emergency. In her research, Schechinger points out that when a crop is mostly covered by crop insurance, there’s often not enough incentive for farmers to embrace adaptive practice. Reducing premium subsidies for the highest-risk farmers could encourage less production, she argues, pointing out that the savings could be put towards helping farmers to permanently retire farmland.

Schechinger also highlights that conservation practices will be key for the longer term. Reducing tillage in drought areas means that soil does not become as hot, and cover crops planted over the winter season can be a huge help. “That is really good for both more rain, and less rain,” Schechinger points out. “It builds up soil health, it stops soil compaction from getting too bad. That’s going to help with a lot of climate variability going forward.”

Two militia members convicted in Whitmer kidnap plot, “conspiracy to use weapon of mass destruction”

A jury convicted two men on charges related to a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Adam Fox and Barry Croft were found guilty Tuesday of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and Croft was also found guilty of possession of an unregistered destructive device, reported WJBK-TV.

“The defendants in this case believe their anti-government views justify violence,” said David Porter, FBI assistant special agent from Detroit. ” Today’s verdict is a clear example they were wrong in their assessment.”

The two men were tried on conspiracy to kidnap charges earlier this year, but the jury failed to reach a verdict, and two other men charged with the same crime were acquitted.

Croft and Fox planned to blow up a bridge to distract police while they kidnapped the governor, who they opposed because of public health measures she implemented to halt the spread of the coronavirus.

“Today’s verdicts prove that violence and threats have no place in our politics and those who seek to divide us will be held accountable. They will not succeed,” Whitmer said in a statement. “But we must also take a hard look at the status of our politics. Plots against public officials and threats to the FBI are a disturbing extension of radicalized domestic terrorism that festers in our nation, threatening the very foundation of our republic.

NC Republican: “We don’t need to be teaching social studies and science” to kids under 5th grade

On Monday, WRAL reported that North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the highest-ranking Republican in the state, called for eliminating science and history classes from elementary schools.

In his memoir, “We Are the Majority: The Life and Passions of a Patriot,” according to reporter Bryan Anderson, “Robinson is dropping more hints about a potential run for governor in 2024. And, if elected, he says he’d work to keep science and history out of some elementary school classrooms. He says he’d also seek to eliminate the State Board of Education, end abortion and work to prevent transgender people from serving in the military.”

“Robinson said he’d work to keep history, science and a number of other subjects out of first through fifth grade curricula and instead prioritize reading, writing and math,” said the report. “‘In those grades, we don’t need to be teaching social studies,’ he writes. ‘We don’t need to be teaching science. We surely don’t need to be talking about equity and social justice.’ Robinson also reaffirms personal views on climate change that became a major issue in the 2020 election. ‘Guess what? Most of the people of North Carolina know global warming is junk science,’ he writes.”

Robinson, a former gun rights activist, was elected in 2020, along with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who was given a second term.

He has become highly controversial for his past statements, including that gay people are “devil-worshipping child molesters,” that transgender identity is a “mass delusion” designed “to turn God’s creation … into a sickening image of rebellion to glorify Satan,” that the Parkland school shooting activists are “silly little immature media prosti-tots,” that Michelle Obama is secretly a man, that Muslims in America are “invaders,” and that the film Black Panther is a Jewish plot to grift money off of Black people. While vehemently anti-abortion, he has also admitted that he once paid his wife to have one before they were married.

According to Robinson’s book, of all his past controversial statements, the only one he regrets is the Black Panther comment; Robinson says that he was actually trying to cite an obscure quote from Mel Brooks, and hadn’t meant any anti-Semitic intent behind it.

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

“Andrew Who?” That’s most of what the over-30 crowd said in response to the news that Andrew Tate had been banned from TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook after a spate of negative coverage and increasing concerns from parents and teachers about the TikTok star’s power over his followers. For adults who don’t have teenage sons, the 35-year-old kickboxer-turned-TikTok star was largely unknown, but as anyone in the high school and college age set could tell you, online he was an overnight sensation.

Across the English-speaking world, parents and teachers grew increasingly alarmed, hearing teenage boys and young men parroting Tate’s woman-hating rhetoric. One teacher on Reddit last week complained about boys “saying shit like ‘women are inferior to men’ ‘women belong in the kitchen Ms____’.,” and refusing “to read an article by a female author because ‘women should only be housewives.'” In the thread, multiple teachers chimed in with their own stories about the adolescent fascination with Tate. Beyond arguing that women shouldn’t be allowed to drive or work outside of the home, Tate has bragged about beating a woman with a machete and praised Donald Trump for sexually assaulting women.

His popularity is directly attributable to the profit motives of social media companies. As the Guardian demonstrated, if a TikTok user was identified as a teenage male, the service shoveled Tate videos at him at a rapid pace. Until the grown-ups got involved and shut it all down, Tate was a cash cow for TikTok, garnering over 12 billion views for his videos peddling misogyny so vitriolic that one almost has to wonder if he’s joking.

Tate is just the latest example of the way that far-right figures lure in young men by preying on their insecurities.

But he is very much not joking.

Police in Romania raided the British-born Tate’s Romanian home in April, as part of an investigation into human trafficking. Tate had previously said he likes living in Romania because he believes law enforcement looks the other way on sexual assault allegations.

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Parents, teachers, and anyone who cares about the well-being of young people should be worried. It’s not just that Tate was spreading hateful ideas and encouraging violence against women, though that on its own is terrifying enough. It’s that Tate is just the latest example of the way that far-right figures lure in young men by preying on their insecurities. Once the influencers suck in these young men, they start redirecting audience energies toward fascist organizing. Tate is just a piece of a larger puzzle that explains, for instance, how so many otherwise normal young men get wrapped up in groups like the Proud Boys and actions like storming the Capitol on January 6.

The strategy is simple. Far-right online influencers position themselves as “self-help” gurus, ready to offer advice on making money, working out, or, crucially, attracting female attention. But it’s a bait-and-switch. Rather than getting good advice on money or health, audiences often are hit with pitches for cryptocurrency scams or useless-but-expensive supplements. And, even worse, rather than being offered genuine guidance on how to be more appealing to women, they’re encouraged to blame women — and especially feminism — for their dating woes.

Gavin McInnes and the Proud Boys: “Alt-right without the racism”?

“It’s certainly true that male privilege ain’t delivering what it used to,” Ash Sarkar writes in her piece about Tate for GQ. “Women don’t have to sit around waiting to be chosen anymore,” but instead are often holding out for male partners who treat them with respect and dignity.

One way for men to respond to this, which many do, is to embrace a more egalitarian worldview and become the partners women desire. But what Tate and other right-wing influencers like him offer male audiences instead is grievance, an opportunity to lash out at feminism. They often even dangle out hope of a return to a system where economic and social dependence on men forced women to settle for unsatisfying or even abusive relationships. Organizing with other anti-feminist men is held out as the answer to their problems.

This bait-and-switch is all over the right-wing influencer world.

What Tate and other right-wing influencers like him offer male audiences instead is grievance, an opportunity to lash out at feminism.

Proud Boys founder Gavin McInness built a young, male audience in large part by suggesting he had the key to landing a “tradwife,” which is far-right slang for wives who stay at home and assume a submissive role. (In reality, McInnes’s wife is a successful publicist.) Psychology professor-turned-right wing influencer Jordan Peterson first rose to fame as a self-help guru with his book “12 Rules for Life.” But his audiences thrill to him not for banal “make your bed” advice, but for proclamations such as recommending “enforced monogamy” on women as a cure for male anxiety. Until his social media ban, Tate was operating something called Hustler University, which promised, for $49 a month, to turn his audience into rich playboys, as he presents himself to be.

But once in the door, the young male audiences aren’t just hit with sexist content, but drawn into a larger world of far-right bigotry and, in many cases, anti-democratic sentiment. McInnes’s Proud Boys ended up being the vanguard of the Capitol insurrection. Peterson was recently suspended from Twitter and demonetized on YouTube for saying gender transition is “Nazi medical experiment-level wrong.”

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Most of the coverage of Tate has focused on his misogyny, but as the group Hope Not Hate notes, they’ve been “monitoring Tate for years, due to his long history of extremism and his close association with major far-right figures.” He’s been linked with a number of far-right American and British influencers, and not just because he loves Trump. He’s been photographed dining with former Infowars anchor Paul Joseph Watson, who was recently recorded ranting about how he wishes “to wipe Jews off the face of the Earth.” He’s also associated with Jack Posobiec and Mike Cernovich, far-right trolls who pushed Pizzagate and similar hoaxes.

But the 17-year-old kid who starts following Tate because he’s titillated by TikTok videos espousing “edgelord” opinions about women doesn’t know any of this. All he knows is that this cut guy with a loud mouth is promising that, while “politically incorrect,” he’s offering advice and opinions that can supposedly give a leg up socially and sexually. It can be intoxicating for young men trying to navigate the confusing and scary world that is often full of rejection. Doubly so when the message they’re getting is that the solution isn’t to do hard, personal work to make yourself a better catch, but instead to become angry and aggrieved at women for wanting a better deal for themselves.

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DOJ subpoenas more security video — suggesting officials believe Trump still has more docs: report

The Department of Justice has subpoenaed more security video from Mar-a-Lago in a sign that “officials are not certain whether they have recovered all the presidential records,” The New York Times reported Monday evening.

Unnamed sources told the publication that officials are seeking additional footage in the wake of the FBI’s August 8 raid on Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort, signaling that the agency is still scrutinizing the manner in which Trump allegedly took the documents from the White House at the end of his tenure.

Trump claims that he had the right to take the documents and that he declassified them while still in office — a suggestion that has been dismissed by former White House officials as untrue.

According to the New York Times, over 300 documents were taken by Trump from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.

FBI agents seized documents marked “Top Secret,” “Secret” and “Confidential” during the search of Trump’s palatial residence.

The search warrant for the raid, which was personally approved by Attorney General Merrick Garland, directed the FBI to seize documents and records “illegally possessed” in violation of three criminal statutes, including one falling under the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to illegally obtain or retain national security information.

Trump vehemently denounced the FBI raid on his home as a “witch hunt” and claimed that all of the material confiscated during the search had been previously “declassified.”

Trump is also facing legal scrutiny for his efforts to overturn the results of the November 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

“This is blackmail”: Republicans deny flood funding to New Orleans over opposition to abortion ban

Progressives are sounding the alarm about the lengths to which GOP officials appear willing to go to advance their deeply unpopular and reactionary agenda after Louisiana’s State Bond Commission, at the urging of right-wing Attorney General Jeff Landry, once again denied flood prevention resources to New Orleans due to the city’s opposition to the state’s new abortion ban.

As CNN reported Saturday, last week marked the second time in as many months that the panel rejected financing for a $39 million planning and infrastructure project designed to protect the residents of Orleans Parish from storm-induced floodwaters, which are projected to intensify in the coming years as a result of the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.

A statement shared on Landry’s official Facebook page and video from Thursday’s bond commission meeting make clear that the Republican attorney general, who can vote on the panel or designate a representative from his office to vote on his behalf, has been imploring his colleagues to withhold credit in a bid to force city officials to comply with the state’s assault on reproductive freedom.

Civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill described Landry and his co-conspirators’ actions as a manifestation of conservative “blackmail” that is “becoming normalized.”

Not enough people are “responding with the urgency these authoritarian moves deserve,” warned Ifill, the former president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The New Orleans City Council on July 7 passed a resolution in which local policymakers proclaimed their support for reproductive healthcare access and asked police, sheriff’s deputies, and prosecutors not to use public money to enforce Louisiana’s draconian prohibition on abortion, which took effect just days after the U.S. Supreme Court’s far-right majority overturned Roe v. Wade and is currently in force following multiple legal challenges.

The bond commission on Thursday voted 7-6 to defer a motion to approve flood prevention funding until next month, threatening the future well-being of Orleans Parish residents whose elected leaders are attempting to defy the cruel and dangerous forced pregnancy bill passed by Louisiana Republicans and signed into law by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards.

“The officials in New Orleans took an oath of office to support and enforce the laws of our state, yet they have decided that some laws are not worthy of enforcement,” Landry said on Facebook after the vote. “Today was another step toward ensuring the parishes and municipalities of our state comply with the laws of our state.”

Thursday’s close vote followed Landry’s overwhelming victory at the July 21 meeting. Just two members of the commission—both designees of Edwards—supported a motion to approve funding for the project in question without delay last month, while 12 members voted to block it.

The first vote came two days after Landry sent a letter urging the bond commission to “defer any applications for the City of New Orleans, Orleans Parish, and any local governmental entity or political subdivision under its purview.”

“Any other funding that will directly benefit the City of New Orleans,” he wrote, “should also be paused until such time as the council, mayor, chief of police, sheriff, and district attorney have met with and affirmed that they will comply with and enforce the laws of this state and cooperate with any state officials who may be called upon to enforce them.”

Deputy Attorney General Emily Andrews, representing Landry, told the commission in July that withholding financing “is really about sending a message that defiance of state law is unacceptable.”

“There’s no question this act of defiance is unconstitutional,” she argued. “We can all agree on the main principle, which is that a municipality and a parish cannot disregard state law. What we don’t agree on probably is the consequences.”

Work on the street improvements was expected to be finished in 2024. It’s unclear whether the decision by a handful of Louisiana Republicans to postpone construction will push back the completion date, but if it does, the consequences could be deadly.

In response to last month’s vote, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell called it “disappointing and appalling” that the commission halted funding for one of the city’s “most vital and valuable infrastructure projects.”

“Regardless of the outcome,” Cantrell continued, “my administration will continue to prioritize the needs of our residents, which includes improving our aging infrastructure, strengthening our resiliency as a city, and protecting the reproductive rights of women throughout the City of New Orleans.”

On Friday, Cantrell reiterated that she is unwilling to budge on abortion and criticized Landry and other Republican members of the bond commission for harming the economy and endangering public health by holding flood mitigation funding hostage.

“We cannot afford to put politics over the rights of people, and particularly safeguarding people from hurricanes and other disasters, because we are on the front lines of climate change,” she told CNN.

“Self-inflicted wound”: Trump’s release of “damning” National Archives letter blows up in his face

Former President Donald Trump reportedly released a new document very late Monday night that legal experts believe is incredibly damning.

Conservative journalist John Solomon, who is one of Donald Trump’s official representatives for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), released a May 10 letter on his JustTheNews.com website.

Solomon released a letter from NARA to Trump’s lawyers.

“As you are no doubt aware, NARA had ongoing communications with the former President’s representatives throughout 2021 about what appeared to be missing Presidential records, which resulted in the transfer of 15 boxes of records to NARA in January 2022,” the letter read. “In its initial review of materials within those boxes, NARA identified items marked as classified national security information, up to the level of Top Secret and including Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Program materials. NARA informed the Department of Justice about that discovery, which prompted the Department to ask the President to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the boxes at issue so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them.”

Experts were stunned.

“Yikes,” tweeted Tufts Prof. Daniel Drezner. Washington Post reporter Olivier Knox said, “this is incredible.”

Attorney Bradley Moss wondered, “Does [John Solomon] realize how bad that letter is for Trump?”

“Trump not only had classified records at Mar-a-Lago, not only had TS/SCI classified records, he had Special Access Program classified information,” Moss explained. “Those are our most sensitive secrets. They were sitting in a damn basement.”

Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said, “The letter also confirms that Trump was on notice that the documents he possessed were federal government property and that he needed to return them to the government’s possession. Very uphill battle for Trump’s team.”

Justin Baragona, a correspondent for The Daily Beast, explained, “The best part of this is that John Solomon posted the letter because he thinks it is extraordinarily damning for the Biden White House. (Or he’s at least trying to preemptively frame it that way for Trumpworld.)”

“Also John Solomon refers to Trump as ‘the man Joe Biden beat in the 2020 election,'” Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) expert Jason Leopold wrote.

“This is quite a damning letter,” he concluded.

But attorney Teri Kanefield tried to put herself in the shoes of the man who released the letter, purportedly on Trump’s behalf.

“I’m trying to figure out why John Solomon thought this letter would help Trump,” Kanefield wrote. “I’m stumped.”

University of Law Prof. Steve Vladeck wrote, “The May 10 letter from NARA is damning to former President Trump on any number of levels — not the least of which is the lack of any reference to a claim by Trump’s representatives that he had *declassified* any of the classified materials that were quite specifically at issue.”

“It’s also telling that, even though this letter really hurts the Trump version of events, it wasn’t released by the Biden Administration or NARA. It was released by Trump’s own team—both a self-inflicted wound and further proof of how the government has been playing by the rules,” Vladeck added.

“Lawyers are giggling”: Legal experts scratch their heads at Trump’s “very strange” new DOJ lawsuit

Former President Donald Trump on Monday filed a lawsuit demanding the return of documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago, arguing that the feds did not have sufficient reason for the raid even though they found 300 classified documents at Trump’s home, according to The New York Times.

The FBI recovered more than 300 classified documents from Mar-a-Lago in three batches over the last eight months, according to the report. Trump only turned over 150 of the documents to the National Archives in January, prompting the Justice Department to investigate whether he withheld some materials. The boxes included documents from the CIA, National Security Agency, and FBI across a “variety of topics of national security interest,” according to the report.

Trump rifled through the boxes of documents late last year as officials were attempting to recover them, sources told the outlet. Surveillance footage obtained by the DOJ also showed people “moving boxes in and other, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in,” according to the report. Trump resisted demands to return the documents, describing them as “mine,” sources told the Times. Earlier this year, Trump attorney Christina Bobb signed a declaration that all classified material had been returned, which ultimately led to the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Trump’s residence to recover documents that he withheld after the first three recovery attempts.

“Going to get someone killed”: Trump lawyer threatens to expose FBI agents even if DOJ redacts names

Andrew Weissmann, a former federal prosecutor who served on special counsel Bob Mueller’s team, called the report “incredibly damning” for Trump, noting that the report suggests the former president personally reviewed the documents to decide what to return.

“If you are a prosecutor, you really look for evidence of what the former president did personally,” he told MSNBC. “If the DOJ either knows about or is soon to interview those people who were sources for the New York Times, they’re going to have a substantial criminal case.”

Despite the mounting evidence that Trump’s actions may have run afoul of federal laws governing classified materials and document preservation, Trump filed a lawsuit on Monday arguing that the feds have “failed to legitimize its historic decision” to raid his home. The lawsuit called for a court to appoint a special master, a third party that is typically a former judge, to review whether some materials may be protected by attorney-client privilege or other guidelines. The lawsuit seeks the return of documents the FBI seized in the raid.

“This Mar-a-Lago Break-In, Search, and Seizure was illegal and unconstitutional, and we are taking all actions necessary to get the documents back, which we would have given to them without the necessity of the despicable raid of my home, so that I can give them to the National Archives until they are required for the future Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Museum,” Trump said in a statement on Monday.

The lawsuit argues that the raid was politically motivated, claiming that Trump is the “clear frontrunner” in the 2024 election “should he decide to run.” The lawsuit accuses the feds of violating Trump’s Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure and asks that the court block “further review of seized material” until they are reviewed by a special master.

The DOJ said it would file a response in court.

“The Aug. 8 search warrant at Mar-a-Lago was authorized by a federal court upon the required finding of probable cause,” DOJ spokesman Anthony Coley told CNBC.

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Weissmann, the former federal prosecutor, said Trump’s filing has a “fatal flaw” because it doesn’t reckon with the fact that the documents legally belong to the National Archives, not the president.

“Nothing needs to be sifted because none of the documents are actually the former president’s. These all belong, whether classified or not classified, to the national archives,” he told MSNBC. He went on to describe the court filing as a “press release masquerading (tenuously) as a legal brief.”

Orin Kerr, a conservative law professor at UC Berkeley, noted that “lawyers are giggling at Trump’s motion, and how poorly it was done.”

“Reading Trump legal filings you imagine a lawyer who doesn’t quite know what he’s doing and then Trump taking a Sharpie to the draft and insisting on passages that read like tweets,” he tweeted.

Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe described the filing as “very strange,” questioning why it took Trump two weeks to call for the intervention.

“It’s sort of too late to ask for some new special master,” he told MSNBC.

Tribe argued that any other citizen who took classified documents home “would be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.”

“So he is sort of asking Merrick Garland to prosecute him,” Tribe said. “If he’s being treated not as president but as a citizen, he’s got to be indicted,” he added. “Otherwise, the rule of law just doesn’t mean anything.”

Read Trump’s full lawsuit below:

Trump complaint by Igor Derysh on Scribd

about the Trump raid

Does turning the air conditioning off when you’re not home actually save energy? Engineers explain

Hot summer days can mean high electricity bills. People want to stay comfortable without wasting energy and money. Maybe your household has fought over the best strategy for cooling your space. Which is more efficient: running the air conditioning all summer long without break, or turning it off during the day when you’re not there to enjoy it?

We are a team of architectural and building systems engineers who used energy models that simulate heat transfer and A/C system performance to tackle this perennial question: Will you need to remove more heat from your home by continuously removing heat throughout the day or removing excess heat only at the end of the day?

The answer boils down to how energy intensive it is to remove heat from your home. It’s influenced by many factors such as how well your house is insulated, the size and type of your air conditioner and outdoor temperature and humidity.

According to our unpublished calculations, letting your home heat up while you’re out at work and cooling it when you get home can use less energy than keeping it consistently cool – but it depends.

Blast A/C all day, even when you’re away?

First, think about how heat accumulates in the first place. It flows into your home when the building has less stored heat than outside. If the amount of heat flowing into your home is given by a rate of “1 unit per hour,” your A/C will always have 1 unit of heat to remove every hour. If you turn off your A/C and let the heat accumulate, you could have up to eight hours’ worth of heat at the end of the day.

It’s often less than that, though – homes have a limit to how much heat they can store. And the amount of heat that enters your home depends on how hot the building was to begin with. For example, if your home can only store 5 units of thermal energy before coming to an equilibrium with the outdoor air temperature, then at the end of the day you will only ever have to remove 5 units of heat at most.

Additionally, as your home heats up, the process of heat transfer slows down; eventually it reaches zero heat transfer at equilibrium, when the temperature inside is the same as the temperature outside. Your A/C also cools less effectively in extreme heat, so keeping it off during the hottest parts of the day can increase overall efficiency of the system. These effects mean there’s no one straightforward answer to whether you should blast the A/C all day or wait until you get back home in the evening.

Energy used by different A/C strategies

Consider a test case of a small home with typical insulation in two warm climates: dry (Arizona) and humid (Georgia). Using energy modeling software created by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory for analyzing energy use in residential buildings, we looked at multiple test cases for energy use in this hypothetical 1,200 square-foot (110 square-meter) home.

We considered three temperature strategy scenarios. One has the indoor temperature set to a constant 76 degrees Fahrenheit (24.4 degrees Celsius). A second lets the temperature float up to 89 F (31.6 C) during an eight-hour workday – a “setback.” The last uses a temperature setback to 89 F (31.6 C) for a short four-hour workday.

Within these three scenarios, we looked at three different A/C technologies: a single stage central A/C, a central air source heat pump (ASHP) and minisplit heat pump units. Central A/C units are typical of current residential buildings, while heat pumps are gaining popularity due to their improved efficiency. Central ASHPs are easily used in one-to-one replacements of central A/C units; minisplits are more efficient than central A/C but costly to set up.

We wanted to see how energy use from A/C varied across these cases. We knew that regardless of the HVAC technology used, the A/C system would surge when the thermostat setpoint returned to 76 F (24.4 C) and also for all three cases in the late afternoon when outdoor air temperatures are usually the highest. In the setback cases, we programmed the A/C to start cooling the space before the resident is back, ensuring thermal comfort by the time they get home.

Energy models can show how much energy a house will use under particular conditions – like Phoenix’s hot, dry summer weather. The researchers ran the numbers on three different HVAC technologies and three different temperature-setting strategies. Pigott/Scheib/Baker/CU Boulder, CC BY-ND

The researchers used the same three different HVAC technologies and three temperature-setting strategies, but this time for a house in hot and humid Atlanta. Pigott/Scheib/Baker/CU Boulder, CC BY-ND

What we found was that even when the A/C temporarily spikes to recover from the higher indoor temperatures, the overall energy consumption in the setback cases is still less than when maintaining a constant temperature throughout the day. On an annual scale with a conventional central A/C, this could result in energy savings of up to 11%.

However, the energy savings may decrease if the home is better insulated, the A/C is more efficient or the climate has less dramatic temperature swings.

The central air source heat pump and minisplit heat pump are more efficient overall but yield less savings from temperature setbacks. An eight-hour setback on weekdays provides savings regardless of the system type, while the benefits gleaned from a four-hour setback are less straightforward.

Aisling Pigott, Ph.D. Student in Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder; Jennifer Scheib, Assistant Teaching Professor of Building Systems Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, and Kyri Baker, Assistant Professor of Building Systems Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

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

Trump, golf and Saudi Arabia: A filthy cycle of “sportswashing”

Here’s the big question in Jock Culture these days: Is the Kingdom of Golf being used to sportswash the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Or is it the other way around? After all, what other major sport could use a sandstorm of Middle Eastern murder and human-rights abuses to obscure its own history of bigotry and greed? In fact, not since the 1936 Berlin Olympics was used to cosmeticize Nazi Germany’s atrocities and promote Aryan superiority have sports and an otherwise despised government collaborated so blatantly to enhance their joint international standings.

Will it work this time?

The jury has been out since the new Saudi-funded LIV Tour made an early August stop at the Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster, New Jersey. (That LIV comes from the roman numeral for 54, the number of holes in one of its tourneys.) And I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it was hosted by a former president so well known for flouting golf’s rules that he earned the title Commander-in-Cheat for what, in the grand scheme of things, may be the least of his sins.

Trump’s N.J. golf resort hosts Saudi-sponsored event — 9/11 families outraged

That tournament featured 10 of the top 50 players in the world. They were poached by the Saudis from the reigning century-old Professional Golfers Association (PGA), reportedly for hundreds of millions of dollars in signing bonuses and prize money. It was a shocking display for a pastime that has traded on its image of honesty and sportsmanship, not to mention an honor system that demands players turn themselves in for any infractions of the rules, rare in other athletic events where gamesmanship is less admired.

No wonder our former president hailed the tour as “a great thing for Saudi Arabia, for the image of Saudi Arabia. I think it’s going to be an incredible investment from that standpoint, and that’s more valuable than lots of other things because you can’t buy that — even with billions of dollars.”

The tournament was held soon after Joe Biden gave that already infamous fist bump to crown prince and de facto Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman. The two events radically raised bin Salman’s prestige at a moment when, thanks to the war in Ukraine, oil money was just pouring into that kingdom, and helped sportswash the involvement of his countrymen in the 9/11 attacks, as well as the brutal murder and dismemberment of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Deals they couldn’t refuse

The buy-off money came from the reported $347 billion held by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Top golfers were lured into the LIV tour with sums that they couldn’t refuse. A former No. 1 player on the PGA tour, Dustin Johnson, asked about the reported $125 million that brought him onto the Saudi tour, typically responded by citing “what’s best for me and my family.”

Phil Mickelson, most famous of the LIV Golf recruits, admitted that Saudi officials were “scary motherf**kers” with a “horrible record on human rights.”

Phil Mickelson, the most famous of the LIV recruits and a long-time runner-up rival of Tiger Woods, justified his reported $200 million in a somewhat more nuanced fashion. In a February interview at the website The Fire Pit Collective, he admitted that Saudi government officials are “scary motherfuckers,” have a “horrible record on human rights,” and “execute people… for being gay.” Yet he also insisted that the LIV was a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reshape how the PGA Tour operates.”

Family needs and the supposed inequities of the PGA’s previously hegemonic universe were the explanations a number of golfers used to justify biting the hand that had fed them for so long. Meanwhile, Tiger Woods, the greatest recipient of PGA largesse and probably the greatest golfer of our time, if not any time, reportedly turned down an almost billion-dollar offer with sharp words for those who had gone for the quick cash.

The PGA obviously agreed and barred any golfer who took up the Saudi offers from its tournaments. In response, some of them promptly sued the PGA.

The Kingdom of Golf

On the face of it, creating a Kingdom of Golf might not seem like a crucial thing for a morally challenged monarchy to do. After all, golf isn’t exactly a charity or a social justice campaign that’s likely to signal your virtue. It’s just a game whose players use sticks to swat little balls into holes in the ground while strolling around. It’s not even good exercise and far less so if you’re driving the course in a motorized cart or hire a caddie to carry your sticks. And it gets worse. After all, the irrigation water and poisonous chemicals necessary to keep the playing fields luxuriantly green at all times are abetting ecological disaster.

Golf symbolized reactionary greed even before the Saudis entered the picture. For starters, its competitors are among the only professional athletes ranked purely by the cash prizes they’ve won. And the leading golfers invariably earn far more from endorsements and speaking engagements. The sport’s almost comic upper-class snootiness sometimes seems like an orchestrated distraction from the profound racism, sexism, and antisemitism lodged in its history and, even today, the discrimination against women that still exists at so many of the leading country clubs that sustain the game.

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Golf has long been retrograde, exclusionary and money-obsessed. To put that in perspective, the estimated revenue of the Professional Golf Association in 2019 was $1.5 billion — and it boasts a nonprofit status that’s sometimes been questioned. Lucrative as it is, it also proved distinctly vulnerable to an attack by an oil-soaked autocracy that, in warming up to invade golf, had already invested in Formula One racing, e-sports, wrestling, and its most recent controversial purchase, an English Premier League soccer team (which provoked protests from fans and Amnesty International).

Still, the Saudis’ move on golf was even bolder, more ambitious and somehow almost ordained to happen.

The PGA had estimated revenue of $1.5 billion in 2019, but despite all that money proved vulnerable to attack by an oil-soaked autocracy that has already invested in Formula One, e-sports, wrestling and soccer.

Unlike football and baseball, which are convenient amalgams of socialism for the owners (in their collusive cooperation) and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the players and other personnel, golf is more of a monarchy along the lines of, um, Saudi Arabia. Until the LIV Tour came along, the main PGA tour, that sport’s equivalent of the major leagues, had been all-powerful in its control over both golfers and venues.

Over the years, golfers have indeed complained about that, but except for Greg Norman, a 67-year-old Australian former champion, not too loudly. Now a highly successful clothing and golf-course design entrepreneur, Norman is called the Great White Shark for his looks and aggressive style. No wonder he’s now the CEO of LIV Golf and the ringleader of the campaign to recruit the top pros to play in the breakaway tour.

Norman denies that he answers to the crown prince, but his attempts to distance himself from that ruthless Saudi ruler are not taken seriously by most observers of golf, including the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins, who wrote:

Let’s be frank. LIV Golf is nothing more than a vanity project for Norman and his insatiable materialism — and an exhibition-money scam for early-retiree divas who are terrified of having to fly commercial again someday. By the way, the supposed hundreds of millions in guaranteed contracts for a handful of stars — has anyone seen the actual written terms, the details of what Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson will have to do to collect that blood-spattered coin, or is everyone just taking the word of Norman and a few agents trying to whip up commissions that it’s all free ice cream?

One of the best sports columnists, Jenkins may seem excessive in her attack on Norman, but the passions that golf and Saudi Arabia have raised separately only increase in tandem. On the one hand, there’s the outrage when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s murderous human-rights abuses and Washington’s continuing complicity with the regime, thanks in particular to its ongoing massive arms sales to that country. (The latest of those deals, largely Patriot missiles sold to that country for $3 billion, feels distinctly like a kind of bribery.)

On the other hand, there’s the long-standing resentment of golf as a symbol of rich, white, male supremacy. In fact, it’s still seen as a private meeting place to create and maintain relationships that will lead to significant political and business decisions, the sports equivalent of, um, Saudi missile deals.

The pro golfers profiting from the current bonanza may not engender much sympathy, but the derision for their materialism should, at least, be put in context. Until the LIV came along, they had next to no options in their sport and few of them made Mickelson- or Johnson-style money. Worse yet, their lonely gunslinger lifestyles made unionization at best the remotest of possibilities, especially for figures deeply wired into the corporate community through their sponsorship deals.

The Saudi golf coup (because that’s indeed what it is) has taken place at an interesting juncture for the sport and its two most compelling figures, Trump and Tiger, who have indeed played together, both seeming to enjoy the trash talk that went with the experience.

Tiger in twilight

Tiger, who is now in steep decline, has long been the face of the sport at its most accomplished, captivating and richest despite, or perhaps because of, his paradoxical nature.

His first auto accident in 2009 revealed a tortured soul involved a maelstrom of sexual infidelities and occasioned a re-evaluation of his mythic rise. No surprise then that he’s struggled ever since, briefly regaining his form before more accidents and surgeries diminished his dominance.

As long as he continued to show up and hit a ball, popular interest in the game was sustained and the PGA’s grip held firm. As he diminished, however, so did public fascination with golf.

In a way, he had been Tiger-washing the sport. It was hard to sustain a critique of golf’s retrograde and exclusionary nature, however justified, while it hid behind his Black face. Of course, that vision of golf was already wearing thin when Tiger refused to define himself as African-American, preferring “Cablinasian” — meant to reflect his racial mix of Caucasian, Black, (American) Indian, and Asian.

With Tiger, at 46, fading as an active force, PGA golf had already become vulnerable to a coup long before the Saudis and The Donald appeared on the scene. And who could have been a handier guy for those Middle Eastern royals than one with such experience in coups, even if his first try, with all those armed deplorables, failed on Jan. 6, 2021.

This time around, though, Trump had millionaires with golf clubs, Middle Eastern oil royalty and the equivalent of bottomless sacks of PAC money.

The first time Trump was infamously linked to sports, he managed to destroy his own organization in what would emerge as his signature style of reckless, narcissistic malfeasance.

And, of course, with Trump involved, anything could happen. The first time he was infamously linked to sports, in the early 1980s as the owner of the New Jersey Generals of the upstart United States Football League (USFL), he managed to destroy his own organization in what would emerge as his signature style of reckless, narcissistic malfeasance. An early Trump lie (in an interview with me, no less) was that the USFL would continue its summer schedule so as not to interfere with the NFL’s winter one. Within days of that statement, he led a lawsuit aimed at forcing a merger of his league and the NFL. It ended badly for Trump and the USFL.

This time around, Trump has said that the LIV Tour would avoid scheduling tournaments in conflict with major PGA events. That will probably turn out to be anything but the case, too. So how will his latest foray into Jock Culture play out? Will the PGA beat back the Saudi coup (maybe by raising its prize money) or will the Saudis burnish their global image through a sport undeservedly renowned for integrity and class?

And what about the Commander-in-Cheat? If only this Saudi enterprise would leave him too busy on the links (not to speak of fighting off jail in connection with those purloined secret documents of his) to run for the presidency again in 2024.

Ultimately, whether Saudi Arabia or golf gets sportswashed, it’s Trump we need to rinse out of our lives.

about Trump’s favorite pastime

Kansas was just the beginning: Abortion-rights activists turn to states — and they’re winning

In a surprising development last week, the South Carolina Supreme Court stopped the state from enforcing a law banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy. That law was enacted in 2021 in the run-up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision which overturned Roe v. Wade. Proponents of the law expected that in a post-Roe world it would end abortion in South Carolina.

But the 2021 law mysteriously included a provision that its enactment “must not be construed to repeal, by implication or otherwise, Section 44-41-20 [(the codification of Roe)] or any otherwise applicable provision of South Carolina law regulating or restricting abortion.”

So litigation was brought by Planned Parenthood in South Carolina to enforce that provision. In granting the injunction, the court recognized what it called a “conflict in the law” and questioned “the constitutionality of the Act under our state’s constitutional prohibition against unreasonable invasions of privacy.”

After Kansas smackdown, anti-abortion right in denial: Either it didn’t happen or it doesn’t matter

No one would ever mistake South Carolina — one of the most conservative states in the nation — for a hotbed of support for reproductive rights. But the court’s decision is a reminder that state constitutions, even in bright red states, often afford protections and freedoms that go well beyond what the federal Bill of Rights provides.

Although no state constitution contains an explicit guarantee of reproductive freedom, all over the country, defenders of reproductive rights are carrying on their fight at the state level, often by reference to state constitutional protections of privacy, autonomy and dignity.

For example, the National Conference of State Legislatures notes that constitutions in Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Washington contain specific provisions relating to a right to privacy, a word that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights.

Alaska’s constitution, for example, declares that “The right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed.” Section 23 of Florida’s constitution says that “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.”

Montana’s constitution includes this expansive provision: “The right of individual privacy is essential to the well-being of a free society.”

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision unquestionably changed the legal landscape at the national level. It returned the abortion issue to the states, with Justice Samuel Alito arguing that the people in each state should decide what he described as a deeply divisive “moral” issue. What Alito didn’t discuss was how those decisions would fare in light of the rights recognized by state constitutions.

For the foreseeable future, the battle to protect reproductive freedom is going to be carried out with reference to those rights.

Progressives have historically taken a jaundiced view of federalism and states’ rights, but now hope to turn them to their advantage. They are winning significant victories.

The Center for Reproductive Rights notes that before the Supreme Court overruled Roe, “the high courts in 10 states recognized that their state constitutions protected abortion rights independently from and more strongly than the federal constitution or had struck down restrictions that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld even under Roe….”

It is no wonder, therefore, that progressives, who historically have taken a jaundiced view of federalism and states’ rights, now hope to use them to their advantage.

As in South Carolina, they are winning some significant victories.

Last Friday, a Michigan judge enjoined county prosecutors from enforcing the state’s 1931 ban on abortion.

Earlier this month, abortion-rights defenders made headlines with an overwhelming victory in a Kansas referendum, as voters soundly rejected a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion.

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In the aftermath of that vote, the New York Times reported that “The Kansas vote implies that around 65 percent of voters nationwide would reject a similar initiative to roll back abortion rights, including in more than 40 of the 50 states.”

The proposed amendment was a response to a little noticed 2019 ruling by the Kansas Supreme Court, which found that the state’s constitution protects the right to an abortion.

That ruling is instructive about the role that state constitutions will play in the ongoing battle over abortion.

The case was brought by two abortion providers who challenged a 2015 state law that prohibited dilation and evacuation, an abortion procedure frequently used in the second trimester of pregnancy.

The Kansas court said that Section 1 of the Kansas Constitution Bill of Rights “acknowledges rights that are distinct from and broader than the United States Constitution and that our framers intended these rights to be judicially protected against governmental action that does not meet constitutional standards.”

That provision states that “[a]ll men are possessed of equal and inalienable natural rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Among the rights,” the court said, “is the right of personal autonomy,” which it called “fundamental.” That right, it went on to say “allows a woman to make her own decisions regarding her body, health, family formation, and family life — decisions that can include whether to continue a pregnancy.”

Since the Dobbs decision, abortion rights organizations have filed lawsuits claiming to find a right to reproductive freedom under state constitutions across the country, including in Utah, Kentucky, Idaho and Mississippi.

Reminding us of the intricacies of America’s federal system, NPR observes that those lawsuits are “not identical. Each appeals to specific lines of legal theory unique to each state, citing different state provisions and different case histories to support their arguments.”

The Idaho litigation alleges that banning abortion “violates the Idaho Constitution’s guarantee of the fundamental right to privacy in making intimate familial decisions.” The Kentucky litigation contends that an abortion ban violates “Sections One and Two of the Commonwealth’s Constitution” by infringing on women’s rights to “privacy and self-determination.”

Federalism is not necessarily a good in and of itself, and it is certainly no substitute for a robust, nationwide guarantee of women’s bodily integrity and reproductive rights. But in the wake of the Supreme Court’s attack on those rights, state constitutions may provide the grounds for protecting them.

In 2020, Gurbir S. Grewal, the attorney general of New Jersey, and Jeremy Feigenbaum, the state’s solicitor, urged progressives to “take a page from our conservative friends and forge a new form of progressive federalism.” The ongoing litigation of pro-choice groups is a prime example of that effort.

More than four decades ago, at the dawn of an earlier era of conservative judicial activism on the Supreme Court, Justice William Brennan aptly described the stakes in this strategy when he wrote that “The legal revolution which has brought federal law to the fore must not be allowed to inhibit the independent protective force of state law — for without it, the full realization of our liberties cannot be guaranteed.”

on the post-Roe fight for abortion rights

Bad to worse for news biz: Gannett chain turns to union busting, layoffs, stock buybacks

There’s been a lot of reporting about the unprecedented wave of union organizing in the wake of the COVID pandemic, which has claimed the lives of many thousands of essential workers and sickened many more.

From Starbucks stores to Amazon warehouses workers are standing up for themselves, collectively putting their own situation at risk to improve the social contract they have with the corporate behemoths who for decades have gotten their way in Washington.

This multiracial labor movement, often led by women and people of color at the local level, is in ascendancy at the local Dollar General in the poorest part of town while also holding accountable media giants like the New York Times, so adept at delivering an audience that demands luxury while informing the world. It was on display at the June Poor People’s Campaign march in Washington, where thousands and thousands of union activists participated, most not yet born when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned the first such march, which he would not live to see.

Workers have had enough: Labor’s tide is rising, from Amazon to Dollar General and beyond

What’s gotten less attention from the corporate news media is how publicly traded corporations like Amazon and Starbucks are doubling down on illegal or dubious strategies to defeat these organizing efforts, often in ways that are not in the long-term interest of workers, the nation, their brands or even their investors, but actually serve only to personally enrich the C-suite.

Such is evidently the case with the Gannett newspaper chain, which owns more than 250 newspapers across the country including USA Today. In my home state of New Jersey, Gannett now controls a long list of the Garden State’s most trusted legacy local papers: the Asbury Park Press, The Bergen Record, the Courier News, The Courier Post, the Daily Record, the Home News Tribune, the Daily Journal, the New Jersey Herald and the Burlington County Times.

All throughout COVID, when New Jersey had the highest per capita death rate in the world, Gannett’s local reporters and videographers were out in the field providing essential independent situational awareness, even as federal, state and local government was tested to near the breaking point and the death toll mounted, with basic supplies like masks and testing kits in short supply.

Jon Schleuss is president of the NewsGuild-CWA union that has 24,000 members, including 50 Gannett newsrooms, including the Bergen Record, Daily Record and Asbury Park Press. In an op-ed several months into the pandemic he described the precarious state of the already struggling for-profit local news business.

Meanwhile, the local news industry is enduring dire circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Advertising revenue has diminished as businesses are making an effort to combat the virus, leading to layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts for thousands of journalists. Journalists, like many others, are essential workers, and New Jerseyeans depend on local publications to receive targeted information pertaining to their communities. This includes getting life-saving public health information about the impact of COVID-19 in their areas. Many outlets are even making their online COVID-19 coverage free for all readers as a public service, despite the financial strains they face.

Journalists who are currently still employed have reported from emergency rooms and other COVID-19 hotspots where risks of infection are significantly higher. Meanwhile, other journalists have been subject to police violence — in violation of their First Amendment rights — while covering protests in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Whether it’s Amazon, Starbucks or Gannett, too many of America’s publicly traded corporations take a scorched-earth approach that would rather close operations down in a given location than let workers sit at the table as equals to negotiate with dignity. Gannett’s precarious business model has been to pile up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, which our corporate tax code encourages, to buy up local papers and then cut costs by shrinking newsroom staffs, invariably resulting in a degradation of local news coverage.

Gannett’s business model has relied on piling up hundreds of millions in debt to buy up local papers and then cut costs ruthlessly, further degrading local coverage.

In response, 1,500 journalists in at least 50 newsrooms, including the Bergen Record and Asbury Park Press, have opted to organize under the NewsGuild-CWA banner to push back against this predator behavior and preserve local journalism using a sustainable business model.

“Many communities have seen the resources of their local news outlets decline as economic pressure and consolidation have created news deserts across the country,” wrote Schleuss. “Since 2004, the U.S. has lost a staggering approximately 2,100 newspapers, many of them small, local papers outside of major cities. In New Jersey alone, we’ve seen 92 closures or mergers, including the Clark Patriot and Edgewater View.”

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

Last year, Gannett CEO Mike Reed raked in $7.7 million while the median salary of a Gannett employee was $48,419. According to their union, it’s not uncommon for members to have to resort to food pantries to make ends meet. Meanwhile, Gannett spared no expense hiring union-busting attorneys and now has 11 open investigations for unfair labor practices, according to the NRLB website.

An email to Gannett’s public relation’s office with the union’s latest concerns did not elicit a response.

Earlier this year, Gannett disclosed it had lost $54 million after it made a bad bet on a partnership with European internet gambling sports book operator Tipico. Reed blamed a 31 percent spike in newsprint costs combined with declines in print circulation and advertising revenues. He also conceded that last summer’s hyped wager on Tipico had not panned out.

Yet, just a year earlier, it was all upside.

“Our highly engaged audience of more than 46 million sports fans crave analysis, betting insights, odds and unique features which we will provide with our Tipico alliance,” said Reed, when the deal was announced in July of 2021. “Tipico adds incredible expertise from their European operations and next generation product capabilities, which offer our sports enthusiasts and local consumers a way to become even more invested in the games and sports they care about.”

A few months later the website Gambling News reported that Dutch regulators had fined Tipico for operating illegally in the Netherlands, a charge it denied.

Early this month, Reed was forced to engage in rhetorical tap-dancing during a call with analysts explaining that Tipico, which was supposed to be such a national player with USA Today, was only licensed to operate in two states, Colorado and New Jersey. (Someone in the C-suite failed to do basic due diligence.) “We are already off and exploring opportunities with other sports gaming providers and expect to see increased revenue from this category moving forward,” Reed reportedly told analysts.

Of course, Reed is personally insulated from his bad bets by his huge compensation, and always had Gannett’s playbook of layoffs and selling off real estate assets, while executing a $100 million stock buyback, to fall back on. According to Poynter, the nonprofit journalism advocacy website, “journalists across more than 25 states also reported being laid off. Several executive editors were terminated, including Mary Dolan, who oversaw The Journal News/lohud.com (New York) and Douglas Ray, who oversaw the Gainesville (Florida) Sun, Ocala Star-Banner and Leesburg Daily Commercial. The Landmark (Massachusetts) also lost its editor and will shut down next month, reported The Grafton (Massachusetts) Villager.”

One under-reported and potentially important trend has been local interests buying back their community paper from Gannett. Last year, Poynter reported that Gannett had sold 23 of its papers to local owners.

“The recent behavior of Gannett’s senior managers’ behavior recalls an old Roman adage: Those who have something to distribute do not neglect themselves,” wrote James Henry, an economist, lawyer and international tax expert, after reviewing Gannett’s latest SEC filings. “Evidently these managers and their favorite bankers realized that 2022 would be a terrible year, with a 5 to 15% decline in circulation and ad revenue, a failed online gambling venture, soaring interest rates and other costs that were hard to control.”

Henry continued. “So they decided in February 2022 to pledge the company’s cash andother assets, borrow up to $100 million (at 6 to 10% interest), and authorize these funds to be used to engage in one of the modern business practices that is truly the last refuge of the CEO who is completely out of ideas: buying back their own stock.

Gannett management’s recent behavior, said economist James Henry, “recalls an old Roman adage: Those who have something to distribute do not neglect themselves.”

“Indeed, armed with this bank term line, in April 2022 they began buying back shares — many of which they may have owned themselves, as part of the company’s generous stock compensation plan — the modern-day private corporate equivalent of printing money,” Henry wrote in a detailed analysis prepared for InsiderNJ. “We don’t have more recent data, but as of June 30, Gannett had bought back 864,000 shares, or $3.1 million worth, at an average price/share of $3.84 — all of this paid for with very costly borrowed money.”

Henry believes Gannett’s declining trajectory is likely to continue, “with senior management increasingly relying on Civil War surgery-type tactics, a sure sign that they have lost the thread and are in lurch mode: mass layoffs, benefit cuts, sudden shutdowns or divestitures of whole business units, U-turns in strategy and — to put bandages on the amputations — even more corporate debt.

“Not surprisingly, Wall Street has seen the impact of such self-serving corporate ‘bloodletting’ practices before, and is not impressed,” Henry concluded. “Gannett’s closing stock price [last Friday] was $2.26, well below the buyback average. Investors, at least, understand that managers who literally mortgage their companies’ futures for the sake of bailing out a few of their pals are unlikely to be part of a sustainable solution.”

Amid all this corporate self-dealing by Gannett, its journalists have delivered like never before for their communities and the entire nation. It was the Austin-American-Statesman, a Gannett paper, that got to the bottom of the botched response of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

In Ohio and Indiana, it was Gannett’s Columbus Dispatch and Indianapolis Star that authenticated the story about a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim who was compelled to leave Ohio and travel to Indiana because of a restrictive abortion law passed after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

“An indignant President Biden cited the story a week later as an example of extreme abortion laws, and his political opponents pounced. They suggested it was a lie or a hoax,” reported the Washington Post. A national newspaper’s editorial board concluded it was “too good to confirm,” and even Ohio’s attorney general suggested it was a “fabrication.” Reporters at Gannett’s papers in Columbus and Indianapolis confirmed that it was not.

As we have seen in our nation’s dysfunctional response to the pandemic, as well as in the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, there’s a steep price to be paid when wild rumors or malicious fake news on social media replaces locally authenticated news delivered by professional journalists like those in the News Guild-CWA. Everything Gannett is doing now is only likely to make that problem worse.

on labor and the future of work