Cryptomining uses a “disturbing” amount of energy, lawmakers find

Seven of the U.S.’s largest Bitcoin mining companies are set up to use nearly as much electricity as all of the homes in Houston — the nation’s fourth most populous city — according to a congressional investigation of the industry.

The findings, released Friday, come as Democratic lawmakers are calling for regulation and cryptominers are increasingly under fire for straining the electrical grid and raising electricity prices for consumers.

In a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, a group of Democratic lawmakers led by Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, revealed that the seven companies have the capacity to use as much as 1,045 megawatts of power, or enough to power all of the homes in Houston, a city of more than 2 million people.

“The results of our investigation, which gathered data from just seven companies, are disturbing, with this limited data alone revealing that cryptominers are large energy users that account for a significant – and rapidly growing – amount of carbon emissions,” the lawmakers wrote.

They also urged federal agencies to develop rules requiring that cryptomining companies report their power usage and greenhouse gas emissions — a first step towards understanding the scope of the problem and crafting regulation.

The cryptomining industry has been undergoing explosive growth in the U.S. In 2021, China banned mining and the U.S. quickly became the world’s hub. Roughly a quarter of American mining operations are located in Texas, where the state’s electrical grid is notoriously fragile.

Mining for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin — a process that requires specialized computers to solve complex math problems in exchange for new tokens — requires a large amount of computing power and is energy-intensive. Earlier this week, as a heatwave swept across Texas, state regulators had to ask Bitcoin miners to voluntarily shut down their operations to avoid overloading the grid.

More troubles lie ahead. According to The Verge, by 2026 cryptocurrency miners plan to increase demand on Texas’s grid by 27 gigawatts, or by roughly a third of the grid’s current capacity.

Cryptocurrency advocates say mining will spur the building of more renewable energy, but so far it hasn’t been enough. Bitcoin mining emits as much greenhouse gasses as entire countries; one recent estimate said as much as the Czech Republic.

The load that cryptominers place on the grid is driving up prices for other consumers, too. Last year a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago found that cryptocurrency mining in upstate New York raised electricity costs for households in the region by a total of $165 million each year.

Moms for Liberty: “Joyful Warriors” in the fight to demolish public school

Last weekend in Tampa, about 500 members of the conservative education advocacy network Moms for Liberty gathered for their first national summit. True to the spirit of a group that has helped drive many of the most heated school board confrontations of the last two years, the summit’s most headline-grabbing moment came when Betsy DeVos, the former secretary of education under Donald Trump, called for the abolition of the Cabinet-level department she used to run.

“I personally think the Department of Education should not exist,” DeVos said, sparking cheers and a standing ovation, during a lunchtime session named for her recent book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.” It’s hardly the first time DeVos has suggested as much (she did so just last month, at an event for conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute), and she’s also hardly alone, as a growing number of Republican politicians and conservative leaders have called for demolishing the DOE in increasingly strident attacks on public education, including a 2021 bill supported by right-wing House Republicans like Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz.

But there was so much more: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis receiving a ceremonial wooden “liberty sword” for his efforts in support of “parents’ rights”; right-wing education activists warning parents that public schools have become “Maoist thought reform prisons” intent on transforming their children into “change agents”; former HUD Secretary Ben Carson promoting his new “Little Patriots” curriculum; Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., promising the audience that, by running for school board, they might provide the coattails congressional and Senate candidates could ride upon; and — likely the real point of the gathering — a suite of nine closed-door strategy sessions training Moms for Liberty activists to launch exactly those kinds of campaigns.

Betsy DeVos and Ron DeSantis: GOP dynamic duo team up to defund public schools

The range and caliber of conservative leaders Moms for Liberty (M4L) were able to attract to the summit is testament to how quickly the group has grown since its founding in 2021 by three conservative Florida women tied into local school board politics: former school board members Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, who run the group today, along with current Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler, coauthor of Florida’s 2021 Parents’ Bill of Rights law and wife of Florida Republican Party vice chair Christian Ziegler, who once enthused that M4L was succeeding where he’d long failed — to mobilize millennial women for the GOP and drive its members to become “foot soldiers” for Ron DeSantis.

Although M4L typically represents itself as nonpartisan and grassroots, the group’s ties to powerful conservative leaders and institutions runs deep, as Olivia Little reported at Media Matters last fall. While the group’s finances are largely opaque, it has received donations from the right-wing Conservatives for Good Government, it hosted a fundraiser (top-tier tickets were $20,000) with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, and it counts a number of Florida elected officials as public allies. In the Tampa Bay Times earlier this month, Maurice Cunningham, author of “Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization,” argued that M4L had grown “at a pace that only a corporation’s monetary resources could manage” and noted that many of its leaders had backgrounds in marketing, communications and political strategy.

Moms for Liberty typically presents itself as a nonpartisan grassroots organization. Its connections to powerful conservatives suggest that is complete nonsense.

Today, Moms for Liberty has around 95,000 members in some 200 county chapters across close to 40 states. Over the last year and a half, the group has led conservative education movements and school board protests focused on COVID-19 mask or vaccine mandates, “critical race theory” in the classroom, LGBTQ rights and inclusion, and efforts to restrict or ban books parents claim are either sexually explicit or too racially sensitive for children.

At times, the group’s influence has been linked to increased harassment of school officials. As Tyler Kingkade reported at NBC News, the group has offered bounties for tips on teachers who they claim are using critical race theory in the classroom. In Brevard County, Florida, school board member Jennifer Jenkins recounted that M4L protests were followed by parents calling her a “pedophile,” yelling at her five-year-old, “Be careful, your mom hurts little kids!” and making threats like, “If you thought January 6 was bad, wait until you see what we have for you!” One prominent M4L supporter, Florida state Rep. Randy Fine, posted Jenkins’ phone number on Facebook, encouraging followers to let her “know exactly how you feel.” Someone filed a false child abuse report against her.

M4L has made connections at times with harder corners of the far right. Later this month in Texas, one local chapter is hosting anti-LGBTQ activist Kelly Neidert, who, as Salon has reported, is a key figure in a number of ugly protests against Pride celebrations in the state who was permanently suspended from Twitter last month for tweeting, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in Pride events.”

None of that was evident in M4L’s first national gathering, which was titled the “Joyful Warriors” Summit, in keeping with members’ reference to each other as “warriors” and “war moms.” Instead, the three-day summit was awash in both patriotic and religious messaging, with an operatic rendition of the national anthem, opening invocations that called on God’s help as M4L “wage[s] war” against their adversaries, M4L-branded pocket Constitutions and buttons from Turning Point USA reading, “No matter what my teacher says, I’ll always love America.” On Saturday night, local chapter leaders received awards named after female figures from the American Revolution.

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The group also appeared to have the gratitude of DeSantis, who ran well over his allotted speaking time on Friday morning, recounting his moves to implement conservative education policies in Florida, from banning mask mandates to banning classroom acknowledgement of LGBTQ issues to banning discussions of race that make people uncomfortable to banning textbooks that include what he called “woke math.” (Because Florida is such a big state, DeSantis said, when his Department of Education complained, the text publishers “took the woke out and sent us back normal math books.”)

After Florida education officials complained about math textbooks, DeSantis told his audience, publishers “took the woke out and sent us normal math books.”

DeSantis also highlighted his recent work to overhaul civics education in Florida — efforts that gained national attention in June after attendees of a teacher training reported that the lessons struck them as “Christian fundamentalist” and revisionist history — as well as the state’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, passed in 2021.

In a subsequent panel on parents’ rights, M4L leader Tiffany Justice said the network intended to introduce similar “bills of rights” in every state, while her fellow panelist, attorney and M4L board member Jeff Childers, compared the bill to an AK-47 that would require additional accessories — that is, amendments to the law — in order to meet the “crypto-Marxist legal warfare” that he said opponents of parents’ rights engage in.

“Our adversaries,” added Childers, “it’s not just that they don’t care about our children. I believe they’re actively trying to harm our children.”

Later on Friday, James Lindsay, an anti-CRT activist and podcaster with a track record of making bizarre accusations, drove that point home in a lengthy lecture about how “social emotional learning” is being used as a subtle form of “brainwashing” to transform children into “change agents” and social justice protesters, and ultimately, to usher in a “new world, with new values” as desired by globalist elites. Warning parents that there was a longstanding communist plot to estrange children from their parents by making “your kid a little sexual weirdo,” Lindsay argued that, “Under social emotional learning,” parents of public school students “are sending your children to a thought reform program” akin to those in Mao Zedong’s China during the Cultural Revolution.

There were other examples of right-wing education narratives. In one strategy session closed to the press, American Enterprise Institute fellow Max Eden, who co-authored a book arguing that Obama-era efforts to reduce racial disparities in school discipline had enabled the 2018 Parkland school massacre, spoke alongside Ryan Petty, a Florida Board of Education member and father of a daughter killed during that shooting. Other closed-door strategy sessions covered topics like “gender ideology” and “school choice.”

But most of the strategy sessions — all hosted by the Leadership Institute, which for more than 40 years has run trainings for conservative activists and claims to have helped launch the careers of numerous current members of Congress — focused on brass-tacks topics: messaging and comms, website and database maintenance, strategic research, candidate vetting and one session titled simply, “Are you ready to run?”

While M4L itself has issued a sweeping number of school board candidate endorsements nationwide — including several dozen in Florida alone — its members have also started drawing endorsements from figures like DeSantis, who estimates that he’s endorsed 20 to 25 candidates so far. In his speech, DeSantis singled out one such candidate at the summit, and suggested he may endorse more.

“We’ve done a lot of good stuff, but the state is not going to be able to do all this stuff on its own,” said DeSantis. “It’s really the local communities that need to be leading the way when it comes to their school districts.” To that end, he continued, “I have this year made an effort to help promising candidates for school boards across the state of Florida.” That, he suggested, might help address the fact that under the state constitution school board races must be nonpartisan, which DeSantis claimed had resulted in situations where reliably Republican districts have wound up with “left-of-center school boards.”

In the meantime, DeSantis said, “What we’re looking to do is really help candidates who are walking the walk, who have strong values, who are going to be there for parents and put the students first and just shine a little light on that and just help particularly some of our voters who come up to me and ask me these questions.”

On Saturday, Sen. Rick Scott, who preceded DeSantis as governor before moving on to Washington, also spoke to the ways conference attendees could help the broader conservative agenda. While state and national candidates have typically been understood as bringing down-ticket campaigns along, Scott suggested that the reverse could prove true, now that education issues have become such polarized ground.

“If you guys run, you’re going to make everyone else win,” Scott said. “You will make sure senators win all across the country, congressmen and women win all across the country.”

on the education wars

Final act of empire? U.S., Israel and the Saudis now heading for war with Iran

The U.S., Israel and Saudi Arabia are plotting a war with Iran. The 2015 Iranian nuclear arms accord, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which Donald Trump sabotaged, does not look like it will be revived. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is reviewing options to attack if Tehran looks poised to obtain a nuclear weapon and Israel, which opposes U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, carries out military strikes.

During his recent visit to Israel, President Biden assured acting Prime Minister Yair Lapid that the U.S. is “prepared to use all elements of its national power,” including military force, to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon.

Saudi Arabia, Israel and the U.S. function as a troika in the Middle East. The Israeli government has built a close alliance with Saudi Arabia, which produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 attacks and has been a prolific sponsor of international terrorism, supporting Salafi jihadism, the basis of al-Qaida, and such groups as the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and the al-Nusra Front.

The Four Horsemen of the 21st century: War, capitalism, fascism and mass death

The three countries worked in tandem to back the 2013 military coup in Egypt, led by Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who overthrew its first democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on politically motivated charges. The Sissi regime collaborates with Israel by keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in Gaza, one of the most densely populated and impoverished places on earth.

Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, has conducted an ongoing campaign of covert attacks on Iranian nuclear sites and nuclear scientists. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated, presumably by Israel, between 2010 and 2012. In July 2020, a fire, attributed to an Israeli bomb, damaged Iran’s Natanz nuclear site. In November 2020, Israel used remote control machine guns to assassinate Iran’s top nuclear scientist. In January 2020, the U.S. assassinated Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, along with nine other people, including a key figure in the anti-ISIS coalition, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. It used an MQ-9 Reaper to fire missiles into his convoy, near the Baghdad airport.

If similar attacks had been carried out by Iranian operatives inside Israel, it would have triggered a war. Only Iran’s decision not to retaliate, beyond lobbing about a dozen ballistic missiles at two military bases in Iraq, prevented a conflagration.

On July 7, Iran informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it was using IR-6 centrifuges with “modified subheaders.” The declared purpose of the enrichment process at its underground facility at Fordow is to create uranium isotope enriched up to 20 percent — far below the 90 percent enrichment levels necessary to create weapons-grade uranium. Under the JCPOA agreement, enrichment levels were capped at 3.67 percent.

Israel has allocated $1.5 billion for a potential strike against Iran and, during the first week of June, held large-scale military exercises, including one over the Mediterranean and in the Red Sea, in preparation to attack Iranian nuclear sites, using dozens of fighter aircraft, including Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets.

The 2016 Memorandum of Understanding signed by Barack Obama provides a 10-year, $38 billion military package for Israel.

Israel and its lobby in the U.S. are working to scuttle negotiations with Iran to monitor its nuclear program. The preparation for war mirrors the Israeli pressure on the U.S. to invade Iraq, one of the worst strategic decisions in U.S. history.

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Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in testimony before the British Iraq war commission, offered this account of his discussions with George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Saudi Arabia, which seeks to dominate the Arab world, severed ties with Iran in 2016 after its embassy in Tehran was stormed by protesters following Riyadh’s execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr. Saudi Arabia, with Chinese help, has built a plant to process uranium ore and acquired ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia signed a series of letters in 2017 with the U.S. to purchase weapons totaling $110 billion immediately, and $350 billion over the next decade.

War with Iran would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It would spread swiftly throughout the region. Shiite Muslims across the Middle East would see an attack on Iran as a religious war against Shiism. The 2 million Shiites in Saudi Arabia, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern province; the Shiite majority in Iraq; and the Shiite communities in Bahrain, Pakistan and Turkey would join the fight against the U.S. and Israel.

War with Iran would be an unimaginable catastrophe, spreading swiftly throughout the region. Shiite Muslims across the Middle East would see it as a direct attack on their religion.

Iran would use its Chinese-supplied anti-ship missiles, rocket and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, mines, drones and coastal artillery to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, the corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquified gas supply. Oil production facilities in the Persian Gulf would be sabotaged. Iranian oil, which makes up 13 percent of the world’s energy supply, would be taken off the market. Oil would jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict drags on, to over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy, already reeling under rising prices because of the sanctions on Russia, would grind to a halt.

Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah’s store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona, would also be deployed. Strikes by Iran and its allies on Israel, as well as on American military installations in the region, would leave hundreds, maybe thousands, dead.

In 2002, the U.S. military conducted its “most elaborate war game” ever, costing over $250 million. Known as the Millennium Challenge, the exercise was between a Blue Force (the U.S.) and the Red Force (widely considered as a stand-in for Iran). It was meant to validate America’s “modern, joint-service war-fighting concepts.” It did the opposite. The Red Force, led by retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, conducted a swarm of kamikaze suicide boat attacks and destroyed 16 U.S. warships in under 20 minutes.

When the war game was reset, it was rigged in favor of the Blue Force. The Blue Force was given access to experimental technology — including some that doesn’t exist, such as airborne laser weapons. Meanwhile, the Red Force was told it wasn’t allowed to shoot down the Blue Team’s aircraft, had to keep its offensive weapons in the open and could not use chemical weapons. Even then, the Blue Force could not achieve all its objectives as Van Riper unleashed a guerrilla insurgency against the occupying forces.

Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be fêted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have as much blood on their hands as they do. Yes, in 2018 the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the assassination and dismemberment of my friend and colleague Jamal Khashoggi. Yes, Israel assassinated Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. But Washington has more than matched the crimes carried out by Israel and the Saudis, including against journalists.

Why shouldn’t Joe Biden be fêted by the murderous regime of Saudi Arabia and the apartheid state of Israel? He and the U.S. have just as much blood on their hands as they do.

The imprisonment of Julian Assange — who released the collateral murder video showing U.S. helicopter pilots laughing as they shot to death two Reuters journalists and a group of civilians in Iraq in 2007 — is designed to destroy him psychologically and physically. The corpses of civilians, including children, piled up by Israel and Saudi Arabia, who do much of their killing in Gaza and Yemen with U.S. weapons, don’t come close to the hundreds of thousands of dead we have left behind in two decades of warfare in the Middle East.

In 1991, a U.S.-led coalition destroyed much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including water treatment facilities, resulting in sewage contaminating the country’s drinking water. Then followed years of U.S., British and French airstrikes enforcing a “no fly zone” along with crushing sanctions imposed via the UN. From 1991 to 1998, these sanctions alone were estimated to have killed 100,000 to 227,000 Iraqi children under the age of five, although the exact figures have been the subject of much dispute. The U.S. “Shock and Awe” bombing campaign of Iraqi urban centers during its subsequent invasion of Iraq in 2003 dropped 3,000 bombs on civilian areas, killing over 7,000 noncombatants in the first two months of the war.

By one estimate, the U.S. has been responsible for directly or indirectly killing nearly 20 million people since the end of the Second World War.

Israel and Saudi Arabia are gangster states. But so is the United States.

“There are few of them,” Biden, reacting to Democratic lawmakers who have criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, told Israel’s Channel 12 news. “I think they’re wrong. I think they’re making a mistake. Israel is a democracy. Israel is our ally. Israel is a friend and I make no apologies.”

The angst about Biden’s not holding the Saudis and the Israelis to account on this visit is risible, as if we have any credibility left that allows us to arbitrate between right and wrong. The idea that Biden and the U.S. are brokers for peace was eviscerated long ago. The U.S. offers shameless support for Israel’s right-wing government, including vetoing U.N. resolutions that censure Israel. It refuses to condition aid on a respect for human rights even as Israel launches repeated murderous assaults against the civilian population in Gaza, labels Palestinian NGOs as terror groups, expands illegal Jewish-only settlements, carries out aggressive evictions of Palestinian families and mistreats Palestinian and Arab-American citizens at points of entry and within the occupied Palestinian territories.

The idea that we represent and promote virtue illustrates the self-delusion that accompanies our moral and physical degeneration. The rest of the world, which recoils in repugnance at whom we have become, does not take us seriously. They fear our bombs. But fear is not respect. They no longer envy our hedonistic mass culture, tarnished by mass shootings, social inequality, the decay of our infrastructure, dysfunction and a Grand Guignol-style of politics that has turned civil and political discourse into a tawdry burlesque. America is a grim joke, one about to be made worse when the Christian fascists, bigots and conspiracy theorists take control of the Congress in the fall, and I expect, the presidency two years later.

The U.S., along with Israel, makes war on Muslims who, with an estimated 1.9 billion adherents, comprise nearly 25 percent of the world population. We have turned many in the Muslim world into our enemies. The Muslim world does not hate us for our values. It hates our hypocrisy. It hates our racism, our refusal to honor their political aspirations, our lethal attacks and military occupations and crippling sanctions. Muslims express the rage felt by Guatemalans, Cubans, Congolese, Brazilians, Argentines, Indonesians, Panamanians, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Filipinos, North and South Koreans, Chileans, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans — those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth.” They too were slaughtered by our high-tech military machine and subjugated, humiliated, forced to accept U.S. hegemony and killed in our clandestine torture centers or by CIA-backed assassins.

No one is held accountable. The CIA blocked all investigations into its torture program, including destroying videotape evidence of interrogations involving torture and classifying nearly all of the 6,900-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that examined the CIA’s post-9/11 program of detention, torture and other abuse of detainees.

Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant, whitewashing the humanitarian disasters caused by those regimes.

Biden goes to Saudi Arabia and Israel as a supplicant. As a presidential candidate, he called Saudi Arabia a “pariah” and vowed to make it “pay the price” for Khashoggi’s murder. But with the rising price of oil, Biden is whitewashing the murder, along with the humanitarian disaster the Saudis have caused in Yemen, imploring the Saudis to increase output, a plea Prince Mohammed has rejected. Similarly, Biden is weak on Israel, powerless against the expansion of Jewish settlements and assaults on Palestinians, and unwilling to move the U.S. embassy back to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem, effectively endorsing a move by the Trump administration that violates international law. Biden’s staff was reduced to pleading with the Israelis not to embarrass him, as they did during his 2010 visit as vice president. That was when Israel announced it was building 1,600 new Jewish-only houses in illegal settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. The Obama White House angrily condemned “the substance and timing of the announcement.”

How can the U.S. bar Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela from a summit of the Americas in Los Angeles and embrace the Saudi regime and the Israeli apartheid state? How can it decry the war crimes of Russia and unleash industrial violence on the Muslim world? How can it plead for the 12 million Uyghurs, mostly Muslim, living in Xinjiang, and ignore the Palestinians? How can it justify another “preemptive war,” this time against Iran? The duplicity is not lost on most of the world. They know who we are. They know that in our eyes they are unworthy. Our inevitable demise on the world stage is cheered by the majority of the planet. The tragedy is that, as we go down, we are determined to take so many others down with us.

from Chris Hedges on war, peace and the future

Abortion, racism and guns: How white supremacy unites the right

White supremacy was one of the primary motivations behind the first movement to outlaw abortion in the United States. In 1858, the American Medical Association (AMA), led by Horatio Storer, launched a crusade to end abortion across the country. Prior to this period, abortion was legal in all U.S. states. Storer and white male physicians not only wanted to push women midwives — often Black, indigenous and immigrant women — out of the newly developing medical profession, but also had another, more sinister aim: these men wanted white male Protestants to politically control the country.

They feared that the growing number of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany and other largely Catholic countries, whom they viewed as separate and distinct “races,” would produce more babies and usurp the political dominance of white Protestant Anglo-Saxon men. The reproduction of Black women, the majority of whom were enslaved at that time, was controlled by systems of white supremacy, and was not seen as a threat. Later, at the turn of the century, the focus shifted to the reproduction of women of color, many of whom were subjected to forced and coerced sterilizations in the U.S. until 1973. The white supremacist core of the movement remained the same, however.

After Buffalo: Is white America ashamed — or has it already forgotten?

It’s important to understand that the definition of “whiteness” did not remain constant throughout that period. In the early 20th century, immigration restrictions created the conditions for consolidating the category “white,” while massive immigration a few decades earlier, in the 19th century, had fragmented it. Political scientist Rogers M. Smith argues that this led to the destabilization and fracturing of the category “white,” and to its replacement by a racial scheme in which the white races of Europe were considered separate and differently suited for citizenship. Many Anglo-Saxons in the U.S. believed them to be inferior races who threatened the country.

With white supremacy perceived to be under threat by some, its approach and rhetoric shifted. Storer lamented a perceived decline in the white birthrate in 1867, writing that “it has been found of late years that the increase of the population, or the excess of the births over the deaths, has been wholly of those of recent foreign origin.” Between 1851 and 1880, almost 5 million immigrants arrived in the U.S., and the rate of immigration increased further in the following two decades. The 1860 census counted 31.4 million Americans, slightly more than 4 million of them foreign-born. Of these, 1.6 million had been born in Ireland and almost 1.3 million in Germany. Physician J.T. Cook argued in 1868 that “the Anglo-Saxon race is rapidly dying out … and the Germans, and Irish, and Swedes … are fast taking the country … by the sheer force of their ever increasing armies of babies…”

According to Storer and company, the problem was abortion: Specifically, too many white Anglo-Saxon women were choosing to terminate pregnancies. In the late 1800s, the New York Times ran stories about abortions performed by Ann Trow Lohman, also known as Madame Restell, who served New York’s elite and ran a lucrative mail-order abortifacient business. She became so associated with abortion that the practice was often referred to as “Restellism.” As one anti-abortion pundit noted: “Restellism is murder with the Roman Catholics. Half a dozen children in every Irish family. Only two in the modern American family. What is the matter? Answer — Restellism. That is why, shortly, the children of the Emerald Isle will be walking through the graveyards of the Puritans.” How did Storer and the AMA decide to solve this “problem”? By criminalizing abortion.

In the 1890s, Anglo-Saxon women and their “guilty husbands” were implored to “stop murdering their children, and stop trying to defeat nature.”

In anti-abortion tracts and pamphlets, Storer implored Anglo-Saxon women (and their “guilty husbands”) to “stop murdering their children, and stop trying to defeat nature in any way, so that our American homes may again become populous with incipient citizens and voters, and incipient mothers of citizens and voters, and so that the American family shall not become an extinct institution in this country.” Storer and the AMA were successful, and by 1890 almost every state had passed laws criminalizing abortion. Unsurprisingly, most gave physicians sole authority to decide when abortion was medically necessary. Many of these laws remained unchanged until vacated by the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. White supremacy and the racist ideas that would later be called “great replacement theory” were born in the 19th century in relationship to these abortion politics.

The Second Amendment also has white supremacist roots. When it was ratified in 1791, many states had laws to prevent enslaved and free Black people from possessing or bearing arms. Prior to the Civil War, Black people were targeted by armed slave patrols, and after the war and the failure of Reconstruction, Black Codes enacted across the Jim Crow South prohibited formerly enslaved people from possessing guns. Carol Anderson, chair of African American Studies at Emory University and author of “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” argues that long after the abolition of slavery, the Second Amendment has been used against Black people: “(P)ervasive anti-Blackness, even after the civil rights movement, turned the Second Amendment’s law for protection — the castle doctrine, stand your ground and open carry — against African Americans.” She concludes that the Second Amendment “is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, it is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use.”

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As we have witnessed over and over again, the Second Amendment and its relatively recent interpretation by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, as permitting almost unlimited ownership of military-grade firearms has become lethal for all Americans, but disproportionately so for people of color. The list of atrocities just since the civil rights movement would fill volumes, from the murder of Black, brown and indigenous civil rights and labor organizers, politicians and civilians to, most recently, the assassination of 10-year-old Mexican American children and their teachers in their Texas school and the massacre of African Americans in a Buffalo supermarket.

The murderer in Buffalo did not specifically reference abortion in the incoherent document he produced prior to killing 10 human beings. But he did mention the U.S. birth rate more than 40 times. He also cited the racist drivel of our former colleague John Gaski, a Notre Dame faculty member in the Mendoza School of Business, who studied marketing but spent the better part of the last three decades offering unqualified, racist and profoundly misogynist opinion on a range of issues from interracial crime (cited by the murderer in Buffalo) to Barack Obama’s alleged “anti-Americanism” to, of course, “unrestricted” abortion.

But it is Gaski’s racist and inartful rant on immigration that most obviously ties into the “great replacement” theory: “Legalization of between 11 and 30 million illegal aliens in the U.S., either through a new Democrat congress or executive order, will produce enough excess Democrat votes to render it impossible for a Republican ever to win at the national level again. (Non-Americans are known to favor Democrats. Why?) This establishes the one-party state without real opposition that the Dems have long craved.” Gaski refers to this as a “political takeover scheme.”

Abortion criminalization and gun rights in the U.S. have their roots in white supremacy and racism. If we want to change the former, we have to root out the latter. The historical and current attack on abortion rights also highlights the misogyny embedded in anti-abortion movements that attempt to regulate women’s bodily autonomy and integrity. Horatio Storer, who was himself a malignant misogynist, opined that woman was “what she is in health, in character, in her charms, alike of body, mind and soul because of her womb alone.” Perhaps Storer was right. If so, it is time that women in the U.S. band together to birth a new political reality, one in which white supremacy and racism are things of the past.

about the new wave of white supremacy

Secret Garland memo to DOJ originated with Bill Barr

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow obtained a Feb. 2020 memo authored by then-Attorney General Bill Barr saying that anyone at the Justice Department who is investigating a political candidate has to run it by the Attorney General. That memo, she explained, was renewed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in May 2022.

“The Department of Justice has a strong interest in the prosecution of election-related crimes, such as those involving federal and state campaign finance laws, federal patronage laws, and corruption of the election process. As Department employees, however, we must be particularly sensitive to safeguarding the Department’s reputation for fairness, neutrality, and non-partisanship,” the memo says.

“Simply put,” it continues, “partisan politics must play no role in the decisions of federal investigators or prosecutors regarding any investigations or criminal charges. Law enforcement officers and prosecutors may never select the timing of public statements (attributed or not), investigative steps, criminal charges, or any other actions in any matter or case for the purpose of affecting any election, or for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party. Such a purpose, or the appearance of such a purpose, is inconsistent with the Department’s mission and with the Principles of Federal Prosecution.”

The new guidance from Barr said that any investigation for a declared candidate for president has to be run by the attorney general personally.

However, the 2022 midterms aren’t elections for presidents, and former President Donald Trump hasn’t declared he’s running in 2024 yet. Even if he had announced or if he announces ahead of 2022, the memo essentially says that any investigator looking into Trump has to run it by Garland. The theory is that if someone at the Justice Department was investigating a former president it likely would include the attorney general. It would have prevented FBI Director James Comey from announcing an investigation into Hillary Clinton in 2016, however.

Former Justice Department official Andrew Weissmann said that under a normal and reputable attorney general something like this would make sense.

“On the other hand, the Bill Barr Justice Department was anything but a Justice Department. The rule of law was so flouted that the idea of re-upping something that he put in place is one that I’m not sure if I were at the department I would look at with anything other than saying, ‘I am not bringing a case against anyone at the White House until such time as I personally approve it’ no matter how much evidence seems to be accumulated in the Jan. 6th committee hearings. So, you know, I think it’s a plus/minus. You know, it probably could have been phrased a lot better and clearer to people at the Justice Department.”

None of the people involved in Jan. 6 are at the White House anymore, however.

Weissmann went on to quote the recent Wall Street Journal report that the Justice Department was getting more funding to address the Jan. 6 cases.

“Is it expanded to include all of the evidence of criminality that was laid out by the Jan. 6th committee? In other words, not just who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6th and not just fake electors, but what was going on at the Department of Justice in terms of beheading Jeffrey Rosenstein to get a lackey? What is going on in other states? The pressuring of the vice president of the United States?” he asked. “All of that seems to me to be appropriate for a criminal investigation.”

Last week, Weissmann penned an op-ed saying that he was concerned by the reports that Justice Department officials were shocked by Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony. It led him to believe that their “shock” meant they didn’t know about her comments to the Jan. 6 committee. That would thus mean that the DOJ isn’t doing investigations into the White House role in Jan. 6, or if they are they hadn’t brought in someone as key as Hutchinson.

Maddow’s opener and Andrew Weissmann’s commentary are below:

Ex-Husband sues clinic over abortion wife had four years ago

Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision.

A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020, alleging that physicians failed to obtain proper informed consent from the woman as required by Arizona law.

Across the U.S., people have sued for negligence in the death of a fetus or embryo in cases where a pregnant person has been killed in a car crash or a pregnancy was lost because of alleged wrongdoing by a physician. But a court action claiming the wrongful death of an aborted embryo or fetus is a more novel strategy, legal experts said.

The experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners, experts said.

Lucinda Finley, a law professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in tort law and reproductive rights, said the Arizona case is a “harbinger of things to come” and called it “troubling for the future.”

Finley said she expects state lawmakers and anti-abortion groups to use “unprecedented strategies” to try to prevent people from traveling to obtain abortions or block them from obtaining information on where to seek one.

Perhaps the most extreme example is in Texas, where the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law in May 2021 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in December, allows private citizens to sue a person who performs or aids in an abortion.

“It’s much bigger than these wrongful death suits,” Finley said.

Civia Tamarkin, president of the National Council of Jewish Women Arizona, which advocates for reproductive rights, said the Arizona lawsuit is part of a larger agenda that anti-abortion advocates are working toward.

“It’s a lawsuit that appears to be a trial balloon to see how far the attorney and the plaintiff can push the limits of the law, the limits of reason, the limits of science and medicine,” Tamarkin said.

In July 2018, the ex-husband, Mario Villegas, accompanied his then-wife to three medical appointments — a consultation, the abortion and a follow-up. The woman, who “ProPublica” is not identifying for privacy reasons, said in a deposition in the wrongful death suit that at the time of the procedure the two were already talking about obtaining a divorce, which was finalized later that year.

“We were not happy together at all,” she said.

Villegas, a former Marine from Globe, Arizona, a mining town east of Phoenix, had been married twice before and has other children. He has since moved out of state.

In a form his then-wife filled out at the clinic, she said she was seeking an abortion because she was not ready to be a parent and her relationship with Villegas was unstable, according to court records. She also checked a box affirming that “I am comfortable with my decision to terminate this pregnancy.” The woman declined to speak on the record with “ProPublica” out of fear for her safety.

The following year, in 2019, Villegas learned about an Alabama man who hadn’t wanted his ex-girlfriend to have an abortion and sued the Alabama Women’s Center for Reproductive Alternatives in Huntsville on behalf of an embryo that was aborted at six weeks.

To sue on behalf of the embryo, the would-be father, Ryan Magers, went to probate court where he asked a judge to appoint him as the personal representative of the estate. In probate court, a judge may appoint someone to represent the estate of a person who has died without a will. That representative then has the authority to distribute the estate’s assets to beneficiaries.

When Magers filed to open an estate for the embryo, his attorney cited various Alabama court rulings involving pregnant people and a 2018 amendment to the Alabama Constitution recognizing the “sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children.”

A probate judge appointed Magers representative of the estate, giving him legal standing to sue for damages in the wrongful death claim. The case, believed to be the first instance in which an aborted embryo was given legal rights, made national headlines.

It’s unclear how many states allow an estate to be opened on behalf of an embryo or fetus. Some states, like Arizona, don’t explicitly define what counts as a deceased person in their probate code, leaving it to a judge to decide. In a handful of states, laws define embryos and fetuses as a person at conception, which could allow for an estate, but it’s rare.

An Alabama circuit court judge eventually dismissed Magers’ wrongful death lawsuit, stating that the claims were “precluded by State and Federal laws.”

Villegas contacted Magers’ attorney, Brent Helms, about pursuing a similar action in Arizona and was referred to J. Stanley Martineau, an Arizona attorney who had flown to Alabama to talk to Helms about Magers’ case.

In August 2020, Villegas filed a petition to be appointed personal representative of the estate of “Baby Villegas.” His ex-wife opposed the action and contacted a legal advocacy organization focused on reproductive justice, which helped her obtain a lawyer.

In court filings, Villegas said he prefers to think of “Baby Villegas” as a girl, although the sex of the embryo was never determined, and his lawyer argued that there isn’t an Arizona case that explicitly defines a deceased person, “so the issue appears to be an open one in Arizona.”

In a 2021 motion arguing for dismissal, the ex-wife’s attorney, Louis Silverman, argued that Arizona’s probate code doesn’t authorize the appointment of a personal representative for an embryo, and that granting Villegas’ request would violate a woman’s constitutional right to decide whether to carry a pregnancy to term.

“U.S. Supreme Court precedent has long protected the constitutional right of a woman to obtain an abortion, including that the decision whether to do so belongs to the woman alone — even where her partner, spouse, or ex-spouse disagrees with that decision,” Silverman said last year.

Gila County Superior Court Judge Bryan B. Chambers said in an order denying the motion that his decision allows Villegas to make the argument that the embryo is a person in a wrongful death lawsuit, but that he has not reached that conclusion at this stage. Villegas was later appointed the personal representative of the estate.

As states determine what is legal in the wake of Dobbs and legislators propose new abortion laws, anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee see civil suits as a way to enforce abortion bans and have released model legislation they hope sympathetic legislators will duplicate in statehouses nationwide.

“In addition to criminal penalties and medical license revocation, civil remedies will be critical to ensure that unborn lives are protected from illegal abortions,” the group wrote in a June 15 letter to its state affiliates that included the model legislation.

James Bopp Jr.,general counsel for the committee, said in an interview with “ProPublica” that such actions will be necessary because some “radical Democrat” prosecutors have signaled they won’t enforce criminal abortion bans. Last month, 90 prosecutors from across the country indicated that they would not prosecute those who seek abortions.

“The civil remedies follow what the criminal law makes unlawful,” he said. “And that’s what we’re doing.”

The National Right to Life Committee’s model legislation, which advocates prohibiting abortion except to prevent the death of the pregnant person, recommends that states permit civil actions against people or entities that violate abortion laws “to prevent future violations.” It also suggests that people who have had or have sought to have an illegal abortion, as well as the expectant father and the parents of a pregnant minor, be allowed to pursue wrongful death actions.

Under the legislation, an action for wrongful death of an “unborn child” would be treated like that of a child who died after being born.

In one regard, Arizona has already implemented a piece of this model legislation as the state’s lawmakers have chipped away at access to abortion and enacted a myriad of regulations on doctors who provide the procedure.

The state’s “informed consent” statute for abortion, first signed into law by then-Gov. Jan Brewer in 2009, mandated an in-person counseling session and a 24-hour waiting period before an abortion. It allows a pregnant person, their husband or a maternal grandparent of a minor to sue if a physician does not properly obtain the pregnant person’s informed consent, and to receive damages for psychological, emotional and physical injuries, statutory damages and attorney fees.

The informed consent laws, which have changed over time, mandate that the patient be told about the “probable anatomical and physiological characteristics” of the embryo or fetus and the “immediate and long-term medical risks” associated with abortion, as well as alternatives to the procedure. Some abortion-rights groups and medical professionals have criticized informed consent processes, arguing the materials can be misleading and personify the embryo or fetus. A 2018 review of numerous studies concluded that having an abortion does not increase a person’s risk of infertility in their next pregnancy, nor is it linked to a higher risk of breast cancer or preterm birth, among other issues.

The wrongful death suit comes at a time of extraordinary confusion over abortion law in Arizona.

Until Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, a law dating to before statehood had banned the procedure. In March, Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has called Arizona “the most pro-life state in the country,” signed into law a bill outlawing abortions after 15 weeks, and said that law would supersede the pre-statehood ban if Roe were overturned. But now that Roe has been overturned, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, another Republican, said he intends to enforce the pre-statehood ban, which outlawed abortion except to preserve the life of the person seeking the procedure. On Thursday, he filed a motion to lift an injunction on the law, which would make it enforceable.

Adding to the muddle, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked part of a 2021 Arizona law that would classify fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses as people starting at conception, ruling that the attorney general cannot use the so-called personhood law against abortion providers. Following the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, eight of the state’s nine abortion providers — all located in three Arizona counties — halted abortion services, but following the emergency injunction some are again offering them.

In the wrongful death claim, Martineau argued that the woman’s consent was invalidated because the doctors didn’t follow the informed consent statute. Although the woman signed four consent documents, the suit claims that “evidence shows that in her rush to maximize profits,” the clinic’s owner, Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, “cut corners.” Martineau alleged that Goodrick and another doctor didn’t inform the woman of the loss of “maternal-fetal” attachment, about the alternatives to abortion or that if not for the abortion, the embryo would likely have been “delivered to term,” among other violations.

Tom Slutes, Goodrick’s lawyer, called the lawsuit “ridiculous.”

“They didn’t cut any corners,” he said, adding that the woman “clearly knew what was going to happen and definitely, strongly” wanted the abortion. Regardless of the information the woman received, she wouldn’t have changed her mind, Slutes said. Slutes referenced the deposition, where the woman said she “felt completely informed.”

Martineau said in an interview that Villegas isn’t motivated by collecting money from the lawsuit.

“He has no desire to harass” his ex-wife, Martineau said. “All he wants to do is make sure it doesn’t happen to another father.”

In a deposition, Villegas’ ex-wife said that he was emotionally abusive during their marriage, which lasted nearly five years. At first, she said, Villegas seemed like the “greatest guy I’ve ever met in my life,” taking her to California for a week as a birthday gift. But as the marriage progressed, she said, there were times he wouldn’t allow her to get a job or leave the house unless she was with him.

The woman alleged that Villegas made fake social media profiles, hacked into her social media accounts and threatened to “blackmail” her if she left him during his failed campaign to be a justice of the peace in Gila County, outside of Phoenix.

Villegas denied the allegations about his relationship but declined to comment further for this story, Martineau said.

Carliss Chatman, an associate law professor at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, said certain civil remedies can also be a mechanism for men to continue to abuse their former partners through the court system.

“What happens if the father who is suing on behalf of the fetus is your rapist or your abuser? It’s another way to torture a woman,” Chatman said.

Chatman added that these legal actions can be a deterrent for physicians in states where abortion is banned after a certain gestational period, because the threat of civil suits makes it harder for doctors to get insurance.

The lawsuit has added to the stresses on Goodrick, who has been performing abortions in Arizona since the mid-1990s, and her practice. She said that since the lawsuit was filed, the annual cost of her medical malpractice insurance has risen from $32,000 to $67,000.

Before providers in Arizona halted abortions following the Supreme Court decision, people would begin lining up outside Goodrick’s clinic at 6 a.m., sometimes with lawn chairs in hand, like “a concert line,” Goodrick said.

“Every year there’s something and we never know what it’s going to be,” Goodrick said recently at her Phoenix clinic. “I’m kind of desensitized to it all.”

“Resident Evil” is the latest show taking on the death of the work/life balance

When one of my previous employers posted the redesign plans for our workplace, among the highlighted enticements were upgraded employee lounges. Most offices have such designated casual spots, but these were designed to be as comfortable as a living room, our home away from home.

Many of my co-workers marveled at the sketches, but I recall them making me queasy. To someone already expected to take work home and log in over weekends, this wasn’t a comfort. It represented another tightening of the noose. It said to me, “Don’t go home. Think of the workplace an extension of home.

Zombies may still be America’s favorite monsters, as proven yet again by the popularity of Netflix’s “Resident Evil” series. But our nightmares tend to be fueled by ordinary horrors like the one described above. Americans may be worried about a recession but not enough to stop record numbers of us from quitting jobs we don’t like or planning to quit.

Often these resignations are related to a company’s refusal to accommodate their employees’ desire to work from home or respect the boundaries they impose between their work and personal lives. More of us are emphasizing work that helps us live instead of living to work.

And this is the single aspect of the series interpretation of Capcom’s survival shooter franchise that bestows it with a grander, more intelligent purpose than the films that preceded it.

“Resident Evil” is a franchise born during Generation X’s and Millennials’ shared heydays, with the former at an age to buy the game for themselves and the latter requesting it from their parents. Its mythology also reflects the overall feeling of those cohorts, who shared a general sense of government and corporate distrust counter to the governing notions of Boomers and Silents.

Flesh-eating lunatics aside, the show’s alternate version of 2022 seems only a few hairs away from our reality.

You don’t have to have ever played “Resident Evil” to understand the global threat posed by its supervillain, the Umbrella Corporation. A quick review for those who aren’t familiar with the franchise: Umbrella is a pharmaceutical company specializing in top secret weapons research, mainly involving biological mutagens. The one that ends it all is the T-Virus, a highly contagious pathogen that turns most humans into aggressive zombies.

It flips the same buttons that made “The X-Files” a phenomenon, acknowledging that some of the creepiest forces in existence are man-made, created for the sake of profit and power.

While the games and movies are mainly devoted to characters led by Alice surviving these hordes, the show is divided between the world of 2022, when everything fell apart, and the future described above. Flesh-eating lunatics aside, the show’s alternate version of 2022 contains seeds of a more unsettling story because it seems only a few hairs away from our reality.

Siena Agudong as young Billie and Tamara Smart as young Jade in “Resident Evil” (Netflix)

That part of the story follows a pair of teenagers, Billie (Siena Agudong) and Jade (Tamara Smart) as they relocate with their father Albert Wesker (a legacy character from the games and films, played by Lance Reddick) to Umbrella’s South African’s company town, New Racoon City. (The original Racoon City, where the film franchise and video games began, was wiped off the map.)

New Raccoon city is sterile in every way. All the houses in their subdivision are chalk white. The school is a palette of white and grey, and its students dress to match.

Between this idea and its vision of corporate life and living, “Resident Evil” shares a similar type of unnerving premise as the ones at play in “Severance,” in which Lumon Industries designs a way to divide consciousness between one’s work existence and one’s personal time, monitoring its employees by setting them up to be neighbors in the same community.

Lumon’s mystery is that nobody knows exactly what it does, including its employees, who only know each other at work and through work, because they have no recollection of life outside of work. Inside the office, productivity is rewarded with odd treats like an egg bar or dance breaks, where employees can choose a type of music and a small instrument to play with, as seen in the episode “Defiant Jazz.”

That’s very different from what “Resident Evil” presents in that Lumon appears to offer incentives to its employees beyond merely staying alive. It’s not far off from what we see at play in the current season of “Westworld,” where Evan Rachel Wood’s character is tracked in her off-hours by her employer when she calls in sick – you know, just to see if she’s telling them the truth.

Between these shows and the world portrayed in “The Boys,” where Vought International has inserted itself in every corner of American life, this is a chance from popular depictions of work that have reigned for decades, mainly viewing cubicle life through the lens of the workplace comedy.

But here office life doesn’t tend to be fun or familiar, but psychologically draining. Digging into the cutthroat corporate culture of Umbrella, “Resident Evil” showrunner Andrew Dabb draws parallels to the inhumane corruption of the Sackler’s and Purdue Pharma.

As a news report explains, the company’s pivot from bioweapons to direct-to-consumer drugs via its antidepressant, anti-anxiety medication Joy is meant to change its fortunes. A side-effect of Joy that isn’t spoken about beyond the company’s board room is the drug’s ability to condition the mind to be harnessed, influencing behavior and attention. Our social media apps do precisely that without drugs. This would conquer that natural addictiveness and, predictably, it is created from a derivative of the T-virus. This is a company that refuses to say die to its worst discoveries, but is perfectly fine if consumers drop dead.

Lance Reddick as Albert and Paola Nunez in “Resident Evil” (Netflix)

This is as ridiculous as the zombie arm of the series, which causes the plot to fall into chaos in the second half of the season. Then again it enables Reddick, who is always one of the best parts of the shows he’s a part of, to enjoy the type of dramatic athletics actors love to engage in, especially these days.

Working to exhaustion, pledging loyalty to a company or industry, sacrificing family time for their job, little to none of it is an acceptable price for success.

It also acknowledges the franchise’s need to reestablish itself with Gen Z by appealing to that age group’s general distrust of systems, mainly those imposed by corporations, government, and other institutions.

To them, the undead probably represent less of a threat than the corporate educational system that heavily censors internet access and controls what they learn about everything – including viruses. Poll after poll shows that Billie and Jade’s contemporaries have no interest in business as usual when it comes to their work life: working to exhaustion, pledging loyalty to a company or industry, sacrificing family time for their job, little to none of it is an acceptable price for success.

To be clear “Resident Evil” is not a good show by any means. None of the many films based on those video games are. And yet somehow, I have seen every one of them and genuinely enjoyed a couple.

The franchise has been alive and sprinting in some form since 1996 because of people like me who played the video games or, starting in 2002, enjoyed watching Paul W.S. Anderson’s delirious action showcases for his wife Milla Jovovich, the franchise’s enhanced hero Alice.

We’re living in a world where most of us have given up on “The Walking Dead,” leaving little to no good reason to build eight episodes of “Resident Evil” expressly around its survival horror, although that’s precisely what the show is in its futuristic 2036. However, one terror central to the game’s mythology that’s more relatable than its rehash of an apocalypse-by-pustule-covered-cannibals is its interpretation of the all-consuming corporate matrix.

And it is through Billie’s brief spate of being bullied by another student that we witness how the social structure works.

Since Albert is higher up in the Umbrella Corporation than the father of the girl who tortures him, he simply shows up at the principal’s office and threatens to destroy the man’s life down to the studs.

The father of the bully has to comply with Albert’s wishes, not because his bullying kid was wrong – clearly, she was – but because he knows where he sits in the social order imposed by Umbrella. Office politics is life politics in this social food chain – which, miserably, tends to be the case in many industries.

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There’s a reason “The Office” remains wildly popular among Millennials and Gen Z: it makes even the most soul-sucking work situations seem fun and lovable owing to the familial bond shared by the team at the Scranton, PA. branch of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. It shows a group of people brought together by managerial hiring who enjoy being around each other and generally care about each other’s well-being.

New Raccoon City and its corporate housing communities take work life to another extreme, reflecting an existence like the one many workers endure in exchange for a regular paycheck, 401K, and health insurance – which is to say, the understanding that you are being monitored and could be culled for any reason.

That surveillance doesn’t merely take place in the same offices that hold secret labs with infectious, chomping dog – cameras are installed throughout the Weskers’ home, for safety and to ensure nobody is stepping out of line. To this corporation, home is an extension of work. Depending on your frame of mind, there’s more to fear in that picture than the thought of being overrun by the undead.

“Resident Evil” is currently streaming on Netflix.

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How to wash a down comforter (because it’s probably time)

My favorite room of my home is, by far, my bedroom. I spent weeks deliberating furnishings, wood tones, and a few pieces of lovely, affordable art. I also landed on a thick, cozy area rug, a big arm chair, and the most exquisite secondhand mirror to accent it all. But what I really splurged on were my percale sheets, matching duvet cover, and the most cloud-like comforter imaginable to make the place where I lay my head at night the happiest place to be.

I was pretty diligent about keeping this oasis of calm and comfort neat and tidy, too: I dusted and vacuumed and stripped my bed each week. There was one item, however, that had escaped my cleaning routine completely. Many many months after I bought it, my comforter hadn’t made it down to the laundry room. That is, until the day I found out that even with a cover on, a down (or alternate down) comforter is a magnet for allergens, dust, dander, even skin cells (oh, my).

Look, I get it, comforters are large and intimidating, which is why plenty of people spend a lot of money taking them to the dry cleaners. Some of us decide to skip the cleaning entirely. (Until it’s too late, and then we eventually haul it to the dry cleaners anyway.) But as I’ve learned, going down this route is completely unnecessary. As it turns out, you can very easily wash your down (or alternate down) comforter at home.

A quick note: We don’t recommend putting your down comforter into a dryer, so if you don’t have a spare one tucked away, we suggest washing it first thing in the morning to leave enough time for it to dry before you hit the sack.

Assemble your tools

Before we get started, let’s go over that checklist of items you’ll need to have an easy (and possibly even enjoyable?) time washing your down, or alternate down, comforter. You’ll need:

Gentle laundry detergent
Access to a commercial washing machine
Tennis or wool laundry balls
Space to air-dry your comforter
Just to be clear, a comforter is a heavier blanket, typically stuffed with goose or duck feathers or shredded foam housed in some combination of a cotton-nylon-poly blend. It might be printed or a solid color that’s ready to throw directly onto your bed, or an insert that needs a cover (when this is the case, the comforter is typically called a duvet, but the cover is the only difference here).

Before we get to washing, you will first need to check the capacity of your washing machine. Most front-loading machines aren’t going to be big enough to properly clean a down comforter that’s any bigger than twin-sized, according to the cleaning company Grove. If you live in an apartment building, look for a top-loading machine with signage on it that specifies that it’s fit for oversized loads, or do the same at a laundromat. Once that’s done, grab a bottle of extra-gentle detergent, and you’re ready to start washing.

Chose a warm water temperature

In a large machine, your comforter is going to have room to move around and get thoroughly cleaned, but the settings on that machine are just as important. Take a look at the care tag on your comforter to see if it details any specifics, but when in doubt, choose the gentlest cycle to prevent feather clumping, and set it to warm water. Cold water here has a tendency to promote bunching and stiffen the material, while hot water can damage the delicate stuffing inside.

Some sources suggest setting the machine to two rinse cycles to guarantee that all the detergent is properly rinsed out. Leaving detergent on the comforter can render it stiff; it will also lead to faster wear. Better safe than sorry!

Play ball

To ensure that all of that stuffing doesn’t end up in one big clump, after adding the detergent and choosing the settings, we’re going to toss those wool balls into the wash to keep everything evenly distributed. While these are typically used in the dryer (for the very same reason), because we’re skipping that step, the balls are going to help in much the same way during the wash cycle. This additional bouncing around inside the drum of the machine helps push the down around, which prevents it from gathering up in one immobile ball — it also helps redistribute stuffing that has migrated to one end of the comforter.

Air it out

Down comforters also aren’t resistant to shrinking so, to be on the safe side, our recommendation is to resist the urge to stuff the comforter into a dryer and undo all the delicate handling you just spent so much time and effort on. Instead, grab some heavy-duty clothes pins and head to your (very sturdy and doubled up) outdoor line or standing clothes-drying tree to hang the comforter out in the sun.

If you have no access to the outdoors or a sturdy clothing rack , set a few non-wooden (the dampness would damage the stain) chairs back-to-back, or prop a storage bin on top of a table to elevate the comforter off surfaces, allowing air to flow around each side so it can dry properly. You can also toss it over your shower frame, if yours is sturdy, or drape it across a long counter. Depending on the size of your down (or alternate down) comforter, this can take a few hours. At the end of its drying time, you’ll have yourself a fresh-smelling, clean down comforter, and you’ll have saved yourself a chunky dry cleaning bill, too.

This isn’t an ordinary strawberry rhubarb pie. This crumb-topped pie is baked in a cast-iron skillet

Bake It Up a Notch is a column by Resident Baking BFF Erin Jeanne McDowell. Each month, she’ll help take our baking game to the next level, teaching us all the need-to-know tips and techniques and pointing out all the mistakes to avoid along the way. — Food52

Watch this recipe

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumb Pie

Makes

1 9-inch pie

Prep Time

1 hour 30 minutes

Cook Time

1hour 10 minutes

Ingredients

Pie Dough

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1/3 cup ice water, plus more as needed

Filling and Finishing

4 cups thickly sliced rhubarb
3 cups chopped strawberries
1 1/3 cups granulated sugar, divided
1/3 cup cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Fine sea salt
1/2 teaspoon vanilla bean paste
1/2 cup old-fashioned oats
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup light or dark brown sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
6 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
Egg wash (1 egg beaten with 1 tablespoon water; optional)
Turbinado sugar, for sprinkling (optional)

Directions

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and salt. Using your hands, toss the butter through the flour until each piece is well coated. Cut the butter into the flour by pressing the butter between your fingers and thumbs, flattening the cubes into big shards. Continue to mix until the butter is almost completely incorporated — the mixture should resemble cornmeal in color and texture.
Make a well in the center of the bowl and add the ice water. Toss the flour mixture gently (rather than stirring) to moisten and incorporate the water without overworking the flour. Continue adding water, 1 to 2 tablespoons at a time, and tossing and kneading slightly until the dough comes together. (It should hold together easily without feeling wet or sticky.)
Form the dough into a disk and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes and up to overnight.
Make the strawberry-rhubarb filling: In a large pot, toss the sliced rhubarb, strawberries, and 1/3 cup of the granulated sugar to combine. Cook over medium, tossing occasionally, until the rhubarb starts to soften slightly, 5 to 7 minutes.
In a small bowl, whisk the remaining 2/3 cup granulated sugar, cornstarch, nutmeg, and a pinch of fine sea salt to combine. Sprinkle the sugar mixture evenly over the strawberry-rhubarb mixture in the pot and mix well to combine. Cook, stirring frequently, until the mixture gently bubbles from the center of the pot. Let cool completely before preparing the pie (to do this quickly, pour into a casserole dish or baking sheet and spread into an even layer).
Make the streusel: In a medium bowl, stir the oats, all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, brown sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and ¼ teaspoon fine sea salt to combine. Rub the butter into the flour mixture with your fingers until the mixture forms large clumps.
Heat the oven to 400°F with the oven rack placed in the lower third of the oven (and preferably with a pizza stone on the rack, though this is optional). Grab a 9-inch skillet.
Assemble the pie: Roll out the chilled dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s about 1/8 inch thick. Press firmly and evenly, rotating the dough as you work to prevent sticking without adding too much flour. (Ideally the dough will also be about 1 1/2 inches wider than the top edge of your skillet all the way around.)
Transfer the dough to the skillet. Starting at one end of dough, wrap it around the rolling pin. Lift the pin to the edge of the skillet and unfurl the dough into it. Press the dough into the base of the skillet and trim the excess dough to 1/2 inch around the outside edge of the skillet.
Pour the cooled filling into the prepared crust and sprinkle the streusel evenly on top. Fold the excess crust over the filling all around the edge of the crust, letting it pleat naturally the way you would for a galette. If desired, brush the exposed crust with egg wash and garnish with turbinado sugar.
Transfer the pie to the oven. Bake for 20 minutes, then lower the temperature to 350°F and continue to bake until the crust is browned and the filling is visibly bubbly, 40 to 50 minutes.
Let cool completely before slicing and serving.

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

Construction workers don gloves and earplugs when wielding jackhammers. Motorcyclists wear helmets when they ride. It stands to reason that woodpeckers would evolve some kind of comparable safety gear to protect their heads from the constant, repetitive stress of banging their face against a woody surface.

That assumption, it turns out, would be wrong. While natural history is littered with animals who have evolved bony or cartilaginous armor to protect from heavy blows — including animals like rams, or armored dinosaurs like the ankylosaurus — woodpeckers have surprisingly little protection from such vibrations.

The hypothesis — that woodpeckers are adept at absorbing the shock during impact with a tree or other woody plant like a saguaro — is “often presented as a fact,” said Sam van Wassenbergh, a biology professor at the University of Antwerp who is corresponding author for a study into the woodpecker’s lack of shock absorbing armor. In a video abstract Van Wassenbergh noted that engineers, zoo placards, books and newspapers often (and without evidence) describe the woodpecker’s head as a “natural shock absorber.”

The discovery that woodpeckers are pecking away unprotected comes from a recent paper published by the scientific journal Current Biology; the online version of the paper includes some entertaining slow-motion video clips of woodpeckers pecking. Every time the feisty bird’s beak makes contact with the hard surface — at up to 20 pecks per second — the impact vibrates throughout its head and neck. Feathers rustle and muscles ripple as the bird’s entire little body appears to absorb each blow.

Woodpeckers do not have any shock absorption built into their skulls; indeed, the notion that they could is self-evidently absurd “since any absorption or dissipation of the head’s kinetic energy by the skull would likely impair the bird’s hammering performance and is therefore unlikely to have evolved by natural selection.”

It seemed unthinkable that there wouldn’t be some kind of natural shock absorber in the woodpecker’s head or neck to protect it from sustained neurological damage, given that they evolved to peck incessantly. For years, many scientists assumed that a spongy bone between the bird’s upper beak and brain case served this function — perhaps because it would almost seem cruel for nature to dictate otherwise.

Yet as the Current Biology study finds, woodpeckers do not have any shock absorption built into their skulls; indeed, the notion that they could is self-evidently absurd “since any absorption or dissipation of the head’s kinetic energy by the skull would likely impair the bird’s hammering performance and is therefore unlikely to have evolved by natural selection.”

So does that mean these headbanging birds are constantly self-inflicting brain damage as they bang their beaks into hard surfaces? The researchers can’t say for sure, though they do seem not to have any shock absorption built into their heads. At the least, the study notes that the impact on woodpeckers’ skulls appears to be “below primate concussion thresholds.”

To study this, a group of scientists from Belgium, Canada and France captured high-speed videos of six woodpeckers in an aviary as they went about their pecking — two black woodpeckers (Dryocopus martius), two pileated woodpeckers (Dryocopus pileatus) and two great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major). Breaking down 109 videos frame by frame, the researchers performed a kinematic analysis, or one that focuses on the mechanics behind how bodies move without regard to the forces causing their motion. They then plugged this data into various models which helped them figure out exactly how the bird’s skull did or did not serve as a shock absorber.

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“Together, these results reveal that the heads of woodpeckers function as stiff hammers during pecking,” the researchers conclude, later adding that “the zones of spongy bone at both the coup and contrecoup side of the braincase… probably serve an important role in ‘resisting’ impact forces without failing rather than ‘absorbing’ impact energy by elastic deforming.”

Like athletes banging their heads against their lockers before a big game, or music lovers moshing at a concern, woodpeckers pay no mind to the state of their brains as they do the thing they love most.

And make no mistake about it: Just like football players and hard rockers, woodpeckers very much love pecking, regardless of the possible damage to their brains.

“When you are observing woodpeckers for many days, like I did during the study, I’m sure that anyone will get the impression that these birds absolutely love pecking,” van Wassenbergh told Salon by email. “Even if they had enough food, every 15 minutes, they [would] find themselves a spot to do their thing.”

When Salon asked van Wassenbergh whether woodpeckers feel any pain while they peck, he speculated that it is unlikely given that they peck every day and uninjured animals generally do not feel pain while performing natural behavior. Still, I found the slow motion pecking videos difficult to watch; any head injury victim will likely wince at the thought of what those birds are enduring.

“Indeed, watching these videos makes us humans feel sorry for the animal, and we think of pain,” van Wassenbergh acknowledged. “But this is our human perspective. If we humans hit our head, it is an accident, and likely it will hurt. Woodpeckers are adapted to this behavior, making it a completely different situation for them.”

Perhaps it is that very tendency to anthropomorphize animals that results in these human assumptions — in the case of woodpeckers, to assume that they would need shock absorbers in their skull in order to avoid suffering.

“It is a logical idea for us, as humans, if we see an animal smashing its head against a tree to believe that it would be great for them to have a built-in shock absorber,” van Wassenbergh explained. “We would like to have an airbag or a helmet with a shock-dampening layer in that case. I think this is why the hypotheses that were put forward in the scientific literature, like the role of the spongy bone at the base of the beak, sounded self-evident. However, the more you think about it, the less a built-in shock absorber makes sense for an animal that must deliver strong shocks to the tree to knock away pieces of wood.”

Read more Salon articles on birds and bird neurology:

How to transform leftover sweet potatoes into creamy, spicy hummus

When I first committed to eating more plant-based meals throughout the week, hummus got promoted from a supporting player to a starring role in my kitchen.

If I wasn’t eating meat, the protein-packed chickpea base of the dip left me feeling satisfied. It also helped that this shift in dining habits coincided with a move that put me within walking distance of a great little Middle Eastern bakery and grocery. Its entire back wall is filled with coolers and refrigerators packed with small, plastic tubs of grab-and-go favorites: delicate, lactic balls of labneh suspended in fire-red chili oil; incredibly lemony baba ganoush; and so many different variations of hummus.

They have regular hummus, lemon hummus, lemon and ginger hummus, red pepper hummus, spicy hummus. The list goes on . . .

Slow roasted sweet potatoes are better than any beyond burger

I’ve made a ritual of riding my bike over on Monday nights to pick up fresh pita and barbari bread, plus at least one tub of hummus (often two).

Seeing the vast array of hummus options inspired me to try my hand at some creative combinations, as well. While some have been less than successful (I’m thinking of one batch that was so dill-heavy it turned the hummus a really unappealing forest green color), others — including this roasted sweet potato hummus — have become part of my weekly repertoire.

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Roasted sweet potatoes mimic the texture of chickpeas in a really beautiful way that makes for a cohesive dip. They also have a caramelized sugar-sweetness that plays well with some other unexpected flavors like smoked paprika and lime juice.

While I call this a dip, it’s also great as a sandwich filling or toast topping — especially for breakfast. It’s also an ideal way to use up leftover roast sweet potatoes.

Roasted Sweet Potato Hummus

Yields

6 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

45 minutes

Ingredients

2 medium sweet potatoes
6 ounces canned chickpeas, drained
1 lime, juiced
1/3 cup olive oil, plus more for roasting and drizzling
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1/4 cup tahini
2 tablespoons dairy-free yogurt
Salted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) for garnish
Salt to taste

Directions

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Prick the skin of the sweet potatoes with a fork before drizzling them with olive oil and placing them on a sheet pan. Add a sprinkle of salt for good measure. Bake until the flesh is completely tender, about 45 minutes.
Remove the sweet potatoes from the oven and allow them to cool. To make this recipe, you can dice the sweet potatoes without peeling off the outer skin. For smoother hummus, I like to scoop the flesh from the skin. Either way works!
Regardless, add the sweet potatoes to a food processor along with the chickpeas, lime juice, 1/3 cup olive oil, paprika, cayenne pepper, tahini and dairy-free yogurt. Add salt to taste, then blend until completely smooth and a little fluffy.
Taste and adjust the seasoning. For a smokier flavor, add more paprika. For additional heat, up the cayenne. Be liberal with the salt to really complement the sweetness.
When you’re ready to serve the hummus, top it with salted pepitas and a drizzle of olive oil. This would go well with crudite; crusty bread or pita; or tortilla chips.

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Sanders calls out Manchin: He only “represents the very wealthiest people in this country”

Sen. Bernie Sanders lambasted fellow Sen. Joe Manchin on Sunday for sinking the Democratic Party’s latest effort to pass renewable energy funding, accusing the West Virginia Democrat of acting on behalf of his corporate and billionaire donors instead of the working class of his home state.

Rejecting the notion that Manchin “abruptly pulled the plug” on the majority party’s revived push for a scaled-back reconciliation package ahead of the November midterms, Sanders told “ABC’s” Martha Raddatz that there was “nothing new” about the West Virginia senator’s move last week, when he reportedly told the Democratic leadership that he wouldn’t support new climate spending or taxes on the wealthy.

Senate Democrats now plan to push ahead with an even narrower bill that would extend soon-to-expire Affordable Care Act subsidies and let Medicare negotiate the prices of some prescription drugs directly with pharmaceutical companies.

“If you check the record, six months ago I made it clear that you have people like Manchin, [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema to a lesser degree, who are intentionally sabotaging the president’s agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want,” Sanders said Sunday.

“The problem was that we continue to talk to Manchin like he was serious. He was not,” added Sanders. “This is a guy who is [a] major recipient of fossil fuel money, a guy who has received campaign contributions from 25 Republican billionaires. You think this guy is serious?”

Sen. Joe Manchin is “intentionally sabotaging the president's agenda, what the American people want, what a majority of us in the Democratic caucus want,” Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @MarthaRaddatz.

"Nothing new about this." https://t.co/DWt4zIjQrg pic.twitter.com/S8uzWP3UKg

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 17, 2022

Sanders reacted with open disdain to Manchin’s insistence that he’s holding up Democrats’ plans for renewable energy investments, Medicare expansion, and other priorities over genuine concerns about high inflation, an argument the West Virginia senator has been using for months to justify his obstruction as the window for climate action rapidly closes.

“Same nonsense that Manchin has been talking about for a year,” Sanders said. “West Virginia, it’s a beautiful state, and I’ve had the pleasure of being there—great people. It is one of the poorest states in this country. You ask the people of West Virginia whether they want to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, and eyeglasses.”

“Ask the people of West Virginia whether we should demand that the wealthiest people and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes,” he continued. “Ask the people of West Virginia whether or not all people should have healthcare as a human right, like in every other country on Earth. That’s what they will say.”

“In my humble opinion,” Sanders added, “Manchin represents the very wealthiest people in this country, not working families in West Virginia or America.”

Manchin—chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee—is the top beneficiary of oil and gas money in Congress this election cycle, and he’s received campaign donations from a number of billionaires who previously donated to former President Donald Trump, including investor Ken Langone and private equity executive Mark Rowan.

As “Politico” reported last week, new campaign finance disclosures show that “business magnate Bill Gates gave Manchin $2,900, as did former Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides and Morris Goldfarb, whose G-III Apparel Group owns brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, DKNY, and Karl Lagerfeld.”

“A number of high-powered executives maxed out to Manchin between April and June,” the outlet noted, “including banker Warren Stephens, hotel executive Tom Baltimore, Motorola CEO Greg Brown, Home Depot CEO Edward Decker, Yum! Brands CEO David Gibbs, Gillette CEO James Kilt, and Robert Kraft and his son Jonathan.”

The 6 most surprising “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” revelations from Netflix’s docuseries

On November 24, 1971, a man, going by the name “Dan Cooper,” boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle. At first glance, Cooper was merely a stylish enigma with a penchant for black attire and expensive alcohol. Little did eyewitnesses know that years later, Cooper would become an infamous name and the most wanted man in the entire nation.

Cooper, also known as the media epithet D.B. Cooper, successfully hijacked the aforementioned flight after threatening a nearby flight attendant and demanding four parachutes and a hefty sum of cash. Although his crimes were marked by infamy, Cooper himself became a media sensation, earning multiple references in artwork, music, films and shows, like “Twin Peaks” and the Disney+ series “Loki.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has since opened an investigation into Cooper, his identity and present-day whereabouts. But 50 years later, the question of “Who is D.B. Cooper?” still remains unanswered.

Netflix’s latest documentary “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” attempts to make sense of these missing puzzle pieces with new clues. Over the course of four episodes, the miniseries introduces the investigators, sleuths and journalists who have been working tirelessly to solve this mystery.

Here are six surprising revelations from the series:

The polite and brilliant hijacking

“D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

On Thanksgiving eve 1971, Dan Cooper purchased a one-way plane ticket on Flight 305, which was headed for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Witnesses on the flight recalled that Cooper was formally dressed in a black business suit and carrying a matching colored briefcase.

Once the plane had taken off, Cooper stealthily began his hijacking attempt. He passed on a folded note to Florence Schaffner, a nearby stewardess who initially disregarded the message and stashed it in her purse. She finally read the note after Cooper whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” The note itself read, “Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit beside me.”

When Cooper opened up his black briefcase, Schaffner saw that Cooper came equipped with a bomb. Cooper also asked for four total parachutes and $200,000 in ransom.

“He was very smart. He didn’t order one or two. He ordered four. He thought they were gonna dummy up a parachute on him, so he’d die,” said Tom Colbert, author of the 2021 novel “The Last Master Outlaw.”

“But if he’s ordering four, ‘He’s taking a hostage. We can’t dummy him up.’ Very smart, brilliant.”

Schaffner then showed the note to the pilot in command, William A. Scott, who landed the plane in Seattle, allowing all the passengers on board to get off safely. Per Cooper’s request, the flight then took off again, now with four crew members, including Captain Scott. The flight was en route to Mexico City but before Scott could land the plane, Cooper secured his bag full of stolen cash and jumped out the back exit using one of his parachutes.

Cooper’s last recorded message was a simple “No,” which was said in response to the pilots via the cabin phone.

D.B. Cooper’s fan club

Still from CooperCon in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

Following his crimes, Cooper became an American folk legend and a so-called “badass” hero. Conspiracy theorists and fans alike praised Cooper’s gutsy escape and endeavors, which only heightened his public yet unknown persona.

“[T]he guy, evidently, really took a lot of time to plan the whole thing out,” said one random passerby in an old clip of a news broadcast featured in the documentary. “And I respect a man who takes his time to do a job well done. He’s one of the slickest cats to ever walk on the face of the Earth.”

Ardent admirers wrote songs about Cooper and even plastered his famed criminal sketch on shirts, caps and other apparel. Bars and pubs also paid homage to the hijacker by using his name in their signature drinks. Soon enough, Cooper became a pop culture sensation and a newfound character in Hollywood productions.

“The case is so American. You have the underdog hero sticking it to the man,” said Geoffrey Gray, author of the 2011 novel “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B Cooper.”

“Cooper resurrected this cultural anthem, almost going back to the heroes like Billy the Kid. And all the famous bandits and bank robbers.” Some notorious comparisons include George “Machine Gun” Kelly, “Baby Face” Nelson and John Dillinger.

The unusual suspects

Cooper’s criminal sketches in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

The FBI compiled thousands of possible suspects throughout the Cooper case, but only a select few individuals stood out as more than “serious suspects.”

There was Barbara Dayton, a librarian, recreational pilot and parachutist, who claimed to have staged the hijacking two years after undergoing gender reassignment surgery in 1969. Then, there was Richard McCoy Jr., an Army-veteran-turned-recreational-skydiver who hijacked a United Airlines passenger jet for ransom in April 1972, just four-and-a-half months after Cooper’s stunt. Other suspects included a former Boeing employee, a former Northwest Orient Airlines employee and several deathbed confessors.

All of them were eventually ruled out during the investigation after FBI officials found inconsistences in their physical appearances and criminal records.

The man who wanted to be Cooper

Thomas J. Colbert in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

One notable suspect named Dick Briggs — a cocaine supplier who claimed to have been a Special Forces soldier during the Vietnam War and an accomplished parachutist — proudly proclaimed that he was indeed Cooper. Briggs’ confession caught the attention of Ron Carlson, who previously met Briggs at a party and later convinced investigators that Briggs was the hijacker in question.

In 1980, Briggs died in a one-way car accident, although his friends believed foul play was involved. Shortly afterwards, FBI officials and investigators learned that Briggs was not the man they were looking for.

“Before this, he talked about Vietnam. But that’s where his story had a real problem,” said Colbert.

“I spent eight months on that thread. I actually believed he was Cooper. But then I find out he’s [Briggs] never been to Vietnam, can’t parachute,” Colbert continued. “He was a part-time weekend warrior for the Air Force, so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam.

“Right at that point, I’m looking at this man and thinking, ‘I got the wrong guy.'”

Like many of the previous suspects, Briggs did not match many of Cooper’s prominent physical traits. Officials noted that Cooper was “a tall, dark man.” Briggs, on the other hand, was “a short, stocky, just gigantic, muscular man.”

“Briggs wasn’t the guy,” said Rich Kashanski, a cameraman who helped connect Colbert with Carson. “He was just some braggart saying, ‘I’m D.B. Cooper,’ you know?”

And so the search for Cooper continued.

A promising suspect

Robert Rackstraw in “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

Colbert and his investigative crew, called the D.B. Cooper Cold Case Team, were convinced that Robert Rackstraw — a former U.S. army pilot, Vietnam veteran and an old associate of Briggs — was the real D.B. Cooper. Out of all the suspects, Rackstraw looked eerily similar to a later sketch of Cooper. His criminal history also revealed that Rackstraw had previously committed fraud, forgery, airplane theft, domestic abuse and, in one instance, pseudocide. On paper, Rackstraw seemed to be the perfect match.

It was clear that Rackstraw enjoyed the ensuing media attention, even though he adamantly denied being Cooper during FBI interrogations and televised interviews. He was subsequently dropped from the FBI’s investigations in 1979, only to be reconsidered as a prominent suspect by Colbert and his team years later.

Despite his repeated attempts to coax Rackstraw to fess up, Colbert was ultimately unsuccessful as Rackstraw continued to deny, deny and deny. Colbert initially offered the ex-convict large sums of money and then used his upcoming book, documentary and show deals to force Rackstraw to speak up. Rackstraw, however, did not confess.

In 2016, Colbert and his team encountered a hitch when the FBI abruptly closed the Cooper case, thus releasing Rackstraw from any further investigations. The team claimed that the bureau’s sudden decision was motivated by the fact that Rackstraw may have had possible ties to the CIA. Although the evidence isn’t concrete, it’s believed that Rackstraw may have flown planes for the organization during the Iran-Contra affair in the mid- to late 1980s.

Rackstraw never ended up confessing to being Cooper, much to Colbert’s disappointment. On July 9, 2019, Rackstraw passed away after suffering from a long-term heart condition.

Cooper still remains a mystery to this day

“D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” (Netflix)

Cooper’s lengthy case has amassed numerous suspects and possible leads over the years. But at this time, it still remains unsolved.

The case, however, continues to draw fascination and is still being pursued by a few group of investigators, Cooper enthusiasts and true crime buffs.

Netflix’s “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” may not have the answers we’ve all been waiting for, but it’s still an entertaining feature that highlights just how bizarre this whole case has been.

Watch the official trailer for Netflix’s “D.B. Cooper: Where Are You?!” below, via YouTube:

More true crime stories you might enjoy:

The part “Game of Thrones” played in helping Emilia Clarke recover from brain injuries

Emilia Clarke, the British actor who launched to stardom playing Daenerys Targaryen in HBO’s blockbuster “Game of Thrones” adaptation, is speaking openly about the realities of living with brain injuries.

Shortly after finishing the first season of “Game of Thrones” in 2011, Clarke experienced a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a bleed in the space between the brain and surrounding membrane.

A sudden, severe headache is the main symptom for a subarachnoid hemorrhage, a symptom Clarke said she experienced while at the gym: “I tried to ignore the pain and push through it, but I just couldn’t.” Vomiting from the pain, she went to the hospital, received an MRI, then was transferred to a special center for brain surgery. Clarke was 24 years old at the time.

Sophie Turner is sure she’ll “exhibit some symptoms of trauma” from “Game of Thrones”

After surgery, Clarke dealt with aphasia, difficulty comprehending language or difficulty with speaking, writing, or reading, which can happen after strokes. Earlier this year, Bruce Willis was open about receiving a diagnosis of aphasia and said he was “stepping away” from acting as a result.

But Clarke went back to work, back to the set of “Game of Thrones” for the next two seasons. As USA Today reported, “She pushed through filming, despite feeling weak and exhausted.” In 2013, Clarke was appearing on Broadway when a brain scan uncovered a large growth (shortly before her insurance ran out). A subsequent surgery failed, leading to a brain bleed that necessitated yet another surgery, which Clarke then took a month to recover from.

In a new interview with BBC Sunday Morning, Clarke was candid about the injuries and their impact on her life, admitting there are parts of her brain “no longer usable” as they incurred a lack of blood flow. But she credited Daenerys for providing her an impetus to recover, saying it was “incredibly helpful to have Game of Thrones’ to sweep me up and give me that purpose.”

Clarke acknowledged the severity of her injuries, saying that she is among the “really, really small minority of people that can survive that.” After her first aneurysm, hospital staff told her many people did not live through what she had experienced. “I was also aware that there were people in the beds around me who didn’t make it out of the I.C.U.”

In 2019, after publishing an essay in The New Yorker where she disclosed her aneurysms, Clarke also announced she was starting a charity “Same You,” dedicated to improving access to life-saving rehabilitation after brain injuries or stroke. As she wrote in the essay: “Countless people have suffered far worse, and with nothing like the care I was so lucky to receive.”

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Clarke is now making her West End debut in Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” an experience she does not take for granted, thanking the craft of acting for her good memory, even after her injuries. As an actor, memorizing lines “is the only skill you have to do.”

She also spoke about her disability in a way that might help others dealing with brain injuries, saying to BBC Sunday Morning: “This is who you are. This is the brain that you have . . . what you have now is great so let’s work with that.”

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Corporate America sponsors lavish retreat for anti-abortion GOP officials attacking Biden’s agenda

Over the weekend, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) hosted a private retreat for corporate sponsors in Palm Beach, Florida to ostensibly raise money for its sweeping assault on abortion access, according to an exclusive report by CNBC.

The swanky dinner reportedly featured C-suite executives from the likes of Comcast, General Motors, Walmart, Match Group, Anheuser-Busch, Juul Labs, Johnson & Johnson, Koch Industries and Lowe’s, according to a list obtained by the outlet.The luxurious event will reportedly took place over the course of three days at the Breakers resort, an oceanfront five-star hotel, where rooms start at roughly $830 per night. It reportedly involved a golf outing, a cigar and whiskey reception, tennis, and deep sea fishing.

Only seven corporations responded to CNBC’s inquiry as to whether any of them would attend.

“General Motors has been a long time supporter of the Democratic Attorneys General Association and the Republican Attorneys General Association,” Jeannine Ginivan, a spokeswoman for General Motors, told CNBC, neither confirming nor denying the company’s attendance. “GM believes that through continuous engagement with these organizations it has the best opportunity to build an understanding around issues important to GM and the auto industry.”

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“While we defer to Congress, state legislatures, and the courts when it comes to policy on this issue, we will continue to support our employees and their dependents through our company-sponsored health care plans and programs,” said Kaitlin Craig, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch, who likewise refused to reveal whether the company will be there.

The event comes amid a decades-long right-wing effort to curtail abortion access, culminating last month in the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that enshrined America’s constitutional right to abortion. Immediately after the ruling, anti-abortion “trigger laws” in at least thirteen GOP-led states took effect, severely limiting the abortion access, even in instances of rape, incest, and medical emergencies.

According to CNBC, the event is designed to ramp up donations from corporate sponsors for the purposes of the group’s anti-abortion crusade. As the group reportedly put in a June email, “every donation will help the Republican Attorneys General combat the Democrats’ pro-abortion agenda and stand tall for life.” Historically, the group has often been the top spender in state AG races. According to investigative reporters Donald Moore and David Shaw, “RAGA has also drawn more than $370,000 this cycle from the Rule of Law Defense Fund, an affiliated policy nonprofit that does not disclose its donors and was an organizer of the Jan. 6 protest that preceded the riot at the Capitol Building.”

Noting that “some of RAGA’s biggest corporate donors this cycle have tried to portray themselves as allies of women’s reproductive health,” including Comcast, Sludge reports that “online dating company Match Group said in early September of last year it would set up a fund to allow Texas employees to seek abortion care out of state. The company donated $125,000 to RAGA on Sept. 20, the bulk of the nearly $137,000 it gave last year. In March, Citigroup announced it would also step up to cover travel costs for employees affected by Texas’ abortion ban. The company gave $75,000 to RAGA last year”:

Uber announced in September it would set up a legal defense fund to help its contractor drivers who could be sued under the Texas abortion ban for simply transporting passengers. About two months later, on Dec. 27, the company gave $50,000 to RAGA. Other top corporate donors to RAGA this cycle include Comcast, AT&T, healthcare company Centene, and gaming company Caesars Entertainment, as well as trade groups like PhRMA, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association.

At the same time, over the past several decades, a broad swath of Corporate America has funneled millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the Republican Party, inadvertently bankrolling the GOP’s war on abortion. According to Popular Information, thirteen major corporations – like Amazon, AT&T, and Coca-Cola – have supplied the party with about $15 million since 2016.

The truth about Uvalde: Will this mass shooting wake Americans up to the need for police reform?

376. That is the number of cops who showed up at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 and did nothing for over an hour while a school shooter murdered 19 children and two teachers.

That’s a lot of cops, especially in a small town in Texas. That there were so many cops to begin with is a testament to the widespread belief that, in the name of public safety, we must spend handsomely on police forces, granting them enormous budgets that far outstrip spending on many other social services. Uvalde may be a sleepy small town, but by god, they were going to be flush with law enforcement, drowning in uniformed police who are armed to the teeth and equipped with expensive military-grade armor and other fancy goodies to keep the public safe.

That’s what folks thought the cops were for: keeping them safe.

“They failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”

But, as the events of May 24 demonstrated, whatever else we may be paying cops to do, “saving people from violent criminals” is more optional than required. It’s secondary to more pressing cop concerns like posing for pictures showing off how tough you think you look.

Sunday, a committee for the Texas state legislature released a report detailing how, despite the minor army of cops right outside the door, the teen killer was allowed an uninterrupted murder spree for over an hour before some of the cops finally worked up the nerve to stop him. (As the Texas Tribune points out, the Alamo had fewer defenders when they held off Mexico’s army for 13 days.) This report builds on weeks of reporting from other outlets showing that the police on the scene were far more interested in handcuffing parents who wanted to save the children than they were in confronting the shooter. Video footage released by the Austin-American Statesman last week shows the 77 minutes of cops “walking back and forth in the hallway” while “talking, making cellphone calls, sending texts and looking at floor plans,” but not “entering or attempting to enter the classrooms.” After all, arresting unarmed parents is safe and easy, but dealing with a maniac with an AR-15 is scary and hard. Eventually, a small group of Border Patrol agents decided to stop messing around and rescue the children.

“They failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” the report reads.

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It’s worth remembering that this committee serves one of the most authoritarian state legislatures in the country. That even they were willing to admit this makes the police look bad speaks volumes. Despite these massive failures, one of the earliest responses to the shooting from local government officials after the shooting was to demand even more funding for police. But if 376 cops weren’t enough to take out one killer, it’s hard to imagine adding even more cops to the pile would do much good.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of debate over police funding and accountability in response to high-profile police killings of civilians, especially the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Some activists made “defund the police” a slogan, arguing that the money spent on police would be better spent on social services that prevent crime instead.

The reaction to this slogan has ranged from dismissive to outraged — and not just with conservatives, either.

As Pew Research found, support for police funding has stayed strong across demographic and political groups. A full 86% of white people want police funding to be increased or stay the same, but that’s also true of 76% of Black Americans. Ninety-four percent of Republicans want police funding to stay the same or be increased, but the same can be said of 74% of Democrats. Right-wing media has, with great success, bamboozled much of the public into thinking Democrats want to “defund” the police, but in reality, Democratic politicians walk a wide berth around the subject.

“What are we paying them for then?”

The idea of policing stays popular, even as outrage over police abuses has grown. People want to be safe, and they believe the police are here to keep us safe. People aren’t wrong to want there to be a taxpayer-funded system of public safety. Being the victim of a crime is an objectively terrible and often deadly matter. People are fully justified in desiring services that prevent crime. Indeed, activists for police reform find better audiences when they recast their arguments as crime prevention, with proposals to redirect some funding from police to mental health and other services.

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But real discussion about police reform will always be stymied if most people believe the cops, as their badges claim, have a duty to serve and protect. People will always want someone they can call on for help, as well as to keep dangerous people off the street. As the January 6 insurrection shows, there’s a lot of bad people out there who will only be checked by the threat of punishment. People have every right to want laws against violent crime to be enforced.

The problem, as the Uvalde shooting shows, is that police don’t actually have a duty to protect you.

As I wrote about for Salon in the aftermath of the shooting, in 2005, the Supreme Court ruled that police are not actually required to stop criminals who intend to harm people. Police can and often do refuse to help people in need. Cops simply do not have a legal duty to do things like stop an active shooter. They can, and often do, hide behind the “not actually my problem” excuse when members of the public ask for protection.

If more people understood this reality, it could help dramatically change the contours of the public debate over police reform. Right now, the assumption is that there’s tension between the desire to reduce police abuses and the need for police protection. But if more people understood that cops don’t actually have to protect you, a lot more would ask, “What are we paying them for then?”

People aren’t wrong to want a government-funded, easily accessed service that has a duty to protect ordinary people from crime. The problem is that we don’t actually have such a thing. Police reform activists would do well to drive that point home: That police have a lot of power but little obligation to help people. The focus should be on replacing the current police forces with something better. Something that flips the current situation on its head, forcing police to do more to protect people, while checking the power they have to abuse people.

Perhaps watching a bunch of police let children die while they handcuff parents for defying their authority will be the wake-up call that the public needs. Police aren’t the public servants that most people want them to be. Understanding that reality is the first step to changing it.

Ron DeSantis, culture war king, suspiciously silent on the biggest culture war battle of our time

The GOP’s most aggressive culture warrior, Ron DeSantis, gave the keynote address at the first annual “The Liberty Moms” meeting in Tampa, Florida last weekend. He was there to lend his explosive star power to their self-described agenda of “battling mask mandates in schools, banning library books that address sexuality and gender identity, and curtailing lessons on racial inequity and discrimination.” He is, in fact, their one true leader, using their authoritarian intimidation platform as his re-election agenda and possible springboard to the White House.

Considering his position as a general in the culture war, you’d think that DeSantis would be first in line with abortion bans and fugitive pregnant women laws like so many of his fellow GOP leaders. Instead, he stood by silently while the Attorney General of Ohio rushed right into the fray to doubt the now confirmed story of a 10-year-old rape victim who had to be transported to Indiana by her mother to obtain an abortion because she missed the 6-week deadline by 3 days. Not to be outdone, the Attorney General of Indiana immediately declared that he would investigate the doctor who performed the procedure even though abortion is still legal in the state (for the time being.) The state of Texas, meanwhile, got the conservative judiciary involved by suing the Biden administration over its guidance that emergency rooms are still obligated to perform abortions in case of a medical emergency, calling it an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic” and forcing “hospitals and doctors to commit crimes and risk their licensure under Texas law.” And with a bracing amount of clarity even Texas can’t claim, Idaho Republicans voted to reject a “life of the mother” exception from its party platform.

Talk about pushing the envelope.

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And at the federal level, Senate Republicans helpfully blocked a bill that would have protected the right of pregnant people to travel from one state to another. It’s probably only a matter of days before a state passes a law restricting such movement.

These and other actions in red states all over the country show that DeSantis is behind the right-wing curve. He defended the state’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks, without exception for rape and incest, and blandly offered to “work to expand pro-life protections” — but that’s about it. Beyond that, he’s been uncharacteristically reluctant to wade into the greatest culture battle of our time. The New York Times explained that he is under pressure from Republicans to adopt the draconian measures that have electrified the anti-abortion zealots throughout the country but remains reluctant because he feels it might hurt his chances at re-election and a possible presidential run.

It’s rare for DeSantis to be out of step with the extreme right but on this one he is and in a big way.

One of the leaders of the far right legal movement, James Bopp, the counsel to National Right to Life, a leading activist curtailing voting rights, and the man who took Citizens United to the Supreme Court and won, wrote the abortion ban “model law” that’s being adopted all over the country. There are no exceptions for rape and incest, as he told Politico:

“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,”

There is no one in America more in touch with the hardcore right than James Bopp. This will be the new baseline. And because his template does generously allow for an exception to be made if the person being forced to give birth will die otherwise (subject to very stringent rules to be set by know-nothing fanatics in state houses) his position will be considered mainstream. That makes DeSantis a RINO by comparison.

The Florida governor and presidential hopeful does have one issue, however, which he can point to as being in the vanguard that might just get him off the hook: the reversal of LGBTQ rights. He’s a clever politician so he started off with the issue of transgender kids and has gradually expanded it to businesses, relationships with their gay employees, and more recently siccing child protective services on parents who take their kids to gay-friendly events like drag shows. (So much for parents’ rights.) He’s passed dystopian legislation that’s been dubbed the “don’t say gay” bill, which prohibits teachers from discussing gay issues in schools. He clearly believes an anti-LGBTQ crusade offers a fertile culture war battlefield.

That flies in the face of Republican messaging that says gay rights aren’t really on the agenda.

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From Justice Samuel Alito, who assured the nation that his reasoning in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade meant “nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” to the right-wing zealot Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who insisted he believes “that Obergefell was wrongly decided, but I also think that at this point it is also settled law. I’m not aware of any concerted effort to get Obergefell overturned, and I don’t think that this opinion will result in that happening,” Republican officials are generally working overtime to reassure the public that they don’t have any intention of overturning marriage equality.

Hawley’s statement that it’s “settled law” is patently absurd considering that the Supreme Court just overturned a constitutional right that was decided 50 years ago and upheld numerous times over all those decades while marriage equality was decided just 7 years ago. No one can be confident they won’t overturn it and “send it to the states” where citizens’ rights go to die.

They’re talking about it. Here is Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tx., over the weekend:

And lest anyone thinks this isn’t an official position of the Republican Party, they should take a look at the last GOP platform, carried over from 2016, in the part where they discuss appointing Supreme Court justices. They’ve only gotten more extreme since then:

Only such appointments will enable courts to begin to reverse the long line of activist decisions — including Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases — that have usurped Congress’s and states’ lawmaking authority, undermined constitutional protections,
expanded the power of the judiciary at the expense of the people and their elected representatives, and stripped the people of their power to govern themselves

The person who made that addition to the platform (and made sure that all inclusive language was kept out) was none other than James Bopp, the triumphant, right-wing, mastermind who represents National Right to Life. He’s an anti-LGBT warrior as well and he’s on a roll. Ron Desantis is too.

Joe Walsh’s MAGA warning: If Trump is indicted, expect “major violence”

Today’s Republican Party is in revolutionary mode. They are escalating their more than 50 years-long campaign to take away the human and civil rights of women, non-whites, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, the poor and others deemed to be the enemy in their “real America.”

As the country becomes more racially diverse, younger, forward thinking and pluralistic, the American right wing is attempting to force the country back to the 19th century and the Gilded Age. Such moves are generally unpopular with the American people en masse. The Republican Party and the larger right wing movement dismiss such protests because they reject the basic principle of a true “We the People” democracy and are earnestly working to create a herrenvolk, apartheid, plutocratic, Christian fascist new America that will be ruled by a small number of white men and their allies.

As seen on Jan. 6 with Trump’s coup attempt and the terrorist attack on the Capitol by his followers, such political violence will become the norm as the Republican-fascists expand and consolidate their power and target the Democratic Party (and liberals and progressives more generally) as illegitimate.

How have Joe Biden and the Democrats and the so-called “resistance” responded to this assault on American democracy and society? They have been largely uncoordinated, hapless, lacking the urgency of now, and in total failing to rise to the challenge and demands of the crisis.

Jan. 6 hearings: A national civics lesson on the dangers of fascism

In so many ways, Biden and the Democrats remain beholden to — and therefore hamstrung by — a type of American politics and its faith in centrism, bipartisanship and institutions that no longer exists in the Age of Trump and ascendant fascism. This means that the Democratic Party’s (and the larger pro-democracy’s forces) plans and strategies and norms are of little use in this fight. Democrats are also being held back by self-inflicted injuries such as infighting about President Joe Biden’s leadership (or lack thereof), horrible messaging and Vichy Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin who consistently sabotage the party’s agenda.

Joe Walsh was a Republican congressman and a leading Tea Party conservative who rose to prominence in part by being a very vocal enemy of Barack Obama. With the rise of Trumpism, Walsh, who now hosts the podcast “White Flag with Joe Walsh” (where “he surrenders the urge to fight and strives to find a path to unite, not divide”), has become a bold critic of the Republican Party and larger right wing movement, which he sees as having betrayed American democracy.

In this conversation, Joe Walsh warns that the Democrats are being routed by the Republican-fascists and the larger right-wing movement because they refuse to accept that the United States and the world are in a populist moment of rage and anger at “the elites.” Walsh also warns that today’s Democrats have no momentum or energy to effectively counter this anger, because unlike the MAGA movement and TrumpWorld they lack a sense of group identity, cohesion and sense of mission and destiny.

Towards the end of this conversation, Walsh sounds the alarm that Donald Trump’s followers cannot be deradicalized, warning that they may become even more violent on a massive scale if their Great Leader is prosecuted for his high crimes on Jan. 6 and the larger coup attempt.

What is the new normal? There are many Americans, especially among the news media and the political elites, who think we can somehow go back home again to some earlier time and place before the Age of Trump.

We are not going to be united and able to put our differences away and generally get along even though we may disagree. That version of home is gone. I don’t think we can ever go back there. America is irrevocably divided, and I do not believe that most people understand that yet.

Your conclusion is an obvious one. Why are so many of the American news media and political class in such denial about reality?

They’re vested in trying to keep the American people engaged in that fiction of returning to normal. The lie that we can go back to what we were before Trump and be some type of “united” United States of America. The elite political class is invested in that story.

But when you get away from the establishment corporate new media and the political establishment more generally, there are braver voices on both the left and the right who acknowledge how divided our world is now. That this country is divided. We don’t agree on fundamental things. The right in this country is now fully radicalized and the left in this country is lost. The elites can’t deliver that truth.

The Republicans and larger right wing and neofascist movement are in revolutionary mode. The Democrats hold onto this fiction of bipartisanship and compromise with them. There are many members of the political class and news media who still hold onto that obsolete model. Too many Americans still believe that the Republican Party is “normal.” Is there a way to break through these delusions? To clearly explain to the public and the country’s elites that the Republicans are a revolutionary destructive force?

I think that message can be conveyed to American voters in the middle and on the left. But I do not believe that the elites and the corporate news media can deliver that message to them. One would think that MSNBC would have me on more often to deliver that message to wake up their audience to the reality of the situation. But then again, they don’t want to scare their audience.

My former political party, the Republicans, are now fully anti-democracy.

When I say that during interviews and panel discussions on the mainstream news media most people there look at me and roll their eyes. They refuse to believe it. But when I talk to people on Twitter, for example — or to people on the left — they understand that what I am saying is true. They wish that more Democrats would communicate the same message I am about the Republicans and how dangerous they are.

“Don’t give me Kamala Harris. God bless her, but no. Pete Buttigieg? Hell, no.”

The Dobbs decision should be a gift for the Democrats in terms of getting momentum against the Republicans. But even there, Biden and the Democrats appear to be hapless, uncoordinated and too late in responding — to a Supreme Court decision that was known months ago. It really is pathetic.

The Democrats can gain an advantage with the Dobbs decision and what it means. But they don’t fight. It’s like they’re afraid to punch. They’re afraid to get into the ring. They’re afraid to get dirty. Consider this: Joe Biden is too old. If Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis runs in ’24, name me one Democrat that can punch DeSantis or Trump in the nose. There are none.

Don’t give me Kamala Harris. God bless her, but no. Pete Buttigieg? Hell, no. Republicans have been obsessed for the last 30 to 40 years in fighting the fight at the state and local level. That’s where they’ve been waging war. Democrats have been focusing on the national level and thinking every solution has to come out of Washington, D.C. The Democrats are getting their clocks cleaned at the state and local level because of that obsession.

I detest the Republican Party and the neofascists and the larger white right. They are evil. I use the correct moral language. But I do admire them in a way because they know how to fight and win. The Democrats need to study them.

The only way you defeat a bully is to punch the bully in the nose, literally and figuratively. Democrats don’t know how to do that. Every day I talk to people — and not just MAGA people. Many of the people I talk to are what we describe as “low information voters.” They are in the middle somewhere and don’t consider themselves Republican or Democrat. These are not just white guys. These are white women, black men, black women, Hispanics and Latinos and other groups. Almost to a man and a woman they have told me some variation of the following: Republicans are a**holes, but Democrats are p***ies who don’t understand me.

Some of them will tell me, “Joe, I know Trump’s a con man and Republicans are f**king a**holes, but Democrats are p***ies who don’t understand me.”

Most Americans, these low information voters, they have to choose between an a**hole and a p***y, especially a p***y who doesn’t understand them, they’re going to vote for the a**hole. Democrats just don’t understand that.

“They love the fact that Donald Trump wants to be a king.”

Donald Trump and his followers have embraced the “King MAGA” moniker as a badge of pride. Trump is fundraising off of it. What does it mean to be “King MAGA” for the followers? Why does it resonate with them?

They love the fact that Donald Trump wants to be a king. They want a political strong man or some other type of tyrant or dictator. Trump’s followers desperately want to be part of that type of power. Trump is also perceived by them to be a doer, a winner and a fighter.

Trump’s followers feel like Hillary and Obama looked down on people like them. Bill Clinton was the last Democrat who didn’t approach these MAGA white working class-type Americans that way. That is a real problem for the Democrats going forward.

Being more specific, what does “MAGA” mean to them?

I’m on a team. It’s an identity. MAGA also means that I’m fighting. They tell me that “We’re trying to make America great, Joe. You just don’t get it yet. You don’t understand it, man.” The MAGA people feel like they are part of a movement to change this country. They believe in the mission, and they want to change it back to this fantasy of an America from the past that they are in love with, that they idealize. They’re on a train that’s going somewhere and that’s real appealing to them.

That means that every time a liberal or progressive or Democrat, or really anyone outside of their MAGA world, makes fun of them it fires them up. It tells them they’re doing something right. Every time a Democrat makes fun of TrumpWorld or Donald Trump or MAGA or calls them deplorables or bigots or rednecks it is a badge of honor to them.

Where is the Democratic Party’s train going?

The Democrats don’t have a train. We are living in populist moment here in America and around the world. We’ve been in a populist moment for a while. What does that mean? It just means regular people. Populism is bigger than MAGA.

These low information voters in the middle will dance with MAGA and they’ll hang out with MAGA and they’ll get on the MAGA train, because again, the train’s going somewhere.

Many of these people were attracted to Bernie Sanders six years ago.

Ultimately, “populist” just means average, regular people — white, Black and brown — who are pissed off at an elite political system that is no longer meeting their needs and seems to be ignoring them. Populist leaders can be good or bad.

Republicans have recognized this populist moment and what have they done? They’ve offered up populist leaders. Donald Trump. DeSantis is next in line. They are bad populist leaders because they are delivering an ugly, divisive message. Democrats are missing the moment. There are no democratic populous leaders to be found.

Here is how the average low information voter thinks about this: There is someone who is listening to my anger and yeah, they’re bad and they are a**holes and sometimes they’re bigots and sometimes they divide us, but they’re listening to me. But I look over here to the Democrats and I don’t see one leader listening to me and taking me seriously about how pissed off and angry I am at the system and how the country is going for people like me.

“The average working class guy doesn’t want to hear about wind and solar and renewable energy right now.”

Looking at the polling information — and the general trends with the economy and the country’s mood more generally — Trump or DeSantis would likely win in a contest against Joe Biden. They may not even have to cheat or otherwise rig the election to do so.

The Democrats are in big trouble. What do regular people care about? The people know that Donald Trump is a con man; he’s an a**hole. Republicans are a**holes and other horrible things too. But guess what? They are listening to the anger.

For example, the average working class guy doesn’t want to hear about wind and solar and renewable energy right now. The Democrats are on the wrong side of that issue. The Democrats keep taking these extreme left positions and most working class people are not there yet.

Here is a simple and powerful message for the Democrats — and one that they will not use. People are mad when they go to the supermarket. Food is too damn high. People are mad about gas prices. Why don’t the Democrats talk about price gouging and come up with a bold initiative and specifically label these huge corporations as being the crooks and profiteers they really are? The American people are being ripped off and Biden and the Democrats need to say that every day as loud as possible.

Even though I disagree with you on the substance of your analysis and conclusion, I absolutely agree with you that that it would be a winning populist message. Here’s the Democratic Party’s problem. The only reason Joe Biden won is because of Donald Trump. Joe Biden is not capable. But he’s the titular leader of the party. He is the leader of the Democrats, and he has to be the one doing the most punching. But he is incapable of doing it. The rest of the Democrats just seem impotent because Biden is their only messenger right now.

Guardian reporter Hugo Lowell: What we still don’t know about Jan. 6 and Trump’s “full-blown coup”

The dominant narrative from the professional smart people and the pundits and commentariat is that the Jan. 6 hearings are “shocking” and “surprising” because of what they “revealed” about Trump and his coup cabal’s high crimes. Why do they persist with this narrative? The facts about Trump’s perfidy and treason and evil have been a matter of public record for years. His presidency was a naked assault on democracy and the rule of law. The coup was announced in public. None of this should be a surprise to an intelligent person who is paying attention. Are the mainstream media types just in denial? Are they pretending?

I tend to believe most of them are not shocked or surprised. They’re saying such things for effect and ratings. You are talking about corporate news media. There are things they are going to allow to be said and things that are off limits. The hosts and guests and reporters you are talking about are not dumb people. They’re not shocked by Trump and the Republicans and all the bad things they do.

“There are no heroes on the Republican side at all.”

Another desperate narrative is this search for Republican heroes. Do you see any Republican heroes here? I don’t. Liz Cheney is the most obvious example of a Republican being buoyed by this false hero narrative.

Few people want to talk about the fact that Liz Cheney voted for Trump in 2020, Liz Cheney campaigned for Trump. She supported Trump after he was in office for four years and she knew what he did to the country during that time and his behavior.

There are no heroes on the Republican side at all. The Democrats do not understand how the Republican Party and MAGA works. It is a cult.

Members of a cult line up, they do their duty, they say what needs to be said, and they fight. They don’t ask questions. Cult members follow orders. Cults are orderly. Cults can get a lot of things done. That is part of why the Republicans are so effective. The Democrats don’t have that same cult gene and programming.

What are your general thoughts about the House Jan. 6 hearings so far?

The House Jan. 6 committee is just retelling the horrible story that we all know. Anybody who’s been paying attention since January 6 knows most of what has been “revealed” during these hearings. I don’t think these hearings will have any political impact on the midterms. The only political impact of these hearings may be to influence who the Republican candidate in 2024 is and therefore the next president.

None of this is surprising, but the CNNs and MSNBCs and the news media more generally has an incentive to make these Jan. 6 hearings into something really big and earth shattering, which they are not.

“Even Rudy Giuliani knew it was bulls**t. “

Trump is a criminal who led a conspiracy to overthrow an American election. I knew that before January 6. I knew what Trump was doing when he first put out the Big Lie months before the 2020 election. He signaled then he wouldn’t accept a loss. He signaled then that he wanted violence and rioting if he lost. And that’s what I would hear every day from his supporters building up to Election Day. So no, nothing that’s come out in these hearings is surprising.

I will offer one qualifier. To hear it all retold is amazing. I always figured that Mark Meadows and the others, because I know some of these guys, knew that it was all bullshit about the Big Lie and the election being “stolen.”

Even Rudy Giuliani knew it was bulls**t. But in the hearings to hear them say there was nothing there, that was still kind of startling. Everyone around Trump knew it was all a lie and yet they let Trump continue to say what he said about the 2020 Election being stolen from him.

None of them are heroes. They knew it was all a lie and what Trump was up to, and not one of them said anything publicly before or after. Mike Pence was privy to a coup before January 6. Pence did not say a world publicly about it. That really makes me angry almost beyond belief.

You know some of the personalities involved. How do these Republicans rationalize keeping their mouths shut about Trump and his coup plot and the attempt to overturn the 2020 Election more generally? What they are now choosing to reveal — under duress — should have been shared and confessed almost two years ago. Again, these are not heroes or virtuous people no matter how much the mainstream news media and political class wants to elevate them to that status.

When people stand for something, they’re either loved or hated. Politicians don’t want to be loved or hated. They just want to be accepted. They rationalized being quiet and keeping their mouths shut because their job was to stay there and make sure Trump didn’t do worse damage. I have heard that explanation privately from my former colleagues in the House for the last five years. They tell me, “I don’t say out loud what I feel about Trump because I want to get reelected. I’m afraid of his voters and Joe, by the way, the Democrats are socialists.”

Why did John Bolton keep his mouth shut? Partly it was because of his book, but partly is because John Bolton believes that Democrats are socialists, and that Democrats are the enemy. They also tell themselves that Donald Trump is some type of aberration as though that makes it all fine somehow.

When the MAGA people call your radio show, what are they saying about the hearings?

In general, MAGA World is ignoring the hearings. The low information voters who are not part of MAGA World are paying just a tiny bit more attention to it.

To them, the Jan. 6 hearings are just confirming what they suspected, which is that Donald Trump is an a**hole, but you know what? F**k it.

There were people around him that made sure our democracy was OK and that was 17, 18 months ago. Joe, let’s move on. That’s generally what I hear.

I will tell you though, I’ve seen a noticeable uptick in the hate that I’m getting from MAGA World in the last three or four weeks since the Jan. 6 hearings began.

There is a lot of anger at these hearings and also a lot of defensiveness about January 6. The MAGA followers are not watching the hearings, but they’re hearing about them. Some bad things about Trump are being confirmed that the MAGA people suspected he did, and they don’t like having to deal with it. The MAGA followers are getting very mad at people like me and other others who have been telling the truth about Trump and the coup since it happened.

“These ‘good Christians’ see Donald Trump as a bad f**king man who’s going to deliver them to the promised land.”

The Republican fascists and the MAGA people and the larger right wing understand power in a way that the Democrats and today’s so-called liberals and progressives and the left in America do not. They want to win at any cost. They don’t care about truth, justice, “the American way” or even reality because they are part of a political religion. They’ve convinced themselves that God is on their side. They literally believe such a fantastical thing.

The Republicans and Trumpists — as though there is a difference now — will lie, cheat and steal, which is why all of these so-called “good Christian men and women” embrace Trump. He is the personification of doing bad things to get what he wants. These “good Christians” see Donald Trump as a bad f**king man who’s going to deliver them to the promised land.

What do you think happens with Attorney General Merrick Garland and prosecuting Donald Trump?

I still believe that nothing will happen to Trump. Perhaps a few of the people around Trump will get indicted. I do not believe that the DOJ can or will go after Trump. They believe that it is just too difficult and risky to prosecute a former president. There may also be some wiggle room for Trump where his attorneys claim that he is not mentally competent or something of that sort. It would be really hard to convict him.

If you don’t convict that evil man, if you indict him and don’t convict him, he becomes a god to his followers. Worst case scenario, Trump becomes a god to people outside of MAGA world if the DOJ goes after him and is not successful. Trump may actually end up being more powerful.

If you were called to be an expert witness at Trump’s trial for the crimes of Jan. 6, and the coup more generally, what would you tell the court?

I’d detail how Trump had been a criminal his whole life. And he’s been a criminal his whole life because he’s always gotten away with it. He’s never been held accountable. And he won’t stop until he’s held accountable. I’d testify that Trump is a traitor to this nation. He’s an enemy of democracy. There must be a punishment for that. And finally, I’d testify that Trump’s greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. And because of that, my former political party is now fully radicalized and fully anti-democracy. Trumpism has metastasized beyond Trump. Trumpism is the denial of truth, the giving up on democracy, the embrace of authoritarianism, and the attempt to kill or destroy your political opponents. That’s where today’s GOP is. All because of Trump. How do I know this? Because for the past few years, I have spoken with hundreds of GOP base voters every single day. This is what they’ve told me.

If Donald Trump is prosecuted, he will order his followers to unleash hell upon the country. What percentage of them do you think will listen?

There is a percentage of Trump’s followers who would become violent. There would be a major uptick in violence from the right around this country if Donald Trump was indicted. He is their cult leader. They would see it as “the Deep State” going after their leader. There would be major violence.

We are too far down the road. It cannot be turned off. I think we may be irrevocably divided and the ugliest manifestation of that now is a fully radicalized Republican Party base. Most of them will remain radicalized until they die.

We are divided as a country on our basic shared principles and values. The Republicans and the right-wing are radicalized and against democracy. We are balkanized. This is all going to lead to some major widespread violence. I am not optimistic.

interviews about Trump, MAGA and Jan. 6:

Historic heat: Over 1,000 dead as record-breaking heatwave scorches Europe

Record-breaking heat has killed over 1,000 people in Western Europe over the past week, while firefighters battle to contain blazes scorching swathes of three countries amid a worsening climate emergency, officials said this weekend.

El País reports heat killed 360 people in Spain between July 10 and July 15. This follows the heat-related deaths of more than 800 people last month, according to the Spanish government’s Carlos III Health Institute. Madrid-Barajas International Airport recorded an all-time high temperature of 108°F Thursday, while some Spanish municipalities registered highs of 110°F to 113°F.

One 60-year-old Madrid sanitation worker collapsed in the middle of the street while working Friday. The man was rushed to the hospital with a body temperature of over 106°F and died of heat stroke. He was one of 123 people who suffered heat-related deaths Friday in Spain.

In drought-ravaged Portugal, where temperatures soared to over 116° in Pinhão on Friday, the Health Ministry said Saturday that 659 people, most of them elderly, have died from heat-related causes over the past week.

In Britain, the U.K. Met Office on Friday issued its first-ever Red Extreme heat warning for Monday and Tuesday, when an “exceptional hot spell” is expected to hit the country.

AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tyler Roys said “there is concern that this heat could become a long-duration heatwave” lasting into August in places including “the valleys of Hungary, eastern Croatia, eastern Bosnia, Serbia, southern Romania, and northern Bulgaria.”

Parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are also suffering heatwaves and wildfires.

Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people in France, Spain, and Portugal have been evacuated as firefighters battle out-of-control wildfires burning throughout parts of those countries. More than half of Portugal is on red alert status as firefighters work to contain 14 separate conflagrations.

According to the Associated Press:

Hungary, Croatia, and the Greek island of Crete have also fought wildfires this week, as have Morocco and California. Italy is in the midst of an early summer heatwave, coupled with the worst drought in its north in 70 years—conditions linked to a recent disaster, when a huge chunk of the Marmolada glacier broke loose, killing several hikers.

Scorching temperatures have even reached northern Europe. An annual four-day walking event in the Dutch city of Nijmegen announced Sunday that it would cancel the first day, scheduled for Tuesday, when temperatures are expected to peak at around 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).

Studies have shown that the human-driven climate emergency is increasing the frequency and severity of heatwaves.

Saudi Arabia’s MBS turns the tables on Biden, U.S.: “Remember Abu Ghraib?”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reportedly told President Joe Biden during their meeting in Jeddah Friday that while the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is “regrettable,” U.S. hands are not clean and other journalists are killed with impunity.

“Bin Salman’s smarmy reply underlines the way in which the U.S. government’s lawlessness… and its weird commitment to Israeli apartheid… undermine its moral standing.”

Bin Salman specifically mentioned the torture scandal at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib, Iraq and the killing of Palestinian-American Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces in May, according to Al Aribiya, which is owned by the Saudi government.

The de facto Saudi ruler also said that the CIA—which along with other American intelligence agencies concluded that Khashoggi’s gruesome 2018 murder was likely ordered by bin Salman—makes mistakes, as it did when it falsely claimed Iraq had an active weapons of mass destruction program prior to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation.

“Bin Salman’s smarmy reply underlines the way in which the U.S. government’s lawlessness in misadventures like invading Iraq and its weird commitment to Israeli apartheid practices against the Palestinians undermine its moral standing to argue for ‘a rules-based global order,'” Informed Comment publisher Juan Cole observed. “Almost no one in the U.S. dares say this, but for the rest of the world it is a commonplace insight.”

Saudi official gives MBS's response to Biden when he asked about Khashoggi. "You can't impose your values on us by force. Remember Abu Ghraib? What have you done about Shireen Abu Akleh?". Yes MBS literally said that to Biden. https://t.co/9DQDrWVM2L

— İyad el-Baghdadi | إياد البغدادي (@iyad_elbaghdadi) July 16, 2022

Cole wrote:

The U.S. government didn’t care about the Israelis assassinating Shireen Abu Akleh, (and many other unlawful killings of Palestinian journalists and just ordinary Palestinian noncombatants) and it does not stop the U.S. from forking over to Israel $4 billion a year in foreign aid, a tax on all Americans in support of Greater Israel expansionism. So why should Biden, bin Salman wants to know, boycott Saudi Arabia over the killing of a single journalist?

Biden has come under fire from progressives for his willingness to sideline Saudi Arabia’s abysmal human rights record and war crimes in Yemen in service of U.S. strategic and energy interests.

Appearing Sunday on ABC‘s “This Week,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who is co-sponsoring a new resolution to end U.S. involvement in the Saudi-led war in Yemen—said he did not think Biden should have visited Saudi Arabia.

NEW: Sen. Bernie Sanders tells @MarthaRaddatz that Pres. Biden should not have gone to Saudi Arabia.

“I just don’t believe we should be maintaining a warm relationship with a dictatorship like that.” https://t.co/yRoCDrJ884 pic.twitter.com/0eyn9R3CKv

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) July 17, 2022

“You have a leader of that country who was involved in the murder of a Washington Post journalist,” Sanders said. “I don’t think that that type of government should be rewarded with a visit by the president of the United States.”

“I just don’t believe we should be maintaining a warm relationship with a dictatorship like that,” he added.

Alan Dershowitz feels “canceled” by Martha’s Vineyard

Alan Dershowitz was ridiculed on Saturday after invoking “cancel culture” to complain about how he has been treated on Martha’s Vineyard after defending Donald Trump in the impeachment trial that could have removed Trump from office before the brunt of the pandemic and his Jan. 6 coup attempt.

“I have essentially been excluded from the Democratic Party,” Dershowitz told Newsmax. “There was recently an event on Martha’s Vineyard for Jewish Democrats – who would be the first person you would think of as a Jewish Democrat on Martha’s Vineyard – me, but I wasn’t invited because I’m now cancelled essentially from the Democratic Party.”

“The library won’t allow me to speak on Martha’s Vineyard, the Community Center, the major synagogue, all of them have canceled me because I had the chutzpah to defend the constitution on behalf of a president of the United States that they all voted against – the fact that I voted against him, too, and then I remain — in my mind a Liberal Democrat doesn’t much matter,” he complained. “If I don’t follow the party line down to the extreme, I am cancelled. People refuse to attend events if they know I’m gonna be there and that’s why several friends of mine have who have invited me for years to events in their home or concerts that they’ve sponsored have apologetically said, ‘We’re sorry we can’t invite you because if you come everybody will leave,’ he added.”

Dershowitz did not receive a great deal of sympathy on Twitter.

“You know what this is? It’s the world’s smallest violin,” wrote TV writer/producer Ken Tremendous. “And it’s playing the Benny Hill theme song as you’re running around Jeffrey Epstein’s island in your underwear.”

Attorney Bradley Moss addressed Dershowitz directly on Twitter.

“Sorry to hear you remain banished from political events on Martha’s Vineyard, but it remains my understanding they have the unfettered discretionary authority to choose who to invite. And they don’t want you. So go down to Florida and party with your MAGA buds,” he suggested.

Boston journalist Adam Reilly said, “Find something you love like Alan Dershowitz loves talking about being shunned on Martha’s Vineyard.”

Business Insider reporter Jake Lahut said, “If you were to tell me Alan Dershowitz has been complaining about being ostracized on Martha’s Vineyard for 30 years, I’d probably believe you.”

The Intercept DC bureau chief Ryan Grim said, “I think it was more that people were mad at him for (allegedly) peeing on the beach all the time, and that was way before the rest of it.”

Here’s some of what other people were saying:

Poor baby. Give him a tissue. https://t.co/3iOsVpvK7X

— Brenda Schory (@BrendaSchory) July 16, 2022

Alan Dershowitz: "Why can't I come to your party? I'm the *most* important guy in Martha's Vineyard!"

Hostess: "Because you were implicated in Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking."

Alan: "But I kept my mesh bikini briefs on!"

Hostess: "Pardon me, I'm going to be violently ill."

— Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social (@BettyBowers) July 16, 2022

After all is lost…reputation…self respect..self awareness.. what’s of greatest concern? Getting snubbed on Martha’s Vineyard. Can’t get an invite to save his soul. Well guess what, Dersh? That ship has sailed. 0/10 @AlanDersh pic.twitter.com/QSnQt1LoiO

— Room Rater (@ratemyskyperoom) July 17, 2022

Calling it "cancel culture" when rich people don't want to invite you to their fancy parties on Martha's Vineyard really underscores how utterly empty that phrase is. https://t.co/gmjBg6Pdda

— Joel S. (@jh_swanson) July 16, 2022

Fox host thinks Biden is being secretly drugged

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo had United States Congressman Ronny Jackson (R-Florida) as a guest on her show on Sunday and their discussion quickly unraveled into a rapid-fire validation of conspiracy theories that Bartiromo made up on the spot about President Joe Biden.

Bartiromo suggested to Jackson that Biden – whom she criticized for isolating himself while running for president during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – is being secretly drugged by, possibly, former President Barack Obama or First Lady Jill Biden so that he can function.

“There were signs that Joe Biden was declining during the 2020 campaign. I mean, let’s face it, he stayed in the basement the whole time during the campaign, uh, so who knew what when? Are they hiding this and feeding him drugs to allow him to function? I know he goes home to Delaware a lot, more than any other president. So I guess my question is, what did Obama know? What did Jill Biden know? And who is running the White House right now, and are they covering up for these mental issues?” Bartiromo asked Jackson, who revealed this week that Obama had scolded him for a tweet that he had posted disparaging Biden‘s cognitive health.

“Well, that’s the big question everybody’s asking. Who’s really pulling the strings and running the country right now?” Jackson replied.

“We don’t really know the answer to that. We don’t know if it’s [former National Security Advisor] Susan Rice or Ron Klain or if it’s Jill Biden or who it is. But somebody else is doing this. They’re doing exactly what you said,” Jackson continued.

“They’re rolling him out at specific times during the day,” Jackson added of the president. “He’s got good days and bad days and whether or not they have him on drugs I dunno but there are drugs out there that can increase your alertness and your memory and things of that nature, you know, to cover stuff like this up temporarily. So I’m sure some of that’s going on as well but we don’t know because his physician hasn’t stood up and took the questions that I took when I was Trump’s physician and answered those questions.”

Watch below:

responsible journalisming happening here pic.twitter.com/1jcfdS2TyN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2022

J.R.R. Tolkien describes the “intensity” of elf sex

In general, “The Lord of the Rings” is a pretty chaste series. Author J.R.R. Tolkien included some depictions of great longing — Aragorn yearns for Arwen, Éowyn yearns for Aragorn, etc. — but there’s nary a description of actual sex to be found. That goes double for elves, who are these perfect eternal beings who seem more angel than man. It’s hard to picture them getting down.

. . .but they do. New elves gotta come from somewhere. And it ends up that Tolkien did write a little bit about it, although not in the main text of his novels. Instead, his description of elf sex was found among his voluminous notes, some of which were published in the book “The Nature of Middle-earth,” which came out last year.

A Redditor was kind enough to transcribe the bit about elf sex. Now to answer every question about elf sex you ever had but were too afraid to ask . . .

According to J.R.R. Tolkien, elf sex “could not have been endured for a great length of time”

Quoth Tolkien:

. . . the act of procreation, being of a will and desire shared and indeed controlled by the fëa [soul], was achieved at the speed of other conscious and willful acts of delight or of making. It was one of the acts of chief delight, in process and in memory, in an Elvish life, but its intensity alone provided its importance, not its time or length: it could not have been endured for a great length of time, without disastrous “expense” . . . it is longer and of more intense delight in Elves than in Men: too intense to be long endured.

So what I’m getting is that elf sex is quick but intense. It’s so good that if it lasted any longer than it does, there would be disastrous “expense.”

I’ll let you insert your own jokes here.

Perhaps Amazon will take some cues from “The Nature of Middle-earth” when it debuts its “Lord of the Rings” series “The Rings of Power” in September . . . but somehow I doubt it.

Dangerous attractions and revolutionary sympathies: 5 Jane Austen facts revealed by music

1. Jane Austen played and sang

Jane Austen played the piano from the age of about 10. Her family inherited some of her books of sheet music, including hundreds of manuscripts in her hand as well as printed music.

Along with piano music, there are many songs in the collection, and judging by the music we have, she seems to have been a soprano. She could accompany herself, improvising the piano part if necessary.

Most of what we know directly about Austen’s musicianship relies on the memories of her niece Caroline, who was only 12 when Austen died. Uniquely among her younger relatives, it seems, Caroline actively shared both Austen’s literary and musical interests. Caroline remembers some of the songs Austen sang for her in her last years, and in January 1817, six months before her death, Austen wrote to Caroline:

The Piano Forte often talks of you; – in various keys, tunes & expressions I allow – but be it Lesson or Country dance, Sonata or Waltz, You are really its’ constant theme.

2. Musical women featured in 5 of Austen’s 6 novels

Catherine Morland in “Northanger Abbey” happily abandoned her music lessons at an early age, but there are female musical characters in the other five of Austen’s six completed novels.

In “Sense and Sensibility” Marianne Dashwood is the musical one, while her sister Elinor was “neither musical, nor affecting to be so.” Marianne’s music becomes a “nourishment of grief” for her when she is abandoned by Willoughby.

Another pair of sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice,” are both musicians. In their case, the contrast is between their attitudes to their music-making: Mary insists on playing a “long concerto” at an evening party, while Elizabeth “easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.”

In “Mansfield Park,” Fanny Price is not musical. Fanny has been brought to Mansfield Park as a young child to be brought up with her rich cousins, Maria and Julia, who are slightly older. Even at the age of 10, she can see that competing with her cousins for accomplishments will be futile, and she refuses to have lessons.

Emma Woodhouse doesn’t exactly compete with Jane Fairfax in the music stakes in “Emma.” Emma knows perfectly well that Jane is much the better musician, and coming to admit that to herself and others is one stage in her faltering journey to maturity.

And in “Persuasion,” Anne Elliot is a consummate musician but does not envy the more showy accomplishments of the Musgrove sisters who play the harp, while she is still on the old-fashioned pianoforte.

3. Austen’s musical men are deceitful

All sorts of women can be musical – or not – in Austen’s novels. It tells us something about each of them, but there’s nothing that the musical women have in common – they can be heroines, anti-heroines, dependant orphans, or spoilt rich young women. With the men, things are a bit different.

Who are the musical men – not just the ones who enjoy music, but those who have some musical skill? There are not many.

Greg Wise as the dangerously attractive but unreliable Willoughby, in “Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility” (1995).

Willoughby, in “Sense and Sensibility,” sings duets with Marianne and copies out sheet music for her. In “Emma,” Frank Churchill sings duets with Emma and with Jane Fairfax at the Coles’ dinner party. What do these two gents have in common, apart from being musicians? They are unreliable and deceitful.

4. Austen heroes fall in love listening to musical women

In Georgian times, the main role of the true gentleman, as far as musicianship is concerned, was to be an appreciative listener. One mark of an Austen hero is listening with enjoyment and attention to the woman who has attracted his interest. More than once, this is the shortest route to falling in love.

Colonel Brandon, unlike the rest of the company, pays Marianne “only the compliment of attention” when she is playing the piano in “Sense and Sensibility.” Mr Darcy’s “dangerous” attraction to Elizabeth is enhanced by music, which gives him an occasion to observe “the fair performer’s countenance.” In “Mansfield Park,” poor Edmund Bertram is “a good deal in love” after listening to Mary Crawford playing the harp.

5. Austen’s music collection reveals sympathies with Revolutionary France

Although French music is not mentioned in the novels, Austen had several French songs in her collection, some of them overtly political.

The husband of Jane’s cousin Eliza was executed by the Revolutionary government in 1794, so one might expect royalist sympathies. However, the music in her collection provides an interesting new angle.

Within a few pages of one of the manuscript books, we find not only a Royalist ballad, and a song lamenting the suffering of Queen Marie Antoinette as she awaits her fate, but also the music and five verses of words of the Marseillaise, the revolutionary anthem.

She chose not to write about it in her novels, but Austen knew very well what was going on over the channel – as her music shows.