Thomas Haden Church on his offbeat new “Acidman” role: “There is clearly something wrong with Lloyd”

Thomas Haden Church is perfectly cast as Lloyd, the title character in “Acidman,” a guy living largely off the grid in Oregon. In this poignant two-hander, directed and cowritten by Alex Lehmann (“Blue Jay,”) Lloyd’s daughter Maggie (Dianna Agron) shows up unannounced to do a wellness check on her father, whom she has not seen in a more than a decade. She finds Lloyd living in a messy home with his dog, Migo, and leaving at odd hours of the night to go on “searches” — where he communicates with IFOs, “identified flying objects” using morse code.

Church, who broke out as the oddball mechanic in “Wings,” was Oscar-nominated for his role as the randy, engaged friend in “Sideways,” and played the villain in “Spider-Man 3,” is entirely convincing as Lloyd. He is both offbeat, enigmatic, and charismatic. What is great about his performance here is that neither Maggie nor viewers can anticipate what he might do or say next. Lloyd has moments of real clarity, but he also slips into “trances” from time to time. In one of the best scenes, Lloyd has a heart-to-heart with Maggie, while getting stoned in the back of his truck. But as father and daughter get reacquainted with one another, questions arise: Is Lloyd mentally ill? And what prompted Maggie to travel 2000 miles to see her father after all this time?

“Acidman” is an absorbing drama that addresses themes of family, trust, truth, and reality. Church spoke with Salon about his new film, which just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.

As an actor, you project a sly sense of humor, and have an offbeat delivery – it is both forceful and playful. Those qualities are very much in evidence with Lloyd. It is easy to write him off as a burnout case, but he marches to the beat of his own drum. How did you connect with the character?

I have to give a significant measure of credit to writer/director Alex Lehmann. Alex, Dianna [Agron] and I started having conversations about “Acidman” in the summer of 2020, but we did not shoot the picture until about a year ago. What I brought to the table was a story about this man who lived in Alabama that was a presence in my writing partner’s life when he was growing up. The guy was a WWII-decorated veteran who existed in this rural community. My writing partner, David, told me about this guy over the last 30-plus years — his name was Lloyd. I started telling Alex the stories that David had being relayed to me. And Alex said, “I think we have a keyhole to how we can ground the character for you.” We started weaving that tapestry together — things I knew about this person, but also how Alex saw the character of Lloyd. It is a personal story for Alex as well.

Lloyd goes into “trances,” but he is also often very lucid. He speaks wisdom when stoned, but he also gets angry and depressed. How do you think the film portrays Lloyd’s need to be off the grid, and disassociated from society? There are issues of mental illness raised here too.

He suffers from an emotional dissociative behavior — that whatever is in front of him is a very stark reality for him. What he believes, with his dog, for example, is that Migo will robotically obey commands with a snap of a finger and doesn’t need to be on a leash. But at the same time, the dog roams freely, and Lloyd believes he has control over that. It’s shocking to him, more than it is to [Maggie], who just bonds with the dog. Lloyd has dissociated from himself from needing to protect the dog, even though there are hunters in the area. And it is sort of the same with the [alien] presence. She’s obviously skeptical of it, but he has a stark affirmation that whatever he sees and perceives. There is no other definition of what that is.

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Lloyd’s relationship with his daughter Maggie is really touching in the film; she is largely accepting of his behavior, even if she questions it or is concerned. She is trying to understand him, and I like that she lets him just be. He sizes her up pretty quickly and rightly. Can you discuss the dynamic of their relationship?

He was supposed to attend her college graduation and did not. She’s now in early to mid-30s, so it’s been 12, maybe 14 years, and Maggie is a completely different human as anyone would be from 22 to 35. Lloyd assumes she is exactly the same, but she is nowhere near the person Lloyd thinks she still is, but Lloyd’s assessment of her emotionally is different. Again, it is a bit dissociative. He sees her for who she is, and he knows why she’s there, but he is reverting a lot of the interaction to the way she was. It’s antagonistic, but it is also kind of diametric in that she is insisting, “This is my presence,” and he knows she is not being honest with herself.

There is a line in the film “The truth is more important than the facts.” What do you think of that? I keep chewing on it. It is the choice between the heart and the head, what you think and what you feel.

His appearance, for one, is something Alex and I had talked about early on. Lloyd goes through life, and there’s a real good chance that the only difference between Lloyd asleep and Lloyd awake has nothing to do with his appearance. Whenever and wherever he wakes up, and as soon as he is conscious, he just starts his march again, whether it is about music, nurturing the garden he has, which is kind of like a rainforest for lack of a better description, going off on treks with the dog. His head never enters into it; it’s always his heart — it just dictates everything about him. In his mind, he’s constantly going forward. When Maggie pulls back or presents any kind of defiance, he is: “You’re either with me or against me.” If she says, “This is what happened,” he is only looking forward. Any of his musings about the past are playful ruminations. It’s never too serious, except when he talks about his father dying. Those are lapses that happen when he goes into these silent seizures. It’s like a vapor lock for his brain. He doesn’t even know it happened.

Do you make decisions, with your head or with your heart?

I remember Michael London, the producer of “Sideways,” told someone, “Thomas is very indecisive because his head and his heart are always in conflict,” [laughs] which is a very interesting assessment. A lot of people in my life would agree with that. I try to be practical, because I’m a father. At times I try to be practical with my older daughter, who is about to start college in the fall — but it’s emotional. I want her to be happy and I want her to feel empowered, and I want all the things a good dad wants for his soon to be 18-year-old daughter. It’s a balance.

Do you think “Acidman” is about the sins of the father? That Lloyd left his family, thinking they would be better off?

I’m not sure he ever reflects on it like that. When she shows up, he has this, “Take me or leave me. Whatever you do that’s your business” [attitude]. They do glacially move forward. There are many unspoken emotions. Maggie is hopeful. There is something ethereal about it. But there is clearly something wrong with Lloyd.

I was oddly moved by the scene where Lloyd confronts hunters on his property, and he is vulnerable. Yet, Lloyd rails against cynics, skeptics, and traitors, and obstacles in his path (war, the environment, etc.) He fires warning shots at teens who trash his house. Can you talk about what pushes his buttons?

You always put something, as an actor or a writer, of yourself into a performance, and there are some stark similarities whenever I reflect on myself. What Lloyd responds to and what he is so defiant about is the possibility that somebody is forcing him to do something that he doesn’t want to do. All the clichés — bullying, or intimidation, or aggressive management, all the phraseology that is synonymous. He is so completely free and independent, and he has thrown off all of the battle chains of society. When Maggie shows up, here’s a responsibility that he left behind. That scene [with the hunters] we put in late. There was never violent confrontation, but I thought he has to physically confront them. The way we staged it was hard to do, going through the creek was physically difficult, but I loved that. Alex wanted there to be a significant obstruction for Lloyd.

You are an executive producer on “Acidman.” Are you looking to work more behind the camera?

I did another picture in the fall that I produced, and I’m writing a script now. I’m not moving away from acting; I did three pictures last year, including “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” which was huge. But it’s always been something that has been there. I started out writing before I was an actor. It’s been a part of my life even back to the mid-1990s. I was a de facto producer and writer on “Ned and Stacy” for both seasons, and that really inspired my writing partner and I to work more. I directed and we cowrote a film that was at Sundance in 2003, [“Rolling Kansas”] and, I was going to direct a picture for Fox, then the “Sideways” script showed up. I knew Alexander Payne and met with him on “Election” and “About Schmidt.” Destiny took the reins.

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A no-frills meatloaf to make for dinner one day, then eat as a lunch sandwich the next

The other day, after speaking with my mother, I was thinking about the best sandwich she packed for my lunch when I was in school. It was leftover meatloaf on white bread with mayo — hands down. So, I decided to make meatloaf. My recipe is simple and produces a moist flavorful loaf — no bells and whistles, just a plain ole meatloaf. In my opinion, it’s comfort food at its most basic. I use ground beef and ground pork in mine; you can use all beef, just make sure its 80%, as you want the meat to be fairly fatty. The celery, carrot, parsley, and onion are ground in the food processor, which adds extra moistness. I use fresh bread crumbs and top the loaf off with ketchup. — Sdebrango

Test kitchen notes

WHO: Sdebrango’s two kitchen helpers are her pugs, Izzy and Nando.
WHAT: A no-frills meatloaf to make for dinner one day, then eat as a lunch sandwich the next.
HOW: Grind celery, carrots, onion, and parsley in a food processor. Mix with sautéed peppers and mushrooms, fresh bread crumbs, puréed tomato, and ground meat. Shape it into a loaf, cover with ketchup, and bake.
WHY WE LOVE IT: If you grew up with a meatloaf-making mother, this one is just like the kind she used to make. It has everything you love with none of the distractions. Tasty and simple with no fancy or weird ingredients, it requires no accompaniments except fresh bread. It’s even better on a sandwich the next day — the flavor and texture only gets better with a little time. — The Editors

Watch this recipe

Meatloaf, Plain and Simple

Yields

1 big loaf

Prep Time

20 minutes

Cook Time

1 hour 10 minutes

Ingredients

1 splash olive oil, for coating baking pan and sautéing
2 stalks celery
1 medium carrot
1/2 small onion (yellow, white, or red — your choice)
1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley with large stems removed
1 small bell or Cubanelle pepper diced
6 mushrooms (I used white stuffer type), cleaned with tough part of stems removed
1 pound 80% ground beef
1 pound ground pork
1 1/4 cups fresh bread crumbs
2 large eggs lightly beaten
1 small tomato (about 4 ounces), cored and puréed in blender
1 pinch salt and pepper to taste
1 splash Worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons heavy cream (optional)
1 splash ketchup to slather on top of loaf

Directions

Preheat oven to 375° F and lightly oil a rectangular baking dish or loaf pan. Cut celery, carrot, and onion into large chunks, and add them to food processor along with the parsley. Process until the vegetables are ground.
Dice the pepper and mushrooms and sauté them in a small amount of olive oil until the pepper softens.
To a large mixing bowl add the meat, ground vegetables, sautéed pepper and mushrooms, bread crumbs, egg, puréed tomato, salt and pepper, Worcestershire, and cream (if using). Mix with spoon — or better yet, your hands — until it’s all combined. To check the seasoning, fry off a tiny test patty, taste, and adjust accordingly. Plop the meat into the oiled baking pan and shape into a loaf. Cover with ketchup.
Bake for 1 hour, remove from oven, and let sit for 15 minutes before slicing. If there are any leftovers, make sandwiches. Enjoy!

Jan. 6 committee makes the case clear for Merrick Garland: Failure to prosecute Trump is political

Donald Trump thinks you’re an idiot.

That’s the message that the Jan. 6 committee sent to Republican voters during Monday’s hearing, the second of what could be as many as eight hearings through June. As Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., had promised, the hearing covered the first part of Trump’s seven-part plan to steal the election, which was “a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.” Straight from the beginning, Trump voters were portrayed as the primary victims of his Big Lie. Cheney kicked things off by painting the people who sacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 as Trump’s dupes, people who acted on Trump’s lies and now are paying for it by going to prison. Quoting the Wall Street Journal, Cheney said, “Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on January 6th. And he is still doing it.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., followed this up by highlighting how Trump has repeatedly sent out emails fundraising off the Big Lie, taking in money that he can redirect into his personal coffers quite easily. “The big lie was also a big ripoff,” she declared.

Tellingly, pretty much all the evidence that Trump deliberately lied to defraud his own supporters came from other Republicans, both in taped depositions and live witnesses. As Heather “Digby” Parton argued in her preview Monday morning, for “at least a few GOP voters it must be a little bit difficult to buy that all of these Republicans are liars.” The all-Republican witness list gave the hearing the air of a cult deprogramming effort, repeatedly confronting Republican voters with truths coming from people they simply can’t write off as Democrats playing politics.

It’s a strategy with some obvious pitfalls, however.

The case that Trump did all this very much on purpose is, as the committee showed, a slam dunk.

Few Republican voters will even allow themselves to take in this information. Instead, they will turn to propaganda outlets like Fox News to be told comforting lies. But the problem may be even bigger than that. Waking Republican voters up with the truth only works if “truth” is something Republican voters care about. Unfortunately, there’s little reason to believe it is.

Republicans know full well that Trump is just making up his claims of a “stolen” election and they simply don’t care. They weren’t duped by the Big Lie —they think they’re in on it.

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As I’ve argued before, the Big Lie is less of a literal belief for Trump supporters, and more a myth embraced because it speaks to their deeper belief: That they’re entitled to rule, no matter what. They don’t believe the 2020 election was a “fraud” because of any actual evidence. It’s far more that they just think that people who voted for President Joe Biden shouldn’t have a right to vote in the first place. By repeating the Big Lie, they are participating, along with Trump, in spinning a narrative that they are using, just like Trump, as a pretext to justify this deeper and more fundamental belief. It’s just that they know that there’s no way to argue out loud that only conservative white Christians should have the vote, so they use these conspiracy theories to perpetuate this ugly belief without stating it out loud.

As Cheney said, there’s no one paying a higher price for the Big Lie right now than the people who have been arrested for storming the Capitol on January 6. If anyone was going to be seized by regret and eager to blame Trump for lying to them, it should be these folks. But almost none of these people have expressed remorse for believing Trump’s lies. Instead, most of these people have refused to admit what they did was wrong or to back off of their Trump worship at all. They clearly don’t feel “betrayed” by a man whose lies sent them to prison. They just don’t feel on a fundamental level, like they were lied to. Attempting to overthrow democracy was their desire all along. For the rioters, like Trump, the Big Lie is just a pretense.

If Republican voters were innocent victims who actually believed the election was stolen, then yes, that’s a belief that could be rattled with facts. But mostly, they’re people who don’t care about facts. They just want to run the country and don’t care if they have to dismantle democracy to do it. That said, there is another audience that might be moved by this cascade of testimony from Republicans explaining that the Big Lie was always a lie: Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Despite mounting public pressure on the Department of Justice to press charges against Trump for sedition, fraud, and incitement of the riot, there’s been very little public evidence that Garland is ready to move forward. The hope is that his reluctance comes back not to political machinations, but to the question of how likely a prosecution of Trump is to succeed.

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As Noah Bookbinder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington pointed out recently at Salon, the case against Trump could very well come back to the question of intent. Did Trump knowingly lie about the 2020 election to create a pretense for a coup? Or was the man simply delusional and acting in good faith?

It’s a dumb question, perhaps, as Trump has never acted in good faith in his life. But convincing a jury otherwise might be an uphill climb. After Monday’s hearing, what is absolutely undeniable is that Trump was told, over and over by his advisors, that he lost the election. He knowingly blew them off to tell petty lies instead. It matters that Trump was claiming “fraud” before the ballots were cast, as this shows he always intended to lie. It matters that his biggest cheerleader was Rudy Giuliani, whose constant drunkness removed the normal human inhibitions against chronic lying. All the evidence points to deliberation, not delusion.

After Monday’s hearing, what is absolutely undeniable is that Trump was told, over and over by his advisors, that he lost the election

The case that Trump did all this very much on purpose is, as the committee showed, a slam dunk. Garland says he wants to run the DOJ as an apolitical organization that follows the evidence where it leads. Well, it leads directly to the conclusion that Trump is a criminal. Any failure to prosecute now should be seen as exactly the kind of political game-playing Garland said he wanted to avoid.

Diana Yen’s refreshing strawberry rose smoothie has three beautiful layers

Some helpful tips for recipe ingredient swaps and smoothie assembly:

• In the recipe, you can replace coconut yogurt with plain yogurt. Just make sure it is unsweetened.
• To make strawberry slices into heart shapes, take a strawberry and cut a v shape out of the top before slicing vertically.
• If half a cup of strawberries is not enough to get your blender going, you may have to add up to 2 cups more strawberries in order for them to purée completely.
• To get crisp, even layers It is highly recommended you make the chia layer the night before, and use a spoon to add each layer to the cup instead of pouring them in.
• The best (and funnest) way to drink this smoothie is with a straw.
• You can keep any extra layers chilled in tightly sealed containers for up to a week.
• Have fun mixing up the ingredients! I have done a yellow version with mango instead, for example.

Hear more about this recipe from Anita on our podcast The Genius Recipe Tapes. — Genius Recipes

Watch this recipe

Diana Yen’s Strawberry Rose Smoothie, from Anita Shepherd

Yields

2 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Ingredients

For chia pudding layer:

1 cup coconut water
1 cup coconut yogurt
2 tablespoons agave
1/4 teaspoon rosewater
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup chia seeds

For strawberry layers:

1/2 cup fresh strawberries, stemmed and halved
1 cup coconut yogurt
1 cup frozen strawberries
1/4 cup ice
2 tablespoons agave, plus more for dipping strawberry slices
Fresh sliced strawberries and coconut flakes, to garnish

Directions

Make Chia Pudding: Whisk coconut water, yogurt, agave, rosewater, and vanilla extract together in a bowl or quart container. Pour in chia seeds and whisk. Cover and refrigerate for at least one hour or overnight.
Make Strawberry Purée: Place 1/2 cup fresh strawberries in a blender and purée until smooth. Set aside.
Make Strawberry Smoothie: Place coconut yogurt, frozen strawberries, ice and agave into a blender. Blend until smooth.
To assemble, carefully dip strawberry slices in a little agave and press firmly against the inside of each glass to decorate. Fill glasses in layers with strawberry purée, chia pudding, and strawberry smoothie. Top with coconut flakes. Serve cold.

Top GOP negotiator tries to defend bipartisan gun deal against pushback from right-wingers and NRA

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of U.S. senators, including Texan John Cornyn, announced Sunday the framework for a legislative deal to address gun violence in the aftermath of the May 24 mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead at a Uvalde elementary school.

The tentative deal, for which Cornyn was the lead negotiator, includes a mix of modest gun control proposals and funding for mental health. It would incentivize states to pass “red flag” laws, which are designed to keep guns out of the hands of individuals who pose a threat to themselves or others; boost funding for mental health services, telehealth resources and more school security; permit juvenile records to be incorporated into background checks for purchasers under the age of 21; and crack down on the straw purchase and trafficking of guns.

“Today, we are announcing a commonsense, bipartisan proposal to protect America’s children, keep our schools safe, and reduce the threat of violence across our country,” read a joint statement from the bipartisan negotiating group that included Cornyn and nine other Republican senators. “Our plan increases needed mental health resources, improves school safety and support for students, and helps ensure dangerous criminals and those who are adjudicated as mentally ill can’t purchase weapons.

“Most importantly, our plan saves lives while also protecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding Americans,” the news release stated. “We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our commonsense proposal into law.”

Sources involved with the negotiations caution there is not yet legislative text to the deal and its prospects remain fragile as the Senate heads into what is expected to be a frenetic week. That 10 Republican senators signed onto the plan adds confidence that a potential bill will overcome the 60-vote threshold needed to bypass a filibuster threat.

The 10 Republican senators are Cornyn, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, Roy Blunt of Missouri, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Rob Portman of Ohio and Mitt Romney of Utah.

On Twitter, President Joe Biden signaled support for the proposal.

“It does not do everything that I think is needed, but it reflects important steps in the right direction,” he said. “With bipartisan support, there are no excuses for delay. Let’s get this done.”

Cornyn, who touts an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, on Sunday seemed eager to defend the package from any potential conservative pushback. On Twitter, he accepted an invitation to appear on the radio show of conservative commentator Dana Loesch, a former NRA spokesperson who is opposed to red flag laws, to discuss the proposal. He also seemed to suggest that the measure might have prevented the Uvalde shooting.

“Enhanced background check of juvenile court, police, and mental health records likely would have disclosed what everyone in the community knew,” he wrote. “The shooter was a ticking time bomb.”

By leaving the issue of red flag laws to the state, the senators made it unlikely that one would go into effect in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott briefly floated the idea after the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas. But he soon abandoned it after he said he observed a “coalescence” in the Texas Legislature against the proposal. Since then, the Legislature has been aggressive in expanding gun rights, including passing a law allowing people to carry handguns without a license.

Over the last two decades, there are few challenges that have stymied the U.S. Senate quite on the scale of regulating firearms. But in the weeks since massacres in Uvalde and Buffalo, many senators have professed a determination to find a path to pass a gun bill.

The proposal falls short of gun control advocates’ calls for measures like raising the age at which people can buy AR-15-style weapons from 18 to 21. But it won praise for many groups, given how hard it has been to pass any kind of gun control legislation in recent years. The groups Everytown for Gun Safety, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action said in a press release that the framework “would provide the basis for the first major federal gun safety law in nearly 26 years.”

The U.S. House passed last week a package of gun regulation bills that are all but certain to fail in the Senate. The measures would have raised the purchasing age for semi-automatic rifles and banned high-capacity magazines.

Democrats are signaling that nearly any Senate-passed gun bill — even a modest one — will receive a positive reception in the House chamber. On Sunday afternoon, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a statement confirming as much.

“While more is needed, this package will take steps to save lives,” she said, praising the red flag component specifically. But she also indicated a desire for measures that are not in this deal.

“As we move forward on this bipartisan framework, we are continuing to fight for more life-saving measures: including universal background checks, banning high-capacity magazines and raising the age to buy assault weapons, which must also become law,” she said.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would bring the bill to the Senate floor as soon as possible.

Disclosure: Everytown for Gun Safety has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/12/senate-uvalde-gun-john-cornyn/.

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Former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt: Network knew early on that Trump lost

Fox News on Monday aired footage of a former Fox News editor suggesting that the network knew President Biden won the 2020 election in several battleground states, even though the channel went on to promote Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud for months.

The development centers on Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor who worked on the channel’s decision desk during the 2020 presidential election. Stirewalt – who was fired after the network called Arizona, a swing state, in then-candidate Joe Biden’s favor – provided testimony this week to the Jan. 6 select committee about the circumstances behind the controversial call.

“Mr. Stirewalt, after the votes were counted, who won the election?” asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

“Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. of the great state of Delaware,” Stirewalt responded.

twitter.com/girlsreallyrule/status/1536372697176809472

At one point, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., another member of the committee, asked Stirewalt what the chances were of Trump having won Arizona after the state had been called for Biden.

“None,” the pundit replied, explaining that most recounts are conducted on the basis of hundred-vote margins. “You’re better off to play the Power Ball than to have that come in.”

Stirewalt’s testimony came just hours after he laid into both sides of the aisle in a Monday column for the news conservative site The Dispatch, where he served as a former politics editor. In it, Stirewalt argues that both sides of the aisle failed to expeditiously hold an effective impeachment trial after Donald Trump’s coup attempt.

“A single, short article against Trump for trying to disrupt the transfer of power, including by sending an angry mob to the Capitol, would have been very hard to vote against for Republicans who hadn’t been part of the power grab,” he wrote. “If such an article had been passed by the House that week, I believe Trump would have been convicted and removed from office by the Senate.”

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“Instead, Pelosi put three cable news stalwarts and sharp-elbowed partisans in charge of drafting the articles: Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, David Cicilline, of Rhode Island, and Ted Lieu, of California,” he added. “What the House voted on a week after the attack was not designed to make it easy for Republicans to get to ‘yea.'”

Stirewalt also alleged that both the Democrats and Republicans fumbled on their investigation into the insurrection. Republicans, he said, failed to nominate anyone to the January 6 committee who did not promote Trump’s baseless claims and election fraud. And Democrats, Stirewalt added, “rather than adopting a somber, non-partisan tone,” were “out in advance boasting about how the hearings would hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections and ‘blow the roof off the House.'”

Stirewalt’s 2020 call wasn’t the first time he angered his own Fox News colleagues.

During the 2012 presidential election between Barack Obama and Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, the pundit correctly called Ohio in Obama’s favor before all the votes had been tallied. But Karl Rove, then a Fox News analyst, pushed back, saying it was a “very early call.” The disagreement led to a significant on-air dustup between Rove, Fox host Bret Baier, and former Fox host Megyn Kelly.

Lauren Boebert tells church crowd that she prays for Biden’s demise: “May his days be few”

Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., suggested that she prays for President Biden’s death during a Colorado church event this past weekend.

The Republican lawmaker’s remarks came during a Sunday family gathering at the Charis Christian Center in Colorado Springs, where she attacked the Democratic effort to regulate guns in the aftermath of two shootings in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.

“I do want you to know that I pray for our President. Psalm 109:8 says, ‘May his days be few and another take his office.’ Hallelujah! Glory to God,” Boebert said, garnering applause from the crowd.

twitter.com/patriottakes/status/1535771933165363200

A video of her comments was later shared over Twitter, where a number of users pointed out that the Psalms express hope for the death of one’s enemy. The next verse after the one Boebert cited states: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.” The chapter continues: “Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.”

I've got something worse I pray for, @laurenboebert

I pray that you spend the rest of your life with the shame and humiliation of being Lauren Fucking Boebert. https://t.co/s9nmqr2y0S

— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) June 12, 2022

The “Christian” crowd erupted in cheers

Squeaky Boebert gleefully adds a “hallelujah!” to her wish that Biden’s days be few

ChristoFascists are so “pro-life” that they’ll pray for you to die https://t.co/GhhR8qwkXH

— Lindy Li (@lindyli) June 12, 2022

Boebert, who is currently under a federal investigation over the possible misuse of campaign funds, has become notorious for her outlandish conduct since taking office.

During Biden’s State of the Union address back in March, the freshman firebrand heckled the president just before he discussed the death of 46-year-old son Beau, who passed away in 2015 from an aggressive form of brain cancer. “You put them in, thirteen of them,” she said along with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., in an apparent reference to the 13 U.S. soldiers who died during Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Rep Lauren Boebert gets booed after shouting while President Biden talks about his dead son Beau Biden. pic.twitter.com/dEEIYbAJzY

— Colby Hall (@colbyhall) March 2, 2022

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Boebert is not the only Republican to invoke scripture in expressing their desire for the death of a Democratic president.

Back in 2016, then-Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who recently lost a gubernatorial bid in his home state, called upon the exact same Psalms verse during Barack Obama’s presidency.

“You know, I think we are called to pray. We are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and yes, even our president,” Perdue said of Obama during a conservative Christian gathering in Washington. “You know, in his role as president, I think we should pray for Barack Obama.”

“We should pray like Psalms 109:8 says,” the Republican added. “It says, ‘Let his days be few, and let another have his office … In all seriousness, I believe that America is at a moment of crisis.”

Perdue later said that he did not regret his remarks, calling them “a little humor.”

Ex-DOJ official testifies Trump pushed conspiracy theory about “Indian people getting paid to vote”

A former Justice Department official raised eyebrows when he testified that Donald Trump complained that Native Americans were paid to vote against him, but the claim appears to have originated with a White House staffer.

Richard Donoghue, who served as Trump’s acting deputy attorney general in December 2020 and January 2021, told the House select committee the former president claimed voter fraud had deprived him of re-election, and many observers were surprised by some of the baseless allegations.

“Dead people are voting, Indian people are getting paid to vote,” Trump said, according to Donoghue. “There’s lots of fraud going on here.”

Donoghue testified that he told the former president those allegations were false, and it appears that Trump heard the claims from Garrett Ziegler, an aide to then-White House economic adviser Peter Navarro.

“The young and earnest Garrett Ziegler rides to the sound of the guns in Nevada,” wrote Navarro in his book, “In Trump Time: A Journal of America’s Plague Year.” “He will soon find himself criss-crossing an Indian reservation investigating outrageously illegitimate bribes for Biden votes.”

Although some election advocates such as Nevada Native Vote Project did offer free food, gift cards and raffle entries to voters, the giveaways were available to all voters, and not in exchange for backing any specific candidate.

Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” when he convinced Trump to falsely declare victory: ex-aide

Former Trump aide Jason Miller told the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riots that Rudy Giuliani was without a doubt drunk when he told the former president to prematurely declare victory on election night 2020.

During Monday’s public hearings, the committee played video of Miller testifying about the atmosphere in the Trump White House on election night, where Giuliani was urging Trump to ignore the advice of his campaign staff and say he won the election before all ballots had been counted.

“He was definitely intoxicated,” Miller said of Giuliani. “But I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example.”

Miller then explained how both he and Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien had urged Trump to hold off on declaring victory until more votes had been counted, but that Giuliani called them “weak” and told Trump to say he won that night.

The committee then played deposition of Stepien testifying that Trump also rejected his advice to hold off on declaring victory, and that “he was going to go in a different direction.”

The committee then played video of Trump on election night declaring that the election was “a fraud on the American public” while also insisting that “we did win this election.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Trump’s “free speech” platform Truth Social bans users who post footage from Jan. 6 hearings

Users of Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, were reportedly suspended after mentioning the ongoing January 6 hearings, putting the site’s “free speech” bona fides in a harsh light.

The platform, which professes to be “free from political discrimination,” came under scrutiny after multiple users took to Twitter to announce that they had been removed from the site after posting content that may have appeared unfavorable to Trump.

“My Truth Social account was just permanently suspended for talking about the January 6th Committee hearings,” tweeted user Travis Allen. “So much for ‘free speech.’ This is censorship!”

“I was suspended from Truth Social for posting about the January 6th hearing last night. Donald Trump is scared of free speech,” echoed Democratic strategist Jack Cocchiarella.

I was suspended from Truth Social for posting about the January 6th hearing last night.

Donald Trump is scared of free speech.

— Jack Cocchiarella (@JDCocchiarella) June 10, 2022

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Other users alleged that their accounts were censored and deactivated for posting footage of Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter, casting doubt over her father’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election, according to Insider.

Despite the platform’s apparent commitment to unfettered speech, Truth Social has unilateral authority to moderate content to its own liking. According to the site’s terms of service, Truth Social reserves “the right to, in our sole discretion and without notice or liability, deny access to and use of the service (including blocking certain IP addresses), to any person for any reason or for no reason.”

Truth Social also tells users it can “terminate your use or participation in the service or delete [your account and] any content or information that you posted at any time, without warning, in our sole discretion.”

This broad authority is vested in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media platforms from liability related to illegal content that’s published by third-party users.

Trump launched Truth Social earlier this year, partly in response to his ouster from Twitter following the Capitol riot. Since then, the platform has been riddled with logistical, financial and technical difficulties. The platform’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), has not reported any revenue, as Variety noted, and the company has said that it “may never generate any operating revenues or ever achieve profitable operations.”

Back in April, two Truth Social executives abruptly stepped down from their positions just ahead of a “critical juncture for the company’s smartphone-app release plans,” as The Guardian reported. And this week, federal investigators expanded their investigation into TMTG and its blank check acquisition company, asking for “additional documents and information” into whether the two entities conducted any illegal communications.

Fox News now airing Jan. 6 committee hearings live despite Tucker Carlson’s complaints: report

On Thursday night, June 9, a long list of television networks and cable channels aired the first in a series of public hearings that are being held by the January 6 select committee — including CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, C-SPAN and CNBC. Conspicuously missing from that list was Fox News, although its sister channel, Fox Business, did carry the event.

The hearings, as of Monday, January 13, moved from prime time to daytime, and Fox News decided to carry the second hearing. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson isn’t happy that the first hearing received as much attention as it did.

Carlson, a far-right conspiracy theorist who now has the highest ratings on Fox News’ prime-time lineup, attacked the hearings as Democratic “propaganda” and accused other networks and cable news outlets of “colluding” with Democrats. On his show, Carlson has defended the insurrectionists who attacked the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, describing them as well-meaning Americans who were merely expressing their understandable frustration.

Fellow Fox News opinion host Sean Hannity has slammed the hearings as well, calling them a “sham.” And his colleague Laura Ingraham has mocked the police officers who were injured while defending the Capitol on January 6, 2021, including Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell.

CNN’s Brian Stelter, describing Fox News’ decision to air the June 13 hearing but not the opening hearing on June 9, explains, “Fox’s argument seems to be that prime time is different from daytime: Prime is for opinion hosts like Tucker Carlson, who rejected last Thursday’s hearing, but daytime is for news. This plan means that Fox intends to show live testimony from one of its former employees, Chris Stirewalt, who was Fox’s digital politics editor during the 2020 election. Stirewalt went on Fox’s air on election night to defend the decision desk’s Arizona call. He was fired in the aftermath.”

Stelter adds, “Stirewalt has given numerous interviews and joined the upstart NewsNation channel, but he has always been somewhat circumspect about the specifics of those perilous days and weeks at Fox. So, it will be fascinating to see how his testimony fits into the narrative of the House committee. He will be up first on Monday, alongside a surprise addition announced on Sunday: Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien.”

Fox News has drawn criticism not only for its decision to fire Stirewalt, but also, for promoting the Big Lie — the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump through widespread voter fraud. And Fox News is facing a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which is suing Fox News as well as its competitors Newsmax TV and One America News (OAN) for promoting the false claim and nonsense conspiracy theory that its voting equipment was used to help now-President Joe Biden steal the 2020 election.

Fox News’ civil trial in the Dominion lawsuit is scheduled to begin in April 2023.

Trump campaign chief who planned to dish dirt on Rudy abruptly bails on Jan 6 hearing at last minute

Appearing on CNN’s “New Day” Monday morning before former Donald Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien excused himself from having to testify on national TV due to a “family emergency,” the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman claimed that, when he testifies, he is expected to focus on “bad actor” Rudy Giuliani activities pushing the “Big Lie.”

While Stepien’s attorney is reportedly going to make an appearance and read a prepared statement, Haberman suggested the former Trump, campaign manager and adviser has a bone to pick with the former New Your City mayor who had Donald Trump’s ear.

Speaking with host John Berman, Haberman explained, “Bill Stepien took over as campaign manager in July of 2020. He was in charge of the campaign on election night as Donald Trump was being urged by Rudy Giuliani, ‘Go say you won.’ Other advisers were saying, absolutely do not do that but Trump wanted to do it.”

“To be clear, Trump has agency here,” she added. “It’s not like he needed Giuliani to tell him to do that. Stepien was present when was told what the data showed, if there was a chance to thwart Biden’s win. Stepien is key to talking about what Trump was informed about over and over, the fact he lost.”

“You think he might have some opinions on Rudy Giuliani?” host Berman asked.

“I’m confident he has opinions on Giuliani, as almost everybody who worked on that campaign did,” she replied. “I think — he’s appearing under subpoena — that’s important to note. It’s not as if he’s showing up as a willing witness against Donald Trump. I do expect he will talk about how Giuliani was a pretty, in their minds, bad actor, saying things to Trump that certainly weren’t true and offering up all kinds of claims about fraud he did not back up.”

Watch below or at this link.

Bigger than Trump: Republicans will expose how the Big Lie took control of the GOP

If anyone thought that the Jan. 6 committee was going to confine itself to exposing the actions Donald Trump and his accomplices undertook to overturn the election of 2020, today’s public hearing will set them straight. The committee is going straight after the Big Lie itself.

While a scheduled appearance by Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien today was canceled “due to a family emergency,” his lawyer will still make a statement on the record. Meanwhile, former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, GOP election lawyer Ben Ginsberg, former U.S. Attorney for North Georgia B.J. Pak, who abruptly quit his position in Atlanta during Trump’s quest to overturn the election, and former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt are all set to testify today. All of them will testify about the truth of the 2020 election — and Trump’s knowledge of that truth. Every one of them is a Republican.

It is a smart strategy to tell this story through Republicans. It should quell some of the mistrust that’s been sown by Trump and his allies over the fact that the committee only has two GOP members after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to agree to the bipartisan independent commission and pulled all of his members from the committee when he was not allowed to put Trump’s personal henchmen on the panel. Republicans have since sought to smear committee Vice Chairman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinsinger of Illinois, both Republicans, as traitors and sell-outs. So whatever credibility the two had to persuade rank and file Republicans is gone. Independents probably don’t know what to think.

Having something on the record from both an important Trump campaign insider about what Trump was told about the election results and a respected Republican election lawyer like Ginsberg testify about the integrity of the vote is harder to ignore. Stirewalt worked for Fox News, the flagship Trump network, and was fired for calling the election for Biden after Trump and his rabid fans had a fit over it. He can testify to the accuracy of the data they used to call the election. Trump forced Pak to resign when he found no evidence of massive voter fraud in Georgia, and Schmidt was the lone Republican on the Philadelphia election board and was hounded out of the job when he attested to the integrity of the vote count. Both of them can testify that there was no voter fraud in their jurisdictions.

I’m sure Trump will say they are all Republicans In Name Only and not to be believed, but for at least a few GOP voters it must be a little bit difficult to buy that all of these Republicans are liars.

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Politico recently reported on a study done by researchers at the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin who interviewed 56 people who believed the election was stolen to get an idea why they think so. Perhaps surprisingly, they found that quite a few were not stuck in “tightly sealed, right-wing echo chambers,” and a majority “did not seem to subscribe to multiple conspiracy theories.” Instead, some believed that Trump’s rally sizes indicated that he couldn’t have lost the election and that the “visuals” they saw on election night in which the vote count changed as more votes were tallied was suspicious. Further, Trump’s portrayal of himself as a victim made them believe that “actors on the left would go to extreme and illegal lengths to see that he was out of office.” The researchers suggest that the news media should change the way they report election results but I think that misses the point: Trump primed them to doubt the election results long before it was held.

Trump is the one who made the case that rally sizes indicate that he couldn’t possibly have lost the election. (This is silly, of course, because the campaign happened during the pandemic and Joe Biden made the prudent decision not to hold super spreader events and kill his own voters.) And a week before the election, Jonathan Swan of Axios reported that Trump was telling associates that he planned to declare victory on election night if it looked like he was “ahead” knowing that mail-in votes, which they expected would be heavily Democratic, would be counted later. Trump told Swan:

“I think it’s a terrible thing when ballots can be collected after an election. I think it’s a terrible thing when states are allowed to tabulate ballots for a long period of time after the election is over.” He continued: “I think it’s terrible that we can’t know the results of an election the night of the election. … We’re going to go in the night of, as soon as that election’s over, we’re going in with our lawyers. We don’t want to have Pennsylvania, where you have a political governor, a very partisan guy. … We don’t want to be in a position where he’s allowed, every day, to watch ballots come in. See if we can only find 10,000 more ballots.”

(That last quote is rich considering that he’s the guy who called up the Georgia Secretary of State and asked him to “find” 11,780 votes.)

Trump and his henchmen were preparing to challenge the validity of the election and suggest that vote that were counted later we illegitimate from the very beginning. Those Republican voters may not know why they were suspicious, but if they had been listening to Trump for months leading up to the election it’s not hard to figure it out.

In a bit of hopeful news, the researchers did find that some of these people might be open to new information. One said “a lot of people were expressing uncertainty as they were sharing their thoughts with me, and they were saying that this felt so complicated to them.” Respondents also didn’t feel as if they had anyone they could trust to help them sort out the questions they still had but were interested in learning more, researchers noted. If a few of them take the initiative to tune in to the hearing today, they aren’t going to see a typical partisan food fight but rather a sober inquiry featuring cooperating Republican witnesses laying out the facts. And what they will learn is that Donald Trump’s story about the stolen election is a Big Lie and everything else that happened was a fraud to illegitimately hold on to power.

The committee starting with Trump’s lies about the stolen election is necessary to understand everything that came next. He was laying the groundwork long before even one vote was cast. Trump knew he would never concede no matter what. In fact, he told us so all the way back in 2016. Why would we have ever thought otherwise?

Sheriff releases photos, addresses of 31 “Patriot Front” members accused of targeting Pride event

Idaho authorities on Saturday arrested 31 alleged members of the white supremacist Patriot Front after they were found in the back of a U-Haul truck with riot gear.

Video published online showed police opening the back of the truck to discover dozens of masked men in matching Patriot Front outfits and riot gear in Coeur d’Alene. The truck was stopped near an Idaho Pride event. Officials at a news conference alleged that the group planned to riot at the park where the event was held, as well as other locations. The men were equipped with shields, shin guards, and at least one smoke grenade, according to police.

“It is clear to us, based on the gear that the individuals had all with them, the stuff they had in their possession and in the U-Haul with them, along with paperwork that we seized from them, that they came to riot downtown,” Coeur d’Alene Police Chief Lee White told reporters.

Patriot Front Fails are always what makes a good day. pic.twitter.com/xBnfaX5pwB

— Daryle Lamont Jenkins (@DLamontJenkins) June 12, 2022

Police stopped the truck after a report from a tipster who said “it looked like a little army was loading up into the vehicle” of a hotel parking lot, White said. “I don’t think this would have been as successful had we not had one extremely astute citizen who saw something that was very concerning to them and reported it to us,” he told reporters.

Authorities had also received information “over the last couple days that there were a number of groups that were planning to disrupt today’s activities,” he added.

Police said the men wore Patriot Front patches and insignia.

“If you go online, look up ‘Patriot Front,’ that’s exactly how these individuals are dressed,” White said.

Patriot Front is a white supremacist group formed by former members of another white supremacist group, Vanguard America, after the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The group, which calls for the formation of a white ethnostate, is one of the most active white supremacist groups in the country and frequently holds masked demonstrations to hide its members’ identities.

“It appears these people did not come here to engage in peaceful events,” said Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris.

Norris on Sunday released mugshots of the men and a list of all their names and addresses.

All of the men were charged with conspiracy to riot, a misdemeanor, and have since bailed out, according to White.

These are the faces and names of the members of the neo-nazi cult Patriot Front who were arrested yesterday in Idaho for conspiring to riot at a Pride event.

Full size images (and the guy who didn’t fit neatly in collages) in the Facebook link.https://t.co/3yeLnXvQuR pic.twitter.com/hghiYx3zLY

— Kris Goldsmith (@KrisGoldsmith85) June 12, 2022

Among those arrested was Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau. Another arrestee, Mitchell Wagner, was previously arrested for defacing a mural of famous Black Americans at a St. Louis college last year, according to the Associated Press.

Only one of the men was from Idaho, White said. The others were from 11 states, including Washington, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Colorado, South Dakota, Illinois, Wyoming, Virginia, and Arkansas.

The FBI is assisting local police in investigating the alleged plot, FBI Public Affairs Specialist Sandra Yi Barker told CNN.

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The group’s members perceive Black people, Jews, and the LGBTQ+ community as enemies, John Lewis, a violent extremism expert at George Washington University, told the AP. They typically find “local grievances to exploit, organizing on platforms like the messaging app Telegram and ultimately showing up to events marching in neat columns, in blue- or white-collared-shirt uniforms, in a display of strength,” he explained.

Patriot Front and other far-right groups have increasingly focused on anti-LGBTQ rhetoric.

“That set of grievances fits into their broader narratives and shows their ability to mobilize the same folks against ‘the enemy’ over and over and over again,” Lewis said.

The Idaho arrests come amid a growing number of anti-LGBTQ+ incidents during Pride month by right-wing extremists. The same day, police said five men believed to be members of the Proud Boys — whose leaders and members were charged with violence and conspiracy in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot — disrupted an LGBTQ event called Drag Queen Story Time for preschoolers in San Francisco.

“The men made homophobic and transphobic remarks against a member of the LGTBQ+ community who was hosting the event,” Alameda County Sheriff’s Dept. Lt. Ray Kelly told KGO-TV. “There was no physical violence. Deputies responded to the disturbance and are conducting follow up to identify the group of men and their affiliation.”

Kelly added that the department is investigating the incident as a hate crime and “will also address the annoying and harassing of children.”

Read more:

Cult expert Steven Hassan sees 95% chance of worsening pro-Trump violence

It has been almost a year and a half since Jan. 6, 2021, when Donald Trump and his cabal attempted to nullify the results of the presidential election, and by doing so effectively bring an end American democracy. By any reasonable standard, this was the greatest crime committed by an American president in the country’s history.

Last Thursday night, the House committee tasked with investigating Jan. 6 and the larger threat to American democracy held the first in a series of televised hearings. Its preliminary findings are that Trump and numerous allies, including Republican members of Congress, orchestrated a sophisticated, well-funded, nationwide effort that included the Big Lie and other propaganda about “election fraud,” dozens of spurious legal challenges designed to subvert the electoral outcome and undermine public faith in democracy, and other attempts to rig the outcome in Trump’s favor.

The coup plot also involved premeditated political violence and terrorism as seen in the attack on the Capitol by right-wing paramilitaries and thousands of other Trump followers. Trump’s coup plot also involved proposals to invoke martial law and use the military and other security forces to “confiscate” voting machines and presumably engage in other nefarious tasks as ordered.

The ultimate goal of this elaborate plot was for Trump to remain in power indefinitely as an political strongman who rules by declaring a perpetual “national emergency” or finding some other quasi-legal justification to end democratic government.

Trump and his cabal’s plan came much closer to succeeding than most people recognized at the time. In that sense, the events of Jan. 6 were practice for a future coup attempt — one far more likely to succeed, given that America’s pro-democracy forces are being defeated at almost every turn.

Many people would like to erase the fact that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump elected in order to undermine American democracy. His plan was remarkably successful.

There are many people who would prefer to erase this fact from memory and history: Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his intelligence services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, with the goal of putting Donald Trump in power and thereby undermining and destabilizing American democracy. As confirmed again by the House Jan. 6 committee’s presentation, Putin’s plan was remarkably successful.

In fact, none of this is a revelation; with the exception of a few new details, all this information has been public knowledge for some time. The real power of the House committee’s first hearing lay in efficiently connecting the dots, navigating a mountain of evidence, and ultimately framing a devastating case that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators should be prosecuted and convicted on numerous criminal charges.

In just over two hours, the committee provided new information that confirmed some of the rumors and rumblings around Trump’s coup plot and the events of Jan. 6. Some of Trump’s Cabinet members, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power following the attack on the Capitol. Vice President Mike Pence reportedly refused to consider this despite ample justifications given Trump’s erratic and dangerous behavior.

Trump was reportedly elated that his followers wanted to kill Mike Pence for refusing to cooperate with the coup plot. But Trump cannot plausibly claim that he didn’t know he had lost the election: He was repeatedly told by political advisers and legal experts, including Attorney General Bill Barr, that Joe Biden had won the election and that voter fraud had not played a role.

At least one Republican member of Congress sought a pardon from Trump for his role in the coup plot, a de facto admission of criminal culpability. As for the violence on Jan. 6, to a significant degree it was premeditated and planned well before Jan. 6 and Trump’s speech urging his followers to march on the Capitol. Members of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have now been indicted by the Justice Department on charges of seditious conspiracy.

In total, as outlined by the House select committee during their first public hearing on Thursday, the unifying theme so far is that Donald Trump is a criminal mastermind, with a remarkable ability to corrupt the people around him by ensnaring them in a web of antisocial and pathological values and behavior. Donald Trump is a political cult leader, an apparent sociopath and an incipient fascist strongman who commands the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans.

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To discuss the current state of the Trump cult I recently spoke with Steven Hassan, one of the world’s leading experts on cults and other dangerous organizations, as well as how to deprogram people who have succumbed to “mind control.” Hassan was once a senior member of the Unification Church, better known as the “Moonies.” He is now founder and director of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center and has written several bestselling books, including “Freedom of Mind,” “Combating Cult Mind Control” and, most recently, “The Cult of Trump.”

In this conversation, Hassan discusses Trump’s enduring power over his followers and why it has outlasted his presidency. He argues that right-wing Christian churches, Fox News, conspiracy theorists, right-wing social media and other propaganda machines are keeping Trump’s cultists loyal and further radicalizing them. He warns that the cult is actually bigger than Donald Trump and may outlast him, because “today’s Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom.”

Hassan also reflects on his own experience as a cult member who was conditioned to be willing to kill on command. He warns that Trump’s most loyal followers would likely obey such orders targeting Democrats, liberals, progressives, Muslims, black and brown people, or other designated enemies.

Donald Trump is a political cult leader, but he is no longer president. How does that influence his power over the cult members? What happens next?

My thesis was completely confirmed after Jan. 6 and all the efforts by the GOP to avoid being held accountable for their role in Trump’s coup attempt.

Trump would never have been elected if not for the thousands of right-wing Christian ministers who told their followers he was doing the work of God. As a cult leader, he was a perfect fit for their beliefs.

I agreed to write “The Cult of Trump” with the knowledge that Trump was a malignant narcissist. He fits the stereotypical profile of a cult leader. I viewed him as the leader of a cult of personality. His business is also part of his cult. As I began to do the research for my book, it became very clear to me that he would not have been elected president if not for the thousands of new apostolic reformation ministers supporting him and then telling their millions of followers to believe in Trump as someone doing the work of God. They represent a right-wing Christian religious movement that does not believe in equality under the law, or in civil rights for women and those not of their faith. These right-wing Christian leaders want to destroy any type of organized effort to advance liberty and freedom and knowledge. Trump as a cult leader and authoritarian is a perfect fit for their beliefs.

What is the role of the Big Lie in Trump’s cult and the larger movement?

The Big Lie operates on the assumption that the more extreme the lie, the average person cannot even imagine making up such a lie. The average person then rationalizes the Big Lie as being true because the opposite somehow cannot be true. The Big Lie is ultimately bigger than most people’s ability to contemplate it. It is just too much of a lie to not be true. What solidifies it is constant repetition, and it also works because the leader projects the Big Lie onto some type of enemy. Mind control cults always need an enemy — a devil to focus people’s anger and negative emotions on.

What is the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump’s cult? So many journalists and other professional politics-watchers still do not understand that Trumpism is much bigger than one man, or that it’s a mistake to say that the Republican Party was “taken over” by Trump and his cult.

Today’s Republican Party is part of an authoritarian cult movement that hates democracy and freedom. They want blind obedience. They want people to distrust science and reason and critical thinking. Another example of how cults work is the belief that a person can create their own reality, where if a person truly believes something then it must be true. Of course that is ridiculous.

That is why it is important for the Department of Justice to prosecute Donald Trump and the other top Republicans who were involved in the coup attempt. A message needs to be sent to the cult members that reality exists and that there are consequences for criminal behavior. Right now, these Trump Republican cult members believe that manmade laws do not apply to them, because they exist on some higher plane or alternate reality.

The Trumpists and other fascists are now burning books they deem to be “dangerous” or “un-American,” and targeting books by Black and brown authors or by and about the LGBTQ community. What is the role of book-burning and book-banning, in terms of cults and mind control?

Book burnings are an example of information control. That is a key part of the authoritarian cult. Book burnings are part of an escalating pattern that ends with arresting and killing journalists and other truth-tellers.

Republicans have wanted to destroy public education for decades. To have a theocracy or an authoritarian regime, you need uneducated citizens.

Republicans and other right-wing authoritarians have wanted to destroy public education for decades. Why? Because an educated citizen is what a democracy needs. To have a theocracy, for example, or some other type of authoritarian regime, you need uneducated citizens, especially young people. That is one of the main reasons why the right wing pushes for homeschooling and charter schools. The dumbing down of Americans is a hugely important part of their anti-democracy project.

Donald Trump has suggested that his followers must be ready to kill and die for his cause. He praises the Jan. 6 terrorists as patriots, victims and political prisoners. Michael Flynn has told people at his events that they should be prepared to “charge machine-gun nests” to defend their children against “critical race theory.” How does this fit into the relationship between the cult leader and his followers?

I was taught such things when I was in the Moonies. I was told to be prepared, if North Korea invaded South Korea, to go to the front lines and die. I was later trained to die or kill on command without hesitation. Michael Flynn is an expert on military intelligence. He knows exactly what he is going to do. Flynn is creating an army of people to engage in a civil war.

Who do you think is likely to follow such orders?

We need to start with the military vets who feel betrayed by the U.S. government. Some of them may also have emotional or psychological issues as well. There are many veterans in the cult of Trump, and they’re trained killers. If you make moral appeals and claim that you are acting in the name of God and country, then it is easy to get people to sacrifice their comfort and even their money, their marriage and their families for the cause. Once you make it into a matter of good and evil, and then psychologically condition a person that the other side are not really human, it is easy to get people to engage in lethal violence.

How do you explain Trump’s enduring power over his followers, and over Republican voters as a whole?

The biggest single bloc of true believers are the members of right-wing Christian fundamentalist churches and other groups. These are authoritarian religions where the members believe that their pastor is an apostle who is directly connected to God and getting direct revelations.

If the pastor says, “God wants Trump,” you’re going to believe in Trump. If the pastor says, “God gave me a revelation where we are now following Ron DeSantis. God’s taken the blessing away from Donald Trump,” then those people are going to blindly follow DeSantis. Why? Because they’re already in a mind-control cult.

How have Trump, the Republican Party and other right-wing leaders been able to successfully create an alternate reality for their followers?

If the pastor tells you God wants Trump, you’ll believe in Trump. If the pastor says God has taken the blessing away from Trump and we’re now following Ron DeSantis, those people will blindly follow DeSantis.

It started with an increasingly extreme Republican Party and right-wing movement. They have their own media, churches and so forth. The members are just voting for the party now, without doing much critical thinking. It was incremental at first, but now the Trumpists are the hardcore base of the authoritarian political movement. These diehard Republicans and other conservatives are in Christian religious cults, or they’ve been sucked into QAnon and other apocalyptic, “end of days,” great-reset conspiracy theories. It is all related.

Outsiders often say that Trump is dumb or stupid and make fun of his rallies. They say his speeches are incoherent. When I listen to Trump and observe his rallies, I see a dangerous and sophisticated propaganda machine and brainwashing operation. The use of repetition and the manipulation of emotions and violent imagery is highly intentional.

If they are already indoctrinated, these rallies and other repeated messaging are just more confirmation, reinforcement and community-building. It makes these Trump cultists feel like they are not alone, that they are part of a big powerful movement. Fox News is an integral part of this as well. When Fox News keeps claiming that it is the most powerful cable news network, that makes the viewers feel like they are part of a powerful community and movement. It is very strategic.

Many experts on national security, terrorism and related topics are warning that the United States is on the verge of a second civil war or a sustained right-wing insurgency, and that Jan. 6 was just the beginning. What is your estimate of the likelihood of Trump’s cult members engaging in widespread violence?

Ninety-five percent. I am certain there will be a civil war or other type of massive violence. I say this as a former cult leader who wanted to take over America and thought that democracy was Satanic, and that we must take over the world for God. Part of that mission was getting rid of Satan’s army. The likelihood of a second civil war in America, because of Trumpism and these other authoritarian cults, is very high.

Will the average Trump supporter participate in this violence?

I’m going to apply the rule of thirds: One-third will double down and engage in acts of violence. Another third will not follow the commands. The middle third will make their decision based on what their peers are doing. I wish the news media would understand the danger we’re in. The people who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God are going to be the ones committing most of these violent acts.

Read more on our 45th president and his long-term effects:

Rudy Giuliani: Still poisoning the airwaves with vicious Jan. 6 lies

Almost 18 months ago, thousands of our fellow Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol in an unprecedented violent attack timed to prevent the lawful certification of Joe Biden’s election as 46th president of the United States.

The siege continues over federally regulated broadcast airwaves, social media platforms and over the largely deregulated cable channels, with programming that insists what we all saw on Jan. 6, 2021, was not a violent insurrection instigated by the sitting president and aimed to extend his tenure, contrary to the U.S. Constitution and the will of the electorate.

It manifests in the form of denial by millions of Americans, enabled by a corporate media complex that includes Fox News and WABC 770 AM, the powerful New York talk-radio station whose 50,000-watt transmitter in Lodi, New Jersey, can be heard at night across much of North America. That’s the station where you can hear unrepentant chief coup plotter Rudy Giuliani continue to promote Trump’s delusional counter-reality narrative that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Like a dystopian plot line that allows there’s no escape, the Big Lie spawns yet another, and then another.

On Giuliani’s afternoon show on June 11, the day after the first televised hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, the former mayor of New York City tried to blame agents provocateurs from antifa for what he claims was the unjustified fatal shooting by Capitol Police of QAnon devotee Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to breach the locked door of the House speaker’s chambers.

“She had no gun, she had no weapon,” Giuliani told listeners, adding that the officer who shot Babbitt “had police reinforcements on both sides.” He then described the Jan. 6 select committee as “liars and crooks” and said the panel was “maybe the most disgraceful committee ever assembled by Congress. It is a desecration to democracy.”

Earlier this year, PolitiFact rated the claim that antifa was somehow implicated in Babbitt’s death as a “pants on fire” lie. The site tracked that disinformation from articles that reported the existence of a “fresh analysis” of two videos of Babbitt’s shooting, supposedly linking antifa activists to the confrontation with police. This was PolitiFact’s summary:

The claim builds off the unfounded conspiracy theory that Antifa drove the attack on the Capitol. The rumor flies in the face of substantial reporting and documentary evidence. The march to the Capitol was weeks in the making, with plans indicating the potential for violence drawn up in the open on social media forums and pro-Trump websites. Video and photographs from the scene show Trump-branded paraphernalia and flags, and well-known far-right personalities and GOP politicians were filmed participating in the riot. Some even broadcast their involvement on live-streams.

Yet this disinformation remains in heavy rotation on WABC. The station was purchased back in 2019 for $12.5 million by John Catsimatidis, a billionaire oil oligarch as well as a major Trump donor and sycophant. Other WABC hosts include nationally syndicated right-wing commentator and bestselling author Mark Levin. On the eve of the June 10 House hearings, Levin went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to suggest that Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be the target of the House inquiry.

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As Insider reported, Levin “sought to divert blame” for the Jan. 6 riot from Trump and his supporters to Pelosi, “baselessly suggesting she was behind security failings during the riot.” The former Reagan administration lawyer went on to suggest that Pelosi be put in “handcuffs and leg irons” and thrown into jail.

Giuliani’s claim on his talk show last week that antifa was somehow responsible for the death of Ashli Babbitt is a recycled GOP talking point, rated “pants on fire” by PolitiFact.

The House speaker has no personal responsibility for the physical security of the U.S. Capitol. That’s the responsibility of the Capitol Police Board, which would be responsible for requesting assistance from the National Guard. Since Washington, D.C., is not a state and has no governor, the D.C. National Guard is under the president’s command.

The canard that Pelosi was responsible for security was raised last summer by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a Trump confidant, at a press conference convened after the speaker blocked Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s selection of Jordan for membership on the select committee. Jordan and Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., were both rejected by Pelosi, who wrote that she took that “unprecedented decision” out of concern for “the integrity of the investigation.”

Both Jordan and Banks voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. Banks has said that participants in the Jan. 6 riot were “just Americans” who were unjustly being investigated “for the sole crime of planning a legal political protest.” Before Pelosi rejected Banks’ selection as ranking member on the select committee, he wrote that “if Democrats were serious about investigating political violence,” the committee would investigate not only the Jan. 6 riot “but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer” — meaning the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 — “when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked.” Pelosi had created the Jan. 6 select committee, he said, “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.”

For his part, Jordan was in contact with Trump leading up to Jan. 6 and publicly embraced Trump’s post-election strategy. He was also in contact with Trump on the day of the attack, as the president watched the siege at the Capitol unfold on television for three hours without taking action to quell the violence.

Last month, Jordan was subpoenaed by the House select committee, along with Minority Leader McCarthy and Reps. Scott Perry, R-Pa., Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Mo Brooks, R-Ala. That came after the GOP members refused to testify voluntarily and after Senate Republicans effectively blocked the formation of an independent commission to investigate the circumstances leading up to the Capitol attack.

“These members include those who participated in meetings at the White House, those who had direct conversations with President Trump leading up to the attack, and those who were involved in the planning and coordination of certain activities” on and before Jan. 6,” the House committee tweeted.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month, McCarthy and Jordan challenged the legitimacy of the committee’s actions. “One would expect this sort of inquiry from a banana republic, not from the U.S. House of Representatives,” they wrote. “By subpoenaing us and three other Republican members, the Select Committee is escalating its abusive tactics. This attempt to coerce information from members of Congress about their official duties is a dangerous abuse of power, serves no legitimate legislative purpose, and eviscerates constitutional norms. Just because members of Congress are responsible for writing the laws doesn’t give a select few license to subvert them.”

In December, when committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote Jordan seeking his voluntary participation in the hearings, Thompson laid out the Jan. 6 timeline and why Jordan’s knowledge of the events that day was critical to the committee’s work:

Despite the urgent requests that the President speak and instruct the rioters to leave, President Trump did not make such a statement for multiple hours as rioters attacked police and invaded and occupied the Capitol. The Select Committee has testimony indicating that the president was watching television coverage of the attack from his private dining room adjoining the Oval Office during this time period. Even after the crowd ultimately dispersed late in the day, then-President Trump, through his legal team, continued to seek to delay or otherwise impede the electoral count. And Mr. Trump’s tweet from that evening further revealed his perspective on the violence: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

We understand that you had at least one and possibly multiple communications with President Trump on January 6th. We would like to discuss each such communication with you in detail. And we also wish to inquire about any communications you had on January 5th or 6th with those in the Willard War Room, the Trump legal team, White House personnel or others involved in organizing or planning the actions and strategies for January 6th.

Much of the disinformation coming over the insurrectionist wavelength originates from those directly implicated in events leading up to the Jan. 6 attack. In addition to Babbitt, three other civilians lost their lives that day. The violent siege also contributed to the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick. Four other officers who responded that day subsequently killed themselves.

As WABC 770 blankets the airwaves with Trump’s alternate reality morning, noon and night, here on Planet Earth the fact pattern continues to suggest that the violent attack on the Capitol was premeditated. Consider the March 2021 arrest of Julian Elie Khater of State College, Pennsylvania, and George Pierre Tanios of Morgantown, West Virginia, for allegedly spraying an unknown chemical weapon — believed to be bear spray — into the faces of two Capitol police officers and one member of the D.C. Metropolitan Police, who was wearing a body camera on the day of the attack.

One of those officers was Sicknick, who collapsed several hours after the spraying incident and was hospitalized. He died the next day. While initial reports indicated Sicknick had been hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, the medical examiner reported that he died of “natural causes” after suffering two strokes. In an interview with the Washington Post, Dr. Francisco Diaz confirmed that Sicknick had been sprayed with a chemical irritant but had not suffered an allergic reaction, nor was there “evidence of internal or external injuries.” But “all that transpired played a role in his condition,” Diaz said.

According to the FBI court filing, Khater and Tanios, who assaulted Sicknick and other officers, “knew each other and grew up together in New Jersey.”

The FBI timeline reports that insurrectionists started to breach the Capitol complex around 2 p.m. Roughly 20 minutes later, both the House and Senate were adjourned and members were forced to flee. Congress did not reconvene until 8 p.m. that night. The chemical spraying of Sicknick and his fellow officers occurred at 2:20 pm, relatively early in the melee, as police were trying to hold back the mob behind bike racks.

“The officers were temporarily blinded by the substance, were temporary disabled from performing their duties and needed medical attention and assistance from fellow officers,” recounted the FBI in court papers. “They were initially treated with water in an effort to wash out the unknown substance from their eyes and on their face. All three officers were incapacitated and unable to perform their duties for at least 20 minutes or longer while they recovered from the spray.”

In one case, an officer suffered injuries to her eyes and “scabbing that remained on her face for weeks.” The police described the chemical agent used as being “as strong as, if not stronger than, any version of pepper spray they had been exposed to during their training as law enforcement officers.”

The criminal trial for Khater and Tanios was scheduled to get underway this month, but was postponed in April by a federal judge to permit plea deal negotiations to continue. Tanios, who was arrested trying to board a plane at Newark airport, has been confined at home, while Khater has remained in custody.

During the televised committee hearing on June 10, Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was assaulted twice on the day of the attack and was one of the three officers allegedly sprayed by Khater and Tanios, recounted the scene at the Capitol during the siege.

“When I fell behind that line and I saw, I can just remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” she testified. “It was something like I’d seen out of the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” Edwards continued. “I’m trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, I’m not combat trained. That day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat, hours of dealing with things that were way beyond any law enforcement officer has ever trained for. … I just remember that moment of stepping behind the line and just seeing the absolute war zone that the west front had become.”

Seated directly behind Edwards in the hearing room was Sandra Garza, Brian Sicknick’s longtime partner. She sobbed as Edwards recounted that Sicknick looked “ghostly pale” after he had been sprayed.

Garza is a licensed clinical social worker who described in a CNN opinion piece last year how her relationship with Sicknick grew out of their “love of animals, our military experience, and our passion for helping others — he as an officer, me as a clinical social worker.”

Because of COVID, neither Garza, nor Sicknick’s parents could see Sicknick in the hospital. After he died, Garza says she in initially avoided watching the coverage surrounding the violent siege of Jan. 6.

“I saw officers being brutalized and beaten, and protesters defying orders to stay back. … I kept thinking, ‘Where is the president? Why is it taking so long for the National Guard to arrive?'”

“But before his memorial a month later, something came over me: I wanted to see everything I could and understand what happened that day,” Garza wrote. “As I watched the videos, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I saw officers being brutalized and beaten, and protesters defying orders to stay back from entering the Capitol. All the while, I kept thinking, ‘Where is the President? Why is it taking so long for the National Guard to arrive? Where is the cavalry?'”

Garza faulted Republican members of Congress who lied “on TV and in remarks to reporters and constituents about what happened that day.” And the ongoing campaign of dishonesty, she reasons, continues to victimize those who were attacked on Jan. 6.

“By denying or downplaying the viciousness and trauma that occurred on January 6, members of Congress and the people who continue echoing their false narrative are engaging in a specific kind of psychological harm that is familiar to people who work in mental health,” Garza wrote. “It’s known as ‘secondary wounding.’ Secondary wounding, described by psychologist Aphrodite Matsakis, occurs when people ‘minimize or discount the magnitude of the event, its meaning to the victim, [or] its impact on the victim’s life.”

Garza concluded: “To know that some members of Congress — along with the former President, Donald Trump, who Brian and I once supported but who can only now be viewed as the mastermind of that horrible attack — are not acknowledging Brian’s heroism that day is unforgivable and un-American.”

Read more on our 45th president and his disgraced former attorney:

Mark Meadows aide claims they have proof he destroyed documents

During a panel discussion on CNN’s “State of the Union” a former key aide to Mark Meadows stunned host Dana Bash by admitting that the former White House chief of staff to Donald Trump destroyed documents after speaking to an associate who also worked for him.

Speaking with the host, Alyssa Farah Griffin stated that it was time that all of the truth come out about what was going on at the White House before and after the Jan 6th insurrection.

“There is testimony Meadows burned papers in his office after he met with [Rep.] Scott Perry, trying to challenge the 2020 election,” host Bash prompted. “Do you think Mark Meadows destroyed documents?”

“I’ve heard it firsthand, I heard it directly from someone with firsthand knowledge so I believe the testimony the committee has,” Farah Griffin replied. “I want to note this, related to the two conversations we’re having, someone smarter than myself pointed out that in 1974 during Watergate, inflation was 11 percent, yet Congress still investigated the president and was able to work to address inflation and deal with the economy.”

“American voters, we know the midterms are going to be about gas prices, they’re going to be about bringing down inflation, consumer costs, but we also need to get to the bottom of what happened on January 6th,” she continued. “We cannot have a corrupt former president who, by the way, I think is going to announce in the coming months that he’s, in fact, running again, get away with what was more or less a coup attempt against the United States. So, we need to be able to walk and chew gum. because this is a moment we need bipartisanship. Hopefully, we’ll see that as a result of these hearings.”

“I just want to go back to what you said,” host Bash interjected. “You do feel confident that — you know that Mark Meadows –or you feel strongly that the person telling is telling you the truth, that Mark Meadows destroyed documents?”

“I do and I expect to see that come out in testimony from the committee,” Farah Griffin quickly answered. “And, again, this goes back to, you know, I was in the House when we wanted to hold Secretary [Hillary] Clinton accountable for destroying documents and not upholding federal record-keeping.”

Watch below:

Facebook algorithm may favor GOP over Democrats

Facebook pages run by state and local level Republican Parties appear to have received more exposure and engagement than the same types of pages belonging to the Democratic Party, new research finds.

On Wednesday, June 8, research was made public highlighting an apparent “gap in engagement growth ‘unique to Facebook’ between the GOP pages and their Democratic counterparts by 2019.”

According to HuffPost, the findings also noted a distinct difference in the level of engagement for posts shared by both parties. Posts shared by local Republican Parties had “a doubling of the total shares” compared to Democratic posts.

The authors of the study also weighed in with more details about their findings.

“Regardless of Facebook’s motivations, their decision to change the algorithm might have given local Republican parties greater reach to connect with citizens and shape political realities for Americans,” the research authors noted.

“The fact that private companies can so easily control the political information flow for millions of Americans raises clear questions for the state of democracy,” they added.

Kevin Reuning, an associate professor at Miami University who also co-authored the study, took to Twitter with visual representations of their findings. With the visual, he tweeted about the “weird patterns” in the data.

“In 2018, local Republican parties on facebook started to receive substantially more attention than local Democratic parties did,” he tweeted.

In response to the research data reports, Meta spokesperson Dani Lever pushed back arguing the data “‘doesn’t add up’ to what Facebook’s 2018 change to prioritize ‘meaningful social interactions’ actually did for the platform,” per HuffPost.

Writing to NBC News, Lever wrote, “The trends here instead seem to coincide with a divisive election cycle, and since the differences between political parties in the U.S. have been growing for decades, the idea that a change to Facebook ranking would fundamentally shift how people choose to engage with political parties is implausible.”

“Barry” star Anthony Carrigan on NoHo Hank in the finale: “This wasn’t supposed to be funny”

Bill Hader and Alec Berg hinted at where “Barry” was headed when the title character, looking more haggard than ever, turned a hit into an impulse kill in the opening scene. Barry Berkman’s (Hader) inability to shed his past life as a contract killer has finally caught up with him, an inevitability accelerated by his former handler Stephen Root’s Monroe Fuches. At the end of a season spent dodging the vengeful loved ones of the people he’s killed, both Barry and Fuches are getting what’s coming to them.

So is Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler), whom Barry spared in exchange for his silence, only to find his acting career in ascent. That outcome is as improbable as Barry’s love Sally (Sarah Goldberg), getting her own TV show . . . which she lost, leading to a career implosion. The only thing the audience couldn’t see coming is Sally getting her hands bloody too, taking out her rage on an attacker who came for Barry and found her beside him.

“Barry is kind of f**king everyone’s life up, so to speak,” Anthony Carrigan, the actor behind audience favorite NoHo Hank, tells Salon. For once, Hank’s life is the only one Barry doesn’t directly ruin in some way this season. Instead Hank got to enjoy a sweet romance with his one-time Bolivian cartel rival Cristobal Sifuentes (Michael Irby), only to have his hopes dashed when Cristobal’s vengeful wife reclaimed Hank’s love and whisked him back to Bolivia.

Emboldened by love, or perhaps naïveté, Hank blindly followed Cristobal there only to end up chained to a basement radiator and, in a terrifying turn, was forced to fight for his life. Carrigan’s finale subplot resolves with Hank breaking from his cell and improbably killing some unseen wild beast, before stumbling upon Cristobal at the center of a bizarre torture scene. The weird part is, Hank’s ending turns out to be the most optimistic of all of them, although it’s unclear whether Cristobal is OK.

Carrigan, however, is thrilled to have gotten a chance to expand his Chechen mobster into much more than the show’s much-loved comic relief. This season’s closer shows Hank as a survivor driven by passion as opposed to a happy-go-lucky bungler who somehow manages to survive by accident. In our conversation we talk about how much this season changes Hank, what it was like to film that surreal escape and rescue, and whether there’s anything to be read in the exchange between the heartbroken mobster and this season’s single episode breakout delight, a wise and profoundly stoned beignet baker named Mitch (Tom Allen).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In the finale NoHo Hank is the only one who has a . . . well I can’t really call it a happy ending, but I would say he can see little bit of hope while everybody else is, you know, either in jail or fleeing the law.

Sure, yeah.

I’ve seen a couple of interviews where you said that Bill Hader hinted that would be the case at the beginning of the season. Do you see it as a positive ending for you and Cristobal, given the circumstances?

“This … wasn’t supposed to be cool whatsoever. It was messy, it was clumsy, and it was terrifying.”

Given the circumstances? Yeah, I think there is a lot of positivity in the sense that he kind of pulled off something that was incredible, where the odds were stacked against him. He literally showed up to Bolivia, not knowing where he was going, saying “Cristobal Sifuentes” out loud in the streets in hopes that he was going to find where his love had been kidnapped and taken. And he goes through this gauntlet of sorts in order to get to his love. That said, it is a positive ending, but I think it certainly has taken a toll on him.

This season placed everybody on separate tracks, so Hank only crossed paths with Barry on a very limited basis. What was your impression of how the season came together and how the overall story evolved?

Well, it’s one of those things that’s always takes me by surprise, because you look at each of these characters, on whatever track they’re on. And on their own, you couldn’t possibly imagine how they could be in the same story as everyone else. Right?

They’re all so distinct and unique. And each of these storylines is just so radically different. However, when you see them all come together, it just fits so nicely. You see so many parallel themes, and you start to kind of connect some dots in terms of how Barry is kind of f**king everyone’s life up, so to speak.

Bill Hader in “Barry” (Merrick Morton/ HBO)

At the same time, it occurs to me as I’m looking on the finale, that out of all the existing main characters, NoHo Hank may be the only one that could be in a position to save Barry from the mess he’s in.

I mean, who knows? That remains to be seen. But yeah, Hank, up to this point, has retained his buoyancy. But who knows how long that can last?

Hank has failed upward throughout the show, and his fecklessness has, in a very real way, saved his life a couple of times. And then at the very end with Cristobal, he finds a way to be heroic. From the outside, if you didn’t know Hank, he kind of looks like a genius: getting captured, breaking out, taking down this drug lord’s daughter and saving Cristobal. He looks like a great man of action. Did you talk about Hank in this scene finding his worth and his, I guess, “quality,” to go all “Lord of the Rings” about it?

Yeah. Love the reference. You know, I think that it was very intentional to have Hank, in his usual idealistic way, try to just wander in and hope it will all work out. In Hank’s mind he was going in a very kind of like “Romancing the Stone“-type way to get the love of his life back. And he’s met with this cold harsh reality of consequences. He’s been met with those consequences before, like on the bus that was lit on fire with him on with him inside [in Season 2]. But at that time, he had people to save him. At this point, he’s on his own.

So yeah, it was talked about that something lights up inside of Hank. It’s pure survival from that point on, which is why it was very intentional that there were no gags, there were no bits. This wasn’t supposed to be funny, and this wasn’t supposed to be an action sequence, in terms of him getting out. It wasn’t supposed to be cool whatsoever. It was messy, it was clumsy, and it was terrifying.

That really fits with what was going on with everyone else too.

Yeah.

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“Barry” is a strange show, in that the further it gets into its run, there are wildly funny sequences that are actually really dark. It invites you to laugh at the absurdity of some terrible situations more than its gags.

I do think that the show from the very beginning has done a wonderful job of subverting the audience’s expectations in terms of what is comedic, and what is violent or graphic. And that kind of expectation as to what the tone will strike is, I think, what what keeps the audience pretty sucked in. I think that’s an intentional move on the creators’ part, just to really mess with the audience. You really don’t know whether you’re going to get something comedic, or you’re going to get something kind of horrifying

They play with the audience’s expectations, but it’s not in like a masturbatory way. There is actually a payoff. There is a real kind of catharsis to what they’re doing. It’s intentional.

You’ve said that everything’s intentional. So let’s talk about Mitch the Beignet Guy. He’s this character who dropped into the show that everybody instantly loved, in the episode where he was featured. One thing that I noticed when I rewatched is that Hank is the only one who he didn’t just give advice to. He gave an invitation to him, which was strange. Have you been told that there’s a reason for that?

Oh, that I’m not sure of. Obviously Mitch the Beignet Guy is like, such an incredible character and really stood out. And I think, you know, it’s kind of amazing that Hank comes to him just blubbering and in tears, and the fact that he wants to open up a franchise with him is like, “What?” Who knows? I would be all in for that storyline. From your mouth to Bill’s ears!

Tom Allen in “Barry” (Merrick Morton/ HBO)

To be clear, I’m not asking if we going to see Hank open a franchise with Mitch. Don’t get me wrong, that would be great. The beignets could be dusted in cocaine. Why not? But the question is more about the fact that when you look back, you kind of realize that everything he said was right.

Yeah.

That got me to thinking about how your character is portrayed this season, in that there’s definitely kind of a halo of luck that buoys Hank. And I was wondering if that was a reaction to that, since Hank seems to be in the right place when it’s the wrong time for everybody else.

That’s true. That’s true. But I mean, I think also that although he is the head of a very serious crime syndicate, he has honorable intentions, and he’s really trying his best to kind of just do what is right. And yeah, and the role of Mitch the Beignet guy as just the kind of voice of reason is something that ties that whole episode together quite nicely.

“This season was extremely rewarding in that I got to see this new side of Hank.”

And there’s growth for Hank too from the beginning of the season, when he and Cristobal are in bed together and Cristobal says very sadly, “I lost all my buddies.” And Hank’s says, “Yeah, I lost all my buddies too,” and seems a little more casual. In some ways that seems to fit his character where he’s very kind of nonchalant at the darkest things. But I’m wondering if that’s changed now, based on everything that happened to him and Cristobal?

I certainly think that element of being aloof to all of those dark things – or even, you know, the luxury of not having to get his own hands dirty, or seeing or facing all these really horrific things – that time, I do think is at an end because he was almost killed. He witnessed something truly just atrocious. In the love of his life being being tortured in such a way. That sequence of survival and of saving the love of his life certainly, I think, damaged him.

That was a very elaborate scene – featuring him escaping, shooting what sounded like, what, maybe a lion? Then coming upstairs and witnessing this, what was a very almost David Lynchian sequence there.

Yeah, it was extremely rewarding, but it was also very challenging.

In what way?

Well, pretty much most of it is dependent on Hank just envisioning what is going on on the other side [of the wall] and not knowing what is happening to his best friends. And ultimately, the imminent threat that is ultimately trying to get to him . . . It’s an extremely heightened scene. So it required a lot of a lot of energy. And a lot of intensity.

How easily were you able to shake it off afterwards?

Oh, I can shake it off. I slept well, that night, for sure, because it was an exhausting sequence and an exhausting process. But, for the most part, I leave work at work. Actually, I leave work during the take. In between takes, I just take it easy and joke around. I like to just keep it light.

I’m guessing that Season 4 hasn’t really been broken yet. But what are you hoping to see with your character next season?

Well, this season was extremely rewarding in that I got to see this new side of Hank: who he was in a relationship, who he was behind closed doors, the lengths he was willing to go to, to protect the love of his life, also in response to running and hiding in the closet, this aspect of shame. I’m just really excited to continue to flesh this character out and find new elements to bring to the table. I imagine that will be the case. So that’s very exciting.

All three seasons of “Barry” are available to stream on HBO Max.

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The rise and rise of Harry Styles: how did the former boyband member become the biggest name in pop?

You’ve probably heard the name Harry Styles. He is the current “real big thing” in popular music.

But how did a former boy band star become such a huge musician and award-winning artist in his own right – and does he deserve all the breathless praise?

The hype began in 2010 as a member of mega group One Direction. Paul McCartney gave them his blessing as they clearly tapped into The Beatles legacy.

On a break since 2016, One Direction is still breaking records online. Their 2015 music video “Drag Me Down” recently passed one billion views on YouTube – seven years after its release.

Since going solo, Styles has wowed audiences as a fashion icon and performer, releasing his third solo album, Harry’s House, in May.

Styles’ latest single, “As It Was,” is already a world record holder for daily streams across multiple platforms, debuting in its first week with 43.8 million plays.

As a solo artist, he has won a swag of international awards, including Grammys, Brits and ARIAs.

His 2019 album, “Fine Line,” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts and is the most recent album to make it to Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

While Styles has groups of young female fans who have followed him since One Direction, his current fan base is much broader, brought together by the community and mood built through his music.

Substance as well as style

Styles’, um, style has been likened to iconic musician David Bowie in terms of gender and genre fluidity. NPR describes him as “dressed in the finery of rock’s legacies.” GQ called him “one of the best dressed men in the world” with “elegance and bold choices.”

In 1970, Bowie appeared on the cover of his album “The Man Who Sold the World” in a “man dress.” In 2020, Styles wore a tailor-made lace Gucci gown on the cover of Vogue.

The nature of his public profile means there has been intense scrutiny about his personal life. Styles has been repeatedly asked about his sexual orientation. His response has been to call these questions “outdated.”

In responding in this way he provides strong leadership for the young mainstream. He is essentially saying no one should need to justify or explain who they love.

Popular music becomes really powerful when artistic statements lead to action. Styles does this most overtly in the song “Treat People With Kindness,” which he performs draped in pride flags. This is a clear act that tells LGBTQA+ fans they are welcome.

Of course, Styles is privileged in terms of money, race and gender – and this means he can make art and take risks with less to lose than others.

As Billy Porter reminds us, queer people of color have been challenging expectations about representation for decades, often as a matter of necessity rather than mere choice.

The personal and communal in action

In addition to fine songwriting, which he does with some regular collaborators, Styles also draws from a diverse pool of influences.

Iconic artist Stevie Nicks referred to him as “the son I never had.” In return, Styles said Nicks’ songs “made you ache, feel on top of the world, make you want to dance, and usually all three at the same time.”

At Coachella in April 2022, he invited Shania Twain to perform with him. Introducing her, he said: “in the car with my mother as a child, this lady taught me to sing.”

The next week he invited Lizzo on stage, and together they performed “I Will Survive,” a tribute to their shared love of 1970s music.

Collaboration with other artists – particularly artists from different perspectives – shows Styles is open to exploring different territory.

Popular music doesn’t have one “sound” over time – it changes with fashion, technology and culture. Staying relevant means being able to embrace different ways of doing things.

“Harry’s House”

His new album, “Harry’s House,” shows another evolution in Styles’ musical career.

It builds on his pop music background and travels around between ’70s-style folk storytelling and various eras of great dance music. Lyrically, it moves from cryptic – “I bring the pop, you bring the cinema” – to explicit – “if you’re getting yourself wet for me, I guess you’re all mine,” mostly drawing praise from music critics.

Popular music matters because it brings people together. Harry Styles, and popular music like his, does this on a mass scale. Whether the Style (sorry) is your taste or not, his value is not only demonstrated in the millions of sales, but in the power of the connections he builds between his fans.

Liz Giuffre, Senior Lecturer in Communication, University of Technology Sydney

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

Why experts rarely speak of “curing” cancer anymore

There’s never been a better time to be hopeful about cancer. There’s never been a moment when both preventing and treating different kinds of cancers has been more possible. And with more and more of us now experiencing what look like actual, honest-to-God cures, it’s time to retire the concept of “the cure for cancer.”

“An unprecedented 100% of rectal cancer patients in a small immunotherapy clinical tria had their cancer disappear after immunotherapy.”

Last fall, Cleveland Clinic launched a vaccine clinical trial with the eventual goal of heading off triple-negative breast cancer in high risk patients. In late May, City of Hope cancer care and research center in Los Angeles and Australian biotech company Imugene announced their first first clinical trial using a cancer-killing virus in patients with advanced tumors. And then, earlier this week, there came astonishing news out of Memorial Sloan Kettering — an unprecedented 100% of rectal cancer patients in a small immunotherapy clinical trial had their cancer “disappear after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy” — a trinity so horrendous to endure they’re known to patients as “slash, burn and poison.”

Is the longed for cure we’ve been waiting for right around the corner, then? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple — because cancer is anything but simple.

“The cure” is a phrase that is fortunately less common than it was back in the 1969, when cancer researcher Sidney Farber took out a full page ad in the Washington Post issuing a challenge to the president; “Mr. Nixon: You can cure cancer,” the ad read. Just a decade ago, the New York Times asked, “Is the Cure for Cancer Inside You?”

Though the rhetoric has become more nuanced since, the phrase refuses to go away entirely. There are initiatives like the Susan G. Komen “Race for the Cure” and Wacoal’s “Fit for the Cure.” There are biopharmaceutical companies making sketchy claims about a “universal cancer cure.” And there are casual headlines in mainstream media outlets, like The Telegraph’s recent musing about whether “the cure for cancer” is in your gut. When the Biden administration ambitiously declared earlier this year the relaunch of the Cancer Moonshot plan to “end cancer as we know it,” they at least amended the goal to add a few words about “improving the experience of living with and surviving cancer.”

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I sometimes cautiously describe myself as cured. After receiving a rapidly fatal diagnosis of metastatic melanoma and entering an innovative immunotherapy clinical trial, I have not presented any evidence of disease in ten years. But I’m careful to try to make clear that my cure was not the cure.

Cancer isn’t one thing. It’s over one hundred things, over one hundred variations on a theme of uncontrolled cell growth, all with their own particular expressions. There are four types of breast cancer, four types of melanoma. As Jonathan Chernoff, MD, PhD, Cancer Center Director at Fox Chase Cancer Center, has explained, “It turns out cancer is a general term. There are lots of different kinds of cancer in different tissues that act in different ways. They’re not all caused by the same mutations and they’re not all going to respond to the same type of treatment.”

Genetic variations in all of us make each cancer its own unique experience. Some treatments work well for some people, and other people not at all. I didn’t have the right BRAF mutation for vemurafenib, a treatment that was approved by the FDA mere days before I was diagnosed at Stage 4. Is vemurafenib an effective treatment for a specific type of cancer? Yes. Would anybody call it “the cure” for cancer? Of course not.

Along with the truly thrilling prospect of more people being able to say they had, past tense, cancer, and even more never getting it in the first place, there needs to be space for thinking beyond all-or-nothing. Cures are great; I should know. And advancements in one form of cancer can often signal hope for treatments for others. Immunotherapy, for example, used be the dark horse of oncology. Today it’s an approved protocol for dozens of cancers, with clinical trials for even more — just like that promising rectal cancer trial out of MSKCC — chugging along right now. There have been incredible recent breakthroughs even in deadly cancers like pancreatic.

But those breakthroughs will continue to be, for the foreseeable future, very tailored propositions. As a researcher once helpfully explained to me, you’re not going to get a sweeping cure-all like penicillin for something as complex and variable as cancer. Frankly, the idea of lots of effective possibilities and treatments, instead of one magic bullet for the second leading cause of death in the US, is pretty amazing.

As we continue to make advancements in eradicating cancer, we can also make space for living with it. For certain patients, cancer is no longer a death sentence but merely a condition they can abide with. Some people’s tumors simply cannot be eradicated entirely. For them, the phrase “halting the progression” can be just as beautiful, and offer just as long and bright a future, as “cured.” Given the often invasive and arduous nature of treatment and the toll it can take on the human body and psyche, the goal of a spotless scan may be far less meaningful than a healthy overall quality of life anyway.

“Future cancer therapeutics will not win through a simple cancer-killing strategy,” the authors of a 2020 paper in the journal Cancers wrote. Instead, “We would likely benefit more patients overall by transforming cancer into a manageable chronic disease, rather than solely focusing on finding a complete cure ‘Holy Grail.'”

This is a line of thinking worth adopting, even for those of us outside of the research world. It would mean that a diagnosis wouldn’t come with a presumptive assumption we’re “battling” cancer. It would mean that one small word wouldn’t get to be the umbrella term for such a complex experience. It would mean, at this breathtaking time in science, shifting the narrative from a war on a single enemy to a story of incredible hope, for millions more living, breathing human beings.

More of Salon’s coverage of the quest for cures:

You won’t be able to stop making Andy Baraghani’s lemony pasta this summer

Lemons are one of the most heroic ingredients ever. Somehow, they’re able to stand up to salads, main dishes, and dessert squares alike. Lemons show up in our roast chickens to sustain us through winter, and they brighten up our summer in sorbets.

In Andy Baraghani’s bestselling debut, “The Cook You Want to Be: Everyday Recipes to Impress,” lemons are the undisputed star of a multitude of versatile dishes, from buttered potatoes with salted lemon to spicy cauliflower ragu with lemony breadcrumbs.

“Lemons are my favorite,” Baraghani writes. “Regular ol’ lemons.”

If you also believe that lemons belong in pretty much everything, I recommend you march into your kitchen tonight and make Baraghani’s gorgeous cacio e pepe with caramelized lemon. Melty, puckery citrus gives the beloved pantry supper standby a glamorous upgrade without adding a whole lot more time or fuss. When I recently made it for my family, I proceeded to shock myself with how much I greedily put away. It’s the kind of dish you make and then want to make again the very next night because you can’t stop thinking about it.

I omitted the rosemary from Baraghani’s recipe for a more summery flavor, and swapped out shallots for garlic, because frankly, that’s what I had on hand. Feel free to adjust this recipe to your own preferences, so long as you remember to be very generous with the cheese and pepper. You won’t be able to stop making this dish.

***

Recipe: Caramelized Lemon Cacio e Pepe
Inspired by Andy Baraghani’s “The Cook You Want to Be: Everyday Recipes to Impress”

Yields

4 servings

Prep Time

10 minutes

Cook Time

20 minutes

Ingredients

1⁄4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 small Meyer or regular lemon, thinly sliced, seeds picked out
1 (15-ounce) can chickpeas, drained
2 cloves garlic, minced
Fresh pepper and a generous pinch of sea salt
1 pound of your favorite pasta
1⁄4 cup butter, cut into small pieces
1⁄2 cup grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving

Directions

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
Heat a large pot or Dutch oven over medium heat and add the olive oil. Add the lemon slices and sauté, flipping from time to time, until they’re lightly browned, about 6 to 8 minutes. Transfer the slices to your serving bowl or platter.
Add the chickpeas into the oil and cook, stirring until slightly crisp and golden, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic, salt and lots of pepper and give everything a stir. Cook another 5 minutes or so.
Meanwhile, add the pasta to the boiling water and cook until just shy of al dente.
Remove 2 cups of the starchy pasta water from the pot and add them to the chickpea mixture. Simmer over medium heat. Stir in the butter, one piece at a time.
With a slotted spoon or kitchen spider, transfer the pasta to the sauce. Continue to cook, slowly adding in the Parmesan. Keep stirring until the pasta and sauce look well blended, about 3 minutes. You may need to add a tablespoon or two more of the cooking water.
Turn off the heat and stir the caramelized lemon back in, then return everything to your serving platter. Add more cheese and pepper before serving.

Cook’s Notes

I used gemelli to make the dish seen in the photograph.

Because I like burned things, I let my lemons get a little more blistered.

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Hushpuppies that quiet my homesickness

Good food is worth a thousand words — sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

My mother, Melissa, wasn’t much of a cook. But she loved making a quick spaghetti with ground beef, bell peppers, and mushrooms. Or a lasagna that was basically the same thing assembled in a different way. Nobody complained.

She had a killer sweet tooth, which I inherited. It led me to my baking career, which started in NYC pastry kitchens, and my job now as a recipe developer and tester. One night, when I was still in high school, we both got hit with a craving. We checked the pantry and found our conduit: a box of Bisquick. “Oh, I know,” she said. “Let’s make some doughnuts!” She mixed the Bisquick with water and formed a makeshift dough, which she spooned into shallow oil and fried until golden brown. We tossed them in confectioners’ sugar and ate them with our hands. Basically Café du Monde beignets, Carolina-style. Our food was never fancy or gourmet, but it checked the boxes.

I lost her four months ago. She was only 49 years old, and it was unexpected and unbelievable and unfair. She had visited me in Los Angeles just three days before, which left me with so many questions. Why now? What if she had known? Why am I the person she got to spend the last week of her life with? Not that I’d have wanted it any other way.

Taking care of myself has been an achievement ever since. Homesickness has taken hold alongside grief, and the only way I’ve been able to soothe it without flying across the country is cooking Southern classics. Anytime I’m going through a rough patch, I’ve always said making a batch of fried chicken will bring me back to center. It’s true. Staring into hot, bubbling oil gives you time to reflect.

Even though my mother wasn’t much of a cook, she spent most of her life working in hospitality — refilling your coffee, frying your eggs, telling you to have a great day from behind the cash register. Her final job was at Bennett’s Grill & Cafe in Calabash, North Carolina. She worked there for two years, and she loved it. She loved helping people, and she rarely left a room without a new friend (or three).

The first time I went in for a visit in 2021, she was so excited to introduce me to everyone. And for me to try the food: Carolina-style barbecue cooked in a 10-foot smoker right outside the restaurant, fried chicken, all the fixin’s (like coleslaw and fried okra), and her favorite menu item: warm, crispy little hush puppies coated in cinnamon sugar the second they left the fryer. Sinfully good.

A few months ago, I returned to Bennett’s for my second visit. This time, my mother was gone. They had a picture of her on the counter, big smile. When I walked in, the first thing I heard was, “That’s Melissa’s son.” Hot tears fell. Her coworkers hugged me, expressed their condolences, asked what I wanted to eat. I ate some barbecue and cried at a picnic table. I could barely look at the hush puppies, but I had to have them for her.

The owner’s daughter, Amber Bennett, let me come back in the kitchen and showed me how they make hush puppies: a just-add-water bag mix, a staple in the South. Scoop, fry, toss in sugar.

My hush puppies aren’t nearly as good as the ones at Bennett’s. But how could they be? I still think my mama would be proud.

Recipe: Cinnamon-Sugar Hush Puppies

How “The Boys” measures up with regard to TV’s full frontal assault

Before the third season’s title card appears, “The Boys” thrusts to the center of what its conflict between men and Übermensch is really all about, via an allegory about size and strength starring a villain known as Termite. Most of the series’ supers parody famous heroes from the Marvel and DC Universes, and Termite, as the moniker suggests, is the show’s perverse answer to Ant-Man, minus the goodness and charm.

What Termite lacks in those virtues he compensates for by overcompensating, as it were. In this case, he makes himself small enough to sprint between rails of coke as tall as he is before leaping inside of his lover’s urethra and gently walking toward the prostate as he strokes its walls.

Cocaine is a helluva drug, and Termite, who had a bump before shrinking, can’t stop himself from sneezing – which instantly reverts him to full size, exploding his ecstatic lover in half. Even by this show’s standards, this was an extreme gross-out, one doubling as a red carpet leading into a season thumping with parallels to real world threats shadowed by distressing social and political shifts.

There’s no evidence that its showrunner Eric Kripke intentionally pumped up the phallus references in the first few episodes for any other reason than to have fun with streaming’s liberal policy concerning full-frontal nudity. (We reached out to Amazon in the hope of interviewing him for this story; unsurprisingly, we did not hear back.)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CeeLwtxlqUb/

Still, in a show that counts among its second season highlights having one of its heroes do battle with an expanding super-schlong whipped around by a character called Love Sausage, this season seems to plug into its BDE with renewed vigor as the country faces an unforeseen masculinity crisis . . . in the form of its top hero Homelander (Antony Starr) coming unhinged.

By nature of what its title suggests, “The Boys” doesn’t need to show its fleshy bits to thump the table with its points about fascism and toxic misogyny. Homelander was ready to go full Nazi in the second season before his fascist lover was exposed and blown apart. Now he’s lonely, horny, and insecure which, combined with ultimate power and thin skin, is a deadly cocktail. Whether in full costume or completely nude, he’s an unapologetic you-know-what.

“The Boys” doesn’t need to show its fleshy bits to thump the table with its points about fascism and toxic misogyny.

Only one thing stands between his misdirected rage and a populace unable to defend itself against his power, and that is the public’s adulation. Worship is Homelander’s personal male enhancement drug, as it turns out. Being informed by his assistant Ashley (Colby Minnie) that his admiration among white males in the rust belt has gone up by 44% gives him a massive hard-on she can’t ignore, especially since he’s naked when she delivers the news.

When she becomes too flustered at his boner to continue delivering her status report, he yells at her, “That’s got nothing to do with you. Just keep going!”

The bleak undertow here is that Ashley is both a masochist and a sadist, taking her boss’s abuses and passing them down the line to ensure nothing ever gets better. Her utter loyalty to Homelander is rewarded by him asking her, with a look that truly threatens to kill her, if “her idiot brain is getting f**ked by stupid,” only to have her repeat the same line to an underling later. The cocky message here is that you’re either stabbing or being stabbed; lose control of the joystick and, as Termite’s unlucky lover found out, it’s game over.

Within “The Boys,” though, penile representations are always employed transgressively – for laughs, shock, or horror.

Scenes like the fourth episode’s hand-to-dildo battle check all three boxes, which kicks off with Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) assassinating a Russian oligarch by penetrating his skull with a device called the Black Noir Silent Screamer.

One cannot fully appreciate the irony of that joke without seeing it. Then again, doing that also requires a strong stomach.

Kimiko beating a roomful of armed Russian gangsters to death with assorted vibrators and sex toys is hilarious – and awesome, let’s be real – but it’s also a low-key tragedy. She hates her enhanced strength and invulnerability and despises being viewed as a weapon instead of a person. “I’m not your f**king gun,” she texts at Butcher.

“That is exactly what you are,” he fires back, reminding her and everyone else on his crew who has the biggest bat of the bunch.

Karl Urban as Billy Butcher in “The Boys.” (Courtesy of Prime Video / Amazon Studios)

“The Boys” is but one of many shows waxing phallocentric over the past couple of years, and in terms of pole count, plenty of other series are a few lengths ahead of it – “Westworld,” and “Minx,” to name two among HBO’s warehouse of options. And for all of its risqué scenes of superhero sexual excess, “The Boys” would have to make a concerted effort to catch up with “Euphoria,” which slapped viewers across the eyes with a 30-sausage parade in its second episode. Premium cable has long reigned as the main stage for most scripted drama poker tournaments, purely as a matter of show.

Quite recently, though, man’s true best friend has become a featured player in some narratives. There will always be shows that treat views of flaccid peen as a joke, as was the case with Mike Myers’ “The Pentaverate” and an opening episode sketch from Amazon’s revival of “The Kids in the Hall.” But in “Pam & Tommy” Sebastian Stan’s Tommy Lee Jr. – a prosthetic, to be clear – plowed new ground by engaging his owner in a serious vein-to-brain conversation about love and fidelity.

Of course, one can easily view this scene and anything else in “The Boys” as a simple off-color joke – way off. The implication of full frontal male nudity is malleable that way on television, even when it’s merely implied, as is the case with Homelander’s fully raised mast. It can symbolize a broadly apparent wrong or add soft levity to a grim situation.

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In some extensions, though, it is a compass whose true North is authoritarianism. Homelander has personality traits in common with an offstage public persona haunting our own lives. That’s certainly no accident, which makes it a scary thought to see him physically and emotionally naked, and tumescent with the realization that he can get away with anything and people will love him anyway.

The implication of full frontal male nudity is malleable on television.

This week of all weeks sharpens the dangerous absurdity of that subplot, what with American TV viewers divided between witnessing the House Congressional Committee hearings on the insurrection that took place on January 6th, 2021, and those choosing to believe the lies claiming its extensively researched findings to be propaganda.

“The Boys” presents a world where propaganda is as inescapable as rulership by force and physical power – and between the omnipresent Vought, the government, and Earth’s strongest and least controllable, it’s a never-ending measuring contest.

The polite way to sum up our situation is that the patriarchy is shoving injustice down our throats. “The Boys” way of describing it is that dicks are everywhere and ready to club anyone into submission who doesn’t bow before them. The only defense is to harden up and hit back.

New episodes of “The Boys” debut Fridays on Prime Video.

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