Judge’s ruling on CDC mask mandate highlights the limits of the agency’s power

The role that the federal government plays in containing future epidemics will hinge on the outcome of an appeal of this week’s court ruling that overturned the mask mandate for travelers on airlines, trains, and the nation’s mass transit systems.

A federal court judge in Florida said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had overstepped its authority in requiring masks on public transportation, a mandate that legal experts considered well within the bounds of the agency’s charge to prevent the spread of covid-19 across the nation.

The CDC said late Wednesday that it had asked the Department of Justice to appeal the decision — a move the DOJ left up to the agency. That will put the issue before one of the nation’s most conservative-leaning appellate courts, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Public health experts worry the ruling, unless overturned, will hamper the agency’s ability to respond to future outbreaks.

“If CDC can’t impose an unintrusive requirement to wear a mask to prevent a virus from going state to state, then it literally has no power to do anything,” said public health law expert Lawrence Gostin, faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.

The outcome of the appeal will shape what the agency does the next time an outbreak occurs. And the ongoing debate highlights a civics lesson: The U.S. gives most responsibility for public health measures to states. The federal role has been more limited but could be further clarified by Congress.

“Congress has authority to pass a law,” said Tony Woodlief, executive vice president at the State Policy Network, a coalition of mainly conservative and libertarian groups. “If they think the CDC does not have enough power, give them more. If they think it has too much, they should curtail it.”

But the case also comes as Congress — and the country — remains sharply divided over just about everything having to do with covid, so passing any kind of legislation could prove impossible. That leaves the courts to interpret what is already on the books.

The latest case, filed in Florida by a group opposed to medical mandates, centers on a federal law called the Public Health Service Act of 1944. The law gives federal officials the authority to make and enforce regulations to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. Those could include “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation” and other measures that in its “judgment may be necessary.”

Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump administration appointee to the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, ruled Monday that the CDC had exceeded its authority under that law. A large section of her decision discusses whether masks meet the definition of a “sanitation” measure.

Federal judges are often called to consider whether a federal administrative action meets statutory requirements. Mizelle’s ruling, while giving a nod to the importance of controlling the covid epidemic, said that wearing a mask “cleans nothing” and at most only “traps virus droplets,” concluding that it “neither ‘sanitizes’ the person wearing the mask nor ‘sanitizes’ the conveyance.”

It isn’t the first time during the pandemic that the CDC has had its authority questioned. The agency suffered a blow last year when the Supreme Court said it overstepped its bounds by imposing an eviction ban during the pandemic.

Jonathon Hauenschild, with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council policy group, sees connections between the eviction and mask mandate cases. “The CDC used its authority or at least argued that its authority should extend to much more broad public health emergency responses than was actually granted,” he said. The recent ruling, Hauenschild argued, simply offers further definition of the powers the CDC and local jurisdictions have — even during an emergency.

“What this case does is it kind of establishes a baseline that says, ‘We’re going to keep the public health authorities to their statutory grant of authority,” he said. “That’s an important distinction because state legislatures or even Congress have weighed the policy implications. They’ve realized there’s a balance here.”

Other legal experts say this case is a bit different because the CDC’s authority over interstate travel is more clear-cut than any power it might have over rental units. “The transportation mask mandate was a textbook example of CDC’s mandate and its legitimate powers,” Gostin said.

Meanwhile, the requirement to wear masks on planes, trains, and subways is on hold — and major airlines wasted no time in telling domestic passengers they can take them off.

States, not the federal government’s CDC, have the broadest authority over public health efforts to control disease. Their public health agencies, or elected officials, have a range of authorities, including the ability to require masks in schools or businesses. Governors can issue stay-at-home orders during public health emergencies. And health departments routinely track outbreaks of communicable diseases and inspect restaurants for pathogens or vermin.

But states don’t have authority over interstate commercial flights.

“Public health is primarily governed at the local level, but the minute a disease crosses a state line or crosses our national borders, then the federal government has a role,” said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The pandemic has caused even state authority to be questioned. Backlashes to local mask mandates and other requirements have prompted more than half of states to roll back public health officials’ powers.

“One day there will be a really scary virus that will come to the shores of the U.S. and we will look to the CDC to protect us and what we’ll find is an agency that is frightened to act, gun-shy, and always looking over its shoulder,” Gostin said.

He and other public health experts said it might also be time for Congress to review and clarify the agency’s authority.

“Traditionally, CDC’s got very little power,” said Glen Nowak, co-director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at the University of Georgia. He spent more than a decade working in communications at the CDC, including during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.

“Most of what CDC does really is about, ‘Here’s our recommendation — we strongly urge you to comply,'” he said. “And then it’s up to typically state and local health departments or states in general to figure out how you’re going to achieve high compliance.”

But such recommendations rely on trust in agencies, something that has cratered during the pandemic. And, said Nowak, public health measures at all levels — federal, state, and local — have landed in court, in part because of misperceptions about how willing the American public would be to comply. “A lot of it was based on assumptions about compliance — that there would be high compliance by the public, that they would share the sense of urgency, and would place a high priority on stopping the spread of a virus,” Nowak said.

The American Public Health Association’s Benjamin said there’s little time to waste. He said the reason public health officials need established lines of authority is because public health emergencies — whether that’s the emergence of a new variant of covid-19 or some future pandemic — require quick action.

“We will not have time to fool around with the courts making a decision,” he said.

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

I helped pen the UN climate report. Here’s why it gives me hope

On April 4, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, an epic synthesis of science exploring the causes and consequences of climate change. This latest document focused on the causes — chiefly, the rampant emission of greenhouse gases — and how to reduce them, fast.

As one of the lead authors of the new report, I and more than 230 scientists from around the world collectively reviewed over 18,000 scientific articles and responded to around 60,000 reviewer comments over the course of more than three years. Our goal was to compile the most accurate and nuanced picture of current climate science and social science, and to use this to inform international climate change treaty-making and policy design. The result was a nearly 3,000 page document that details a stark, urgent threat — but that also gives us reason for optimism.

First, the grim news: Average annual greenhouse gas emissions were the highest during the past decade than they have been in human history. This, despite escalating social movements, high profile declarations, and splashy vows from political and business leaders to integrate climate into investment and business decisions. Without immediate, deep, and accelerating emissions reductions in all sectors and in all regions of the world, the goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — the threshold for avoiding the worst, but not all, impacts of climate change — will be out of reach. The human and environmental toll of such a scenario is unfathomable.

But glimmers of hope also emerge from this report. For the first time, we’re seeing evidence of real, sustained decreases in greenhouse gas emissions from some countries. These reductions aren’t blips that can be attributed to the economic recession of 2008 and 2009 or to the hardships inflicted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Rather, they are the result of effective and, in some cases, targeted efforts to scale up renewable energy, electrify transport, enhance building efficiency, foster compact, sustainable communities, and otherwise reduce society’s carbon footprint. In some countries, these reductions are deep and comprehensive enough to be consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, the overarching target set in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

These signs of progress also point to a path forward. The solutions to climate change now exist; we just have to adopt them.

In the energy supply sector, which is responsible for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions, a particularly major transition is required. Limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius will require us to prematurely shut down oil and gas infrastructure by mid-century. In other words, we will have to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and the new infrastructure that continues to be announced in countries like Canada may end up as stranded assets by 2050. Coal, of course, will have to go. Absent effective carbon capture and storage, neither of which is currently used widely or well enough to measurably impact our climate goals, coal use will need to decline by up to 92 percent by 2030.

There are promising indications, however, that a transition in the energy sector is already underway. As we watch the volatility of gas prices, we’ve also seen the price of renewable energy fall. The costs of photovoltaics used to harvest solar energy plummeted by around 85 percent over the last 10 years, surpassing even the most optimistic projections. Likewise, the price of wind has come down around 55 percent over the same time span, and the price of lithium-ion batteries — crucial for when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow — has come down by 85 percent as well. Fuels like hydrogen and biofuels will fill in the gaps to support a transition in aviation and heavy shipping.

Our report also suggests vast potential to shift our cities toward low-carbon, resilient development. Cities are responsible for more than two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is where the transport, building, and infrastructure sectors collide to shape individual decisions. Demand for transport can be reduced by locating homes near workplaces, recreation, and services. The remaining emissions can be dramatically reduced by encouraging a shift toward electric vehicles powered by clean energy sources and toward active transport, like walking and biking. Efficient buildings that use zero net energy or produce zero net carbon emissions will also be critical, and we find evidence that these buildings are springing up in every climate.

But it’s also important not to pin responsibility for mitigating climate change on the individual. We can only choose low carbon transport if the infrastructure is available and affordable; we can more easily make our homes energy efficient if incentives and building codes support these changes. The link between collective decision making, at all levels of governance, and individual behavior is a powerful one.

Ultimately, the new IPCC report lays bare the state of our efforts to mitigate the worst harms emerging from the rampant burning of fossil fuels. It shows that we cannot reach our broader sustainable development goals of a vibrant natural environment, clean water, peace, zero poverty, and healthy communities without addressing climate change. It just won’t work. Our report shows that addressing climate change is a matter of justice, and that a stable climate is the foundation upon which our societies thrive. We now have the solutions, and the path ahead is difficult, but clear.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

What is “social emotional learning” — and how did it become the right’s new CRT panic?

Last Friday, Florida’s Department of Education — which, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis, has been setting the agenda for conservative attacks on education for the last two years — announced that it had rejected 41 percent of the math textbooks proposed by the state’s schools. Why? Supposedly the books contained “impermissible” material related to critical race theory (CRT), Common Core and “social emotional learning.”

In the department’s press release, Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, a longtime warrior against public education, described the move as a continuation of the state’s commitment to “reinforce parents’ rights by focusing on providing their children with a world-class education without the fear of indoctrination or exposure to dangerous and divisive concepts.” DeSantis himself suggested the textbooks contained “indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism,” and praised Corcoran for having “conducted such a thorough vetting” of the books to make sure they complied with Florida’s recent ban on CRT.

On its face, this news seemed absurd — CRT in math curriculum? — but it reflects a new right-wing narrative, piloted last year but growing increasingly loud in recent weeks, to cast social emotional learning (SEL) as the “new CRT.” If you’ve heard conservatives warning recently about “data mining” in public schools, complaining that American kids were being turned into a neo-Maoist “Red Guard” or using baffling language like “suicide grooming,” that’s about SEL. While SEL itself is a decades-old field focused on incorporating life-coping skills into classrooms, according to its critics it’s “quack psychology,” “occult” totalitarianism or a “Trojan horse” that uses the edifice of well-being to conceal the agendas of the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the LGBTQ “lobby” and, of course, CRT.

“CRT is the theory, SEL is the delivery system,” proclaimed one recently-formed activist group last week. “Let’s make 2022 the year to SEL what 2021 was to CRT.”

This may sound silly but on the right, it’s working. In Wisconsin, Republicans proposed a bill to outlaw SEL, and similar efforts are being considered in Indiana, Oklahoma and Virginia. In Idaho, the state Department of Education announced it was dropping the label of “social emotional learning” even as it would continue to use its substance, because of how toxic the term had become. In Georgia last week, conservatives running for offices from state superintendent to U.S. Congress to governor have all adopted anti-SEL language in their platforms, with Republican gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor (campaign slogan: “Jesus, Guns, Babies”) tweeting, “Critical Race Theory, Social Emotional Learning, & Comprehensive Sex Education have no place in public education.”

* * *

At its most basic level, SEL is an updated form of the “life skills” that have been part of education for decades, whether in designated class time or integrated into routine coursework. The framework was developed in the 1990s, largely led by the nonprofit group Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), as an attempt to address “the whole child.” It focuses on five “core competencies” — self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision-making — that mostly boil down to helping students understand and regulate their emotions, cooperate with classmates and be more empathetic.

Sometimes SEL looks like a start-of-the-day check-in for students in homeroom. Sometimes it’s the unspoken aspect of having students work in teams. Sometimes it’s urging kids to collect themselves when they’re angry.

“It can take a lot of different forms, but generally it involves a focus on building positive relationships among students and adults and involves having dedicated time to learn and practice social and emotional skills like goal-setting or perspective-taking,” said Justina Schlund, CASEL’s director of content and field training. “In some respects, the concepts of SEL have been around since the first educators were teaching students in classrooms, because they understood intuitively that education isn’t about dumping information into children’s minds but engaging them socially, emotionally, cognitively, so they’re able to connect with the academic content and develop into successful, happy and healthy adults.”

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

Dozens of states have established standards of guidelines for their schools to implement SEL programs, a list of which CASEL curates although it doesn’t develop curricula itself. In March, Congress increased funding for SEL initiatives significantly: a sign that until very recently, the field has enjoyed broad bipartisan support. In 2019 alone, more than 200 bills related to SEL were introduced around the country.

That spike was largely a result of the tragic Parkland school shooting in Broward County, Florida, the year before. In the aftermath of the massacre, groups from the American Psychological Association to the Aspen Institute to Betsy DeVos’ Department of Education promoted SEL as an intervention for students dealing with trauma and young people at risk of suicide, and also as a preventative measure that might head off school shootings in the future. That became such a dominant theme that some argued SEL was being used to avoid taking action on gun control.

“Out of the Parkland shooting, we got a lot of legislation that talked about social and emotional learning and cultural competency, meaning more mental health services in our schools,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest education workers’ union. “I think a lot of it was in response to not having to deal with gun legislation, [to say] that this was a social emotional, cultural competence and mental health issue instead.”

Now, said Spar, “you’re seeing the opposite of that, where they’re saying, ‘Don’t touch cultural competence!'”

* * *

While the news from Florida has brought new attention to SEL, conservative activists have been cultivating opposition to it for several years.

In 2019, the right-wing think tank Pioneer Institute released a brief charging that SEL “represents progressive education’s greatest victory in its 100-plus-year campaign to transform our public schools, and thus, the nature of America itself.” In part, Pioneer’s complaint was that SEL allowed the government to inculcate “approved mindsets” in children, although at the same time, it lamented that SEL had replaced “Judeo-Christian religion code” in public schools, wherein teachers had long been designated as “moral educators,” with a more vacuous framework of “character education.”

In 2019, a right-wing think tank suggested that SEL was “progressive education’s greatest victory,” and allowed the government to inculcate “approved mindsets” in children.

The same year, writing in the National Review, conservative researcher Max Eden, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, echoed the complaint, suggesting that SEL was a poor substitute for old-fashioned virtue instruction, stressing “value-neutral methodological ‘competencies’ while remaining outwardly agnostic about the particular or universal good toward which those competencies are directed.” It was also possible, he suggested, that progressive ideology would fill that vacuum, rendering SEL a “Trojan horse for delivering” left-wing ideology into elementary schools.

At that time, Eden, then at the Manhattan Institute, was in the midst of promoting a book he’d written the previous year with the father of a Parkland victim. The gist of the book — and the ugly 2018 Broward County school board fight that Eden helped inspire — was that the shooting wasn’t the result of lax gun laws but rather of an Obama administration policy urging schools to reduce racial disparities in school discipline, as a means of addressing the “school-to-prison pipeline.” In many ways, Eden’s 2018 crusade against efforts to address racism in school discipline served as a dress rehearsal for the CRT fight, in the sense that it tapped into right-wing racial grievances in order to advance conservative educational priorities. In 2020, through one of Eden’s successors at the Manhattan Institute, Chris Rufo, that playbook went pro, launching a nationwide moral panic around CRT. Today, the terms of the fight are shifting again.

Two Utah mothers got their district to drop an SEL curriculum by objecting to the program’s call for students to “disrupt” bullying. They associated that term with Black Lives Matter and antifa.

In late March, Laura Meckler reported at the Washington Post that numerous states were witnessing new challenges to SEL, which conservative activists were now calling “the latest child-indoctrination scheme.” In Indiana, one parents’ group warned that the “mindfulness” language many SEL programs used was rooted in Buddhism, not Christianity. In Utah, two mothers successfully got their district to drop an SEL curriculum after they wrote a 25-page list of objections to its content. One such objection was that the program called for students to “disrupt” bullying, a term the pair associated with Black Lives Matter and antifa.

Last May, Florida’s Richard Corcoran telegraphed his plans to reject textbooks in a speech at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, which, as Salon reported in an investigative series this March, has become the unlikely center of the right’s fight against public education. In his talk — which more broadly described a plan to collapse public education through attrition — Corcoran described SEL as a devious means that education curriculum publishers (a profession “just infested with liberals”) use to disguise CRT.

While CASEL’s Schlund said that widespread mental health issues amid the pandemic, including rising rates of youth suicide, have led to a dramatic increase in demand for SEL resources, at the same time, political polarization has made SEL a target. Sometimes critics argue that SEL reduces valuable instruction time for core subjects. Sometimes they say SEL was once acceptable, but has now been co-opted by progressive ideologues.

In part, that reflects changes in SEL since around 2018, after progressive critiques that SEL programs weren’t addressing the reality that many students’ social-emotional realities are directly impacted by racism. CASEL responded by discussing a new form of the field: Transformative SEL, which suggests that social emotional learning might serve “as a lever for equity” by including references to the ethical implications of decision-making, “distributive justice” and “collective well-being.” This version of SEL, says CASEL, is just one among many schools can choose from. But recently, it’s become the way conservatives characterize the field as a whole.

If the campaign against SEL began to ramp up last year, in the last couple of months, it’s taken off with a vengeance. In early April, the National Review published an essay warning conservative parents who’d been alerted to the CRT threat that “a broader suite of radical ideas, couched in therapeutic language, is quietly being advanced under the banner of SEL,” exemplified by lessons urging middle schoolers to intervene in situations where classmates are being bullied for their perceived sexuality.

Last week, the National Association of Scholars, a conservative education reform nonprofit whose board features such right-wing notables as Ginni Thomas, released a brief warning that SEL had undergone “ideological drift” and calling for recruits to join their new network of state activist organizations to fight its spread.

This issue is increasingly showing up in politics at all levels. In late March, Ivy Liu, a Colorado Springs-area school board member elected in 2021 as part of a conservative sweep of the board — or rather, a further-right takeover, since that city is already so conservative it has been called “the evangelical Vatican” and its school district was the first in the state to ban CRT last year — pressed her colleagues to ban SEL as well. Citing a 45-page document a local parent had compiled about SEL in general and CASEL in particular, Liu charged that SEL was intended to “turn out social justice warriors” and that its use of words like “collective” indicated a plan to instruct children in socialism.

At a subsequent meeting last week, reported Heidi Beedle at the Colorado Times Recorder, tensions around the SEL debate became so pronounced that the board chair read aloud threatening letters that members had received around the topic. One letter, notably sent even to one of the newly-elected conservatives, complained of “SEL and more SEL,” warning the new member, “we can take you out if you screw with our kids.”

* * *

As the anti-SEL campaign has expanded, the charges against the field have also grown, sometimes to cartoonish extremes. A key exemplar of that trend is James Lindsay, the right-wing activist whom Chris Rufo credited with laying the intellectual groundwork for the CRT fight he went on to popularize.

James Lindsay has described SEL as “so much worse” than a “gateway” for CRT. It’s also, he claims, “psychological abuse, data mining, and the cult grooming technique for American Maoism.”

In January, Lindsay designated SEL as the movement’s new target, tweeting, “If the fight against CRT in schools burns with the heat of the sun, the fight against SEL needs to burn with the heat of a thousand suns.” Last week, he upped the ante, writing, “However mad you are about Critical Race Theory in our schools, you should be a solid 10-20x madder about Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). Honestly, if you understood it, you’d be at least as mad about it as you are about the grooming. It’s how the grooming works.”

In the last few weeks, Lindsay has described SEL as “so much worse” than just “a gateway for CRT concepts.” It’s also, he charged, “psychological abuse, data mining, and the cult grooming technique for American Maoism.” He’s described the field variously as “a brainwashing tool” and “a hypodermic needle for injecting” CRT, gender theory and “a psychological immune suppressant into your children.” He has repeatedly called for its criminalization, suggesting a “Nuremberg 2.0” tribunal that would imprison “SEL facilitators for at-scale child abuse” and charge educators who use it with felonies “and, where the bigger purpose of its use is known, sedition.” “Unlike the purveyors of CRT, who merely deserve to be fired,” he wrote, “those implementing SEL belong in prison for the rest of their miserable lives.”

In a remarkable new extension of the right’s recent adoption of “groomer” as a slur to denounce both LGBTQ people and those who oppose legislation like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, Lindsay also charged that SEL programs tied to student suicide prevention amount to “suicide grooming of children” that merits a “life sentence.” As outlandish as it seems, that has been echoed by other right-wing activists. As Tyler Kingkade and Mike Hixenbaugh reported at NBC News last fall, parent activists have accused SEL programs of “advertising suicide” to students by having counselors deliver suicide prevention presentations to schools, and the group No Left Turn in Education had similarly tied SEL to “grooming.”

Behind all this vitriol is a movement that’s increasingly well-organized.

Parents Defending Education, a Koch-connected group founded in 2021 that played a significant role in boosting Glenn Youngkin’s successful gubernatorial race in Virginia, has become a prominent anti-SEL voice. Last fall, its vice president, Asra Nomani, a former journalist (who once wrote for Salon), helped launch a conservative narrative that SEL student surveys — which largely focus on questions of personal well-being but often seek demographic information and ask whether students feel accepted or discriminated against — was a scandalous plot to “data mine” American children in order to create psychological profiles and “give activist school boards cover to infuse curricula with divisive ideology.”

The claims came amid Attorney General Merrick Garland’s first testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, as conservatives argued that an education consultancy group for which his son-in-law once worked, Panorama Education Inc., was somehow part of a larger plan to cast protesting conservative parents as domestic terrorists. But while the Garland accusations faded, the charges of student data-mining have only grown.

Online, conservative speculation about the true purpose of student surveys and SEL has run wild. One blogger who writes under the pseudonym “Undercover Mother” charged that “CASEL uses data taken from our children” to refine its efforts to “‘cultivate anti-racist mindsets’ and achieve ‘equitable’ outcomes.” Urging parents to collect copies of any surveys their schools administer, she warned, “Do not let your children have sessions with school SEL administrators … They will groom your children against you.”

Activist Jennifer McWilliams suggests SEL may be used to establish a “social credit system” that tracks students into adulthood and measures employability “through a woke lens.”

One advocacy group that appears to have been founded within the last month, Courage Is a Habit, is promoting a “guide to defending your child” which offers 10 questions parents should use to confront local school administrators. Among an otherwise predictable list of queries about bathrooms, pronouns, sex-ed and racism, the group’s first question is whether a school district uses “in-class surveys to collect data on students.”

Another activist, Jennifer McWilliams, a former Indiana elementary school reading specialist who claims she was fired in 2020 for opposing SEL, has founded a consultancy business to “educate parents and legislators on why SEL delivers harmful political indoctrination.” Although McWilliams has made an array of unlikely claims — SEL can be traced back, she says, to occultists hoping to create a New World Order — she has gained a number of influential supporters on the right, including both Lindsay and Max Eden, as well as high-profile activist groups like Parents Defending Education and Moms for Liberty.

“One of the most alarming parts of SEL,” McWilliams wrote this March in an overview of her arguments for the right-wing think tank Center for Renewing America, “is its potential in establishing an American social credit system through data collection.” When SEL programs facilitate companies like Panorama to collect data on school children, she continued, the findings may end up being used not just to justify the creation of new “gender identity clubs” (for students who report on surveys that they feel they don’t belong), but also a system that will track students from school into adulthood, where the data might be used “to measure employability through a woke lens.”

Lindsay elaborated on this theme in a tweet this month, writing that SEL “data mining” will result in both “hyper-sophisticated” profiling of children “so they can be individually propagandized” and also a “social credit” system that will force them to adopt progressive viewpoints or risk ostracization.

What it all adds up to, Lindsay argues, is an attempt “to recreate the psychological destruction of children” that Chinese leader Mao Zedong undertook in the 1960s Cultural Revolution. In a four-hour podcast this March — much of which was dedicated to reading aloud an academic paper about SEL — Lindsay elaborated that SEL surveys were a means of setting students up for “struggle session environments in the classroom,” a reference to the ritual public denunciations of the Cultural Revolution, in which militant young people were deployed to battle intellectuals and other elites Mao considered political threats.

Similarly, last week, Parents Defending Education researcher Rhyen Staley shared an iconic image from the era — four Chinese girls raising their fists at a rally in 1974 — as a parallel to the threat of CRT and SEL. “These kids were also taught that the system was oppressing them,” he wrote. “They eventually rewarded their teachers for the education by beating them, humiliating them, and murdering them.” As though warning young people who might oppose his activism today, he added, “Later they became the victims of the second wave of oppressed kids who saw them as the oppressors.”

Some of this may be social media hyperventilation. But the same arguments are making their way, in more restrained and respectable fashion, into discussions at every level of government.

In October, Parents Defending Education wrote to the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to request a hearing on “Big Tech’s data mining of America’s children.” In Colorado Springs in March, two of the school board’s new conservative members raised the threat of SEL data mining and “what the federal government is finding out about our kids.” This month, Max Eden was one of three experts to testify about SEL before a House Appropriations subcommittee, arguing that SEL had not only become “an ideologically charged enterprise” but also that it posed “major” concerns about student data privacy.

In Florida, noted New York Times education journalist Dana Goldstein, an overlooked aspect of the “Parental Rights in Education” law, which is most famous for banning classroom discussion of LGBTQ issues or people, is that it takes “particular aim” at the use of mental health questionnaires “intended to determine what students might need.”

This week came news that Florida’s Department of Education has silently withdrawn from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, a biannual survey of high school students created by the CDC that has been used for 31 years in 46 states. The survey includes questions about wellbeing and mental health, students’ thoughts of suicide, sexual orientation and gender identity. In 2021, it tracked the first increase in suicide attempts by Florida LGBTQ high schoolers in close to a decade. If the state forgoes the next survey, warned Norín Dollard of the nonprofit Florida Policy Institute, there will be no way to know how Florida’s restrictive new education laws are affecting LGBTQ students. Perhaps, as Marni Stahlman, president of the Mental Health Association of Central Florida, told the Orlando Sentinel, that’s the point.

* * *

“A lot of these attacks on SEL that we’re seeing are not based on research, not based on what social emotional learning actually looks like in practice,” said CASEL’s Justina Schlund. “And frankly, they’re not based on what parents have said they actually want in schools or what’s best for kids.”

Billy Townsend, an education journalist and former school board member in Florida’s deep-red Polk County, likewise said that he’d never received a single complaint “about CRT or a child being made to feel ashamed of whiteness in my four years [on the board], talking to thousands of parents. But every single parent I spoke to, of all races, parties and ideologies, insisted that schools take the social and emotional well-being of their child into consideration in their schooling.”

On Thursday, Judd Legum, Tesnin Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby at the media accountability website Popular Information reviewed eight of the 26 Florida math textbooks that had been rejected for “prohibited topics.” They found nothing that could conceivably be cast as critical race theory (unless capsule biographies of notable Black mathematicians or equations that mention sickle cell anemia count as CRT). While some of the books include principles that could fairly be called SEL, they amounted to short sections of text asking students to use teamwork, have a positive attitude and encourage their classmates.

Later on Thursday, the state’s Department of Education belatedly responded to questions about the textbook rejections by posting three examples of offending passages on its website. One example used data showing how racial bias varies by age groups as the premise for a pre-calculus exercise. The others concerned SEL, including an elementary-school lesson about counting numbers that included a tertiary objective of increasing students’ social awareness of their classmates.

Underwhelming as that “evidence” is, as with so many other recent conservative attacks on education, SEL was never the real point. On Wednesday, capitalizing on the newfound energy around the fight, the right-wing organization Accuracy in Media released the third part of a series it’s been running since late March. In seeming imitation of Project Veritas, the group used hidden-camera recordings of school administrators in various states describing how recent bans on CRT and the demonization of SEL had compelled them to shift their language while teaching the same core concepts. To Accuracy in Media president Adam Guillette, it was proof that not only was SEL a “Trojan horse,” but it was merely one in a long line of euphemisms progressives would deploy, and which Guilette promised to continue to expose, “finding CRT wherever it may be.”

“Once again, we’ve seen that simply banning critical race theory will not get it out of your schools,” he said. “Teachers will call it social and emotional learning, or mental health, or whatever they need to call it so that you don’t think your child is being indoctrinated.” In all three videos the group has released to date, Guilette reached the same conclusion: The only real solution to CRT, or SEL, is a widespread conservative movement to promote “school choice.”

To follow Guilette’s lead, that is to say the privatization of education. In that sense, the right’s Trojan-horse metaphor might turn out to be strikingly accurate.

Read more from Kathryn Joyce on religion, education and the far right:

Michigan state lawmaker caught sending fake gender reassignment confirmations

A Michigan state lawmaker who is running for Congress is reportedly sending out texts that read: “CONFIRMED, your child’s gender reassignment surgery has been booked.”

“If you have any issues with this operation, please view the objectives of Biden’s National Transgender Strategy here,” the texts also state, according to a screenshot, with a link to a Republican fundraising site.

The texts are being sent by Republican state Sen. Tom Barrett, who is also running for the newly drawn 7th Congressional District, Michigan Advance reports, breaking the story.

Barrett’s fundraising page reads: “STOP BIDEN FROM DOING THIS TO OUR KIDS!”

“President Biden is forcing 5-year-olds to learn about gender reassignment surgeries, gender identities, and other radical ideas. Every American needs to step up TODAY and stop this sick and twisted ideology from poisoning our children. If we fail, our children are doomed.”

It is unknown if they violate any state or federal laws.

Michigan Advance adds that “Barrett’s original fundraising appeal came via text and appeared to be an appointment confirmation for ‘Your Child’ to receive ‘Gender Reassignment Surgery Tomorrow at 9 AM.’ It then asks, ‘If you would like to CANCEL this appointment because you do not believe in teaching young children about dangerous transgender ideologies, please sign your name NOW.'”

Since late last year conservatives have been increasingly attacking the LGBTQ community, including using false claims that LGBTQ people are “groomers,” or “grooming” children for sex.

Barrett’s fundraising appeal is among the worst attack yet on the safety and security of LGBTQ people but in line with one from another Michigan state Senator, Lana Theis, attacking Democratic state Senator Mallory McMorrow. Morrow made national headlines with a speech from the Senate floor pushing back against Theis’ baseless claims.

Candace Cameron Bure leaves Hallmark for Trump-adjacent GAC, leaving Christmas confusion in her wake

Christmas will never be the same. Candace Cameron Bure, who is known as the “Queen of Christmas,” is officially leaving Hallmark Channel after starring in 29 holiday-themed films and the “Aurora Teagarden Mysteries” films.

Fans are decidedly not happy, but her departure from the Crown Media Networks actually points to something more disturbing than Hallmark needing to find a replacement face for their brand.

On Tuesday, it was announced that the “Full House” actor signed a mega-deal with Great American Country Media (GAC) to develop, produce and star in TV shows and movies for their networks while also “overseeing and curating programming,” according to Variety. She’ll also serve a prominent executive role, “create year-round seasonal content” through her company, Candy Rock Entertainment, and take part in GAC’s annual “Great American Christmas.”

On the surface it appears as if Bure made the career shift in order to have more control over content as she moves behind the lens and quietly power more faith-centered storytelling. (While she identifies as Christian, her older brother – former “Growing Pains” star Kirk Cameron – is an Evangelical.) GAC just also happens to be run by Bill Abbott, previously the president of Crown Media during Hallmark’s heyday of very all-white Christmases.

That all sounds rather dandy. But a closer look at GAC Media exposes the cable TV network as more than just a Hallmark wannabe. The company reportedly also has deep ties to Donald Trump and far-right media.

Bure has frequently talked about being a conservative in Hollywood.

According to a report from The Daily Beast, both GAC Family and GAC Living were purchased by an investor group led by Thomas Hicks, whose private equity firm also sought to acquire the “mega-MAGA” channel One American News Network (OANN) and the conservative news channel Newsmax TV. In addition to associating with right-wing outlets, the Hicks family maintains personal relationships with Trump and his closest associates. Hicks’ eldest son, Thomas “Tommy” Hicks Jr., is “co-chair of the Republican National Committee, a longtime friend of the Trump family and Donald Trump Jr.’s hunting buddy,” according to Buzzfeed.

Bure has frequently talked about being a conservative in Hollywood, however, she is not a supporter of Trump, which she made clear during a discussion on the “Behind the Table” podcast.

Regardless, Bure expressed her excitement with the new GAC deal and the opportunity to develop “heartwarming family and faith-filled programming” in a statement obtained by TV Line.

“I am constantly looking for ways that I can inspire people to live life with purpose. GAC fits my brand perfectly; we share a vision of creating compelling wholesome content for an audience who wants to watch programming for and with the whole family,” she said. “Great, quality entertainment with a positive message is what my partnership with GAC is all about!”

“GAC fits my brand perfectly.”

Bure also took to Instagram to share the announcement with her followers.The post elicited mixed reactions from fans, with many expressing their disappointment.

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

“Wow, leaving your Aurora Teagarden family without jobs,” one comment read. “And where is your post thanking @hallmarkchannel and @hallmarkmovie for all the support and opportunities they provided you?”

Another user took the opportunity to slam GAC and pledge their allegiance to Hallmark, writing, “GAC channel isn’t even HD. Sorry, not sorry but I’ll stick with Hallmark.”

“Sorry Candace but I don’t think this is good news at all!!!!!” a different follower simply said. “My heart is broken, I didn’t think you’d cave to the switch over,” read another comment. “I always had faith that your place with God was a place safe for all people. I’m sorry to see you go.”

Many of the comments, however, pointed out that GAC was programming for a predominantly white, straight audience – exactly the rather exclusionary critiques that Hallmark faced a few years ago under Abbott’s leadership. In June 2020, Wonya Lucas replaced him as Crown Media’s new president and CEO, and since then Hallmark’s offerings became more inclusive, with mixed results.

Bure joins a handful of former Hallmark stars who made the switch to GAC.

Regardless, ushering in more people of color and queer storylines has been embraced by many – but not by all. Those put off by the inclusion also voiced their support of Bure and GAC’s more “traditional” offerings.

Bure joins a handful of former Hallmark stars who made the switch to GAC, including Jen Lilley, Danica McKellar, Trevor Donovan and Jessica Lowndes. Bure’s former “Full House” co-star, Lori Loughlin, also starred in the drama series “When Hope Calls” on GAC in December after appearing in multiple Hallmark productions. This, of course, was after she had been sentenced for her part in the College Admissions Scandal.

Bure wasn’t just the headliner for many of Hallmark’s Christmas films and its sister network’s mystery series, but she actually was the face of Christmas for the network, hosting its yuletide specials. With Bure and many of her compatriots gone, Hallmark will have to crown a new queen. Lacey Chabert, who commands plenty of her own films, is the most likely successor.

It appears the Christmas movie landscape will not just be more crowded this year – Lifetime, Netflix and other networks have stepped up their game recently – but will ask fans of Hallmark films to split their attention between networks. Expect the annual cries about the fictional War on Christmas to become the War for Christmas on TV.

More stories you might like:

In “The Duke,” Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren make a real-life art heist charming

“The Duke” is a genial retelling of the true story of Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), who in 1961, was tried for the crime of stealing a Goya painting of the Duke of Wellington, valued at £140,000, from the National Gallery in London. Although director Roger Michell’s (“Notting Hill“) film does depict the theft twice, it is not really a caper; rather, this comedic drama is a genteel character study of a man from Newcastle who rallies against social injustice and for the greater good.

Kempton is first seen rebelling against having to pay for a license for his TV because it airs the BBC. (He actually removes the appropriate coil from the set to make the station unavailable.) But that does not appease — or engender much goodwill — with the authorities who put him in jail for 13 days. But Kempton continues to wage his campaign, “Free TV for the OAP,” emphasizing that pensioners should not have to pay for television. He believes it is often a way for them to stave off loneliness.

The theft happens quickly, and Kempton stores the painting in a wardrobe in his home with the help of his son, Jackie (Fionn Whitehead, “Dunkirk“). What Bunton hopes to do with the stolen painting is generate income that can be used to pay for TV licenses. It may be an admirable plan, but it hardly seems feasible. Nevertheless, it is easy to root for Kempton, who is seen as a kind of Robin Hood or Don Quixote, as observers note.

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

Kempton may have a cockeyed outlook on life that causes folks to look at him sideways, but he does have common sense, and his heart is in the right place. “The Duke” has its heart in the right place, too, championing a principled man who agitates against inequality. (It’s hard not to want him to succeed in any or all of his causes.) He gets canned from his job as a taxi driver for being too talkative and letting a veteran not pay his full fare. When Kempton stands up against racial discrimination after a bakery manager treats a Pakistani coworker unfairly, Kempton is fired from his job for speaking out.

These scenes illustrate Kempton’s upright character, but more revealing are his exchanges with his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (Helen Mirren), who disapproves of her husband’s shenanigans. (She buys the TV license because it is “normal” to do so, and, perhaps, to spite him.) Kempton tries to charm Dorothy with tea and biscuits, but she knows he wants something from her. He does also dance with her to show they can be loving. However, Dorothy is a dour sourpuss in part because she mourns their late daughter. Kempton’s efforts to channel that pain by writing a play he hopes the BBC will produce, causes her additional stress and grief.

Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren in “The Duke” (Sony Pictures Classics)Broadbent, who seems incapable of giving a bad performance, has a rascally nature about him here, which is appealing and gives the film its vitality. Kempton is an autodidact, and it is amusing to hear him prattle on about Chekhov being better than Shakespeare, or having him praise his sons, Jackie and Kenny (Jack Bandeira) for not “swallowing what the establishment tells ’em.” Moreover, scenes of Kempton on the witness stand in the courtroom provide moments of high comedy. Broadbent is obviously relishing in this part of the film, capturing Kempton’s mischievous nature with deadpan humor.

Mirren’s role is pretty one-note, but she does layer it with some depth, worrying what her employer will think of her husband’s crimes and being surprised at their benevolence. Likewise, Matthew Goode plays Kempton’s lawyer, Jeremy Hutchinson QC, with a twinkle in his eye that is reassuring, especially when he declines to question some of the trial witnesses.

The courtroom scenes have some crackle, but Michell’s polite film never quite excites, even when Michell employs split screens — as if “The Duke” was made in the 1960s — or makes a deliberate wink and nod to the painting’s appearance in the Bond film, “Dr. No.“

But even when the story hits the expected moment of someone discovering the painting — which forces Kempton’s hand, and he returns it as if he had simply borrowed it — it feels surprisingly benign. At least there is some dry British humor as the authorities believe the painting was stolen by “a well-funded, highly professional, international crime gang,” because nothing could be further from the truth.

And while the truth of what transpired does come out over the course of the film, it feels almost quaint. “The Duke” is completely agreeable, and pleasant, but it could have been more arch or cynical. This film ends up being as likeable as its puckish hero, who gets by on his good will.

“The Duke” opens in theaters Friday, April 22. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories to read:

A final “Jeopardy!” rarity that pays off in a “crazy season of streaks”

“The Masked Singer” made headlines on Wednesday following a surprise appearance from anti-masker Rudy Giuliani. But so did the latest episode of “Jeopardy!,” for better reasons of course.

Reigning champion Mattea Roach, a 23-year-old tutor from Toronto, won her 12th consecutive match Wednesday. But she was also achieved that by being only contestant who qualified for the Final Jeopardy round. Her fellow contestants, Loni Lewis and Sean Wong, did not make it to the end after losing hefty sums of money and finishing in the negatives.

A Final Jeopardy with only one contestant is a rarity. The last time it happened was back in October 13, 2020, according to the show’s official website. Co-host Ken Jennings even teased the exciting news online, tweeting, “I’m too late for the East Coast but there’s a real @Jeopardy rarity on the show tonight! Plan your evening accordingly!”

I’m too late for the East Coast but there’s a real @Jeopardy rarity on the show tonight! Plan your evening accordingly!

— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) April 21, 2022

During Wednesday’s competition, Roach entered Final Jeopardy with $21,400 and in a shocking moment, stood by herself on stage opposite from Jennings.

“And then there was one. It’s a rare solo Final Jeopardy,” he said before reading the final clue. The category was “On the Internet” and the specific clue read, “This website launched in 2015 with 3 offerings, from James Patterson, Dustin Hoffman and Serena Williams.”

Naturally, the tension was high. Roach could take the safe route and wager nothing or very little, effectively assuring that she would still come out in the black even if she got the answer wrong. She decied to bet $5,000.

The correct answer was “Masterclass,” which Roach guessed correctly and finished the night with $26,400 and an impressive 12-day total of $271,282. Roach also earned a spot in the upcoming Tournament of Champions and became the fourth contestant this season to earn a double-digit win streak. Other contestants who have accomplished the same feat include super-champs Amy Schneider, Jonathan Fisher, and Matt Amodio.

Roach will attempt a 13th consecutive win on Thursday.

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

“This has been such a crazy season of streaks,” the “Jeopardy!” champ said about her win, per the show’s website. “I was fully thinking, you know, Amy might still be here. If it’s not Amy, there’s going to be some other super-champion that’s just going to knock me out game one. And then, I guess what I didn’t realize is maybe I could become the super champion I wanted to see in the world.”

“I am genuinely having so much fun,” Roach added. “I’ve told that to everyone that I’ve played against before every game. Like, have fun up there. You’ll play better and this is a once in a lifetime experience. Why would you not want to have fun?”

Watch her reaction after winning below, via YouTube.

More stories you might like:

Ready for “Russian Doll”? Before you hop on, here are five things to watch out for

Like Mordor, one does not simply walk into “Russian Doll.” It’s no “Virgin River” – no offense to “Virgin River,” whose calming properties are unparalleled; there is simply no better relaxingly mindless show to watch while making dinner or while taking a bubble bath, laptop balanced precariously on the counter.

But with “Russian Doll,” entering its second season on Netflix, you need to pay attention. This is not a scrolling on your phone while half-watching show. This is a story with various timelines, themes, fan theories and for those fans paying attention, rewards.

With more references than a “Gilmore Girls” episode, it can be a challenge to discern what matters the most. Here are some key references to know as Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) begins her second trip around the sun. (First of all: it’s her 40th.)

1 The 6 train

“Russian Doll” takes place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It’s the blissful before. The first season released in 2019, COVID on the horizon like a burning sunset we never see coming. So, there are parties in this Manhattan, apartments full to bursting, friends sharing drinks and Israeli joints, and no masks on the 6 train, the Lexington Avenue Local and Pelham Bay Park Express on the Manhattan subway.

But this is no ordinary 6 train. Pay attention for the markers inside and outside the car that (sometimes) identify it as from elsewhere. One of the most fun parts of the second season is Nadia realizing things are not what they seem (in a different way than in the first season). Trains are the key to that startling, timey-wimey reveal, and of course, her transportation to elsewhere.

You can check the trains out in their show biz glory here via YouTube:

2 The Gold train

The 6 line isn’t the only train of the season. Season 2 of “Russian Doll,” makes more of those Krugerrands, the gold coins that were a fundamental part of Nadia’s family history (and her family’s tragedy). Nadia goes into deep research mode, uncovering stories of the Hungarian “Gold Train.” In 1944, a train journeyed from Budapest, Hungary to Berlin, Germany, full of valuables Nazis had taken from Jews in Hungary. The Nazis kept these families’ stolen possessions for themselves, one of the many reasons Nadia’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, has difficulty trusting. Also, Lyonne speaks Hungarian now.

3 Lenora

Lenora (Chloë Sevigny) was Nadia’s perpetually down-on-her-luck mother. You may know her from her cloud of bright red hair in full frizzy ’80s glory and from the fact that she stole gold from her own mother to survive.

Lenora struggled with young, single motherhood (Nadia’s father goes unmentioned) and with an undiagnosed mental illness. Despite having an ally in her steadfast therapist friend, Ruth, Lenora had several difficult incidents that we viewed through Nadia’s young eyes in flashbacks, including Lenora breaking all the mirrors in their apartment. Nadia’s fear that she may have inherited her mother’s struggles, both in the form of illness as well as generational trauma, is a central part of the show.

4 Sweet Maxine, baby

Good news, Maxine fans. The quirky friend is back, and it’s a birthday miracle: Maxine has a larger role in the second season. Sweet! Maxine, played by the wonderful Greta Lee, is a gregarious, unflappable and hilarious sidekick who does magical things with eyeshadow. This season, she’s a good travel buddy too, as long as you don’t mind your companion leaving you on your own at a party at some rich Hungarian guy’s house.

Nadia will be fine.

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

5 Know your “Russian Doll” memes

The first season of “Russian Doll” gave rise to the line “Thursday. What a concept.” Uttered in Lyonne’s perfect droll delivery, it emerged as one of the most memorable bits from the show. You likely cannot spend a Thursday on Twitter without seeing someone tweet it out. What will the memes be from this season? There’s an obvious contender, but like Gretchen trying to make “fetch” happen in “Mean Girls,” it feels a little forced. Likely, the one meme to rule them all will be a line we didn’t see coming, just like that 6 train.

“Russian Doll” Season 2 is now available to stream on Netflix. Watch a trailer for it below, via YouTube.

More stories like this

“The Flight Attendant” returns with double the baggage and showcase for Kaley Cuoco

“The Flight Attendant” demonstrates why “it’s a lot” is a favorite idiom of mine. It’s a short phrase, yet one that expresses manifold emotions. Depending on who is saying it and what they’re describing, it can be a pejorative, but not necessarily. Generally someone or something being “a lot” merely implies a complicated but navigable situation.

“My life is a lot right now,” Kaley Cuoco’s titular protagonist Cassie Bowden tells anyone who’s either intentionally or accidentally making her life tougher. Cassie flings around that expression as an excuse sometimes. In the second season of “The Flight Attendant,” however, she utilizes some version of it to explain behavior she cannot, whether for reasons of national security or her own safety.

But Cassie is “a lot” too, as the first season establishes. Her adventures begin in Bangkok next to the dead body of a guy she picked up on a flight she worked. Since our flight attendant was blackout drunk, she has no memory of what happened.

Cassie tends to be a wreck.

But she’s not the only one in her circle with secrets. Her co-worker Megan (Rosie Perez) inadvertently sold intelligence to North Korea. Her best friend Annie (Zosia Mamet) performed shady acts for the law firm where she used to work, on top of keeping other secrets from Cassie.

One year later each of them contends with the fallout of those choices, although Cassie’s troubles are in large part her own making. Along with getting sober, she has relocated to Los Angeles, has a solid relationship with a sexy, sober man named Marco (Santiago Cabrera) and is moonlighting as a civilian asset for the CIA. Managing a plate that full would be challenging for a stable organized person. Cassie tends to be a wreck.

Yet again, she ensnares her friends and family into a fresh web of drama and danger that would have been entirely . . . well, mostly . . . avoidable, if she tended her own life and stuck with her handler Benjamin’s (Mo McRae) insistent directions to walk away.

But sober life, like idle hands, proves to be the Devil’s playground. Before long Cassie’s trotting along in a dynamite-red coat behind a woman who looks exactly like her, then thinks she sees her kill a man she was tracking in a car bombing. From there her murderous double starts getting too close for comfort, to the point that Cassie wonders if her doppelganger is also working for the CIA. The stress of her predicament winds her up, and the viewer along with her, to the point that each time her phone bounces alive with its ’80s one-hit wonder ringtone you might start tugging at your eyelashes.

Sober life, like idle hands, proves to be the Devil’s playground

However, it’s tough to say who is more dangerous: the other Cassie or the multiple versions of her who have taken up residence in the chic bar inside her head, goading her to drink at every conceivable moment. See? It’s a lot!

It’s also doubtful Cuoco would have it another way, given the dramedy’s unstated role as a vehicle to vault beyond “The Big Bang Theory” and to demonstrate her dramatic range. “The Flight Attendant” is at its sharpest when it fulfills this purpose – especially this season, which trades Cassie’s externalized interior conversations with last year’s dead lover (played by Michiel Huisman) for increasingly sweaty sparring with various versions of herself.

Kaley Cuoco in “The Flight Attendant” (Jennifer Rose Clasen/HBO Max)

Cuoco still plies the zany comedic side with aplomb, playing to strengths that have served her so well in other shows, including the animated cult hit “Harley Quinn.” But this season’s harsh gaze allows her to differentiate each version of Cassie with confident dexterity, escalating her party girl-self’s vicious undermining to bringing out Cassie’s mopey depressive and her inner dejected teenager (Audrey Grace Marshall).

All of them magnify the character’s profound self-loathing, a bitter and degenerating feeling that slowly pulls apart her outward self over the course of the six episodes made available for review. And this unraveling also amplifies the unease permeating the scenes she shares with McRae, or her co-worker Grace (Mae Martin) or, much later into the season, a long-avoided confrontation with her mother (played by Sharon Stone).

As a platform to showcase the star’s talent without straying too far from its frenetic narrative path, few shows can match it.

Nevertheless, the added mass in this new season drags on the overall velocity that gave prior episodes so much kick. Cassie’s tangled A-plot apparently isn’t enough for her to manage by itself, so she draws in Annie, who’s also trying to relocate to Los Angeles, while taking it upon herself to track down Megan, who is in the wind following the first season finale’s revelations.

Margaret Cho pops up in a charming if morally murky role.

Where that previous season’s lightning pace is expertly driven by a character whose blood alcohol content was far too high for her to be behind a wheel, this season’s espionage plot can at times feel like carriage tugging along Cuoco’s character study on regret, repressed guilt, anxiety and shame, along with a raft of famous guest stars. (In addition to those aforementioned names, Margaret Cho pops up in a charming if morally murky role.)

The convolutions involved in this combo of whodunit and “who is it,” while interesting, carry far less weight than the more substantial show crouching behind all the excitement. I’m referring to the one that uses Cassie, Annie and Megan to dig into what it means to be a bad person, or what it takes to be a good one, and whether it’s even fair to try to jam ourselves into those costumes.

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

Part of this requires a few familiar faces returning, including Cassie’s brother Davey (T.R. Knight), Griffin Matthews as Cassie’s other co-worker and brutally honest confidante Shane Evans, and others best left a mystery. But we’re also subjected to a classic and somewhat hackneyed TV interpretation of the alcoholic’s journey. I am not in recovery, but a person doesn’t have to be to recognize that Cassie follows a long-established TV pattern of fresh sobriety as many TV writing rooms map it out.

If a person hasn’t seen shows that get closer to a more realistic take on new sobriety, like the tightly crafted “Single Drunk Female,” this may not bother them. Cuoco’s realistic writhing and perspiration through moments of temptation makes for engrossing viewing, and augments Shohreh Aghdashloo’s robust performance as her sponsor Brenda. But it also sets up Cassie’s sobriety as a means of saucing the action with predictable tension, to the point that it’s not a question of whether she’ll relapse but when.

There’s no denying the soaring pleasure of “The Flight Attendant” despite these minor irritations even so, because Cuoco is simply that good at captaining our way through Cassie’s muchness. She is a lot, but it’s nothing we can’t handle.

Season 2 of “The Flight Attendant” debuts with two episodes on Thursday, April 21 on HBO Max. New episode premiere on Thursdays.

“The Masked Singer” episode unmasking Rudy Giuliani sees viewership drop to all-time lows

Rudy Giuliani’s appearance on Wednesday night’s episode of “The Masked Singer” garnered the expected backlash and disapproval. The not-so-surprising unmasking of Donald Trump’s former personal attorney also coincided with the show’s ratings falling to an all-time low.

The episode received a 0.6 demo rating and a total of 3.6 million total viewers, which is a newly recorded season low for “The Masked Singer,” according to Variety. In comparison, the show experienced a season high of 4.3 million viewers on March 30 and a 1.0 demo rating following its season premiere. On average, “The Masked Singer” has 4.1 million total viewers and a 0.7 rating among adult viewers between the ages of 18 to 49.

Giuliani’s episode, which aired at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, was also overpowered by its cable show competitors that share the same broadcast time. According to the Variety report, latest episodes of CBS’s “Survivor” had a 0.8 rating and garnered 5.2 million viewers, while NBC’s “Chicago Med” had a 0.6 rating and drew 6.5 million viewers.

It’s still unclear why “The Masked Singer” decided to feature Giuliani — who is both a self-declared anti-masker and a political figure embroiled in plenty of scandal. Most likely it was a ratings ploy, but clearly, the unpopular and divisive stunt did not boost the show’s viewership. Such decisions probably won’t help the show in the long run either as its ratings continue to follow a downward trend. The show already made a similar mistake in May 2020 when it showcased guest star Sarah Palin, who revealed herself as the masked cotton-candy-resembling Bear. The politician later attempted to explain her appearance, saying she took part in the show as “a walking middle finger to the haters out there.” Palin, however, is relatively toothless compared to the harm that Giuliani or Sean Spicer – who was a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” – perpetrated as part of the former administration’s lackeys.

Can Fox, ABC and any other network that has a fun reality competition show stop trying to normalize these flunkies by casting them now?

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

During Wednesday’s episode, Giuliani was dressed as the Jack in the Box and sang “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers. His unveiling later prompted judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke to exit the stage, albeit briefly.

“With all of the controversy that’s surrounding you right now I think it surprises us all that you’re here on ‘The Masked Singer,” said host Nick Cannon. Giuliani simply replied, “Me too.”

Giuliani then said the reason why he agreed to be on “The Masked Singer” was because he wanted to set an example for his granddaughter, Grace.

“I want her to know that you should try everything, even things that are completely unlike you and unlikely,” Giuliani explained. “I couldn’t think of anything more unlike me and unlikely than this. And I enjoy the show, I have for years, and it just seemed like it would be fun. I don’t get to have a lot of fun.”

More stories you might like:

No, a “woke mob” did not convince Snickers to get rid of the “veins” on its candy

Alright, let’s get this out of the way: No, Snickers did not remove a “dick vein” from its candy bars. I’m sorry that I have to write that sentence, but let me explain why I do.

Earlier this month, an image of an eerily smooth Snickers bar began to make the rounds on social media alongside a screenshot of a news article claiming that Snickers’ parent company, Mars Inc., had removed the (sorry again) “world renowned dick vein from the candy bar.”

The screenshot of the article included the line: “Woke mobs have been begging for decades and cancel culture prevails.”

According to Snopes, the image of the smooth Snickers may be real — if so, it’s likely the result of a simple manufacturing error — but the article is not. Instead, it’s a play on the news surrounding the recent redesign of the Green M&M and the ensuing (very real) backlash from conservative pundits. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for his part, connected Mars’ decision to make its cartoons “less sexy” to the decline of American society.

In January, Mars announced that the anthropomorphic candy icons would be undergoing a makeover to better reflect a “more dynamic, progressive world” and to show off the character’s “personality, rather than their gender.” This included stripping the Green M&M of her signature white platform boots and replacing them with “cool, laid-back sneakers to reflect her effortless confidence.”

It was a weird flex (especially amid allegations of child labor in Mars’ supply chain), but everyone pretty much took the transition in stride — except for Carlson. In a now-memed rant, the Fox News host said in January that “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them — that’s the goal.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food’s newsletter.

As Snopes wrote, in the wake of these changes, many people made jokes about other candies that “needed be desexualized, such as the Snickers bar and its ‘dick vein,’ which social media users have been poking fun of since at least 2009.”

You may be wondering, “Now, what does Snickers think of all this?” Well, instead of keeping mum or offering a subtle statement like, “Snickers: The same as they ever were,” it decided to take advantage of this week’s trending topic.

On Tuesday, the brand posted: “Good news, contrary to what’s trending on Twitter… THE VEINS REMAIN!”

Read more:

Tucker Carlson hawks “testicle tanning” to boost testosterone. Experts say it may do the opposite

Far-right talking heads like Tucker Carlson love bemoaning the state of masculinity, as measured by their very narrow and stereotypical lens, as though it is in some sort of crisis. To that end, Carlson recently humored the internet (and world?) by offering up a wellness solution for this so-called crisis in his “Tucker Carlson Original” documentary, title “The End of Men.” And Carlson’s prescription, to stop the death spiral of the American man, was something called “testicle tanning.”

“The solutions are actually really simple,” fitness professional Andrew McGovern told Carlson. “Red-light therapy—testicle tanning…has massive benefits.”

Testicle tanning, more formally known as red-light therapy for testosterone, involves exposing one’s scrotum to infrared light; this, supposedly, increases testosterone levels. Trailers for Carlson’s documentary feature multiple images of a naked white man appearing to plug his testicles into some sort of infrared light device. As his bottom half lights up, the man’s arms slowly raise, indicating some sort of victory or enlightenment has been achieved. Presumably with the help of testicle tanning.

RELATED: What is a “warrior poet?”

“Half the viewers right now are like, ‘What?! Testicle tanning, that’s crazy!'” Carlson responded. “But my view is: Okay, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it, that’s crazy, so why is it crazy to seek solutions?”

This isn’t the first time the idea of testicle tanning has entered the public discourse. In 2015, former Major League Baseball player Gabe Kapler made headlines for promoting testicle tanning as a solution to Vitamin D deficiencies in men. “If you want to be your strongest, get some sun on your boys. And by boys, I mean your testicles,” Kapler said.

In 2017, self-proclaimed “biohacker” Ben Greenfield wrote in Men’s Health magazine about his experience trying red-light therapy on his testicles to increase his testosterone levels. After, Greenfield claimed to have “never felt better.”

But despite these anecdotes, there has been little written about whether this is actually a therapy that many people are doing — or, if there is there any scientific evidence to suggest it works. A related trend, of perineum sunning, was briefly a wellness trend in 2019 and 2020. Yet in my research, I could find no spas that offered the testicle tanning service. Indeed, in 2020, Inverse reported that it is more of an “at-home treatment” rather than something being offered as a service.

In any case, those interested in testicle tanning can purchase in-home devices such as light beds, lamps, lasers, and infrared saunas, which range in price from hundreds to thousands of dollars. In 2019, researchers estimated that the global light therapy market was expected to surpass $1 billion by 2025, though light therapy mostly includes non-testicle related treatments for things like eczema and psoriasis.

The greatest irony behind the testicle tanning fad, however, is that it seems to do the opposite of what boosters like Tucker Carlson say that it does. Indeed, urologists do not recommend red-light therapy to boost testosterone, noting exposure of infrared light can negatively affect a male’s testicles and may actually lower testosterone levels.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter The Vulgar Scientist.

“Any extreme chronic exposure can prove harmful for the testes leading to decreased testosterone, decreased sperm counts and subsequent infertility,” reproductive urologist Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy told Salon via email. “However, the true efficacy of testes-focused light therapy in improving testosterone levels is currently unknown and not backed by the scientific literature.”

Ramasamy said that there have been some studies to show that red-light therapy can improve the destruction of cells on a person’s skin. Indeed, it is sometimes used to treat wrinkles, redness, acne, scars and other signs of aging. But “the true effectiveness of this therapeutic modality remains unknown,” Ramasamy notes.

Advocates of the therapy often point to one study from researchers at the University of Siena in Italy from 2016 who claimed that “bright light increases testosterone levels and leads to greater sexual satisfaction in men with low sexual desire.” Professor Andrea Fagiolini recruited 38 men who had been diagnosed with hypoactive sexual desire disorder or sexual arousal disorder, both conditions that are characterized by a lack of interest in sex.

Fagiolini divided the study participants into two groups, one of which received treatment with a specially adapted light box and the other which received a placebo. Both groups received an hour of treatment from a light box for two weeks. The researchers claimed there were significant differences in the groups, with increased testosterone levels in the group exposed to a light box, but they recognized the study was small and thus they couldn’t “recommend this as a clinical treatment.” Notably, the study wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed journal, and participants’ testicles were directly exposed to the light.

Ramasamy added that too much sunlight could negatively affect male testicles, too, and lead to decreased sperm count and “intratesticular testosterone levels.”

“This study fails to mention that the men in this study were likely suffering from hypogonadism given the low testosterone level and presence of symptoms (in this case low sex drive or libido),” Ramasamy told Salon. “Testosterone levels are very dependent on quantity and quality of sleep and the use of aids to optimize such as light therapy could theoretically increase endogenous testosterone production,” Ramasamy said, adding that this study doesn’t indicate that light therapy focused on the testicles specifically could increase testosterone.

“Previous studies examining the use of light therapy focused on the testicles have often been done in men suffering from fertility issues such as azoospermia or asthenozoospermia with no indication or studies supporting its use in healthy men,” Ramasamy continued. “The few studies demonstrating the use of red-light in increase testosterone levels have been done in animal subjects which are very imperfect models of humans and do not fully represent our own physiology.”

Ramasamy added that too much sunlight could negatively affect male testicles, too, and lead to decreased sperm count and “intratesticular testosterone levels.”

“The testicles are vital organs responsible for producing the majority of testosterone and source of sperm, both of which are essential for maintaining fertility,” Ramasamy said. “Normally the testicles prefer to be in a slightly cooler environment than the core body temperature which is one of the reasons they move in response to local temperature.”

Read more about right-wing health misinformation:

Jordan Klepper sees the future of GOP: “Conservatives look to Hungary as a conservative wonderland”

Jordan Klepper, correspondent on “The Daily Show,” has made a name for himself going to Trump rallies in recent years and cleverly getting Trump supporters to share their unintentionally comedic — and even alarming views. Now Klepper is traveling to the ghost of autocracy’s future as he heads to Hungary in his new TV special for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.” In “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Globe: Hungary for Democracy,” premiering Thursday, April 21 at 11:30 ET/PT on Comedy Central, he explores the alarming connection between the increasingly autocratic government there and our own budding autocratic movement known as the GOP. In fact, America’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) is holding a conference in Hungary this May.

As we discussed on our “Salon Talks” episode, which you can watch below, Klepper first became aware of this unholy love affair between America’s right and Hungary’s autocrats when he covered the most recent CPAC convention in Orlando for “The Daily Show.” That event surprisingly featured Hungarian politicians who served up all the typical GOP red meat including saying, “Let’s Go Brandon,” which is code for “F**k Joe Biden.” As Klepper explained, “It turns out conservatives look to Hungary as a conservative wonderland.”

Why? Simply, Hungary’s right wing prime minister Viktor Orban is passionately anti-immigrant, has demonized Muslims, passed vile anti-LGBTQ laws, controls the media, rigged elections, banned topics in school he doesn’t approve of and has made George Soros his number one enemy. Sound familiar?

Klepper warned of “Americans’ lack of imagination as to what can happen to our own democracy.” He aptly noted that the backsliding of democracy happens slowly. “It’s the frog that’s boiling in a pot of water.” That is what happened in Hungary and appears the trajectory the GOP wants to take the United States.

Klepper also shared his view on why people like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin fear comedy at their expense. “Sometimes you just need the clearest way of calling BS, and a joke is often the fastest way to that.”

The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

You’ve got this new special about going to Hungary, “Jordan Klepper Fingers the Globe: Hungary for Democracy,” and it speaks to all different levels about what’s going on in our country. You go to Trump events for “The Daily Show” and have sincere, earnest conversations with people, even though you’re being playful. How do you get them just to have a normal conversation and not say “fake news” and that kind of garbage?

Trust me, I go to some rallies and I’m getting yelled at by folks who do say “fake news” and do want to cause a ruckus, but more often than not people want to engage at a rally. People are there to scream for Donald Trump or whoever’s in front of them. And so the idea of engaging with somebody and screaming in front of a camera is appealing to many of them.

You either get the folks who see it and are like, “screw you” and walk off, or you get the folks who say, “Screw you. I want to heckle you for the next hour and a half,” or you get the folks who say, “I know exactly who you are and that makes me want to engage,” so we can go back and forth. Or you get people who have no idea who you are and just want to talk. They want to get their opinions out there in the public. More often, they’re not ready for the follow-up to understand what’s behind that opinion because a lot of these opinions are just plucked from a man who is making it up on the spot and he doesn’t get a follow-up. I luckily get that follow-up and we start to see the gaps in information.

When you talk to some of these people, forget politics, do you get a sense that some of them just want to be a heard? And for some reason, in the case of Donald Trump, they feel that finally someone listens to them or sounds like them?

Well, I think the very human side of all of this, especially when you look at rallies, people want a community and a sense of belonging. I think you go to a rally where you’re surrounded by 10,000 other people in a small town, it’s a great event, it’s why I go tailgating. It’s why people join improv groups. It’s a community.

They want a sense of meaning. And guess what? When the former leader of the free world says, “You are a patriot. These are the bad guys. Do what you can,” you suddenly have meaning, you have meaning and community. I think a lot of these people feel empowered and I think that’s very human. That’s the most human thing there is. We all need this in our lives. When I engage with those folks, I think they are in a sweet spot where they feel like they are loved, they are part of something, and they are energized to speak truth to power. And also they want to try it out.

“A funny story about Trump events is they’re poorly organized.”

But for what it’s worth, I think a lot of these people are engaging in the political world for the first time. I think that’s also some of the issue, is it becomes all politics and governing completely gets left aside. So the actual issues that we engage with, those are just tools to talk about the politics. They’re more interested in the “this did it wrong; that did it wrong – rah-rah” portion. The governing part, the thing that actually matters, that’s something people are less versed in. And so that hasn’t been thought through. I think you’re starting to see people who are like, “Let me engage in this political argument. I am now a part of this. I’ve watched enough talking heads that I can talk about this thing, let’s go. Oh s**t, you’re still asking why I think that. Now we have a problem.”

You mentioned some people heckle you. Have you ever felt concerned for yourself?

It definitely gets contentious. I saw a real shift after the election. Going out to rallies beforehand, people were confident because Trump was in office. He had won, and they felt very good about the election. After the election took place, even though the narrative was that they had won, people were wounded and they were angry. We were traveling with three or four security guards each place we went, and the Million MAGA March was the first time there was, I think, really palpable danger there. I was interviewing people and what happens when you interview people who are around other people who are bored, what you start to find is people are looking for things to do.

“This isn’t all just fun and games”

A funny story about Trump events is they’re poorly organized. A the Million MAGA March, there were two stages a mile apart, with speakers. And what they didn’t do was invest in a good speaker system. So if you were there to listen to the speakers, you had to be within 30 yards of the stage to actually hear it. And so what that meant is you had 40,000 people there and 39,000 of them couldn’t hear any of the events so they were just milling about. And when you see a guy from “The Daily Show” starting to interview people, everybody gets activated.

Talking to one person became talking to five people, which became 30 people. And I have to be taken away because people start to charge at me. I’m brought down an alley by security, and they have to create a distraction to get away. And that was the first time it was like, “Oh things are getting palpably angry.”

And that’s called radicalizing people.

It is.

That’s interesting for you that it gets real where you actually have to fear for your own safety. How does it affect the way you process it personally? Do you think, “I’m doing the comedy segment, but there’s something deeper that’s really troubling in our society going on”?

I love what I get to do. I think to go out and engage with people and hear what actually the narrative is on the ground. And more often, we walk out the door assuming one thing, but more often than not it’s something else and actually this is what people care about, this is where their mind’s at, this is the conspiracy that we hadn’t read on the internet. But when you get there, somebody’s going to talk to you about social distancing and the reason that it’s six feet is because that’s the sign of the devil. And you’re like, “Oh, well, I guess I had to go there in person to understand the depth of these conspiracies.” We’d like to reflect that in the pieces that we do.

“Satire heightens the BS and the blind spots that we see in society, so that it’s palpable and understood in the quickest, biggest, possible way.”

I love finding the comedy there and I think the satire is really important to me, but I think it’s also reflective of what’s happening in this society. People don’t get to see the conversations people are having out in the middle of America. So wherever we can bring some of that energy to the internet and to the show so people get to see, this is the conversations, this is the logic, this is sort of the anger that is there. We don’t want to glorify people attacking a foe journalist, so we’re not going to make heroes out of these people who are charging at me because I want to continue to have a job, but we also want to show that this isn’t all just fun and games.

With this special, for example, we get a little bit more time to show what else is happening outside of here. Or even the last special I did where we showed what happened on January 6th, where you’re like, “Yes, we find humor in the blind spots of Americans.” I think there’s also a lot of sadness in the way that it’s weaponized, but there’s also a lot of danger. When we can show all of that, then we’re giving more complete picture.

In your special, you travel to Hungary. Before we talk about that, I wanted to mention President Zelensky, who we all know was a comedian, was interviewed by the Atlantic and said over the weekend that Vladimir Putin, he fears comedy because it’s accessible and it’s a tool that cuts through things. It’s a shortcut to telling the truth. And I thought, what a great definition of it. Here we have seen Donald Trump literally call for “Saturday Night Live” to be canceled, as a candidate, and as President called for the FCC to investigate “Saturday Night Live.” And he lashed out against the late night hosts and even before that, he went after Jon Stewart and Bill Maher and other comedians. Do you think there’s a connection to the idea that Putin, according to Zelensky, fears comedy for his own reasons, and that Trump, a wannabe dictator, objectively fears comedy for similar reasons?

Look at Donald Trump, part of the reason he may have gotten into this whole thing in the first place was getting made fun of at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. That guy reacts more to jokes aimed at him than he does images of immigrants on the border, families separated, or COVID death tolls. Those seem to wash over him, but an “SNL” joke, that’s going to haunt him for days. So there’s something to it. One, he’s a baby. That’s what a child does. A child with no empathy reacts more to the jokes aimed at them, than they do the human suffering that he has a hand in affecting. That aside, I think it’s emblematic of how effective humor can be. Laughter is a response of recognition and when you see a bunch of people laughing at a joke on “SNL” about Donald Trump or supporting that, it’s because people see that BS that they see in Donald Trump and they recognize it. And it’s a democratic response to bulls**t. Donald Trump isn’t immune to that democratic response, as much as he tries to affect it in other ways.

Comedy is scary. It’s also the language of the people. People understand comedy. Satire heightens the BS and the blind spots that we see in society, so that it’s palpable and understood in the quickest, biggest, possible way. And in a media landscape where you’re in your own bubbles, it can get overwhelming by the influx of information. Sometimes you just need the clearest way of calling BS, and a joke is often the fastest way to that. So, it depends on how you wield that, but I have no doubt. I understand why for giant men in power, whose power is based on the way in which they can control the narrative and control the people who hear that narrative, comedy is a great way to disrupt that narrative. And they should be freaking scared because these jokes are sharp, Dean, sharp.

They’re sharp. Look, I have performed comedy in the Middle East and you cannot do jokes with the leaders of those countries. And not all want to truly be feared, but they understood that if you become a punchline, people might not take you as seriously. Instinctively, Trump is cut from that cloth. In Russia, there have been comedians who have been forced to leave the country. They canceled what was equivalent to almost like their “SNL” show. It’s a puppet show, but it’s well known. These guys don’t like being laughed at.

It’s power. These people are elevated by power, but it’s the emperor has no clothes. And if you’ve created this world where you’re like, “I am invincible because of all of these things that are mostly projections I put out onto the world, you shouldn’t be able to criticize my position. I have reached this status.” Why did you reach that status, Donald Trump? It’s not out of things that you’ve earned or intellect. You reached that status because you were given money in a privileged society and allowed to fail and continue to fail up, and then bolstered by people who had other more moneyed interests and wanted you to play off of the fears of others to get into that position.

That’s not earning something. That’s a bulls**t institution that you’ve definitely benefited from. And so, you don’t want people to point that out. You want people to treat you with the respect of somebody who’s achieved something. But when you’ve achieved nothing, well then jokes are going to cut at that and point it out. And so, I don’t think he’s the smartest guy in the world, but he’s smart enough to understand that that emperor is nude as all hell, and it ain’t a pretty sight and it’s not very big either.

That’s just a horrible mental picture. So before you headed to Hungary for this special, you were at CPAC in Florida and you pointed out there were politicians from Hungary there, who were saying the same things. Even the “Let’s Go Brandon” chant at the event. Why were politicians from Hungary at CPAC in America?

This was shocking to us and why we went to Hungary. It turns out conservatives look to Hungary as a conservative wonderland. They’ve gotten a lot of things done that I think many conservatives in America wish they could get done here. Viktor Orban, their prime minister, has been called a competent Trump. Steve Bannon called him, “Trump before Trump.” And I’ll be honest, I knew very little about the politics of Hungary, but once we heard that CPAC was going there, we started to look into it more. We started to talk to people about it. Tucker Carlson suddenly does a special about Hungary. Donald Trump, endorses Viktor Orban. Viktor Orban, who in February, was hanging out with Putin, trying to get his endorsement for the election. And so a lot of red flags go off. What is it about this country? What is it about this guy that conservatives see as something to emulate?

“When we look at what could happen in America, Hungary is a very fascinating place to look. What you see is things like gerrymandering, keeping people in power.”

Jordan Klepper goes to Hungary to find out why American conservatives are obsessed with the Hungarian right-wing government. (Joel Sadler/Comedy Central)

Is there anything that you took away about where the GOP might be going?

Well, I think Americans lack imagination as to what can happen to our own democracy. I think it often gets hyperbolic and people will talk about the fall of democracy and imagine perhaps there’s a militarized state and an overthrow. And that’s hard for people to grasp, or it feels so far away that people don’t engage with that as a real possibility. I think looking at Hungary is a great example. It’s the frog that’s boiling in a pot of water. It’s part of the EU. It’s a democracy, that you can vote. They have a free media, but like you just said, they’ve just been downgraded to a partly free society. And what that looks like is, smart little moves to keep people in power, in power. It means vilifying segments of the population as a way to one, push them out, two, change the constitution, and three, keep those people in power, continue to stay in power.

And so I think, when we look at what could happen in America, Hungary is a very fascinating place to look. And I think, what you see is things like gerrymandering, keeping people in power. You see, once Viktor Orban got in power and his party Fidesz got two-thirds, they started changing the constitution. They started to change what the definition of marriage looked like. So it’s between a man and a woman. And that then means that there’s no adoption for any kind of gay community there. They started to write vague LGBTQ laws that were vague enough to make essentially it illegal to put any kind of positive gay characters on television, because they start to conflate sexuality with pedophilia.

We start to see this game plan happening in America. I think what we saw with the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in Florida, and what’s happening now in places like Ohio and Georgia. This is starting to build a narrative that one, gets people scared and upset. Two, politicians start to run on. And also when it comes to immigration, Orban with Syrian refugees basically came up with the blueprint for what Donald Trump did with our border crisis during his tenure.

So I think, it’s a really interesting country to look at and it is effective. And what you have is, you have a guy who’s been in power for I think 12 years now, who just won reelection, is going to continue to stay in power. And you have these folks who are dissenters in what is happening in their country, losing more in power every election, because they’ve codified ways in which that party can stay in power. And those people who are part of minority communities have less and less say.

You visited essentially the ghost of autocracy future for America.

Well, I think as far as the culture wars go, the LGBTQ community is fascinating, and we’ve talked about how they’re vilifying that. And I think it’s vague laws that make it harder for people to know how to engage with culture without being penalized. They kicked out a university called Central European University. And that is, again, part of this whole woke war, is a George Soros-funded university. Guess what? Also a bad guy in Hungary, perhaps their original bad guy. And now that university, which is a progressive university, it’s a global university, it’s a giant campus in the center of Budapest; empty. It’s completely empty right now. It’s been kicked out and now it’s in Vienna.

Why? Well, because when you have people in power, you can write very specific laws into your constitution that create ways in which that cultural institutions in your country, well, they can no longer be there anymore. So now they have to go overseas. And so I think they’re effectively waging the war on higher ed. They’ve essentially banned the term gender in a way that has affected the culture and made it really difficult for people to protect those in need.

You start to see things like this, you’re like, “Oh, this could happen with America.” And again, it doesn’t look like something on the surface. “What happened with CEU?” Well, when you get into the weeds about it, it has to do with accreditation, it having international status in America and what have you. And you’re like, “Oh, OK. This is just a weird accreditation battle. That’s going to happen with some colleges.” Well, when you look a little bit deeper and what it is, is it’s a progressive institution in the center of Budapest, and now it’s no longer there, making way for more and more conservative ideologies. And so, I see that on the horizon in a country that finds effectiveness in its bureaucracy. You get somebody like a Ron DeSantis in office or a more competent Trump, and I think you put people in power who can control those decisions and they can affect culture in that way.

“What you’re seeing in Hungary is not an autocracy, but it’s a slide away from democracy and that’s the dangerous place to be. “

It’s not enough now with the critical race theory bills, the next step would be closing down state universities or private universities that dare teach things that these leaders don’t like. And that’s the future.

Tucker Carlson goes there and they showed Budapest, which is a beautiful city. This is also when you imagine this like, “Oh, do I go to Hungary?” And it’s this rundown spot. Budapest is a gorgeous city. And they applaud how, “Look there’s very little homeless population in the downtown.” And then you look into it and guess what? They’ve essentially made being homeless a crime. And what happens when you go to jail in Hungary? Well, they can put you to work, doing things like building a wall on their border. And suddenly you’re like, “Oh, when you’re criminalizing homeless people and now they’re building your wall? Feels a little bit like slavery. Oh, yikes. Oh, these are blueprints we don’t want getting out.”

And that’ll be in the 2024 GOP platform.

The crazy thing about that is you’re right. Hungary has found sneaky ways to do it. I think the GOP platform in 2024 is just going to tell you, “Homeless people will build our wall for free.” And if you can get that into a nice, concise, clever chant, that thing will be successful at whatever rally you go to.

It’s remarkable to see the GOP, instead of having a conference like CPAC in America to bring revenue to American city, has brought it to Hungary because they’re getting the access power to get there. This is like fascism. This is not the same as Germany and Italy under Mussolini and Japan, but we’re getting close.

I think people have a hard time thinking of what does autocracy look like. Those ideas are so hard for us to grasp. What you’re seeing in Hungary is not an autocracy, but it’s a slide away from democracy and that’s the dangerous place to be. That’s what Americans need to be super vigilant about, because that’s a scary, scary territory where things get dangerous.

Watch more “Salon Talks” with Dean Obeidallah:

Why it’s so hard to recreate your grandma’s chicken

The worst thing I ever baked was my grandmother’s banana bread. I was 20 and a fairly good, though not entirely confident, baker. I followed the recipe — a handwritten script with a list of ingredients and two or three sentences of instructions — but the bread came out rock hard. Had I misread her handwriting? Were my ingredients different from hers? To this day, I don’t know what I did wrong.

Whether it’s indecipherable handwriting or insufficient instruction, family recipes can often be difficult to recreate. Add the pressure of making something that’s imbued with history and meaning, and even the most assured cook is bound to feel less confident. Some of these come from cookbooks, dog-eared and stained from use; others have been passed down in the kitchen, with the guiding hand of another family member; and many have been carried on in memory alone.

From cultural traditions to reckonings with grief and identity, family recipes tell our stories. The first season of the podcast My Family Recipe explored these stories in greater depth, as writers delved into their own beloved recipes. Often joined by family and friends, the conversations traveled beyond family anecdotes to get at the heart of what it means to bring recipes from our pasts into our present. Here are some of the lessons we learned along the way.

Find your bearings

When writer Jennifer Justus recreated her grandmother’s butterscotch pecan pie, she knew the filling’s consistency just wasn’t right. She reached out to friend and pastry chef Rebekah Turshen, who had a quick fix on hand.

“People get a little nervous about overcooking pudding, so often it gets undercooked. With butterscotch and caramel, and that sort of pudding, there’s so much sugar that it’s actually difficult to curdle. But, if you do curdle an egg pudding of this sort, you can always just throw it in a blender and it will smooth right back out.”

Turshen had another suggestion for Justus, which is to compare your family recipe with other similar ones, especially one that you know already works.

“With things like flour, there can be a lot of different weights, so I try to average things out. I compare against something I’ve done, that I’m comfortable with, and that I know works. And that’s a good way to just get your bearings.”

Looking for similarities in process and ingredients can give you a good indication of how a recipe works, and whether or not it will be successful. These comparisons are especially helpful with recipes that have a list of ingredients but little or imprecise instruction. If you’re comfortable with recipe imprecision (“a handful of this,” and “a few spoons of that”), estimate based on what makes sense, and once you hit the right amounts, make sure to update your recipe card.

Recipe: Butterscotch-Pecan Pie

Ingredients change

A recipe’s ingredients might change over time for a number of reasons: changes in tastes and trends, access to better quality ingredients, and discontinued ingredients, but often, it’s the simplest ingredients that can trip you up, like salt and fat. Older recipes often call for less salt than their contemporary versions — in fact, you’ll find salt almost entirely missing from older recipes of baked goods. Don’t be shy about adding more. Similarly, older recipes can lean too far in the direction of sugar. When coming across fats, such as lard, shortening, and margarine, these can also often be replaced with unsalted butter. However, Turshen had this to add:

“Sometimes, when you’re trying to recreate something that you remember, you might actually like to keep something like margarine or shortening in, because it gives you that authentic flavor of something you remember so vividly.”

When writer and culinary historian Adrian Miller recreated family friend Minnie Utsey’s cornbread, substituting shortening was unthinkable. “I think the part that really trips people up is the melted shortening, but there’s a reason why you have to use the shortening,” he explained. Part of what we love about family recipes is their ability to transport us through time: These recipes nourish our bodies, but they also sustain our connection to the past and guide us through the present. While it can be tempting to update old recipes with different ingredients, there is a lot to be said for the nostalgic flavor certain ingredients provide.

Editor Coral Lee found more than just a list of ingredients in her Popo’s sponge cake recipe:

“My Popo is not only, fortunately, alive and well, but also a great record keeper. When she shared the recipe with me, Popo was explicit in recommending certain brands of ingredients, crediting her foolproof success to these products explicitly. Perhaps it’s me romanticizing it all, but I can’t help but think it’s a very touching way that she constructs and expresses her Asian-American identity.”

Recipe: Minnie Utsey’s No-Fail Cornbread

Recipe: Popo’s Sponge Cake

Piecing things together

When Joelle Zarcone lost her mother prematurely to cancer, she found herself struggling to recreate the Sunday sauce that had graced her childhood table. Zarcone combed through e-mails and text messages to create an ingredient list, and relied on her memory to piece together the process. It took a few tries, and involving family members in taste tests, but finally Zarcone knew it was right:

“I remember walking back toward my kitchen and smelling it and thinking to myself that it smelled like my house growing up, like it smelled like my mom was in there . . .”

Several essayists from the series note that family recipes often come with scant direction. In some cases, the recipe was never written down at all. Giselle Krachenfels’ mother, Clariza, recalled how she was taught to make her family’s leche flan:

“When I was younger, my mother would just have us stand next to her and say, ‘Watch how I cook.’ And so I would watch how she made things and later, I’d have to kind of wing it. So it’s like you watched what was in the pot and that’s how you learned it.”

Take the absence of information as a gentle nudge to connect with the family members that are still around, to ask questions and to learn their stories.

Recipe: Cheesy Baked Ziti With Big-Batch Sauce

Recipe: Leche Flan

Embrace the mistakes

Nostalgic family treats can be a lot like the game of telephone. The written recipe (or your family member) might assume a cook’s skillset or familiarity with ingredients. Krachenfels found that her mother initially made the same mistakes she did in the recreation of the family’s leche flan.

Mistakes will happen, and chances are, someone else has made the same mistake. Remembering that those mistakes are part of a common experience can bring you closer to loved ones. For Gary Schiro, who wrote about attempting his mother’s most frequently cooked dish after she passed away, it was imagining his mother as a newlywed, learning to cook:

“I’m thinking about her as a very young woman marrying into this Italian family and trying to figure it all out. And probably from time to time grasping at straws, and getting it wrong many times. And I can just see her with the same cookbook (that I now own), trying to find a way forward, which clearly she did.”

Recipe: Sunday Sauce

Make it your own

Recipes are formulas, but they aren’t immutable. The mistakes you make trying to duplicate a recipe might lead to a new version that carries it forward into the present. Schiro recreates his mother’s sauce to the letter. The meatballs, however, are another story. Embracing the access to meat that his mother didn’t enjoy, Shiro has made the meatballs lighter than their all-beef counterparts by incorporating turkey, veal, and pork.

Turshen has some useful advice when combining the past with the present:

*”When I’m looking to recreate something that I’ve had in my past or that I find in an old book, there are certain parts, like the pie crust that I use my own recipe for — one that I’m comfortable with. And then I use the filling from the original recipe. That balances things out where I know I’m going to have the base that I’m happy with but I’ve added the old-fashioned main event to go with that.”

The beauty of family recipes is that they tell our stories. These stories don’t just have to be reminiscent of the past, they contain our navigations of the present and our hopes for the future. At its heart, a recipe helps us find and create those connections and, if we’re lucky, is part of a delicious meal for generations to come.

How to warm up corn tortillas, once and for all

It’s impossible to not love taco night (especially if it falls on a Tuesday). It’s satisfying, serves plenty, and adapts to your whims — carnitas one week, fried avocados or grilled fish the next. With a spread of salsa, guacamole, beans, and warm tortillas before you, it’s a DIY dinner and a sanctioned chance to play with your food — something that the kids and kids at heart will love.

Oh and yes, we did say warm tortillas. And no, we won’t ask you to make your own, unless that’s what your heart is telling you to do. The truth is, store-bought tortillas work just fine for shuttling maximal taco fillings from plate to mouth, but try telling that to the cold, rubbery tortillas that sit neglected while you eat your carnitas with a fork. Look past the microwave — with a little know-how, you can reheat tortillas so they’re worthy of the things they hold. Food52 community user MarionRose asked for your tips, and you had her back:

In the oven

Enlist your oven, like Food52 community member lisina does: “Wrap a stack of tortillas in aluminum foil and pop them in a 350°F oven for 10 minutes or so. They’ll steam inside the packet and stay nice and soft. Keep them wrapped until you’re ready to use them.” Former Food52-er Sarah Jampel heats them for 15 to 20 minutes and will warm multiple stacks of tortillas (five or fewer) at the same time. It’s the slowest method, but the best for entertaining a crowd.

Stovetop

Chef’s Hat prefers to stick with the stovetop: “I always put them in a non-stick pan, heating both sides until they start to get some color. Takes some time, but I like it far better than putting them in the oven.” You can also use a comal, griddle, cast-iron skillet, or wok; heat the pan until it’s very hot and cook on both sides until toasty. Food52er Sarah Larter wrote that her mom would “put a wire rack over the pot of simmering meat/fillings and set the tortillas on that to warm up.” Cover with a wide lid until the heat from the fillings steams the tacos.

Over on Serious Eats, J. Kenji López-Alt contends that the right way to warm tortillas is on a very hot flat surface. But the important caveat: Dip each tortilla in water before directly transferring it to the griddle so that it will steam when it encounters the hot pan. And wrapping the stack of warm tortillas in a towel is an essential step for ensuring they’re completely tender.

In “Super Natural Every Day,” Heidi Swanson says to wrap a stack of tortillas in a barely damp dish towel before placing the package in a large pot set over very low heat. Cover the pot and warm the tortillas until you’re ready to serve.

Pan-less

Our favorite way to heat them up also happens to be the fastest — with no equipment necessary. Cut out the middleman and get rid of the pan, but keep the stovetop. Set a tortilla over a gas burner on medium-low heat. (Do not step away from your kitchen!) When the tortilla is charred, use a pair of tongs to flip it over and expose the other side to direct heat. Stack the tortillas in a warm dishcloth as you char the rest. You can do this on two, or three, or four burners if you’re very coordinated. (Even so, it’s probably not the method you’ll rely on if you want to heat dozens of tortillas at a time.) You can also use the same technique on a grill or grill pan.

And here’s another tip: Commenter Becka Hurst Schact wrote that she dips each tortilla in the dregs of a can of beans before throwing it on the grill. Lisabu fires up her gas stove and says: “I take tongs and hold the tortillas directly over the flame for 10 to 15 seconds on each side.” Pierino loves the same “radical approach,” because it gives his tortillas “a slight char and a mildly smoky flavor,” whether he’s using them for tacos or huevos rancheros.

In the microwave

Diana Kennedy, in “The Cuisines of Mexico,” advises the use of a microwave and plastic wrap (even she seems a little scared to be making the suggestion): “I never thought I should be recommending a microwave oven but it is very handy when you have a large number of tortillas to reheat in a hurry.” Wrap a dozen tortillas (no more!) in plastic wrap and heat for about 1 minute. Then turn the package over and heat for another 30 seconds. Done.

Rick Bayless also votes for the microwave (but omits the plastic wrap): Drizzle a clean towel with 3 tablespoons of water and wring it out so that it’s evenly damp. Use the towel to line an 8- or 9-inch casserole dish with a lid, then pile on a dozen (no more!) tortillas, lay the towel over top, cover with the lid, and microwave at 50% power for 4 minutes. Let stand for 2 to 3 minutes before eating.

In a steamer

Bayless also offers instructions for steaming tortillas, which is the best method for warming large quantities (though you’ll need a steamer): Pour 1/2 inch of water in the bottom of a steamer, line the basket with kitchen towel, then lay the tortillas in the basket in a stack of 12. Cover the tortilla stacks with the towel, then put the lid in place and bring the water to a boil. Let the water boil for 1 minute, then turn off the heat and let stand, covered, for 15 minutes. To keep the tortillas warm, either put the basket in a low oven or reheat the water.

But many of us can’t have fresh tortillas every time we want a taco — which makes embracing heat, the critical element for getting the most out of a grocery store corn tortilla even more important. Warming the tortilla releases their aroma and makes them pliable, so they won’t crack under the weight of your carnitas.

Lawless: Clarence Thomas and his wife’s texts expose Supreme Court’s missing ethics rules

Time and time again, the nation’s highest court has come under fire for failing to manage potentially unethical behavior by its justices.

In the past, the Supreme Court of the United States has cast aside pleas to adopt an ethics code for the justices.

Now, the actions of Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, Virginia – who pushed the White House to overturn the 2020 presidential election – have once again thrown light onto this long-standing conflict: How accountable should the justices be?

No justice

In general, ethical behavior by judges in our federal system is governed by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, which was adopted in 1973. The code applies to federal judges and magistrate judges serving in the courts of appeals, district courts, bankruptcy judges, the Court of International Trade and the Court of Federal Claims.

Judges cannot “allow family, social, political, financial, or other relationships to influence judicial conduct or judgment.” Such influence of conduct or judgment constitutes a conflict of interest.

Judges must not only avoid actual conflicts of interest, they must also avoid the appearance of impropriety. Thus, judges covered under the code need to recuse themselves from cases whenever their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

Notably absent from coverage under the code are the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Dead end in Congress

Acting on the assumption that it has the authority to impose rules on the justices, Congress in 1974 specifically included justices in a law requiring the disqualification of judges and magistrate judges when they engage in conduct that mirrors the types of prohibited conduct covered by the code.

Unfortunately, Congress did not include justices in the law that sets up the procedure for enforcing complaints about the judiciary and imposing discipline when a judge acts inappropriately, such as when violating the disqualification law.

Congress sought to bring attention to this gap. In 2015, bills were introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that would have mandated the Supreme Court to establish a code of ethics. The House bill never made it out of committee. The Senate bill met a similar fate.

And even more recently, in 2021, a U.S. House of Representatives resolution called on the justices to subject themselves to the code or to establish their own ethical code. The resolution is a nonbinding and symbolic gesture, and its fate is unresolved, as it remains in committee.

A similar House bill also was introduced in 2021 to require the Judicial Conference of the United States, which oversees the code, to make the code applicable to justices. The House has failed to take further action on the bill.

Court doesn’t police itself

The debate on this issue is not academic, because the instances in which justices have recused themselves are surprisingly frequent.

For example, one judicial watchdog organization reported that in the U.S. Supreme Court’s October term of 2020 alone, justices recused themselves close to 250 times for reasons including stock ownership in a company involved in the case, previous work on the case or having been personally named in the lawsuit.

Yet despite these documented occurrences, public outcry continues when justices have declined to recuse themselves in cases in which there are strong indications that their impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

The arguments for and against more meaningful ethical rules and oversight of the justices are complex.

One view is that Congress’ imposing an ethical code on justices is not only unnecessary, but might also be unconstitutional. The argument is that because the U.S. Constitution creates the Supreme Court – as opposed to the rest of the federal courts, which are established by Congress – the direct application of a code on the justices would violate the legal doctrine requiring a “separation of powers” among the branches.

Chief Justice John Roberts asserted in 2011 that the adoption of an ethics code was unnecessary. He wrote in his annual report on the federal judiciary that justices not only consult the code “as a key source of guidance,” but also turn to numerous other authorities to govern their conduct, especially in light of unique ethical considerations presented at the Supreme Court.

For example, unlike other courts, there is no substitute justice available to fill in when a justice recuses himself or herself. Therefore, wrote Roberts, each justice cannot recuse “as a matter of convenience or simply to avoid controversy,” because litigants could be needlessly deprived of having a full court hear their case.

Finally, can the justices themselves police a fellow justice’s decision to recuse or not to recuse? That’s unlikely, wrote Roberts, because a court generally “does not sit in judgment of one of its own members’ recusal decision in the course of deciding a case.”

Likewise, because the Supreme Court is the final court in the U.S. system, there is no higher tribunal to review such decisions.

Court reform groups disagree, arguing that individual justices cannot be the sole decision-makers on whether to recuse.

In light of that, one option would to institute an ethics code with enforcement mechanisms similar to what exists under the code for lower-court judges. Greater accountability, such as publishing explanations when a justice decided to recuse or not, would also increase transparency and the public’s confidence in the Supreme Court.

Other reform advocates have gone even further to suggest a host of changes such as term limits, restriction on ownership of individual stocks, more detailed financial disclosures and increased transparency of any public appearances by the justices.

Who has the better argument?

In the end, it really boils down to how much faith the public places in the nine members of the nation’s court of last resort.

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

Michael Cohen threatens to stop cooperating with Manhattan DA unless he charges Trump this month

Michael Cohen has told Manhattan prosecutors that he wouldn’t cooperate in a future investigation of Donald Trump if he isn’t indicted soon.

The former president’s longtime personal attorney told The Daily Beast he would not testify again if prosecutors end this six-month grand jury term without bringing charges, which they must do by the end of this month.

“No,” Cohen told the website. “I spent countless hours, over 15 sessions — including three while incarcerated. I provided thousands of documents, which coupled with my testimony, would have been a valid basis for an indictment and charge.”

“The fact that they have not done so despite all of this … I’m not interested in any further investment of my time,” he added.

Prosecutors have only until the end of the month to issue charges against the former president, or they have two other options: Ask grand jurors who have already served for six months to continue hearing evidence or make the entire presentation again before another panel of 23 jurors — and they probably couldn’t do that without Cohen’s help.

Cohen’s testimony is so important to the case that the entire investigation is named after him.

Court records made public last week show prosecutors have refer to the investigation as “The Fixer,” which describes Cohen’s relationship to Trump.

Trump had relied on Cohen to deliver hush money payments to former Playboy playmate-of-the-year Karen McDougal and adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, better known as Stormy Daniels, during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Former Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance Jr. convened a grand jury that sent an Aug. 1, 2019, subpoena to the Trump Organization demanding records about the hush money payments, after he realized New York prosecutors weren’t going to prosecute the then-president for election violations and fraud.

Manhattan prosecutors met with Cohen that same month while he was at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, and eventually met with him three times while he was there, and he gave them detailed explanations of how the Trump Organization operated like the mafia.

His evidence helped prosecutors indict the the Trump Organization and its longtime accountant Allen Weisselberg for criminal tax fraud, but Weisselberg hasn’t turned on his boss — and attorneys for both Trump and his accountant have complained investigators have spent so much time talking to Cohen.

The grand jury hasn’t been asked to indict Trump, because new district attorney Alvin Bragg Jr. has refused to sign off, which caused two top prosecutors to quit in protest, and investigators have begun to return evidence to witnesses.

However, New York law could allow prosecutors down the road to impanel another grand jury, but that carries risks — whether or not Cohen agrees to participate.

“Generally speaking, re-presenting a case is logistically difficult and also long-term problematic for the case,” said Alissa Marque Heydari, a former Manhattan assistant district attorney who now runs the Institute for Innovation in Prosecution at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You’re creating more opportunity for impeachment of a witness. You now have a witness who has testified twice. Nobody is going to testify the same way every single time. The defense can say this person is clearly lying because they can’t keep their story straight.”

Should you make Stephen King’s viral microwave salmon recipe for dinner? An expert weighs in

Stephen King has written what some would consider a new, tweet-length horror story.

“Dinner: Get a nice salmon filet at the supermarket, not too big,” the “It” and “Carrie” author wrote on Twitter. “Put some olive oil and lemon juice on it. Wrap it in damp paper towels. Nuke it in the microwave for 3 minutes or so. Eat it. Maybe add a salad.”

Some commenters began to express disgust at the suggestion, saying that it was college dorm cooking at best and a form of cat food at worst. Even actress Patricia Arquette jumped into the fray with a warning about potential chemicals in paper towels.

Others, however, didn’t seem turned off by King’s recipe, stating that the paper towel would likely keep the salmon moist. Not to mention, the prospect of having dinner on the table in three minutes seemed appealing.

I was on the fence. After all, microwave cooking — which has long been derided as lazy or even dangerous — has enjoyed something of a renaissance. Famed chef David Chang is an outspoken proponent of using the appliance, enough so that he co-wrote the cookbook “Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Recipes (And Love My Microwave)” with the New York Times’ Priya Krishna and struck up a partnership with Anyday, a company that produces microwave-safe cookware.

Last year, New Yorker writer Helen Rosner published a beautiful story called “How to Cook with Your Microwave” about how she overcame the culturally ingrained perception that microwave cooking was somehow less legitimate than other forms of cooking.

“I found myself, at the height of the sweltering, mostly indoors summer, facing down a pair of snapper fillets,” Rosner wrote. “I couldn’t so much as bring myself to light a burner on the stove for a quick sauté; I swear the microwave winked at me from its mount above the stove. Three minutes at full power (patted dry, topped with strips of julienned ginger, set in a glass dish tightly covered with plastic wrap) and those snowy wings of fish were gorgeously cooked, silken and tender, ready to be drizzled with soy sauce and sesame oil and zapped for another minute, with scallions to finish.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food’s newsletter.

She continued, “It was so fast, and so flawless, that it almost felt wrong.”

Wrong, perhaps, like King’s salmon? To get a definitive answer, I reached out to Institute of Culinary Education chef-instructor Joshua Resnick for his take on the preparation method. He wouldn’t classify it as outright wrong, though perhaps not ideal.

“Microwaves naturally produce steam, so that, in addition to covering the salmon with a wet paper towel, would produce an environment that can steam the salmon properly,” Resnick said. “The lemon juice would also help steam and add flavor. Stephen King’s method would technically work, but it is not something I would do or recommend.”

Stephen King’s method would technically work, but . . .

One issue with this method, Resnick said, is that it takes place in an enclosed environment.

“When cooking in a pan, on the stove or in the oven, you can open the door. You have more control over the cooking process because you can engage all of your senses,” he said. “You can feel the texture of a protein, see if it’s denaturing, smell it cooking, hear if the skin is crisping . . . Additionally, if the skin is on the salmon, it will be impossible to get crispy skin — which is one of the best preparations for skin-on fish.”

That said, Resnick did offer a tip for folks eager to try King’s method at home. Much like stoves, you can adjust the heat on your microwave so you don’t have to cook it on full power all the time.

“Use the power levels to reheat and cook foods more evenly, so you don’t end up with a hot exterior and frozen interior,” he said.

Some of our favorite 2- and 3-ingredient recipes:

Trump campaign ordered to pay unprecedented $1.3 million after trying to block Omarosa’s tell-all

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has been ordered to pay Omarosa Manigault Newman’s million-dollar attorney fees following a years-long court battle.

According to CNBC News, Manigault Newman’s attorney has confirmed the Trump presidential campaign will pay $1.3 million in legal fees over its lawsuit filed to challenge the former “Apprentice” star and White House trade advisor’s book written about her time working for the Trump administration.

The latest ruling comes several months after the arbitrator over the case delivered a favorable ruling for Manigault Newman stating: “a confidentiality agreement she signed while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign was invalid under New York law.”

Following her abrupt departure from the Trump administration in 2018, Manigault Newman penned a scathing tell-all memoir titled “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.”

Shortly after its release, the Trump campaign filed its complaint with the American Arbitration Association in New York arguing that the former White House official “violated that nondisclosure agreement” with the release of her book.

However, the arbitrator has ruled otherwise; another legal blow for the Trump campaign. In wake of the ruling, Manigault Newman’s lawyer John Phillips released a statement reacting to the ruling as he noted that it is the “largest known attorney fee award against a Political Campaign or President we can find and hopefully will send a message that weaponized litigation will not be tolerated and empower other lawyers to stand up and fight for the whistleblower and vocal critic against the oppressive machine.”

He added, “However, the $1.3 Million pales in comparison to the $3 to $4 million the Trump Campaign paid its own lawyers in order to suppress speech.

“That’s a lot of donations which went to lawyers in the name of politics. It’s truly shameful,” Phillips said. “We look forward to receiving a check and will donate a portion of the proceeds to groups who stand up to the suppression of speech.”

Sorry, New York Times: Republicans aren’t “concerned” about democracy — they want to destroy it

As the 2022 midterms get underway, Democrats and Republicans are both canvassing communities and responding to what voters have to say. Democrats are hearing concerns about inflation and gas prices. In response, candidates are talking about ongoing efforts to curb costs, while highlighting low unemployment and other economic gains during President Joe Biden’s first year and a half in office. Republicans are hearing from voters who are angry that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and are repeating ridiculous conspiracy theories about Biden “stealing” it. Republicans, hearing the underlying racism and antipathy to democracy fueling those conspiracy theories, are responding by promising their supporters they will never allow another free and fair election again.

To normal people, whose sense of morality and basic decency hasn’t been crushed by the relentless both sides-ism of the Beltway press, these two pathways are totally different, especially in moral terms. The first is an example of how a normal party in a democratic system behaves. The second is a bunch of authoritarians using lies to hype each other up for a fascist takeover of government.

But according to Reid J. Epstein and Jonathan Weisman reporting for the New York Times, these two approaches are samesies. In an article headlined “Democrats Fear for Democracy. Why Aren’t They Running on It in 2022?” the Times reports approach the issue with a “gosh darn, isn’t it ironic?” thesis that somehow it’s Republican voters who are more “concerned” about democracy than Democratic ones. You know, because of that unpleasant business where Trump lied about voter fraud for months and then incited a failed insurrection.

Admitting that a plurality of Americans are straight up fascist is the third rail in mainstream political media.

In a pathetic bid to make the story seem fair-and-balanced — rather than plain old truthful — Epstein and Weisman lean heavily on euphemisms to describe Republican enthusiasm for repeating the Big Lie. In the subhead, Republican voters are described as “energized about the issues of elections and voting.” To describe the three-quarters support among GOP voters for anti-democratic conspiracy theories, the writers go with “impassioned about electoral issues.”

While the reporters are careful to repeatedly note that there is no basis for claims that Biden stole the election, this kind of framing of the Big Lie as a sincere-if-misguided concern is still a massive problem. It makes it sound as if Republican voters have legitimate concerns about the future of democracy. In reality, however, Republican voters are increasingly hostile to democracy.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Trump voters use the Big Lie in the same way Trump uses it: To put a moral gloss on what is a deeply immoral desire. We know this, because a new poll by Hart Research, commissioned by the New Republic, shows that the majority of Republicans support Trump inciting a violent insurrection to overthrow an election and install himself illegally in power. A full 57% of Republicans describe the January 6 attack as “an act of patriotism.” Those folks saw the same thing everyone else did: A group of people, refusing to accept a lost election, using violence to derail the certification of the legitimate winner. The majority of Republicans simply would rather end democracy than accept losing power.

But admitting that a plurality of Americans are straight up fascist is the third rail in mainstream political media. It’s far easier to tell a story about how these are just good-hearted Americans who are deluded by Trump’s lies into believing that democracy is under threat.

A recent Atlantic piece by never-Trump Republican operative Sarah Longwell showcases how much pretzel logic is employed to maintain the delusional-not-fascist narrative. Longwell has been conducting focus groups of Trump supporters and their support for the Big Lie. As she writes, “the belief that the election was stolen is not a fully formed thought,” and really “more of an attitude, or a tribal pose.” When asked about why they believe the election was stolen, they tend to say things like, “it just didn’t seem right.”

We cannot deal with the problem of rising fascism without naming it or understanding what it is.

The most straightforward explanation for these results is that none of these people really believe the election was stolen. They’re just mad that Black people got to vote in it and those votes tipped the scale towards a Biden win. But saying so outright makes them sound racist, so instead they allude to how it’s just “not right” the way things went down. (This problem in polling’s ability to suss out people’s true feelings is known as the “social desirability bias.”) But even as she grasps that the Big Lie is more “a tribal pose” than a sincere belief, Longwell continues to insist that these “voters aren’t bad,” but merely deluded. But even her own research shows that the Big Lie is less a fully constructed belief and more of a glib thing that fascists say to avoid admitting they are fascists.

About 35% of Americans, and a strong majority of Republicans, espouse the Big Lie. That’s a lot of people who are either partially or fully on board with a fascist agenda, so it’s unsurprising that journalists grasp for alternative explanations to explain poll results. But really, this level of fascist sentiment isn’t exactly unprecedented in American society. As a history piece at PBS notes, estimates for membership in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s ranged from “three million to as high as eight million Klansmen.” A little over 25 million people voted in the 1920 election, which puts official KKK membership at 12-32% of the voting population at the time. There’s long been a plurality of Americans who are fascist or fascist-adjacent, especially when there’s someone like Trump churning out conspiracy theories they can use to justify their otherwise indefensible beliefs.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

As Perry Bacon wrote in the Washington Post on Wednesday, outlets like the New York Times and CNN “are signaling that they will continue and even increase some of the both sides-ism, false equivalence and centrist bias that has long impaired coverage of U.S. politics and therefore our democracy itself.” It’s tempting for journalists to believe the fascism problem has receded now that Trump is no longer in office, allowing them to slide right back to the comfy territory of treating the two parties as morally equivalent. But doing so comes at the expense of the truth.

We cannot deal with the problem of rising fascism without naming it or understanding what it is. A story about well-meaning but deluded Republicans who think they’re “saving” democracy may be soothing, but it’s also untrue. We’re very much facing down what Hannah Arendt described as the “banality of evil,” where outright fascism is getting normalized and legitimized. By writing and talking about this problem as if it were normal partisan politics, journalists are contributing to banality of the evil. But that is a choice. Another choice is available: To name things for what they are and be honest with your audience about what’s happening.

Telling the truth may be the harder path, but it’s literally what journalists are supposed to be doing.

Leaked memo: Bernie Sanders has “not ruled out” 2024 White House run

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders has not ruled out a third run for the White House if President Joe Biden does not run in 2024, according to a top aide’s campaign memo viewed by The Washington Post.

“In the event of an open 2024 Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Sanders has not ruled out another run for president, so we advise that you answer any questions about 2024 with that in mind,” Faiz Shakir, the independent senator from Vermont’s 2020 campaign manager, wrote in the memo to political allies.

The Post reports that “the memo was shared by a person with direct knowledge of its contents on the condition of anonymity because it was not released publicly, and confirmed by a second person with direct knowledge of the contents.”

Sanders spokesperson Mike Casca told the Post that “while it’s frustrating this private memo leaked to the media, the central fact remains true, which is that Sen. Sanders is the most popular officeholder in the country.”

SCOOP: Sen. Bernie Sanders ‘has not ruled out another run’ for president if Biden doesn’t in 2024, a top adviser tells allies in a private memo. https://t.co/J8PeEEStrr

— Sean Sullivan (@WaPoSean) April 20, 2022

According to recent YouGov America polling, 80-year-old Sanders is the most popular currently serving politician in the United States, with a 48% positive opinion rating. Biden trails at 42%, followed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) at 38% and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who are tied at 37%.

In April 2020, Sanders ended his second consecutive attempt to represent a party whose establishment was accused of being primarily focused on ensuring that the democratic socialist never became its presidential nominee. The following month, Sanders said there was only a “very, very slim chance” that he would ever run for president again.

Last month, it was reported that key Sanders campaign officials are encouraging Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to run for president if Biden does not run in 2024.

Addressing the 2022 midterm elections, the memo states that Sanders—who has endorsed progressives running for Congress including Nina Turner in Ohio, Jessica Cisneros in Texas, and Summer Lee in Pennsylvania—”is interested in endorsing more candidates and we’d love your help identifying potential target races.”

“We do understand that corporate-backed campaigns will try to make Sen. Sanders’ endorsement controversial, especially in a Democratic primary,” the memo adds before offering suggested answers to frequently asked questions.

One of those: “Will you support Sanders if he challenges Biden in 2024?”

The suggested response: “Sen. Sanders is focused on helping Joe Biden have a successful presidency. As chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, no one fought harder for the president’s policy agenda than Bernie. He traveled to Republican congressional districts last summer to promote Build Back Better. Unfortunately, that legislation was stopped by corporate Democrats.”

On Sunday, Sanders will head to New York City to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers, some of whom recently won and others who are fighting for a union. That same day he’ll head to Richmond, Virginia to congratulate Starbucks employees who won five straight unionization votes on Tuesday.

Madison Cawthorn wants Donald Trump to sue Piers Morgan

Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., on Wednesday encouraged Donald Trump to sue host Piers Morgan after the British commentator released a video suggesting that the former president walked out of an interview when challenged on his 2020 election conspiracies.

Footage of the interview came in a 30-second ad spot released by TalkTV this week. In the trailer for the interview, set to debut Monday, Morgan tells the former president that the 2020 election “was a free, fair election. You lost.”

“Only a fool would think that,” Trump responds.

“With respect, you haven’t produced the hard evidence,” Morgan notes.

Later, the video appears to show Trump storming out of the interview, calling the British presenter “very dishonest” and telling him to “turn the camera off.”

Following the trailer’s release, Trump immediately denied walking off set.

“This is a pathetic attempt to use President Trump as a way to revive the career of a failed television host,” said his spokesperson, Taylor Budowich.

Cawthorn, for his part, suggested that the president should take legal action against Morgan, tweeting: “I hope President Trump sues Piers Morgan over this.”

I hope President Trump sues Piers Morgan over this. https://t.co/ky4xmI8mjD

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) April 21, 2022

According to The Guardian, audio provided by Trump’s team indicated that the former president’s request to “turn the camera off” was made after the interview was finished. However, Morgan disputed the notion that the interview was deceptively edited.

“The promo reflects exactly what happened,” Morgan said. “Donald Trump got very angry about one particular thing and he couldn’t let it go. But when people see the interview they’ll see that we have nice exchanges. We always have done before. But simmering is this anger he was feeling about what was said to him before we started the interview.”

“He says it’s a rigged election, and he now says I have a rigged promo,” the British presenter added. “What I would say is watch the interview. It will all be there. We won’t be doing any duplicitous editing.’

The trailer was released in anticipation of Morgan’s new show, “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” which will include allegedly unvarnished 60-minute segments for “lively, intelligent debate.” Morgan is a former CNN host who left the network over comments he made about Meghan Markle, later claiming that the “woke mob” forced him to resign.

Read more:

Kevin McCarthy privately called for Twitter to ban Republicans who pushed Trump’s Big Lie: report

Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, among some other officials, is on her party leader’s list of undesirables, according to the upcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future.

The New York Times posted excerpts of the book, detailing the anger of Mitch McConnell, who was ready to push Donald Trump out of office on Jan. 6. He quickly changed his tune.

But one nugget of information revealed just how annoyed Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is with his fellow Republican members of Congress for promoting the lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

During a Jan. 10 conversation, McCarthy said he was so furious with Trump for Jan. 6 and was going to instruct him to resign. But further, McCarthy wanted to see social media sites take away the accounts of anyone pushing the so-called “big lie.”

“We can’t put up with that,” McCarthy said. “Can’t they take their Twitter accounts away, too?”

The Times notes that among those pushing the 2020 election conspiracy theories is Boebert as well as other members like Reps. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Matt Gaetz, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Many of the members are now having their candidacy challenged, saying that participants of an insurrection are constitutionally barred from running for office. Greene’s case begins this week and a judge is deliberating about Gosar and Biggs.

Read the full report at the New York Times. The book will be released on May 3.

GOP mega donor charged with assault in bogus voter fraud scheme — but he’s still on the hunt

Conservative activist Steven Hotze on Wednesday was indicted on two felony charges related to his alleged involvement in an air conditioning repairman being held at gunpoint in 2020 during a bizarre search for fraudulent mail ballots that did not exist, according to his attorney, Gary Polland.

Hotze, 71, was indicted by a Harris County grand jury and faces one count of unlawful restraint and one count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Court filings in the case were not available Wednesday evening. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg declined to comment.

The charges stem from Hotze’s hiring of more than a dozen private investigators to look for voter fraud in Harris County ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

One of the investigators, former Houston police captain Mark Aguirre, was arrested in December 2020 and charged with aggravated assault. Prosecutors said Aguirre used his vehicle to run an air conditioning repairman off the road before dawn on Oct. 19, 2020.

Aguirre then detained the repairman at gunpoint and ordered an associate to search his truck, according to court filings. When a Houston police officer happened upon the scene and stopped to investigate, Aguirre said the truck contained 750,000 fraudulent mail ballots prepared by Democrats.

The truck contained only air conditioning parts and equipment. Hotze’s investigators have not produced any credible evidence to support allegations that Democrats orchestrated a wide-ranging mail ballot scheme in Harris County during that election.

Polland said the charges against Hotze are “outrageous” and his client had no knowledge of the roadside incident until he read media reports of Aguirre’s arrest. He said Aguirre asked Hotze for funds to investigate alleged election fraud, Hotze agreed, and that was the extent of his involvement in Aguirre’s affairs.

“All I know is Hotze didn’t aid or abet this in any way,” Polland said. “The donation of funds was for a righteous activity of rooting out ballot fraud.”

Grand jury subpoenas in Aguirre’s case show that Hotze paid Aguirre $266,400. Most of that sum, $211,400, was paid to Aguirre on the day after the alleged holdup.

Aguirre remains free on bond awaiting trial. One of his conditions of release is that he no longer work for Hotze.

Hotze, however, plans to continue monitoring election activity in Houston. At a “Freedom Gala” fundraiser Hotze hosted on April 2 with Attorney General Ken Paxton, Hotze said donations would be used to investigate voter fraud in Texas.

Also attending the event was Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who has promoted the baseless theory that former President Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election.

Polland said Hotze does not plan to alter his plans because of the indictments.

Hotze, a physician, has long advocated on behalf of conservative issues. He was instrumental in the 2015 defeat of Houston’s anti-discrimination ordinance, which he derided as “pro-homosexual.” He opposed the legalization of same-sex marriage spurred by a Supreme Court ruling earlier that year.

In 2020, he unsuccessfully sued Harris County in an attempt to have 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru locations thrown out.

His far-right beliefs have sometimes led to disputes with other Republicans. In June 2020, during protests following the police killing of George Floyd, Hotze left a voicemail with Gov. Greg Abbott‘s chief of staff urging the governor “to shoot to kill if any of these son-of-a-bitch people start rioting.” U.S. John Cornyn called the remarks “absolutely disgusting and reprehensible.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/20/steve-hotze-houston-indicted-voter-fraud/.