More often than not the Oscars will let a mediocre film rise to the top. (See “CODA” beating “Power of the Dog” and other examples). In the acting categories, it is often the most acting, not the best acting that is rewarded. (This explains why La Streep is frequently nominated for her hammy performances.) 

Even the screenplay awards are deemed prizes that signify, “Your film is really great, but we can’t give it best picture.” (See last year’s “Women Talking” as an example of an adaptation, and “Get Out” for an original screenplay).

But if the Oscars are the ultimate prize for cinematic achievement, there are some award-worthy films and performances this year that deserve recognition but are longshots to win. As such, here are this year’s Underdog Oscars, to honor those that may not get a chance at the podium.

01 Best picture

“Oppenheimer”  is all but guaranteed to win and possibly even sweep several categories after it led with the most nominations this year. Nolan’s biopic about the father of the atomic bomb is exactly the kind of long, historical prestige film the Academy likes to honor.

What deserves to win is director Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things,” an eye-popping allegorical fantasy — it's phantasmagorical! — about a young woman (nominee Emma Stone) who learns about life and sex while also developing language and motor skills. It’s not unlike its fellow nominee, the juggernaut “Barbie” in several respects — except it’s better. 

But this year’s best picture underdog is “American Fiction,” Cord Jefferson’s brilliant and biting comedy-drama about race, and how a Black academic (Jeffrey Wright) finds unexpected — and unwanted — success when he pens a pandering so-called Black novel that becomes a bestseller. “American Fiction” has a slim chance to upset “Oppenheimer,” but it features an ending that bites the very Hollywood hand that feeds it. And that would make its winning even more delicious. 

“The Zone of Interest,” which is arguably the least commercial film to ever be nominated for best picture, has an even slimmer chance to win, but it will be rewarded with the best international film statue instead.

02 Best director

Director Christopher Nolan is expected to be one of the many "Oppenheimer" wins for the night.

However, this year’s best director underdog is Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” which exacts a remarkable pull on the audience for two and a half hours as a woman (nominee Sandra Hüller) is tried for possibly killing her husband. Featuring extensive and intense courtroom scenes, and possibly the greatest marital spat ever committed to film, Triet’s drama will likely pick up the best screenplay prize, which acknowledges its achievement.

03 Best actor

The best actor race was favoring Paul Giamatti for his role in “The Holdovers,” perhaps as compensation for being snubbed for “Sideways” two decades ago. But the oddsmakers are now expecting the Oscar to go to Cillian Murphy for his performance in/as “Oppenheimer,” which makes sense given the big push for that film.

 

The underdog in the race is Colman Domingo, who has to settle for the honor of being nominated. Domingo has been generating Oscar buzz in recent years with his performances in everything from “Zola” to “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” And it is satisfying if unsurprising that he scored yet another nomination for “Rustin.” Domingo delivers a blistering work as the gay civil rights leader, and while his performance is often big when he inspires folks to help organize the largest peaceful protest” even getting folks to sing. But Domingo is also moving when he cries, being told by Ella Baker (Audra McDonald) to put his differences aside and work with Dr. Martin Luther King (Aml Ameen). Rustin tells Ella that he likes his men to be passionate and smart. Domingo is both throughout “Rustin” which is why his feisty performance deserves the Oscar.

04 Best actress

This race was initially focused on Lily Gladstone’s strong, often silent performance in “Killers of the Flower Moon” as she would make history were she to become the first Indigenous actor to be win an Oscar. But the oddsmakers are now favoring Emma Stone’s maximalist performance in “Poor Things,” which involves considerable physical and verbal dexterity.  

The underdog here is Sandra Hüller, whose does exceptional work as Sandra, a writer accused of killing her husband in “Anatomy of a Fall.” From her opening scene, where Sandra is practically flirting with a young woman who is interviewing her, to her deliberate and caring conversations with her blind son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), she comes off as a funny, likeable, caring person.

But then Sandra is absolutely stoic on the stand as she is cross-examined for practically every decision she has made in her life. Watching her react  —  by not reacting  —  as a recording seemingly incriminates her and accusations fly, shows how masterful Hüller’s performance truly is. And that Sandra’s utmost concern that her friend and lawyer, Vincent (Swann Arlaud) believes her to be innocent is full of drama. A scene of Sandra crying in a car is astonishing and should be her Oscar clip. Hüller was also magnificent in “The Zone of Interest,” as the privileged, selfish wife of a Nazi commandant, but her performance in “Anatomy” is staggeringly great.

05 Best supporting actor

The Oscar will likely go to Robert Downey, Jr. for “Oppenheimer,” which aligns with the film’s domination. Downey delivers solid work as Lewis Strauss, and the prize may be seen as an opportunity to reward his body of work over a decades-long career.

The underdog here is Mark Ruffalo, whose comic turn as the cad Duncan Wedderburn in "Poor Things." His rants are hilarious, and Ruffalo’s mugging is a comic highlight. The actor can wring laughs by revealing his incredulity at Bella’s behavior; his expressions of shock are priceless. Watching Ruffalo process what Bella has done provides a giddy pleasure, especially when he deadpans, “Oh,” or “Bella!” because he expresses so much emotion in a single word response. The actor gives what may be a career best performance here. It is a shame he is a longshot to win. But at least he was nominated — unlike his costar Willem Dafoe, who was also fantastic in “Poor Things,” but was snubbed this year.

06 Best supporting actress

Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a lock for this race for her kitchen scene in “The Holdovers.” It is next to impossible for anyone to spoil her chances of winning, as she's collected statuette after statuette during this awards season.

The underdog in this category is Jodie Foster in Netflix's “Nyad,” who delivers an ingratiating performance as Bonnie, Diana Nyad’s (nominee Annette Bening) ride-or-die bestie and coach who joins the 60-year-old Nyad on an “adventure” — swimming from Cuba to the Florida Keys. Equal parts cheerleader and drill sergeant, Bonnie understands the rush that achieving against the odds provides and watching her convince others to help her and Diana accomplish the impossible is inspiring.

While Bening is terrific in the title role, Foster steals her every scene with her tough love telling a hospitalized Diana about her experience “watching her die,” or when truly exasperated, quietly asking, “Do you have any idea how exhausting you are as a friend?” Foster’s Bonnie may be second banana, but she engenders real compassion when she asserts herself letting viewers in on her life even if Diana is blind to Bonnie’s desires. And when Bonnie practically goes hoarse coaching Diana on her historic swim, it is impossible not to share her triumph. If only Foster could triumph at the Oscars.

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

07 Best original screenplay

“Anatomy of a Fall” is being touted for the original screenplay prize, as indicated above. Which makes the Samy Burch-penned “May December” – the multilayered drama (or is it a comedy?) inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau scandal – the underdog.

 

Burch’s script about actress Elizabeth (Natalie Portman) following Gracie (Julianne Moore), whom she will play in a movie about her tabloid life, is a brilliant and puzzling drama about truth and lies that prompts viewers to recalibrate things in almost every scene, not unlike “Anatomy of a Fall.”

08 Best adapted screenplay

The adapted screenplay award will likely go to “Oppenheimer,” though it would be great to see “American Fiction” steal its thunder for its caustic dissection of race (and class). Cord Jefferson made some minor changes in adapting Percival Jackson’s novel “Erasure,” such as changing the setting from DC to Boston (so the film can take advantage of Martha’s Vineyard), but it captures the key concepts at the heart of the story regarding race and taste, as well as the absurdities of academia, white privilege, literary awards, family dynamics and more. It is often very funny and moving, which “Oppenheimer” is not.

The 96th Academy Awards will be presented live on Sunday, March 10 at 7 p.m. ET on ABC.

The FDA was able to detect levels of lead in the affected ground cinnamon products through product testing. Consumers should not eat, sell or serve the ground cinnamon products and instead, should discard them immediately, per the FDA’s recommendations. The FDA is also recommending that the manufacturers of the products recall them, with the exception of MTCI cinnamon because the agency has not been able to reach the company.  

Following the FDA’s alert, two of the companies formally announced recalls. Colonna Brothers of North Bergen, N.J., is recalling 1.5-ounce Ground Cinnamon and 2.25-ounce Supreme Tradition Ground Cinnamon distributed nationwide and through mail order. Colonna said it had ceased production and distribution of all cinnamon.

Additionally, El Chilar Rodriguez of Apopka, Fla., is recalling 127 cases of El Chilar Ground Cinnamon "Canela Molida" sold in 1.25-ounce bags, distributed by La Raza of Forestville, Md., and sold at retail stores throughout Maryland.

The new rules are much weaker than those originally proposed. Significantly, the SEC dropped a controversial plan to require companies to report Scope 3 emissions – emissions generated throughout the company’s supply chain and customers’ use of its products.

The rules do require larger companies to disclose Scope 1 and 2 emissions, which are emissions from their operations and energy use. But those disclosures are required only to the extent that the company believes the information would be financially “material” to a reasonable investor’s decision making.

More broadly, the new rules require publicly listed companies to disclose climate-related risks that are likely to have a material impact on their business, as well as disclose how they are managing those risks and any related corporate targets.

After announcing its initial proposal in 2022, the SEC received a staggering number of comments from experts, companies and the public – about 24,000 of them, the most ever received for an SEC rule. The comments reflected both strong public interest in being informed about corporate climate-risk exposures and greenhouse gas emissions and also significant pushback, particularly over how much the rules would cost companies. Several Republican state attorneys general threatened to sue.

In response to the comments, the commissioners took their time to adjust the disclosure requirements, but the legal challenges may not be over.

I specialize in sustainable finance and corporate governance and have been following the SEC’s climate disclosure plans. Here are some of the major issues that led to this change and the implications of the new disclosure rules as they phase in starting in 2025.

The rule’s unequal cost to companies

The most important reason for adding climate disclosure rules, as SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has noted, is that climate-related risks and greenhouse gas emissions appear to be financially material information demanded by investors.

Indeed, for the past several years, large institutional investors have been vocal about the need for more transparency and consistency in corporate climate-risk disclosures.

As the SEC has often emphasized, most large companies already disclose some of this information voluntarily in their sustainability or ESG reports, which often are published alongside their annual reports.

Since investors seem to demand this information, and many companies are voluntarily providing it, the SEC and proponents argued that it would be sensible to mandate some consistency in disclosures.

However, much of the debate around the new disclosure rule has focused on whether it passes the cost-benefit smell test. In other words, would the compliance cost borne by firms potentially outweigh the financial benefits of mandated disclosures of climate risks and emissions that investors might value?

The compliance costs of federal disclosure requirements have been estimated to be substantial. When the SEC first proposed the rule in 2022, the commission’s own estimates implied that disclosure-related compliance costs would nearly double for the average publicly listed company.

Comments on the rule have since pointed out that there are also likely to be even greater indirect costs related to adjustments that companies might have to make in how they conduct their operations. These costs might also have broader implications for employment in certain jobs and sectors.

Given that many smaller listed companies do not have voluntary disclosure practices in place, the burden is also expected to hit companies unequally, disproportionately affecting smaller companies while large corporations see little impact.

Measuring greenhouse emissions isn’t simple

Another practical problem lies in enforcing consistent measurement of emissions and climate-risk exposure.

International groups such as the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and the International Sustainability Standards Board have provided reporting standards and guidelines. But the measurements themselves are still subject to estimation and collection problems that might vary across industries and activities.

Moreover, estimating Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions separately presents significant challenges.

What Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions involve. Chester Hawkins/Center for American Progress

In particular, the difficulty of measuring a company’s indirect emissions from its supply chain – Scope 3 emissions – exponentially compounds the estimation problem. Reporting Scope 3 emissions also opens a floodgate of legal issues, as many smaller organizations in a large company’s value chain might have no legal obligation to disclose their own emissions.

The backlash over the challenges inherent in measuring Scope 3 emissions led to the commission’s decision to pare back that part of its proposed rules.

Many companies will also likely have to outsource the estimation and quantification of emissions and climate risks to third-party companies, where there have been concerns about higher costs, conflicts of interest and greenwashing.

How SEC stacks up to California, EU rules

The SEC is not the first to adopt climate disclosure rules.

A similar rule went into effect in the European Union in January 2024.

California has an even more stringent rule, signed into law in October 2023. It will require both publicly listed and privately held firms to fully and unconditionally disclose all of Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions when it goes into effect in 2026 and 2027. Since California is among the world’s largest economies, its regulations are already expected to have wide effects on corporations around the world.

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler discusses what the SEC has to do with climate change.

Hardcore proponents of the SEC rule who wanted California-level disclosures across the board argue that Scope 3 emissions need to be disclosed given that they compose the largest fraction of all carbon emissions.

Skeptics of the rule, including two of the five SEC commissioners, question whether there needs to be any rule at all if things are inevitably watered down anyway.

Given the recent conservative backlash against companies focusing on ESG issues and the ensuing retrenchment by several institutional investors from their previous climate commitments, it will be interesting to see how the new corporate climate disclosures will actually affect investors’ and corporations’ decisions.

Sehoon Kim, Assistant Professor of Finance, University of Florida

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

"People don't talk enough about periods,” Biel said in an interview with PEOPLE about "A Kids Book About Periods," which she hopes will de-stigmatize the topic and educate youth, regardless of their gender identity, before they're out in the world as adults lacking necessary intel. "I’ve always felt strongly that we need to normalize the discussion around periods and as a parent, writing this book felt like an organic way to engage kids in the conversation from early on.”

Scheduled for release on May 7 as the latest addition to Penguin Random House subsidiary DK's "A Kids Book About" series in partnership with the nonprofit PERIOD, Biel drew from her own personal experience while writing the book, saying she felt terrified and unprepared when she first got her period, and wants to help prevent others from going through that.

“If we grownups have the confidence to tell the truth about how our bodies work, then we'll give the kids around us the agency and voice to talk about their own bodies with confidence, now and for the rest of their lives," she says.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4JYoPwPhzj/?igsh=N2d2YjV0ZG5zaGxz

UVALDE — A city-commissioned independent review of Uvalde police’s response to the Robb Elementary School shooting cleared local officers of wrongdoing, infuriating parents of the 19 children killed in the massacre and at least two city council members who rebuked the report after it was released Thursday.

City officials hired private investigator Jesse Prado, a retired Austin police detective, to conduct the review into the response from the city’s police department to the May 24, 2022 mass shooting that also resulted in the deaths of two teachers and injured 17 others.

The findings of the report were presented in a question-and-response format with Prado at a city council meeting and the actual 182-page report was released later Thursday after city officials shared it with families. Prado said the review identified training, communication and leadership lapses, but he also commended some of the city’s officers and characterized their actions as in “good faith” — contradicting findings of previous audits by state and federal officials.

Those reviews have illustrated a catastrophic law enforcement failure in which children remained trapped with the gunman for more than an hour as nearly 400 law enforcement officers arrived at the school and encountered a chaotic scene without leadership.

Several people walked out of the impromptu council chambers roughly 40 minutes in when Prado said one of the issues that police encountered was crowd control. Some families tried to breach police tape to run into the school and try rescuing their children, some of whom ultimately died while others had called their parents and 911 pleading for help.

Following the presentation and right before the public hearing, Prado left.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was among the children killed, slammed a podium in the civic center and in between tears demanded that Prado return to the meeting. A crowd then began chanting, “Bring him back!” One person shouted, “Coward.”

Prado returned five minutes later and sat with an expressionless face, underneath a big white cowboy hat he did not once remove, for the following hour as relatives of those killed castigated him and dismissed his audit as “bullshit,” “a joke” and disrespectful.

“They chose their lives over the lives of children and teachers, and there’s no policy change [that] will eliminate their fear,” Mata-Rubio said in calling for the firing of three officers who remain on the city’s police force.

Brett Cross, whose son Uziyah was killed by the shooter, approached the podium with AJ Martinez, one of the children who survived the shooting.

“I want you to look at this child,” Cross said. “Good faith for 77 minutes? The true heroes are those that passed, those teachers, the survivors are heroes.”

After the public speakers, City Council members echoed the disbelief in the report’s findings and how it was unveiled. One said he wished that Prado had actually presented the report himself and just given copies to families instead of the questioning method that resembled a court hearing.

“For you to come in here and say ‘No, everything was hunky-dory, they did their job,’ I can’t accept that,” Councilmember Hector Luevano said to applause. Luevano, and several other council members, had not reviewed the report prior to the meeting. “I’m insulted by this report. The families deserve more, the community deserves more.”

Apologizing to the crowd, Councilmember Ernest "Chip" King III said Thursday’s presentation was not how the city wanted the information to be released.

The private investigator’s report arrived almost two months after the U.S. Justice Department released its analysis of law enforcement’s bungled response, in which the federal government found “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” by responding officers.

That report’s findings about the failure to follow protocol and the lack of sufficient training to prepare officers for a mass shooting mirrored the flaws revealed in a Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation that showed states require students and teachers to receive far more training to prepare them for a mass shooting than they require for the police.

At least 37 states require schools to conduct active-shooter-related drills, nearly all on an annual basis. But Texas is the only state that mandates that all of its police officers complete repeated training, at least 16 hours every two years. That requirement was implemented after the Uvalde shooting.

A speaker at the council meeting Thursday noted that the children had followed their active shooter training while officers did not.

Prado said the lack of cooperation from Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell hindered the investigation. In December 2022, the city sued Mitchell over her refusal to produce documents. The district attorney agreed to hand over some, but not all, of the information Prado requested.

Mitchell did not respond Thursday to a request for comment.

Prado also said the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District stopped cooperating with him after a few months into his investigation. The city reportedly paid him nearly $100,000 for his work.

After the meeting, Prado declined to comment, telling reporters who followed him to his pick-up truck that he was done with the report but not with his job and still may have to answer questions. He did not acknowledge Felicha Martinez, whose son Xavier was killed in the shooting and who had also followed Prado to the parking lot.

“I wanted to ask him, is that how he really feels that the officers did — did they do right?,” Martinez said after Prado drove away.

“How does he sleep at night knowing that this is what he had to say? And he hurt all of us today — just opened wounds, after wounds, after wounds. I wanted to ask him if that’s really how he felt.”

Prado said he previously conducted 36 similar investigations. Of those, he said roughly 75% of the time there is a violation of policy. His Uvalde review, however, fell in the remaining 25% of investigations in which officers did not violate department policy.

The report recommended 23 city police officers, three dispatchers, the fire marshal and the police chief be “exonerated.” In all but one instance, Prado wrote that his probe uncovered “no evidence of serious acts of misconduct in direct violation of Uvalde Police Department's policies was found in” those officers’ behavior in responding to the shooting.

That included the highest-ranking officer, Lt. Javier Martinez, and the acting police chief the day of the shooting, Lt. Mariano Pargas.

In exonerating Martinez and Pargas, Prado blamed the lack of leadership on the school district’s Police Department. Prado cited an agreement between the city and school district that confirms Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was the incident commander. Arredondo never established a command post during the incident.

The report noted that Pargas “could have performed a stronger role in the overall incident command structure.” Pargas resigned within a couple of days of his interview with Prado and two days before the City Council was scheduled to discuss his termination in November 2022. Pargas still holds public office as a county commissioner.

On Thursday, Prado said he would have recommended exonerating Pargas because the acting police chief responded to the crisis correctly based on the division of responsibility between the city and school district.

Prado’s investigation found one 9-month pregnant detective, the closest to ballistic shields, violated the department’s insubordination policy surrounding limited duties when she did not ask a supervisor for permission before she “engaged herself in the incident” and delivered shields to officers.

The detective also identified the shooter by going to his house and interviewing his grandfather, according to Thursday’s report. The audit suggested exonerating her of the policy violation because she “only acted under extreme circumstances and because of her actions she provided valuable assets to the officers and valuable information in identifying the shooter.”

At least one investigation into the shooting remains ongoing. In January, a special grand jury convened to begin investigating law enforcement’s delayed response to determine whether criminal charges can be filed against officers. To date no one has been charged in connection to the massacre.

We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/07/uvalde-robb-elementary-shooting-report/.

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

WASHINGTON — Texas Democrats were not thrilled with President Joe Biden using the term “an illegal” to describe an undocumented immigrant during his State of the Union address Thursday.

During the speech, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled Biden to acknowledge Laken Riley, a Georgia student who was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant, as he was discussing the border. Biden repeated Greene saying Riley was “killed by an illegal. That’s right.”

Democrats were not impressed, even if it was parroting Greene.

“It's dangerous rhetoric. And I think that the president is getting bad advice from his advisers and speech writers. That kind of rhetoric is what inspired the people who killed Aaron Martinez,” U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro said, referring to a North Texas man who was killed by his neighbor who repeatedly harassed Martinez’s family over their Latino ethnicity. Castro brought Martinez’s wife, Priscilla Martinez, as his guest Thursday.

“I just don't get why the president will go down that road,” Castro added. “I don't think it's helpful to him or to the Democratic Party.”

U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar, an El Paso Democrat who is also a co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, said “that is the statutory language,” though “it’s not the language I use.”

U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Austin, found Greene’s heckling inappropriate and thought it did not reflect Biden’s views. He predicted Biden’s team would clarify his remarks later.

Republicans heckled Biden as he made a case for a bipartisan border security deal introduced in the Senate late last year. The bill, negotiated by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Arizona; Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut; and Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. Republicans turned on the bill after former President Donald Trump denounced it, essentially stopping it in its tracks. House Republicans oppose the bill.

“In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen in this country,” Biden said. “It’d be a winner for America. My Republican friends, you owe it to the American people to get this bill done.”

The border was one of the most contentious issues discussed during the speech. After the speech, Sen. Ted Cruz said Biden’s comments were “profoundly dishonest and out of touch.” U.S. Rep. Jake Ellzey, R-Midlothian, said Biden was “gaslighting Republicans” by “blaming us when he invited the border to be open.”

U.S. Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Sherman, tried to give Biden a pin that said “STOP THE BIDEN BORDER CRISIS” as he entered the chamber. Biden refused.

Escobar also does not support the Senate border deal, but she praised Biden’s speech otherwise as demonstrating “why the difference between him and the other guy is so stark,” referring to Trump. Escobar has long been a voice on bipartisan border reform, introducing her own bipartisan plan last year.

Earlier in his speech, Biden also vowed to overturn Texas’ restrictive abortion laws if he gets reelected and Democrats retake control of Congress.

“My predecessor came to office determined to see Roe v. Wade overturned. He’s the reason it was overturned. In fact, he brags about it,” Biden said. “Look at the chaos that has resulted.”

Biden highlighted the plight of Kate Cox, a Texas woman who filed a lawsuit to end her pregnancy in Texas after her doctor uncovered a lethal birth defect. Cox’s doctor said terminating the pregnancy was necessary to save her health and future ability to have children but would not carry out the procedure due to the state’s strict abortion ban.

First Lady Jill Biden invited Cox as her guest to the address Thursday.

Cox’s lawsuit said the state’s abortion ban discouraged doctors from risking their medical licenses to perform the procedure. The Supreme Court of Texas blocked a lower state court order that would have allowed her an abortion. She ultimately sought medical care outside the state.

“Because Texas law banned abortion, Kate and her husband had to leave the state to get the care she needed. What her family has gone through should never have happened as well. But it is happening to so many others,” Biden said. “Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom. My God, what freedoms will you take away next?”

Multiple Texas Democrats used the annual address to highlight abortion access. U.S. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Houston Democrat who spearheaded legislation to protect abortion access nationwide, invited Dr. Damla Karsan, an OB/GYN who sought court approval to terminate Cox’s pregnancy. U.S. Rep. Colin Allred invited Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB/GYN who had to leave Texas to terminate her pregnancy after detecting a lethal birth defect.

U.S. Rep. Nanette Barragan, D-California, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, invited last year Olivia Julianna, a Gen Z activist who has been outspoken about abortion rights in Texas.

The White House has previously used the State of the Union to highlight Texas’ restrictions on abortion. At last year’s address, Jill Biden invited Amanda Zurawski, an Austin woman who nearly died after being denied an abortion for a nonviable pregnancy.

National Democrats are making reproductive rights a key issue in competitive races in Texas, crediting the overturning of national abortion access for staving off a larger Republican majority in the U.S. House. Allred has highlighted Sen. Ted Cruz’s opposition to legislation expanding access to abortion in his campaign to unseat him.

Jill Biden also invited Jazmin Cazares, a gun violence prevention advocate whose sister Jackie was killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, to the speech.

President Biden evoked his visit to Uvalde after the shooting, after which he established a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. He urged Congress to pass further legislation on gun safety to prevent future shootings.

“We heard their message, and so everyone in this chamber should do something,” Biden said. “Meanwhile, my predecessor told the NRA he’s proud he did nothing on guns when he was president. After another school shooting in Iowa he said we should just ‘get over it.’ I say we must stop it.”

We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/03/07/state-of-the-union-joe-biden/.

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

The freshman senator's high-profile rebuttal was stern in its focus on immigration and the state of the economy — two key sticking points against the president — but had a bizarre delivery, according to The Daily Beast. Its dramatic cadence and beige-toned kitchen backdrop left political operatives and observers unsure of what to make of it.

Britt's performance was so unnerving that some Republicans watched "with a grimace," the Daily Beast reports. A GOP strategist even told the outlet that gossip about Britt's delivery quickly circulated among operatives connected to Donald Trump, which could have an impact on her consideration as his running mate. 

"Everyone's f—king losing it," the Republican, granted anonymity discuss private conversations, told the Daily Beast. "It's one of our biggest disasters ever."

In the minutes afterward, Britt's performance appeared to become a marked embarrassment for the Republican Party, generating widespread criticism among its pundits. Many took issue with the setting of Britt's speech: the GOP rising star gave the remarks clad in a deep-green blouse and seated at what she said was her home's kitchen table in an effort to come off as "America's mom."

“Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person. She ran a hell of race in [Alabama],” former Trump White House advisor Alyssa Farah Griffin, who supports Nikki Haley, posted on X. “I do not understand the decision to put her in a KITCHEN for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”

Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person. She ran a hell of race in AL. I do not understand the decision to put her in a *KITCHEN* for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.

— Alyssa Farah Griffin (@Alyssafarah) March 8, 2024

Griffin elaborated on those thoughts during an appearance on CNN late Thursday, underscoring how "the staging of this was bizarre" to her, according to The Hill. 

“Women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen,” she continued. “So to put her in a kitchen, not in front of a podium or in the Senate chamber where she was elected where she won a very hard fought race, I felt fell very flat and was confusing to some women watching it.”

The substance of her comments was "great" the "The View" co-host added, before reiterating that the setting was "just very, very bizarre."

Alyssa Farah Griffin: "I've got to say, the staging of this was bizarre to me, women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen. So to put her in a kitchen... I think fell very flat and was confusing to some women watching it." @justinbaragona
pic.twitter.com/g6Lx0F9BQF

— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) March 8, 2024

Olivia Perez-Cubas, Haley's former campaign spokesperson, echoed Griffin's sentiments in a post to X, writing that while Britt “is incredibly impressive, unsure why she felt the need to deliver the SOTU response from a kitchen.”

While Katie Boyd Britt is incredibly impressive, unsure why she felt the need to deliver the SOTU response from a kitchen…

— Olivia PC (@olivia_pc) March 8, 2024

Britt also appearing alone in the kitchen is "creepy," Tim Miller, a former Republican Jeb Bush aide, said on X, adding that Britt's speech made former Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's notorious 2009 response to Barack Obama's State of the Union address "look like the Finest House speech."

Brendan Buck, an ex-senior advisor to Speakers John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Paul Ryan, R-Wis., called Britt's delivery "unfortunate," arguing on MSNBC that she "was clearly overcoached."

Britt's speech also became the subject of mockery from viewers across the political spectrum, with some dogging the showing for its apparent "tradwife" and TikTok appeal. 

"Campiest, creepiest SOTU response in history?" Democratic strategist Lis Smith teased on X. 

Campiest, creepiest SOTU response in history? https://t.co/Qm512fTADi

— Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith) March 8, 2024

"Sen. Katie Britt is delivering this speech with the cadence and theatrics of a TikTok video," Luke Russert, the host of "MSNBC Live," posted. "Looks like it’s written to be chopped up into 100 different social media quips."

Sen. Katie Britt is delivering this speech with the cadence and theatrics of a TikTok video. Looks like it’s written to be chopped up into 100 different social media quips.

— Luke Russert (@LukeRussert) March 8, 2024

Hosts and guests of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" were both stunned and amused by Britt's performance, with the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson emphasizing the difference between Britt and Biden's speeches.

"You had Joe Biden talking about fundamental rights that everyone deserves to have, that women deserve to have as human beings, as Americans," Robinson told the panel Friday morning, according to RawStory. "And you had Senator Katie Britt. For some bizarre reason, they decided to stage her in apparently her kitchen, which says a lot about how the Republican Party sees women."

He went on to describe Britt's comments as "all over the map," citing her "overdone affect" throughout and noting "one instant, she was near tears. The next instant, she was smiling. The next instant, she was serious."

Former White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri pointed out that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk and his followers railed Britt's speech almost immediately, before explaining that the GOP rebuttal shared similarities with the conservative "tradwife" movement on social media, which sees women embracing a "traditional wife" role via embracing homemaking and being a stay-at-home mom while presenting "in a certain way." 

"I feel like that is the cadence and emotion [Britt] was going for was to present as one of these TikTok moms," Palmieri said.

"You would have no idea this woman was a United States senator," she added with astonishment. You know, a Republican man might have done a speech, a response like that from his kitchen, but we would have heard something about being a United States senator and something about governing and something that resembled the truth."

Britt's performance "was just wild," Palmieri continued. "I mean, I have never — and I was reassured to see that even people on the right, people were rejecting whatever it was that they were trying to convey about women's place."

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Awkward and unflattering rebuttals are par for the course as far as State of the Union responses from the opposing party's rising stars go, the Daily Beast notes. Sen. Marco Rubio's, R-Fla., awkward sip during his response speech more than a decade ago still follows him through his career. 

A GOP strategist likened Britt's speech to Rubio's sip, telling the outlet that Britt's performance was not only worse but that it “lowered her stature.”

"SNL is going to have to bring back Kristen Wiig to capture this one," quipped Karen Tumulty, an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post. 

SNL is going to have to bring back Kristen Wiig to capture this one.

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) March 8, 2024

New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan granted a request from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to shield prospective and actual jurors to prevent possible harassment or tampering but information about the jurors would still be available to Trump and his legal team.

“This Court concurs that a protective order is necessary,” Merchan wrote. “The Court further finds good cause… ‘that there is a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of juror(s).”

Merchan wrote in a footnote that the court further found that Trump “has an extensive history of publicly and repeatedly attacking trial jurors and grand jurors.”

Remarkable findings by Merchan:

- "The Court further finds good cause..."that there is a likelihood of bribery, jury tampering, or of physical injury or harassment of jurors."

- Trump has "an extensive history of publicly and repeatedly attacking trial jurors and grand jurors." pic.twitter.com/JKaHxXGJF0

— Frank G. Runyeon (@frankrunyeon) March 7, 2024

But the judge declined to “explicitly” warn Trump that "any harassing or disruptive conduct that threatens the safety or integrity of the jury" would result in Trump’s team losing access to juror information, relying instead on his past warnings, Law360’s Frank Runyeon reported.

Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection to hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump has pleaded not guilty. Jury selection is scheduled to begin on March 25.

Biden came out swinging and knocked the Republicans so far back on their heels that they had to completely abandon the image of him they've been building since 2020 — a man so old and feeble that he can't even feed himself — and instead hilariously whimper about his loud macho aggression. They whined mightily that Biden was too "political" apparently forgetting that in his last State of the Union speech, Donald Trump bestowed the Medal of Freedom on far-right, hate radio star Rush Limbaugh calling him "a special man, beloved by millions of Americans." 

Biden gave a barn burner of a speech that wasn't boring, which is highly unusual for any president but especially unusual for a president many people have been convinced has one foot in the grave. As it turned out, what actually died last night was Trump's Truth Social media platform. Trump had flamboyantly promised to do a "play-by-play" of Biden's address but the site went down for many people all over the country before Biden even reached the podium, leaving us with only these important insights:

We were all waiting on tenterhooks for over an hour to read what he had to say about Biden's choice of socks until the site came back up to reveal that Trump had pretty much just been ranting about Biden coughing and warning people not to shake his hand because it has germs. And Trump also lied and lied and lied about his own record, obviously unnerved by Biden's very pointed criticism, especially in the very strong opening section of the speech, when the audience was biggest and most attentive, in which Biden strongly contrasted his record against his predecessor. 

Starting with foreign policy Biden made a compelling case for support for Ukraine and went after Trump (without ever using his name) for his Putin toadying, particularly the asinine comment that he'd tell him "do whatever the hell you want" to any NATO country that doesn't "pay its bills." He said, "A former American President actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable.” Republicans all sat glumly silent, obviously terrified to cross their Dear Leader, as he railed on Truth Social. "He said I bowed down to the Russian Leader. He gave them everything, including Ukraine. I took away Nord Stream 2, he gave it to them! He was a Puppet for Putin and Xi, and virtually every other Leader!" Trump raged. It appears that criticism hit a nerve, maybe because it's true. 

The president admonished the Republicans to their faces for Jan. 6, saying, "My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win." Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., sitting behind the president on the podium looked as if someone had just rubbed a grapefruit in his face.

And he took on the conservative Supreme Court Justices, some of whom were sitting in front of him as he excoriated the GOP's assault on reproductive rights. He reminded them of the passage in the court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade which said “Women are not without electoral or political power" and then added: "You're about to find out." He asked the Republicans in the chamber, "My God, what freedoms will you take away next?” and he blamed Donald Trump right upfront, pointing out that Trump brags about overturning Roe. 

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And much to my happy surprise, he went after Trump for his greatest failure, and one of our country's worst tragedies, which for some reason people have flushed down the memory hole — the horrible response to the pandemic and the carnage he left in his wake:

“Remember the fear. Record job losses. Remember the spike in crime. And the murder rate. A raging virus that would take more than 1 million American lives and leave millions of loved ones behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness. A president, my predecessor, who failed the most basic duty. Any President owes the American people the duty to care. That is unforgivable.”

He did not care. He was worried about "his numbers" going up. 

That opening salvo was impressive and Biden didn't lose any steam for the rest of the speech as he laid out the differences between his agenda and his opponent's, and talked about his accomplishments and plans for the future. He announced a new plan for humanitarian aid to Gaza and while he reiterated his support for Israel he also said, "To the leadership of Israel I say this: Humanitarian assistance cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives has to be a priority. As we look to the future, the only real solution is a two-state solution." If you want to know the prospects for any Republican president agreeing with that, all you have to do is look at the sour look on every one of their faces as they sat on their hands when he said that.  

It wasn't all aggressive rhetoric, he also went off script and confidently jousted with the Republicans on various topics (although he, unfortunately, used the ugly term "illegals" in a back-and-forth with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.) He even managed to trap the GOP in the same trap he laid last year on cutting Social Security, this time on corporate tax cuts:

This was a great moment 🔥🔥 https://t.co/4QaBWBMQCd

— Brad Batt for TN State Sanity ✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾 (@bradbatt) March 8, 2024

It was one of his best speeches and delivered with a vigor that puts Donald Trump's recent rambling low energy rallies to shame. 

If you were a person who only saw the headlines of the major papers or watched Fox News over the past year or so, you didn't recognize the president last night, that "elderly man with good intentions and a bad memory" as Special Prosecutor Robert Hur so snidely put it. It was Joe Biden, the same guy that 81 million people voted for three and half years ago. He's fine. Now maybe we can start talking about something other than his age. 

Smith in a 29-page filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon detailed how Trump’s case is different from those of President Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Mike Pence and former FBI Director James Comey.

“This is a remarkable document in which Smith compares Trump's actions to a long list of high-profile people accused of mishandling classified info. In a nutshell, none of them were as brazenly obstructive as Trump, he argues,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney tweeted.

This is a remarkable document in which Smith compares Trump's actions to a long list of high-profile people accused of mishandling classified info. In a nutshell, none of them were as brazenly obstructive as Trump, he agues. https://t.co/lzO5HSYLRe pic.twitter.com/v44qAZLbgp

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) March 7, 2024

“While each of them, to varying degrees, bears a slight resemblance to this case … none is alleged to have willfully retained a vast trove of highly sensitive, confidential materials and repeatedly sought to thwart their lawful return and engaged in a multi-faceted scheme of deception and obstruction,” the filing says. “There is no one who is similarly situated.”

Smith noted that while Biden’s case has “superficial similarities” to Trump’s, Trump stashed his documents in a “social club” accessed by hundreds of people and then engaged in a campaign of “deception” to prevent investigators from recovering the documents.

“Trump appears to contend that it was President Biden who actually made the decision to seek the charges in this case; that Biden did so solely for unconstitutional reasons; and that this decision was somehow foisted on the Special Counsel through a newspaper article, a press conference, and an interview that each preceded the Special Counsel’s appointment,” Smith writes. “That theory finds no support in evidence or logic. Indeed, the very sources Trump relies on undercut his claim.”

Smith noted that Trump’s posts on Truth Social, in which he claimed he “openly and transparently” took documents home and insisted he had “declassified” them, are further evidence against him.

“If he persists in these declassification claims, that, too, would provide additional evidence that he knowingly possessed the documents,” Smith argued.

Biden during his speech criticized Republicans for killing a bipartisan border deal while decrying the border situation.

"We can fight about the border — or we can fix it. I'm ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now," Biden said.

During Biden’s remarks, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., shouted the name of a Georgia nursing student killed by an undocumented immigrant, Laken Riley.

Biden responded by holding up a pin that Greene had given him and responded by referring to Riley as "an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal” — a term that drew criticism from Biden’s Democratic allies.

Marge Greene yells about Laken Riley. Biden responds with some hardline rhetoric about undocumented immigration. pic.twitter.com/2Iw1v6Ygj1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2024

"My heart goes out to you, having lost children myself," Biden told Riley’s parents, who were in attendance.

Biden also called out Trump directly for torpedoing the border deal.

“If my predecessor is watching, instead of playing politics and pressuring members of Congress to block the bill, join me in telling the Congress to pass it,” he said. “We can do it together.”

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who led the negotiations, was seen nodding on the floor.

Other Republicans continued to shout at Biden from their seats.

When Democrats chanted “four more years,” Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., chanted “Trump, Trump, Trump,” according to The Washington Post.

Biden at another point chided Trump over his COVID response, saying the former president  “failed in the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people the duty: to care.”

“Lies!” shouted Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis.

Rep. Van Orden defends yelling “lies” at Biden during SOTU. Inside the room, it was difficult to tell who said it. Then sources told me he yelled at them. 
At first, he wouldn’t say it was him. Then he eventually acknowledged it pic.twitter.com/l6JLSnsYAF

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) March 8, 2024

Republicans also booed when Biden called them out for enacting a tax cut for the ultrawealthy.

“Oh no, you guys don’t want another $2 trillion tax cut?” Biden said, smiling. “I kinda thought that’s what your plan was. Well, that’s good to hear.”

Biden: "Oh no? You guys don't want another $2 trillion tax cut? I kinda thought that's what your plan was. You're not gonna cut another $2 trillion for the superwealthy? That's good to hear!" pic.twitter.com/1TVX03kJVs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 8, 2024

During another part of the speech, Steve Nikoui, a guest of Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., and the father of Marine Lance Cpl. Kareem Nikoui, who was one of the 13 U.S. service members killed in an attack during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, was escorted out and arrested for interrupting the speech.

“Remember Abbey Gate! United States Marines!” he shouted.

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Biden during his speech also called out the Supreme Court justices in attendance while criticizing Trump for appointing judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“With all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral or political power,” Biden said. “You’re about to realize just how much.”

Biden: Many of you in this chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom, my god, what other freedom would you take away? With all due respect, justices, women are not without power pic.twitter.com/3BXtd6DJJ8

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 8, 2024

Biden also accused Trump of wanting a national abortion ban, which the former president has been coy about.

“My god, what other freedoms would you take away?” Biden said.

BIDEN: Many of you & Trump are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom.

What other freedoms would you take away?

Women are not without electoral & political power -- and you're about to find out.

THANK YOU PRESIDENT BIDEN FOR STANDING UP FOR WOMEN'S FREEDOM! pic.twitter.com/NvgN2L2K7D

— Dream for America (@DreamAmerica_) March 8, 2024

Democrats praised Biden’s performance after the speech.

"Nobody is going to talk about cognitive impairment now," Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., was caught on video telling Biden.

Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) after the SOTU: "No one's gonna talk about cognitive impairment now!"

President Biden: "I kinda wish sometimes I was cognitively impaired." pic.twitter.com/CYKpIcKzG9

— The Recount (@therecount) March 8, 2024

"Hard for anyone at any age to give that performance," former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told CNN.

"Joe Biden owned the Republicans in every way,” MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said Friday morning. “It was an incredible night for the president and I don't know if the Republicans understood just how negative they looked."

"Joe Biden owned the Republicans in every way... It was an incredible night for the president and I don't know if the Republicans understood just how negative they looked."

— @morningmika on the SOTU pic.twitter.com/9MrbUu5gEH

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) March 8, 2024

Her videos and photos of the event suggest that whatever tummy imperfections she was confessing to were not visible to the naked eye. 

@ballerinafarm

What an incredible experience it was to compete on the Mrs World Pagent stage. There were so many emotions last week, the biggest one being gratitude. Grateful to feel it all. Grateful to be a mother, woman, daughter, sister. Honored to have made top 17, and congratulations to our new Mrs World, Mrs Germany!

♬ original sound - Ballerina Farm

This combination of faux humility and orchestrated perfection is intoxicating to some, infuriating to others and confusing to many. But what's indisputable is that it's hard to look away. It's how this Utah resident built an online following of millions for a social media account that purports to portray the humble life of a former ballerina turned farm wife. (It's fair to note that her family's financial security has other sources: Her father-in-law founded JetBlue.) 

Neeleman, with her bucolic images of grazing cattle and her sourdough recipes, is an especially successful example of the growing industry of social media influencers often described as "trad" (for "traditional"), or as "momfluencers" and "beige moms," for the minimalist aesthetic that dominates this online universe. Some of these influencers are married couples and some are just women, but they all sell variations of the same fantasy: a simple-but-luxurious life with a loving husband and charming children, all for the low, low price of abandoning one's ambitions of a career outside the home. 

Feminist critics like Sara Petersen, Anne Helen Petersen (no relation) and Anna North have built an impressive body of social criticism unveiling the cynical blend of capitalism, gender politics and plain old dishonesty of the "momfluencer" enterprise. (Neeleman's feed, for example, never shows us her farm workers, her kids' full-time teacher, her babysitters or her personal assistant.) What is less often discussed in these critiques is the ways many of these online influencers also function as propaganda outlets for the Christian right. 

There's another group of whistleblowers, however, who are working to confront what they see as a deeply misleading portrayal of life inside right-wing religion. It's an amorphous but devoted collection of former evangelicals, former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (aka the Mormons) and other critics of the Christian right. What unites them is the desire to call B.S. on the idyllic self-portrayal of conservative Christian influencers. And they're fighting on the same turf as their adversaries: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Spotify. 

"You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband"

It's hard to keep track of the metastasizing numbers of Christian influencers peddling beatific images of their family lives online: Estee Williams, Nara Smith, Cynthia Loewen, Natalie Bennett and Mrs. Midwest, just to name a few. These women (and occasionally couples) often rack up followers in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, despite (or because of) a depressing sameness in their presentation: Magazine-perfect kitchens and gardens. Rows of mostly-blond children. Long, layered haircuts, ranging from cornsilk blond to light brown with blond highlights. 

"They lead with the beautiful babies and the pretty families and the obedient children," explained Tia Levings, a former fundamentalist who now releases TikTok and Instagram videos exposing what's known as "Christian patriarchy." It's "a very wholesome image of function and beauty and order." 

She continued, "In chaotic times, people crave order, they crave fundamentalism. They want formulas."

"It's seductive," said Matthias Roberts, a therapist who helps people recover from religious trauma. "It offers certainty and belonging, which are core to what we need as humans."

Dr. Laura Anderson, a therapist who herself left a fundamentalist sect and now helps others who are leaving, said she had longed for that "sense of stability" and argued that "fundamentalism is a coping mechanism for a deregulated nervous system." But what's "underneath the photos," she said, is not "reality." 

In one sense, there's nothing new about Christian influencers, explained Blake Chastain, who hosts the Exvangelical podcast. Christian right YouTubers and TikTokers, he said, are continuing a century-old "alternative media ecosystem." 

Evangelicals have always "seized whatever the media was at the time," Jennifer Bryant of the YouTube channel Fundie Fridays said. "Before you had radio, they were doing tent revivals. Then they started to get on TV. Now it's on TikTok."

Christian social media differs from those previous efforts in two principal ways. The omnipresent nature of the internet means that online personalities can have wider reach and more influence than even the biggest televangelists of the past. Bradley Onishi, a former evangelical minister who now hosts the "Straight White American Jesus" podcast, described how the "rabbit hole" effect of social media leads people to consume exponentially more of this content than they ever could in the past.

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Even in his hardcore Christian youth, Onishi said, he might "go to church three times a week and, in between, visit a Christian bookstore and listen to Christian radio." Now, he argued, by the time a believer gets to church on Sunday morning, they've "digested a hundred hours of influencers, podcast, pundits, talking heads, Fox News and YouTube." Online Christianity has, for many, totally overwhelmed what's on offer from a pastor "you see once or twice a week." More than 40% of self-described evangelicals rarely or never attend church. As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported for the New York Times, these unchurched Christians build their spiritual lives around "podcasts and YouTube channels that discuss politics ... from a right-wing, and sometimes Christian, worldview."

Secondly, social media influencers who present themselves as lifestyle gurus aimed largely at women don't necessarily foreground religion. Their primary focus is guidance on parenting, housekeeping, sexuality and being more attractive to men. "They're the marketing department," Bryant said. Their "job is to look pretty" and advertise "how amazing my life is," with the underlying pitch: "You could have this too, if you just submit to your husband."

"They will do all this normal influencer stuff," McKay Forsyth, who hosts a popular ex-Mormon YouTube channel, said. "Then they'll just slip in a Sunday photo of them going to church."

"Fundamentalism is really good at taking what we love in our hearts and using it to exploit us," Levings said. 

"I know your Bible way better than you"

This veneer of polished perfection is increasingly under attack, however, by social media competitors who want to tell a different story about what's going on behind all those family photos and lovely landscapes. "The only way to debunk something that is so pretty and so attractive and so comforting," Levings said, "is for people who've actually lived it to share" their stories. 

The people doing this work often call themselves "exvangelicals," or "ex-mos" for former members of the Latter-day Saints. Some call their campaign "#fundiesnark," a phrase that apparently launched on Reddit, and is now a common hashtag on Instagram or TikTok. A more serious term is "deconstructor," derived from the "deconstruction" concept pioneered by philosopher Jacques Derrida. Originally that meant exploring the dynamic relationship between a "text" — which could be writing, visual art, film or something else — and its social context. For the anti-fundamentalist movement, it's become a favored term to describe the process of unlearning what they see as the toxic and unhealthy views enforced by conservative religion. 

Maybe it's a big leap to link 20th-century European philosophy to people who make YouTube videos mocking "tradwives." Spend enough time with the fundie-snarkers, though, and it starts to make sense. Authoritarian religious leaders push the notion, for instance, that the Bible is literal truth — and there's only one correct reading. Through music, storytelling and, of course, humor, the snarkers undercut that certainty, arguing that such texts are being selectively interpreted to suit the political and social goals of fundamentalists.

Anti-fundamentalist influencers who spoke to Salon almost universally described their community as one grappling with massive trauma inflicted by conservative religion. At the same time, an irresistibly infectious sense of fun informs their debunking of conservative Christian ideas. 

"It's so liberating, not only to question but to laugh," said journalist Sarah Stankorb, the author of "Disobedient Women."

"Why Don't Mormon Influencers Wear Their Garments?" asks one popular video by McKay Forsyth and his wife, Jordan. The video is an amusing explanation of what the "magical underwear" worn by Latter-day Saints actually is, and why so many popular Mormon influencers clearly are not wearing it. Garments that cover the body from shoulder to mid-thigh, the Forsyths explain, are mandatory for all adult members of the church — which probably turns a blind eye to influencers who show up online in miniskirts and tank tops, serving as attractive, relatable symbols of their faith.  

But if people actually join the church, McKay Forsyth said, they will find the garments are not optional. It's just an effort to sell "a more palatable version of Mormonism" and get people "started down their high-demand religion path."

Karen Alea, who hosts the podcast "Deconversion Therapy," told Salon that she and her co-host, known only as Bonnie, wanted to share the "funny and odd experiences" they and others like them had "growing up as Christians." One listener described how, as a child, he was finally given the stuffed Smurf he'd longed for, only to see it burned in a church bonfire targeting "demonic influences." He saw "Papa Smurf flying over his head into the fire," Alea said, followed by a cloud of "blue toxic smoke."

Levings makes videos recounting the horrors of the "Quiverfull" life. But watching them is hardly a death march — they're often sarcastic and focused on the weirder details of her former life, such as being told that girls and women never need haircuts:

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Tia Levings (@tialevingswriter)

Fundie Fridays started off as a channel where Jen Bryant did her makeup on camera while telling the back story of some famous or influential fundamentalist. If that sounds like a bizarre juxtaposition, it worked brilliantly on YouTube, creating an atmosphere of intimacy. She no longer does her makeup in public view, although she still shows up with enviably colorful looks. Now she and her husband, James Bryant, bring a mix of research, clever editing and their personal charm to bear in a series of videos meant to capture what James calls "the best and the worst of Christianity." 

That, of course, entails a lot of dunking on Christian influencers and revealing the less-than-godly motivations that drive lucrative online ministries. In one recent video, "Kat Von D is Christian Now," Jen Bryant recounted how the famous tattoo artist and makeup peddler "rebranded" herself as a Christian after losing fans and sponsorship deals amid allegations of racism and anti-vaccine views. Jen Bryant points out that this Christian "rebrand" brought Von D to an audience with different standards than the secular world, where marrying a guy with a swastika tattoo is frowned upon. 

There's "a low, low point of entry" to the Christian-influencer world, James Bryant said. "As long as you're like, 'I'm saved, I found Jesus,' you're going to get people who mindlessly agree with that to follow." But to keep that audience, an influencer must keep dishing out more red meat, which usually means increasingly right-wing politics. "You see this pattern of them doubling down more over time" in pursuit of that audience, he said. "You're making yourself, ironically, more niche," since most people outside the world of conservative Christianity reject those far-right views.

This new crop of anti-fundamentalists is dramatically different from the militant and male-dominated "New Atheist" movement that emerged early in this century. These newer and younger opponents of the religious right are more focused on social justice issues than on whether or not there's a God. Many still identify as Christians or hold other spiritual beliefs. Their focus is on fighting what they see as the widespread damage done by right-wing religion. Many will point out that evangelical intolerance and Christian nationalism "cause problems for the rest of" believing Christians, by giving them a bad name.

While many of this movement's prominent figures are women and LGBTQ folks, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world is predominantly white. In that sense, of course, they resemble their conservative Christian rivals and peers. As Bradley Onishi points out, this sometimes means unintentionally minimizing the role that racism and white identity play in the Christian cultures they critique.  

But this cultural mirroring also lends the #fundiesnark community a major strength: They come from the world they're now attacking, and bring a level of knowledge that makes their criticisms harder to ignore. "You'll never out-evangelical me," Onishi said. "I know your Bible way better than you. I can speak your language with no accent.” This cultural fluency makes it easier, he said, to reach people who are still inside right-wing religion but are "trying to find a window to the outside."

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"On the sly," Onishi said, someone like that can "listen to the podcast, watch the YouTube channel" and come to understand "the other ways people think" and "why they left." 

The journey Onishi describes, from conservative Christianity to more skeptical circles, was dramatically illustrated this week. Dav Beal — the husband of popular Christian influencer Bethany Beal, of "Girl Defined" — revealed that he is "circling deconstruction," meaning that he's considering leaving his faith. "When I try to find my identity in Christ, it just doesn't seem to work," he said in a video the couple posted. The announcement spurred a frenzy of excitement in the #fundiesnark community.

@the.cassiemarie

Girl Defined husband deconstructed! #girldefined #bethanybeal #paulandmorgan #deconstruction #deconstructiontiktok #exvangelical #exvangelicaltiktok #christianitytiktok #christiantiktok #evangelical

♬ original sound - No Culty Vibes

There are dozens of Reddit threads about this, largely expressing a desire to welcome Beal to their side, and glee that their message seems to be breaking through.

Sex sells ... Jesus?

Hannah Neeleman, she of Ballerina Farm and the beauty pageants, is no outlier with her swimsuit photos and her unfathomably toned post-partum body. It swiftly becomes apparent, when one delves into the world of tradwives and Christian-influencer content, how downright sexy a lot of it is. It's not just the Latter-day Saints forgoing otherwise mandatory garments in order to pose in spandex and low-cut blouses. As I noted in a November column on tradwife content, it's hard not to get a cheesecake vibe off the chest-first photography or the TikTok videos that pretend it's normal to bake bread while dressed like a pin-up.

@gwenthemilkmaid

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Even when Christian influencers aren't using age-old tricks to capture eyeballs by appealing to the lizard brain, it's astonishing how much of their content is about sex and romantic relationships. Indeed, that's primarily what the term "trad" reflects. Sure, influencers go on about all manner of "traditional" lifestyle choices, but "trad" largely refers to the fundamentalist conception of what a healthy sex life should look life: Heterosexual and married, with overtly regressive gender roles.

Deconstructors call this "purity culture," and it runs much deeper than the well-documented fundamentalist obsession with controlling people's sex lives. Purity culture is also a promise that conservative Christians make to young people: If you follow the strict life path we're showing you, you'll be rewarded with true love, a beautiful family and lots of scorching hot sex — within the bounds of marriage, of course.

This sales pitch goes back decades, Chastain explained, citing Elisabeth Elliot's 1984 book "Passion and Purity," a romantic account of her brief marriage to a Christian missionary who was killed in Ecuador in 1956 by members of an indigenous group he tried to convert. As Liz Charlotte Grant at the Revealer recently wrote, the book appeals to those "hungry for romance," turning that longing into an argument for self-denial. As a young woman, Grant wrote, "I loved her example of courtship, of 'saving yourself' for ecstatic marital sex, of the hand of God directing a humble woman’s love life." But, she added, "it never worked for me."

Other bestsellers have made similar pitches: "Every Man's Battle" portrays giving up masturbation as the path to a satisfying sex life; the self-explanatory "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," which has since been rejected by its author; "Love & Respect" by Emerson Eggerichs argues for rigid gender roles and chastity before marriage. 

The rulebook of purity culture often goes beyond a ban on premarital sex to proscribing kissing and holding hands. Some go further and seek to forbid all forms of dating, embracing a "courtship" model almost indistinguishable from arranged marriage. (The infamous Duggar family of reality TV believes in "courtship.") Of course abortion is forbidden, but in many cases so are all forms of birth control. 

Therapist Laura Anderson said that when she was still a believer, "the tenets of purity culture provided a sense of stability." She didn't like the restrictions, but amid the "chaos of having to choose a career and life path," it felt like a "life raft": "If I did things this way, then I would get this reward."

In the world of Christian influencers, with intense competition for audience share, things can get weird fast. Influencers use sex to get attention, while also proving their purity bona fides through performative adherence to ever-stricter rules. The result can be uncanny, as in videos of conventionally attractive young couples discussing whether it's OK to kiss before marriage. Or when the aforementioned Bethany Beal, who built an empire by pushing abstinence before marriage, now hawks "The Ultimate Sex Course for Christian Women" for $169 a pop.

Jeremiah Gibson, a couples therapist who hosts the Sexvangelicals podcast with his wife and fellow therapist Julia Postema, told Salon that the sex-and-relationships material that dominates the Christian influencer world is a form of bait-and-switch. "Conservative folks are less concerned about sex and more concerned about the performance of gender," he said. "Sex just happens to be the vehicle" they use to promote rigid gender roles. 

Content that promises to be about sex is really "talking about a gender dynamic," Gibson said. In this worldview, being a man means "you lift weights. You eat certain foods. You stuff your emotions down." Being a woman means "you bake bread. You pay attention to the needs of your husband." For many people, it can be comforting to "sit with" these kinds of stereotypes, hoping they'll solve all your problems. But what Gibson and Postema find in their practice, they say, is that these "gender scripts stop working for people."

Multiple sources said this dynamic is especially pronounced among LGBTQ people, whose bodies, desires and identities simply can't adhere to the idealized vision of purity culture. A 2023 study by the Williams Institute at UCLA found that "two-thirds of LGBTQ people who were raised Christian no longer identify as Christian." Levings argues, however, that "everybody who grew up in those kinds of environments" experiences this pain to some degree. 

For deconstructors, Christian influencers' focus on sex and relationships is a kind of Achilles heel, offering a crucial opportunity to tell the world that these promises of sexual bliss are empty. When people buy into purity culture, Anderson said, "we have a lot of sexual dysfunction as a result." She has seen "sexual pain" and a lot of "shame and disgust toward self" in her practice, she said, along with people who define themselves as asexual "because sex feels so uncomfortable."

Chastain agreed that this disconnect between the sexual promises of purity culture and the messy realities of life leads many people to start questioning conservative Christian values. "People get married young and then they realize that there's a whole bunch more to marriage than just sex," he said. "It leads oftentimes to a self-discovery that is a lot more painful."

People struggling with that disconnect have often done so in silence and shame. Now they're a few Google inquiries away from finding videos, podcasts and other media from the deconstruction community that validates what they're feeling. "When we've experienced trauma in community," Roberts said, "the only way to heal that is by being in community."

While online spaces are no substitute for therapy or in-person community, he said, they can offer a "breadth of voices" that open up "more options for people to really find what works for them."

Freeing oneself from conventionally gendered scripts about love and sex isn't easy, Gibson said, but it can allow people to "develop a sustainable happiness" based on "challenging each other and pushing each other."

"They get really defensive"

The conflict between Christian influencers and the anti-fundamentalist community invites an irresistible comparison to the biblical story of David and Goliath. The Christians have more money, sleeker marketing and institutional support from their churches, while the deconstructors are a ragtag bunch of nerds broadcasting from their bedrooms. Many began with nothing more than an iPhone and a ring-light. Yet there are signs the Christian Goliaths are worried about their online hecklers. 

For one thing, various churches, faith organizations and Christian influencers appear to have invested in search engine optimization around the term "deconstruction." Typing terms like "Christian deconstruction" into Google's search bar returns pages of results from Christian sites with titles like "The Most Dangerous Form of Deconstruction" or warnings that "you can easily come out the other side a lonely and bitter person with no hope." Some sites that claim to offer "deconstruction" content deliver bland Christian generalities, possibly concealing a more conservative agenda. (A technique seen recently in the "He Gets Us" ads aired during the Super Bowl.)

“People that are still within the evangelical camp," Chastain said, rarely engage with genuine "exvangelicals," only with "straw-man versions." Most anti-fundamentalist influencers that spoke with Salon don't seem worried. Many noted that they had built up audiences with little to no marketing, and saw no need to echo the aggressive proselytizing of their counterparts. Most offered some version of "If we build it, they will come." Faith may require an advertising budget, they argue, but doubt sells itself. 

Trolls are more of an annoyance, especially those Christians who genuinely seem hurt or aggrieved by anyone who dares to criticize them. "A lot of them think I am attacking the religion, so they get really defensive," Jen Bryant said. Some of her jokes are "a little mean," she admits, while saying she doesn't intend to attack anyone's faith. The Bryants, who do not come from religious backgrounds, avoid discussing theology on Fundie Fridays, focusing on the real-world harm they see caused by the bigotry or corruption of religious leaders and Christian influencers. 

Alea is amused by the trolls, who she says typically can't even land good insults. They'll accuse her of not being married (although she is) or say that "she lives at home with three cats." Apparently the worst thing they can say about a woman, she jokes, is that she's single. "This reveals where modern Christianity is today. I let it display itself," Alea said.

Some Christian influencers escalate past complaints or arguments into attempted censorship, usually through bogus copyright claims. A good deal of #fundiesnark content relies on appropriating clips, images and music from Christian influencers, which generally falls within the bounds of legal "fair use," since it's deployed "to comment upon, criticize, or parody a copyrighted work." But the big corporations behind social media networks are generally unwilling to adjudicate disputes between users, and tend to err on the side of those who claim copyright infringement, often without bothering to investigate.

Fundie Fridays nearly lost its YouTube channel in 2022 when Lawson Bates, a Christian influencer who has spun off his own empire from his relationship to the Duggar family, kept lodging copyright claims against the Bryants. At first the couple appealed to Bates directly, asking him to chill out about obvious parody. When that failed, they had to fight to keep their channel, which provided a full-time living by that point. Eventually, they prevailed and got it reinstated, but the experience left a bad taste in their mouths. 

Sometimes efforts by conservative Christians to silence their critics can backfire in a fashion reminiscent of the "Streisand effect." That's what happened in the case of Matthew Blake, aka "Flamy Grant," a drag singer-songwriter. Blake belongs to an LGBTQ-affirming Christian church and wrote a '90s-style country-pop tune called "Good Day" for his congregation to "sing on Sunday mornings." The song is religious in a broadly appealing sense, with lyrics like, "Out of the light, I'm not gonna hide/ I got a heart in the right place."

Flamy tasted the ugly side of online attention when Christian nationalist influencer Sean Feucht attacked her on Twitter, accusing Flamy of trying to force "perversion" on kids and quoting a threatening Bible passage calling for "a large millstone [to be] hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." 

Flamy admitted to Salon that the incident was frightening, since Feucht is a notorious MAGA-world character. Still, "drag queens know how to make lemonade," she said. Instead of pulling back, Flamy went to her followers: "I was like, 'Hey, I've got this album, I've got this song.'" People spread the word and started downloading "Good Day" on Apple Music, driving the song to No. 1 on the iTunes Christian music charts.

"There's no such thing as bad publicity, right?" Flamy said. She recalled being a child in an evangelical family reading criticism about the 1995 drag-centric film "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" in Focus on the Family's magazine. "I didn't even realize I was queer — I was like, I need to see this movie."

"They're like sirens"

Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but most #fundiesnark and deconstruction influencers believe they've seen a dramatic surge in interest in their content in recent years. "Once the 2016 election cycle began, we started to see an outflux of people from high-control religion," Anderson said.

"Because of our political realities, people are realizing this world that I once existed in is not good, I want to get out," Roberts agreed. There's some evidence to back that up. Church attendance has gradually declined for decades, but took a precipitous fall after the election of Donald Trump. The COVID pandemic, which forced churches to choose between protecting their congregants by closing down or yielding to MAGA pressure to stay open, creating major rifts that have not healed. Church attendance has not recovered to pre-pandemic levels. For those in the anti-fundamentalist online world, offering a soft landing to people who are bailing out is a major priority. 

When you leave a "high-control religion," Cait West, an escapee from Christian patriarchy said, you're often "leaving your friends and your family and your community." To go online and "find people who understand what you're going through, it's like a found family."

“My end goal is making people feel seen and safe," Flamy said. "I realized that my drag had the power to do that for people, because that's what it did for me.”

Even for those who haven't suffered these experiences, this struggle matters. There may be no single greater predictor of support for Trump than white evangelical identity. As Atlantic reporter and lifelong evangelical Tim Alberta makes clear in his new book "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," people within that subculture are not allowed to harbor doubts about Trump. Those who do often find they are no longer welcome in their faith communities. 

Anti-fundamentalists are keenly aware of how Christian influencers try to normalize far-right politics — and recruit vulnerable young people. 

"I am worried about younger men," West said, noting that "trad" content offers them a deceptive promise: "If only the world was like this, then I would get what I deserve."

"It's not an overnight thing," Anderson noted. "You're not anti-MAGA one day and then you wake up the next day" to find yourself "storming the Capitol." She called radicalization a "slow fade" that "slowly chips away at a person's sense of self and autonomy" until they find themselves deeply entrenched in far-right ideology.

Jen Bryant noted that social media has created "the perfect place for pipelines" of radicalization, "because of the never-ending scroll" and the promise of community that conservative influencers offer. "Their job is to entice you in. They're like sirens.”

As extremism researcher Brian Hughes told Salon last year, "individuals pursue radicalization because it meets certain social and psychological needs." There's no easy way to measure how much a counternarrative, delivered within the same social media networks, can help deter people from that path. Anti-fundamentalists believe that encountering progressives, especially those who defy ugly stereotypes and are literate in internet humor, can undercut right-wing messaging and interrupt young people's journey to darker places.

Social media can be a hellscape of bad faith, right-wing propaganda and porn-inflected material. It can also be where people learn how to think, debate and discuss ideas. In that sense, the #fundiesnark and deconstruction world suggests the best possibilities of the internet. "I like to think of the old philosophers' dens, where it was just 20 or 30 students going back and forth," James Bryant said. These kinds of exchanges can get heated, he said, but they have a purpose. "You're figuring out life. You're breaking the world down around you in those conversations.”

"Climate change is clearly well underway and represents a major, even existential threat that is not being adequately addressed," Trenberth writes. "Improvements are much needed in expressing why and how the climate is changing from human activities."

He asserts that when it comes to fixing climate change, humanity is missing a key point, one that he has repeatedly emphasized throughout his career: Warming and heating are not the same thing. As Trenberth explained both in his paper and in his interview with Salon, if our species does not soon fully grasp both this fact and its implications, the consequences will be disastrous.

It all comes down to a statistic known as EEI, or Energy Earth Imbalance, that measures the difference between the solar energy that reaches Earth and the amount which returns to space.

"Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and greenhouse gases are those which trap the infrared radiation that would otherwise be escaping to space," Trenberth told Salon, adding that the "general rule of thumb" is to classify any molecule with more than two atoms in it as a greenhouse gas. This includes carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor, methane (CH4) and the various CFCs, also known as fluorocarbons.

These gases trap heat that would normally escape back into space — creating an EEI that could prove detrimental to humanity's future. While temperature is a part of this imbalance, there are other aspects of it too that cannot be measured solely with a thermometer.

"In this case, we really should think more about it in terms of global heating rather than warming," Trenberth said. "Heating and warming are synonyms, in some sense, but not always. Sometimes 'heating' relates more to temperature change rather than simply the temperature itself, and that's where some of the confusion arises."

In his paper, Trenberth elaborates on why this confusion is bad for humanity.

"The United Nations, and especially the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their Summary for Policy Makers, focus on global temperature targets rather than broader facets of climate change including EEI, and do not always adequately discriminate between temperature and heating," Trenberth wrote. "This also has consequences for future climate if or when heating is brought under control by cutting emissions. Improvements are needed in expressing how the climate is changing by properly accounting for the flow of energy through the climate system."

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If humanity reaches net zero in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, Trenberth pointed out, the planet will still be be much hotter than our recent past and present, while the nature of our climate will still be very different.

"At that point, there is no longer this close relationship between heating and temperature," Trenberth observed. "The temperature maybe stalls, doesn't go up anymore or not quite so much," but other issues caused by overheating such as problems with the water cycle will persist. Those problems will, in turn, lead to extreme weather events impacting millions of people.

Other experts who spoke to Salon agreed with Trenberth's assessment.

"The basic premise — that greenhouse gas increases are causing changes in the hydrological cycle and various types of weather extremes — is well-founded," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an email. "I think the paper is mostly just suggesting a different way for scientists to frame the climate crisis, i.e. rather than emphasizing the warming, better explain how the warning is symptomatic of a whole range of changes, including an intensified hydrological cycle and increases in various types of weather extremes."

Dr. Shiv Priyam Raghuraman from NCAR also told Salon that he "largely agree(s) with the paper," adding that his own 2021 paper for the journal Nature Communications "shows that this heating, known as Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI), is increasing due to human activities." 

Raghuraman also shared Trenberth's concern about people not paying enough attention to this aspect of climate science.

"A positive EEI, i.e., a surplus of heat in the Earth system, manifests as many symptoms such as global warming, less sea ice and land ice, a more powerful hydrological cycle, etc," Raghuraman pointed out. "The paper advocates not focusing on just the global warming part but also paying attention to the entire planetary heating."

Trenberth was not shy about how humanity will suffer if the planet does not fully heal from its positive EEI. His paper focuses on the water cycle because it is the "best example, or the simplest example" that can be used to illustrate how this is the case.

"If you have extra heat, a lot of that heat goes into evaporating moisture at the surface, and that puts more moisture into the atmosphere," Trenberth said. "It rains harder. There is a greater risk of heavy rains and flooding as a result, but in the places where it's not raining, then things dry out. There is a greater risk of drought and wildfire, and heat waves as a consequence of that."

None of these extreme weather events will come as a surprise to those who have been following climate change — but the exact reason why they are occurring might be. If Trenberth's paper does what the scientist hopes, policymakers and ordinary people alike will better understand how climate change is changing the weather and be able to react accordingly.

As Trenberth and other experts agree, the stakes could not be higher.

The legal cases against the former president and his enablers are making significant progress in achieving consequences. He is facing mammoth civil liability and he will likely soon join some of his closest associates in sustaining his first criminal convictions. While there is also considerable uncertainty in some of the cases, the overall pattern points to accountability.

Just this week, Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer at the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to perjury, admitting that he repeatedly lied in an apparent effort to protect his former boss. This was the second guilty plea secured by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg against Weisselberg, following an earlier one to 15 counts of tax fraud in his dealings with Trump. 

Weisselberg is just the latest occupant of Trump’s collapsing house of cards; a long list of people and entities associated with him have been convicted. The Trump Organization and another business bearing his name were convicted of criminal tax fraud in 2022 with prosecutors telling the jury that the misconduct was “explicitly sanctioned” by the former president. In the Fulton County election interference case, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis all pleaded guilty in October. Other examples of legal accountability abound, including for Trump’s former White House advisors Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and Michael Flynn, his erstwhile political guides Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, and many more.

Now Trump himself is being hit by the courts, starting with major financial ramifications for his actions. He was found by a civil jury in 2023 to have sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. Following the multi-million dollar verdict in that case, Trump was in January ordered to pay a staggering $83.3 million in damages for defaming Carroll, and then commanded to pay more than $450 million last month (including prejudgment interest) in the civil fraud case brought by New York attorney general Letitia James. The damages levied against Trump were important steps for holding him accountable. They are so large that his lawyers have said he may have to sell properties to pay them. 

Even more serious consequences likely loom in New York, where Trump made his home and his reputation for most of his life. DA Bragg’s 2016 election case lies just ahead, with jury selection beginning on March 25. Trump is alleged to have hidden information about a sex scandal from voters following an eruption of controversy over his  “Access Hollywood” tape. The evidence that Trump falsified records to cover up that campaign corruption is damning. If found guilty of the 34 felonies, Trump could face incarceration. Each count carries a penalty of up to four years in prison. 

It is when we get beyond the New York case – expected to take about 6 weeks — that the state of accountability becomes murkier. But with three additional serious criminal cases on the docket, it is more likely than not that at least one more makes it through to trial. While there are no guarantees when it comes to criminal cases — especially ones against the notoriously slippery former president — the likelihood that at least one of those cases is tried makes the state of accountability stronger still.

In the January 6 federal case, while the decision to give a hearing to Trump’s claims of absolute presidential immunity by the justices of the Supreme Court that Trump helped to shape will delay the case, there is still more than enough time for a trial if the justices resolve the case on the same timetable as they applied in the 14th Amendment case, where a decision came less than a month after oral argument.  

The immunity question can be decided quickly if the Supreme Court makes this as much of a priority as they just did with Trump’s ballot status in Colorado in advance of the Super Tuesday primary. If the justices care that much about finishing that case before an intermediate primary date, they should care a whole lot more about finishing the immunity case in time for a verdict before the presidential election in November. The American public needs to know whether Trump is guilty of abusing the very powers he seeks to recover before they decide whether to restore him to office. 

In Fulton County, the case against Trump’s election interference in Georgia has been delayed for weeks by a distraction manufactured by Trump and his co-conspirator, Michael Roman to focus on the DA in the case. After nearly twenty hours in court, however, Trump and his allies have failed to make the legal or evidentiary case to disqualify DA Fani Willis. A decision is expected on disqualification shortly. The steep legal hurdle to prove disqualification has not been met and time to move past this distraction now, to a swift trial before a jury. The DA had requested an August start date and if the federal election overthrow case is not moving there’s no reason not to grant that request.

Perhaps the most dubious prognosis is in the Mar-a-Lago case— but even there a trial is possible. After prior indications of favoritism toward Trump by Judge Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed, and numerous delays invited by the judge, she is considering putting the case before a jury this summer. The prosecution is asking for a July 8 trial and Trump has counter-offered the option of August 12, although he would strongly prefer kicking the can to 2025. And no wonder: If that happens and he is elected, he will likely try to dismiss the case, pardon himself or both. Despite Cannon’s partiality so far, we should not write off this prospect until we see what happens.

The chances of holding former President Trump accountable in the 2016 campaign corruption and cover up case election case plus at least one of these three possible prosecutions still look good. Polling indicates that Americans would take the conviction and sentencing of Trump seriously. The American people want answers from a jury of Trump’s peers — from their own fellow Americans. I believe they can still get those answers this year – before it is too late. If they do, then the state of accountability in our nation will, like the rest of our union, be strong indeed.

A truly gonzo montage unfolds, and we witness a gun-wielding teenage police force drag older adults out of houses and bus them into a concentration camp named “Paradise Camp 23.” They are force-fed the psychedelic drug LSD while dressed in bright blue togas adorned with peace symbols. The sequence ends with dozens of blissed-out senior citizens dancing in a field — happy, peaceful, psychedelic zombies.

For well over 50 years, there has been a persistent belief in the psychedelic world: If everyone could be switched on with these drugs, then we’d all be better off. A commonly recounted experience with psychedelics is that it dissolves one’s ego, blurring the boundaries between ourselves and others. As the ego dissolves, we profoundly understand that we are all connected, all the same, all one.

This recollection is so common, it’s reasonable to expect anyone who goes through a psychedelic experience to come out of it with a sense of deep humility and balance with the universe. This ego death inevitably brings about a realization that no one is better than anyone else. We are all worthy of love because we are all one.

Except that isn’t always what happens.

The history of western psychedelic use is littered with stories of elitism and evangelism. From Aldous Huxley to Timothy Leary, psychedelics have long been considered agents of spiritual betterment — drugs that bring about enlightenment. In fact, an uncomfortable truth is that many psychedelic “prophets” of the past century were also advocates of eugenics, believing a small group of genetic elites were crucial in steering humanity to its next stage of evolution.

In the 21st Century, these evangelical ideas have taken hold in the minds of a self-appointed “hallucinogenic elite." An assortment of business leaders, politicians, billionaires and tech bros who are now taking psychedelics at invite-only luxury retreats, such as The Journeymen Collective, with the express intention of fostering change in the world. But not just any change. It is this elite group deciding which way to steer human evolution. As author James Oroc described in his 2018 book, “We are the 5% who have to help humanity move into its next phase, the recognition of our own divine origins.”

But how does psychedelic ego death lead to ego inflation? Why are some people going through these experiences and coming back not with humility but with a heightened sense of righteous purpose? And what do we even mean when we talk about ego death with psychedelics?

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How to kill an ego

“At moderate to high doses, one very typical effect [of psychedelics] is to reduce the ordinary sense we have of being an entity separate from everything else,” philosopher Chris Letheby explained to Salon. “I think sometimes when people talk about ego death, maybe what they're referring to is what you might call total ego dissolution: a state of consciousness in which there is no experiential sense of self at all.”

Letheby has been studying the nexus of psychedelics and philosophy for several years. He says scientists have worked to quantify “ego dissolution” in relation to psychedelics, developing simple questionnaires that can rate the level of ego death a person experiences during a trip. And these surveys certainly have value in establishing a universality to some aspects of the psychedelic experience.

But pretty quickly in our conversation we hit a controversial philosophical roadblock, one that has been debated for a long time. Can a conscious experience exist without a self to experience it? If our ego dissolves completely during a psychedelic experience then “who” is left having that experience?

Letheby is in a philosophical camp that does believe total ego dissolution experiences can happen on psychedelics, but he suggests they are rarer than most people realize. For the majority of psychedelic experiences, some minimal sense of subjective self holds strong, but perhaps most importantly — regardless of the degree of ego dissolution during a trip — a process of reconstruction must occur for someone to engage again with the world.

“For whatever reason, the brain doesn't stay in that state. It doesn't stay in the kind of no boundaries, one-with-everything state. Its default tendency reasserts itself as the concentration of the drug exits the system and stops altering how the brain is processing information,” Letheby says.

Indeed, our ego springs back following a psychedelic experience — often in a different form, whether positive or negative. And according to Letheby the big factors that determine how one’s sense of self is reconstituted following a trip are set and setting: What happened to you during the trip? What community of people are around you? What were your intentions going into the trip? Who were you before the trip?

Who will lead the “revolution?”

“I remember when I was in college, on my third or fourth acid trip, being just shocked and horrified that assholes who took psychedelics were assholes on psychedelics.” Douglas Rushkoff told Salon. Since the late 1980s, he has been at the coalface of psychedelic counterculture. Crossing paths with everyone from Timothy Leary and Terrence McKenna to Robert Anton Wilson and R.U. Sirius, Rushkoff was an early proponent of the crossover between technology and psychedelics.

Over time Rushkoff watched the promising liberatory nature of technology be squashed by billionaire techno-capitalists. His most recent book, “Survival of the Richest,” investigated the mindset behind the super rich who are simultaneously leading the world into catastrophe while using their profits to hide from the apocalyptic reality they created.

In the book he recounts being invited to an exclusive gathering of business elites. The gathering was spawned by a duo who had a powerful ayahuasca experience and felt it their purpose to bring together like-minded leaders to address problems of climate change. A Zen monk was present at the gathering to help oversee things, and after a few hours of small talk the cohort got down to brass tacks. They were the self-anointed ones who were going to save the world.

“How could this awakening group of elites now lead humanity to a greener, more cooperative future?” Rushkoff wrote. “Lead? Really? These were freshly-minted New Agers whose entire life experience had been spent as financial advisors, brand managers or tech investors. Now, thirty minutes into their awakened selves, they were ready to lead the revolution.”

According to Rushkoff, for these people, psychedelics seemed to simply garnish their pre-existing capitalist beliefs with a newfound cosmic justification. All their systems of exploitation and domination held strong, and psychedelics just amplified a sense that they were the only ones that could save the world.

“There's [a-hole] capitalists having intense psychedelic experiences, blowing their f**king brains out, but still processing the experiences in such a way as to reinforce the worst of themselves,” Rushkoff said in an interview with Salon.

The phenomenon of these billionaires consuming brain-blasting doses of psychedelics and not being shaken and humbled is one that still flummoxes Rushkoff. He sees this as both a problem of set and setting — powerful people who consider themselves leaders and are surrounded by lackeys who never say no —  and a fundamental indication that some people’s brains are just wired differently.

“There is a feedback loop quality to some psychedelics,” Rushkoff explained. “It can loop where you become a more strident version of yourself. So you know, Elon Musk on psychedelics is even more Elon Musk than Elon Musk.”

When talking about the way the über-rich take psychedelics and come back with a heightened elitism, Rushkoff is very clear. These people are not neurotypical. Their brains are wired differently, he says. If your view on reality is one of a systems theorist, then your psychedelic experience will simply amplify that perspective. Combine the idea that reality is something to be “fixed” with a sense of embedded power — suggesting you are the one to fix it — and you’re getting close to a perfect recipe for entering the echelons of the hallucinogenic elite.

We are God... Or I am God?

In 1987 actress Shirley Maclaine adapted her autobiographical novel “Out on a Limb” into a five-hour TV miniseries. The story followed MacLaine on her journeys into new age spirituality and the series concluded with her standing on a beach, arms outstretched, yelling “I am God!”.

Rushkoff recounts the scene as a way of highlighting how some people can come away from psychedelic experiences with inflated egos. For MacLaine, the affirmation was there to symbolize how we are all God. How our ego is merely an aspect of a greater whole. I am God really means We are God.

“But I can understand someone whose neurology is different, and feels not part of the social fabric. I am God, becomes I am God,” Rushkoff says.

Valerie van Mulukom is a cognitive psychologist at Oxford Brookes University. A few years ago, she co-authored a 2020 study in the journal Psychopharmacology that surveyed over 400 psychedelic users. The research asked participants to describe their most awe-inspiring or emotionally intense psychedelic experience. Subjects also completed several questionnaires designed to measure things like awe-experience and narcissism.

The findings were somewhat surprising, uncovering a link between intense psychedelic experiences and reduced levels of maladaptive narcissism. But as with most science, the devil lay in the details — and in this instance they told a much more complicated story.

The research compared ego-dissolution scales with a survey that quantified awe-experience. And it turned out ego dissolution did not correlate with increased feelings of connectedness and empathy, and reduced symptoms of narcissism. Instead, it was feelings of awe that seemed to be fundamental in reducing levels of narcissism.

And it wasn’t all kinds of awe either. Most specifically, the research found psychedelic experiences that generated feelings of awe leading to a sense of connectedness with nature and humanity were most associated with positive reductions in narcissism. But those subjects who took psychedelics and had feelings of awe connected with the greater universe came back from the experience with no decrease in narcissistic traits.

Several years later, van Mulukon is still not entirely sure what to make of these results. Speaking to Salon, she said there may be something important in psychedelic experiences that connect one directly with nature or other people. But again, questions of set and setting become crucial, and why some people come out of psychedelic experiences with increased narcissistic drives is still a mystery.

When pressed to speculate, van Mulukon suggests individuals with a more porous sense of self will possibly find it easier to gain that positive sense of human connectedness from a psychedelic experience.

“Do narcissists have stronger self boundaries because they are guarding their creation of the sense of self?” asks van Mulukon. “Then you take psychedelics. You get the euphoric feeling. You feel like you're connected, but you're not actually. Your self-boundaries are not porous. So then you get the feeling of enlightenment without actually experiencing that connection.”

So if you have pre-existing narcissistic tendencies then you could frame the psychedelic awe experience as an interaction between just you and the universe. But van Mulukon proffers another wrinkle to the mix of set, setting and neurology: culture. Ideas around self are vastly different from culture to culture. Some communities of people believe we are deeply connected to each other, and these beliefs can manifest in supernatural ideas such as mind-reading. Underpinning these beliefs is a more porous sense of the boundaries between our individual selves.

And one thing that really defines current Western civilization is a profound focus on individualism. The self reigns supreme in our modern techno-capitalist world. There is no we, only I. 

Spiritual utopianism

In the late 19th Century, the psychedelic drug mescaline started to circulate through certain intellectual groups in New York and London. The drug was rapidly adopted as a tool for many proponents of what was known as evolutionary spirituality. Followers of this tradition, which goes back to 18th Century enlightenment philosophy, claim human evolution can be steered in the right direction by an elite group.

In his 2023 paper in Frontiers in Psychology “More evolved than you," Jules Evans confidently argues evolutionary spirituality has been a dominant cultural container for psychedelic use in the West for 130 years. From W.B. Yeats to H.G. Wells to Aldous Huxley, many early 20th century mescaline experimenters came away from their experiences with the view that these psychedelic drugs are likely crucial to enhancing our human potential.

It is no coincidence that many psychedelic-using evolutionary spiritualists were also eugenicists. And Evans has previously chronicled the uncomfortable crossovers between psychedelic culture and eugenics — from Huxley to Leary.

But over recent decades, ideas around society-level eugenics have been usurped by the more modern cult of self-improvement. Psychedelics are still aligned with spiritual evolution but the focus is now on the individual. Evans says what this has led to is a kind of simplistic spiritual utopianism evangelized by many leaders of the modern psychedelic renaissance.

“There's a seriously simplistic utopianism at the highest levels of the psychedelic industry,” Evans told Salon in an interview. “Like Rick Doblin seriously saying that psychedelics would lead to net zero trauma by 2070. Michael Pollan, seriously believing that psychedelics are crucial to save the human race. That's how he ended his Netflix series. The leading figures in the psychedelic renaissance have all fallen prey to a very simplistic utopianism.”

Evans says this simplistic notion of psychedelic utopianism often leads one to ignore the more challenging truth, which is that these drugs are simply cultural amplifiers that turn up the volume on whatever pre-existing tendencies are already present. Evans uses the Aztecs as a pertinent example of a society that employed psychedelic use in a way that did not necessarily make them kind and gentle.

Psychedelic use was at the heart of several Aztec rituals, Evans explains. These rituals were often violent, bloody and deeply hierarchical. Human sacrifices melded with psychedelics in ways that destroy any notion suggesting the drugs inherently create “nicer” people.

“You give psychedelics to David Icke, he becomes even more of a conspiracy theorist,” Evans adds. “The QAnon shaman takes psychedelics, he becomes even more into QAnon. The idea that they lead to a predictable outcome, I mean, it's possible, but they can actually amplify all kinds of cultural tendencies.”

Mindset, setting, neurology and culture. All are fundamental to the direction and nature of a psychedelic experience. Psychedelics can’t intrinsically save the world. But they can make you feel like you alone are the one anointed to save it. So are people who go to Burning Man or visit shamans in the Amazon really a member of this hallucinogenic elite?

According to Rushkoff, if you are asking that question then the answer is likely no. For most of us, having a modicum of self-awareness is enough to insulate from the worst ego-inflationary aspects of psychedelics — a kind of real-world inversion of the infamous Am I The A-Hole subreddit. Simply asking the question "Am I a self-righteous psychedelic narcissist?" is enough of an answer.

Unless you are rich, in a position of power, or Elon Musk. For the psychedelic billionaire elite, "they're in a different place,” Rushkoff said. “So much of their life is about insulating themselves from the externalities of their own actions. And you would have thought, you drop acid and they're gonna cry and realize they're evil s**ts, right? That's what we would have thought. But it doesn’t. That's not what happens.”