#how i am notoriously terrible at it in our actual campaigns so. i wanted to turn it around

[impfamiliar]

you:

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[thewestmeetingroom]

Planting Seeds

Broadcast Jan. 2, 2021

SPEAKERS

Braeden, Janine, Rebekah, Sabrina, Melissa

[Intro Music]

Braeden:  Hello and welcome to The West Meeting Room. We are broadcasting on CiUT 89.5 FM at Hart House where we are taking up space on Dish with One Spoon Territory. My name is Braeden, and I'll be hosting the show today. Welcome to 2021 everyone. I hope this finds you somewhere safe and taking good care. A few weeks ago, we had a virtual meeting with our team of co-producers for the show. And before the pandemic we used to meet up in the studio once a week for these really beautiful and open-hearted roundtable discussions. I've been missing deeply sharing that space with everyone in person this past year. So for our last gathering of the year, we created a virtual Roundtable. So for this first show of 2021, we'll be bringing you into our last conversation of 2020 in the West Meeting Room. So grab a cup of tea and come join us. Joining me in the studio - Do you want to introduce yourself?

Sabrina:  Hi. I'm Sabrina. I feel like I'm a tired voice. [laughs] You might have heard me a lot. But yeah, I'm Sabrina.

Rebekah:  I can go next. I'm Rebekah. I'm not as tired. But um, yeah, I'll probably take a nap after this.

Janine:  Hi, I'm Janine. I'm really tired, too, but on a sugar rush. So god helped me today. Thank you. (laughs)

Melissa:  Hi, I'm Melissa. I'm new to the party. So I am very excited to be here, but also very tired.

Braeden:  Well, thank you all, this tired bunch,  for joining me in our zoom studio today. Um, just wanted to, Yeah, just have some casual conversation to round out the year. But I guess, I did have in mind to maybe start with Sabrina because we were talking a bit about snail mail. And I know you put together a package of letters for your business. And I just wanted to ask like, Yeah, what were like - what sort of inspired that and what is maybe drawing you to like this slower form of connection and communication?

Sabrina:  Yeah, I feel like this is like a mix of business strategy and also like genuine inspiration. I created a product called Letters from the Tarot, which isn't super unique by any means. Like a lot of people do this in different iterations. But basically what that was, is like me going to my tarot cards and pulling just in general, like a general message, and then taking a picture of it in like a Polaroid style thing. So that that person had like a physical representation of the card, and then writing out their reading, like on proper letter paper, and like putting it in an envelope and making it like a super analog process. Because I usually do readings like online. One of the reasons for this is because the holiday seasons are coming up, and I wanted a physical product that would be like really good to put in some stocking stuffers. So that's like the business perspective. But also, I feel like there's a lot of screen fatigue going on. I was like really excited for the prospect of, there's like a restaurant down the street from where I live. And they're like, super, like spooky and like gamer-esque kind of thing. And I was like really excited to like proposition them over at Halloween and being like, I'd love to like sit in a corner booth in your restaurant and just like do live readings. And I'm like, I just get paid with tips and you can like bring people in or whatever. And then I can't do that because of  the pandemic and everything. So it's like, how can I reproduce that kind of physical experience and like bringing those messages that way. And it was really nice, because as we were discussing earlier, I'm notorious for over-committing myself, always. And as I was putting it together, I kind of, I got a wholesale order for them. So someone like bought a bunch of them to put in their store. And at that point, it was like at the point of no return I had to like buy all the materials and I was like, Hey, we're doing this. And midway through I was just like, this is too big like I can't do this. I've never done this before what if everything I do is gonna let this store down. I already bought all this stuff like this is terrible. I had like 18 assignments due and I was like freaking. And then I finally got to the point where I was just sitting down and like writing the letters. And it was like, super nice and meditative. And then I got like washi tape and  stickers and I like did them all up. And then I put them in the envelope. And then I did a wax seal, which is like  much easier than I thought it was going to be. So I learned a new skill and just going through all the process and like putting all the letters together, it was a great way to disconnect from my screen. It was a great way that I hope I can intuitively connect with just like people in the community in a way where they kind of have like a physical reminder of that reading. But also that like allows them to disconnect from their screens for a little bit as well. And maybe do some intuitive reflective work, just kind of like on their own with actual paper. And it was nice to write things. So yeah, that's kind of like the story of that. In a nutshell. I hope I answered your question.

Braeden:  Yeah, no, that's nice. It touched on it really beautifully. And yeah, you've got, you definitely inspired me to like, bust out the wax seal that's been in my drawer that I just like impulse bought at like a stationery store, and then never did anything with. So I think this is the season for snail mail. And that's why, yeah, I really wanted to connect with you about that.

Sabrina:  Oh, another point real quick, too, was that the other inspiration for this too, was with electronic readings, it's very much just me. But the sheer amount of supplies that I needed to do this required me to go out and buy things. And this was also an avenue for me to reinvest into the community. So all of my like materials are from, or not all of them completely all of them, but the majority of the materials, I made sure to look and try to source as much as I can from like local Toronto businesses. So most of my stationery stuff is from this place called Wonder Pens, which is like, in the West. And they're owned by the like this couple, who I believe are also people of colors, so I'm also trying to like uplift like BIPOC and other marginalized communities. And then I got like one of the cameras that I was using from this place called Henry's, which is like an independent photography shop in Toronto. So that was another thing too, was like a physical product means that I could get physical tools and buy them from other small businesses.

Braeden:  That's very cool. Thank you for sharing. Maybe in keeping with thinking about like analog and slowing down and time away from screens, and just sort of like, I don't know, connecting with tactile things in a meditative way - I think, Melissa, I'll toss it over to you. I noticed that there's a lot of foccacia popping up on your Instagram feed if you don't mind me sharing that? I wondered if you had any reflections on that that you could share with us?

Melissa:  Yeah, you would be right, we have been making like two foccacia a week, which is like not good, because that means we've also been eating two a week. And I mean it's, I guess it could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. But yeah, I'm not sure if anybody is familiar with Claire Saffitz. She used to work at Bon Appetit. And now she's doing her own independent thing, which is awesome. But yeah, we took her focaccia recipe that she posted kind of as like the breakout on her YouTube channel. And we, my partner and I, aren't super big breadmakers, which actually thinking about that is a lie, because I do have a sourdough starter in my fridge. But yeah, we thought we'd give foccacia a shot, because in all honesty, I don't think I had  ever even eaten it before. So I was like, might as well just make it and try it all at once. And it is very therapeutic. In terms of slowing down, I mean, obviously, you do need to rely on the screen a little bit to like, watch the video and take your notes and stuff. But once you're there, it's a lot of waiting, which I'm not very good at. I'm not a super patient person. So I think that it's a good exercise for me to make things like bread where you are forced to wait. And, you know, if you don't wait and you get impatient, bad things can happen to your bread. So it's a really good exercise for me. And if you ever get a chance to make focaccia when you get to the dimpling part, where you have to like press down the dough, you will never feel anything like that in your life. It is amazing. And the better, like the more you  you let your dough proof and like the bigger it is. We also realized the first time we made it, we didn't put enough water. So the second time we made it, it was that much fluffier. And even that, like even if you don't eat bread, I would make the bread and dimple it so that you can feel it and then gift it to somebody because it's amazing. So yeah, that's kind of a way that we've been, I guess turning off and kind of spending some nice time together. Which is great. So yeah, we've been eating a lot of bread, you would be right in saying that my feed is all foccacia now.

Braeden:  No, it's wonderful. I really enjoyed it. So, yeah. What about you, Rebekah? Janine? Are there like some tactile analog screens-free activities that you're doing? Or maybe, or maybe thinking about doing in these coming weeks of hopefully getting some some rest and some time away from work?

Rebekah:  Yeah, absolutely. When you mentioned snail mail earlier, like with Sabrina, I was thinking like, over this entire summer, I actually also did a snail mail campaign where, because I was back home with my parents after having left Canada because the lockdown, I spent a lot of time like writing letters back and forth, like people I hadn't talked to in a really long time. I wrote letters to my cousins. I wrote letters to like classmates from like university and classmates from high school. And it was just like, really therapeutic. And that act of waiting. Like Melissa said, I'm not a very patient person. So that idea of like having to be patient for like the mail to be delivered. And then, you know, checking the mailbox every day thinking like, Oh, is it here? Like is the letter here? I don't know. I felt like SpongeBob in that moment, just like constantly waiting by the mailbox, just like for something to come. And then I also was staring at the stack of cards that I have sitting next to my computer on my desk that I bought on a whim because I was like, You know what, maybe we'll do like holiday gift - like holiday card ideas, like send out to friends and family. Um, haven't gotten around to that, because this semester has not permitted me to do so yet. But I think that that's something that I'm going to try to pick back up again. Because like Sabrina said, it's like really therapeutic for me to like, write to people, and then the idea of waiting. I just love getting something in the mailbox. Like, I think that's really fun. So, yeah, and another tactile thing. I'm just like constantly writing in my journal. Like, I always joke that like, my journal is going to be turned to a memoir one day. But like, I think I'm like actually serious about it. Now at this point, I'm not writing for other people still, but like, I'm very much thinking in that historian brain and like wanting to document like my life during this pandemic over the course of this year, because I've learned a lot about myself. I grew a lot, challenged myself a lot. And so I think it'll be a really cool way to like, look back, like during this time especially because this - time is fake - But like, especially looking back over this year, like, time has gone by so fast and so slow at the same time. Like February is right around the corner. And I'm thinking like the last time I went out and had fun was for my birthday, which was in February of last year. And that's like two months away. So not really sure what happened between now and then but it just keeps going by so I think a journal will be a really cool way to like, share that with my future family. You know, like you're learning about 2020 in school. Well, let me crack open a journal for you. And I'll tell you about what was actually happening. So yeah, that's kind of where I'm at.

Braeden:  Thank you for sharing. Janine, what about you?

Janine:  I feel like, during this time, I've gotten a lot more in touch with my creative side. Like the past month, I think I was super stressed. And one way that I kind of, like kind of took care of myself because I don't want to say self care. I want to just be like, Yeah, I was not doing well and it wasn't like a skincare routine. It was like, I felt like I was losing my voice for a bit because I was working like so hard on things to please other people that I kind of lost my creative voice a bit. And so I created this photo essay and I interviewed a lot of people around me about their experiences and about their lives about different themes. And that made me really happy. And I think that going back to my journalistic side, that's a lot more of just listening to people and talking about things in a more abstract way has made me feel more myself. So I want to do more of that. I want to explore, like photo essay type projects. Obviously podcasts, but even like just poetry. I feel like sometimes we work, work, work, work work, and we forget that our internal voice is still there. And I want to do projects that are true to myself as well. Because sometimes I get sucked into this idea that um you know, I have to be the perfect package of like a 4.0 student and a perfect daughter, a perfect sister, a perfect whatever. And I end up losing myself in the process. So doing projects like this really make me happy.

Braeden:  That's it. That's all my questions. [laughs]

Rebekah:  I was gonna say like, Braeden, what about you? Have you been linked in with any like tactile things?

Braeden:  I feel like I did kind of get into a flow with  cooking. I feel like the past couple weeks, there is something about like - I feel like it's so boring - but just like chopping vegetables. Like I can just turn my brain off. And not like, I mean - I'm sure all of you  wrestle with this - like work is showing up in your dreams and like, it just completely hijacks your brain space. And, and I find like when I'm cooking, it's just the smells and I'm chopping, you know, 1000 carrots. What's really nice, I think, that's helped me get into this ritual - I get a Good Food Box from Foodshare, which is a really amazing organization, every Thursday. And it's just like a signal to my brain  that I have to like - it kinda reminds me - I used to work, I've worked in a lot of restaurants as a cook. And, you know, you have your delivery days. And you just, like you just cook, or cut, chop, like 1000 things of everything. And so, yeah, every Thursday, I just  chop a ton of vegetables. And I can just -  it just feels like the only time that my brain shuts off from the things that I'm stressed about, or like my to do lists. And I'm just, I feel like fully present. And then I get a great nourishing meal out of it. So yeah, I feel like I'm actually also doing something nice for myself that is nourishing and generative. So yeah, that's been really nice. Thanks for asking.

Janine:  I love that you guys love doing things with your hands. And like, that's a form of therapy. For me, it's the opposite. Like I hate, like cutting things up for cooking and stuff like that. Like for me, I find a lot of comfort in stillness. And I feel like, granted I've burned down the kitchen once before or almost burnt down the kitchen trying to cook. So there's some bad experiences with that. But like, generally, I've just been having a lot of walks in trails and just forcing myself to, you know, just sit and journal and write or like, think of the first thing that pops into my mind. And I feel like, I don't know, I really love that you guys - like we each have different ways of expressing ourselves and different coping mechanisms. And I think, Melissa, it's funny that you mentioned foccacia, because I only learned about that yesterday. I didn't know what it was until yesterday. But my mom is also a bit big on making breads. I just for some reason, I am too scared to try it myself. I think if I tried it myself, it would go terribly bad.

Melissa:  You should definitely try it, I promise you, it will not go poorly. My only expert tip for you is don't forget the salt because I forgot the salt yesterday. And it does make a difference. But you should try it. It's really easy. And I can send you the video. And if it doesn't work out, then just slather some dip on it and dip it in balsamic vinegar. And it'll be fine. You can't mess it up, I promise.

Sabrina:  I think, too, there's like salience. And like, say your thing, like just try it. And like see, especially when it comes to bread. And I know especially in the everyone like being at home people are reconnecting to like growing plants. And like everyone's like baking bread and like doing these very kind of like slower tasks that take time. And I think something that I keep thinking about too is this post I saw an Instagram, which is not unique to that person, because I think it's just a general thing. But like "the day you plant the seed is not the day that you like harvest the fruit." And I think too, like we're talking about, like work showing up in our dreams and like having these expectations. And I think moving back to these things where it's like especially when it comes more to plants, I'm thinking more to plants, the philosophy like your breathing life into something that's like also its own thing. And sometimes things don't work out. And like that's okay. And even with bread, like honestly, sometimes the breads rising, and then it collapses. Like, it doesn't want to hold all that air in you know what I mean? L ike I don't - I mean I kind of subscribe to a form of animism. So I think there's life in all things. But I do think the life in bread is different than the life in like plants. But I think that's just like more of a testament to like, not everything can be controlled, or like confined into like a small test, test-case box. And sometimes things just kind of like, do run their course. And it's up to you to just kind of adapt and accept that and like wait and see how things crop up in time. I think there's virtue in that as well. Like learning to like live more slowly and like see what happens.

Rebekah:  Yeah, that's actually a really cool idea that like something that I've been trying to reflect more about recently is, you know, trying to like - this year has thrown so many curveballs in like many, like many ways than one and so the idea of like not really knowing what the final product will be like, and kind of like you said, Sabrina, like, you're planting seeds and like, you have to wait for them to grow and like see what kind of options and stuff kind of come out of that. And I'm in the process of like applying to different programs right now. And everyone's like, well, what's your number one choice? Like, where do you want to go? And I'm like, you know what, I'm just, I'm just planting seeds right now. Like, I'm just trying to, like, see and wait and not trying to get my hopes up too high. And just trying to like, become more comfortable with like, living in this ambiguous like, not being able to plan my life out for like, five or 10 years kind of thing. Um, over the summer, I actually like bought a stick and poke tattoo kit. As like a whim like, everyone's out here making foccacia or like making sourdough and was like, You know what, I'm gonna learn how to tattoo myself. So why not? Um, that was my quarantine project. And I did this one tattoo. It's like, what is it called, like a crystal ball. I tattooed it on my ankle. And I just really like the idea of a crystal ball. Because you're always trying to like, see into the future. Like, you're always trying to look and like, figure out what's coming next. And that was my entire shtick over the summer. I was like, what's coming next? When am I coming back to Toronto? What am I doing after this year? Like, how - what is life going to look like? And things were changing every two weeks. Like you couldn't really plan for it into the future. Like you had no idea what was going to happen next month. And even now my mom's like, when am I gonna see you? I'm like, You know what? I can only think till the end of December. I can't think past that right now. But yeah, looking at that crystal ball literally reminds me like, okay, you're always trying to look and see what's coming next. And like, of course, it's good to have a plan. I'm a planner. Like, it is what it is. But I'm just trying to like, remind myself like, it's fine. If you don't know exactly what's happening next. You are not supposed to that's like the really cool thing about like, this whole life thing or whatever. Yeah, I don't know, I think crystal balls are a really cool way to monument that and I got a really sick tattoo out of it. So yeah.

Janine:  I kind of feel the same way. Like, I feel like I've, I've always like, wanted to control everything in my life and wanted my plans to work out a certain way. And even though I'm really young, I still feel like, that's been a part of me, since I was really young. I've always kind of wanted to be an overachiever. Never really was, but always had that intention. And I feel like, as we're graduating next year, next semester, I feel this sense of like calmness knowing that I don't know what my next step is. And I like that. I like that, you know, I'm going  into this new chapter of my life, this new phase, where I'm not sure what's gonna come of it. But what I do know is I kind of - it's kind of cheesy - but I want to live a value-based life as opposed to like a goal-oriented life. And that doesn't mean that I don't have ambitions, but I am trying to focus more on the day to day values that I instill in my work and my friendships and my character, as opposed to like, you know, associating my worth with a certain career or a certain job, or, you know, whatever it is. I just, I'm kind of tired of like, putting my worth up against, like, my ambitions. And it's good to have a healthy balance with that. But right now, I want to take a break from that next year. And that's my, like, seed that I'm trying to grow next year. Yeah,

Sabrina:  I feel like what you're talking about when it comes to like, future planning is really salient. I was literally in my apartment yesterday talking to Max like, Okay, so we'll  graduate in June, and then we can like rent our new place, and we're going to foster dogs for a year and then we're gonna foster children. And I'm like, trying to figure out like my three year plan, because, you know, I came into it thinking that I was going to go to law school, which is not completely off the table, but I'm definitely not going to go right after graduation. And this is gonna be like, the first time in my life where like, I'm not - I'm like ending that - I'm ending a year, but I'm not knowing that I'm going to go into another year, you know what I mean? Like, I don't have that structure of school telling me like, where you're going to be and like, what you need to read and what you need to do, and it's a full time thing. And I was ready to like, until 24, just like have that structure. And then I got into this audio thing. And then I was like, I'm not gonna go through the torture that is professional school. Now it's like, literally, I turned to my partner and I was like, I just don't -  I'm, it's just hitting me that I need to figure out like, what am I going to do for the rest of the entirety of my life? Like starting in May, it's just going to be - like I'm not taking summer classes to get somewhere else. I'm not in pursuit of a degree or any sort of like outside metric of like something that like someone else deemed I need to get or like to get to something. I just can, I don't know, I can like move somewhere if I want to. I can like try buy a house. I can't buy a house. But like, theoretically, I could buy a house if I had the means, you know what I mean? Like, if we were in a different world, I could buy a van and like, go live in the woods somewhere. Like, I'm just like, freaking out. So yeah, I think I need to plant some seeds, but then like, let them grow. And stop trying to like envision what the life, what my life would be like having those fruits yet when I don't even know what seeds I'm planting.

Melissa:  I think that's such like, everybody's kind of echoed the same sentiments that like, you know, we all kind of have an idea. And then the pandemic had other ideas. And now nobody really knows what's happening. And obviously, nobody wants to be in a pandemic. But I think something that has come out of this is like, it's a very humbling experience for a lot of people. But I think especially for students, and especially for students who are, you know, like, everybody's kind of set already. Like, they have goals in mind. And they have a schedule, and they have a life plan and whatever. And the pandemic came around and was like, actually, none of that is on the table anymore. And, like, obviously, that's distressing. And a lot of people who have, you know, mental health issues are really struggling right now. And like there are a lot of negatives. But I think that the one thing that it's really teaching people is you, you can't know what's happening. And I think that that's okay. So yeah, I don't know. I feel like I also graduate this year from, in April, from grad school. Which is crazy. So we're not going to talk about that. But in general, like, there's just so much up in the air right now. And I think that, I don't know. I think that it's kind of healthy, especially for folks like myself who are really type A and really planners and organized and whatever. Like you don't know what's happening. And that's okay. And nobody else knows what's happening, either. So I think that it's been sort of, like the patience that is needed to make bread. I think that the patience that's needed now, too, is something that maybe nobody asked for, but maybe some people needed. I don't know. Yeah, I struggle a lot too with wondering what to do after because I haven't not been in school since I was like a kid. So I don't know, that's a lot of pressure. But I think that what you guys have said about like, just planting seeds where you can and figuring out which ones are going to grow and blossom and which ones aren't, like that's all right. And I think that's just part of the experience. So yeah, I don't know, just everything that you guys said was really nice. And I think that it's true that everybody has been forced to slow down, which has been tough, but I don't know, maybe unnecessary toughness for a lot of us. So it's gonna be interesting to see what happens when our seeds start to grow wherever we've planted them.

Janine:  And I don't know if you guys also feel this, but I have depended on other people's validation for a really long time with my work and what I want to do. And culturally, you just feel like, you know, it's a reflection of not just yourself, but your family, your parents. Like they've invested in you your whole life and stuff like that. So I I kind of had to let go of that pressure of I'm trying to impress other people, because I have to choose between, you know, being true to myself doing work I'm passionate about and being okay with uncertainty, and put other people's opinions of me aside and not give them the weight that they once had on the way I think of myself. And so, yeah, I just wanted to also add that.

Braeden:  Yeah, I'll jump in as, as someone who's sort of like on the other side of, of having gone through school, and then, you know, it feels like a long time since I was in school. But yeah, Janine I think that was like the biggest transition of - I remember, my first actually, my first job after school was cooking, was as a cook in a kitchen. And it was like, I had to retrain my brain. I didn't realize how institutionalized my brain had become where I would like, you know, I would like make something or prep something and be like, okay, but like, what's my grade on this? Like, how did I perform? Like, what's the bell curve on this like creme brulee I made? Like I was so desperate for this like feedback or like, you know, or how I'm doing or - and it was like it was a real, it kind of felt like a brick wall of a reality check of like, Oh, I actually need to source this from myself. And I can't just like move through the world trying to like mine this like performance based review from people, because that's not real life. Like it was, it was a really trying experience. Like going, getting out into the working world and also just as like, yeah, listening to all of you talk about like, what's next - like, I mean, you're just gonna live lifetimes. Like with each year that passes you're going to work so many jobs. You're going to go so many places. You're going to meet so many people that like before you know it, when you look back at the past couple years - when I look back at the past 5 years, 10 years, since I've been out of school, like I can't even list the number of different jobs I've worked in. It's just all just sort of snowballed one, one from the other. So yeah, I'm really excited at like the blank canvas that sort of lays ahead for all of you. And, yeah, I'm excited to like, keep in touch, you know, throughout all of that, to see where all of you are, are traveling and doing and creating.

Rebekah:  That's actually interesting, because it reminds me of an article that I read from the New Yorker yesterday. The article was about, like, if you could see other iterations of your life, like, depending on the choices and stuff that you made. And I love that concept. Like, I think that, you know, a bunch of sci fi movies kind of do that. But my favorite movie is called Mr. Nobody with Jared Leto, where he lives like three different lifetimes because he never makes a choice. And so at the end of his life, when someone's like interviewing him, like, Oh, so what was your life, like? He recounts, like, all of these different lifetimes that he lived because in his mind he never made a choice and actually lived all those different realities. It's a really trippy movie and I highly recommend if you get a chance to watch it. But the article was really fascinating, because, you know, this like concept of like, oh what would my life be if I made this choice? Or if I did this thing, if I did that thing? Like, for people who constantly live in that framework, you know, like, what if, what if? what if? what if? It can be like really overwhelming. Whereas like, some people kind of wrestle with that "what if" idea, and they're like, Okay, cool. That's a fun thought experiment. Now, let's get back to like, you know, regular life. I don't know. I don't know if anyone else like in this call does that but I also think about like the movie Meet the Robinsons, and how like, he built a time machine where he could have like seen what his life - like there's different alternate realities. I think alternate realities are really cool. But I sometimes wonder like what my life would have looked like if I had made different choices. But not trying to dwell on that. So I'll just toss it out there.

Sabrina:  Yeah, my main like philosophical stream is ethics. Not that they stream you in philosophy in U of T. It's just what I enjoy. So that is the life that I live Rebekah. I wake up in the morning, and I'm like, what if I wear this blue shirt? Like, is it immoral to wear it? Like what? I like go to the grocery store and I'm like, Is it wrong that I'm buying this? Like what if I didn't - you know what I mean. But it's like all the way down to like a micro, like microcosmic decisions to be like how would my life be differently if I changed my life in this way? Always from like, a moral perspective. And I definitely think that, it's like, yeah. I feel like there's definitely those people there who like have that thought experiment and then they like move on with their lives. And I think that's also really important to be able to cast like that. But when you're like trapped in that cycle of like, but what if I do this, but what if I do that? What if whatever? It can become like really overwhelming, like you were saying. Because then you just don't want to make a decision. Because who knows what's gonna happen. And I think that's the - that's that thing, too - is like that need for control that we're talking about. And like, some semblance of like I know where I'm going. And I know what's about to happen and I know that I'm going to be safe, right. I think that's like, the big thing, too, is like people looking for safety in like a lot of the visions of  the future that they see. And it's like an interesting balance to strike between like allowing yourself to consider all these possibilities, but then also acknowledging that you can't, like you were saying with a crystal ball, like you can't actually look into the future.

Janine:  Yeah, that's such a cool article. I really want to read it Rebekah. I love Meet the Robinsons was one of my favorite when I was younger. And I think that if you pose the question, would I want to know what my life would look like a year, two years, three years from now, the answer for me is always No. I do not have that curiosity in me because I actively create my own future every day. And that sounds like - I've - this sounds kind of, I don't know, I watched an interview with Miley Cyrus last night talking about her album. And I really liked what she said. She goes, "every night, I kind of say goodbye to myself and I wake up a new person." And so that's where self forgiveness comes in is, you know, you can't say that, you know, next year I have to have this like checklist for my life. And for this year, and I have to do this, this and that. And I have this intricate plan. Because when you do that life kind of laughs at you and just says no. [laughs] Refuses everything that you know, you've pushed yourself to you know obsess over and stuff. So I think it's like maybe this balance that we need to strike between actively working for what we want in our lives. And, you know, working and manifesting that every day, but also letting go of that control and being like, I have this self forgiveness, self acceptance. Whatever comes will come, and I'm okay with it. And it's a very hard balance to strike.

Sabrina:  I think too Braeden, going back to what you were saying about like that external validation is so real. And it's like one of the many, many, many, many, many reasons why I get very upset when professors like excuse their terrible policies being like, well, I'm just preparing you for the real world. Like, no. You're just preparing me to continue in academia. And that's a whole other kettle of fish. But like, the real world is not like this. I had to like work through this, like with my therapist. Because at my - this job is great, because it's all about creative expression. And there's like no punishment to that. But I feel like the world, "real world" is interesting. Because when you're like employed somewhere, like you can get fired. So there is that kind of form of performance review. But like, as long as you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, like no one's gonna check in at the end of your work every day and be like "Good job! B plus! Here's how you could have improved," you know what I mean? Like, maybe you should have used like, a blue paperclip and 12 point font instead of a red paperclip and 10 point. Like, they just want to know that you got the thing done. And I'm now in a position where I'm like working in a more of like a professional capacity where like, to me, it's like the concept of like being fired has like replaced the concept of like getting a C plus. And I'm like everything's terrible because then I'm just automatically gonna be fired. And I have to like, talking to my therapist about it, and I'm like, every decision I make, I'm like waiting for my supervisor to come back at me and be like here's where you could have improved. Here's where you did well and here's what you whatever. And it's like, she just wants me to get my work done. She does not care. You know what I mean? Like, she hired me because she thinks I'm competent. So she's like, there's ways that I'm being trained, but also ways where it's just like she's trusting me to do the thing. And it's more of like a completion mark, I suppose. If you want to keep up the school analogy. I think it's very interesting to be aware of those things, because I was not aware of it. And I also found myself too - and I think this is like another issue with like the post-secondary system - but like, a lot of the assignments that I do in class, I'm not necessarily doing what I want to do. I'm doing what I think my TA is going to mark well, right. And that's also another mentality that I needed to subvert when I entered like this sort of position where it's like, I need to stop creating things that I think my supervisor is going to like pat me on the back for solely because I want her to pat me on the back. Like I need to create good work that I'm proud of that I know she will be happy with. Because she hired me to do the work that I know that I can do you know what I mean? And I feel like these are like really important things to acknowledge that people might not even realize, because then you enter like these workspaces and you have this feeling of like, why does everything feel so out of place? Like, what am I seeking? Like, why does this feel so weird? And it's just like, because everything that you've been like taught to do and the way that you've been trained to like interact with the work that you're doing is not actually appropriate for this space. And like you're not the problem. It's just like your conditioning and the way that you've been working for the past couple of years. And, yeah.

Melissa:  I actually, Sabrina, something that you said made me think, actually kind of have a realization. I have an interview this week for a big person job, which is very exciting. But speaking of, you know, having that academic like evaluation sense instilled into you, I didn't even realize that I did this. But I reached out to somebody who like already works for the organization to try to get some insight into the interview process. And now that you said that, Sabrina, the only two questions that I asked her were about how I was going to be evaluated. So I asked her a question, how much do I need to know about x topic? Or like, Am I - I basically asked her if I was going to be quizzed. And then the second question that I asked is, does she want like, the interviewer, in your experience, does she want me to hand her a portfolio. And she basically responded and was like none of that is necessary. They're basically just - I hate, like, I don't want to say vibe checking, but basically they're just making sure that you're a good fit. And like, they made me do a personality assessment. So I'm pretty sure they're just making sure I'm not lying. But like, the first thing that I wanted to know is like, Am I being tested on my knowledge? And if so, how am I being tested? And if, like what is the test look like? And I didn't even realize that that was an academic thing until this conversation right now. And it's funny, because when I realized that it wasn't going to be that, I felt relieved. So I feel like, I wondered what that kind of says about those values that have been instilled in us from being in academia for so long. The fact that I feel so relieved that she's just going to ask me about who I am as a human being and not judge me based on if I get a pretend test, right. Like, I don't know. I just, I didn't realize but that's kind of just a personal anecdote about how that - I feel like that idea kind of creeps into your life in ways that you don't realize all the time, which is very harmful in my opinion. But yeah, that definitely is going to take some unlearning. So if anybody has any tips on how to unlearn years of academic pressure, let me know. [laughter]

Rebekah:  We're all like shaking our heads.

Sabrina:  I did want to say, like, the biggest like - this isn't necessarily like a learning process. It was just one situation, but that kind of like helped me put things in certain perspective. It's like - my, one of my siblings is like over, a decade older than me. So I was like, back in like, [Rebekah gestures "me too"] (whoo, yeah! Rebekah! Twinsies). So like, it was like, I was back in early highschool, early highschool. And he was at my house, and he was doing like an interview, like Skype interview or whatever. And I was just in the living room, but I was like, over listening, because he was just talking, it was like everyone's business in the common space. And, you know, he's talking about his resume. And he's talking about his qualifications. And he was just like, yeah, I speak French, like English is my native language, but I also speak French. And I was waiting for them to be like, okay, conjugate like passe compose. Like, he was like, whatever. And like, the interviewer, I believe, also spoke French, and then just started speaking French to him. And then they spoke French for like, five minutes. And then they moved on. And I was like, they didn't test him. Like, they didn't test them. Like, they just spoke French. And then they moved on. And then I - this is like years later, right - like, a couple months ago, I was in the interview for the job that I'm in now that I'm trying to unlearn these like academic things. And, you know, she was just kind of like "So I see you speak French on your resume." And I was like, yeah, and she's like, cool. Like, someone that we're working with also speaks French, so you can connect on that. And then we just moved on. And I was like, Wow, I didn't need to do a dicte. I thought I would going to like interviews and they'd be like, so here are your conjugation sheets, you have 20 minutes, hand them back and then we'll evaluate your proficiency. And I think it's really interesting because like, even like my partner, he's going into a different sector. And he actually gets quizzed in the sector that he's in. It's actually common to be quizzed and have take home assignments. And they'll send them to you and then see how you go through those assignments like to be hired, like, Oh my god, that sounds terrible. I'm looking at him right now telling him that like, that sounds terrible. So it's definitely not like all the case, I'm sure in certain respects like that academic training is helpful in certain sectors. And this is more of like a STEMy kind of sector for him. So that I think makes a lot more sense. Because it's more quantitative than qualitative. But yeah, I think what was very helpful for me was that seeing possibly the way that my life could turn out, even in  early high school by like watching my brother's interview, even years, or listening to my brother's interview like even years, years, years ago, and then experiencing that kind of situation myself, is just understanding kind of like, even what Melissa was saying. Like understanding the circumstances where like, you aren't necessarily going to be quizzed. And like, that's okay. And just know that like, not everything in life is going to be like some pop quiz trying to trick you into like, creating a metric for your performance or something. Some people will just like believe you. Which I think is also something like it's like, phased out of people as they move through like institutions and structured institutions. Like people don't believe people for things. Like you need a whole note that you have to pay for just to tell someone that you were sick. And like, can I get like a rewrite for this thing? Like yeah, it's just interesting that in the "real world" there's more space for trust and just kind of like taking people for their word.

Braeden:  Yeah, um, maybe to round out the end of our hour together I would love it if we could go around, and if everyone, if you're comfortable, if you could share maybe some work or an aspect of your work, or the way that your work that you work that you're proud of. And then maybe, do you have like an intention or a well wish to cast towards yourself over this break for your rest and restoration? Like, as we round out our last conversation into the year like what's like a good intention that you want to cast towards yourself to invest in yourself over the break?

Rebekah:  Oh, tough question. I don't know, for me, I'm working on a couple of different projects right now. And I guess I'm just really proud of the way that like, I've not only like sought out like these different projects that feel very different from what I usually do in my academics as a way to like challenge me. Like I'm working this writing project right now, and I write a lot for myself, but I don't really write for other people very often. And so this is a, like a challenge and a test, but I get to interview some people who I'm really excited to interview and like, you know, tell the story that I don't think that is like currently being told. But my well wish for myself for over the break is to reconnect with my grandparents. I know, that's completely unrelated to what I just said. But, um, I've been like, meaning to like, reconnect with them for a while. And it gets like really hard to do that like during the thick of the school year. And so I floated the idea to my grandparents a couple of weeks ago that I want to do like an interview style thing with them like I did when I was in high school as an updated version four years later. Because I think that there's like more questions that I want to ask them. And while I still have them here to ask those questions, I want to like make sure I can document that and like have that as a family historian type of thing. So, um yeah, that's my wish for myself is to like actually make that happen. And so I'm saying this now, because I'm gonna listen to this later. And it's going to remind myself, Hey, did you do that thing that you said you're going to do? And hopefully the answer will be yes. There we go.

Janine:  I love that idea. I think that just inspired me to do the same with my grandmas. To call them and ask them these questions. I think for me in the break, I want to just personally clear my head a bit. And like I said before, kind of find my voice again and find my passion again. Because I think I've lost it for a bit. Like not lost it, but it's definitely dim because of like, a lot of anxiety and stress and stuff lately. And I think that I want to meditate. That's one way that I want to take care of myself and whatever will come creatively will come. Whether it's writing or audio or visuals, I'm just giving myself that space to breathe. Like, it sounds like a simple thing. But it's, it's harder than it seems to just breathe and meditate and take care of myself in that sense.

Sabrina:  For me, something that I'm proud of, in my workflow - I think I've been moving into a space of establishing good boundaries across everything that I'm committed to in a way that honors how I've committed to those things. And doesn't like, have me like under delivering. But then also in a way where I can like juggle everything. And I think my like wish for myself for this, this kind of break period is honestly just to rest. And to like, just take some time to do nothing or like do things that I enjoy. Like for myself. I don't even know, I don't even know what rest means. Because I also have like a bunch of ideas. So it's like, people are like well you need to rest and it's like but I also want to do 1000 things. So like, I don't. I don't know how you marry those two things. But I will - I don't know, hit me up in three weeks, and we'll see if I figured it out.

Melissa:  Those are all really great well wishes to yourself. I think that it's really important to cut yourself some slack when you can. And on that note, I guess something that I am proud of is I was talking to folks about my education plan earlier. So it's basically just an academic assignment that I'm working on. And I'm really proud of it. Because I think that I surprised myself with how like legitimate it feels. Like I feel like looking at it makes me feel like maybe I am actually a museum professional. And I don't know, I feel like it kind of helps mitigate some of that imposter syndrome. So it's always nice when you produce something that you feel like, Hey, I could maybe actually show this to an institution. So that's been pretty cool. And it's also been fun to work on. And then my wish for myself I think is just to be nice to myself over the break. So if I need a day off to not do anything like that's okay. Whatever the outcome of this interview is, I think just being nice to myself about that. In echoing what Janine said, like, I'd also like to be creative over the break. I have a knitting project that I'm working on, but like if I don't finish it that's okay. So yeah, I think just giving myself space to be productive or to not be productive and trying not to put too much pressure on myself, which I'm pretty good at putting pressure on myself. That is I'm not as good at taking pressure off. So we'll work on that this week. And what about you Braden?

Braeden:  Um yeah, I think something, I think something that I'm, I'm proud of around work is that I'm realizing, I feel like for the first time, sort of my work is like integrating itself with me as a person and like who I am and how I move through the world. And like - and I feel like the actual bedrock of my work is in building relationships. And I feel like that's kind of who I am as a person. Like, I feel like I'm returning to who I've always been. And that's also just like integrating its way into work where it's just like the foundation of all of this, is in building relationships, building trusting meaningful relationships. But also, yeah, creating pathways for creative expression for myself and for the people around me. And so yeah, that just feels, it feels really nice to come into alignment with that after sort of years of like, a very like turbulent working life. And then something I guess, like some well wishes, I think I just want to read. Like, I just want to, I just want to sit on the couch and like read a book for three hours. And if I like fall asleep after 15 minutes with like,  with napping with like the book on my face, like, that's cool. That sounds like bliss. So yeah, thank you. Thank you all for for sharing. And for joining me in this convo. This is, this was really lovely. And I'm wishing all of you a wonderful restorative break and look forward to connecting in the new year and in hearing about all the nice things you all did for yourselves. Thank you so much to Sabrina, Rebekah, Janine, and Melissa for joining me in the West, Meeting Room for our last conversation of 2020. And a big thank you to all of our extended Hart House podcasting family who have all taught me so much about how to hold space for meaningful conversations. I hope this finds you heading into 2021 with a bit of a lighter load. And if things are feeling heavy right now, I would encourage you to call up someone who's helped you, someone who can bring you comfort, or someone who can make you laugh. Take care of each other in the meantime, and we'll be with you next week.

[hpc-media]

[From the Archives: Daily Prophet, December 2018]

Meet Your Minister for Magic: Duncan Armstrong

A Julia Turnbrook Exclusive; New Year, New Minister

While I am not unfamiliar with the gilded fireplaces of the Ministry’s Atrium, the stunning decor of Minister Duncan Armstrong’s very own office is another story. Lavish purple carpets with warm mahogany accents is a combination that sounds as bizarre as it is - but it works. I’m greeted by the Senior Undersecretary - Camilla Armstrong, the Minister’s very own sister - who leads me directly to the Minister’s office where a gorgeous spread of afternoon tea already awaits. First impressions of the Minister only prove how at ease he is. Quick to introduce himself, charming and charismatic, he offers me a gentle handshake and some refreshments - yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was waited on by the Minister himself! 

With a cup of tea in hand, we both take a seat, and Duncan - he insists that I call him Duncan, readers! - dispenses of any unnecessary formality.

So, Duncan; tell us a little about yourself. I’m Duncan Armstrong, newly elected Minister for Magic, though 36th to hold such a prestigious title. Following Kingsley Shacklebolt would be a hard task for anyone, but I’m hoping to do those who voted for me proud.

You earned a job at the Ministry straight out of Hogwarts, isn’t that right? I certainly did. I was your typical Ravenclaw bookish-type, and politics had never particularly been on my radar. It was actually my sister who pointed out an opening at the Wizengamot Administration Services. We both applied and were both successful, thus starting our careers in the Ministry.

And your sister, who is here with us today, is now acting as your Advisor and Senior Undersecretary. What’s it like working so closely with family? Camilla and I are very lucky; we have an excellent work ethic and our morals are perfectly aligned, so it really helps to have someone of an identical mind in my team. We’ve developed a great dynamic over the years and I really wouldn’t be here today without her.

We like to ask the hard questions here at the Daily Prophet, Duncan, so I have to ask; your approach to the Being situation over recent years has been seen as very ‘modern.’ Do you think that affected your recent victory? Hard questions are important, so I’m glad you’re asking them, Julia - that’s why journalists like you are so vital. The topic is often a hard one because the reality is you can never please everyone, but you can certainly try your best. The changes I proposed during my campaign for Minister are already in motion and I hope the public will be pleased with how they’re executed. It’s clear that Wix are looking for a sense of security in this time of uncertainty, and I’m incredibly thankful for the opportunity everyone has given me to help provide that for everyone, Beings included.

Why not remind us a little about what you propose to do to ensure the safety of all magical people, Wix and Beings alike. I believe having a registry can help keep track of Being populations in our society, meaning we can offer the best help and assistance to those communities as and when it's needed. It also means, should the worst happen, we can pinpoint the problem and address it swiftly. I realise the apprehension many Beings have after the Muggleborn Registration Committee during Voldemort’s puppet Ministry, but I’m thankful for the confidence their community has found in me over the years and will always advocate for their safety. We will not have a repeat of that terrible year.

For our last question, it’s one I’m sure many people have been wondering; do you have any advice for young wix wanting to follow in your path? Hard work is imperative, but remember to be open-minded to the concerns of other people. Politics can be notoriously tricky, but I truly believe that having the capability to adapt to problems and address them in a responsible manner is a skill that can never be underappreciated. Oh, and always dress to impress.

[the-desolated-quill]

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Quill’s Quickies (No Spoilers)

This year, Star Wars has been almost mired in controversy. From the loot box controversy in EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II to the noticeable lack of non-white characters in The Last Jedi’s marketing. Rian Johnson making a total prat of himself by claiming that Kylo Ren is a dual protagonist with Rey, and now the reviews are in it turns out Episode 8 is the most divisive movie in the whole franchise, with critics clambering over themselves to praise the movie for its ‘bold new direction’ while the fans decry it as the arse-raping of their collective childhood. On the whole, I’d say this has been a complete and total cock-up.

I had no idea what to expect going in. I’m sure you all know how lukewarm I was about The Force Awakens. It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that the critics were praising the hell out of The Last Jedi considering they were doing the same thing with the previous film, which in my opinion was mediocre at best. The fan reaction surprised me. After all the blind (and arguably undeserved) praise The Force Awakens got, if even the fans are struggling to find good things to say about this movie, something must have gone spectacularly wrong.

So what did I, diehard Star Wars fan and professional arsehole, think of The Last Jedi? Well honestly I’m disappointed I didn’t hate it more. Truthfully I liked this movie about as much as I liked The Force Awakens, which is to say not very much. Like The Force Awakens, it’s a competently made movie and it’s possible to derive some enjoyment from it if you switch your brain off for two and half hours, but otherwise it’s just yet another tired retread of the original Star Wars movies that brings absolutely nothing new to the table. Not for the first time, I feel a real disconnect from the rest of the Star Wars community here. I have no idea why the critics are praising this movie for being a game changer because there’s genuinely nothing very revolutionary or groundbreaking going on here, and I’m confused as to why the fans have chosen to fling their bile and venom at a movie that, in my opinion, is the very definition of average. I mean sure, The Last Jedi isn’t very good and there were some bits that did kind of annoy me, but there’s nothing about it that’s outrageously offensive as far as I can see.

Let’s start with the things I liked. The biggest, shiniest gold star has to go to Finn. He was quite possibly the only new character I was in any way invested in last time around, and he’s just as brilliant here. We see him slowly embrace his new role as a hero of the Resistance and we also see him get the chance to stick it to his First Order oppressors, which I thought was quite emotionally satisfying. He’s joined by Rose, played by Kelly Marie Tran, who I thought was a nice addition to the cast and who undergoes the traditional everyman turned hero journey. I really liked her relationship with Finn and their scenes together are by far the highlight of the film, which makes their subtle erasure from the Star Wars marketing campaign all the more offensive to me because, as far as I’m concerned, they’re the main characters. They were the most developed, the ones I was most invested in, the only ones that actually grow and develop over the course of the film and who pretty much drive the plot.

The other thing I liked (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) is Kylo Ren. I really wasn’t impressed with him in The Force Awakens because he was pretty much just a shitty rehash of Darth Vader, and I mentioned in my review at the time how it might have been better to embrace the more weaselly and slightly pathetic nature of the character to help better distinguish him and give him his own identity. So I’m extremely pleased to see that’s exactly what this film does and it’s great. There’s no pretence anymore. Kylo Ren is this spoilt, impotent man-child that desperately craves power and attention, but doesn’t really know what he wants to do with it, and that’s glorious. That’s just the burst of inspiration the character sorely needed and Adam Driver does a great job with this new material. I’m actually looking forward to seeing where he goes in the next film and if they handle it well, he should make for a very unique antagonist (that’s antagonist Rian Johnson. AN-TAG-GON-NIST).

It’s just a pity that in order to prop up Kylo Ren, Rian Johnson felt the need to completely warp Luke Skywalker’s character into something wholly unrecognisable.

Yes now we come to the bad stuff, and there’s quite a bit. My main gripe is with Luke’s characterisation. In order to justify a lot of the plot, they have to make Luke this cynical halfwit and there are loads of moments where he says or does something that just simply doesn’t ring true with what we already know about him. His reasons for his exile are utterly out of character for one thing and his reasons behind his provocative statement that ‘it’s time for the Jedi to end’ are even more ludicrous. What’s worse is that the majority of the movie is dedicated to Rey trying to persuade Luke to come out of exile and rejoin the fight. Remember the scene in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke tries to persuade Yoda to train him? Well imagine that dragged out for an hour and a half. That’s pretty much the movie in the nutshell. I think that’s part of the reason why I loved Finn and Rose so much. Because it was a blessed relief to get off that fucking island for a while. There were several moments where I came close to dozing off.

I’m sure it’s no secret to anyone by this point that Rian Johnson has played pretty fast and loose with the Star Wars canon. Luke’s odd characterisation is one example. There are a few others. None of them truly insulting in my opinion. But the most notorious is a scene involving Leia, which I will hereby refer to as ‘The Scene.’ This got a lot of Star Wars fans riled up, but I personally thought it was absolutely hysterical just because of how random and idiotically daft it was. I’m not going to tell you what happened in ‘The Scene’ because this is a non-spoiler review. All I can say is you’ll know it when you see it.

Of course this was Carrie Fisher’s last film before her untimely death and that’s incredibly sad. Does The Last Jedi offer a fitting tribute to Princess/General/Queen (she’s a a Queen in my eyes) Leia Organa? Not really. In fact, outside of ‘The Scene’, Leia doesn’t really do anything worthy of comment. Some say she was mischaracterised too, but I don’t think so. At a push, I could see Leia doing some of the things she does. I just wish Fisher could have been given something with actual substance.

My views on Poe and Rey remain virtually unchanged. Poe Dameron is still a one dimensional cardboard cutout and I’m still continuously baffled as to why people like him so much. He doesn’t have a character. We’re two movies in and we still haven’t learnt a single sodding thing about him. Frankly I’ve seen fossils with more life in them. Rey meanwhile is still quite possibly one of the blandest protagonists I’ve ever seen. I’m struggling to find any reason to actually give a shit about her. Why should I be invested in her Jedi training? Why does she even need Jedi training when she seems capable of pulling any random superpower out of her arse at the convenience of the plot? At no point have these films ever given me a reason to care about her. Maybe if they focused more on her looking for her missing parents, I might be slightly more invested. And that’s another thing. In The Force Awakens, her missing parents are basically used as sequel bait. Here (without giving too much away) they’re pretty much just swept under the carpet entirely, which begs the question why was JJ Abrams wasting our time with them in the first fucking place (yes I am blaming JJ Abrams instead of Rian Johnson because Abrams was the one that actually came up with this shit and it’s very much reminiscent of his bullshit ‘mystery box’. The principle where an audience are naturally drawn to some big unknown or mystery and that he frequently utilises in his projects, most notably the TV series Lost. What he often forgets however is that good mysteries tend to have a satisfying fucking answer at the end).

And that’s pretty much all I have to say really. No doubt some of you are disappointed I haven’t quite given The Last Jedi the vengeful pummelling you’ve come to expect from me, but honestly I can’t work up the energy to get properly angry at it, and that’s largely because I’m past caring about this sequel trilogy. I think I’ve made my views on the sequel trilogy quite clear by now (that they’re a soulless cash grab concocted by studio execs who wouldn’t recognise a decent script if one jumped up and bit them on the arse) and I think it’s my total lack of interest that kind of shields me from some of Rian Johnson’s ‘creative’ decisions. These movies don’t count as far as I’m concerned. I’m not especially bothered by Johnson’s ‘reimagining’ and there’s nothing truly terrible going on here. The only crime The Last Jedi is really guilty of in my opinion is that there’s large swathes of it that are just really, really boring. And the main reason for this (apart from the obscenely long running time and a plot that drags its feet) is because, like with The Force Awakens, a lot of this stuff has been done before and done better in the original trilogy. While The Force Awakens ripped off A New Hope and a few elements from The Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi rips off The Empire Strikes Back and a few elements from Return Of The Jedi. What makes it slightly more egregious here is that The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi are both very emotionally charged stories that rely on three films’ worth of character development and buildup to make an impact, whereas The Last Jedi just blunders in, trying to replicate these emotional moments, but fails to recognise what made them so powerful to begin with and hasn’t done any of the legwork to make us feel truly invested in what’s going on, and thus it has all the impact of a feather duster.

So that’s The Last Jedi. A pointless and mediocre middle chapter to what has so far been a pointless and mediocre trilogy. The one bright side is that now it appears they’ve finally rehashed all they can from the original trilogy, there’s a chance we might finally get to see some original ideas in Episode 9. Unless they’re planning to ripoff the prequels next. In which case Disney must be more creatively bankrupt than I thought.

[attredd]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2zT5fh6

[myeclecticcollectorblazeus]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2zT5fh6

[bigbirdgladiator]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2zT5fh6

[itssquidwarsjournal]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2zT5fh6

[beautytipsfor]

Trumpworld Fears Its ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Is Coming True

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[batenchantingcollectorsong]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[newsfundastuff]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[orendrasingh]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[newseveryhourly]

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[lorajackson]

Trumpworld Fears Its ‘Nightmare Scenario’ Is Coming True

As Donald Trump returns to the campaign trail this Saturday night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, some of his top political advisers are growing increasingly concerned that the president won’t be able to dig himself out of the hole he’s made for himself.Over the past two weeks, several of the president’s campaign lieutenants as well as individuals in his administration have reacted with mounting alarm as multiple polls have shown Trump dipping into the 30s against former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. In weeks past, various aides in the White House and on the Trump re-election effort had privately expressed cold comfort in the fact that with everything going on—a bungled response to a deadly pandemic, a massively crippled U.S. economy, protests across the nation, and a number of Trump’s own former top officials coming out against him—it was practically a miracle that the president’s poll numbers hadn’t sunk even lower.Early this month, one senior White House official told The Daily Beast that their “nightmare scenario” would be for the president to slip beneath 40 percent support in a sustained string of public and private surveys—thus signaling that a previously unshakable base was starting to grow a bit disillusioned. Trump’s consistent—though perhaps unenviable—standing in the low 40s had for years remained an illustration of his enduring base and iron Republican support. “Until then, I’m not a doomsayer,” this official said, referring to the nerve-racking 30s in national, and some state, polling.In the time since that comment, multiple polls have shown Trump sliding into the 30s. Asked this week about the change, the same White House official simply responded, “This is not where any of us wanted to be at this point [in the election], but there is still time… to make up the difference.”Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible—And Tell Him OtherwiseSome advisers lay the blame for recent poll numbers squarely at the weeks-long news coverage of the mass protests against institutional racism and police brutality following the killing of George Floyd, and how Trump has responded to it. “When race is in the news cycle and dominating the conversation, President Trump’s numbers always go down,” said a source close to the White House. “That’s just a fact.”The source added that they hoped coverage of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s tell-all book about Trump would actually lead to a poll bump for the president, if for no other reason than it would mean less talk of racism, COVID, and social unrest.But Trump has had a knack for getting in the way of even the most well-crafted media plans, to say nothing of the ones his advisers hope play out. Even the announcement of the Tulsa rally was fraught with hiccups and missteps. His team had previously scheduled it for Friday, which meant it would have fallen on Juneteenth in a city that was the site of one of the country’s most savage massacres of Black people. Following a backlash, the president announced the date switch to Saturday. He subsequently claimed that he had made Juneteenth—which has long commemorated the end of slavery in the United States—“very famous” because “nobody had ever heard of it.” His White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, defended those remarks on Friday by noting a spike in Google searches.Stephen Colbert Slams Trump’s ‘Stupid’ Juneteenth ClaimTrump has also attempted to portray the economic damage caused by the pandemic as fleeting. But Republican operatives have expressed concern that his talk of a rocket ship recovery may effectively portray him as out of touch to voters who still feel left behind. And even his own team is uncertain about whether it’s an effective campaign play. Two of the four aforementioned officials told The Daily Beast that they were unnerved by the fact that they’d seen no polling evidence, in internal data or in multiple different public polls, that the news of higher retail sales and the addition of 2.5 million jobs in May had given the president the bump they had wanted and expected.“If the next [unemployment] reports get better and better, hopefully you’ll see a change then and noticeable impact,” one of these officials said, adding that right now far too many people are out of work and “hurting.”Hoping to give himself an additional boost on the economic front, Trump has continuously expressed a desire for additional, big-ticket federal stimulus—which some Republican officials believe would improve his chances. Top Democrats on the Hill, however, say they have not yet had any formal discussions with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about such a package (House Democrats have passed one of their own) and there is wide antipathy among aides about working with the White House unless it provides more insight into how it is spending the hundreds of billions of dollars that was already appropriated.“It is a top priority,” a senior House Democratic aide said of getting answers on where the Treasury Department’s funds have gone. Senate Republicans, meanwhile, have put off talk of another bill entirely. And even among Trump’s cadre of advisers, there is not much appetite for another stimulus bill.“The economic damage done by the coronavirus is a lot less than what was predicted months ago… It’s awful, but it’s much better in states like California, Texas, and Florida than what experts thought it would be,” said Art Laffer, the notoriously conservative economist who informally advises Trump. “People are even hedging their bets on if there’s going to be a second wave of the virus… The stock market is telling us this ain’t going to be a big deal. It’s nothing compared to Y2K or 2008… Those were really big downs in the market, and this is nothing compared to that. It started off really big, with a big drop… but then it came right back. That’s not the way it went in 2008 and 2009.”Absent a major economic measure or turnaround, Trump’s options for reversing his polling slide are slimmer. In an interview with Politico that was published on Friday, the president did express a degree of worry about his chances against Biden. But he couched his concern in baseless theories about the potential for rampant voter fraud in mail-in ballots. “My biggest risk is that we don’t win lawsuits [regarding mail-in voting],” the president said. “We have many lawsuits going all over. And if we don’t win those lawsuits, I think—I think it puts the election at risk.”Increasingly, Trump seems content to try and re-run the playbook he used in 2016 in hopes that it works again. Elsewhere in that Politico interview, he warned other Republican candidates—including those running to help preserve the party’s Senate majority—not to tiptoe away from him, no matter what his poll numbers look like. And in recent days his team has made another aggressive effort to troll Biden (much as they did Hillary Clinton) as physically and mentally unwell. The president has brought back top aides from his last presidential run and is turning to one of his most prominent surrogates from that race to help, as well. On Thursday, Politico reported that the Trump campaign had enlisted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani—who as Trump’s personal lawyer launched a dirt-digging expedition into the Bidens that led directly to the president’s impeachment—to “spearhead a campaign to press for more debates this fall, starting earlier than usual and to have a say in choosing the moderators,” so that Trump can have more opportunities to publicly humiliate Biden, someone who the president seems convinced will crack under a one-on-one grilling.Asked on Thursday if he now has an official title on Trump 2020, Giuliani told The Daily Beast, “No sir I am just helping out.”Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[miscellanyblue]

Tales from ‘the heart of modern misogyny’

The Daily Beast unmasking of a New Hampshire House member as the founder of a notorious online forum that has been called “the heart of modern misogyny” sent shockwaves through the state’s political community. The governor, House speaker and GOP party chair all called on Rep. Robert Fisher (R-Laconia) to resign and last week the Republican-led House voted 307-56 to review Fisher’s actions for possible sanctions.

In a Laconia Daily Sun column, Fisher implicitly acknowledged his role in creating the forum when he explained and defended comments attributed to Reddit user pk_atheist in Bonnie Bacarisse’s detailed investigation. The previously anonymous Redditor is the founder of The Red Pill, which bills itself as a forum to discuss “sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men.”

Fisher’s defense pointedly omitted any mention of The Red Pill, either his role in creating it or his ongoing involvement in the community. He will have a chance to expound on that Tuesday when he appears before the House Legislative Administration Committee. Here’s what we found.

‘Friends, I am stepping down’

On January 4, 2013, pk_atheist handed off the role of The Red Pill moderator to RedPillSchool, a Redditor whose account had been created just 17 minutes before the message from pk_atheist.

“Friends, I am stepping down,” he wrote. “Thanks for the great month.. this place has really grown and I'm excited for its future. Unfortunately due to circumstances I won't be bringing up here I am officially stepping down as a moderator and will no longer take part in any way with this community.”

“But don't worry..” pk_atheist wrote. “I leave you in the very capable hands of /u/redpillschool. I have been talking with him over the past few weeks and he is more than prepared to continue taking the community in the same direction. So long, and thanks for a memorable experience.”

“Don't worry... I promise to fill the void!” RedPillSchool chimed in. “Pk and I are on the same page.”

Over time, some Red Pillers conflated the two aliases and referred to RedPillSchool as the forum’s founder. For example, pickup artist Daryush "Roosh V" Valizadeh introduced The Red Pill to his blog’s readers by writing, “The Red Pill subreddit was created by an anonymous individual who goes by the handle RedPillSchool.”

When “The Red Pill Sidebar” was published in 2015, a post that had been written by pk_atheist in November 2012 to introduce the forum was included -- but it was now attributed to RedPillSchool. RedPillSchool thanked the member who assembled the collection and he placed a copy on a Red Pill website “so it doesn't disappear one day.”

In that same discussion, RedPillSchool recounted a date he had with a women's studies major who was familiar with The Red Pill and “went on and on about how refreshing it was to go on a date with a guy who was nothing like that. … I told her that I created the forum and actually hated women. She laughed and ordered another round. I don't think people would believe me if I did go public. Lol”

RedPillSchool made an explicit effort to refrain from providing personal details that would threaten his anonymity. In 2013, though, he did confirm his age as “30 +- 2 years.” (Fisher was 28 at the time.) In a Guardian interview he also confirmed that he is “white, atheist [and] conservative” (though admittedly, that likely applies to most Red Pillers).

RedPillSchool does occasionally repeat the story that he inherited The Red Pill from its founder, pk_atheist. “The sub itself was handed over to me early on,” he wrote last year, “I had had a lot of long conversations with the founder who went on to bigger and better things and he trusted I would run the forum well.”

But in a Guardian interview, RedPillSchool changed his story and said that he was the creator of The Red Pill. In the unabridged version of the interview RedPillSchool posted online, he told the reporter that he had been moderating the subreddit “since the red pill's inception.”

RedPillSchool described the events that led him to create the site. “I got started when I stumbled upon a few manosphere blogs and realized there wasn't really a good forum for discussion on masculine topics,” he explained. “I noticed the attitude of women in the dating market was very negative, it was a terrible experience. So that led me to researching others' experiences which led me to the mansophere, and eventually theredpill.”

(The Guardian piece referred to RedSchoolPill as “Morpheus Manfred.” RedPillSchool explained: “A few years ago was my first big interview, it was BBC world News. I needed an email, quickly. So I made a GMAIL, and it needed a name, so I figured, let's try Morpheus. You know, for obvious reasons. They needed a last name though, so I just thought Manfred sounded kinda righteous. Didn't realize they'd read my ‘From’ line on the email and announce me as Morpheus Manfred on the air. Since then I just kept it for consistency's sake.”)

‘We are the Puerarchy’

As The Red Pill grew, RedPillSchool was instrumental in rolling out a series of Red Pill-related websites – all with a connection to Fisher.

The original administrator’s email address for each site was Fisher’s personal email address -- the same email address linked to his campaign website, his band website and included in Fisher’s letter of complaint to the PUC -- and are all hosted on servers in Orlando, Florida. (Fisher once told Redditors that he is “personally spending thousands of dollars to co-locate [computer servers] in places like Florida.”)

The websites include trp.red (email), a Red Pill-related social media platform; forums.red (email), an archive of the Reddit Red Pill subreddits; feministvictims.com (email), a fundraising site for “victims of feminism;” and puerarchy.com (email), RedPillSchool’s blog.

Puerarchy.com is also linked to Fisher through a Google Adsense account. The website shares a Google Adsense publisher ID with insideNH.com, a website authored by Fisher and Rep. Nick Zaricki (R-Goffstown) where the legislators discussed issues related to their work in the New Hampshire House. (The insideNH.com domain name expired last month and the site is now offline.) Ad revenue from the two sites is directed to the same user's account.

Puerarchy.com made its debut in the summer of 2013. The word “puerarchy” was coined by the author of The Manosphere: A New Hope For Masculinity, Ian Ironwood, to describe “the evolution of male values and masculine goals toward a more selfish, self-oriented and unashamedly masculine perspective.”

RedPillSchool embraced the notion as a battle cry: “We’re going to eat pizza. We’re going to play videogames. We’re going to look at porn. We’re going to fuck every bitch we can. And we’re never going to ‘grow up,’” he wrote. “Some of us may make brilliant amounts of money. But one thing’s for sure: what we do is for us- and we’re not going to share. … Honor is dead. Long live the Puerarchy.”

In addition to news and discussion, the site hosts an interactive, text-based game: Slut Quest. It’s a sendup of Depression Quest, the game by female game developer Zoe Quinn that was at the center of the Gamergate controversy. The Slut Quest storyline is a typical Red Pill trope: a woman who has sex with men to advance her career and threatens to accuse them of rape if they don’t accede to her demands. “Slutquest was my crowning achievement,” RedPillSchool wrote.

Feministvictims.com was launched in response to the Andria Richards controversy that resulted in a male tech employee losing his job after she overheard him making an off-color remark. A Huffington Post write-up included a quote from RedPillSchool explaining why he believed the new site was necessary. “Unfortunately in today’s climate, being a man has become a financial liability,” RedPillSchool wrote. “Say the wrong thing in the wrong place and you can find your entire life ruined. Destroyed.”

“Feminists have fought for equality, but now they’re out for our rights,” he continued. “They’re destroying us financially. They’re trying to tear apart our families. We’re saying that enough is enough. No longer should men fear masculinity.”

‘I won't deny that the language is colorful’

When interviewed by Guardian’s Stephen Marche about The Red Pill’s notorious reputation as a misogynistic cesspool, RedPillSchool said, “I won't deny that the language is colorful and there's a lot of emotion expressed by the men on the forum.”

“I would argue that the definition of misogyny isn't really very concrete, that much is labeled as such because it's inconvenient. So, let's say there's a guy who just says ‘well I hate women.’ I think that's textbook misogyny and, in fact, we let them say that,” he continued. Because there's nowhere else for a man to blow off steam. … The endgame of our advice isn't to hate women. It's to understand them so you can stop being so darn frustrated by them.”

“If a guy came on and talked about actually hurting women or plotting to harm them, we'd remove them and possibly contact authorities if there was any risk of an immediate threat,” he insisted. “But this is the one place where men have the freedom to throw around ideas, vent, and discuss openly with other men.”

RedPillSchool denied the forum promotes rape culture. “There's no discussion of rape strategies. It's antithetical to our entire purpose, which is to find a way to become attractive enough that women will want to be with us,” he said. “If the group was seriously pro-rape, there simply wouldn't be a discussion on building attraction. We'd just take 'em all by force.”

“There have been probably a handful of comments I've removed over the past three years,” he continued, “and they're usually one-offs by trolls who want to make the group look pro-rape. They're banned and removed, since that is strictly forbidden in our forum rules.”

On the other hand, RedPillSchool has endorsed the subject of rape as “a great marketing gimmick.” In a post summarizing the “Red Pill state of affairs” written last year, RedPillSchool praised pickup artist "Roosh V" for the attention garnered by his plans for an international meet-up that was condemned as a “make rape legal” rally by detractors. The American blogger is best known for a 2015 article in which he proposed legalizing rape – a piece he said was a “satirical thought experiment” and “not to be taken literally.”

“I really can't fault him for the play that he made,” RedPillSchool wrote. “Some clever statements about rape that could be played off with the plausible deniability of satire, but gaining international attention on the sound bites. He was able to scare feminists and women in every major city, convincing them that big, bad rapists were coming to town to meet, plot and fester in the underbellies of their streets.”

‘The wrath of vitriolic women’

RedPillSchool has apparently been keeping a close eye on the Fisher unmasking and the subsequent reactions. The day Fisher’s response to the Daily Beast article was published by the Laconia Daily Sun, RedPillSchool posted a link to it on a Red Pill-related site. “I just got sent this by somebody on [Reddit],” he wrote.

Saturday, he addressed the unmasking, referring to it as “the recent doxxing of an alleged redpill founder.”

“Knowing the truth and living by it was not enough to save that man from the wrath of vitriolic women,” RedPillSchool wrote. “He stands as a testament to what happens to men who stand alone: They get torn down. Had he not built his own support structure, it could have been the end of his career.”