#she was also low key a little racist in new new york and like it's sort of refreshing to see the doctor love someone who is flawed

[stainedglassgardens]

Watched in April

Queen of Earth Black Christmas Dogs of Chernobyl Firecrackers Les Misérables The Evil Dead The Daughters of Fire (Las hijas del fuego) The Fallen Idol The Wailing (곡성, Gokseong) Inherent Vice Sorrowful Shadow Mistery Lonely The Grand Bizarre Zombieland: Double Tap Waves '98 Uncut Gems The Last Séance Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven) Room Queen & Slim The Holy Mountain (La montaña sagrada) The Chaser ( 추격자, Chugyeokja) Made in Dagenham The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, Nřan guynə) Lost Girls Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues) And Then There Were None Doctor Sleep Meshes of the Afternoon Circus of Books Catfish Wildling Delphine The Strange Love of Martha Ivers The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge) Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (Nona. Si me mojan, yo los quemo) The Lodge Invisible Man Sans Soleil

Did not finish

Horsehead (Romain Basset, 2014) Sinister (Scott Derrickson, 2012)

Did not like

Sorrowful Shadow (Guy Maddin, 2004) Mistery Lonely (Harmony Korine, 2007) Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2019) The Last Séance (Laura Kulik, 2018) The Holy Mountain (La montaña sagrada, Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1973) Doctor Sleep (Mike Flanagan, 2019)

Okay

Queen of Earth (Alex Ross Perry, 2015): The way it was filmed reminded me of The Midnight Swim and Always Shine. I watched it because Elisabeth Moss is in it but was rather disappointed in the end -- it was beautifully shot but went nowhere

Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019): Like Assassination Nation, this is a film I'm glad young people today have -- and it was fine, and if there’s anything I’ve got to say about so-called raging feminists it’s that we need more of them, but yeah the ending was disappointing and I felt that I had aged out of the target audience a good number of years ago

The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981): Finally saw this! Love me a a good campy horror story once in a while

The Wailing (곡성, Gokseong) and The Chaser ( 추격자, Chugyeokja) (Na Hong-jin, 2016 and 2008): A healthy dose of wtf in both of those, I’m still not sure I “correctly” grasped the intended tone. I also just lost all interest in The Chaser when (spoiler) the girl died. What’s the point of that? Are we in Game of Thrones now? I may still be angry about that, actually

Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014): I know it’s a good film but it bored me to death. I don’t like stories about men or drugs

Zombieland: Double Tap (Ruben Fleischer, 2019): A sympathetic, slightly disappointing sequel

Waves '98 (Ely Dagher, 2015): I don’t remember much about this short but I did think it was good

Room (Lenny Abrahamson, 2015): I couldn’t watch this as separate from the book, it felt more like a companion film to me than anything else. It was good I think, but I’m definitely not the best judge on this one, because the book was so amazing and I’m still not over it, apparently

And Then There Were None (René Clair, 1945): Was it good? Who knows. They changed the ending and added in a crap love story, so who cares, really

Wildling (Fritz Böhm, 2018): I liked it? I didn’t really see the “feminist themes” in this but it was good

Delphine (Chloé Robichaud, 2019): This is one of those short films that are a little too “slice of life” for me to really enjoy. I can tell it’s good, tho

The Red Balloon (Le Ballon rouge, Albert Lamorisse, 1956): This is apparently a classic short film, and I think I would have enjoyed it a lot had I seen it in 1956. Seeing it today, when everything in it has been used in a hundred thousand other films, made it fall flat a little

Nona. If They Soak Me, I’ll Burn Them (Nona. Si me mojan, yo los quemo, Camila José Donoso, 2019): Watched this because it was directed by a woman! Did not know what to expect at all. The non-linear narration kept me trying to remember if there was something I could possibly have skipped that would have made more sense of it. I think the premise (old woman throws Molotov cocktail at former lover’s car) is better than the finished product, although it is very well-shot and the acting is amazing

Good

Dogs of Chernobyl (Léa Camilleri & Hugo Chesnel, 2020): Short documentary that had me on the verge of tears several times (you can watch it for free on YouTube!)

Les Misérables (Ladj Ly, 2019): It’s hard to talk about films like these. It is very good, very important, I think everyone should watch it. Think a new La Haine

The Daughters of Fire (Las hijas del fuego, Albertina Carri, 2018): Loved the reflection on pornography. The pornography itself was a little more... boring... but I appreciate the intention, and the guts it took to shoot something like this

The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948): An amazing British classic (adapted from Graham Greene!) that I had somehow never heard of. Great acting, especially considering the main character is a small child

Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven, Dominga Sotomayor Castillo, 2018): There will be people in this world to say that "uhh nothing happens in this film", a statement to which my reply will be twofold: first, it's beautiful so who cares, and second, how many other films have you seen that take place in a commune in the 1990s in Chile? That's what I thought. Shut up

Made in Dagenham (Nigel Cole, 2010): Films like this and Suffragette, that is, mainstream films about the working classes and political activism, are almost bound to be flawed, but I'm grateful they exist all the same. And how many of those have we seen that are about workers’ unions, with an all-female main cast, and nuanced dialogue about communism and the place of women in the home and of men in feminism? I’m glad that male directors have finally figured out that one of the best ways to avoid showing a one-dimensional idea of women is to have lots of them in one film. And Sally Hawkins! I love her

The Color of Pomegranates (Նռան գույնը, Nřan guynə, Sergei Parajanov, 1969): Another one of those classics I had never heard of (until I got Mubi!). Indescribable, beautiful

Lost Girls (Liz Garbus, 2020): Really liked the speech at the end about the police failing the victims and their families, really liked that the old inspector guy wasn't made to be someone who was on the side of the victims instead of on his own side. Bleak, sobering. When I watched this I didn't know Garbus was the person who directed that Nina Simone documentary, which I also love.Will definitely seek out more Liz Garbus in future

Ghost Town Anthology (Répertoire des villes disparues, Denis Côté, 2019): I watched this not knowing anything about Denis Côté or the film, and I loved the atmosphere even before the supernatural element really kicked in. Films like this and The One I Love or Everything Beautiful is Far Away are my kind of low-key science fiction

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943): Aaaand another classic I finally saw! It just warms my heart to see that stuff like this was being made (by a woman!!) in the 1940s

Circus of Books (Rachel Mason, 2019): I saw a headline calling this “the queer Stories We Tell” and I loved Sarah Polley’s documentary and wouldn’t go quite that far but I can see where it’s coming from. A good autobiographical documentary about the complexity of families

Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010): I think everyone going into this today knows what this is going to be about, but let me tell you, it does not reduce the impact

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946): Barbara Stanwyck and Lizabeth Scott! Murder! Intrigue! Love and sleaze!

The Lodge (Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala, 2019): This was so efficient. It is so well-done, and Riley Keough is amazing as usual. More subtle than Franz and Fiala’s last effort, Goodnight Mommy, and at least as good

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983): It’s hard not to be disappointed by this after hearing every film bro I’ve ever met describe this as his fave ever. It is... pretty racist and sexist... but yes, very pretty, very nice if you can get past that

Faves

Firecrackers (Jasmin Mozaffari, 2018): Is this a coming-of-age story? Anyway it’s about two working-class teenage girls in small town Canada who are this close to making their dream of leaving for New York, and one of them is fuuuuucked up...

The Grand Bizarre (Jodie Mack, 2018): I think this is what I want from a non-narrative documentary. I’m tired of seeing pretentious Godfrey Reggio knockoffs. This quite simply blew my mind and is one of those very rare films I can see myself rewatching ten times

Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas, 2019): I can’t not compare this to Natural Born Killers and Thelma and Louise, both of which I used to love and haven’t seen in a number  of years -- but Queen & Slim is quite possibly better than both of those. The tone, the breadth, the acting -- even the soundtrack. It’s a masterpiece

Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020): This is about a man who creates an invisibility suit. This is also about a woman who is being stalked and abused by a controlling man who just won’t rest until he has completely destroyed her -- but of course, since this is cinema and the woman in question is Elisabeth Moss, she ultimately beats the shit out of him. This was very difficult to watch for me but I’m glad I stuck through

*

I got Mubi this month! So glad I did. It’s so much better than both Filmstruck (RIP) and Amazon Prime. I like that choices are made for me up to a certain extent -- and those choices often turn out very good, and always interesting. And yes, we’re still in lockdown, I’m still unemployed, hence the number of films watched this month. Hopefully we can get out in May and I’ll end up watching less!

[amostexcellentblog]

IYO, which Golden Age stars had the most interesting "will make degrading cameo for food" phases?

Sorry this is so late, but whoa boy that’s a loaded question. Honestly, a lot of silent and classic Hollywood stars had money troubles in their later years because residuals weren’t really a thing until the 50s. Before the television market nobody thought there was a way to consistently make money on old movies so everyone was content to be paid upfront. Then add on a lot of stars grew accustomed to lavish lifestyles and never learned responsible spending and most of them had some degree of financial difficulties after their careers declined. Some of them had a sense of humor about it, for others it was humiliating and there can be a vague sense of exploitation about the whole thing that makes some fans reluctant to talk about these periods.

We should probably begin with Orson Welles, who made what was/is considered the greatest movie of all time, and yet had to take some pretty demeaning work to pay the bills. Like, he really did do a frozen peas commercial. That’s not something the writers of The Critic made up. It exists, it’s on youtube!

Bette Davis famously placed an ad in Variety asking for work when parts dried up. She spent most of the 60s starring in horror movies of declining quality, primarily because she needed money to support he family, but also because she was desperate to work. By the 70s though the Hag Horror fad had passed and she became even more desperate. A 1971 film Bunny O'Hare had her playing an elderly woman who dresses up as a hippie to rob banks on a motorcyle, it was so bad she sued the studio claiming it had damaged her future employment prospects. During this time she also filmed 4 sitcom pilots, and not good ones either. they were for Aaron Spelling, the man behind “Jiggle-TV” (although Davis herself did not jiggle, she still had some pride). The tv show Feud treated this as a sort of tragic time where the woman who once sued Jack Warner for better scripts was so desperate for work she stopped caring about quality. I look at it more as Davis realized that no matter how much dreck she did the public would always consider her a Hollywood Legend, so she was free to stop worrying about her image and just take whatever paid work she could get while playing the movie queen in interviews. 

Another low point was the Disney-sequel Return From Witch Mountain in 1978 where she and Christopher Lee (who took the part just to work with her) played the villains intent on using mind control devices on two super-powered alien kids. To say Davis’s character was as flat as cardboard is an insult to cardboard. She finally got a decent script in the 1980s with The Whales of August opposite Lillian Gish, so she was able to remind everyone how good she could be a few years before her death. Not every star would be so lucky.

Joan Crawford, who must be discussed alongside Davis by Hollywood law, has become, along with Welles, the poster-child for late career humiliation. Like Davis, Crawford spent the 60s doing low budget horror shlock, but somehow her movies always seemed shlockier. She teamed up with William Castle twice, for his Strait-Jacket he let her act like the movie queen she’d once been and she took full advantage. She demanded a limo to drive her to set each day, a role be given to a vice-president of Pepsi (she was on the board) and refused to let him be fired even when it became obvious he couldn’t remember his lines. She insisted on portraying her character as in her 40s despite turning 60 the year it came out, and also played the character as a 20-something in flashbacks. The air conditioning on set was cranked obscenely high because she believed cold air kept her skin from wrinkling.

In 1968 Crawford guest starred on The Lucy Show as a version of herself who liked being out of the public eye (Ha!). Lucille Ball by this point was a terror to work with and she bullied Crawford relentlessly over everything from her dancing to her drinking (which of course just made Crawford drink more). Later that year her daughter Christina was hospitalized, meaning she wouldn’t be able to film her scenes for the daytime soap opera she was in. Crawford, 64 years old, convinced the producers to let her fill in. And they said yes, so for four whole episodes Crawford appeared as a 24 year old girl. And on top of that, she was so drunk she could barely remember her lines. A year later Crawford had what I think is her most interesting TV role. For Rod Serling’s Night Gallery she played a ruthless, blind heiress who will stop at nothing to be able to see. It’s a standard Serling morality play right down to the ironic twist. What so fascinates me is that it marked the professional debut of one Steven Spielberg, although by his own admission he shot the thing like a European art film and had it taken away in editing so it could be re-worked into something presentable on network TV. So you have Crawford, who started her career in the silent era, came to embody the studio system, and remained a movie star into the 1960s, being directed by Spielberg, one of the key directors of the New Hollywood era who went on to create the era of the blockbuster tentpole we live in today. It’s such a fascinating meeting in the middle moment of the woman who ebodied the first half of Hollywood’s history, and the man who embodied its second half.

From there she went on to her final film, 1970′s Trog. She played a scientist investigating a ape-cave man hybrid believed to be the missing link. She was so drunk she had to use cue-cards to read her lines. The movie was so low-budget she had to wear her own clothes and change in an old van. Roger Ebert once said that the difference between Crawford and Davis was that Crawford would agree to make Trog. He wasn’t wrong. She made a handful of TV appearances after that, but then the tabloids published some unflattering pap photos. In the 1930s when she’d been the most beautiful woman in Hollywood she famously told an interviewer “I never go out of my house unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star, if people want the girl next door they can go next door.” Decades later she lived up to her words, convinced she could no longer look like the glamorous movie queen she cancelled her public appearances and spent the last years of her life in Norma Desmond-like isolation. She died in her New York apartment in 1977 with only her maid and a loyal fan by her side.

This is getting long, but I have to mention Aldo Ray, a big macho man action hero of the 1950s who made a porno in 1979 and spent the 1980s working mostly with cult exploitation filmmaker Fred Olen Ray (no relation). Ray Milland was a hunky leading man in the 40s, spent the 1970s alternating between genuine A-list hits like Love Story and shlock like Frogs and The Thing With Two Heads where he played a racist whose head is grafted onto a black man. Yeah:

Bela Lugosi’s fall from grace has been much covered. He had a huge hit with Dracula but feuded with the studio and soon found himself confined to B-level shlock, eventually finding himself a member of Ed Wood’s stock company. Fan still debate if Wood was exploiting him or helping him. Boris Karloff fared better. He made plenty of low budget dreck for Roger Corman, but he also endeared himself to younger audiences, most notably in How the Grinch Stole Christmas and went out on a high note with Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut Targets.

Lastly, we must speak of Veronica Lake. She was a glamour queen of the 40s, famous for her hair style where her long blonde locks were styled to cover one eye, studio publicists dubber her “The Peek-a-Boo Girl.” She made one genuine 4-star must-see classic, Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, and some well regarded noirs and comedies, but she was washed up by the 1950s. She was discovered working a a waitress in the 1960s and subsequently told her story on the talk show circuit and later in an autobiography. She decided to use the money she’d earned from various public appearances to produce a comeback vehicle. For some reason, perhaps known only to her, she decided the best movie to relaunch her career was Flesh Feast. A no budget Grade-Z catastrophe where she played a mad scientist developing a breed of flesh eating maggots while moonlighting for an underground organization of escaped Nazis in possession of Hitler’s body. She is charged with reanimating their Führer so they can take over the world. Turns out though, Lake is only doing this to avenge her mother who was subjected to Nazi experiments in the concentration camps. Once old Adolf is alive and kicking again, she throws her flesh eating maggots in his face and laughs maniacally as he dies a second, painful death. Honestly, Lakes delivery of the line “Don’t you like my little maggots?” deserves to go down as one of the all-time camptastic line readings in the history of cinema. But seriously, this movie raises so many questions I can’t even start. Like, if she just agreed to star I could understand, but she was a producer on this, she went all-in on this project, why? Why this of all things?

[dipulb3]

Progressive lawmakers reflect on wins and losses in Biden's first 100 days

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/progressive-lawmakers-reflect-on-wins-and-losses-in-bidens-first-100-days/

Progressive lawmakers reflect on wins and losses in Biden's first 100 days

With Democrats in the House operating with razor thin margins — the party can only lose two votes or else legislation ends in a tie — progressive power and the prospects of members withholding their votes will only further complicate the relationship between the White House and House progressives.

“The progressive candidate did not win the presidential nomination, and so we’re working within that,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York, told Appradab. “But I don’t know who would disagree with just saying that, like, a lot of people are surprised by how ambitious, how much more the Biden administration has delivered, compared to their expectation.”

‘A lot of goodwill’

For Rep. Ro Khanna of California, it is often easier to get in touch with White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain than members of his own family.

“It’s pretty remarkable,” the progressive congressman told Appradab, adding that Klain’s responsiveness is not unique to him — he has heard the same from other progressives since Biden entered the White House.

The pair started working together after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the presidential race in April 2020 when Khanna, a former Sanders campaign co-chairman, joined unity task forces to negotiate with then-candidate Joe Biden over what could be adopted from Sanders’ platform, which ultimately won over progressives to help deliver Biden the White House.

These relationships, said Khanna, helped the Biden administration when passing their first priority, a Covid relief package, even if the package did not include some key progressive priorities like a $15 minimum wage.

“I think that that first push with the American Rescue Plan bought a lot of goodwill because it was packed with progressive ideas and progressive framing,” Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat, told Appradab.

Ocasio-Cortez echoed that sentiment — “I think a lot of people thought the Covid bill was going to be worse, I’ll be honest,” she said — but the progressive champion added that there were serious conversations about the caucus withholding their votes when a minimum wage hike was stripped from the overall package.

Ocasio-Cortez said the saga highlighted how progressives in the House are focused on “fights that we can win,” an acknowledgment that overcoming the eight Democratic votes in the Senate opposed to a minimum wage was too high a bar for the caucus to defeat. But Ocasio-Cortez said she did seriously consider withholding her vote when Republicans tried to cut stimulus checks and change the threshold income that made individuals eligible, a fight in which progressives came out on top.

Progressives also argued that there was too much in the Covid relief package to hold up over the minimum wage fight.

“We didn’t get the minimum wage, and we hated that,” freshman progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman told Appradab. “We were organizing to potentially withhold then we decided not to because we needed to get resources into states.”

And without the Covid relief package as a vehicle, the path forward for progressives to deliver on raising the minimum wage is a steep one. For Chairwoman Jayapal, there are three, equally challenging options: Overrule the Senate parliamentarian if she decides the provision cannot be included in the next spending bill; abolish the filibuster, which currently does not have the votes in the Senate; or attach the provision to a must pass bill that progressives would withhold their vote over. But progressives like Jayapal said their patience on minimum wage wouldn’t last forever.

“They needed to get their Cabinet secretaries in place … they needed the rescue plan to pass, but at some point, there’s not going to be quite as much tolerance for a wait attitude on something that is so popular like the minimum wage,” the Washington Democrat said.

Looming fights

How progressives walk that line between sinking legislation and getting in line behind the Biden administration could determine the Democratic President’s success in the coming years.

And despite the warm feelings between House progressives and the Biden White House over the first 100 days in office, a minefield of issues loom over the relationship, highlighted most recently by the Biden administration’s less-than-clear approach to Trump-era caps on refugees entering the United States.

The Biden administration announced earlier this month that they would not raise the refugee cap as high as he had promised, instead signing an emergency determination that kept the cap at 15,000 people. The decision drew swift and pointed blowback from across the political spectrum, but more vocally from progressives like Ocasio-Cortez and others.

“Biden promised to welcome immigrants, and people voted for him based on that promise. Upholding the xenophobic and racist policies of the Trump admin, incl the historically low + plummeted refugee cap, is flat out wrong,” she said on Twitter. “Keep your promise.”

The blowback was so fierce that Biden’s administration backtracked, announcing hours later that they would set a new, increased refugee cap by May 15.

The Biden backtrack and progressive blowback could presage fights to come between the two sides and show that despite the positive feelings, acrimony is only one decision away.

“Despite campaign promises and early signs of a humane approach to immigration, they have failed to stop human rights abuses at the border, including keeping kids in cages,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a former refugee herself, said in a statement to Appradab. “I’ve also been disappointed with many of their early foreign policy decisions — whether refusing to hold Saudi Arabia fully accountable for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and their ongoing deadly blockade of Yemen, or their refusal to lift draconian sanctions on Iran, Venezuela and others.”

The most pressing of those looming fights — and one that will be a test for the working relationship between the White House and House progressives — is the Biden administration’s latest push on reforming the nation’s infrastructure.

The day after Biden first announced the package, progressives issued five top priorities for the caucus. Seventeen senators sent Biden a letter on Sunday asking him to include improvements to the health care system in the package, Ocasio-Cortez and others are trying to make the package more climate focused. And progressive lobbying efforts on the bill have continued behind the scenes.

Those progressive priorities have become the backbone of Republican attacks on the bill, arguing that the Biden proposal is too broad and focuses on far more than just infrastructure. So far, there has been little Republican support for the bill, as it was rolled out.

The question for lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman and others is whether the caucus is willing to withhold their needed votes if they don’t get what they want in this package.

“People always go to that point of like, what is the line and where are you going to hold your votes and I always say, let us work to try to get it done,” Jayapal said. “That’s more important to me than just putting out a false deadline or a false line because I feel like we are still in that process.”

Why progressives don’t want to ‘rest on their laurels’

The fate of the ongoing relationship between progressives and the White House becomes increasingly precarious when considering progressives are feeling the pressure of needing to deliver on their campaign promises made to voters ahead of the 2022 midterms.

A progressive lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak openly about the deliberations with the White House, said the childhood tax credit in the Covid relief bill cannot be the only major legislative victory progressives bring back to their districts.

“That doesn’t speak to the heart and soul of voters,” the lawmaker told Appradab. “The question is our side going to be fired up to turn out. And that’s a challenge.”

That pressure is especially potent for lawmakers who were elected by arguing that Washington politicians often fail to deliver on the promises they make on the campaign trail.

“We don’t want anybody resting on their laurels because the first bill out the gate was okay,” said Ocasio-Cortez, who was first elected by upsetting 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary. “I’m trying to push as much on this infrastructure package as possible because, yeah, this one Covid bill is not enough work to show for an entire two-year House term or four-year presidential term.”

A key reason for that is because of pressure from outside progressive groups, many of whom have organized to both hold progressive leaders to their promises and push the Biden administration to listen to those progressive lawmakers. For example, the Green New Deal Network, which is comprised of 15 organizations located in all 50 states, hosted more than 200 events while the House was in recess in March to put pressure on lawmakers and the administration to pass a Green New Deal and incorporate its proposals in Biden’s infrastructure package.

Working Families Party national director, Maurice Mitchell, whose organization is part of the Green New Deal Network, outlined how organizers are trying to capitalize on the ear that progressives have with the White House at the moment.

“It’s clear that the Biden-Harris administration was listening” Mitchell said, referring to the organizing done that resulted in tangible progressive wins in the American rescue plan. “So, if they’re listening to progressives and the grassroots, and people in frontline communities, why would we stop talking?”

With that mentality, Mitchell said he views the Biden administration “as a door not a destination. Meaning that our advocacy does not stop at the election, it actually really begins.”

Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, characterized progressives’ relationship with the White House as “trust, but organize.”

“Trust, meaning there’s a general belief that the Biden White House genuinely wants to get there on things like a $15 minimum wage, massive investment in taking on climate change and canceling student debt,” he said. “But, you know, it’s up to organizing to ensure that the incentives are aligned for them to go bigger and faster.”

For Jayapal, it’s good that Biden has been more progressive than people had thought, but that hasn’t just happened — it’s the product of hard work.

“I think everyone is surprised at how progressive he is,” said the progressive caucus chairwoman. “That’s not an accident.”

[spideyxchelle]

So not sure if ur actually doing headcanons but I want one where MJ is Midtowns BAMF. Like she gets arrested in protests and punches Nazis in the face and she ain't got time to do makeup and dress pretty because she's raising money to get young black girls through school. Like, she's the real life superhero and Peter is the romantic interest, but also she's incredible smart and help Pete with issues in his suit not even Tony Stark figures out. Just badass MJ

MJ is bamf, okay?? like, we only get maybe (and I’m being generous here) 10 minutes of her in the whole movie but I know and you know and we all know that she is the most boss-ass bitch at Midtown. LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT IT-

so MJ in middle school was crazy popular

she was the girl™ and pretty much everybody (girls, boys) had their first crushes on her. she was pretty, smart and admittedly a bit of a conformist….so everything that was cool was what MJ did and no one was better at being popular than MJ…

then, in 2013 George Zimmerman is acquitted for the murder Trayvon Martin and MJ isn’t interested conforming anymore. BECAUSE BLACK LIVES MATTER and she’s a black woman and the system she’s been conforming to, the system that makes her “popular”, isn’t a system that supports her and her culture and just like that MJ is Queen’s resident intersectional feminist

she stops wearing makeup (not because makeup inherently is anti-feminist but because she only wore it to fit in and that’s some bullshit) and wears clothes that her grandmother wore to Civil Rights marches in the 1960s and she feels, for the first time, like herself

and she stops being social because not because she’s an asshole and doesn’t like people but because she has SO MUCH TO CATCH UP ON, OKAY?! she spent years not fighting for her rights and the rights of all women and the right of LGBTQ+ people and sexual assault survivors/victims and every minority group ever. and she needs to know. she needs to learn. and she needs to do it now. 

their entire freshman year of high school people still flock to MJ because she’s MJ and she’s amazing. and even though, basically overnight, she’s dedicated her life to something beyond being popular in high school she’s still MJ. and, frankly, the fact that she’s a protest babe is fascinating to stupid fourteen year olds

MJ thinks its stupid. she doesn’t go to protests to be cute, okay??? its serious business because this country is some bullshit and systematic oppression isn’t going to be fought against in Washington so she’ll fight for it in the streets. 

she marches in every march she can manage, from marches for science to planned parenthood to pride month to BLM to marches for immigration. EVERYTHING. 

the first time she gets arrested its in the midst of Trump mania during the 2016 election season. a group of racists form downtown with their racist signs and their RACIST chants. and she joins the small coalition of people that protest their little racist hoedown. a guy with a stupid red hat calls her the n word and crudely tells her where she can put her “liberal mouth”

….

she absolutely decks him in the face AND EVERYTHING TURNS INTO A FULL ON BRAWL. and she gets arrested and is kept overnight. her brother bails her out first thing in the morning and when she asks what took him so long, he tells her that he’s been dealing with reporters outside their house all night because SOMEONE went viral. 

that someone is MJ. 

and she’s hella pleased. 

when she gets to school that day everybody is looking at her like she is the most fabulous person to ever exist and while she doesn’t agree, she thinks Maxine Waters holds that title, it feels nice to be appreciated for something besides how “pretty” she is. for the first time she feels like her classmates see her beyond the #fade of protesting. they see how serious she is about changing the world, about making a difference. 

and so sophomore year she starts going to parties. she, like, doesn’t interact with people much (again, she has a lot of reading to do) but she’s there. because midtown kids aren’t the shitty majority, they’re diverse and woke and kind of cool. eh. not as cool as her, tho. 

MJ gets arrested a few more times (all for the greater good) and the myth of Michelle Jones only seems to grow at Midtown. like everybody has their version of crazy things MJ did. some of which are true, some of which aren’t. she low-key enjoys during lunch listening to people at surrounding tables talk about her like she’s a superhero.

“I heard MJ met Hillary Clinton and told her she’s too moderate” “well I heard she was at the Women’s March in DC and came up with the chant we reject the president elect” “well I heard she started working with the New York Philharmonic to bring their musicians into homeless shelters and prisons to give underprivileged people access to music” “well I heard she’s punched like fifteen Nazis”

and some of the rumors are true, some aren’t. but she never clarifies which are which. she sort of enjoys being more legend than teenager. 

BUT THEN stuff at Midtown goes really weird. like her teammates almost die at decathlon in DC and Liz’s Dad gets arrested and she’s made team captain. and Peter Parker is definitely hiding something. 

not that she cares because she’s got money to raise for young black girls’ education and charities to volunteer for that house homeless LGTBQ+ youth that were kicked out by their homophobic families

basically, she’s got better things to worry about then the fact that Peter Parker is definitely up to something

she finds out he’s a superhero completely by accident 

she’s at a rally against Trump (which, honestly, feels like all she does lately because this orange cheeto is always doing something abysmal) and some a-hole tries to set off a bomb to attack the protesters. before he can hurt anybody, tho, SPIDER-MAN shows up and saves the day.

and Parker is such a moron he doesn’t even try and change his voice when he’s on the job. like, Parker…get better at your job, man. she KNOWS what his voice sounds like and Spider-man is definitely Peter. 

the next day at school she sits by him and lunch and everyone in the cafeteria gets SILENT. because OMG WHY IS MICHELLE JONES sitting with Peter Parker? like, she’s a goddess and he’s kind of a loser. what’s happening????

she jots down a note and slides it to him. its simple. gets straight to the point- “I know you’re Spider-man” and Peter’s eyes to HILARIOUSLY big. like, he can’t even believe that she figured it out. but, uh, she’s way smarter than him so of course she did. 

and, its weird, but they slowly become friends after she knows his secret. they do their homework together and Peter starts to go to marches with her. she doesn’t invite him, he just kind of shows up hoping to see her. and she SUPPOSES if she’s going to have a love interest (because, um, he may have super powers but she’s the one that’s going to change the world one day so he’s definitely her love interest) Peter isn’t a terrible one to have

he even gets her an audience with Tony Stark who she basically commands to throw some money at charities that need support right now in this weird dystopian Trump era of human existence

and after that meeting MJ gives Peter a hug. he seems sort of shell shocked and star struck but that’s not her problem

AND when Thanos appears and makes this whole weird world even worse Peter is called to action to help the Avengers punch their way to a diplomatic solution. but before he can ship out with the rest of the squad the tech in his suit goes haywire and MJ has to fix it because Tony Stark doesn’t know what happened and Peter sure as hell doesn’t. she spends the better part of the night getting him battle ready. and when the time comes for him to go and fight she doesn’t give him a kiss for good luck or hugs him and tells him to be safe. she simply tells him that she needs the world to be in one piece if she’s going to save it. and that he needs to go make sure she’s got a world to save. 

so he does. he and his team defeat Thanos and two days after the end of the war, she’s back on the streets protesting against corruption. because the world didn’t stop spinning just because an alien invaded. no sir. 

the first day of their senior year, Peter slides MJ a note and instead of revealing any kind of secret identities like the first time, its a question. 

she looks up at him genuinely surprised. “you wanna go out with me?” she asks, “why?”

he gets flustered and manages to tell her what she already knew, “you’re like a freakin’ superhero. who wouldn’t want to go out with you?”

he gets a kiss for that comment. their first kiss. “yea, i’ll go out with you.”

“tonight?” he replies, almost too eager to sit still. 

she rolls her eyes and turns back to her book about dysphoria in the trans community, “I’m going to a BLM march.” “i’ll go with you.”

and that’s their first date. their second is private dinner with the Obamas to thank the Avengers for saving the world. and when the former President asks who Michelle is Peter introduces her as “the girl who is going to save this country” and Obama smiles wide at her, shakes her hand and says sincerely, “well, its very nice to meet you” 

[stateofdisunion]

Featured Avatars  Massachusetts and Pennsylvania

Massachusetts is a personality to be reckoned with. She is one of the most outspoken state’s and extremely sure of her opinions. Her opinions on things may change, but she has always been sure she knows exactly what should be done. She is also quite the business shark, and has always favored merchants.  She can be quite violent is relating to those who don’t agree with her, which is good now that mot of that is directed at hate groups, but very *extremely* destructive when she was a young colony and still in her religious extremist phase 

Massachusetts started out as the Plymouth Colony, but quickly asserted herself over the whole area. Her forceful personality and extremest religious convictions (which she no longer has) put her at odds with other Avatars, resulting in Massachusetts Bay moving himself further from her and declaring himself the independent colony of Rhode Island, and eventually causing New Hampshire to break from her as well and straining their relationship for many years until mutual annoyance with New York rekindled a common bond, and many long and bloody wars with Native Avatars. While she notably calmed her religious extremism over the years, she remained stubborn and hard to work with on an epic scale until her behavior nearly lost her little sister Maine during the war of 1812. She then finally did a hard look at her behavior and tries not to be so abrasive when things don’t go her way. Unless she is dealing with Virginia.. Her arguments with Virginia are still legend amongst states. South Carolina she also still does not give the time of day to for anything, not just because of the Civil War, but because she still(rightfully) holds huge resentment for the time he responded to an abolitionist speech of hers by beating her with his cane after the meeting. She was only to happy to kick his ass multiple times during the Civil War and the still are two state’s likely to come to blows is left alone near each other. 

Despite cooling down somewhat, she is still one of the loudest states and on of the judgiest.  And she still has an intolerant streak that manifests itself when people don’t see eye to eye with what she feels is right. However, most of her stubborn energy is spent opposing the Nazi Hate bugs, which no states minds, or the Pro-Confederate state’s and their related Hate groups, which most state’s don’t mind.  However, she is very stringent on who she feels should count as LGBT which brings her at odds with Asexual North Carolina and Genderqueer Missouri.

She had a relationship with Virginia, but despite making overtures of friendship recently, she still considers the sexual relationship a huge mistake. She flirts some with Delaware, but that has never really gone anywhere. She is often frustrated that so many of the female states are much younger than her and/or straight. She does flirt with Georgia, but that is merely because it pisses off Georgia and South Carolina. Often these days she hooks up with New York, but there is no long term relationship in the horizon for them as they too quickly get annoyed with each other and baseball season is not good for them. 

Mass enjoys sports- especially baseball- and is very active, which many state’s don’t suspect as she is a bit plump due to genetics. She also enjoys debating for the sake of debating, but few want to do that with her anymore. 

Pennsylvania is a much more low key quiet state and easy to get along with. He is hard working and doing what he needs to do to get by. Penn does not favor any industry over any other as long as those industries help his people. He is, however, extremely antagonistic to businesses he feels hurt more people than help, which often puts him at odds with CEO. 

As a colony, he was amiable and one of the easiest to get along with. He was also one of the very few he truly worked hard to have fair and kind relationships with the native Tribes,and to sway his people to do so has well, and his follow Avatars.. Even though his protests, efforts, and even anger and fights on the Natives  and efforts proved in vain,  many of the tribes still have good relationships with him, notably the Lenape. 

He also often finds himself at odds with his fellow states because of his reluctance to fight. He doesn’t understand why so many of the State’s are quick to fight over seemingly every little thing. His large religious populations, in contrast to Massachusetts, have made him much more of a pacifist and he often has to be dragged kicking and screaming into most wars. This doesn’t mean he won’t stand up for causes he believes in. he was a main voice advocating for Rebellion from England, and he supported his farmers in their Whiskey Rebellion as he felt betrayed by Uncles handling of taxes. That said, he doesn’t feel like- in most cases- fighting does anything other than ensure more fighting later on. Virginia specifically choose to target him during the Civil War thinking he would fold quickly, and instead felt that when he was driven by what he felt to be a just cause (Penn has always been strongly anti-slavery and was one of the few Northern States fighting for Abolition from the beginning) he can be as formidable a fighter as some of the strongest states.

He and Delaware are close, partially because she appreciated his continued fight against slavery (even into modern times), and also because he helped her when she was trying to establish herself as a colony. Because she had previously been Virginia’s indentured servant, and was not white, many of the other Colonial Avatars didn’t want to recognize her, so Penn had her as part of his colony until there was no doubt she could maintain her own land and wanted loose it to another greedy colony. He was also extremely apologetic anytime his people took advantage of hers for monetary gains and tried to make up for it as best her could. 

He is close with most of the New England and Mid Atlantic State’s (or rather has no strong reason to dislike them and tries to see their good points over their bad). He does have strained relationship with some of the Southern and Midwestern states, blaming them for the hate bug invasion that invests parts of his states and endangering his minorities. He is however an older brother figure to West Virginia as he taught her mining and the struck up a good friendship. He is a good influence on her and has done a lot to counteract some of the more racist thinking she learned from her sisters. He also has a good relationship with Iowa as he mined for Iowa in exchange for good and services and they often told stories. 

Penn enjoys working in his garden and writing short stories an poetry that he is too shy to share with anyone but Delaware. 

[trumpsupportersunited]

HAPPY SATURDAY CENTIPEDES 🐛💖🐛💖🐛💖🐛I hope everyone is enjoying this beautiful afternoon! It's your girl /u/Ivaginaryfriend back at it again with another DANK Presidential recap!So sit back, relax, and let us BASK IN THE GLORY OF THIS TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION TOGETHER!!!Sunday, December 10th:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Things are going really well for our economy, a subject the Fake News spends as little time as possible discussing! Stock Market hit another RECORD HIGH, unemployment is now at a 17 year low and companies are coming back into the USA. Really good news, and much more to come!Getting closer and closer on the Tax Cut Bill. Shaping up even better than projected. House and Senate working very hard and smart. End result will be not only important, but SPECIAL!Very little discussion of all the purposely false and defamatory stories put out this week by the Fake News Media. They are out of control - correct reporting means nothing to them. Major lies written, then forced to be withdrawn after they are exposed...a stain on America!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Employed every race and religion on the planet...gets called a racist. The left is full of lies and hatred. DJT is a great man!!Current State of the left.Stop Child Abuse!This is why California goes red in 2018 and 2020.HOLY SHIT!! Don Jr. just nuked Takei from orbit.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:In honor of us having 538k "official" centipedes, I'm just going to leave this photo of Nate Plastic right here.This Tweet did not age wellSeeing A wild Pede out in the Wild.At Starcucks no less!Man of the year, every year.Just a couple liberals waiting for their daily dose of fake news.Monday, December 11th:TODAY'S ACTION:President Donald J. Trump Will Make America a Leader in Space Exploration AgainRemarks By President Trump and Vice President Pence at Signing Ceremony for Space Policy Directive – 1F.H. Buckley: “GOP tax bill is good for middle-class Americans”Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding Today’s Attack in New York CityFour Nominations Sent to the Senate TodayPresidential Memorandum on Reinvigorating America’s Human Space Exploration ProgramText of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President Pro Tempore of the SenatePresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Personnel to Key Administration Posts🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Another false story, this time in the Failing @nytimes, that I watch 4-8 hours of television a day - Wrong! Also, I seldom, if ever, watch CNN or MSNBC, both of which I consider Fake News. I never watch Don Lemon, who I once called the “dumbest man on television!” Bad Reporting.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Wife of demoted DOJ official worked for firm behind anti-Trump dossierLive Thread: Explosion Reported in New YorkMaduro Bans OppositionOh Please No one is going to get murdered.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:She's at it again.New York ExplosionK...?ALMOST HAD IT!"THE DUMBEST MAN ON TELEVISION!"Tuesday, December 12th:TODAY'S ACTION:Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Bottom line, GOP tax reform’s good for the middle class”President Donald J. Trump will Make the American Military Great AgainRemarks by President Trump at Signing of H.R. 2810, National Defense Authorization Act for FY2018President Donald J. Trump Signs H.R. 2810 and H.R. 4374 into LawState and Local Leaders Push for Tax ReformArmstrong Williams: “Passing tax reform is a task that shouldn’t be taxing”Statement by President Donald J. Trump on H.R. 2810Support For President Trump’s Signing Of The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)A Message from President Donald J. Trump on HanukkahChristmas at the White House 2017Readout: Second Lady Karen Pence Visits with Young Patients; Gives Coloring Books and CrayonsPresident Donald J. Trump Announces Intent to Nominate Andrea Thompson to the Department of State🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Despite thousands of hours wasted and many millions of dollars spent, the Democrats have been unable to show any collusion with Russia - so now they are moving on to the false accusations and fabricated stories of women who I don’t know and/or have never met. FAKE NEWS!Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill & Crooked-USED!The people of Alabama will do the right thing. Doug Jones is Pro-Abortion, weak on Crime, Military and Illegal Immigration, Bad for Gun Owners and Veterans and against the WALL. Jones is a Pelosi/Schumer Puppet. Roy Moore will always vote with us. VOTE ROY MOORE!Consumer Confidence is at an All-Time High, along with a Record High Stock Market. Unemployment is at a 17 year low. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Working to pass MASSIVE TAX CUTS (looking good).Wishing all of those celebrating #Hanukkah around the world a happy and healthy eight nights in the company of those they love.Congratulations to Doug Jones on a hard fought victory. The write-in votes played a very big factor, but a win is a win. The people of Alabama are great, and the Republicans will have another shot at this seat in a very short period of time. It never ends!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:NEW: Family of NYC terror attack suspect releases statement, saying they’re “outraged” by actions of law enforcementThese 4 officers saw the attempted bomber with wires all over him on the ground and held him down, stopping him from using his cell-phone to cause a 2nd blast. They are heroes.BILL O REILLY: "I have a tape of someone who is anti-Trump offering $200,000 to a woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault"Yeah, uh, no it's fucking not. Regardless of how you feel about Net Neutrality, this is a fucking lie and Reddit needs to be held responsible for their lack of transparency or register as a PAC.DACA needs to go when an illegal with 3.6 GPA scams $185k in scholarships from hardworking American born students.PRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:GOD BLESS THE NYPD!Never faltering before the MSM horde. Let's show some love for Sarah: Warrior PrincessSHOTS FIRED by Congressman Steve Smith at Gillibrand [Bill Clinton is a RAPIST!]Buck Sexton rewrites the statement by the failed pipe bomber's family for accuracy.Wednesday, December 13th:TODAY'S ACTION:Alfredo Ortiz: “Tax Bill Is Christmas Present Americans Have Been Waiting For”Final IT Modernization ReportRemarks by President Trump at Lunch with Bicameral Tax ConfereesAmerica Will Once Again Reach for the Moon—and BeyondRemarks by President Trump and American Taxpayers on Tax Reform🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:The reason I originally endorsed Luther Strange (and his numbers went up mightily), is that I said Roy Moore will not be able to win the General Election. I was right! Roy worked hard but the deck was stacked against him!Wow, more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative, with numerous forced retractions of untrue stories. Hence my use of Social Media, the only way to get the truth out. Much of Mainstream Meadia has become a joke! @foxandfriendsIf last night’s election proved anything, it proved that we need to put up GREAT Republican candidates to increase the razor thin margins in both the House and Senate.Thank you Omarosa for your service! I wish you continued success.SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:Looks like the FBI has been caught planning an investigation of Trump since BEFORE his election purely as an “insurance policy” in case he got into office!Strzok, his Mistress, and (Now) Director McCabe discuss "Insurance Policy preventing Trump PresidencyHappy Hanukkah from President Donald J. Trump🚨🚨 HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!! Remember when FBI tried to bribe a Russian Hacker to confess to hacking Hillary's email a while back? Guess what just hit the front page of Reddit!!! 🚨🚨Fake News CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper Calls The President A "Loser," Then Predictably Deletes Tweet, Claims He Was Hacked🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Spicy Ben Garrison. Fake News Chasing Tall TalesNothing to see here, move along.Voter ID requirements need to be Federal law."There’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk." -Peter Strzok Deputy Asst Director FBIThursday, December 14th:TODAY'S ACTION:The Closing Argument for Tax ReformPresident Donald J. Trump’s Year of Regulatory Reform and Environmental Protection at the EPAPresident Donald J. Trump is Delivering on DeregulationMerry Christmas from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania TrumpMerry Christmas from Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen PenceRemarks by President Trump on DeregulationPress Briefing by Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Neomi Rao on the Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory ActionsReadout of President Donald J. Trump’s Call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Republican Tax Cuts are looking very good. All are working hard. In the meantime, the Stock Market hit another record high!As a candidate, I promised we would pass a massive tax cut for the everyday, working Americans. If you make your voices heard, this moment will be forever remembered as a great new beginning – the dawn of a brilliant American future shining with PATRIOTISM, PROSPERITY AND PRIDE!Today, we gathered in the Roosevelt Room for one single reason: to CUT THE RED TAPE! For many decades, an ever-growing maze of regs, rules, and restrictions has cost our country trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, countless American factories, & devastated entire industries.When Americans are free to thrive, innovate, & prosper, there is no challenge too great, no task too large, & no goal beyond our reach. We are a nation of explorers, pioneers, innovators & inventors. We are nation of people who work hard, dream big, & who never, ever give upIn 1960, there were approximately 20,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations. Today there are over 185,000 pages, as seen in the Roosevelt Room. Today, we CUT THE RED TAPE! It is time to SET FREE OUR DREAMS and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!“Manufacturing Optimism Rose to Another All-Time High in the Latest @ShopFloorNAM Outlook Survey”(Retweeting Ronna McDaniel) .@realDonaldTrump is the Paycheck President. Learn how the tax bill will put more money in your pocket & how to contact Democrats who are trying to stop it: http://paycheckpresident.comSIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:THROWBACK THURSDAY Reddit advocates "Net Neutrality" by conspiring numerous subs to push the same Red Image but censors T_D from /all for the last year because they dont like opposing viewpoints. Repealing Title II allows a freer internet-Reddit’s against that (they didnt even read the bill). Sad!The battle for Net Neutrality is over! The companies that spent hundreds of millions shilling to trick the public into supporting their agenda have LOST! Just like magic all the hysteria will disappear.HIS NEW STORY: His assistant left his phone “UNSUPERVISED” at the gym and some mystery person tweeted POTUS. Got it. Makes complete sense, definitely not FAKE NEWS.Based regulation slayer Ajit Pai TROLLS THE SHIT out of snowflake Soros NN shills. Shitposting has become an art form! TENDIES EVERYWHERE!Did He Just Say on Live T.V. that They Came from Another STATE to Vote in Alabama's Election?!? ~ This is Important: Being DownvotedPRESS BRIEFINGS, INTERVIEWS, RALLIES:Press Beating🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:(unemployed noises)NEW TRUMP TWEET ON NET NEUTRALITY REPEALJapanAnon mocks people saying Japan needs to accept immigrants to survive.Donald Trump Jr. Journalism is DeadJuanita Broaddrick: Why did I support President Trump?Friday, December 15th:TODAY'S ACTION:Remarks by President Trump Before Marine One DepartureIt’s Time To End Chain MigrationRemarks by President Trump at FBI National Academy Graduation CeremonyRemarks by President Trump to Marine Helicopter Squadron One🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:It was my honor. THANK YOU!To each member of the graduating class from the National Academy at Quantico, CONGRATULATIONS!You are always there for us – THE MEN AND WOMEN IN BLUE. Thank you to our police, thank you to our sheriffs, and thank you to our law enforcement families. God Bless you all, and GOD BLESS AMERICA! #LESMToday, it was my tremendous honor to visit Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1) at the Marine Corps Air Facility in Quantico, Virginia. I am honored to serve as your Commander-in-Chief. On behalf of an entire Nation, THANK YOU for your sacrifice and service. We love you!DOW, S&P 500 and NASDAQ close at record highs! #MAGA(Retweeting Sarah Sanders) .@POTUS historic tax cuts + doubling of the child tax credit will do infinitely more to empower working moms than liberals' personal attacks on women they disagree with ever will.(Retweeting Paul Ryan) For individuals and families, the final Tax Cuts & Jobs Act: ✔lowers individual taxes ✔nearly doubles the standard deduction ✔expands the Child Tax Credit ✔repeals Obamacare’s individual mandate ✔preserves the mortgage interest deduction(Retweeting Rep Krisi Noem) A lot of tough decisions got us to this point, but we’re closer than we’ve been in 30+ years to a fairer tax code that keeps more money in the pockets of hardworking Americans. Proud to sign my name to the Conference Report. READ THE BILL>> http://noem.house.gov/taxreformGreat job Kevin, we are all proud of you!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:TICK TOCK BOOM! Lisa Bloom offered women hundreds of thousands of "donor" cash to accuse Trump"Eric Trump Posted A Picture in the Oval Office That Nearly Broke the Internet." [in a good way]"Real talk: The only reason John McCain hasn't resigned yet, given his condition and mountain corruption scandals, is because in AZ, resigning senators have their replacement chosen by the governor. And our governor was an early Trump Supporter."IT'S OFFICIAL: WE HIT 4% GDP GROWTH! PRESIDENT TRUMP IS MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!Rahm Emmanuel declares Chicago a "Trump Free Zone". How about you make it a "Murder Free Zone" instead because 630 people have already been killed this year, Mayor🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:They're with her.Here we see a wounded and weak candidate. Sensing its weakness, the strong bull offers it as sacrifice for the safety of the nation.WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUB WUBNo Thanks.Saturday, December 16th:🔥🔥TRUMP TWEETS🔥🔥:Congratulations to two great and hardworking guys, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, on the success of their just out book, “Let Trump Be Trump.” Finally people with real knowledge are writing about our wonderful and exciting campaign!SIGNIFICANT TWEETS AND NEWS:HOLY SHIT! The Lisa Bloom "accuser" she was texting with who abruptly cancelled the press conference was the same girl that also sued Jeffrey Epstein! Was this a STING OPERATION? They were trying to frame Trump w/ Epstein and got caught! These people really are stupid -- HOLY FUCK!!THE FACE YOU MAKE WHEN for 14 years you had one of the highest rated shows on television, got bored and decided to create the GREATEST and HIGHEST rated reality show the world has ever seen. Oh and you save America and Western Civilization in the process.But Trump is the bad guy. insane.🐸 TOP SPICE OF THE DAY 🐸:Life comes at you fast media cucks.Legendary Japanese wrestler The Great Sasuke dressed as The Great Trump. He cut a promo to the Tokyo crowd saying "TPP is Bullshit" before fighting Rocket Man.REMINDER: SIKHS ARE OUR ALLIES AND FRIENDSSOOOOOOO MUCH WINNING!What's a recap without a couple jams to help you get through it!One Man Can Change The WorldThe New Workout PlanDoing it Right - Daft PunkLana's ThemeOnly OneFamousGold Dust - Flux Pavillion RemixBulletproof - La RouxMAGA THE FUCK ON PATRIOTS!! via /r/The_Donald

[popofventi]

MENTAL YOGA SUNDAY / 5 FAVORITE LONG FORM READS THIS WEEK / ISSUE No. 16

The best Sundays are languid, slow motion, sprawling, stretching cats in sunshine kind of days with a good long something to read and a good long silence in which to do it.

1

INSTAGRAM’S KEVIN SYSTROM WANTS TO CLEAN UP THE &#%$@! INTERNET. (Wired)

"KEVIN SYSTROM, THE CEO of Instagram, was at Disneyland last June when he decided the internet was a cesspool that he had to clean up. His company was hosting a private event at the park as part of VidCon 2016, an annual gathering that attracts social media virtuosos, and Systrom was meeting with some Instagram stars. They were chatting and joking and posing for one another’s phone cameras. But the influencers were also upset. Insta­gram is supposed to be a place for self-expression and joy. Who wants to express themselves, though, if they’re going to be mocked, harassed, and shamed in the comments below a post? Instagram is a bit like Disneyland—if every now and then the seven dwarfs hollered at Snow White for looking fat.

AFTER THE CHAT, Systrom, who is 33, posted a Boomerang video of himself crouched among the celebrities. It’s an ebullient shot of about 20 young people swaying, waving, bobbing, and smiling. In the lower right corner, a young woman bangs her knees together and waves her hand like she’s beating eggs for a soufflé.

The comments on that post started out with a heart emoji, a “Hoooooo,” and “So fun!” Soon, though, the thread, as so often happens online, turned rancid, with particular attention focused on the young woman in the lower right. “Don’t close  wait  just  wait  OPEN them leg  baby,” “cuck,” “succ,” “cuck,” “Gimme ze suc.” “Succ4succ.” “Succme.” “Go to the window and take a big L E A P out of it.” A number of comments included watermelon emoji, which, depending on context, can be racist, sexist, or part of picnic planning. The newly resurgent alt-right proclaimed over and over again that “#memelivesmatter.” There was a link in Arabic to a text page about economic opportunities in Dubai. Another user asked Systrom to follow him—“Follback @kevin.” And a few brave people piped up to offer feedback on Insta­gram’s recent shift to ordering posts by relevancy rather than recency: “BRING BACK THE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER!”

Systrom is a tall, lean man with a modest bearing. His handshake is friendly, his demeanor calm. He’s now a billionaire, but he doesn’t seem to play the alpha male games of his peers. There is no yacht; there are no visits to the early primary states; there is no estranged former partner with an NDA. Systrom’s personal Instagram feed is basically dogs, coffee, bikes, and grinning celebrities. A few years ago, Valleywag described his voice as “the stilted monotone of a man reading his own obituary,” but he’s become much smoother of late. If he has a failing, his critics say, it’s that he’s a sucker: He and his cofounder, Mike Krieger, sold Instagram to Facebook too soon. They’d launched it a few years after graduating from Stanford, and it went into orbit immediately. They got $1 billion for it. Snap, which spurned an offer from Facebook, is now worth roughly $17 billion.

Systrom takes pride in this reputation for kindness and considers it a key part of Instagram’s DNA. When the service launched in 2010, he and Krieger deleted hateful comments themselves. They even personally banned users in an effort Systrom called “pruning the trolls.” He notes that Krieger “is always smiling and always kind,” and he says he tries to model his behavior after that of his wife, “one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet.” Kevin Systrom really does want to be the sunny person on display in @kevin’s feed.

So when Systrom returned from VidCon to Instagram’s headquarters, in Menlo Park, he told his colleagues that they had a new mission. Instagram was going to become a kind of social media utopia: the nicest darn place online." - Read Full Story

2

In the future, your body won’t be buried... you’ll dissolve (Wired)

"The Resomator stands monolithic in the corner of a room in the bowels of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). It's as sterile as a hospital here, but every patient is already dead. This is the penultimate stage of their time under the care of Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at the David Geffen School of Medicine. Bodies are wheeled in under crisp sheets for disposal in Fisher's alkaline hydrolysis machine, which turns them into liquid and pure white bone. Their bones will be pulverised and scattered off the coast by nearby Camp Pendleton, the Marine Corps Base, where they will float and then disperse, because pure calcium phosphate will not sink. From the coastguard's helicopter it looks like drug lords flushing their stash.

The machine emits a low hum, like a lawnmower several gardens away. The cadavers awaiting grinding sit in blue plastic containers at the back of the room, identities anonymised by numbers and dog tags. The chalky bones are soft enough to destroy by hand: touch a femur and it falls apart." - Read Full Story

3 

The untold story of QF72: What happens when 'psycho' automation leaves pilots powerless? (The Sydney Morning Herald)

"Booooom. A crashing sound tears through the cabin. In a split second, the galley floor disappears beneath Maiava's feet, momentarily giving him a sense of floating in space. Blood rushes to his head as he, the off-duty captain and his wife are propelled into the ceiling, knocking them out.

Flight attendant Fuzzy Maiava was slammed into the aircraft's ceiling during the nosedives. He relies on visits to the gym to cope with his physical and psychological injuries.  Photo: Chris Skelton

In the cockpit, Sullivan instinctively grabs the control stick the moment he feels the plane's nose pitch down violently at 12.42pm (Western Australia time). The former US Navy fighter pilot pulls back on the stick to thwart the jet's rapid descent, bracing himself against an instrument panel shade. Nothing happens. So he lets go. Pulling back on the stick does not halt the plunge. If the plane suddenly returns control, pulling back might worsen their situation by pitching the nose up and causing a dangerous stall.

Within two seconds, the plane dives 150 feet. In a gut-wrenching moment, all the two pilots can see through the cockpit window is the blue of the Indian Ocean. "Is my life going to end here today?" Sullivan asks himself. His heart is thumping. Those on board QF72 are in dire trouble. There are no ejection seats like the combat jets Sullivan flew in the US Navy. He has no control over this plane." - Read Full Story

4

The Last American Baseball-Glove Maker Refuses to Die (Bloomberg)

"The town of Nocona, located some 100 miles northwest of Dallas and named after a Comanche chief (hence the Native American-in-headdress logo on Nokona gloves), developed a reputation as a leather-goods hub.

The company’s name is spelled with a “k” because it was told in the 1930s that the town’s name couldn’t be trademarked. Today, Nocona is home to about 3,000 people and a few stoplights. “God Bless America” banners line the street, and locals wish you a “blessed day.”

Founded in 1926, the company originally made wallets and purses. It was a former Rice University baseball player named Roberts Storey who steered Nokona into ballgloves.

In the early days of baseball, it was considered unmanly to use a glove. Broken bones were common. The first mass-produced gloves had little padding and no fingers. In the 1920s and ’30s, companies started producing gloves with a web between the thumb and forefinger, to create a pocket.

The shift to Asia in the 1960s nearly put Nokona out of business. Storey wouldn’t budge. “It hit him all wrong that we would have to go to Japan,” said his grandson Rob Storey, now the company’s executive vice president. “One of his favorite sayings was: ‘If I have to tell my employees we’re closing up and they don’t have jobs any more, I may as well get a bucket of worms and go fishing’." - Read Full Story

5

A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. (The New York Times)

"Sheila James starts her Monday, and the workweek, at 2:15 a.m. This might be normal for a baker or a morning radio host, but Ms. James is a standard American office worker.

She is 62 and makes $81,000 a year as a public health adviser for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in San Francisco. Her early start comes because San Francisco is one of the country’s most expensive metropolitan areas. Ms. James lives about 80 miles away in Stockton, which has cheaper homes but requires her to commute on two trains and a bus, leaving at 4 a.m.

Plenty of office workers get up at 5 a.m. or a bit before, but 2:15 is highly unusual.

“Two-fifteen is early enough that some people are still having their evening,” she said on a (very) early morning. But she likes to take her time and have coffee. She keeps the lights low and the house quiet and Zen-like. “I just can’t rush like that,” she said.

When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from leisure to precision." - Read Full Story

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Alison Roman, Bon Appétit, and the Global Pantry Problem added to Google Docs

Alison Roman, Bon Appétit, and the Global Pantry Problem

In this, the age of the global pantry, ingredients like turmeric, tahini, and gochujang have finally shaken off their hitherto “exotic” status. But it’s white cooking personalities like Alison Roman and many of the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen stars who have had viral success using them.

Alison Roman is the “prom queen of the pandemic.” Or, at least, she was. The cookbook author and YouTube star, who rose to fame on the strength of her heady-yet-approachable recipes, low-key glamour, and self-effacing charm, recently experienced what she referred to as “baby’s first internet backlash.” It stemmed from a recent interview that Roman gave in which she criticized both minimalism icon Marie Kondo and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen for peddling branded merchandise, implying that they were sellouts — while discussing her own “capsule collection” of cooking tools, no less. A low hum of outrage greeted Roman’s choice to rebuke two women of color, then positively exploded after Teigen created a long thread on Twitter to talk about how hurt she was, as someone who “genuinely loved everything about Alison.”

The backlash to Roman’s comments, like most backlashes, was a combination of legitimate grievance and the way that Twitter refracts and concentrates reaction. All the same, there was a whiff of inevitability to the suddenness and vociferousness of the anger directed at Roman, who had become ubiquitous thanks in part to her knack for proselytizing ostensibly “ethnic” ingredients like tahini, turmeric, and yuzu kosho to a broader American audience. Roman’s critics charged that she was not only a hypocrite but a racist, one who had moreover very successfully capitalized on the ingredients of other cultures. If it felt as though people had been sitting around waiting for her to mess up, it was probably because many of them had.

Roman, after all, is arguably the most fashionable avatar of a broader shift. We are living in the age of the global pantry, when a succession of food media-approved, often white figures have made an array of international ingredients approachable and even desirable to the North American mainstream — the same mainstream that, a decade ago, would have labeled these foods as obscure at best and off-putting at worst. This phenomenon is why you now see dukkah on avocado toast, kimchi in grain bowls, and sambal served with fried Brussels sprouts. It’s a kind of polyglot internationalism presented under the New American umbrella, with the techniques and raw materials of non-Western cuisines used to wake up the staid, predictable flavors of familiar Americana.

Not long ago, you could see this playing out on the menus of hip restaurants across the country. At AL’s Place in San Francisco, squash tahini was served with burrata, sumac-galangal dressing, pickles, and dukkah; in LA, there was preserved Meyer lemon and lacto-fermented hot sauce in Sqirl’s sorrel pesto rice bowl, and a “Turkish-ish” breakfast of vegetables, a sumac- and Aleppo pepper-dusted egg, and three-day-fermented labneh at Kismet. Over in Nashville, Cafe Roze put a turmeric egg in its hard-boiled BLT and miso ranch in its barley salad. Up in New York, Dimes served a veggie burger with harissa tofu and a dish called huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs.

Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed

But now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most of us to stay home and make the most of our kitchen skills, the global pantry is most visible on the pages and websites of establishment food media. It’s Bon Appétit’s gluten-free coconut-turmeric pie and kimchi-cream cheese toast; Food & Wine’s tofu masala and rosy harissa chicken; the New York Times’s brothy chicken soup with hominy and poblano; and Every Day With Rachael Ray’s minty matcha smoothie and Korean barbecue burgers. You can see it all over social media and particularly Instagram, where its most viral example is #thestew, Roman’s 2018 recipe for a chickpea-coconut milk stew whose broth is made golden with turmeric. And you can see it on Bon Appétit’s extremely popular YouTube channel, where its test kitchen stars make everything from saffron brittle to “dahi toast” to slow-roast gochujang chicken to spicy chicken katsu sandwiches (though it bears noting that the first two of those recipes were created by people of color).

As the culinary has become a marker of contemporary culture, occupying much of the space once monopolized by music or fashion, food media and social media have fused to create a supercharged form of aspirational desire. Within this mode of desire, however, the idea of using new, hitherto “exotic” ingredients only seems to become aspirational when those ingredients appear on the pages of prominent tastemaking magazines (or, perhaps more relevantly, on Instagram) — or are espoused by white tastemakers. Remember that time in 2018 when the author Stephanie Danler told T Magazine about her “kitchari cleanse,” explaining how the Indian dish of lentils and rice (actually called khichrhi) allowed her to “reset [her] system”? Or the time that haldi doodh took over coffee shop menus, the food media, and Instagram after being rebranded as the turmeric latte?

The question that such representations present for the food world is a difficult one: Who gets to use the global pantry or introduce “new” international ingredients to a Western audience? And behind that is an even more uncomfortable query: Can the aspiration that has become central to the culinary arts ever not be white?

Because the aesthetics of food media are indeed white. That white aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, the abundant natural light, ceramic plates, strategically scattered handfuls of fresh herbs, pastel dining rooms, artisan knives, or even the butcher diagram tattoos that the food media so loves to fetishize. It is more accurate to say that the way we define what is contemporary and fashionable in food is tied to whiteness as a cultural norm — and to its ability to incorporate other cultures without actually becoming them.

Only whiteness can deracinate and subsume the world of culinary influences into itself and yet remain unnamed. It’s a complicated little dance of power and desire: The mainstream is white, so what is presented in the mainstream becomes defined as white, and — ta-da — what you see in viral YouTube videos somehow ends up reinforcing a white norm, even though the historical roots of a dish or an ingredient might be the Levant or East Asia. You might say whiteness works by positing itself as a default. You might also say that this sucks.

You cannot have influence without authority. It’s why well-known (white) chefs and cookbook authors have historically been so effective in popularizing global ingredients among the North American mainstream. Think, for example, of Rick Bayless, the Chicago chef whose Mexican restaurants introduced many Midwesterners to contemporary regional Mexican cuisine, or Andy Ricker, the Portland, Oregon, chef whose Pok Pok restaurants spread the gospel of Northern Thai cooking through the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Or of Yotam Ottolenghi, the Israeli chef and cookbook author whose restaurants and cookbooks were so effective in communicating the joys of Middle Eastern ingredients like Aleppo pepper and tahini that his influence earned its own moniker, the Ottolenghi Effect.

Each of these chefs became successful at a time before social media and the notion of viral stardom had become as all-encompassing as they are today. And, aside from some extremely boneheaded comments Bayless made regarding race and appropriation, their notoriety hinged far less on their personalities than the seductive properties of their food — and how readily their work was gobbled up by the establishment and, by extension, the white mainstream.

In today’s food media landscape, there are few more powerful authorities in the Anglo-North American food world than Bon Appétit. BA’s YouTube channel has become so viral that it has spawned memes, to say nothing of a fan account just for star Claire Saffitz’s hair (and, hey: understandable). It has almost 6 million subscribers, and its videos have collectively surpassed a billion views.

Bon Appétit’s on-camera staff is predominantly white, and the aesthetic and culinary mode of the channel feels similar to a lot of contemporary food media: attractive, mostly millennial people wearing bespoke aprons make vibrant, casually elegant, well-lit food that balances approachability with technique and/or fancy ingredients.

It was an aesthetic developed on the glossy pages of the Condé Nast magazine. When editor Adam Rapoport came over to BA from GQ in 2010, he was tasked with reinventing the publication one year after Gourmet folded. It was neatly symbolic: As one bastion of high-end food disappeared, another announced itself as the wave of the future. Rapoport imported a particular style to BA from his previous gig: cool but unfussy, effortless but only superficially so. It’s a mix that has occasionally gotten the magazine into trouble — see, for example, its website’s (since deleted) 2016 “Pho Is the New Ramen” video, in which a white chef told viewers exactly how they should eat the Vietnamese dish. Today, it allows BA to teach its readers how to reverse-sear steak or carve $1,500 legs of ham, but also make mac and cheese or the perfect vodka soda. The foods it chooses to cast in the spotlight illustrate the way in which authority grants legitimacy. If BA is using sumac on eggs, or dashi powder in porridge, it means it’s time for you to use those things as well.

But if desire, expertise, and charm work magic in food media, then perhaps it’s no coincidence that the globalization of the pantry has found its viral apotheosis in Alison Roman. An erstwhile pastry chef who worked in the Bon Appétit test kitchen before going on to become a New York Times columnist and the author of two best-selling cookbooks, Roman’s story is one of years of hard work, viral-recipe creation, and social media savvy — at least until her recent self-own.

It remains to be seen if Roman’s comments about Kondo and Teigen coalesce into a broader or more permanent rejection (yesterday, the New York Times confirmed to the Daily Beast that her column is on temporary leave, though it declined to provide a reason why). Regardless, the lessons of Roman’s success are lasting. For one, it is impossible to talk about Roman’s influence without talking about social media, and her masterful use of it.

The fame of #thestew, the now-viral recipe for chickpeas in coconut milk and turmeric, felt a bit weird: I know these ingredients; what are white people so excited about?

With 566,000 Instagram followers and legions of fans who make and then photograph her approachable, well-tested recipes — which she then reposts in her own Instagram stories — Roman is successful in part because of her understanding that social media has transformed cooking into a social experience, one that particularly resonates with millennials. It points to how aspirational desire — and the brands that tap into it, whether personal or corporate — can popularize things within that space. Oh, this is one of Alison’s recipes? I want to make it too.

Like the staff of BA, Roman’s appeal doesn’t lie just in what she does, but who she is and what she represents to her audience. She is self-deprecatingly funny, unapologetically opinionated, and, with her signature orangey-red nail polish and bold lipstick, she projects effortless cool. As Michele Moses put it in the New Yorker, “Roman, with her crackling chicken skin and red lips and nails, is libidinous and a little bit mean.” Even Roman’s kitchen, which features prominently enough in her videos to warrant its own treatment, is undeniably appealing, and its organized clutter of Le Creuset pots and hanging plants may as well have its own Pinterest page.

Roman’s loosely white style is mainstream, contemporary food culture right now: Looking through Roman’s cookbooks, Dining In and Nothing Fancy, I noticed how every second page of beautifully shot recipes seemed to feature some “mainstream” American ingredient made new with yuzu kosho or turmeric or chile oil. But even as I found myself poring over the recipes, something felt off. It was the same thing that made the fame of #thestew, Roman’s now-viral recipe for chickpeas in coconut milk and turmeric, feel a bit weird, but also vaguely familiar to me: I know these ingredients; what are white people so excited about?

Is #thestew really just a curry? (Roman has insisted it’s not, but others beg to differ.) And are all curries just stews? It’s precisely the ambiguity of what separates one from the other that makes neat assertions of cultural appropriation unhelpful, but also lets the issue linger. Less important than ascribing a strict lineage, or, worse, the retrogressive idea of cultural ownership, is the question of whether, say, a person of color could have also made a stew featuring chickpeas and turmeric go viral. Aren’t both the perceived novelty and the recipe’s virality tied to the whiteness of its creator?

For her part, Roman feels the success of that recipe was less about her than what preceded it. Talking over the phone while on the road for her book tour several months ago, she suggested her viral success wasn’t unique. “I think if it were Padma Lakshmi or Nigella Lawson or any other person who already has a platform, it could absolutely go viral,” Roman told me. “I think the only reason the stew went viral is because the cookies did.”

Perhaps that’s true, but it does seem worth asking: If a South Asian or Middle Eastern person put forth that mix of ingredients, could it have merely been #thestew, with no other descriptors attached, or would whiteness have forced it to have a name? While it wasn’t Roman who gave #thestew its label, having a thing that draws on a variety of influences, but takes on such a generic, rootless — and yet definitive — name is precisely how whiteness works: positing itself as the norm from which all other things are deviations.

“The sad thing about my cultural background is that I don’t really have one,” Roman told me with a chuckle. It’s a line she had used before, one that evokes the same self-deprecation she employs in her videos. Peering in from the outside, one of the things that seems, well, sort of fun about being white is that way in which things can just be: “Ethnic” fashion is quirky or inventive, spirituality can be a generic mix, and cuisine can simply be food. There’s a sense, too, that the collective output of Bon Appétit takes a similarly obfuscated view: It’s just food, man. I mean, imagine the freedom.

When we spoke, Roman seemed aware of this reality, if only partly. “I absolutely feel whiteness is a factor [in my success] because white privilege is everywhere. That’s not lost on me,” she said. “But I don’t think that has to exist separately from the hard work I’ve put in to create a career for myself and a palate and flavor profile.”

It’s a comment that reads differently now, and the lengthy apology Roman issued for her comments about Teigen and Kondo suggests that she is more aware of the complex relationship between her privilege and her prominence. Still, I don’t think there is much to the idea that Roman’s success is somehow unearned, or even that we aren’t better off for it. Nor do I think that Bon Appétit comes close to the more egregious examples of appropriation and erasure; to the contrary, it increasingly seems to be doing more to educate its audience. Bon Appétit is also hardly the only powerful food media authority to grapple (or not) with whom it chooses to cast as its ambassadors of the global pantry: Scrolling through the New York Times’s cooking section’s 15 of Our Best Vietnamese Recipes and its Mexican at Home recipes, for example, it is impossible not to notice that every single byline is that of an (ostensibly) white writer. And just last week, Momofuku Milk Bar owner Christina Tosi posted a recipe on Instagram for “flaky bread” that, as some commenters quickly pointed out, looked an awful lot like paratha, an Indian flatbread.

But to recognize white privilege is one thing; to actively combat it or resist taking advantage of it is something else altogether. That balance between competing and contradictory ideas is a useful way to think about food media in 2020. It doesn’t help to say that certain people own ingredients, or have dominion over certain types or presentations or techniques. But the way that excitement over particular trends and recipes circulates publicly, whether on Instagram or in Bon Appétit, can reinforce whiteness as a norm, just as divorcing history from food erases the contributions and lives of people of color from Western narratives. When whiteness is allowed to function as if it weren’t that, it hurts us all.

During our interview, Roman pointed out that many home kitchens, particularly in places like the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, now feature such previously so-called exotic ingredients as anchovies, soy sauce, and Aleppo pepper. “The modern way we cook now integrates so many different ingredients that come from so many different places, and I think that’s fucking awesome,” she said.

That seems quite correct, and the last thing anyone should argue is that people shouldn’t use an ingredient in their own home for some abstract fear of “theft.” Instead, the question here is much less about what we do in private than what public representation does and means: if or why it matters when a white person popularizes ghee, or Nashville hot chicken becomes a big thing but the work of African-American cooks and chefs is still ignored. In the circuits of culture, there are routes to legitimacy and fame, and the problem we have in the food world is that the most reliable path seems to center whiteness again and again.

That’s not to say things aren’t changing. It felt symbolic that last year’s BA Thanksgiving extravaganza featured Rick Martinez’s self-described “Mexican-ish” take on stuffing. Fan favorite Andy Baraghani now draws on his Iranian heritage in some dishes, particularly after coming to terms with how he suppressed both his ethnic identity and sexuality. And BA’s more recent hires include Sohla El-Waylly and Priya Krishna, the latter of whom used her profile at BA to augment the launch of her book Indian-ish, a collection of, um, Indian-ish recipes that to my mind is pleasingly inauthentic. In fighting to get their recipes featured, all of these cooks from nonwhite backgrounds are doing the hard work of representation.

Yet Krishna herself believes there is still a long way to go. “I have been told so many times that my Indian food isn’t click-y, that it won’t get page views,” she says in an email, “and then I see white cooks and chefs making dishes that are rooted in Indian techniques and flavors, calling it something different, and getting a lot of attention.”

Her experience speaks to the assumption that food media’s readership is always white, as if the audience is unfamiliar with or intimidated by what, to many of them — to us — are in fact quite ordinary things. “I love that people’s pantries are getting more global,” says Krishna, “but I do hope that when people cook with them, they take the time to educate themselves about the origin of these ingredients, rather than treating them as ingredients in a vacuum, divorced of their context.”

The idea that we need to pay attention to where things come from is certainly true, but it’s a mantra that can take you only so far: If cultural forces like BA or Roman are necessary to popularize new-to-white-people ingredients, then only part of that dynamic changes. In the attention economy, those who garner attention will always have more sway, and even in 2020, the collective unconscious wants what it wants.

What is it that actually captures attention, then? At least one thing is the subconscious desire to emulate BA’s authority or Roman’s cool. In aspiration, desire matters. But that leaves me with another question, one that stalks my thoughts a lot of the time: What might nonwhite aspiration look like?

Real change only happens when the thing that white supremacists fear becomes true: that the mainstream increasingly becomes rather than simply appropriates the “ethnic.”

Thankfully, we already have one answer: Samin Nosrat. Her warmth and seemingly limitless charm, coupled with her encyclopedic knowledge of food, has endeared her to many, and her book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat is a No. 1 New York Times best-seller that became a Netflix series. Nosrat jumps between cultural influences frequently, particularly her own Persian heritage, and her generous, open approach to both food and people has done much to expand the conversation. As Jenny G. Zhang noted on Eater, the image of Nosrat eating with gusto throughout the Netflix series changed the rules for who gets to eat on TV.

Yet Nosrat’s success isn’t only about who she is inherently, but her ability to bridge worlds, to speak about and make comprehensible to the mainstream the assumed difference of minorities and the places and cultures they come from. To paraphrase postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak, it’s indicative of the way in which minorities must contort themselves to ever have any power: They have to manifest it in ways recognizable to those who hold it.

The only way that changes is representation. “As long as staffs of food websites and publications are mostly white, and as long as the leadership of food websites and publications is mostly white,” Krishna says, “everything other than white food will always be seen as the other, as a museum artifact versus someone’s lived experience.”

Even then, representation has its limits. It’s easy for those in the mainstream to cherry-pick the aspects of whatever culture they happen to like that week. Actual change, then, comes up against a difficult paradox: We need to pay attention to where things come from, to focus on their difference, but in order to overcome both fetishization and exploitation, the foreign needs to become domestic.

Rather than simply having people who look like us on our screens or pages, our definition of what is shared needs to change. The polyglot culinary vocabulary that Roman and Krishna evoke must represent a genuine expansion of how we understand food and flavor and, sometimes, culture, too. More simply, real change only happens when the thing that white supremacists fear becomes true: that the mainstream increasingly becomes rather than simply appropriates the “ethnic.” But to speak of a mainstream North American culture that isn’t neatly “white” in both its logic and its aesthetics is to envision something that doesn’t yet exist, and that we don’t know how to articulate.

In the meantime, I find myself searching for food media that reflects me. Yes, as a North American urbanite with a global pantry and a New York Times subscription, Roman’s work certainly fits the bill sometimes. But that quest has also belatedly led me to Ranveer Brar. An established chef with experience in both the U.S. and India, he runs a YouTube channel focusing broadly on Indian cuisine, but mostly food from Brar’s own Punjabi heritage, which I share. A tall, handsome man with a wry presence in front of the camera, Brar likely has his share of fans who are drawn to him by desire, subconscious or otherwise.

But his content is also closed off to people who don’t speak Hindi, and reaffirms my lingering suspicion that some cultural difference is insurmountable: that ideals of kitchens and food and life in Brooklyn and Toronto and New Delhi are different, regardless of how the 21st century has both shrunk and intertwined the world. And it seems these divides will remain until cooks and chefs of color finally push their way into the mainstream. It’s almost as if we’re waiting for something to catch up — that the cuisines and ingredients we’ve become so familiar with now have to sort of seep into our bones, become a part of us, have stories and myth accrete in layers over time.

Aspiration is about wanting, and what I want from food media isn’t a bone thrown in my direction, but simply more: more representation, more diversity, more sense that the mainstream isn’t just accommodating me, but instead making room for me. What I want as we head into the 2020s is — God — isn’t it time yet? I just want more.

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture critic.

Xia Gordon is an Ignatz-nominated cartoonist and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. She grew up in Orlando, FL and graduated from the School of Visual Arts with a BFA in Cartooning & Illustration in 2016.

Disclosure: Chrissy Teigen is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of these shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

via Eater - All https://www.eater.com/2020/5/20/21262304/global-pantry-alison-roman-bon-appetit

Created May 21, 2020 at 05:26AM /huong sen View Google Doc Nhà hàng Hương Sen chuyên buffet hải sản cao cấp✅ Tổ chức tiệc cưới✅ Hội nghị, hội thảo✅ Tiệc lưu động✅ Sự kiện mang tầm cỡ quốc gia 52 Phố Miếu Đầm, Mễ Trì, Nam Từ Liêm, Hà Nội http://huongsen.vn/ 0904988999 http://huongsen.vn/to-chuc-tiec-hoi-nghi/ https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xa6sRugRZk4MDSyctcqusGYBv1lXYkrF

[bountyofbeads]

5% of Congress Was Born Abroad. Those Members Show What It Means to Be American. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/politics/foreign-born-congress-trump.html

5% of Congress Was Born Abroad. Those Members Show What It Means to Be American.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Lola Fadulu | Published July 16, 2019 | New York Times | Posted July 16, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — When President Trump suggested foreign-born Americans should “go back” to the countries they were born in, he may not have realized that his entreaty could clear out five percent of Congress.

In all, 29 members of the House and Senate were born abroad, about half of them to parents serving in the military or working overseas. Republicans like Representatives Mark Meadows of North Carolina, born in an Army hospital in France, and David Rouzer, also of North Carolina and born in an Army hospital in West Germany, mostly stood by the president, who aimed his remarks at four progressive House Democratic women of color, only one of whom was born outside the United States.

“No, I don’t think it’s racist,” Mr. Rouzer said.

But to others, Mr. Trump’s words — which he repeated on Tuesday — hit home in a deeply personal way. Their feelings will be reflected in the resolution the House takes up Tuesday condemning Mr. Trump. Immigrant Democrats will lead the effort on the House floor.

“I first took the oath to support and defend the Constitution when I was 10 years old,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, who was born in Poland and came here when he was six, after his mother met an American journalist. “That’s meant a lot to me all my life.”

Mr. Trump’s “go back” remarks have long been a thread through the fabric of the United States, a nation founded by people who came from somewhere else. In every era, in every generation, and particularly in times of economic anxiety, notions of “the other” have seeped into the American psyche. But no modern president — not even Franklin D. Roosevelt, who ordered the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II — has made such aggressive use of his platform to whip up a fervor about foreigners.

That is making even some Republicans uncomfortable.

Representative Daniel Crenshaw, a freshman Republican from Texas, expressed unease with Mr. Trump’s comments. The former Navy SEAL was born to American parents in Scotland, where his father worked in the oil industry, and also spent part of his childhood in Ecuador and Colombia.

“I don’t agree with the president’s remarks, but that doesn’t mean I accept the rhetoric we hear repeatedly from this group of lawmakers either,” he said in an emailed statement. “As someone who sacrificed for our country and buried too many friends, I find the constantly negative, anti-American comments concerning and tiresome.”

There are 14 members of Congress — all Democrats, 13 in the House and one in the Senate — who became citizens after emigrating to the United States, either through naturalization or a parent’s citizenship. They come from countries like India, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam and Taiwan.

Senator Mazie K. Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, is a naturalized citizen, born in Japan; her mother came to this country fleeing an abusive husband, she said. Representative Jesús “Chuy” García, is a naturalized citizen from Mexico. Representative Adriano Espaillat, Democrat of New York, is a naturalized citizen, born in the Dominican Republic.

“I dream American. I wake up American. I have dinner as an American,” Mr. Espaillat said. “I am a Yankee fan and I love this country. It’s given me a great number of opportunities, including to be a member of Congress. For him to downgrade or even not take into consideration the kind of opportunities that this country gives these folks from all over the world, I think is sad and tragic.”

Far from making them less American, many foreign-born members of Congress said their experiences as children abroad made them far more appreciative of the freedom and opportunity in America than others who have spent little time in countries that lack such gifts.

“I grew up in Latin America at a time when most of the countries were under military dictatorship and soldiers were on corners with machine guns,” said Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut, who was born in Peru. “I think having spent the first 10 years of my life in environments like that has given me an unbelievable appreciation for the freedoms and liberties that we have here.” He said Mr. Trump “just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the United States.”

Some white lawmakers born abroad saw a distinctly racial tinge to Mr. Trump’s singling out of women of color.

“My father got back from the Vietnam War, went to graduate school, and when he and my mom were young newlyweds, got a job outside of Dublin on a cattle feed lot,” said Representative Sean Casten, Democrat of Illinois. “They went over there, lived there for four years, I was born halfway through. No one ever called me an anchor baby.”

One of the 29, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, was born in Canada to an American mother and Cuban father, and is thus considered a “natural born citizen” — a status Mr. Trump questioned during the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, when he suggested that Mr. Cruz “could be tied up in court for two years” if he became the party’s nominee.

At the time, Mr. Cruz brushed it off, saying on Twitter that Mr. Trump had “jumped the shark.” On Monday, many of his Republican colleagues were searching for just the right words to describe what Mr. Trump had said; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s only black Republican, settled on “racially offensive.”

Mr. Cruz was not searching for words. He was zipping toward the senators-only elevator, head down, to avoid questions about it. “I have a longstanding policy that I don’t comment on tweets,” he said, moments before the elevator doors closed.

Mr. Cruz, of course, was not the first politician to have his citizenship questioned by Mr. Trump. Long before he ran for president, Mr. Trump stoked the so-called birther movement to pressure President Barack Obama to prove that he was actually born in the United States and not in Kenya, the birthplace of his father.

This time, Mr. Trump’s comments were directed at the group of Democratic freshmen known on Capitol Hill as “the Squad”: Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts. All have been deeply critical of him. On Tuesday, he misleadingly suggested they have extremely low poll numbers — an apparent reference to a recent survey of white voters with two years or less of college education, a key component of the president’s base.

“Get a list of the HORRIBLE things they have said,” Mr. Trump shouted on Twitter.

Only one of the four, Ms. Omar, was born overseas; she fled war-torn Somalia with her family and spent four years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the United States with her family when she was 12. In an interview in December, she told of how she fended off bullies in school who stuck gum on her scarf, knocked her down stairs and jumped her when she changed clothes for gym class.

On Monday, Ms. Omar fought back.“He’s launching a blatantly racist attack on four duly elected members of the United States House of Representatives, all of whom are women of color,” she said. “This is the agenda of white nationalists, whether it is happening in chat rooms, or it is happening on national TV, and now it’s reached the White House garden.”

Mr. Meadows, one of the president’s closest allies on Capitol Hill, pushed back, saying the real fight was over the president’s policies on the border, which Ms. Omar and the others vociferously oppose.

“He’s not racist,” Mr. Meadows said. “I probably talk to him more than anybody else, and he’s certainly not a racist.”

But to those lawmakers who have been bullied because of the color of their skin, like Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, the president’s remarks were especially painful.

Mr. Krishnamoorthi came to the United States when he was three months old. His father moved to Buffalo to study engineering, and his family lived in public housing and on food stamps before they moved to Peoria, Ill., to start, as Mr. Krishnamoorthi put it, “the golden period in our lives.”

“People lifted you up and embraced you, and that’s America, that will always color my image of America,” he said, reflecting on his childhood. But he said racist heckles and taunts grew more prominent as he became an adult, during road rage situations in traffic and the like.

“I’m an ethnic, religious and a racial minority, and I’m an immigrant,” he said. “When the president says what he says, it hits home in a bigger way.”

Other immigrant lawmakers — at least the Democrats — said Mr. Trump is assailing the very idea of what it means to be an American, among them Representative Raul Ruiz, a doctor and California Democrat who was born in Mexico and is the first Latino to earn three graduate degrees from Harvard University.

“Being American is not defined by color of skin or eyes or hair or any accent,” he said. “Being American is defined by our ideas, by our diversity and by the land that we call home.”

Catie Edmondson and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

[thall49nonfictionproject]

White Trash and Proud?

When I think of stereotypes I think of white trash, trailer trash, Okie or hick, and all that those stereotypical terms entail. These terms are all meant to degrade the person who they are being used on. “You see that piece of white trash over there, she will never have any class.” This is what my family was considered, at least some of them, and what I was considered growing up and into my adult years. We may have been less cultured, poorer, social outcasts as it were, but did this mean that we would never amount to anything other than being trash? If you asked the residents of small-town America who had the proverbial silver spoon in their mouth, that is exactly what it meant.

           Really, it doesn’t help personifying the stereotypes by acting like trash as a teen; being a teenage mother and living in a trailer rounded out my trashy reputation. Working hard over the years to rise above this reputation, caring what others thought, but more so what I thought of myself was quite a challenge. So that snarky mouthed teenager that spewed curse words, bought clothes from Wal-Mart, and always got into fights turned her life around. Somewhat. Now she can use a few ten-dollar words, write a pretty decent story, and is traveling and planning her future after her college graduation. This is a feat that nobody every thought could be reached, and one that is to be celebrated, and rejoiced for some time to come.

           Thinking about personal growth got me wondering about the growth in others and their views on “white trash culture” in the South, so I interviewed some people in my family about how they viewed “white trash” stereotypes, and how they in turn thought they were viewed.

First, we have my husband Jeremy, 37 who comes from a white middle-class family, his parents are still together, and he had an “ideal,” childhood. He has always held a job, does not like change, and is perfectly happy living in his hometown for the rest of his life.

Then my children Kristofer who is 24, and Taylor who is 21, who come from a lower to middle class Native American/Caucasian family, their dad passed away when they were 9 and 6, respectively, and they had a hard childhood being raised by a single mother.

Kristofer has suffered most of his life with bi-polar depression, anger issues, and has been in and out of therapists and mental health facilities. Kristofer has never had many friends at one time, struggled in school until he eventually dropped out and got his GED.

Taylor has not had to struggle with these same demons as his brother, he loved school, has many friends, and is an outgoing young man. He does seem to struggle with some self-esteem issues but is a generally well-rounded man.

Last buy no least, my nephew Benny is 17, and has been raised by several different people, his mother has never worked much, she has had many different partners in and out of her life, which mean they have been in and out of his life as well. Benny has had a rough time of his short life; he is currently living with me and he is doing just fine and turning into a fine young man.

All this personal information about my family is being told to reveal the different backgrounds and personalities of the people being interviewed.

Do     you consider yourself or your family white trash, trailer trash, native     trash?

Kris: No.

Jeremy: No.

Benny: My nuclear family.

Taylor: I do not consider my family trash.

Have     you ever been called a derogatory name that means trashy, or lower class?

Kris: No

Jeremy: No

Benny: Not trashy or lower class.

Taylor: I don’t believe I have.

Do     you label others as trashy or any other stereotypical term that you can     think of that is degrading in anyway? If so, why do you think you did     this?

Kris: Yes, because they were acting like the stereotypes.

Jeremy: No, I treat people the way they should be treated.

Benny: Yes, not necessarily a bad thing though, I call myself trailer trash. Cause I know trailer trash when I see trailer trash.

Taylor: I don’t label them, but I do playfully say it sometimes. Why do I do this? Um…because I’m racist *laughs* I’m not much to use it as hatefulness but as a playful way, and if it gets out of hand, I say I’m sorry.

How     does it make you feel when people label you?

Kris: I don’t care.

Jeremy: Bothers me, but it doesn’t. I just blow it off, I’ve learned to deal with it by now.

Benny: I mean, depends on the context I suppose. I don’t mind it, labels have their purpose.

Taylor: I don’t really offend me, it doesn’t hurt my feelings or anything.

Do     you own your labels or are you ashamed of them?

Kris: I own them/embrace them.

Jeremy: I own them.

Benny: I don’t care.

Taylor: Just a little bit ashamed of them, I guess.

What     do you think the “white trash” stereotype is?

Kris: I believe typical “white trash” people are druggies, dope heads, or just people who live a life of nothing but wrong doings, like women beaters, child molesters, rapist, thieves, physically/mentally abusive people, usually living in disgusting places and don’t care. I consider any color of person I call trashy as someone who’s like that.

Jeremy: Living in a trailer with tons of kids, and a baby on your hip, beat up car because you spend your money elsewhere, yelling and cussing at your neighbors.

Benny: Donald Trump, *laughs*, no I’m kidding, tacky, unpleasant, I think of drugs when I think of trailer trash, that one little plot of trailers behind Wal-Mart.

Taylor: People that have low class, low taste, because they would rather spend their money on other stuff, instead of making themselves look more presentable.

It was nice to see that my children have different views on lower class people than we were brought up with. To them low class people seem to be people who won’t do anything form themselves, not people who make less money because their circumstances are not the same. My generation was taught more that the lower classes included people who would do for themselves, but also those who couldn’t do for themselves. No matter their circumstances or what brought them their they were still looked down on.

           White trash stereotyping is not a new concept in this country. In an article I read on the NPR website by Leah Donella, she states that:

“1853, in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about "white trash people," whom she described as "a class of white people who are, by universal admission, more heathenish, degraded, and miserable" than slaves; "a poor white population as degraded and brutal as ever existed in any of the most crowded districts of Europe."”

In this context Stowe describes white trash in the same context if not worse than slaves further on in the article, Donella references Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, that suggests that white trash of the time period were in fact from indentured slaves, or those brought over to do the work in the new world who were criminals and were no longer wanted in England.

           Stereotyping people seems to be an exercise for ignorant people., but it is not. Many smart, educated people stereotype others and don’t have a second thought about it. Some people just find stereotyping funny I found an internet article by Ben Yakas on the Gothamist website where New York artist Winston Tseng, decided it would be funny to use images of “white trash” to put on the trash cans and label them “Keep NYC Trash Free” (Yakas). However, to some they just are not funny not all people considered “white trash” are bible thumping, Make America Great Again homophobes that eat at Chick-fil-a. See figures 1 and 2 on the next page.

Embracing my white trash side was a journey to becoming the person that I am today. When I come across people that I knew before, people who would talk down to me because they placed me in their trashy girl stereotype, assuming I would never amount to anything, I enjoy bragging about myself and the accomplishments I have made in life. Just when they are really impressed that I have done something with my life, I like to throw a “y’all,” or some other down-home vernacular into the conversation, just to add to their idea of the stereotype that they boxed me into. I just really hate to disappoint. And as shown above this is what people expect of “White Trash” people.

I’m not an ignorant person, but I do find myself being intolerant of other people’s actions at times. When my little sister acts like she has no sense or how to act in polite society, I find myself wanting to chastise her like she is that same trashy teenager that we used to be. I know she is not though. She has lived the same life as me, been to college, raised three kids, and has a brain. She just chooses to present herself differently than I do, so I stereotype her as white trash. Stereotypes as a trope, or as a label in society will never cease to exist, but we can work on making ourselves better as a society by not grouping certain people together in a stereotypical fashion, and just love and accept people for their individual strengths and weaknesses alike.

My hope for the future is that my children can live in a world that is free of stereotypes, one that is accepting of people no matter their status in life. World peace seems like such a trite idea, but if I could have one think for my children that is what I would want World peace and I believe everything else would fall into place. Knowing that we left the world a better place where our children, our grandchildren, and many more generations to come could live in a world of equals, and happiness, would make me the happiest woman alive. So, when the world is at peace we would no longer have need for derogatory terms for people of different races, or stereotypical terms like redneck, white trash, or hick.

    Works Cited

Church, Nate. “'Keep NYC Trash Free' Signs Insult Trump Supporters.” Breitbart, Breitbart News Network, 27 Oct. 2018, www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/10/26/keep-nyc-trash-free-signs-insult-trump-supporters-nyc-garbage-cans/.

Donnella, Leah. “Why Is It Still OK To 'Trash' Poor White People?” NPR, NPR, 1 Aug. 2018, www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/08/01/605084163/why-its-still-ok-to-trash-poor-white-people.

Fox, Kristofer. In person interview. 2 March 2019.

Fox, Taylor. In person interview. 2 March 2019.

Hall, Jeremy. In person interview. 2 March 2019.

Marshall, Benny. In person interview. 2 March 2019.

Yakas, Ben. “Fake Anti-MAGA Sanitation Posters Want To 'Keep NYC Trash Free'.” Gothamist, 24 Oct. 2018, 2:12PM, gothamist.com/2018/10/24/fake_anti-maga_sanitation_posters_w.php.

[duaneodavila]

Making Censorship Respectable Again

For all his twits about Fake News and “Enemy of the People,” Trump hasn’t done more than make noise. Offensive as it may be to denigrate the Fourth Estate as evil, even a president gets to complain about things he dislikes, even if he does so in a way they dislike.

And in fairness, the media hasn’t always helped itself, replacing factual reporting with “advocacy journalism,” the mechanism of telling the news in such a way as to include only those parts the lead the public to the conclusion members of the media believe are “right.” Sometimes this means omitting inconvenient facts. Sometimes it means outright lying. In their defense, advocacy journalists argue that they don’t lie as much as Trump, and their cause is “just,” so no harm, no foul. But it’s not news. It’s not journalism. And Trump does it too.

Democratic candidate for president, Andrew Yang, whose big issue is Universal Basic Income of $1000 per month, payable in dollars rather than Cheetos, has come up with a new proposal: the creation of a position of News and Information Ombudsman. Apparently, the days of calling someone the Czar are over, and Ombudsman seems softer, kinder, as they wield the Ax of Truth.

The problem?

“Fake news” is a rampant problem.  Online media market incentives reward ‘clickbait’ and controversy even as our social media feeds send us more and more outrageous stories to incite a reaction.

The rewards for publishing inflammatory content are high with no real penalty.  At the extreme end, those who wish to misinform the American public can do so with little fear of repercussions.  The lack of trusted news increasingly isolates us in information silos that hurt our democracy.

The key phrase in there is “with no real penalty.” After all, it’s uncontroversial to say “fake news” is a problem, but is the solution to impose a “real penalty”?

We must introduce both a means to investigate and punish those who are seeking to misinform the American public.  If enough citizens complain about a particular source of information and news is demonstrably and deliberately false, there should be penalties.  I will appoint a new News and Information Ombudsman with the power to fine egregious corporate offenders.  One of the main purposes of the Ombudsman will be to identify sources of spurious information that are associated with foreign nationals.  The Ombudsman will work with social media companies to identify fraudulent accounts and disable and punish responsible parties.  The Ombudsman will be part of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

There are two curious components to this proposal. The first is obvious, the idea that the government will be in charge of deciding “true news” from “fake news” at all. Yang graduated from Columbia Law School in 1999, so he must have taken Con Law and, presumably, was there the day they talked about the First Amendment. Of course, he may be of the living Constitution view, so that the freedom of the press is inviolate as long as it’s the right press, because why would the First Amendment protect news that was just wrong?!?

But the second curious piece is that this New Czar (sorry, old habits die hard) wouldn’t require a new law, a new federal agency, any approval of Congress whatsoever. It would be created with the stroke of a pen, maybe a text message, within the existing agency, the Federal Communications Commission. There are already tons of rules and regs, all enforceable at the end of a gun, and surely they could shoehorn the Censor in Chief in there somehow.

Bad idea? Silly idea? Of course it is, and nobody except the kids in the basement eating Cheetos would ever consider Andrew Yang for president, so who cares what he proposes? But this isn’t about Yang getting the nod, or the imminent creation of a New Czar. This is about the Overton Window.

The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse,

For a few years now, the attack on speech has been waged with astounding success. The low-hanging fruit went first, with “hate speech” being the easiest sell, but also tiny slices like “harassment” and “revenge porn” being peeled off by claims of how hurt feelings are traumatic, so something must be done. In other words, this has been building, normalizing, for years.

And finding acceptability on a piecemeal basis, for anyone who would question the criminalization of such horrifying and socially damaging speech is relegated to the Nazi side of the binary. There is no spectrum, anymore, as you’re either a social justice warrior or a racist, sexist, etc. Are you one of those awful “free speech absolutists” who run around using horrible words?

But this is just some whackadoodle named Yang, one of the 435 candidates running for the Dem nomination, so who cares? First, that a proposal of such outrageously unconstitutional dimensions would find its way into a candidate’s platform speaks to where the Overton Window is today. Censorship has gained respectability, at least sufficiently to be part of acceptable political discourse.

But second, it’s not just Yang plus a few crazies with their respective axes to grind. In the New York Times, Sarah Jeong* writes about how Mark Zuckerberg is ready to hand over the “trash botton” at Facebook to someone getting a government paycheck, thus taking the burden off him to do the dirty work and, far more importantly, removing his platform from the line of fire for whatever censorship comes of it. After all, Zuck doesn’t care what gets censored, as long as you keep using Facebook, he gets his ad revenue and he doesn’t have to appear before Congress to explain why he didn’t do more to prevent the Ruskies from buying ads.

Jeong says it’s not going to happen in the United States, even as it’s happening in Europe already, where there is no First Amendment equivalent.

We’re not likely to see a Facebook Supreme Court — not an American one, in any event. The Hays Code died after the First Amendment was extended to movies; a Hays Code for the internet will probably be dead on arrival.

Much as Jeong’s capacity to reason hasn’t improved with her new job, not only is her leap of faith suspect, but her blithe dismissal of a future where some analogue of the the Hays Code isn’t instituted, but applauded by the woke, may be wishful thinking. If the notion of a Censorship Czar can be part of reasonable political discourse, and the powerful like Zuck support it due to enlightened self-interest, not only is it possible, but respectable. After all, you’re not one of those Free Speech Absolutist Nazi racists, sexists who supports hate speech and white supremacy, are you?

*Is this her first by-lined op-ed since her hiring as a member of the Editorial Board, and subsequent castigation for the revelation of her performative twitting about how she hates white men.

Making Censorship Respectable Again republished via Simple Justice

[theconservativebrief]

Republicans currently hold an astonishing two-thirds of the governors’ mansions across the country, giving the GOP an overwhelming advantage in controlling state governments. This year, 26 of those seats are on the ballot.

Forecasts from leading election watchers show about 18 of the most competitive governor races in the 2018 midterm elections are currently Republican-held seats. Democrats finally have a lot of chances to regain some ground.

Beyond the usual issues, there’s one other big reason to pay attention to governors this year: Governors who are elected in 2018 will almost all still be in office in 2021, when the next round of congressional redistricting starts. In many states, governors will wield a veto pen over the new House and state legislative maps.

As in all elections this year, Donald Trump will loom large over the gubernatorial campaigns. In some major races, like Florida, his handpicked candidate is running up against an upstart Democrat who is betting on a big blue wave. Democrats are polling strongly even in states like Ohio, which Trump won by 8 points.

A few seem sure to flip: Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner in Illinois, for example, is considered all but a goner; Democrat J.B. Pritzker has a 16-point lead in the polls, on average. In Michigan, Democratic nominee Gretchen Whitmer has established an impressive 9-point lead in the polling over her Republican opponent to replace the outgoing, unpopular GOP Gov. Rick Snyder.

But a dozen or more other races look like they could go either way. Here they are: 2018’s most competitive gubernatorial races, ranked by the current polling average, according to Real Clear Politics.

Maine: Shawn Moody vs. Janet Mills

Who is the Republican? Business executive Shawn Moody. But outgoing Gov. Paul LePage will loom large over this race. He’s spent his final months in office fighting to block Medicaid expansion, even after the state’s voters approved it in a ballot referendum. He also keeps saying bad things about black and Hispanic people.

Gubernatorial candidate Shawn Moody talks with Michael Tribuzio, an employee of Swan Lake Grocery, while making a campaign visit to Swanville, Maine on August 3, 2018. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Who is the Democrat? Janet Mills, Maine’s attorney general since 2013 and a state lawmaker before that.

How much does the state like Trump? Maine has soured on the president after giving him pretty good marks in his first month in office. Now, according to Morning Consult, his job approval rating is at 55 percent disapproval.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? It’s really all about LePage and Trump. LePage has defined his tenure with vaguely racist sentiments and by viciously opposing Medicaid expansion, which would provide health insurance to 70,000 low-income Mainers. His job approval is just 40 percent after eight years in office, according to Morning Consult.

Mills is positioning herself as a fresh change of pace after eight years of LePage and two years of Trump, promising “a new direction.” Moody is running as a business-friendly conservative with a “common sense” independent streak. But he can only do so much to distance himself from a divisive GOP.

He is also facing tough questions about a sexual discrimination claim filed in 2006 by a woman who worked for one of his companies. Moody settled the complaint, as the New York Times reported this week.

What does the polling say? There is very little polling in Maine, but the one survey we have showed a tie between Moody and Mills. The Cook Political Report rates the race a toss-up.

Nevada: Adam Laxalt vs. Steve Sisolak

Who is the Republican? Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. Another term-limited Republican, Gov. Brian Sandoval, will be leaving office in 2019. Unlike LePage, though, Sandoval is hugely popular. Laxalt, a former US Navy lieutenant, is hoping to pick up where Sandoval left off.

Who is the Democrat? Clark County Commission Chairman Steve Sisolak prevailed in a heated primary to win the Democratic nod for governor.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Steve Sisolak chants with supporters while touring the site of the future Raiders football stadium on June 11, 2018, in Las Vegas. John Locher/AP

How much does the state like Trump? Trump lost Nevada in 2016, and the president doesn’t fare so well in the Silver State now: 52 percent of voters disapprove of him, according to Morning Consult.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Sandoval stayed out of the GOP primary, giving the cold shoulder to Laxalt, with whom he often found himself on opposing sides in policy matters, particularly immigration and health care.

Last December, Sandoval said he would not “support a candidate who seeks to undo what we’ve done the past seven years,” in reference to Laxalt, who took a blow in the polls. Even Laxalt’s extended family opposes the Republican candidate, with two of his cousins hosting a fundraiser for Sisolak, and five more family members attending.

The two candidates may not debate (Sisolak canceled their one scheduled appearance set for October 15). But so far, they’ve been divided on taxes, with Sisolak saying they may need to be raised and Laxalt promising he would never raise them. Immigration is a big issue, as always, in the Southwest.

The expensive and high-profile Nevada Senate race could be an X-factor, driving more voters to the polls, as could the Democratic get-out-the-vote machine built by former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

What does the polling say? It’s impossibly close: Sisolak has just a 0.7-point lead on average, according to Real Clear Politics. Cook Political Report rates it a toss-up.

Georgia: Brian Kemp vs. Stacey Abrams

Who is the Republican? Gov. Nathan Deal cannot seek a third term, so the Republicans have bet on Brian Kemp, Georgia’s secretary of state, to hold his seat.

Getty Images

Who is the Democrat? Stacey Abrams, minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives, has already claimed a victory by becoming the first black female gubernatorial candidate from a major party in the United States.

How much does the state like Trump? Trump’s approval rating has slumped in the Peach State: While Georgia voters were favorable toward the president by a 53-35 margin in 2017, now they are much more evenly divided: 50 percent approve and 45 percent disapprove, according to Morning Consult.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Abrams has attracted maybe more star power in her campaign than any other gubernatorial nominee. R&B star John Legend has closed her public appearances in concert, and almost every Democratic politician of note and/or with national ambitions has endorsed her campaign. She’s betting that a young and diverse electorate can carry her to an unlikely victory.

Kemp is playing to his own base, holding events in rural parts of the state. The outgoing Deal is quite popular — 56 percent approval — so November’s election seems likely to be a collision between Deal’s popularity, Trump’s divisiveness, and Abrams’s unique brand.

Adding to the stakes: Kemp has been accused of suppressing voter registration, putting 53,000 registrations — most of them of black voters — on hold. The nominee has waged a years-long battle against voting rights groups and minority voter registration efforts, using an “exact match” program to approve voter IDs, something that has aggravated minority Georgians and thrust the race into the national spotlight.

What does the polling say? Kemp consistently ekes out a narrow lead — currently averaging a 1.4-point advantage, per Real Clear Politics — but it’s also consistently close. The Cook Political Report rates the race as a toss-up.

Kansas: Kris Kobach vs. Laura Kelly

Who is the Republican? Kris Kobach edged out incumbent Gov. Jeff Colyer in the GOP primary. The deeply divisive secretary of state of Kansas has been a leading immigration hawk for years, and he ran Trump’s much-ridiculed voter fraud commission.

Who is the Democrat? Laura Kelly, 68, has been a member of the Kansas Senate since 2005.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Laura Kelly is congratulated by supporters at her campaign party in Topeka moments after she won the Democratic primary on August 07, 2018. Travis Heying/Wichita Eagle/TNS via Getty Images

How much does the state like Trump? Not as much as one would think. As in Georgia, Kansans have fallen steadily out of love with the president, with his net approval dropping from +24 in January 2017 to just +4 in 2018.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Truly, what is the matter with Kansas? Things are strange here. Despite being a Democrat, Kelly has attracted the backing of key state Republicans, including former GOP Gov. Bill Graves, endorsing a Democratic candidate for the first time ever. The state budget has been in crisis for years now after Sam Brownback’s disastrous economic policies.

Kobach, though, is sticking to the Trumpist base. His conservative credentials on immigration and voter fraud particularly are the foundation of his campaign. Yet, with Trump’s low-ish approval ratings in the state, that’s a problem for Kobach as much as it helps him. The question is how many crossover voters there really are.

What does the polling say? It’s incredibly close. Kobach and Kelly have traded 1-point leads in the most recent surveys. The presence of a credible independent candidate, Greg Orman, who ran for Senate in 2014 and who’s getting 10 percent of the vote in the polling, adds another wrinkle. Cook rates it a toss-up.

Wisconsin: Scott Walker vs. Tony Evers

Who is the Republican? Incumbent Gov. Scott Walker, residing in the governor’s mansion since 2011, is looking at a third term after a brief presidential campaign stunt two years ago. Wisconsin Republicans like to think he is unbeatable, but 2018 will be the biggest test for an incumbent who already won a recall election and one reelection.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and President Trump arrive at a groundbreaking for the Foxconn plant on June 28, 2018 in Mt. Pleasant, Wis. Brian Cassella/Chicago Tribune/TNS via Getty Images

Who is the Democrat? Walker’s challenger is Tony Evers, a 66-year-old cancer survivor who has been the state schools superintendent for the last decade.

How much does the state like Trump? Trump is sagging in the Badger State, with 54 percent of Wisconsin voters disapproving of his job performance. Just 42 percent approve.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Walker has built a long, conservative record as governor, most notably the union crackdown that prompted the recall effort against him in 2011. He is presently trying to institute work requirements and drug testing for Medicaid. A divisive economic development project for multinational FoxConn, undertaken in tandem with the Trump administration, will also be a major issue in the November general election.

Evers isn’t a particularly strong candidate, but he is a familiar face with a long record of public service. Trump is also unpopular, Democrats have won some stunning special election victories here, and the party is eager to oust Walker after two prior failures. If Wisconsinites are looking for change in the Trump era, that could be the best chance for Democrats to beat Walker.

What does the polling say? Evers is polling well, building up Democratic hopes that they can finally extinguish the Walker boogeyman. He currently has a 2-point average lead, per RCP. Cook rates it a toss-up.

Ohio: Mike DeWine vs. Richard Cordray

Who is the Republican? Incumbent Gov. John Kasich is term-limited. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine, a former US senator, is the Republican running to replace him.

Who is the Democrat? Richard Cordray, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Obama. The wonky, progressive wing of the party — the Elizabeth Warren wing, you could say — loves him.

Former President Barack Obama speaks during a campaign rally for Ohio Gubernatorial candidate Richard Cordray, on September 13, 2018 in Cleveland, Ohio. Angelo Merendino/Getty Images

How much does the state like Trump? Ohio was one of four states — along with New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Nevada — in which Trump had a double-digit positive net approval rating at the time of his inauguration that has now dropped to a negative score. He’s at 46 percent approval, 49 percent disapproval.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? History is repeating itself: The two candidates first competed to be Ohio’s attorney general back in 2010, with DeWine defeating the incumbent Cordray by a narrow 2-point margin in a GOP wave year. They find themselves in another toss-up race.

But this gubernatorial campaign doesn’t promise many surprises. DeWine and Cordray have a combined 63 years in the public eye, and they’ve each focused on the same strengths they have for decades now in all three debates they appeared in: health care and consumer protection for Cordray, crime and business development for DeWine. The opioid crisis has hit the Buckeye State especially hard too, in one of the rare Republican Medicaid expansion states.

DeWine is trying to keep some distance from Trump — the popular Kasich has notoriously been one of the president’s biggest GOP critics — portraying himself as the GOP’s “adult in the room” to set himself apart during some of the president’s more imprudent moments.

What does the polling say? Ohio took a strong red turn in 2016, but Cordray looks competitive. He’s currently holding a 2.4-point lead on average in the polls. Ohio would be a monumental win for Democrats after the Buckeye State swung so hard toward Trump; Cook says it’s a toss-up.

South Dakota: Kristi Noem vs. Billie Sutton

Who is the Republican? Again, incumbent Gov. Dennis Daugaard cannot seek reelection, leaving US Rep. Kristi Noem to battle for the seat.

Rep. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), speaks during a news conference in the Capitol after the House passed the the GOP’s tax reform bill on November 16, 2017. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Who is the Democrat? Billie Sutton, the state Senate minority leader and a former professional bronco rider.

How much does the state like Trump? Still a whole lot. The state witnessed one of the lowest decreases in Trump’s total approval rate (from 54 to 51 percent in two years), but the president’s dissenters also slightly rose in numbers, nearly hitting 45 percent. Trump carried the state by nearly 36 points in 2016.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Noem, a proven winner in South Dakota elections, agrees with the president on 92.1 percent of the votes in the House. She is a Republican woman looking for a promotion in a year so far defined more by the enthusiasm of Democratic women.

Sutton strongly supported Clinton two years ago. He is considered a moderate Democrat — for gun rights and against abortion, per VoteSmart.org — and is campaigning with a moving personal narrative after a rodeo accident 11 years ago left him in a wheelchair.

What does the polling say? Though a poll more than a year ago saw Noem 13 points ahead of Sutton, the Democratic nominee seems to have covered a lot of ground in 12 months, recently polling 3 points ahead of the GOP candidate. Previously leaning Republican, the state is now rated a toss-up by Cook.

Iowa: Kim Reynolds vs. Fred Hubbell

Who is the Republican? After Trump nominated Gov. Terry Branstad to become the US ambassador to China following his election in 2016, Lieutenant Gov. Kim Reynolds assumed the position. Moving to the general election unchallenged in the primary, Reynolds is now looking to win outright as the first female governor of the state.

Who is the Democrat? Businessman Fred Hubbell. He is looking to unseat Reynolds after cruising through an easy Democratic primary, in which he won more than 55 percent of the vote.

Fred Hubbell, Democratic candidate for governor of Iowa, speaks to supporters at a get-out-the-vote rally on October 8, 2018 in Des Moines, Iowa. Scott Olson/Getty Images

How much does the state like Trump? Trump carried the state in 2016 with the largest margin by a Republican president since Ronald Reagan. But now, just 44 percent of Iowa voters approve of his job performance.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Local media have long predicted this would be the state’s most expensive gubernatorial race to date: Hubbell is a strong fundraiser, and Reynolds promised to be a well-funded incumbent.

Democrats have looked unexpectedly strong in Iowa in 2018, where they could also pick up several House seats. Hubbell is pouring a lot of his own money into the campaign, and it’s paid off; the Cook Political Report previously put the governor race in the Lean Republican column, but now it’s considered a toss-up,

What does the polling say? Hubbell has built a 3.5-point average lead in the polls, according to RCP.

Oregon: Kate Brown vs. Knute Buehler

Who is the Republican? The last Republican governor in Oregon was elected in 1982. Knute Buehler, currently in the Oregon House of Representatives, could make some history.

Oregon gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler speaks during a news conference in Portland, Ore on Sept. 19, 2012. Don Ryan/AP

Who is the Democrat? Kate Brown got the job in 2015 after John Kitzhaber resigned. Her win in Oregon’s special election the following year made her the first openly LGBTQ person to be elected a US governor. She now seeks a full second term.

How much does the state like Trump? Oregon, as solidly blue as states come in presidential elections, doesn’t really like Trump: The president has a 38-percent approval rating. Buehler has notably positioned himself as a moderate GOP to put some distance between himself and some of Trump’s most conservative, controversial views.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Oregon is a good reminder that, whatever the national environment, the state of the state will have a big impact on these elections too.

Brown has been criticized by Republican s for a “low-profile leadership” and for failing to provide solutions for the state’s ongoing homelessness crises and a pension program with $22 billion in debt. Her approval rating is just 44 percent, with 41 percent disapproving.

Buehler diverges from the typical Republican on some issues, vouching he’ll protect abortion rights and same-sex marriage and increase the standard of living — all in a state that sees a big discrepancy between big cities like Portland and farming communities in the rural areas.

What does the polling say? Brown can’t seem to break out of a narrow lead over Buehler, clinging to a 3.7-point lead in the polling average, but Cook still says the race leans toward the Democrats.

Florida: Ron DeSantis vs. Andrew Gillum

Who is the Republican? Incumbent Gov. Rick Scott’s second term has ended, so he’s decided to take a shot at the Senate next. Ron DeSantis, a three-time congressman who personally lobbied Trump for an endorsement, is running to replace him.

Who is the Democrat? Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum. Before assuming office in 2014, he served on the Tallahassee City Commission, first elected at age 23.

Andrew Gillum, the Democratic candidate for Florida Governor, greets people during a campaign rally on August 31, 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

How much does the state like Trump? Florida is always evenly divided, and Trump’s 49 percent approval/47 percent disapproval ratings reflect that.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? DeSantis is all-in on Trump, airing ads of he and his daughter building the president’s wall with Mexico and his son wearing a “Make America Great Again” onesie. He’s also dealt with constant questions about his associations with white nationalists.

Gillum, on the other hand, is the first black Floridian to be nominated for governor. He already had the backing of Bernie Sanders and, more recently, received former President Barack Obama’s blessing. His campaign is haunted by an FBI investigation into corruption in Tallahassee (Gillum has not been implicated), but as a young, exciting candidate who could motivate less-frequent voters, his campaign is a good proxy for the scale of Democratic voter enthusiasm in 2018.

What does the polling say? Gillum has polled strongly, with a slim but persistent lead. It works out to an average 3.7 point advantage, per RCP. Another toss-up, according to Cook.

New Mexico: Steve Pearce vs. Michelle Lujan Grisham

Who is the Republican? Republican Gov. Susana Martinez is leaving office, so US Rep. Steve Pearce has stepped up to keep New Mexico’s governor seat in the party’s control.

Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), participates in a scrimmage between Republican team members at the Washington Nationals Youth Baseball Academy on June 13, 2016. Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call

Who is the Democrat? Another member of the House and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus: Michelle Lujan Grisham is the Democratic nominee.

How much does the state like Trump? Hard pass. New Mexico is currently ranked as the state with the largest drop in Trump’s net approval rate since his inauguration: 31 points down to just a 34 percent approval rating. And that’s after Hillary Clinton beat Trump pretty easily here in 2016.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Democrats should have the edge here: New Mexico is becoming more blue in the Trump era, and Martinez isn’t a very popular outgoing governor, with just a 35 percent approval rating. Lujan Grisham is a solid candidate who has won her elections to the House with ease.

Pearce is trying to walk a line, like so many Republicans in the midterms, between not abandoning Trump (for fear the conservative base would then abandon him) while reassuring his voters that he won’t hesitate to challenge the president when circumstances demand it.

Whichever case, both candidates expressed concern over the same issues during their debate in September, stressing the importance of reviving the state economy. New Mexico has the second-highest rate of poverty after Mississippi.

What does the polling say? Lujan Grisham has a comfortable lead against Pearce, polling an average 7.4 points ahead of him, according to RCP.

Connecticut: Ned Lamont vs. Bob Stefanowski

Who is the Republican? Trump-endorsed Bob Stefanowski, another mega-businessman and former executive of firms like General Electric, UBS, and Dollar Financial Group.

Who is the Democrat? Connecticut doesn’t have governor term limits, but incumbent Dannel Malloy has decided to retire. Ned Lamont, a Greenwich city official and former Senate nominee, has instead taken his place as the Democratic standard-bearer.

Democratic Party candidate Ned Lamont, speaks to the media after a gubernatorial debate at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Conn., on Sept. 26, 2018. Jessica Hill/AP

How much does the state like Trump? Less than 40 percent of the state backs Trump in this solidly blue state. But voters have also turned against Malloy after eight years of Democratic rule; he has one of the worst approval ratings in the country.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? The state’s biggest issue in this election is its slow-growth economy, so there’s no surprise both candidates have focused on tackling it in their respective platforms. Stefanowski, with his strong business background that’s made him millions, has vaguely said he’ll “root out government waste,” while Lamont has provided a more detailed agenda in how he’ll reform state taxes.

Lamont has already lost a few elections here, though, including a former bid for governor. However, the state’s Democratic races in the House are looking very strong — with FiveThirtyEight giving Republicans virtually no chance of winning a seat — so Lamont could benefit from voter enthusiasm to defeat Stefanowski.

What does the polling say? The latest poll gave Lamont an 8-point lead over his GOP opponent. Cook, though, ranks the race as a toss-up.

Alaska: Bill Walker vs. Mike Dunleavy vs. Mark Begich

Who is the Republican? Mike Dunleavy, who has been a member of the Alaska Senate since 2013.

Who is the Democrat? Former US Sen. Mark Begich, who has also served as mayor of Anchorage, the state’s largest city.

Oh wait, who is the independent incumbent? Gov. Bill Walker, the only independent governor in the United States, is seeking a second term.

Alaska Gov. Bill Walker poses for a photo before the start of a gubernatorial candidate forum on Oct. 2, 2018, in Juneau, Alaska. Becky Bohrer/AP

How much does the state like Trump? Alaskans have mellowed on Trump since the 2016 election, when Trump beat Hillary Clinton by double digits, but 48 percent of Alaskans still hold a positive view of the president, per Morning Consult.

What’s interesting about this race, anyway? Winter is coming for Walker, who is deeply unpopular. Only 29 percent of the state’s voters approve of his job performance, according to Morning Consult. A surge in property crime and financial troubles for the state’s unique quasi-universal basic income program have hampered Walker’s standing in the state.

Alaska is one of the GOP’s best chances to reclaim a governor’s seat: Cook Political Report rates the race Lean Republican. Democrats and independents in the state are worried that a split vote between Begich and Walker could leave a wide opening for Dunleavy to get elected, even with well under 50 percent of the vote.

What does the polling say? Dunleavy is the clear frontrunner in the race, edging out Walker and Begich by more than 15 points in every poll that has been conducted so far, per RCP. But Alaska is notoriously hard to survey, and the three-way nature of the race makes it more unpredictable. Cook considers it a toss-up.

Original Source -> The 13 most important governor elections in 2018, briefly explained

via The Conservative Brief

[atthevogue]

“Bagdad Cafe” (1987)

The basics: Wiki | IMDb | Ebert

Opened: Percy Adlon’s Bavarian-housefrau-in-the-desert comedy Bagdad Cafe opened at the Vogue on Friday, September 16, 1988. It played once a day for one week, and as far as I can tell, never screened in Louisville again.

Also on the bill: During the six days it was showing in Louisville, it played with the 1987 Italian drama The Family. Both were shooed out the following week for Louis Malle’s acclaimed Au Revoir Les Enfants (and also for James Fox’s much  less acclaimed White Mischief).

What did the paper say? ★★1/2 in the Courier-Journal, though this was another one outsourced to Janet Maslin at the New York Times. She said it was “too slow-paced to work as a comedy” and “simultaneously shapeless and pat,” but praised Marianne Sagebrecht’s performance as Jasmine, the German tourist who befriends C.C.H. Pounder’s Brenda, the harried owner of a roadside diner in the Mojave Desert.

What was I doing? I was eight years old. Even if I could’ve seen it (the nudity makes it unlikely), I’d have been bored. This is potentially something I could have rented in high school. But it didn’t even look like it was on cable that often, based on the listings.

Like Lair of the White Worm, which also screened for one week a few months later, considering Bagdad Cafe in the context of the Vogue Theater in 1988 is to consider some very low numbers. There’s no way that more than a handful of people saw this during the week. The lukewarm review in the C-J didn’t inspire much confidence (the local critic didn’t bother writing about it), there were no ads in the paper, and word-of-mouth only goes so far if it’s playing for one weekend. I’d be curious who turned out, but these are the sorts of the facts that are lost to historic record. Maybe some German ex-pats who saw anything playing in German. Percy Adlon didn’t have the devoted following that some of his West German colleagues like Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders had, but perhaps there were a few film nerds who loved the New German Cinema and turned up out of curiosity. So for six screenings, maybe we’re looking at about a hundred people, max.

This is the kind of movie that falls by the wayside in the United States, although apparently it was enough of a hit in Germany that the real Bagdad Cafe in California, where the movie was filmed, remains a tourist destination for Germans to this day. It’s funny in a low-key way, and it’s got the sort of aimless ‘80s indie weirdness that feels charming viewed thirty years later. Fuzzy aimlessness onscreen was in a transitional state in the ‘80s, I think: less grim or politically fraught than the ‘70s version (a la Altman), and not quite as self-aware or studied as the ‘90s version (a la Kevin Smith).

The movie begins with a series of low, flashy shots and untranslated German dialogue between Jasmine and her soon-to-be former husband, who abandons her in the desert after an argument. It’s stylized to the point where it seems almost like a hip trailer. It’s kind of hard to say what Adlon had in mind for the movie, as far as whether he’s making a cool hipster curiosity or a sweet and cuddly tale of friendship and love. His MTV-influenced camerawork and minimalist dialogue would seem to indicate the former, while the title track is a bubbly harmonica ballad that suggests the latter.

It’s not really a movie with any big ideas, which is kind of refreshing. Adlon and his partner Eleonore, who co-wrote it, seems to regard the oddball small-town Southwestern community as a type of racially integrated paradise inhabited by outcasts and eccentrics, African-American, Hispanic and Native. The characters’ primary problem is not poverty, lack of social services or racism, but a sort of good-natured aimlessness that can be set right by a little bit of stoic German know-how. Jasmine and Brenda are at loggerheads at the beginning -- Jasmine, a provincial German hick, has a weird, racist fantasy about being boiled in a stew initially (!), and Brenda is pretty provincial herself, instantly suspicious enough of this German woman to call the local sheriff (!!). 

Eventually, though, they build a relationship over time that blossoms into a professional partnership. Jasmine tidies everything up, and more importantly, picks up some magic tricks from a kit left in her husband’s suitcase. By the end, the diner has a floor show that’s made it a destination for truckers and tourists. The warmth and eccentricity reminds me much less of a brutal quasi-nihilist like Fassbinder than someone like Jonathan Demme. Proto-Andersonian character-focused whimsy was in ample supply during the period, though, so I don’t know if this one made much of an impression nationally (and certainly not locally). Not all of these could become cult films, I suppose.

A lot of German filmmakers seemed to be fascinated by the United States in the 1970s and ‘80s, like Wim Wenders, whose Paris, Texas deals with some of these ideas a little bit more effectively. I wonder how a reversed Bagdad Cafe would play today, now that the roles have partially reversed from the 1980s: United States is a tired, decaying superpower in decline, and Germany often seems to be the last best hope of democracy. What would a displaced Texan tourist bring to a community of people in Berlin or Frankfurt or small-town Bavaria? Not in the familiar way of a free-spirited American liberating a bunch of uptight Germans (though, to some extent, that’s what happens here: Jasmine is able to let her inner magician/cabaret star shine in this free-spirited environment). 

Rather, made from a German perspective, what would such a tourist learn from the community? Would she toss aside her stubborn, contrarian individualism and embrace the communitarian ethos of an efficient and cosmopolitan society? Would something about her sense of independence, in fact, assist in the communitarian German project? It’s Jasmine’s firm but humanitarian sense of order and discipline that liberates the people of the Bagdad Cafe from their own ennui and frustration. Her Germanness allows the Americans to be all the more American: happy, successful, idiosyncratic, fun-loving, harmonious. Could Americanness allow a German community to become more German?

Who knows what anyone seeing Bagdad Cafe at the Vogue thought about any of this. Socio-cultural considerations, aside, there was such a rich vein of this kind of movie in the 1980s, as I noted before. My guess is that, compared to other charming culture-clash character studies like Local Hero or Down by Law, Bagdad Cafe got lost in the shuffle. The fact that any small, independent movie was able to find any kind of audience nationally when in many cases it showed in a city for just a single week is sort of miraculous.

[foursprout-blog]

Hillary: Trump Voters "Didn't Like Black People Getting Rights" or "Women Getting Jobs"

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/hillary-trump-voters-didnt-like-black-people-getting-rights-or-women-getting-jobs/

Hillary: Trump Voters "Didn't Like Black People Getting Rights" or "Women Getting Jobs"

Taking a break from her girls’ trip to India with top aide Huma Abedin and an unknown blonde woman, Hillary Clinton told a Mumbai audience that Americans don’t “deserve” Donald Trump as President, and that Trump voters hate black people, women, and Indian Americans.

“I would have to say, no, we did not deserve that,” said Clinton at the Saturday event, adding “He ran the first reality TV campaign and he was the first reality TV candidate.”  

“If you watch reality TV, you know it means that the person who is the most outrageous, the person who says the politically incorrect things, the person who’s insulting and attacking, drives big ratings,” said the failed presidential candidate. 

Hillary then called Trump voters racists and misogynists: 

…I won the places that represent 2/3 of America’s gross domestic product. So I won the areas that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign “Make America Great Again,” was looking backwards.

You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t wanna see that Indian American succeeding more than you are. 

Bitter Hillary Clinton suggests to audience in Mumbai, India that voters who supported Trump in 2016 did so because they “didn’t like black people getting rights,” or women getting jobs. pic.twitter.com/bJGkvMhEHS

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) March 12, 2018

Perhaps Clinton – whose “charitable” foundation paid top executive women $190,000 less than men, and had an average gender pay gap of $81,000 – forgot that black unemployment recently hit at an all time low under President Trump. But hey, all the racist Trump voters are why she lost…

Speaking of excuses, the Daily Mail has created a handy list of all the other reasons Hillary failed to win the White House that’s simply too comprehensive not to share:

JAMES COMEY

Clinton is furious that Comey, then the FBI director, publicly revealed the re-opening of the secret email server investigation just before election day – and has said so time after time after time.

THE FBI  

Comey’s entire organization does not escape her wrath. 

‘The FBI wasn’t the Federal Bureau of Ifs or Innuendoes. Its job was to find out the facts,’ she writes in What Happened.

VLADIMIR PUTIN

‘There’s no doubt in my mind that Putin wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,’ she told USA Today in September last year while promoting What Happened. 

It was hardly a new theme. As early as December the New York Times obtained audio in which she told her donors: ‘Putin publicly blamed me for the outpouring of outrage by his own people, and that is the direct line between what he said back then and what he did in this election.’  

THE RUSSIANS

Putin’s entire apparatus gets a name-check. In May she told the Codecon convention how ‘1,000 Russian agents’ had filled Facebook with ‘fake news’.

She told NPR ‘my path toward November was being disrupted with Russians’.

WIKILEAKS 

The ‘transparency website’ is consistently ranked along with Comey by Clinton at the top of her blame list.

She told NPR : ‘Unfortunately the Comey letter, aided to great measure by the Russian WikiLeaks, raised all those doubts again.’

And she writes of its founder Julian Assange in What Happened: ‘In my view, Assange is a hypocrite who deserves to be held accountable for his actions.’

LOW INFORMATION VOTERS

‘You put yourself in the position of a low information voter, and all of a sudden your Facebook feed, your Twitter account is saying, “Oh my gosh, Hillary Clinton is running a child trafficking operation in Washington with John Podesta.”,’ she told the Codecon convention in May.

‘Well you don’t believe it but this has been such an unbelievable election, you kind of go, ‘Oh maybe I better look into that.”

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

‘We have an electoral college problem. It’s an anachronism,’ she told Vox. 

ANTI-AMERICAN FORCES

‘I think it’s important that we learn the real lessons from this last campaign because the forces that we are up against are not just interested in influencing our elections and our politics, they’re going after our economy and they’re going after our unity as a nation,’ she told Codecon in May.

‘What is hard for people to really accept – although now after the election there’s greater understanding – is that there are forces in our country – put the Russians to one side – who have been fighting rear guard actions for as long as I’ve been alive because my life coincided with the Civil Rights movement, with the women’s rights movement, with anti-war protesting, with the impeachment.

EVERYONE WHO ASSUMED SHE WOULD WIN

‘I was the victim of a very broad assumption that I was going to win,’ she told the Codecon convention.

BAD POLLING NUMBERS

Clinton says polls in key states did not serve her. 

‘I think polling is going to have to undergo some revisions in how they actually measure people,’ she told the Codecon convention.

‘How they reach people. The best assessments as of right now are that the polling was not that inaccurate, but it was predominantly national polling and I won nationally.’

BARACK OBAMA 

Clinton has two beefs with Obama: one of them being that he won two terms. Clinton says that succeeding an incumbent is almost impossible for a Democrat.

‘No non-incumbent Democrat had run successfully to succeed another two-termer since Vice President Martin Van Buren won in 1836,’ she writes in What Happened.

But she also says his response to the Russian campaign of interference wasn’t enough.

‘I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack,’ she writes in What Happened. 

WHITE WOMEN

‘I believe absent Comey, I might’ve picked up 1 or 2 points among white women,’ she told Vox in September.

‘White woman… are really quite politically dependent on their view of their own security and their own position in society what works and doesn’t work for them.’

THE NEW YORK TIMES

The newspaper was blamed as early as May at the Codecon conference in Rancho Palos Verde, California.

She singled out its managing editor Dean Baquet – the paper’s most senior editor – and said of coverage of her email issue under his direction: ‘They covered it like it was Pearl Harbor.’

JOE BIDEN

Biden could have run against her and didn’t. But Clinton writes: ‘Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 ‘did not talk about what it always stood for—and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.’

‘I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.’

BERNIE SANDERS

‘His attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s ‘Crooked Hillary’ campaign,’ she writes in What Happened.

‘I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not.’

BERNIE BROS 

‘Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist,’ she writes in What Happened. 

PEOPLE WANTING CHANGE

‘I thought, at end of day, people would say, look, we do want change, and we want the right kind of change, and we want change that is realistic and is going to make difference in my life and my family’s life and my paycheck,’ she told Vox.

‘That’s what I was offering. And I didn’t in any way want to feed into this, not just radical political argument that was being made on other side, but very negative cultural argument about who we are as Americans.’

MISOGYNISTS

Asked by CNN’s Christine Amanpour at the Women for Women International event in new York in May if misogyny was to blame she said: ‘Yes, I do think it played a role.’  

TELEVISION EXECUTIVES

‘When you have a presidential campaign and the total number of minutes on TV news, which is still how most people get their information, covering all of our policies, climate change, anything else was 32 minutes, I don’t blame voters,’ she told The View.

‘They don’t get a broad base of information to make decision on. The more outrageous you are, the more inflammatory you are, the higher the ratings are.’

NETFLIX

Hillary does not do Netflix and chill – or if she does, she doesn’t find it very relaxing.

‘Eight of the top 10 political documentaries on Netflix were screeds against President Obama and me,’ she claimed at the Codecon convention.

FACEBOOK

‘If you look at Facebook the vast majority of the news items posted were fake. They were connected to as we now know the 1,000 Russian agents who were involved in delivering those messages,’ she told Codecon.

TWITTER

Usually mentioned in the same breath as Facebook, the micro-blogging site is seen by Clinton as one of the reasons for her loss. 

She told the Codecon convention in may that Trump had a method in his tweets.

‘They want to influence your reality. That to me is what we’re up against, and we can’t let that go unanswered,’ she said.

CONTENT FARMS IN MACEDONIA

‘Through content farms, through an enormous investment in falsehoods, fake news, call it what you will – lies, that’s a good word too – the other side was using content that was flat out false,’ she told the Codecon convention in May. 

‘They were conveying this weaponized information and the content of it, and they were running, y’know there’s all these stories, about y’know, and you know I’ve seen them now, and you sit there and it looks like you know sort of low level CNN operation, or a fake newspaper.’

CAMPAIGN FINANCE

‘You had Citizens United come to its full fruition.’ she told Codecon in May.

‘So unaccountable money flowing in against me, against other Democrats, in a way that we hadn’t seen and then attached to this weaponized information war.

THE MEDIA

‘American journalists who eagerly and uncritically repeated whatever WikiLeaks dished out during the campaign could learn from the responsible way the French press handled the hack of Macron,’ she writes in What Happened. 

Now-president Macron had a massive tranche of his emails hacked and released shortly before the French voted. Many outlets did not report on their contents.  

STEVE BANNON AND BREITBART

‘Provided the untrue stories,’ she told the Codecon convention in May. 

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 

‘I set up my campaign and we have our own data operation. I get the nomination. So I’m now the nominee of the Democratic Party. I inherit nothing from the Democratic Party,’ Clinton said told the Codecon convention in May.

 ‘I mean, it was bankrupt. It was on the verge of insolvency. Its data was mediocre to poor, nonexistent, wrong. I had to inject money into it.’

THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

The Republicans were far better prepared for a campaign than the Democrats she claimed, when it came to money and data, telling the Codecon convention: ‘So Trump becomes the nominee and he is basically handed this tried and true, effective foundation.’ 

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA

The data-targeting firm ultimately owned by Robert Mercer, the billionaire Breitbart backer, and his family, is said to have targeted voters to drive them away from Clinton.

‘They ultimately added something and I think again we’d better understand that. The Mercers did not invest all that money for their own amusement,’ she told the Codecon convention.

WOMEN PROTESTERS

The massive demonstrations in Washington and other cities in the wake of the election were organized as an immediate response to Clinton’s shock defeat.

But that did not stop Clinton from writing in What Happened: ‘I couldn’t help but ask where those feelings of solidarity, outrage and passion had been during the election.’

MATT LAUER

The NBC Today show anchor quizzed both candidates at a ‘commander-in-chief forum’ on board Intrepid in New York. 

But Clinton – who went first in the back-to-back interviews, complained about Lauer focusing on her secret server and whether it raised questions over her trustworthiness.

‘Lauer had turned what should have been a serious discussion into a pointless ambush. What a waste of time,’ she writes in What Happened. She later delighted in his firing for sexual misconduct, saying in December: ‘Every day I believe more in karma.’ 

WHITE VOTERS

‘White voters have been fleeing the Democratic party ever since Lyndon Johnson predicted they would,’ she told Vox.  

DEMOCRATIC DOCUMENTARY MAKERS 

‘We’re not making the documentaries that we’re going to get onto Netflix,’ she told Codecon.

She was asked by the interviewer: ‘This is because Hollywood isn’t liberal enough?’

‘No, it’s because Democrats aren’t putting their money there,’ she replied. 

BENGHAZI INVESTIGATORS

The attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in the Libyan city of Benghazi on September 11, 2012, happened when Clinton was Secretary of State. It claimed four American lives, and was the focus of intense investigation by Congress.  

Clinton told the Today show: ‘Take the Benghazi tragedy – you know, I have one of the top Republicans, Kevin McCarthy, admitting we’re going to take that tragedy – because, you know, we’ve lost people, unfortunately, going back to the Reagan administration, if you talk about recent times, in diplomatic attacks.

‘But boy, it was turned into a political football. And it was aimed at undermining my credibility, my record, my accomplishments.’

VOTER SUPPRESSION

Suppressing her voters was named by Clinton as one of the major factors in her defeat in her interview on the Today show when she rattled off her laundry list. ‘What was at work here?’ she said.

‘In addition to the mistakes that I made, which I recount in the book, what about endemic sexism and misogyny, not just in politics but in our society, what about the unprecedented action of the FBI director,  what about the interference of an adversary nation, what about voter suppression?’ 

It was a return to a theme – she suggested it was a problem in Wisconsin in an interview in May with New York magazine.

‘I would have won had I not been subjected to the unprecedented attacks by Comey and the Russians, aided and abetted by the suppression of the vote, particularly in Wisconsin,’ she said. 

‘Republicans learned that if you suppress votes you win.’

MITCH McCONNELL

The Senate majority leader is accused of stopping the Obama administration from revealing what Clinton says the Russians were up to, helping tip the balance against her because he did not want a third successive Democratic term in the White House.  

‘Mitch McConnell, in what I think of as a not only unpatriotic but despicable act of partisan politics, made it clear that if the Obama Administration spoke publicly about what they knew [on Russia], he would accuse them of partisan politics, of trying to tip the balance toward me,’ she told the New Yorker.   

THE SUPREME COURT

Clinton claims the Supreme Court watered down the Voting Rights Act at the Codecon convention.

‘You had effective suppression of votes,’ she said.

‘I was in the senate when we voted 98-0 under a Republican president, George W Bush, to extend the Voting Rights Act and the Supreme Court says ‘oh we don’t need it any more’ , throws it out, and Republican governors and legislatures began doing everything they could to suppress the votes.’

Clinton appears to be referring to Second 4(b) of the Act being ruled unconstitutional by the court in 2013, because it relied on out of date data which meant it was not in line with the 15th Amendment. 

FATHERS, HUSBANDS, BOYFRIENDS, AND MALE BOSSES

Clinton says that James Comey’s actions in re-opening the FBI investigation allowed men to influence their wives or girlfriends.

‘Women will have no empathy for you because they will be under tremendous pressure – and I’m talking principally about white women – they will be under tremendous pressure from fathers, and husbands, and boyfriends and male employers, not to vote for ‘the girl’,’ she told NPR. 

THE INVISIBLE STATE

The newest addition to the list: named by her confidante Lanny Davis as the reason she lost at a reading of his book while Hillary nodded along in approval. 

[rawskruge]

werds

The fact that chimps share 99% of their DNA with us is really impressive until you realize that string beans share 50% of it

mosquitos are like dirty used needles that can fly

the top 2000 m of the world ocean warmed about0.09 C degrees during the time period from 1970 to 2013. It also reports the UK’s Met Office calculated that if the same amount of energy had gone into the lower atmosphere, it would have raised its temperature about 36 C degrees!

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Understanding time:

- Oxford University is older than the Aztecs.

- In the span of 66 years, we went from taking flight to landing on the moon.

- There is more processing power in a TI-83 calculator than in the computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon.

- The first pyramids were built while the woolly mammoth was still alive.

- The fax machine was invented the same year people were traveling the Oregon Trail.

- Everything in this 1991 RadioShack ad exists in a single smartphone.

- There was more time between the Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex than between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and you.

- If the history of Earth were compressed to a single year, modern humans would appear on December 31st at about 11:58pm.

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Asker or guesser:

We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.”

Neither’s “wrong”, but when an Asker meets a Guesser, unpleasantness results. An Asker won’t think it’s rude to request two weeks in your spare room, but a Guess culture person will hear it as presumptuous and resent the agony involved in saying no. Your boss, asking for a project to be finished early, may be an overdemanding boor – or just an Asker, who’s assuming you might decline. If you’re a Guesser, you’ll hear it as an expectation. This is a spectrum, not a dichotomy, and it explains cross-cultural awkwardnesses, too: Brits and Americans get discombobulated doing business in Japan, because it’s a Guess culture, yet experience Russians as rude, because they’re diehard Askers.

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the multiple benefits of organic farming — what Europeans call multifunctionality. For one, farmers benefit because instead of needing to purchase costly chemicals, genetically engineered seeds and synthetic fertilizer, they can largely work with the ecological systems of their own farmscapes to fend off pests and promote fertility. Organic farming benefits the rest of us too. These low-input practices promote biodiversity (key to food security), protect pollinators (key to one-third of the food we eat), reduce farm energy use while storing more carbon in the soil (key to fixing climate change) and foster clean water and air (key to, well, everything).

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tower of babble (from Harpers)

Donald J. Trump, a reality-television star erecting a mausoleum for himself behind the first-hole tee of a golf course he owns in New Jersey, first declared his candidacy for president of the United States in the atrium of Trump Tower, which he built in the 1980s with labor provided by hundreds of undocumented Polish workers and concrete purchased at an inflated price from the Gambino and Genovese crime families. “The American dream is dead,” Trump said to the audience members, each of whom he paid $50 to attend. During Trump’s primary campaign, he told his supporters that he knew “all about crazies,” loved “Wall Street guys” who are “brutal,” planned to “use the word ‘anchor baby,’ ” and preferred to pronounce “Qatar” incorrectly. Trump, who in 1999 cut his sick infant grandnephew off the Trump Organization’s health-care plan and in 2011 compared being gay to switching to a long-handled golf putter, pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act and said he’d consider trying to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. Trump said that his book The Art of the Deal was second in quality only to the Bible and that he never explicitly asked God for forgiveness. At a church in Iowa, he placed a few dollar bills into a bowl filled with sacramental bread, which he has referred to as “my little cracker.” Trump, who once dumped a glass of wine on a journalist who wrote a story he didn’t like, told his supporters that journalists were “liars,” the “lowest form of humanity,” and “enemies,” but that he did not approve of killing them. “I’m a very sane person,” said Trump, who once hosted a radio show in which he discussed the development of hair-cloning technology, the creation of a vaccine for obesity, the number of men a gay man thinks about having sex with on his morning commute, and the dangers of giving free Viagra to rapists. Trump denied being the voice of John Miller, one of several fictional assistants he had previously admitted pretending to be, in a recording of himself telling a reporter that he had “zero interest” in dating Madonna; that he had three other girlfriends in addition to Marla Maples, with whom he had been cheating on his wife; and that he had an affair with Carla Bruni, who later responded by describing Trump as “obviously a lunatic.” Trump, who once offered the city of New York vacant apartments in his building to house homeless people in hopes they would drive away rent-controlled tenants, sent a bumper sticker to a group of homeless veterans whom he had previously declined to help and asked them to campaign for him. Trump, whose companies have been cited 24 times since 2005 for failing to pay workers overtime or minimum wage, said the federal minimum wage should go up, and then said it should not. Trump referred to 9/11 as “7-Eleven,” and called Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren “the Indian” and “Pocahontas.” Trump, who had previously labeled a deaf contestant on his reality-TV show The Apprentice “retarded,” and had described poor Americans as “morons,” said the country was on course for a “very massive recession,” one resembling the U.S. recession of 2007 to 2009, which Trump once said Americans could “opt out of” by joining Trump Network, a multilevel-marketing company that sold a monthly supply of multivitamins purportedly tailored to customers based on a test of their urine. Trump submitted his financial-disclosure form to the Federal Election Commission, on which he swore under oath that his golf course in Briarcliff Manor, New York, which was being sued by the town for causing flooding, was worth $50 million, despite having sworn in a previous property-tax appeal that it was worth $1.4 million; and swore that his golf course in Palos Verdes, California, which he was suing for five times its annual revenue, was worth more than $50 million, despite previously having filed papers with Los Angeles County stating it was worth $10 million. Trump claimed he made $1.9 million from his modeling agency, which a foreign-born former model accused of “modern-day slavery,” alleging that the agency forced her to lie about her age, work without a U.S. visa, and live in a crowded apartment for which she paid the agency as much as $1,600 a month to sleep in a bed beneath a window through which a homeless man once urinated on her. Trump sought to exclude a recording of himself telling the nephew of former president George W. Bush that he grabs women “by the pussy” from a fraud suit filed against Trump University, a series of real-estate seminars taught by salespeople with no real-estate experience, which was housed in a Trump-owned building that the Securities and Exchange Commission said also housed the country’s most complained-about unregistered brokerages, and whose curriculum investigators in Texas described as “inapplicable.” Trump announced that he would win the Latino vote, and tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl from Trump Grill in Trump Tower with the message “I love Hispanics!” Trump referred to a black man at one of his rallies as “my African American,” and pledged his support for black people at a gathering of mostly white people in Wisconsin, whom he often referred to as “the forgotten people.” “I am the least racist person,” said Trump, who was sued twice by the Justice Department in the 1970s for allegedly refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, whose Trump Plaza Hotel was fined $200,000 by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1992 for removing black dealers from card tables, who allegedly told a former employee that he hated “black guys counting my money,” who in 2005 floated the idea of pitting an all-black Apprentice team against an all-white one to reflect “our very vicious world,” and who was endorsed by leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, one of whom said, “What he believes, we believe.” Trump tweeted statistics credited to a fictional government agency falsely claiming that the majority of white murder victims in the United States are killed by black people. Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture of Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, who Trump had said “had blood coming out of her wherever,” standing next to a Saudi prince, who tweeted back that he had “financially rescued” Trump twice, including once in 1990, when the prince purchased Trump’s 281-foot yacht, which was formerly owned by a Saudi arms dealer with whom Trump often partied in Atlantic City, and with whom Trump was implicated in a tax-evasion scheme involving a Fifth Avenue jewelry store. Trump disputed former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s claim that Trump magazine is defunct, showing as proof an annual circular for his clubs that was not Trump magazine, which folded in 2009. Trump republished his book Crippled America with the title Great Again. Trump told and retold an apocryphal story about a U.S. general who executed Muslim soldiers with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and proposed that Muslims be banned from entering the country. At the first primary debate, Trump praised his companies’ bankruptcies, including that of Trump Entertainment Resorts, in which lenders lost more than $1 billion and 1,100 employees lost their jobs, and that of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, a publicly traded company that Trump used to purchase two casinos for almost $1 billion, and from which he resigned after the company went bankrupt for the first time, but before it went bankrupt for the second time. “I made a lot of money,” said Trump. At the fifth primary debate, Trump defended the idea of retaliating against America’s foreign aggressors by killing non-combatant members of their families, saying it would “make people think.” At the eleventh primary debate, Trump told the crowd there was “no problem” with the size of his penis. Trump said that he knew more about the Islamic State than “the generals,” and that he would “rely on the generals” to defeat the Islamic State. Trump said he would bring back waterboarding and torture because “we have to beat the savages.” Trump offered to pay the legal bills of anyone who assaulted protesters at his rallies, denied making the offer, then made the offer again after a 78-year-old white supporter in North Carolina punched a 26-year-old black protester in the eye and said, “Next time we see him we might have to kill him.” Trump, who in 1999 called Republicans too “crazy right” and in 2000 ran on a Reform Party platform that included creating a lottery to fund U.S. spy training, said that the 2016 primaries were “rigged,” then clinched the Republican nomination for president, receiving more votes than any Republican in history. “I was the one who really broke the glass ceiling,” said Trump when his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, became the first woman to lead a major party’s ticket. Trump hired Steve Bannon, the editor of the white-nationalist website Breitbart, to replace his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who ran a firm that once lobbied for the military dictator of Zaire, and who himself replaced Corey Lewandowski, who resigned from the campaign not long after he was filmed grabbing a Breitbart reporter by the arm to prevent her from asking Trump any questions. Trump selected as his running mate Indiana governor Mike Pence, who previously backed a bill that would allow hospitals to deny care to critically ill pregnant women, and who once criticized the Disney character Mulan as a “mischievous liberal” created to persuade Americans that women should be allowed to hold combat positions in the military. In his general-election campaign, Trump said he would consider recognizing Crimea as Russian territory, and called on Russia to hack into Clinton’s email account. Trump said that he doesn’t pay employees who don’t “do a good job,” after a review of the more than 3,500 lawsuits filed against Trump found that he has been accused of stiffing a painter and a dishwasher in Florida, a glass company in New Jersey, dozens of hourly hospitality workers, and some of the lawyers who represented him. “I’m a fighter,” said Trump, who body-slammed the WWE chairman at WrestleMania 23 in 2007, and who attended WrestleMania IV with Robert LiButti, an Atlantic City gambler with alleged mafia ties, who told Trump he’d “fucking pull your balls from your legs” if Trump didn’t stop trying to seduce his daughter. Trump, whose first wife, Ivana, accused him in divorce filings of rape, and whose special council later said rape within a marriage was not possible, said “no one respects women more than I do.” Trump threatened to sue 12 women who accused him of sexual misconduct, including one who recalled Trump trying “like an octopus” to put his hand up her skirt on an airplane 35 years ago; four former Miss Teen USA contestants, who alleged that Trump entered their dressing room while girls as young as 15 were changing and said, “I’ve seen it all before”; the winner of Miss Utah USA in 1997, who alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her on the lips and then told her, “Twenty-one is too old”; an adult-film star, who alleged that at a golf tournament in Tahoe in 2006 Trump offered her $10,000 and the private use of his jet to spend the night with him; and a People magazine reporter, who alleged that while she was writing a story on Trump and his current wife, Melania, on the occasion of their first wedding anniversary, Trump pushed her against the wall and forcibly kissed her before telling her, “We’re going to have an affair.” “What I say is what I say,” said Trump, who previously told a pair of 14-year-old girls that he would date them in a couple of years, said of a 10-year-old girl that he would date her in 10 years, told a journalist that he wasn’t sure whether his infant daughter Tiffany would have nice breasts, told the cast of The View that if Ivanka weren’t his daughter “perhaps I would be dating her,” told radio host Howard Stern that it was okay to call Ivanka a “piece of ass” and that he could have “nailed” Princess Diana, and tweeted that a former winner of his Miss Universe pageant, whom Trump once called “Miss Piggy,” was disgusting. “Check out sex tape,” tweeted Trump, who once appeared in a soft-core pornographic film breaking a bottle of wine over a limousine. Trump did not comment on reports that he used over $200,000 in charitable contributions to the Trump Foundation to settle lawsuits against his businesses, $20,000 in contributions to the Trump Foundation to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself, and $10,000 in contributions to buy a smaller painting of himself, which he hung on the wall of his restaurant Champions Bar and Grill. “I’m the cleanest guy there is,” said Trump, who once granted the rights to explore building Trump-branded towers in Moscow to a mobster convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of margarita glass, who was mentored by the former lead council for Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Gambino and Genovese crime families, who once purchased a nightclub in Atlantic City from a hit man for a Philadelphia crime family, who once worked with a soldier in the Colombo crime family to outfit Trump Golden and Executive Series limousines with a fax machine and a liquor dispenser, and who once purchased helicopter services from a cigarette-boat racer named Joseph Weichselbaum, who was charged with drug trafficking in Ohio before being moved to Trump’s sister’s courtroom in New Jersey, where the case was handed off to a different judge, who gave Weichselbaum a three-year prison sentence, of which he served 18 months before moving into Trump Tower. Trump told journalists he “made a lot of money” when he leased his house in Westchester to the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. “I screwed him,” said Trump. Trump, who in 2013 said that he did “have a relationship” with Vladimir Putin, said in 2016, “I don’t know Putin.” Trump, who wrote in 1997 that concern over asbestos was a mob conspiracy, who in the 1990s spent $1 million in ads to bolster the theory that a Native American tribe in upstate New York had been infiltrated by the mafia and drug traffickers, who once implied that Barack Obama’s real name is Barry Soetoro and that he won reelection by making a secret deal with Saudi Arabia, and who in 2012 tweeted that global warming was a “hoax” created by “the Chinese” to weaken U.S. manufacturing, suggested to his supporters that the Islamic State paid the phone bills of Syrian refugees, that his primary opponent Ted Cruz’s Cuban father was involved in a conspiracy to kill President John F. Kennedy, and that U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia may have been suffocated with a pillow. During the first debate of the general election, Trump said that Rosie O'Donnell had deserved it when he called her “disgusting both inside and out,” “basically a disaster,” a “slob,” and a “loser,” someone who “looks bad,” “sounds bad,” has a “fat, ugly face,” and “talks like a truck driver.” At the second general-election debate, Trump invited three women who have accused Clinton’s husband of sexual misconduct to sit in the front row; claimed that Clinton had once laughed about the rape of a 12-year-old girl, which audio showed not to be true; claimed that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had endorsed him, which it had not; and afterward suggested that his opponent had been on drugs during the debate. Trump, who said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose supporters, told his supporters that Clinton could shoot one of them and not be prosecuted. Trump told the audience at a Catholic charity dinner that Clinton “hates Catholics,” that she is “the devil,” and that Mexico was “getting ready to attack.” Trump, who once kept a collection of Adolf Hitler’s speeches at his bedside, told his supporters that the election was “rigged” against him, won the election despite losing the popular vote by a margin of almost 3 million, claimed that he had in fact won the popular vote, and then announced that he would be staying on as executive producer of The Celebrity Apprentice on NBC, which a year earlier had fired him because he called Mexicans “rapists.” “Our country,” said Trump at a victory rally, “is in trouble.”