Oregon officials at every levelthe city, the state, and congressional representativeshave demanded that these agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, and other federal authorities leave Portland immediately. The state has even filed suit against these federal agencies. The ACLU calls it a constitutional crisis.

President Trump is doubling down, not backing down. He says that the paramilitaries are there to restore order. The Feds are preparing to descend on Chicago, and Trump is also warning Philadelphia and New York that theyre next. Look at whats going onall run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by [the] radical left, Trump said. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And were not going to let it go to hell.

Halfway around the world, meanwhile, the Russian authorities arrested Sergei Furgal, the governor of the far eastern city of Khabarovsk, on charges that he orchestrated the murder of two men 15 years ago. Over the last week, tens of thousands of people have demonstrated on the streets of Khabarovsk demanding the release of this leader of the opposition to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Furgal and his supporters argue that the arrest is politically motivated.

In Hong Kong, authorities are using a new national security law criminalizing many forms of protest to arrest several pro-democracy advocates, including the politician Tam Tak-chi, who was expected to run for the legislature in the September election. The action put an immediate damper on opposition efforts to select candidates for the vote. From Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party is cracking down on any challenges to its authority from the periphery, whether in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Tibet.

Analysts of the new authoritarian wave that has swept across the world in the last few years have largely focused on power grabs in capitals. Leaders like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping have attempted to reduce the influence of legislative and judicial bodies in favor of their own executive power. They have targeted civil society and media. They have used the coronavirus crisis to consolidate their control.

An equally important feature of this new authoritarianism is its intolerance for regional or local power bases that lie beyond executive reach. For countries that have federal structures, this means a conscious effort to strengthen the federal center at the expense of the regions. Its part of the remaking of the nation-state in the 21st century, a reversal of the two-edged trend to devolve power to local authorities and delegate authority to international institutions.

These nationalists dont just hate globalists. They hate anybody who stands in their way, including just about any potential counterforce taking shape on the periphery.

Trump and the New Civil War

You might think that Donald Trumps embrace of the Confederate flag and Confederate generals is just an overture to his white nationalist supporters. It is all that and more. Trump and his strategists are very consciously pitting states against each other in a replay of the pre-Civil War conflict over federal authority.

Trump and his allies in predominantly red states want to reopen the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, and he also wants to preserve the freedom of Americans to refuse to wear protective masks in public. This strategy echoes the arguments of southern states in the late 1850s to maintain their economic system without federal interference and to have the freedom to own slaves.

Of course, the analogy is complicated by the fact that Trump is the head of the federal system. However, Trump disagrees with the public health authorities associated with the U.S. government who support mandatory mask use. The president demonstrated his support of Georgia Governor Kemp, who unilaterally voided requirements to wear masks in Atlanta and other cities, by touching down unmasked in the state capital.

Trump also backs those governors who reopened their economies prematurely and are reluctant to shut down again now that the virus has returned with redoubled strength. The battle is shifting to a showdown over reopening public schools. Trump has ordered students to return in person for the upcoming school year, which will begin in some places next month. He has even threatened to withdraw federal funding from schools that dont reopen.

But the coronavirus is surging out of control in some states, including Florida, which is adding more than 10,000 new cases a day. If Florida were a country, it would be the eighth hardest hit nation in the world. Only three countries are adding as many new cases of infection daily. And yet the governor of the state, Republican Ron DeSantis, is moving full speed ahead to bring children back to the local virus incubation centers otherwise known as schools.

Trump might not have the public health agencies on his side. And the military balked at the presidents plan to send soldiers out onto the streets to suppress public protest.

But the president has discovered that he still controls the security forces attached to other federal agencies. He deployed the National Guard in D.C. to tamp down protests last month, prompting a demand from the mayor of the nations capital for the president to withdraw the forces. Agents from both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection were also used to police the demonstrations in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

Now Trump is claiming that areas of the country under Democratic Party control are in fact swamps of anti-Americanism. He is deploying the classic vocabulary associated with dehumanizing Americas putative enemies prior to attack. This is no longer a conflict between red and blue. Trump is transforming Americas political divide into an existential battle between grey and blue, where the Feds are supporting a Confederate-friendly president and the rebellious states long for the return of a more perfect Union.

Trumps use of federal paramilitaries is a classic tactic of autocrats to test how far they can push their authority and what forces they can count on in an emergency. The Black Lives Matter protests inadvertently provided Trump with that opportunity. Come election time, hell know which guns are on his side if he chooses to question the election results and stay in office.

Where Dissent Flourishes

Autocrats fear the periphery. Its where dissent can germinate beyond the prying eye of the panoptical state. East Germanys revolution in 1989, for instance, began with demonstrations every Monday in the southern city of Leipzig. The Romanian revolution a few months later was sparked by the Hungarian minority in Timisoara. The overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000 began with protests by miners in Kolubara, an hours drive from Belgrade.

Federal states face a continual tension between center and periphery that occasionally breaks the country apart (as with Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union). The Spanish government cracked down on Catalan moves toward independence in 2017, imposing direct rule for a time. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia have all faced secession movements that have resulted in autonomous regions that claim statehood. Occasionally, breakaway regions achieve international recognition as statesBangladesh, East Timor, South Sudan.

The autocrat fears secession as well as anti-government protest. The first attacks the unitary power of the nation-state, the second challenges the unitary power of the ruler. Its one and the same thing for the authoritarian nationalist.

This is why Xi Jinping fears Hong Kong, Vladimir Putin worries about Khabarovsk, and Donald Trump wants to stamp out dissent in Oregon. But its also why Recep Tayyip Erdogan has replaced the mayors of cities affiliated with the pro-Kurdish opposition party. It explains why Narendra Modi has made it more difficult for state governments, particularly those led by the political opposition, to raise revenue. It is why Jair Bolsonaro has clashed with the governors of Brazils states over their respective handling of the coronavirus.

The new nationalists have defined the people in very specific ways to exclude portions of the population based on ethnicity, religion, or politics. They are transforming the federal government into a tool to reward only those who support the ruler in the capital. They are attacking democracy, yes, but also reducing faith in governance more generally.

What better way to deconstruct the administrative state, as alt-right guru Steve Bannon likes to say, than to turn the government into a body with no power beyond its military and police. The coronavirus and the economic downturn have brought the United States to its knees. But Trump also helped to hobble the nation. Now he wants to deliver the knock-out blow all by himself.

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Tactic of an Autocrat: Trump is provoking a replay of the pre-Civil War conflict over federal authority - Milwaukee Independent

The beloved pop-culture character returns to our screens, but this time he's a conflicted private eye rather than an eagle-eyed attorney

09 August 2020 - 00:00 By

Perry Mason has had an enviably long life as a character in US popular culture since being introduced to the world in the novels of Erle Stanley Gardner in the 1930s. A criminal defence lawyer with a knack for proving the innocence of his clients by implicating the real culprits, Mason went on to feature first as the star of a popular radio drama and then in the 1950s as a television stalwart, in one of the US's longest-running TV dramas.

The titular character was played by Raymond Burr in the show, and then in a short-lived 1970s reboot and a series of 30 television films that he starred in before his death in 1993...

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Are there too many red herrings in the 'Perry Mason' reboot? - TimesLIVE

One of the biggest goals of the left in recent years is to portray those on the right as racists. It saves them the effort of having to refute the rights arguments substantively. If they are successful, they can discredit all of the rights viewpoints since theyre views held by racists. There are few white supremacists left, but the media and left love to feature them as if theyre a huge threat from the right.

One way theyve set about accomplishing thisis through use of the term alt-right. They use it to lump white supremacists in with some regular conservatives who are dissatisfied with the mainstream Republican establishment. Its a brilliant tactic, since the two are not similar, but it makes people start to think they must be.

The reality is many white supremacists are on the left. The National Socialist Party, which callsitself the largest and most active National Socialist party in America, has plentyof views on the left.

The right denounces white supremacists and kicks them out of their events. There is no overlapping. And this is nothing new. Back in the 1960s, William F. Buckley Jr., editor of National Review, ensured that racists were not allowed in the conservative movement. As one of his biographers wrote, Buckley stood guard over the movement he founded and in what he called his greatest achievement kept it free where he could of extremists, bigots, kooks, anti-Semites and racists. In 1993, Buckley fired Joseph Sobran over a series of columns he considered antisemitic. Buckley and National Reviewdefined the essence of conservatism for multiple decades, so this was nothing to be dismissed.

Adam Bhala Lough recently wrote and directed a documentary currently popular on Netflix entitled Alt-Right: Age of Rage. But the only people on the right it features are white supremacists (some may call themselves white nationalists or other variations). There are no white supremacists on the left. The ones featured are shown saying vile things followed by conservative viewpoints; its very cleverly done, as if white supremacist and right wing are interchangeable. One headline states, Right-wing e-zine calls for black genocide. Racist images are posted in a row followed by Breitbart logos.

The left is represented by Daryle Lamont Jenkins, a charismatic black man who is a member of Antifa. Now that already raises red flags, because Antifa is almost completely white. So theyre trying to portray the violent hate group Antifa as a likable black man. They show him criticizing racism repeatedly and posing next to paintings of civil rights leaders. He brings up his military background, saying he took an oath to defend against foreign and domestic enemies. But both the right and the left find this admirable.

Antifas violent tactics are mostly ignored, except when one punches one of the worst white supremacists in the face, Richard Spencer. He is the main white supremacist featured and interviewed, a truly vile human being who is probably the most well-known since he craves attention. He says horrible things about Jenkins, like claiming he weighs at least 400 pounds and is gross looking. When he runs into him, he tells him he thought he would be dead by now because of obesity. To tie him to conservatives, Spencer is pictured standing in front of the Jefferson Memorial, then giving a speech where he yells Hail Trump! He denounces multiculturalism.

What the documentary wont tell you is that Spencer was kicked outof CPAC, the leading annual national conservative conference, in 2017 when he tried to show up. CPAC spokesman Ian Walters said Spencer wasnt a conservative, "He's anti-free markets, anti-Constitution, anti-pluralism."

Jenkins helpfully lumps Spencer in with the right by referring to Spencer as a right-wing propagandist, which is the same phrase someone on the left might use to label anyone on the right. Jenkins blames President Trump for giving them their juice. He uses Trump supporters interchangeably with white supremacists. The late Andrew Breitbart, a leading figure in the conservative movement during this century, is shown yelling at Jenkins to get out of his face, but tellingly the documentary doesnt reveal why. Breitbart was Jewish and hates racists. Jenkins says he goes after the National Socialist movement but there is no admission that the group is more on the left.

Another white supremacist the documentary prominently features and interviews is Jared Taylor, the founder of the racist site American Renaissance. Superficially, he looks like a traditional statesmanlike conservative and uses a tone of voice that sounds like it could be any thoughtful person on the right except vile things come out. He decries the people who criticize him in patriotic terms, saying Were the land of the free and the home of the brave. It is no coincidence he was chosen for this documentary. He puts on an annual conference of white supremacists every year, and complains that because of the efforts against him, they had only 300 show up instead of 400-450. Yep, thats how many in the entire U.S. would show up. Protesters show up outside his conferences. Tellingly, they are practically all white most black people realize his group is just a handful of losers who no one pays attention to except the media.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center chimes in periodically to reinforce the connection. He says that Dylann Roof, who shot and murdered people in a black church, was influenced by the radical right, a term commonly used for regular conservatives. He says there has been a rise in racist groups which might seem believable if youre now lumping in regular conservatives. Nowhere is it revealed that the SPLC is itself a hate group, labeling regular Christian organizations as hate groups. Its great to hear Potok denounce white supremacy but thats something we all agree on except a handful of white supremacists. Someone knowledgeable on the right could easily have sat in his place and said the same things.

The documentary covers the deadly Charlottesville riots of 2017. That event played right into their hand, because its organizer, Jason Kessler, a known white supremacist, named the rally Unite the Right as if he was including regular people on the right too. Its not very likely there were regular people on the right there, because one of the speakers saidthe rally was meant to unify various white nationalist factions against unidentified enemies. But the title even fooled President Trump, who denounced the violence but said there were "very fine people on both sides. Taylor helpfully stated that Trump appeals to those who are racially conscious. Even if true, as Ive explainedpreviously, this is no reflection on Trump.

People on the left are shown saying in interviews that they denounce violence by their side, while the white supremacists are shown saying its necessary. Jenkins says violence should only be engaged in as a form of defense, but we all know thats not representative of Antifa.

The problem is conservatives dont understand whats happening to us. They blindly accept the clever lumping in of white supremacists with regular conservatism and accept the phrase alt-right. I dont know anyone personally who refers to themself as the alt-right. Why dont conservatives create a documentary about the leftists in the National Socialist Party, the white supremacists who supportedHillary Clinton andBarack Obama as well as the antisemites in the Democratic Party vs. the conservatives who fight that racism? Perhaps feature the group Patriot Prayer, which is run by minorities and finds itself frequently the victim of Antifa, and gay Asian reporter Andy Ngo who covers these protests and was savagely beaten by Antifa. Maybe call it Alt-left and contact me to help fundraise.

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The Lefts Brilliantly Deceptive Documentary Alt-Right ...

A&E has built its brand around true crime of one sort or another for the better part of the last three decades, from Bill Kurtis (left) in the 90s, to Dan Abrams (middle) in the 2010s,

With the possible exception of BET, no cable channel has made less of its tremendous potential over the years than A&E. Formed in cables infancy in 1984 from a merger of two networks, one called Arts and one called Entertainment, A&E spent the Eighties trying to live up to its mission. There were shows about dance, music, travel, live comedy. Peter Graves hosted Biography, one-hour profiles of artists and (mostly) entertainers. A&E acquired Sherlock Holmes and other series from the BBC so many shows, in fact, that TV Guide called the channel BBC West. Politicians questioned the need to keep funding public broadcasting when channels like A&E, Discovery and CNN seemed perfectly capable of doing PBSs job.

And then the ratings came in. By the early 1990s A&Es co-owners, Hearst and Disney, were moving away from the A and looking desperately for anything that could E. Thats when they found that crime pays.

Bill Kurtis, the square-jawed Chicago news anchor, began taking over A&Es prime-time schedule in 1991 with documentary-style programs about murders and other violent crimes. From a state-of-the-art virtual studio that let him do multiple shows in the same space, Kurtis presented such A&E staples as American Justice, Cold Case Files, L.A. Detectives, and his signature show, Investigative Reports, which A&E stripped nightly, overtaking Biography (which was getting kicked to its own minor channel anyway).

The network that once produced a documentary called Dogs hit it big with Dog the Bounty Hunter, a reality show that made a star of Duane Dog Chapman, who profited off the countrys broken cash-bail system and did a poor job of hiding his contempt for Black people. Gene Simmons, another piece of work, got a reality show on A&E. The calls to London for high-class programming ceased as unscripted programming completely took over. A beautifully-done drama called 100 Centre Street, which showed the criminal-justice system as a flawed institution run by humans, was canceled by A&E after one year.

Yes, there have been highlights. A&Es IndieFilms division provided crucial funding and a platform to worthy docs like Jesus Camp, Happy Valley, and Life, Animated. I thought Hoarders was a good concept for a reality show, though Intervention was better. But the addiction to quick-hit ratings led A&E to hoard more and more true crime shows, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would land on a show inspired by the most prolific crime show of all time, and I dont mean Law & Order.

From its debut at the dawning of the reality TV era in 1989 until 2013, COPS was a staple of the Fox network lineup, consistently winning both its Saturday-night time periods with edited, formulaic, voyeuristic drive-alongs with local police. Justice advocates protested the show for decades, saying it drove home a narrative of predominantly white cops protecting law-abiding citizens from poor people of color. But as 2017 dawned and the 1000th episode of COPS aired on Spike TV (now the Paramount Network), there seemed no end in sight.

Inevitably, A&E came up with a COPS of its own Live PD. Hosted by ABC legal analyst Dan Abrams, Live PD did COPS one better by broadcasting its drive-alongs in real time from such crime hotspots as Missoula, Montana, and Springfield, Missouri. Frequently the top-rated cable show on Friday and Saturday nights, Live PD spawned several spinoffs and zillions of views for its clip reels on YouTube.

And then George Floyd was killed. The effects of his death are still reverberating through our culture as I write this, but surely one of the quickest and most dramatic results was the decision by Paramount to cancel COPS.That was not such a big deal;the show is over 30 years old and will live onin reruns, which are running 24/7on their own PlutoTVchannel (which ViacomCBS owns, along with COPS). But then came the stunner A&Es decision to cancel Live PD and all of its spinoffs, a huge deal since those programs filled a lot of real estate onA&Es lineup.

The blowback was swift, asA&Es primetime viewership was cut in half the next week. Thatnews wascelebrated by right-wing websiteswith headlines likeGet Woke, Go Broke. Alt-right mediainterpretsany concessions tothe Black Lives Movement as a sign of moral weakness. Ironically, the show promoted police transparency, one of the reforms championed by BLM and others, by following officers on their rounds in cities across the country, declared The Federalist. That canard has long been refuted by studies that found people who watch shows like COPS and Live PD believe their communities to be more crime-infested than they actually are.

As with the removal of Confederate statues, cancelling Live PD was an overreaction brought on by years of inaction. Abrams and A&E took no responsibility for the messaging being sent out by their programming, which if anything escalated the same damaging narratives about people of color that COPS had trafficked in for decades. Marijuana busts are at the heart of the mass incarceration problem, yet Live PD cops made drama out of finding bags of weed. Even seasoned cops complained that Live PD was doing them no favors with its distorted picture of law enforcement.

After Floyds death, A&E quickly pulled episodes of Live PD. A week later, it pulled the plug. This is a critical time in our nations history and we have made the decision to cease production on Live PD, the network said in a statement. Going forward, we will determine if there is a clear pathway to tell the stories of both the community and the police officers whose role it is to serve them. And with that, we will be meeting with community and civil rights leaders as well as police departments.

Ive long thought that crime TV was overdue for a course correction. So many people have been wrongfully convicted on spurious evidence by political prosecutors and judges behaving badly, cant anyone squeeze some drama out of the other side of the courtroom? Well, now is A&Es chance to do just that. With one-third of all Black men in America having a felony conviction on their records, mostly for non-violent offenses, thats a bunch of viewers and their families that would welcome a revamped, reformed Live PD. It will take creativity, because no ones really doing this right now, outside of perhaps Netflix. But it was A&Es long habit of favoring cheap, expedient programming that got them into this mess. Getting out will require innovation, imagination and, dare I say it, art.

Aaron Barnharthas written about television since 1994, including 15 years as TV critic for theKansas City Star.

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Barnhart: It's Time for A&E to Reinvent Itself (Again) - PRIMETIMER

If Facts Man is Political Facts Man, hed rather not discuss his actual politics. Do not believe that his politics are precisely what they look like; just believe that his conclusions are what he says they are. Perhaps Facts Man is part of the intellectual dark web or the alt-center. Perhaps Facts Man hates the intellectual dark web or the alt-center. Perhaps Facts Man is clearly on the alt-right but also a fierce critic of the alt-right. He is not to be placed on the policy spectrum!

Facts Mans politics are, in fact, non-politics. Facts Man hates politics, though not exclamation points! Facts Man hates the party system. Facts Man hates politicians. Facts Man hates political thinkers. Thats not a political statement! Facts Man cares about truth and truth only.

If Facts Man is Science Facts Man, he is adjacent to science, so he understands science better than scientists. He has credentials that let him look at the data and see them, instead of looking at the data and just looking at them. Or looking at them and interpreting them however your field interprets them. Or looking at them and waiting for them to be interpreted in the press. Science Facts Man operates without the encumbrances of peer review or any sense of the complexities endemic to many scientific fields. That is what he brings to the debate!

Facts Man is about truth, and by truth, Facts Man means the discourse. He parachutes in to rectify the discourse. He invites conversations. He ends conversations. He is not about contrarianism, but correctness. He is obsessed with the media, which he is not part of, though perhaps he is a major media figure himself. Theres no contradiction there.

Read: A cultural history of mansplaining

Facts Man is about truth, and by truth, Facts Man means conclusions. He is drawn inexorably to them, moth to flame, magnet to steel. Facts Man hates complexity and uncertainty. He hates the messy, hazy process of updating our understanding as data come in and things change. How is that science? How is that something the media are allowed to do? Facts Man is about clear-cutting his way to the truth. Facts Man is about disrupting his way to the truth. Facts Man is about arriving out of nowhere with the truth in hand.

Sometimes, Facts Man is less about truth than raising questions. Why cant Facts Man talk about certain issues in exactly the way he wants to? Why cant Facts Man bring up scientific facts relevant to other peoples humanity without getting called out for it? Why cant Facts Man make obscenely offensive conjectures about life-or-death issues? Wheres the open debate? Why does Facts Man have to genuflect to other peoples identity politics? Facts Man himself has no identity politics! He is an individual, as unique as a snowflake, but certainly not as fragile as one.

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Beware of Facts Man - The Atlantic

Los Angeles protest led by Walk Good LA. Credit: Kavi Peshawaria @kavipictures

Black Lives Matter may be the largest movement in US history, yet as the Justice for George Floyd protests enter their third month, there is a sense that the national news cycle, outside unprecedented events like the federal occupation of downtown Portland, has largely moved on. Likewise, many protesters have also moved onto social media, where they can stream videos of police brutality on Instagram and TikTok, form neighborhood watches on Facebook, and exchange encrypted information over Signal. I asked protesters, organizers, and citizen-journalists how theyve been staying informed and informing others, and whether this moment has changed their views on traditional media.

To be honest with you, Im not even watching the news. Theyre going to give you their story. Im out hereI am the news for our people.

Photo credit: Misha Cohen

Joseph Blake, forty-eight, club promoter and barber. A Portland native, Blake has livestreamed the citys protests on Facebook for fifty-six nights in a row, since June 1. His videos are viewed by thousands.

When the protests first started, you would hear about them just on social media. They call Portland a city, but I call Portland a big town. Word gets out super fast. Right now, its Facebook. People are going live. Twitter, you can put a video on and talk about it. Twitter is popular with celebrities and bigwigs that have the blue check. Regular people like us, we dont usually get too many Twitter followers. I would say Instagram a little bit, but its mostly Facebook, because you can add groups. Just like with the Wall of Momsthey started a Facebook group that Im a part of. I started a Facebook group called We Gone Be Alright.

My kids are into that TikTok stuffI cant get into it. But thats what got me started in this. I used to be the type who sat on the couch and watch TV and be like, Them fools is crazy, I aint going out there with them crazy-ass fools. Until I saw my son and daughters pages. My son, twenty-three, is a professional photographer. Hes capturing so much stuff, its crazy and amazing. And my daughter, twenty-six, is out there protesting, too. So I was like, Well, let me see whats going on. I went and I got the bug, and Ive been out there every night since then.

To be honest with you, Im not even watching the news. Theyre going to give you their story. Im out hereI am the news for our people. Im doing a lot of livestreaming for people who cant get down there to see. I give it to em rough and raw. Im right in the thick of things. Im getting shot. Ive been shot four times by rubber bullets just this week. I come home and I have to take my clothes off outside because theres pepper-spray dust.

Anything youve seen on the national news coverage, man, Ive seen it with my own eyes.

I never thought in my wildest thoughts I would be down there doing nothing like this. I didnt know nothing about protesting, only what I seen on TV. But now its like Im an expert.

Photo credit: Ilaria DAlessandro

JahI Bazin, seventeen, rising freshman at Seton Hall and a volunteer with Street Riders NYC, which leads thousands of bike protesters on weekly justice rides. Since the killing of George Floyd, Bazin estimates, hes been to sixteen protests, where, among other things, he has been struck by a van and called a racial slur.

I went to the Million Man March with my dad in DC in 2015. As a twelve-year-old boy, I didnt see the importance of it until this summer, when I started protesting on my own. When you see that its not just people that look exactly just like you, you get a sense of hope because your people arent the only ones that hear the struggle or see the struggle. They might not feel the struggle, but at least we have other people trying to help us out in our time of need.

I stay informedobviously you have the internet, you have Instagram, Twitter. Most of the protests Ive partaken in have been through Street Riders, through their Instagram. Or else it will be a friend texting me, or their Instagram account. Its pretty simple. Ive seen people say, Oh, I dont know where to go. I dont know when things start. I dont know who to talk to. When, really, its not like the protest organizers are celebrities or godstheyre regular people just like you. You can talk to them and ask.

Photo courtesy Isabella Moles

Isabella Moles, twenty-one, a founder of Central Pennsylvania Advocates for Justice. I met Moles at a Pride event in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, population 3,540. She was wearing several rainbow pins and a yellow shirt that read sounds gay im in.

Its young folks who are coming together. I think we have the gift of technology and social media, even when we are apart, to unify and make sure that we get progress. We see that with TikTok too. I find most of my shit from TikTok, even videos of police brutality. When I talk to my ninety-two-year-old grandpa, whose father was a member of the KKK, when Im having conversations with him, I use TikTok. These are actual things that my generation was able to record and document as proof of violence and police brutality. And when I show him that, the evidence is right there and he cant dispute what hes seen with his own eyes.

One of my main sources has been through grassroots journalism like Unicorn Riot. I know for a fact that they are reporting the closest thing to the truth.

Photo courtesy Maiingan Sherritt-Stone

Maiingan Sherritt-Stone, twenty-one. During the curfew, Sherritt-Stone volunteered with a Minneapolis-area nonprofit working to provide protesters with assistance and information in real time. Working sixteen- to eighteen-hour days, he followed police scanners, helped to encrypt organizers information, and created Facebook groups that became neighborhood watch groups. He also assembled a lengthy, encrypted Google document on known white supremacist activity in the area. The list included known plate numbers, people, and how to recognize when there might be an imminent attack. He described a beetling of school alarms and domestic violence calls before things really hit the fan.

One of my main sources has been through grassroots journalism like Unicorn Riot, which has done a really good job reporting things from not only Minneapolis, but across the US. I know for a fact that they are reporting the closest thing to the truth.

ICYMI: How Unicorn Riot covers the alt-right without giving them a platform

A big problem that I had, especially with my own family membersI have some relatives in Floridawas with people believing that we were destroying our own businesses. When I was covering police scanners, I was reporting on white supremacist activity and the tactics they used. It was very clear, hearing on police scanners, who was doing the damage. There was a lot of bait-and-switch. Somebody would set the alarm off at a school. And because its a school, the police have to respond to that, and then thered be nobody there. And then while they were doing that, other buildings that were known Black- and Brown-owned businesses were being targeted. Things like that werent being reported on whatsoever. So it was almost a battle having to explain what was happening to people outside of Minneapolis. A big part of that was the lack of media coverage and what the media painted from just hearing reports and then spinning their own stories.

So I have a lot of mistrust with media. I dont follow many bigger outlets because I and other nonprofits reported to some journalists at the New York Times and I dont think they really did anything with that information.

I definitely sit down and watch some Fox. I like to see how the same story is played out in very different ways.

Photo courtesy Khadija Ahmed

Khadija Ahmed, thirty-two, restaurant manager. Two days after George Floyds killing, Ahmed pivoted from batching cocktails to providing food, water, and supplies to protesters through Inbound NYC, a mutual aid group she cofounded.

Theres three forums that you go through. One is the people youre messaging, that you already have the numbers of, that youre close to. Then theres Signal chat, the different groups that are talking together. And theres Instagram, the groups that post schedules for protests every day. Protect Protesters and Justice for George NYC are the main ones that Ive seen. Everything is Instagram. Instagram is the one where you can catch the most age range, from eighteen to sixty.

I grew up in DC. I had a political job, and I left because I hated it. I need all sources of news. I watch CNN and MSNBC, but I definitely sit down and watch some Fox. I like to see how the same story is played out in very different ways. I still read articles. I read the Washington Post and the New York Times. I read The Guardian and The Independent. Im definitely a three-sources girl. Watching non-American news is really interesting lately. When youre watching Al Jazeera or the BBC, it literally looks like America is a war zone. The way we used to judge all these other countries, were being judged in that way now with video footage.

Photo credit: Brian Davidson

Christine Rossi, twenty-nine, server and volunteer with Street Riders NYC.

When my roommate and I came home every night from the protests, we would watch Fox News and CNN. Not because we believed their narrative, but because we needed to see what it would become. We know were in our own bubble, and we just needed to see what the other bubbles are like out there. Theyre not covering protests. The people in our inner circles are out there, taking photos, taking videos, and Im seeing all of that raw shit on Instagram. But its nowhere on the news. So Ronald Weaver II, Mel D. Cole, Nate Brown, Budithats who were getting the news from now. Theyre not news anchors, theyre photographers, videographers.

Its almost like going home and watching a fantastical movie thats been falsely made about everything thats going on. It feels like another world. Ive felt like this for probably the past decade, but right now its being exposed to its fullest, seeing what a sham the media has become, along with everything else: the cops, the media, our government.

We will still watch Democracy Now! I do think its a good general way of getting news. But I think whatever news you watch, you should be in contact with all different kinds of people.

Jack Duren, left, and James Carthel. Photo credit: Rick Simpson

Jack Duren, eighty, a retired art teacher, makes signs for weekly protests at Rose Villa, a retirement community just outside of Portland.

There are two retirement communities side by side here. Were putting maybe a hundred people out on the street in front of both. We only do it for about an hour, because were old farts. But these are very active retirement communities. People are not sitting on their porches in rocking chairs waiting to die.

I have three primary news sources: one is The Oregonian. Theres also Willamette Week, which is much more independent and subscriber-supported, and a third one called Bridgeliner. We watch the local news as well as PBS NewsHour. Im skeptical of a lot of stuff online. I had to bail out of Facebook because it got too awful. I dont like going to bed mad at this age.

A lot of people here use NextDoor. A couple posts on there were like, Doggone it, cant they move their protests down the street, so I dont have to listen to cars honk? The thing is, its one hour a week. Gimme a break. The person said, Why do they have to encourage the car-honking? Then there was one employee of Rose Villa that posted, We think they should be honking more. I liked that one.

Theres a sense of narrative structure and narrative construction that doesnt seem to reflect what you are watching happening in real time, where there isnt one narrative.

C.J. Holmes, thirty-three, a sales director who was laid off at the beginning of April. When he got in touch, Holmes described himself as a medium protester, attending about a dozen actions in Chicago.

When I read mainstream coverage, it feels very delayed. I have a friend from college who lives in Portland, and she was posting and reporting about it, being a citizen, about a week before it broke more broadly. Sometimes Ill read to get that official view, that language, to see how it was articulated, but itll be more about fact-checking and understanding what people who are not in my headspace are saying. Ill occasionally learn a nugget, but its deeply unsatisfying. Its not a place I go to feel informed, because its so slow. Also theres a sense of narrative structure and narrative construction that doesnt seem to reflect what you are watching happening in real time, where there isnt one narrative. As we know, theres never one narrativeits intersectional, its constantly changing.

I check every box of privilege. Every single one. Ive been recognized as a leader probably since I was ten. So entering these spaces and trying to do the quote-unquote right thing, its very difficult until you decenter yourself. Because when you are centered, you cant listen or learn. Even if youre allowed in the room, the way that you experience that room is going to be untrue, or filtered, or affected, or prevented.

Photo credit: Nicholas Page

Mahadi Lawal, twenty-six, graphic designer, event planner, and an organizer of Occupy DC, which has occupied Black Lives Matter Plaza and is currently hosting yoga sessions in the space.

May 29 was the first day that the protests got violenttear gas and everything in front of the White House. I went home after that day realizing how serious things were, and I formed a Signal group chat with friends and acquaintances that I knew were interested. For the next few weeks we used that chat; I called it America.

Instagram has been the key tool. When I got arrested on the morning of June 24, there was a huge campaign all over Instagram and Twitter. There were videos of my arrest, and all my friends were like, Free him. So I gained a lot of followers like that. I started to use my account more to be informative. After the sit-in, we made the Occupy DC Instagram. We gained one thousand followers in a week. Thats been our main way of getting the information out, that and Signal.

I probably spend 80 percent of my time scrolling through Twitter. I get most of my news through Twitter, just because of how fast it is. When I need information on protests, Ill go on the Instagram pages of accounts like DC Teens Action.

I feel like the city leadership has come to a consensus that theyre just not going to respond or acknowledge the protests and the violence committed by the police, that its just going to go away. The only DC media thats been consistently covering these things has been the Washington Post.

I went from throwing parties to now having protests. This is way more fulfilling.

Photo credit: Kavi Peshawaria

Etienne Maurice, twenty-eight, actor, filmmaker, activist, and organizer of Walk Good LA. Each week the group hosts a 5k run for justice and yoga for restorative justice.

I started out by making my own flyer on Adobe Spark. I made the flyer, I posted it on social media, and I also texted a lot of friends that live in my neighborhood. I made it grassroots. Then I started finding out about other Instagram profiles that had a huge following that became an online bulletin for protests in the neighborhood. One Instagram called In This Together LA have been a major helpthey have over 100K followersand they have short blurbs about what each protest is focused on. I cant tell you how many new people have come to my protests because I submit to that account. Also, a big help is to continue to post the photos and video recaps of what took place that day. That next day I hit the ground running, I get on my computer making those one-minute recaps of what took place that day, so that people stay engaged, they see it happened and will continue to happen.

Its important to be of service in our fight for justice. Thats been the biggest lesson for me. I went from throwing parties to now having protests. This is way more fulfilling. Im using the same organizational skills getting people together in one place that believe theyre going to have a transformative experience.

Photo courtesy Corky Lee

Corky Lee, seventy-two, activist and photo documentarian. Lee, a Queens native whose business card describes him as the undisputed, unofficial Asian American photographer laureate, told me hes gone to more than a thousand protests over forty-nine years.

Before they had the internet, there was something called a phone treeyou ever hear that term? This was the sixties. If you wanted to organize a protest, at the end of a public meeting, or teach-in, everyone would get a list of phone numbers, and you would call, lets say, twenty people, and hopefully each person would call twenty people. This to find out whats going on and where its going to happen.

With Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, it all happened in one location. That was great for the NYPDthey knew if anything was going to happen, it would be in Zuccotti Park. Now the NYPD has to monitor social media more than ever before. Its not going to be in mainstream news or people putting up flyers. A lot of stuff will happen spontaneously.

Another thing about Occupy Wall Street, there werent many leaders, so the news media couldnt figure out who was representing the people. Pretty much the same thing is happening here. Mainstream media doesnt know who to go to speak to, so theyre grabbing anyone whos willing to speak to them. But those people may not necessarily be the organizers or the leaders. This was something that wasnt learned from the civil rights movement of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and so forththose guys were well organized. Without some identifiable leaders in the current George Floyd situation, I think that the general public is in a bit of a quandary and they dont know whats happening.

Hammad Ahmad, twenty-five, business analyst, Atlanta. In early June, Ahmad and his sisters raised over $2,400 for local bail bonds and to deliver a van full of water and snacks to protesters.

Im not on Twitter. Just seeing the things people tweet makes me angry. But if you were to talk to any other person who would be going to these, I think they would say that Twitter is what they would rely on. There was one Twitter account called Where Is the Protest in Atlanta?Literally every day they would post and then pin where they would have protests in the metro Atlanta area, even in the suburbs. There were a few Instagram accounts that I followed that posted regular updates. In terms of finding out where we could drop things off, whenever we would find out about a protest over the weekendit was kind of hard to go during the weekdays, just because of workwe would reach out to the organizers and go from there.

Honestly, I dont really look at the news, because it just angers me. It doesnt really make sense to me to go somewhere that isnt covering it well enough. I dont share these types of news sources. I dont share CNN.

Photo courtesy Tiana Rawls-White

Tiana Rawls-White, twenty-three, hospitality industry. Rawls-White went to her first protest on June 28 and spoke at the recent Rally for Justice, organized by the group If Not Us, Then Who?, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.

On Facebook, you have the opportunity to see what other people are saying and how theyre reacting to these things, and it really shows peoples true colors. It also gives you the opportunity to have conversations.

I try my best to watch Fox, even if its something I wont agree with. Its like going to war with somebody and wanting to know what the other side is thinking. The best way to do that is to listen to what theyre saying. Because youre not going to be able to inspire people to do better and to change if you dont know where their head is at to begin with.

There was a woman that I had reached out to. She had said, If you support BLM, then youre a racist, or something like that. And I was like, Hey, do you think Im a racist? I dont think youre a racistyoure one of the nicest people I know. But sometimes the things that you post really upset me and it scares me to think that you would think this way. And I get very disappointed in you, and honestly if you were anyone else I probably would have unfriended you by now. Why dont we talk, lets get lunch, you hear me, I hear you, and lets go from there. Because nothings going to get resolved if people dont talk.

Shes my exs stepmother. After he and I separated, she and I kept in contact. She never responded about getting lunchshe saw it, but she didnt say anything. Im like, Okay, Ill just let it go. If she wants to talk, she wants to talk. But I at least put it out there that Im willing to hear her out.

THE MEDIA TODAY: A mammoth explosion, tears, and resilient journalism in Beirut

See the article here:

I'm out hereI am the news for our people. How protesters across the country are keeping informed. - Columbia Journalism Review

There has never been a better time to get lost in a book, but that can prove harder than you think with a pandemic at the door. Six Haaretz writers select the books that are getting them through the summertime, when the living isnt easy...

OMER BENJAKOB

Ive only recently made peace with audiobooks. Though still on the fence regarding consuming fiction through my ears, Ive discovered that the medium works like a charm for nonfiction. Even the longest and most tedious tomes are remarkably congruous with headphones like having a history professor read you to sleep. And yes, while reading quasi-academic books by anyone who isnt Yuval Noah Harari tends to be exhausting, listening to nonfiction works can turn even the most detailed historical analysis into a thing of entertainment.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Initially published in four parts, William L. Shirers The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich clocks in at over 57 hours of audiobook. This is one of those books that everyones father claims to have read in college. However, the more I delve into the annals of internal Nazi politicking and power struggles between the SS and the SA, the harder I find it to believe that anyone ever finished the print version. (Disclaimer: I am part of the MTV generation.)

Shirers book came out 15 years after the war ended and was one of the earliest attempts to provide a detailed account of Hitlers rise to power. Oh, and how detailed it is. A journalist by profession, Shirers account of the Nazi infrastructure seems quaint when recited if not some relic of a long-gone news era. He uses dog-whistle terms such as pervert and deviant to describe the sexual orientations of some Nazi party members, giving the reading an air of old-timey radio like a homophobic version of A Prairie Home Companion but with Nazis.

Over 25 hours in, Im glad to report that despite what some political commentators might say, the political realities of the Weimar Republic look nothing like our current political landscape, and Im struggling to find any political lessons beyond not trusting people who, early on in their careers, promise to cancel democracy. If Ive learned anything, its that Nazis should be taken at their word.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

I lied earlier I cant stand Yuval Noah Harari. Ive read all three of his books and, though I enjoyed the first one which I also saw in its original format as an introductory course at the Hebrew University (you can still see it online in Hebrew) I found his second tome to be mediocre at best and the latest a new-age self-help book that should have been titled 21 Lessons for Making YNH Richer.

A bit tedious at times, and a bit too dedicated to a rigorous academic form of argumentation, Jared Diamonds personal excitement at the field of human history is nonetheless infectious. From tales from his own expeditions to Papua New Guinea to his accessible explanations on everything from microbiology to the origins of writing, its no wonder Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies started a new genre in the late 90s and laid the groundwork for YNHs success.

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Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

As a liberal born in the late 80s, Im old enough to remember a time before identity politics but young enough to feel Im generationally required to be woke or at least strive to be. Angela Nagles Kill All Normies has long been considered an act of heresy among the latter crowd and its for this reason Im finding it so interesting. A critique of both the alt-right and the new left from within contemporary internet culture, the book and its author are considered part of a new group of anti-PC left-wingers known informally as the dirtbag left.

Interesting but far from perfect, the book lays out strong arguments regarding identity politics place within the culture wars of the digital age. For all its flaws, its a thought-provoking and at times brave political and cultural reading that, at least for me, felt like a breath of fresh air from much of the debate happening today be it on Twitter or the Op-Ed pages of The New York Times.

Love it or hate it, Nagles book attempts to navigate nuances few today are even willing to admit exist.

DAVID B. GREEN

Hamnet

Maggie OFarrells Hamnet has been the pleasant literary surprise of my summer. That title is not a typo; in an epigraph, the author quotes scholar Stephen Greenblatt, who tells us that the names Hamnet and Hamlet were entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

In OFarrells novel, Hamnet is the son of Agnes and her unnamed husband, who met when he was tutoring her step-siblings in Latin, in Elizabethan-era Stratford. Agnes is 26 and the tutor 18 when they meet, but he is enchanted by this woman whom other suitors have steered clear of because of her unnatural powers of healing and clairvoyance.

After Agnes becomes pregnant, the couples families arrange a hasty marriage, following which they move in with his parents. The young mans father, a glovemaker, is a bully and is especially cruel to his useless son, who seems more interested in words than work. Agnes, sensitive to her husbands suffering and intuiting a reservoir of untapped potential within him, encourages him to move to London to work, even though it will separate their young family. At one point, he tells her that living with her, someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself, can be both a joy and a curse.

In London, the plan is for him to sell his fathers products, but he quickly moves from providing theater companies with leather goods to acting and writing plays for them.

When the couples twins come down with bubonic plague, back in Stratford, it is the one whos supposed to be indestructible, Hamnet, rather than the frail Judith, who dies at age 11, and OFarrells description of the pain caused to the family by his death is exquisite and unbearable. (Her account of the journey of a lone flea from Alexandria to Stratford, in order to carry the pestilence there, is particularly poignant today, and not without humor.)

Youve probably figured out who the husband is. To OFarrells credit, she focuses on Agnes, while her husbands life and playwriting career proceed mostly off the page. Who, after all, could reasonably explain William Shakespeare? What we do learn is that Agnes husband finds solace for the loss of his son in the writing of a play a tragedy, in which it is the son who loses his father and not the reverse. The play is called Hamlet.

Our People: Discovering Lithuanias Hidden Holocaust

It is by now common knowledge that in much of post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Holocaust education and commemoration have become highly politicized and contentious fields. Countries that became independent only 45 years after the end of World War II suddenly were asked to confront the fact that some of their national heroes whose reputations were based on their opposition to communism were also enthusiastic collaborators with the German occupiers following 1941. As archives opened up in the 90s, historical events long forgotten or distorted in memory could now be reconstructed, but the locals didnt always want to know what they revealed.

In countries like Lithuania, Latvia and Ukraine, Efraim Zuroff, an American-Israeli Holocaust historian and war crimes investigator for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, has attempted to get governments to prosecute surviving war criminals, and their school systems to teach uncomfortable truths about their recent national histories thus becoming a much-reviled visitor in a number of states. In 2015, he joined popular Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite for a tour of many of the sites where more than 96 percent of Lithuanias 220,000 Jews were murdered following the Nazi occupation in summer 1941.

Vanagaite, an enlightened and educated woman, had grown up knowing that her paternal grandfather had died in a Russian prison camp, where hed been sent in 1945 for his anti-Soviet activities during the war. He was a national hero. Only as a mature adult did she learn that Jonas Vanagas also helped compile lists of local Jews for murder by the Nazi occupiers in 1941. She had only a vague knowledge of the Holocaust and didnt personally know any Jews.

What made her extraordinary was that, at her own initiative, she began to learn about Lithuanian Jewry, and to organize educational programs on the subject for young people. This is what brought her to Zuroff, and set them and their tape recorder off on a journey to dozens of overgrown forests and fields that hide the mass graves in which Lithuanias Jews were shot and covered up.

In the book, Zuroff and Vanagaite both of them feisty, contentious and ironic share what they each know and have learned, allow us to eavesdrop as they make a genuine effort to understand what could have caused normative people (as Israelis call them) to participate in the torture and murder of their neighbors. Vanagaite has a bit more empathy for the ordinary men of her parents generation, and Zuroff (who is named for his maternal great-uncle, who was one of the Lithuanian Jews murdered in 1941) has more moral outrage. But mostly, both are struck dumb by the stories and numbers they encounter, and shocked by an ongoing societal refusal to come to terms with a shameful chapter in Lithuanias past. This story is not finished.

ADRIAN HENNIGAN

Im ashamed to say Ive only read one work of fiction in 2020 (Jonathan Freedlands To Kill a Man highly recommended for fans of cerebral thrillers), but fully intend to rectify that this summer. The three at the top of my list are Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams, Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and All Adults Here by Emma Straub. And, with my TV critic hat on, Im finally hoping to read the six novels in Mick Herrons Slough House spy saga before Gary Oldman stars in the Apple TV adaptation next year.

Still, its not like I havent read any books this year. Here are three standouts.

Dewey Defeats Truman: The 1948 Election and the Battle for Americas Soul

We always tend to think that the next election is going to be the most important, era-defining one ever. I thought the stakes had never been higher for Americans than this November until I read A.J. Baimes astonishing Dewey Defeats Truman.

The title refers to perhaps the biggest newspaper gaffe in history even worse than the time Haaretz mistranslated rimon as pomegranate instead of grenade. But then, President Harry S. Trumans triumph in 1948 was, much like that pomegranate, hard to see coming.

The parallels between 1948 and 2020 are staggering: allegations of Russian interference, Zionist lobbying over the Palestine issue (which Truman described as loaded with political dynamite), progressives threatening to split the Democratic Party, a fight for racial justice except here its racist Democratic Southerners fighting to deny Blacks the right to vote, and an inexperienced president whos been written off by everyone. Oh, and the small matter of apocalyptic tensions with other superpowers.

Of course, any comparisons between Truman and 45 are ridiculous one is a noble man putting country above all, the other is Donald Trump. And while Trump might say that the president has to look out for the interests of the 150 million people who cant afford lobbyists in Washington, Truman actually meant it.

This is a classic underdog story that works brilliantly regardless of any nods to the present day. And even though its end is known, Baime still manages to create superb tension as Truman takes his message to the American public from the back of a railcar ahead of Election Day. Someone buy those screen rights.

And while were on the subject of political books, I strongly recommend you keep a copy of Ben Shapiros How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps at home just in case theres another toilet paper shortage.

House of Glass

One of the most reliable signs of any artworks true worth is how much it stays with you, haunts you even. I first wrote about Hadley Freemans House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family in March and nothing else this year has remained lodged in my mind so much.

Youll read novels with more plausible storylines than House of Glass, but the fact its all true gives this book its devastating power. In Freemans hands, its a beautifully recounted tale about one seemingly ordinary group of siblings and their extraordinary lives. As the clich goes, youll laugh, youll cry but mainly youll cry.

Its remarkable to see how different family members react in different ways to the Nazi threat in occupied France: One takes up arms, one escapes (against their will), one lies low, one places their trust in good overcoming evil. (No prizes for guessing how that turns out.) Youll also involuntarily put yourself in their shoes and ask, Which member of the Glass family would I be? You may not necessarily like the answer, but youll love this book.

And while on the subject of great Jewish memoirs, I also loved Bess Kalbs love letter to her grandmother, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me: A True (as Told to Me) Story.

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time

Im not the biggest fan of the Beatles music, barely knowing my Mr. Kites from Mr. Mustards, but Im a sucker for stories about them encapsulating as they do Britains transformation from depressed postwar backwater to nerve center of the 60s cultural revolution.

Craig Browns book feels like being bombarded with stories about the band by someone whos read all the biographies and autobiographies, but only remembers the best bits. As well as presenting us with a scattershot tour through the bands crazy ascent its remarkable how quickly they go from Scouse no-hopers to the most famous people on the planet he also delivers a withering assessment of the modern-day Beatles industry.

This is an extremely funny book, with stories about the bands scummy early days in Hamburg particularly entertaining though John Lennons goose-stepping antics on German stages would surely kill any nascent musical career today.

The level of detail is phenomenal, whether recounting a plot by antisemites to kill Ringo Starr (The one major fault is that Im not Jewish, said the bemused drummer) or discussing the forgotten entertainers sharing the bill with the band on their sensational Ed Sullivan Show debut back in 1964.

Browns tome also mocks the numerous biographers who offered up omniscient accounts of behind-closed-doors moments in the Fab Fours lives. Instead, he presents a full gamut of possibilities, recognizing the sheer impossibility today of being able to gimme some truth about this most legendary of groups.

ALLISON KAPLAN SOMMER

As a journalist, I feel grateful that Ive been working harder than ever in the coronavirus era, instead of suffering from unemployment or underemployment like my friends in hard-hit sectors like restaurants, travel, entertainment and retail.

But this also means that even during lockdown, Ive been glued to the keyboard without much time for bread-baking, bingeing Netflix or otherwise breaking free of my social media feeds and trying to keep up with news in Israel and around the world.

It also makes it more difficult to lose myself in a good book. Still, I have been trying my best to make reading time a high priority. Here are three recommendations of recent publications one a nonfiction must-read book of the moment, related to current events; the second a just for fun escapist beach read. The third, meanwhile, falls somewhere in the middle: absorbing literary fiction, but deeply connected to the politics weve been living through for the past decades.

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the Worlds Most Dangerous Man

I felt I had to read Mary Trumps book, given that our world is being rocked daily by this most dangerous figure and no one as close to him as his niece has been able to give us a glimpse at the man behind the curtain, the roots of his dysfunction and the big lie of Donald Trumps success in business.

Its no surprise that he seems to have treated the family members he was supposed to care for as badly as he treats the country he is supposed to serve. What is a surprise: how well written the book is. Mary Trump is a student of literature, and it shows particularly gripping is the spy novel-esque description of how she secretly handed over her familys financial records to The New York Times.

Big Summer

I gobbled this one down in a single day a total escape from bleak reality. From her first novels, Jennifer Weiner has been the fun read of choice for women of a certain age, background, religion and dress size. Or, as Vogue put it: Elevating size-16 women from lowly sidekicks to triumphant stars of their own stories, with ambition, sex, and love.

The heroine of this one is a plus-size Instagram influencer, whose relationship with a privileged frenemy brings her to the center of a murder mystery (what else? Its a summer novel), with a story packed with plenty of Weiner-esque observations on the dynamics of female friendship and romance.

Rodham

Its not an understatement to say Ive been writing about Hillary Rodham Clinton my entire journalistic career from Bill Clintons national debut in the early 90s that made her first lady, to her stints as senator and secretary of state, until the fateful 2016 election.

It actually has felt odd over the past three and a half years to NOT be covering her. So reading the novel Rodham was like having a fascinating reunion with Hillary with a major twist. The book provides a fantastically detailed alternative history recounting what might have happened, in Hillarys life and American politics, if she had made the fateful choice NOT to marry Bill Clinton.

One of Sittenfelds earlier novels, American Wife inspired by Laura Bushs life was a fictionalized version of a real story that pretty much stuck to the facts. Rodham, however, opens up a unique world of what ifs that insightfully confront our worlds dynamics of gender and power through alt-Hillarys observations.

In a way, its themes harken back to Mary Trumps book. We see clearly how the charisma and deep human failings of overconfident alpha males like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump not only transform the lives of those around them they also change history.

JUDY MALTZ

Ill start with a confession: Im a die-hard fan of Joyce Carol Oates and will read anything, absolutely anything, she writes I dont even need to know what the book is about. So when her latest novel Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. came out in June, I naturally stopped what I was doing and ordered it.

Usually, I can zip through an Oates novel in a matter of days or weeks (depending, of course, on how much spare time I have). For me, theyre the ultimate escape and boy, did I need an escape this summer.

But this particular book is going slowly, that is, slower than usual for me, and Im trying to figure out why. Since Im not done with it yet, its early for a final verdict, but having reached the halfway mark I feel comfortable saying this: Its a good book, even great in some ways, but for whatever reason its not having the usual effect. Im not getting lost in it certainly not to the point where I can forget about whats happening in the real world for a few blissful hours, as I wouldve liked.

The McClarens, the protagonists of Oates latest novel (set in upstate New York), have all the makings of the perfect American family. That is until Whitey, the family patriarch, unexpectedly dies, and everything in the lives of his grieving widow and five adult children begins to unravel. The book opens with a rather dramatic scene: A dark-skinned man, driving his car along the highway and minding his own business, is suddenly stopped by police and subjected to harsh verbal and physical abuse. Its clearly his skin color that bothers the police.

Oates began writing this book long before the death of George Floyd sparked a nationwide protest movement, but I couldnt help wondering whether my immediate association with that event was part of the problem I was having with this book: I had come to it yearning for a break from reality, not a stark reminder of it.

Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout are two other favorites of mine, and thankfully their latest novels did not disappoint. Patchetts The Dutch House is an extraordinarily beautiful tale of sibling love, told over the course of nearly half a century. For Olive Kitteridge fans, Strouts Olive, Again is a collection of short stories devoted to the prickly, yet lovable-in-her-own-way character, which is also sure to provide some pleasurable reading and diversion in these challenging days.

I couldnt help but wonder whether my disappointment with two other books on my summer reading list had to do with all the hype surrounding them. Sorry, but I really dont get all the wild praise for Sally Rooneys bestseller Normal People. Is it a generational thing? A cultural thing? How come everyone but me seems to love this book about what seemed to me a pretty boring relationship between two millennials? Neither did Kevin Wilsons Nothing to See Here do it for me. Maybe it was those children who kept bursting into flames. The first time it happens, Ill admit, its a bit scary. By the second time, somewhat less so. By the umpteenth time, meh already.

Next on my summer reading list are two books in Hebrew. The first is Menatzachat (Victorious), Yishai Sarids latest novel. Its about a female psychologist who treats soldiers suffering from shellshock, and since Ive loved his other books I hope I wont be disappointed. The second is not as new and hardly fiction: Optimi (Optimistic) is the two-volume autobiography of Uri Avnery, the prominent Israeli journalist and peace activist who died two summers ago. The recommendation comes from my husband, no less, who hasnt been able to put it down.

ANSHEL PFEFFER

After the Israeli election in March (the third in less than a year), I was planning to read mainly fiction. A pile of novels, some new, others long overdue, awaited. But as our days became dominated by the new and bizarre realities of COVID-19, fiction paled.

Over the months of lockdown, I drifted instead mainly toward historical biographies and other nonfiction encapsulating entire eras of the past, trying to put the present into perspective. Most of these tended to be written a while ago, by well-established authors, but this summer Ive also managed to read some new books dealing with both historical and contemporary themes. These are two of the best.

The Influence of Soros: Politics, Power, and the Struggle for an Open Society

Journalist Emily Tamkins book on George Soros is an original attempt to try to understand the 21st-century phenomenon of the billionaire activist, and the effect capitalist philanthropists have on our age. As Tamkin makes clear at the outset, this is not a biography of the Hungarian-born American financier. His life and times, as both the manager of a hedge fund that savaged global currencies and economies, and founder of the Open Society Foundations that ploughed billions of dollars into causes around the world, are the books narrative vehicle. But Soros is just a parable for the last three decades in geopolitics from the fall of communism to the rise of populism.

Tamkin ably demolishes the main conspiracy theories that have been constructed around Soros and his Mephistophelian influence (though one fears many believers of these theories will not be swayed by mere facts). At the same time, she doesnt set out to portray Soros as a particularly sympathetic figure either. He emerges as a man with a preternatural ability to make immense sums of money in a very short time, but who simultaneously has the need for recognition and acclamation that money cant buy.

The books title is ironic. As Tamkin makes clear, for all the billions Soros has poured into liberal causes across the globe, many have failed and those that succeeded would probably have done so without Soros influence. The image conjured up by anti-liberal leaders like Trump, Viktor Orbn and Benjamin Netanyahu, of someone using his wealth to subvert the will of nations, is a figure with an influence many times that of the real-life Soros. Indeed, in some cases such as his early funding of the elite education of a cadre of young Hungarian politicians including Orbn his political investments seem to have achieved the opposite of the intended result.

Another fascinating irony is that the Soros name, originally Schwartz, was changed by his father in the 30s to avoid drawing attention to their Jewishness, yet has become a byword for 21st-century antisemitism. As Tamkin points out, Soros is neither religious nor particularly interested in Israel. Not that he is running away from his Jewish identity. I was facing extermination at the age of 14 because I was Jewish. Wouldnt that make an impression on you? he once said in an interview. But for him, that identity and his own Holocaust experience mean working for what he sees as the universal goal of an open society. How ironic that in doing so, he has been cast as the eternal scheming, manipulating Jew.

The People on the Beach: Journeys to Freedom After the Holocaust

Rosie Whitehouses book (out in September) is the story of another group of Jews from Soros generation who, unlike him, didnt have the good fortune to remain protected with their families during the war. They endured the worst of the ghettos and camps, and, emerging from the war without families or belongings, decided to rebuild their futures in a new homeland.

This account of the survivors who illegally immigrated to pre-state Israel on the Josiah Wedgwood is not focused primarily on their experiences during the Holocaust, though.

Anyone who has interviewed survivors (or indeed lived with survivors) will know theyre often much more eager to speak of how they recovered their own agency and sense of identity once their lives were no longer in danger. How they stopped being survivors and became normal men and women again. Many times, they are much prouder of their resurrection than of what they faced before.

In her journalism in recent years (for Haaretz, among other publications), Whitehouse has taken upon herself a mission to tell the stories of the survivors after the war. She has written of how these survivors reemerged and came into contact with the outside world. In collecting the stories of those who sailed on the Wedgwood from Italy to Mandatory Palestine in 1946, she has produced a very different Holocaust book. Whitehouse follows the passengers on their lives journey, from their birthplaces in Europe through the ghettos and camps (where she barely lingers), and to their present-day homes in Israel and elsewhere. She hears about their trials in a world where the Holocaust, and everything they had survived, was now yesterdays story.

As the last of the survivors still with us bear witness, now more than ever we need to listen to their experience of coming to terms with a world transformed.

See the rest here:

From Soros to Shakespeare 16 great books to read this summer - Haaretz.com

Donald Trump. File

Donald Trumps suggestion that the US election be postponed shouldnt come as a great surprise. He might not admit it but hell have seen the polling. Its sufficiently bad that in many quarters its already assumed that hes lost.

This is still quite a leap given how volatile the outlook is and his previous defying of the odds (which have contracted a bit in recent days).

But enough people have taken his defeat as a certainty to start a debate over the future of the Republican Party.

Bret Stephens, a Conservative writer for The New York Times, defined this as a battle between the What Were We Thinking side of the party, keen to hurry back to what it was when Paul Ryan was its star, and the Didnt Go Far Enough arm of Trumpist true believers and the cynics who have allied with them.

The opening salvos have already been exchanged. A recent example was congresswoman Liz Cheneys backing for Anthony Fauci Americas doctor and her real men wear masks tweet which, among other things, provoked a fierce backlash from Trump and his loyalists. While this is playing out theres another strand of thinking that says it doesnt much matter. The Grand Old Party is toast. The alt-right rabbit hole down which it has dived will destroy it because, demographics.

They have been steadily shifting. Whites, from whom the Trumpist Republicans draw almost all their support, will soon lose their majority.

But its a dangerously complacent view to see the doom of the GOP in this.

Even armed with a majority in both the Senate and the House, which is quite possible, a new President Biden will face a very difficult situation. The pandemic has devastated the US economy and dealing with the aftermath will define the early part of his tenure.

However moderate he proves to be, he will face the massed ranks of Americas bellicose Conservative media, its army of conspiracy theorists, trolls, bots and pedlars of falsehoods. These are what Anne Applebaum, in her book The Twilight of Democracy would refer to as clercs, whom she identifies as having played a key role in the rise of various authoritarian populists around Europe (including one Boris Johnson).

A situation of high unemployment, global tension, and the fallout from the virus, will be catnip to them.

Joe Bidens tactic to date has largely involved keeping his head down and letting Trump lose the election for him. Its hard to argue with that because its working. But even if he doesnt have to raise his game prior to reaching office, hell surely need to shape up when hes in it.

If he cant, or wont, a restive public, disillusioned Democrats staying home, and our old friends gerrymandering and voter suppression, could deliver a Republican revival. Its happened before.

And if the Trumpists win the internal debate, which looks highly likely, and find among the number a smarter, more competent front man? One capable of finding a way to temper their message sufficiently to reduce the intensity of some of the demographic headwinds the party faces?

Thats when you have to worry. Trump has indulged in far right rhetoric, sent federal agents into cities like Portland to bundle peaceful protesters into vans, filled key positions with incompetent cronies, trampled over hallowed American conventions, pardoned his crooked friends, thumbed his nose at the US constitution when it suits. I could go on in that vein. And on and on.

Yet when push came to shove, when the pandemic held open the opportunity to really tighten the screw, as Viktor Orban did in Hungary, he didnt grasp it.

More recently, federal agents have withdrawn from Portland and he doesnt have the authority to postpone the election because that would require the consent of Congress and the Democrats control the House. Theres also his incompetence to consider, which, allied to his narcissism, has surely played a role in preventing him from doing worse than he has.

His successor, whoever that is (Tom Cotton? Tucker Carlson?), will probably be less self-obsessed, more skilled at avoiding pitfalls, better at reading the room, better at pushing the buttons necessary to further the sort of authoritarian project seen in parts of Europe.

Originally posted here:

Heated debate on the future of President Trump - Gulf Today

David Harsanyi Published 11:00 p.m. ET July 29, 2020

Despite the occasional looting, chaos, property damage, trespassing, rioting, graffiti, assaults, arson and general mayhem, the media consistently assure us that antifa "protesters" are "largely peaceful." And since the majority of buildings in Portland, Seattle and Denver haven't been looted yet, who am I to argue?

Of course, it takes only a sliver of the population to transform downtowns into a mess and create quality-of-life issues for thousands of law-abiding citizens. And the mayors who surrender parts of their cities to left-wing "protesters" are tacitly endorsing lawlessness themselves.

There's little doubt that if alt-right activists had occupied a few city blocks in Seattle or tried to firebomb a federal courthouse in Portland, we'd be in for feverish wall-to-wall media coverage, engulfed in a national conversation about the perils of right-wing radicalism. Every elected Republican would be asked to personally denounce the extremists to make sure they take implicit ownership of the problem.

When a few hundred angry tiki torch-carrying Nazis marched in Charlottesville, you would have thought the RNC had deployed the Wehrmacht. Those who led the riot were even asked to opine on CNN. On the other hand, left-wing rioters the people Chris Cuomo and other journalists compared to GIs landing on Normandy are immediately transformed into apolitical actors, rogue "anarchists," as soon as any violence starts.

Who knows? Perhaps the majority of citizens and businesses in Portland, Seattle and Denver want their elected officials to let antifa act with impunity. Or maybe some of those citizens and businesses will begin fleeing those cities. Whatever the case, it's a local concern.

To a point. If mayors do nothing to stop anarchists from tearing down federal monuments or from defacing, vandalizing, and attempting to burn down federal buildings, the feds have every right to dispatch teams of agents to restore order.

None of which is to deny that there are legitimate concerns about how law enforcement is conducting itself. I'm sympathetic to criticisms of the federal officers who operate in camouflage and in unmarked vans. Cops should display badge numbers and identification if they truly aren't doing so right now otherwise civilians have no real way to hold those in authority accountable for their actions. But the claim that Pinochet-like secret police have begun snatching Portland protesters off the street and making them disappear amounts to the arrest of one man, who refused to speak without his lawyer and was released a little more than an hour later without any charges.

If it were up to me, I'd leave Portland to the anarchists and their political accomplices. But federal law enforcement including agencies such as the DEA, FBI, ICE, ATF, Department of Homeland Security and Marshal Service regularly operate across the country. Sometimes they make arrests, and sometimes they do so after going undercover. This happens under every administration, every day, and it often happens for far less compelling reasons. As far as we know, cops haven't broken any laws in the streets of Portland. The protesters who cover their faces have broken tons.

With this in mind, it's been instructive watching many of the same characters who cheer on governors who take undemocratic emergency powers and shut down houses of worship without the consent of the people and who sometimes arrest Americans for playing Wiffle ball, attending church or cutting hair act as if policing portends the end of democracy. The same people who incessantly clamor to empower the federal government when it suits their purposes now act as if protecting a federal courthouse is the Reichstag fire.

MSNBC's John Heilemann says that Trump's sending federal police into Portland is a "trial run" for using "force" to "steal this election." In a piece titled "Trump's Occupation of American Cities Has Begun," Michelle Goldberg, somehow still allowed to freely opine at The New York Times, says that "fascism" is already here. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls the police "stormtroopers" who are "kidnapping protesters."

All of these contentions are ugly conspiracy theories, hyperbolic allegations meant to fuel partisan paranoia before an election. Even if we accept the criticisms of law enforcement, the driving problem, and it's been happening to various degrees in a number of major cities, is that mayors are allowing "protesters" to trample on public and private property. They allow it because they share the same left-wing sensibilities. But protesting should never be a license for anarchy.

David Harsanyi is a senior writer at National Review and the author of the book "First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History With the Gun." T

Read or Share this story: https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2020/07/30/opinion-problem-portland-isnt-law-its-lawlessness/5535192002/

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Opinion: The problem in Portland isn't the law; it's the lawlessness - The Detroit News

2020 may be an unprecedented year, but one constant is PBS programming, featuring such stalwarts as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,Masterpiecedramas, new kids shows,and exhaustiveFrontlinedocumentaries. Here's a preview of some of what's coming in the fall and summer.

September 7

This new PBS KIDS series for preschoolers follows the observant and curious bunny rabbit Elinor as she and her friends Ari the bat and Olive the elephant explore science, nature, and community in Animal Town.

September 9

As the possibility of editing human DNA with CRISPR technology becomes more and more refined,NOVAexamines the difficult questions posed by such advances: how far should we go?

September 22

As it has since 1988,Frontlinepresents the life stories of the two major party candidates for president, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, examining the evolution of their views, their path to the presidency, and defining moments of their career. It's an in-depth portrait of both candidates in a decisive election.

October 5

Hosted by theNew York Times-bestselling author Kelly Corrigan, this interview series from PBS andPBS NewsHourwill feature such luminaries as Bryan Stevenson, the lawyer, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author ofJust Mercy.

Premieres October 6

The sixth season of the popular ancestry investigation series continues with new episodes featuring everyone from Carly Simon to Lupita Nyong'o, PBS's own Lidia Bastianich, Gayle King, Jordan Peele, Bill Hader, and more.

October 9

This new half-hour, age-appropriate program features both conversations between real children and their parents as well as segments from PBS KIDS showsArthur,Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, andXavier Riddle and the Secret Museumabout race and racial justice.

October 16

Enjoy a starry tribute celebration of Recording Academy Lifetime Achievement Award winners featuring archival clips and acceptance remarks from the honorees and the artists they have influenced, including Chicago, Roberta Flack, Iggy Pop and more.

October 19

Artist Matt Furie's creation Pepe the Frog has been co-opted by alt-right people online as a symbol of hate. Now Furie is trying to reclaim his creation.

October 28

The bushfires that devastated Australia in the past year wreaked havoc on the unique wildlife of the continent. Follow the stories of rescue and rehabilitation of kangaroos, wombats, koalas and other species.

Premieres November 1

Hugh Laurie stars in this newMasterpiece drama as an ambitious politician whose enemies seem to be picking apart his public and private life to his detriment.

December 29

Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65 when she turned her childhood in the Ozarks into theLittle House on the Prairieseries, influencing generations of Americans conceptions of the West.

January 3

In thisMasterpiecefilm, Glenda Jackson plays an independent grandmother who lives alone despite early-stage Alzheimer's. The drama is propelled by the disappearance of her only friend, Elizabeth, and the mystery surrounding it.

January 2021

This new adaptation of the beloved books of James Alfred Wight, aka James Herriot, brings the humorous adventures of a young country veterinarian in Yorkshire during the 1930s.

February 2021

For his next sweeping history, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. takes on the exuberant history of the Black church in America, as a site for worship, resilience, organizing, freedom and more, in two parts.

February 2021

This documentary, executive produced by Alicia Keys, tells the stories of six female Black entertainers, and their struggles against racism in the entertainment industry:Lena Horne, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, and Pam Grier.

Winter 2021

SOUL! was America's first variety show, premiering in 1968 and running for six years. In this documentary, the niece of the show's producer and eventual host, Ellis Haizlip, tells the story of the pioneering show.

The COVID-19 pandemic could be the perfect time to dive into Ken Burns's in-depth films covering the breadth of American history and culture, from baseball to jazz to the Civil War, and beginning in August all of his films will be available to stream via WTTW Passport, available to WTTW members.

Read more here:

What's Coming to PBS This Fall and Winter - WTTW News

Isaias is bringing the threat of tornadoes as it barrels north.

Isaias pounded a large swath of the Atlantic Coast on Tuesday, unleashing heavy rains and winds as fast as 70 miles per hour as it swept through the Carolinas and into the Northeast.

Isaias, which made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane and quickly weakened to a tropical storm, left a trail of floods, fires and hundreds of thousands of people without electricity. Some of the storms most devastating effects, including the deaths of at least two people, were wrought by a series of tornadoes that it spawned across its path.

New York and New England were on alert and bracing for the worst of the storm to hit later on Tuesday, with tropical storm warnings reaching as far up the Atlantic Coast as Marthas Vineyard in Massachusetts.

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey declared a state of emergency for the entire state, and closed government offices. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said the front end of the storm had already arrived in parts of the state.

I urge New Yorkers to look out for local weather alerts, exercise caution and avoid unnecessary travel, especially if you are in the storms direct path, he said on Twitter.

At 2 p.m. Eastern, the center of Isaias, which is written as Isaas in Spanish and pronounced ees-ah-EE-ahs, was about 65 miles west of New York City.

Officials said that the storms rapid pace, moving nearly 35 m.p.h., stood to help limit river flooding and allowed the authorities to mobilize swiftly in assessing the toll.

All in all, this storm got in, got out pretty quickly, Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said in an interview on Good Morning America on Tuesday. Because of that, he added, the damage was not as great as it could have been.

Tornadoes had landed in parts of northeastern North Carolina, southeastern Virginia and southern New Jersey. Another likely touched down near Dover, Del. Photos and videos posted to social media showed trees snapped and pieces of buildings blown on top of vehicles. Tornado threats would continue north along the coast and into New England, and the New York City region was under a tornado watch until 4 p.m.

Isaias could cause flash flooding around much of the Mid-Atlantic region, the center said, with potentially life-threatening urban flooding possible in Washington, Baltimore and other cities along and just west of I-95. The storm had delivered only a glancing blow to Florida as it skirted the coast there, with officials expressing relief that it failed to cause the level of damage they had feared. Georgia was largely spared as well.

The authorities in Bertie County, N.C., were assessing the devastation caused by a tornado that ripped through a neighborhood overnight, killing at least two people.

Television footage showed a rural patch of mobile homes that had been eviscerated, leaving streaks of debris. One home had been reduced to splintered wood and metal, piled with kitchen appliances, furniture and laundry.

The Bertie County sheriff, John Holley, told reporters on Tuesday that the tornado touched down in the early morning hours on Tuesday, shredding the cluster of homes so intensely that only two still stood.

The rest of them is pretty much gone, he said in an interview with WVEC-TV, a television station based in Hampton, Va., adding that he had regularly passed the community during 38 years with the Sheriffs Department and it was now unrecognizable. It dont look real, he said. Its sad and its hard.

The authorities said that at least 12 people had been hospitalized. Mr. Holley said that his deputies were looking for at least three people who were unaccounted for.

Our hearts are heavy as we continue to survey damage and get the big picture about what transpired and just how many were impacted, said Ron Wesson, the chairman of the Bertie County Board of Commissioners.

The authorities made it to the community in the northeast corner of the state before the storm had even passed, county officials said, with emergency workers contending with the wind and rain in the dark of night as they pulled people from their homes.

We want to emphasize that this is not a recovery mission, and rescues are still taking place, Mitch Cooper, the emergency management director for Bertie County, said on Tuesday.

Officials were also trying to take stock of the aftermath across the state. Weve had a number of tornadoes, Governor Cooper, a Democrat, said on Good Morning America. Im not sure of the count yet.

More than two million utility customers along the storms path in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York were without power, according to Poweroutage.us, a website that tracks and aggregates reports from utilities.

As of 1:45 p.m. Eastern time, more than one million customers were without power in New Jersey, a number significantly higher than in any other state. In Eastern North Carolina and Virginia, 448,066 utility customers were without power, and in Pennsylvania more than 356,000 customers were affected.

Storms can disrupt power in a number of ways. Strong wind gusts can sometimes snap cables and poles directly, though utilities try to build and maintain their infrastructure to be wind-resistant. Often the culprit is a broken tree limb or debris from a building that strikes a power line, or a skidding vehicle hitting a pole. Lightning strikes can damage equipment, and so can wind-driven rain or flash floodwaters.

Downed power lines can remain dangerous even when the lights nearby seem to be out, and wet conditions add to the danger. Utility companies like Dominion Energy warn the public to stay at least 30 feet away, and not to attempt to move them.

Loss of off-site power caused one reactor at the Brunswick nuclear power plant in Southport, N.C., to automatically shut down overnight, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission notice. The plants other reactor was unaffected. The report said safety systems worked as intended and the impact of the shutdown was minimal.

The projected path of the storm has shifted slightly westward on Tuesday, giving New York City and the surrounding areas a slight reprieve from the heaviest expected rainfall.

But the shift has also increased the chance of severe weather in the region, including the possibility of weak, brief tornadoes, said Matthew Wunsch, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. A tornado watch is in effect until 4 p.m. for New York City, Long Island, much of New Jersey and parts of Connecticut.

Even with the worst rain falling to the west, the New York City area could still see some heavy bands of rainfall pass through in the morning and afternoon, Mr. Wunsch said. Winds will pick up in the afternoon, with sustained speeds of 35 to 45 m.p.h. and gusts over 60 m.p.h., he said, and coastal flooding is expected in the evening and through tomorrow.

Mr. Wunsch said the fast-moving storm was likely to inflict far less damage overall than Hurricane Sandy did in October 2012. Sandy was such a large-scale event, and it happened over such a long period of time, he said. It was just a different beast altogether.

Even so, officials in New York City were bracing for the bad weather and urging residents to be vigilant for wind, rain and power outages. Beaches were closed on Tuesday.

Gov. Phillip D. Murphy of New Jersey declared a state of emergency and asked people to stay off the roads and to secure loose furniture and other items that could be blown around by the high winds. He said hundreds of thousands of utility customers could lose power in the state, depending on the severity of the wind gusts and the specific track of the storm.

The southern end of the state was already being hit Tuesday morning, with a tornado reported in Strathmere in Cape May County.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said in a statement that the state had rescue teams standing by with boats and high-water vehicles in areas that could be hardest hit by the storm. The state had also sent out water pumps, chain saws, sandbags and bottled water, he said, noting that up to six inches of rain could fall in some areas.

Several homes caught fire, cars were swept away in floodwater, and outdoor stairways were ripped off houses as Hurricane Isaias made landfall in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., on Monday night.

Morgan Strenk watched from her vacation home as rising water flooded the streets outside and filled her basement with three feet of water.

We didnt think it was going to get to this level, she said.

And while the water crept higher, a more urgent threat emerged: Stepping onto her porch, Ms. Strenk smelled smoke, and saw a house across the street going up in flames. The fire then spread to a neighboring house.

When a family came out of another nearby house, Ms. Strenk said she signaled with her flashlight to invite them to come shelter with her on the opposite side of the street.

One of the houses burned completely to the ground, Ms. Strenk said. Only a burned front porch and stairway remains of the other. Photos she took show a burned structure with only the stilts remaining, and a car that was swept up by the flood and dropped nose-down in a pool of water.

The streets are just covered with debris, a lot of houses right on the shoreline lost their stairs, she said on Tuesday. Theres random pieces of furniture all over the place.

In all, fire crews had to put out at least five structure fires, said Tony Casey, a spokesman for Horry County Fire Rescue, which had come from South Carolina to help the local firefighters.

Twin emergencies on two coasts this week Hurricane Isaias and the Apple Fire, which has burned 27,000 acres in Southern California offer a preview of life in a warming world and the steady danger of overlapping disasters.

And in both places, as well as everywhere between, a pandemic that keeps worsening.

Experts say that the pair of hazards bracketing the country this week offers a preview of life under climate change: a relentless grind of overlapping disasters, major or minor.

The coronavirus pandemic has further exposed flaws in the nations defenses, including weak construction standards in vulnerable areas, underfunded government agencies, and racial and income disparities that put some communities at greater risk. Experts argue that the country must fundamentally rethink how it prepares for similar disasters as the effects of global warming accelerate.

State and local governments already stretched with Covid responses must now stretch even further, said Lisa Anne Hamilton, adaptation program director at the Georgetown Climate Center in Washington. Better planning and preparation are crucial, she added, as the frequency and intensity of disasters increase.

In recent weeks as the coronavirus has been resurgent in many parts of the country, experts and politicians alike have implored people to protect themselves and others by always wearing a face mask in public.

Does that apply when you have to be out in the gusting wind and driving rain of a tropical storm? Our health columnist Tara Parker-Pope says, probably not: Face masks arent as effective when they are wet.

For one thing, its much harder to breathe through a wet mask than a dry one, Ms. Parker-Pope notes. And on top of that, a moist or wet mask doesnt filter as well as a dry mask. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends mask-wearing in general, says they should not be worn when doing things that may get the mask wet.

It doesnt take a tropical storm to drench a mask, of course. They can become soaked with condensation from your breath or sweat from your face, and some people think of wetting them deliberately to cool off in hot weather. But the harm done is the same, wherever the moisture comes from.

A paper surgical mask that gets soaked should probably be discarded, Ms. Parker-Pope advises, but a cloth mask can be washed, dried and re-used.

When rain is coming down in buckets, social distancing is not likely to be a problem, and any viral particles exhaled by an infected person probably would be quickly diluted by gusting wind and rain. So there is little need to wear a mask out in a rainstorm, Ms. Parker-Pope notes: In fact, you should take it off and keep it dry, so if you need to duck into a store to wait out the storm, you have a dry mask to wear indoors.

Reporting was contributed by Johnny Diaz, Christopher Flavelle, Henry Fountain, Patrick J. Lyons, Tara Parker-Pope, Rick Rojas, Daniel Victor, Will Wright, Alan Yuhas and Mihir Zaveri

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Isaias Live Updates: Tornadoes Are a Threat as Storm Charges North - The New York Times

My father is an incredibly gifted teacher. Until he retired to become a cattle farmer (true storythats what he does now), he was a math professor. He spent most of his career at Georgetown College, a small Baptist college near Lexington, Kentucky. At one point, he was so popular that when students were asked to vote on a faculty member to give the commencement address, he received an absolute majority of votes cast (not a plurality) in spite of competing against dozens of colleagues.

In church, his Sunday School classes were always packed. Ill never forget his biggest class. After multiple ordeals within the strange hothouse of faculty infighting, he developed a curriculum for a class called, The Christian and on-the-job politics. It was a great idea (Ive got a strong pro-Dad bias here, so hang with me), and it created an actual buzz in the congregation. I skipped my youth group to attend the first class. There werent enough seats. Folks lined the walls.

He started the class with something he called the LBALAG principle. When confronted with the Lesser Bad, he asked, Shouldnt the Christian be at Least as Good? He walked through verse after verse of Christ and the Apostles advocating love in the face of hate, blessings in the face of persecution, kindness in the face of intolerance, put it in the historical context of violent, state-sanctioned murder of Christian believers, and said, Given our far lesser challenge in our own workplaces, cant we be as least as loving and at least as kind as these first Christians?

He took a lesson about dealing with or coping with bad bosses or malicious co-workers and transformed it into a lesson about loving bosses and caring for co-workers. He made the point that you can never, ever divorce goals from methods, ends from means. It made a powerful impact on my high-school mind. It convicted me. How fragile was my love for others when I struggled with basic kindness even while living a life of ridiculous privilege?

I think of that lesson often. I thought of it again when John Lewis was laid to rest.

My Sunday newsletter two weeks ago argued that all too many Christians lack a robust political theology. We think of political engagement primarily through the prism of issues and secondarily (if at all) through serious consideration of methods. In politics, we tend to ask far more, What should a Christian believe? than consider, How should a Christian behave?

I touched on this on the weekend when Lewis died, but how many times in American life have we seen a better marriage of Christian belief and Christian behavior than the nonviolent resistance to segregation and Jim Crow in the American South? Remember Lewiss own words, from a 2004 interview:

During those early days, we didnt study the Constitution, the Supreme Court decision of 1954. We studied the great religions of the world. We discussed and debated the teachings of the great teacher. And we would ask questions about what would Jesus do. In preparing for the sit-ins, we felt that the message was one of love the message of love in action: dont hate. If someone hits you, dont strike back. Just turn the other side. Be prepared to forgive. Thats not anything any Constitution say anything about forgiveness. It is straight from the Scripture: reconciliation.

In his legendary Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. didnt just deliver a master class on the injustice of segregation, he also delivered a lesson in the method of nonviolence, of the graduated approach before he took to the streets. In any nonviolent campaign, King wrote, there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action.

And he appealed of course to scriptural principle and scriptural example:

One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.

Moreover, its important to remember that the civil rights movements success was hardly assured. In other words, the fact that the tactics worked is not the reason they were justified. They were right regardless of the outcome. And they were pursued against great odds.

What looks inevitable in hindsight was anything but certain. In fact, if you were placing contemporary bets on a political outcome, would you guess that some version of a three-century status quo would prevail, or that the civil rights movement would achieve a legal revolution nearly on par with emancipation itself?

At the same time, can we even recall a modern Christian political movement so consistent with the upside-down logic of biblical Christianity? To gain your life you must lose your life. Bless those who persecute you. Love your enemies. The last shall be first.

In fact, the turning point of the movement came in 1963, in the Birmingham Childrens Crusade, when the least-powerful members of Southern society, the black children of Alabama, confronted Bull Connors dogs and firehoses, andfinallyshocked the conscience of a nation chock full of Christians and moved it to take decisive legal and political action.

Thats what a Christian political theology looks like in action. Both ends and means are suffused with Gospel truth.

Now, lets return to the LBALAG principle and reflect just a bit on contemporary Christian political action. In the face of less evil than the systematic segregation, lynching, and comprehensive violation of basic human rights that characterized the Jim Crow South, are Americas contemporary political Christian leaders behaving at least as good as these civil rights-era heroes?

Or are we frequently responding with a degree of fear and panic and compromise thats mystifying in its historical context?

In 2016, one of the things that we learned was that Donald Trumps rise first owed its real strength to the irreligious rightthe segment of the Republican electorate that attended church the least. For example, in March 2016, a Pew poll found that Trump trailed Ted Cruz by 15 points among Republicans who attended religious services every week. But he led Cruz by a whopping 27 points among those who did not.

In early 2017, The Atlantics Peter Beinart wrote a prescient, important essay noting the negative cultural effects of our increasingly secular politics, on both the left and the right. Far from ushering in a new, more tolerant political dawnsecularization was creating a far more vicious political reality.

Heres Peter, first speaking about the right:

Secularism is indeed correlated with greater tolerance of gay marriage and pot legalization. But its also making Americas partisan clashes more brutal. And it has contributed to the rise of both Donald Trump and the so-called alt-right movement, whose members see themselves as proponents of white nationalism. As Americans have left organized religion, they havent stopped viewing politics as a struggle between us and them. Many have come to defineusandthemin even more primal and irreconcilable ways.

And next, speaking about the left:

The decline of traditional religious authority is contributing to a more revolutionary mood within black politics as well. Although African Americans remain more likely than whites to attend church, religious disengagement is growing in the black community. African Americans under the age of 30 are three times as likely to eschew a religious affiliation as African Americans over 50. This shift is crucial to understanding Black Lives Matter, a Millennial-led protest movement whose activists often take a jaundiced view of established African American religious leaders. Brittney Cooper, who teaches womens and gender studies as well as Africana studies at Rutgers,writesthat the black Church has been abandoned as the leadership model for this generation. As Jamal Bryant, a minister at an AME church in Baltimore,toldThe Atlantics Emma Green, The difference between the Black Lives Matter movement and the civil-rights movement is that the civil-rights movement, by and large, was first out of the Church.

And given the tenor of the times, these words from Beinart are downright prophetic:

Black Lives Matter activists may be justified in spurning an insufficiently militant Church. But when you combine their post-Christian perspective with the post-Christian perspective growing inside the GOP, its easy to imagine American politics becoming more and more vicious.

It is now increasingly clear that the un-Christian de-linking of ends and means is working its dark magic on the United States of America, including on the American church. When confronting lesser evils, our political selves are behaving far worse than we should, and theres strong evidence that the religious right is now joining the irreligious right on the march down that dark path. Rather than resisting the de-linking, its advancing the degradation of our political culture.

Remember the statistics about churchgoing Republicans rejecting Trump more than their non-churchgoing peers? Well that changed, dramatically. By the time Beinart wrote his essay, white churchgoing Evangelicals supported Trump more than nonchurchgoing Evangelicals, and that gap has now persisted for years. Rather than presenting the last line of defense against his rise, churchgoing Evangelicals are now the foundation of his political power.

Whats the old saying? If you cant beat em, join em. Thats exactly what white Evangelicals did. They didnt change the post-Christian ethos of Trumps movement. All too many times they embraced that ethos. And in so doing they have often shocked the conscience of the nation, but sometimes in the worst ways.

As a nation says farewell to John Lewis and is saying farewell to his peers in that great generation of black Christian political leaders, its worth remembering that there is a better way. Christian political engagement can look very different than it so often looks today. Yes, later in life John Lewis could be bitterly partisan and sometimes deeply uncharitable, but in those most crucial years, he showed us what Christian political courage looked like. May we remember, and may we learn.

One more thing ...

Speaking of Christian charity, Id urge you all to watch George W. Bushs brief eulogy at Lewiss memorial service. It pays proper tribute to Lewis, without keeping any record of personal wrongs. Lewis, remember, famously boycotted Bushs first inauguration. This is how to lay down partisan differences to celebrate the best memories of a great man:

One last thing ...

In my quest to send you good music that nourishes the soul, Ive neglected to send along the best beard in Christian music. I love this songit communicates the power of encountering Christ in scripture. Its a power that can transform a person and a nation. Enjoy:

Photograph by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images.

Excerpt from:

Remembering John Lewis, and the Political Theology that Changed a Nation - The Dispatch

Evan Krell July 31st, 2020 - 6:47 PM

The rise and rapid expansion of video sharing sites like YouTube have given people all over the world a voice and a platform to talk about film and other forms of entertainment. Its done plenty of good by promoting more independently created content and breaking down a lot of boundaries between creators and audiences. Movie making, discussion, and critique is easier than ever. YouTube however has become a breeding ground for alt-right groups of internet trolls posting hour long videos complaining about films featuring women and people of color in prominent roles. This groups often have their origins in nerd culture and their roots can be traced back to the mid 2000s when the internet was still relatively new, all things considered.

In 2004, amateur filmmaker James Rolfe inadvertently started a trend when he uploaded the first video in his Angry Video Game Nerd series. This series featured Rolfe portraying the titular character of the Angry Video Game Nerd, a foul mouthed, ill-tempered video game player who would review bad video games in a humorous manner. These reviews would usually feature skits, running gags, and slapstick interwoven with actual criticism of the games. When the series hit YouTube in 2006 it gained immense popularity and paved the way for the angry reviewer archetype.

Perhaps most famous of these was Doug Walkers character the Nostalgia Critic. The shows format was very similar to Angry Video Game Nerd, only centered around films instead. The Critic would go through the movie, picking it apart, performing skits, all the while screaming and swearing. Countless imitations would pop up over the years, almost all of which would focus on bad movies or video games. The biggest allure to the series wasnt the actual criticism though. People were drawn to these videos because of the over the top personalities and the humorous skits. Neither series really provided great critical insight, but they served their purposes as light bits of humor, often appealing to teenage audiences.

Both Angry Video Game Nerd and Nostalgia Critic (pictured above) are still running today with new episodes. Though the landscape of the internet and YouTube have changed drastically since both series were created. In the early 2010s both Screen Junkies and CinemaSins would get their start on YouTube. Screen Junkies biggest claim to fame is their Honest Trailers series. These videos are set up like a traditional movie trailer but poke fun at the movie by pointing out shortcomings and what not. CinemaSins features a narrator going through a movie scene by scene, pointing out every single little problem or inconsistency with the film and adding it to the sin counter with the total being shown at the end of the video. Like the angry reviewers before them, these videos became immensely popular and still rake in hundreds of thousands of views today with new videos. Unlike the earlier reviewers, these shows will focus on recently released popular movies rather than poor quality films of the past.

In recent years, people have begun flocking to these kinds of videos and putting them on a pedestal as the gold standard for film criticism. Despite these internet series starting off as being nothing more than comedy, people have begun to take their word as gospel and point to them in an attempt to discredit people who happen to like a film that has been covered. Many filmmakers have spoken about the prevalence of these kinds of channels. Jordan Vogt-Roberts, director of Kong: Skull Island stated, These guys are just trolling the art form we love and profiting from it while dumbing down the conversation. Many other directors and writers have agreed, stating that these types of videos are reductive and replace the nuance of film criticism with nitpicking and mean spirited complaining.

A lot of this rallying behind voices like CinemaSins stems from a disdain for mainstream movie critics. This has been especially prominent in so called nerd culture with one of the most notable examples being the response to the DC Comics superhero films. The films of the DCEU have done relatively poorly with critics and many hardcore fans of DC have claimed that its an elaborate conspiracy of critics paid off by Marvel and Disney to give their competitors lower scores. People like to flock to these internet personalities because they tell it like it is, which naturally ends up drawing in alt right circles. Despite many championing these internet personalities as voices of reason, any attempt at criticizing them results in a response of its just satire, stop taking it so seriously. If it fits their narrative, its gospel. If it doesnt then its just a joke.

Even if reviewers like CinemaSins are just meant to be viewed satirically and not seriously, it doesnt help that the creators dont make this clear at all. Even more so, the type of people being drawn to these reviewers arent being satirical at all. With a sizable alt right presence, the conversation drifts towards people complaining about films that dont conform to white, male, hegemonic expectations for films. Perhaps most infamously was the response to The Last Jedi, featuring an unprecedented amount of vitriol and debate among the Star Wars fan base. The film despite being praised by critics for its inventive story, fleshed out characters, and stunning visuals was met with an extreme amount of backlash by many fans claiming that it ruined the franchise forever. To this day its hard to mention the film in any capacity online without someone starting a debate about it.

Any attempt at nuanced criticism was buried by the hordes of people tearing the film down as disgrace to Star Wars. The most vitriolic hate was directed towards the female characters of the film, labeling the protagonist Rey as being too perfect and a Mary Sue, a reductive name given to characters who have no flaws. Perhaps most egregious was the way members of the cast were treated by these internet trolls. Rose Tico actor Kelly Marie Tran ended up leaving social media entirely due to the constant harassment from the trolls targeting her because of her gender and race. Some radical alt right internet users even went as far as to create an entire cut of The Last Jedi that removes almost all of the female characters, running at just 47 minutes. This goes beyond just mere satire and is symbolic of the deep rooted misogyny in many of these pop culture circles.

To say that entities like CinemaSins singlehandedly created the alt right movement would be too much. These types of people have always been around and the internet has only further radicalized them and given them a more vocal platform. However, its important to realize how intertwined they are. It started with angry comedy reviewers and evolved into channels entirely dedicated to making surface level judgements and nitpicks on films under the guise of genuine critique. The audiences grew and grew, drawing in the alt right crowds from nerd circles, many of whom have developed a deep resentment towards women and define themselves by their hatred. This comes from deep sexist roots of othering women and feeling like they, straight white men, are entitled to sex. And much like the bad faith internet reviewers, they use their platform to tear down movies for having women and people of color in prominent roles. There is no nuance, no genuine critique. Just pure hatred.

This issue is much larger than just angry Star Wars fan boys. The rise of the online alt right can be found in every facet of life and has become especially prominent on video streaming sites. Additionally, YouTube has taken very little action against the hateful content on their site despite literal Nazis posting videos. YouTubes algorithm makes it such that its impossible to watch anything Star Wars related without the recommended videos section becoming flooded with vitriolic rants directed at the women and people of color involved with the franchise. Its important to always be mindful of the content youre consuming, and to take a stand against bigotry and hatred where it manifests. The internet has, and continues to do plenty of good. Creators from marginalized backgrounds are getting more exposure then ever and people are able to engage with media like never before. The ugly, hateful underbelly of YouTube still festers and needs to be uprooted entirely to ensure a healthy online environment.

Visit link:

How the Internet has Warped Film Criticism - mxdwn.com

Federal officers deploy gas to disperse crowds of protesters near the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., July 20, 2020.

Jonathan Levinson / OPB

After more than 50 days of nightly protests against racism and police violence, demonstrators in Portland are intimately familiar with the immediate effects of tear gas: blurry eyes, burning skin, choking, coughing, crying, retching.

But some protesters believe the gas is doing more than causing red eyes and seething skin. OPB interviewed 26 protesters, ranging in age from 17 to 43, who said they believe regular exposure to tear gas has caused irregularities within their menstrual cycle.

Related: 60+ days of tear gas leaves behind 'a stew of pollutants'

The experiences range. Some protesters reported getting their period multiple times in a single month. Others reported debilitating cramps at least one that ended in a hospital visit and blood clots the size of half a fist. Trans protesters who had stopped menstruating since taking testosterone said they have seen their cycles restart.

There are two common threads between the experiences of the 26 protesters: All said what they were experiencing was abnormal for their bodies. And all believed the tear gas, which law enforcement has been using against demonstrators for two months, was at fault.

Related: 60-plus days of tear gas leaves lingering questions about environmental impacts

There has been little scientific research into whether tear gas can affect a persons hormones and experts warn against extrapolating a solid medical conclusion from anecdotal evidence. But while the science remains thin, the troubling stories have mounted as the release of the chemical has become a near-nightly occurrence.

Lindsey Smith, a 26-year-old preschool teacher who has been live-tweeting the protests since mid-June, said shes noticed a pattern: If she inhales a significant amount of gas in the night, shell have her period the next morning. She said this has happened at least three times in two months even though the hormonal birth control shes on makes it so shes only supposed to menstruate four times a year.

On July 12, after another night that saw federal officers blanket the crowd with tear gas, Smith tweeted to ask if anyone else was menstruating after being exposed to the gas. She received nearly 30 responses from protesters with their accounts of irregular periods: cramping within hours of exposure, periods that stretched for nearly a month, or arrived weeks early.

She was also met with some trolls.

When I posted that, there were a lot of alt-right people screenshot-ing it and reposting it and a lot of them are saying, Good, I hope after this youre sterile, she said. That was the first time that the thought occurred to me: I dont know what this is going to do. And I dont think anyone really knows long-term.

Within the small body of research that does exist on tear gas, the question of what effect it could have on a persons reproductive health, if any, has been left unanswered.

Sven Eric Jordt, an associate professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who has extensively studied tear gas agents, said its possible the gas impacts hormones. He pointed to a 2010 study that showed burning the agent in CS gas, a common type of tear gas, could generate chemicals potentially toxic enough to affect hormonal homeostasis. Researchers in Chile raised concerns tear gas might cause miscarriages in 2011, leading the government to temporarily ban its use. In Bahrain, Physicians for Human Rights documented accounts of pregnancy loss among civilians gassed during anti-government protests.

But no one can say with certainty if theres a link.

Theres really no data on this. Its entirely possible that some of these chemicals that if you inhale them at high levels can have effects, Jordt said. But its really hard to say.

Intense stress could be another culprit. Rising levels of cortisol, the bodys primary stress hormone, are known to upend normal menstrual cycles, And the policing tactics common among local and federal officers including tear gas, impact munitions, and flash bangs could all be fairly described as cortisol-inducing. Not to mention the new unusual rituals that could potentially alter someones usual menstrual cycle: bedtimes pushed to the early morning, a diet of snacks and energy drinks, nightly sprints away from gas and police.

But some protesters in Portland are convinced that stress alone cant explain their experiences.

While many nights are traumatic, protesters are not breathing lungfuls of the chemical every single evening. And some report its only in the aftermath of these hazy nights, during which theyve inhaled for minutes without a mask, that they notice the irregularities.

Alissa Azar, 29, has been protesting downtown at least five nights a week since the demonstrations began. She said shes been caught in the thick of a cloud of gas six times. On two of these occasions, her period started immediately after. The other four times, it started within a few days.

Obviously were experiencing a significant amount of stress right now physically, mentally, emotionally. It would be naive to believe that doesnt have an effect. However, I definitely think theres a correlation between menstruation and tear gas, she said. The timing has been too spot-on.

She said the periods are different than what she expects. Each one lasts for four or five days. The cramps are more like the contractions she had when she gave birth, inducing nausea and severe back pain. A dozen other protesters interviewed had similar accounts of cramps that felt like sharp rocks being cradled in their stomachs.

Were not paranoid. This isnt a coincidence. Somethings going on, Azar said. Within 15 minutes of a gas attack, myself and others will have to take a break from how bad the cramps are.

For some, the experience goes beyond physical pain. Five transgender individuals taking testosterone, which typically stops menstruation after a matter of months, told OPB theyd seen their cramps and bleeding return after attending demonstrations.

These protesters say these unexpected periods were accompanied by a sense of gender dysphoria, the clinical term for the discomfort and distress people feel when their bodies dont align with their gender.

Its definitely a back and forth feeling. Im still pretty early in my transition, and Ive waited a really long time to be able to do this, said Lester Lou Wrecksie, a nonbinary transmasculine person who has been taking testosterone since September.

Wrecksie, 43, said on most nights they stay in the back of protests, largely out of the way of gas. But on June 21, they got knocked down and ended up getting caught in the chemical for longer than usual. Two days later, Wrecksie said their cycle returned for the first time in half a year.

Its unsettling to be like, I can go out into the air with chemicals and have it basically undo part of what Im trying to do for myself, they said.

A few protesters said they were concerned enough with the period irregularities that they scheduled a call with the local Planned Parenthood. Paula Bednarek, the medical director for Planned Parenthood Columbia Willamette, said clinicians had not noticed an uptick in patients reporting unusual menstruation since the protests began.

But enough reports linking period irregularities and tear gas have cropped up nationwide in the last few months that another branch of Planned Parenthood has taken note. An epidemiologist with Planned Parenthood North Central States, which supports reproductive health in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, crafted a research proposal after putting out a call for reports from protesters whod spontaneously menstruated after being tear-gassed. A handful of online outlets have also done write-ups this summer questioning a possible connection between the chemical and periods.

Dr. Rohini Haar, a medical expert for Physician for Human Rights, said while these experiences should be acknowledged, she believed there is danger in overreporting a potential link without the hard scientific evidence to back it up.

Haar, an expert in crowd control weapons who has studied the health consequences of tear gas up close among Palestinian refugees, said shed only started hearing these anecdotal reports of tear gas affecting menstruation a few weeks ago. She worried these new accounts could genderize protests and lead to a narrative that protesting is only safe for people without ovaries.

This may be an issue, but its certainly not enough of an issue to intimidate people away from protesting especially women, she said. Its not the situation where you should tell your teenager, This definitely injures your reproductive tract, you are not allowed to go. There is no evidence to say that.

Dr. Jordt said he thought it would be worth trying to find out. He suggested a local or state health department in Oregon should initiate a study, taking health data from protesters and residents and following up with them over the long term.

Jordt estimates there are currently five or six of these sorts of studies that look at long-term effects of tear gas on people who have been exposed repeatedly, most coming from the Middle East during the Arab Spring. But he said governments in these countries often hampered the efforts of the doctors leading these studies, making it difficult to follow up with civilians over long periods of time.

One of the most comprehensive studies within the United States was conducted on recruits for the U.S. Army in 2014. Researchers found recruits exposed to CS gas as part of a training exercise were at a higher risk for developing respiratory illnesses, including influenza, pneumonia and bronchitis.

They were exposed to the gas just once.

Jordt pointed to two reasons why learning the long-term health effects of repeated exposure to tear gas has yet to become a top concern of health experts in the United States: The first is that its rarely used at the levels the country has seen this summer. While its been used en masse on protesters before in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, during the Vietnam War protests in the 60s and 70s he said the chemical hasnt been pervasive enough to become a top priority among health experts.

Nor is it top of the list for law enforcement agencies. Jordt said theres a strong belief among law enforcement that teargas is their safest option for controlling crowds. He suspects they will not be the ones leading the charge for a deeper study.

The lack of concrete studies has left some protesters feeling like guinea pigs, scouring Google for answers on whats happening to their bodies with no satisfying results.

We dont know the long term effects of this, said Elisa Blackman, 24, who said she got her period five times between June 2 and July 5. She tried to search for an explanation, but the hits she got on the internet focused on effects you could expect in the minutes after being gassed, not weeks or years.

Its like theyre testing it on us.

Go here to see the original:

'It's like they're testing it on us': Portland protesters say tear gas has caused irregularities with their periods - OPB News

In late July, rapper Talib Kweli posted a lengthy message to his Instagram account, announcing that after 11 years, he was finally leaving Twitter. I have officially left @twitter for the greener pastures of @patreon which is membership fee based, Kweli wrote. Now most of my exchanges will always be with real fans who invest in me.

But Kweli didnt leave Twitter voluntarily. On July 23, Kweli was suspended for repeated violations of Twitter rules, according to a spokesperson for the app, after he spent over two weeks in the mentions of black women who characterized his behavior as harassment. His primary target: A 24-year-old student and activist named Maya Moody, who became Kwelis obsession after a discussion about colorism in hip-hop went left.

The suspension came nearly two weeks after Kweli began incessantly tweeting at Moody, sometimes for more than 12 hours straight in a single day. During that time, several Black women participated in a campaign to report Kweli for targeted harassment and get him suspended, to no avail.

Its unclear what, precisely, changed Twitter Supports mind after weeks of inaction. In a statement to Jezebel, a Twitter spokesperson claimed his account was suspended for violating its rules around harassment, among other things:

[Talib Kwelis] account has been permanently suspended after repeated violations of the Twitter rules. Twitters purpose is to serve the public conversation. Violence, harassment and other similar types of behavior discourage people from expressing themselves, and ultimately diminish the value of global public conversation. Our rules are to ensure all people can participate in the public conversation freely and safely.

Moody is unsurprised by Twitters initial inaction, which fits into a pattern of the company ignoring rampant abuse against Black women on the platform. Twitter has a history of defending those who speak out against oppressionspecifically Black peoplebut staying silent when white supremacists and alt-right people are saying unbelievable things online and still allowing them to have platforms, still allowing them to post crazy things, Moody explained. But those that have spoken against [bigots] have been suspended for way less than targeting someone and harassing them constantly for over two weeks straight.

Twitter is familiar with this critique from Black women. In 2019, Rachelle Hampton wrote a piece for Slate about Black feminists who encountered far-right trolls on Twitter in the early and mid-2010s; this was before Gamergate and before the calamity of the 2016 presidential election. Whether it was white men masquerading as Black people or other racist and sexist harassment campaigns, Black women have often been the early targets of coordinated harassment and doxxing before it spreads to other people of color and white people. Yet theyve been largely ignored. As Hampton wrote in Slate, some media outlets diminished the danger of trolls by characterizing their flirtation with white nationalism as tongue-in-cheekuntil those trolls took their rhetoric offline and onto the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia.

While the Kweli debacle isnt a matter of racist right-wingers versus Black women, the harassment campaign Moody has endured illuminates a larger concern Black women have long held about normalized harassment on Twitter. Whether from miscellaneous trolls or verified Twitter users like Kweli, Moodys experience is not just an isolated incident, but rather a microcosm of the harm Black women experience online dailywhether or not anyone listens.

It started in early July, when a video of rappers 50 Cent and Lil Wayne talking about dating exotici.e. non-Blackwomen made the rounds, prompting a Twitter user to ask which rappers, aside from Snoop Dogg, are married to Black women. Another user replied with a list of names: Jay-Z, 2 Chainz, Gucci Mane, Chance the Rapper, Ludacris, Kendrick Lamar, Big Boi, Killer Mike, and more. Talib Kweli was also included in the list.

On July 9, Moody responded, writing, Literally almost all of them are married to lightskinned women but thats a conversation for another day.

Moodys offhand comment hinting at colorism in the Black community soon spiraled.

Kweli replied the next day, tweeting the following: Nah lets have this convo today. Are we talking all of my relationships? My childrens mother as well? Or are you only talking about who you think Im currently in a relationship right now? I mean, is any of this really any of your business?

Kweli dug up and publicized Moodys old tweets in an attempt to discredit her, including one in which Moody swooned over white actor Alan Ritchson and quoted a popular meme of Tamera Mowry (whose husband is white) lamenting that people have called her white mans whore. (Black women and other women of color have reappropriated Mowrys quote in a humorous light over the years, reframing it as a joke for when they find a white man attractive, perhaps beyond their best judgment.) Kweli framed Moodys tweetcalling herself a white mans whoreas proof of her hypocrisy, failing to understand the facetiousness.

But Kweli didnt stop at this contextless attempt to smear Moody. For weeks, Moody has been subjected to Kwelis incessant attacks on social media, during which Kweli accused Moody of aligning with white supremacists and Nazis. During this very public spat, photos of Moodys parents and identifying information was leaked by trolls, various Twitter accounts publicized her stepmothers salary, and she received death threats and threats of sexual abuse from defenders of Kwelis.

Its definitely been draining and overwhelming, Moody told me in a phone interview last week. Yesterday alone, I had to get 12 different accounts suspended for trying to make new profiles doxing my family and me using my stepmoms name and pictures and where we live... basically pretending to be my stepmom on Twitter.

Kweli, meanwhile, vowed on the app that he wouldnt let up unless Moody deleted her Twitter account or apologized. When a Twitter user pointed out at the time that his tweets for the past 13 hours had been nothing but harassment, Kweli replied, I can go for 13 years if you come for my family. Im just getting started.

In an email to Jezebel, Kweli denied that he was harassing Moody. Maya Moody is a liar, he wrote. Ive never cyber harassed anyone in my life. I responded, on Twitter, to the lies that Maya posted about me. When you respond to someone who posts lies about you, that is not harassment.

Responding for hours on end for over two weeks on various social media platforms may, in fact, qualify as cyber harassment, which the National Conference of State Legislatures defines as an act that usually pertains to threatening or harassing email messages, instant messages, or to blog entries or Web sites dedicated solely to tormenting an individual. It waseventuallyconsidered harassment by Twitters standards as well.

But he was, indeed, just getting started. For weeks, it was impossible to scroll through Kwelis Twitter account without seeing him interacting with Moodys Twitter handle. The Root covered Kwelis Twitter behavior in late July with a post full of screenshots.

Moody is not the only woman who has been on the opposite end of Kwelis fixation. A two-hour-long YouTube video from 2019 details seven months of targeted harassment against Yvette Carnell, YouTuber and ADOS (African Descendents of Slaves) co-founder.

Kwelis harassment of Moody didnt remain on Twitter. He dragged the fiasco to Instagram for his 918,000 followers to enjoy, posting screenshots of her tweets, accusing Moody of harassing him, and dedicating an hour-long Instagram Live session to the kerfuffle (ironically titled Addressing The Lies That I Harass Black Women).

In his Instagram Live video, Kweli accuses Moody of denying the blackness of light-skinned Black women. Shes saying that these womenwho are Black womenare not Black enough because theyre light-skinned. And shes also implying that these rappers only marry these women for the color of their skin.

Moody didnt say that, nor did she imply it. Acknowledging a Black persons light complexion doesnt inherently negate their blackness, and for Kweli to act as if the desirability of light-skinned and non-Black women isnt pervasiveregardless of ones intentionsis absurd.

So many people pretend that they dont know that [colorism] is a real thing, especially in the Black community, Moody said. This is something that impacts every aspect of our lives, from our education system to our prison system to [who gets] harsher punishment. Its a part of us. And if we cant acknowledge that and talk about that without getting defensive and gaslighting each other and saying, you know, You just hate Black men, just hate Black people... No, thats not the case. I love us. And because I love us, I want us to be able to have the conversation and talk about it.

In Kwelis Instagram Live video, he acknowledged that colorism is a problem. Despite this, he has maintained his obtuse approach toward Moodys initial tweet, and continued to talk about her on his Instagram. This has always been about a bunch of groupies doing celebrity cockwatch, Kweli wrote in a recent Instagram post. He tagged Moody.

When Jezebel contacted Kweli, his response via email was long and thorough, but terse in tone. Kweli accused Moody of calling him a child rapist; tweeting white supremacist diss tracks about him; harassing and encouraging others to harass his wife, DJ Eque; contacting all of his business partners in an attempt to stop him from getting work; posting his phone number; and using a photo of him and the mother of one of children as her Twitter header.

Kweli sent me an iCloud folder full of screenshots he says prove his point. But for the most part, the photos demonstrate just how much Kweli has lost the plot. The diss track Moody tweeted was by a white rapper named Diabolic, whose insipid comments downplaying the threats that the Trump administration posed appeared to anger Kweli years ago. This was enough for Kweli to infer that Moody a Nazi sympathizer. (A perusal of Diabolics social media concludes that while prone to conspiracy and disdainful toward what he considers communism, Diabolic is likely not a Nazi, just ignorant).

The insinuation that Moody instrumented a harassment campaign against DJ Eque also falls flat. Many Black women on Twitter began to reach out to DJ Eque in earnest, days into Kwelis neverending tweetstorm against Moody, asking Eque why she hasnt tried to intervene. In since-deleted tweets, Eque wrote, Hey he makes his own damn choices for his life and that hes a debater who has a way with words. Im sorry but I rather he do it online than to me, she wrote. She later tweeted that she tried to ask Kweli to stop, but said she felt less inclined to do so after Moody started calling Kweli a rapist.

Moody did accuse Kweli of being a child rapist, citing an article about Kweli suing a blog for defamation after it claimed, without evidence, that Kweli raped a teenage girl. Moody also called Kweli a predator, based on sexual harassment allegations against Kweli made by Res, a Philadelphia artist with whom Kweli once collaborated. In 2018, Res publicly accused Kweli of bullying her and holding her career hostage after she rejected his sexual advances.

Kweli uploaded an Instagram photo of a court document in response, showing that Ress sexual harassment claim was dismissed by a judge. Kweli wrote, Res is a liar... I find her claim to be dubious in nature. Bogus. Kweli also accused Res of taking advantage of the MeToo movement for personal gain.

That same day, Res tweeted a screenshot of a 2014 e-mail from Kweli, in which he admits attempting to kiss her in a pool.

Moody denies contacting Kwelis business partners. She also denies publicizing his phone number, and none of the screenshots Kweli sent to me support this claim either (someone else did, however, and Kweli did receive a few threatening text messages).

But Moody did not hesitate to own up to temporarily changing her Twitter header. It was a petty move, but during a phone call with Jezebel, she explained why she wasnt above it. After three days of consistent, non-stop harassment, I sure did, Moody said, laughing. After I already blocked [him] and told [him] to stop and leave me alone and [he] did not... yes, I did. I sure did. And I am not sorry.

Its worth noting that virtually no other hip-hop artists pushed back on Kwelis behavior. His tweets were on full display for all to see, and few condemned him. Activist and rapper Noname was one of the few public figures who bothered to speak out against Kwelis two-week harassment spree, invoking the mockery and abuse that hip-hop artist Megan Thee Stallion received after she was reportedly shot.

Watching black men joke about [Megs] shooting as a call to action to harm more black women hurts in a way Im not smart enough to articulate, Noname tweeted. And the silence from male rappers while Talib Kweli harassed black women for weeks, disgusting.

The presumption is that Black women are fair game, easy targets, for racists and Black men alike. Misogynoir is for everyone.

[Megs] life could have easily been taken from her, Moody said. And it just goes to show how Black women are not taken seriously. They make a mockery of our pain.

Both Moody and Kweli experienced nastiness throughout this ordeal. Both of their personal lives were made public for drama-thirsty spectators, and both received threatening messages. Trolls and bored opportunists with an ax to grind got into the mix to hassle and terrorize both parties. But there is an obvious power imbalance at play here that, judging by Kwelis email to me, he is reluctant to acknowledge. He writes (emphasis ours):

I challenge Jezebel and Maya to

1. present these death threats

2. prove she was doxxed or sexually harassed

3. prove that somehow any of these claims are connected to me. I have screenshots of everything I say happened.

While Kwelis relevance has waned since the height of his popularity in the 90s and early 2000s, Kweli still maintained over one million Twitter followers and was featured in an interview with Common just last week. Hes not an obscure artist, and hes not a random guy on social media. Hes a 44-year-old who has collaborated with Pharrell and Kanye West and enjoys a devoted following. Moodys audience is nothing to sniff at, with just under 30,000 Twitter followers, but shes still a student who largely tweets about pop culture and men she finds attractive. Yes, Moody spoke disparagingly of Kweli, but only after he turned her tweet into an indictment against him and spammed her.

But just as perplexing was Kwelis attempt to deny that he harassed Moody while justifying his harassment of another Black woman. When I asked Kweli about his alleged harassment campaign against Yvette Carnell, he didnt deny it, but rather justified it.

Yvette Carnell AKA @breakingbrown is the founder and patent owner of #ADOS which is an anti-immigrant hate cult, Kweli wrote. Carnell is a board member of PFIR [Progressives for Immigration Reform] which is a white nationalist organization. The job of ADOS is to target progressive black folks.

He added, Why would Jezebel, a known feminist site, not know what ADOS is? ADOS is anti-feminist. The fact that Maya Moody would align herself with an anti-immigrant, pro right-wing, anti-feminist, hate cult like ADOS proves that everything Ive said about her intentions is correct.

The condescension was glaring, and the assumption that I am uninformed about ADOS is strange. For the record, Im well aware of the ADOS movement. I agree with its support of reparations to descendants of enslaved people (I am one), and I see no harm in emphasizing the unique history of Black Americans with slave ancestry. I do not, however, agree with its pseudo-nationalist leanings, its approach toward immigrants, its race essentialism, nor its tendency to platform right-wing talking points.

I am skeptical of the ADOS movement for several reasons. That does not mean I think it is appropriate for Kweli to spend seven months harassing a member of that movement. It is obsessive behavior that Carnell did not deserve. Kwelis failure to understand this is alarming, but it also makes sense: Kweli doesnt believe his behavior is harassment as long as he sees his actions as righteous.

(Moody confirmed to Jezebel that she is not involved or associated with ADOS).

Kwelis tendency to jump to conclusions is how this entire mess started in the first place, and its a mess he seemed unwilling to let go weeks after it all began. Last Tuesday, he made an Instagram post about Moody that he crossposted to Facebook. On Wednesday, he talked about her in an Instagram Live stream from his moving car. Grown ass man bullying a woman smh the insecurities are really jumping out, one woman commented on Kwelis Instagram Live. Yet Talib Kweli and Maya Moody are just part of a larger narrative about how Black women are treated on social media, a pattern that continues without interventiona story that never seems to end.

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Talib Kweli's Harassment Campaign Shows How Unprotected Black Women Are Online and Off - Jezebel

President in waiting, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. | AP

Amidst a public health catastrophe thats already taken 150,000 lives in this country and a national anti-racist uprising which has mobilized millions, the extreme right is methodically planning its next steps, ensuring its political survival no matter the outcome of the November 3rd elections. Whether or not Trump prevails and wins a second term, the Republican Party is preparing for a future after him. And in Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, its possible they might have found their next frontman.

Cotton has earned widespread condemnation from the liberal media, Black leaders, and left commentators in recent weeks thanks to his back-to-back provocative attacks on Black Lives Matter demonstrators and the reporters and scholars behind the New York Times 1619 Project. Unless youre a Washington watcher, Cotton might be someone whos passed under your radar. But now that hes put himself front and center in the so-called culture wars, he deserves some fresh scrutiny.

When protesters demanded an end to systemic racism and police violence in June, Cotton urged Trump to show BLM no mercy; he said to Send in the Troops in a controversial NYT op-ed. After that, Cotton picked a fight with Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Times journalist who jumpstarted a national conversation around the central role that slavery and its legacy played in the founding of the United States and its subsequent history.

Almost as if his only goal was to poke at his ideological opponents and rile up the GOPs racist base, Cotton filed a bill that would ban federal funding for any educational curriculum that drew on the Pulitzer Prize-winning materials of the 1619 Project. Talking to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette about his bill earlier this week, Cotton said doing more to integrate slavery and the oppression of Black Americans into school history classes is left-wing propaganda and revisionist history at its worst.

The comment that critics believe really showed Cottons true colors, however, was when he called slavery the necessary evil upon which the union was built. Generations of untold human suffering was apparently the price to pay to build the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind. Its the same nationalist and racist ideology constantly pushed by Trump, but from a politer and more articulate spokesman.

(Although, to give Cotton his due for speaking some truth, slavery was indeed the necessary evil that enabled U.S. capitalism to take over the worldhundreds of years of unpaid slave labor helped American imperialism dominate competitors in global markets and amass the resources needed to build and fuel the worlds most powerful war machine by the early 20th century.)

If the far right is looking for a fresh poster boy for their authoritarian agenda, they probably couldnt ask for better than Cotton. Hes a darling of the MAGA crowd, a hawk when it comes to foreign policy, one of the most anti-China voices in Congress, a law-and-order guy who says we have an under-incarceration problem, and a firm opponent of immigration. And, at just 43 years old, hes the youngest member of the Senate. That means hell potentially be around to lead the Trumpist brigades long after Trump himself is gone.

Hes got the strongman populist instincts that appeal to the base as well as the connections to the party establishment and big money that it takes to get things done in Washington. Hes a pal to both alt-right bomb-thrower Steve Bannon as well as former GOP chairman Reince Priebus, the very example of insider politics. Hes equally at ease at either a Tea Party rally or a Senate caucus meeting.

Cotton comes from a working-class family in the town of Dardanelle, in west-central Arkansas, where he grew up on the Cotton cattle farm. His parents were both public employees; dad worked for the state Health Department, and mom taught at the local school. After finishing high school, Cotton studied government at Harvard University. He became known for the conservative positions he took in articles for the college newspaper, attacking reforms such as affirmative action. He went on to earn his law degree from Harvard and practiced law for a short time following his 2002 graduation. In 2005, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, opting to serve in the infantry.

It was during his time in the Army that Cotton catapulted onto the political scene. Writing to the NYT from Baghdad in 2006, he condemned journalists whod exposed a secret Bush administration program to monitor international financial transactions for the purpose of tracking supposed terrorist activity. Cotton charged the whistleblowing reporters with helping terrorists and said they belonged behind bars. The Times never published the letter, but a conservative blog did.

From the time of that letter onward, Cotton became known as a militarist without equal. His Army credentials and service medals from both the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns were deployed as validators for his opinions on foreign policy. As a legislator, hes always been ready to shovel public funds into the military-industrial complex and flex American muscle around the world. In his blustery maiden speech upon joining the Senate in 2015, he announced, Our enemies and allies alike must know that aggressors will pay an unspeakable price for challenging the United States. The best way to impose that price is global military dominance.

Since January 2017, Cotton has been a reliable Trump loyalist in the Senate, hewing more closely to the presidents line than even Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Hes a Trumpist, but without the total bootlicking and lack of dignity typical of so many Trump coattail politicians. The president highly values his counsel, reportedly keeping Cotton on speed dial and regularly consulting with him about whom to nominate to the Supreme Court or appoint to Cabinet.

Cotton knows well enough to keep himself close to Trump, given the ferocious fealty the GOP electorate shows the president, but the Arkansas Senator also ensures that he appeals to a wider swath of the GOP than Trump himself manages to do.

From the start of his political career, Cotton has been a part of the dark money world of seedy establishment Republican politics that initially shunned Trump. When he first ran for Congress in 2012, Cotton had the backing of the libertarian Club for Growth super PAC. Jumping to the Senate two years later in 2014, the same group helped him portray centrist Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor as an Obama hack. Cottons strong anti-Iran line garnered him hundreds of thousands of dollars that year from Bill Kristols Emergency Committee for Israel.

And his biggest backer of all? The billionaire Koch brothers network, which funded his electoral effort to the tune of some $8.1 million. The same big money operation refused to back Trump in 2016, even though it was their mega-spending on behalf of the far-right agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, and crooked elections which actually paved the way for Trumps rise to power. Tom Cotton, however, has always been their man.

Cotton has the potential to bridge the factional divides in the Republican Party opened up by the growth of Trumps extreme right populism. He could also, possibly, even appeal to moderates and independents who are open to a conservative agenda but turned off by Trumps crass style and divisiveness. Cotton knows when to push the lefts buttons and also when to not go too far. The Democratic Party of Arkansas didnt even come up with someone to challenge Cotton this fall; hes running unopposed for re-election in November.

In just a short time, Cotton has risen from being the junior senator from a small rural state to one of the most talked-about candidates for 2024. Hes a Harvard Law graduate, a decorated veteran, and he doesnt display any of the wacky conspiracy thinking or unpredictability and recklessness so often associated with Trump. The pro-fascist elements in the GOP, which extend well beyond Trump and his cabal, would certainly rally around a military man like Cotton. And the billionaire class has proven it will enthusiastically back him to the hilt.

Add up all of these facts and you end up with a far-right political leader who, in the long term, may end up proving even more dangerous than Donald Trump.

Like free stuff?So do we. Here at Peoples World, we believe strongly in the mission of keeping the labor and democratic movements informed so they are prepared for the struggle.But we need your help.While our content is free for readers (something we are proud of) it takes money a lot of it to produce and cover the stories you see in our pages. Only you, our readers and supporters, can keep us going.Only you can make sure we keep the news that matters free of paywalls and advertisements.If you enjoy reading Peoples World and the stories we bring you,support our work by becoming a $5 monthly sustainer today.

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Is Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton the next Trump? - People's World

Local residents show support for a Confederate soldier statue on the grounds of the City of Virginia Beach Municipal Center in Virginia during a rally calling for the statues removal on Aug. 24, 2017.Alex Wong/Getty Images This article is part of the Free Speech Project, a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.

Earlier this month, a meme was shared in the Facebook group Save Southern Heritage that featured the portraits of two men: the Prophet Mohammed on the left and Robert E. Lee on the right, their chins tilting toward each other. [Mohammed] owned many slaves. Robert E. Lee was against slavery, the caption reads. So why are we tearing down statues instead of mosques? That post, which received 248 likes, is still up, despite the suggestion of real-world violence. But a comment, rambling about Arabs and Jews running this mess as a little joke, was removed within hours. Whether it was Facebooks algorithms, or content moderators, or one of the groups eight admins, a decision was made that one had to go while the other could stay. One slipped through the porous free speech filter; the other did not.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, demands for Facebook to address hate speech have escalated, coinciding with a nationwide movement to remove Confederate statues and flags from cities, states, and institutions long imbued with Confederate symbolism. More than 1,100 companies and organizations have pulled ads from Facebook for at least the month of July as part of the #StopHateforProfit advertiser boycott. At the same time, Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia has ordered the removal of the statue of Lee that famously towers over Monument Avenue in Richmond, Mississippi decided to drop the cross of the Confederate battle flag from its state flag, and NASCAR banned the flag from its races.

These movements, intertwined and mutually reinforcing, pose a particular threat to those who consider themselves present-day Confederates. From their perspective, Facebook has become more essential than ever to amplifying their message at a critical moment in historyjust as Facebook has shown a new willingness to police their speech.

Facebook has recently deplatformed hundreds of groups that express overtly violent, white supremacist beliefs, such as those associated with the Boogaloo movement. But the platform has yet to settle on a consistent approach to a more difficultand more commonquestion: how far to go in policing groups that the platform doesnt consider hate groups, but that nonetheless often attract hateful content. This gray area contains hundreds, perhaps thousands, of neo-Confederate groups that are thriving on the platform. Individual posts containing hate speech are sometimes flagged and removed, but as a whole, these groups have so far remained relatively unscathed amid Facebooks heightened moderation, continuing to churn out thousands of posts a day in support of the Lost Cause. By insisting they promote heritage not hate, theyre able to skirt the boundaries of content moderation, even as their ideology rests on a reverence for the Confederacy and the antebellum South. Their complicated position on Facebook gets to the heart of the problems inherent to content moderation itself. It is a slow, often arbitrary process, driven not by clear understandings of what hate speech and hate groups are, but by haphazard flagging, a reliance on self-policing, and confusion over the kind of space Facebook or its critics want to create.

Since Facebook users exist in echo chambers, its easy to miss how widespread Confederate heritage communities are if your Facebook friends arent sympathetic to their cause. Many such groups, both public and private, have existed since the mid-2010s, but a spate of new groups appeared this summer. Some local varieties have just hundreds of members, while other national groups, such as Confederate Citizens, have nearly 100,000 members. Not only are these groups extensive, but they also serve as content factories. Groups such as In Defense of the Confederacy, Dixie Cotton Confederates, and Save Southern Heritage see hundreds of posts each day, which circulate rapidly around other groups, pages, and news feeds. At heart, these groups share some common features: the casting of Lee as a benevolent, misunderstood figure despite his documented defense of slavery in the U.S.; the efforts to preserve and build Confederate iconography; the indignation at the toppling of statues; and therhetorical?call to arms.

Many of these groups spend a lot of time thinking about hateful speech. Just take a look at their self-policing and content policies: Its not uncommon for a group to explicitly forbid hate speech, racist content, and bullying. Nor is it rare for moderators to post and repost these rules in a groups main discussion. Megan Squire, a computer science professor at Elon University known for her work on extremist communities on Facebook, told me that this dynamic is particular to Confederate groups. A public-facing Facebook presence is important to the Confederate agenda of, for instance, getting the Lost Cause narrative in childrens textbooks. At the same time, they also attract this sort of hateful element, and so they know they need to clamp down on that or it will look bad, Squire said. I guess my question is always: If people didnt talk like that on your page, you probably wouldnt have to write that rule, right?

Moderators and group members are vigilant in part because theyre aware some of the content they attract (and many would like to espouse) wont fall within Facebooks policies. I fully respect the First Amendment. But the Wizard of Facebook doesnt. I dont want to get kicked off Facebook or have my growing page taken down because of racist words, posted a moderator of Confederate Defenders, a public group, a few years ago. That same moderator wrote earlier this month, with greater urgency, With all the censorship going around, I dont want to lose my page. PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR LANGUAGE.

For many Confederates, that censorship is a worthwhile trade-off. If Im willing to self-censor myself and my organization, I can reach a reasonable number of people with my message and I can do it every day, Kirk Lyons, an admin of Save Southern Heritage, told me. He also runs the Facebook page for the Southern Legal Resource Center, an organization he co-founded that has been called the legal arm of the neo-Confederate movement. Lyons identifies as an unreconstructed Southerner, but the Southern Poverty Law Center considers him a white supremacist lawyer. (Lyons denies this and maintains that the SPLCs article on him contains many inaccuracies.) Lyons sees Facebook as a sort of necessary evil to getting his message out. Its worth putting up with all of Mark [Zuckerberg]s nonsense because its so much easier than it was in the email age or the letter and postage stamp age, he said. If hes careful, he explained, his individual posts can reach hundreds of thousands of people, such as a recent image of a Confederate flaghis Confederate flagflown over NASCARs race at Talladega.

How sincere the language opposing hate speech comes across varies from group to group, user to user, which is fitting for a movement known for its broad ideological spectrum. Some say that their beliefs are compatible with an outright rejection of racism or even disrespectful content; they may believe they can revere Dixie on their own terms, irrespective of the racial violence its rooted in. Along these lines, the least incendiaryand the most moderatedgroups tend to focus on Confederate soldiers and their descendants, as well as historical documents.

On the more extreme end of the spectrum, groups affiliated with the League of the South are known for openly discussing white supremacist beliefs. (For this reason, Facebook actually deplatforms them: A few weeks ago, for instance, Facebook took down one such group based in North Carolina, though a new group replaced it within a day.) Group discussions often bear out the disparities among Confederates approach to hate speech. In screenshots Squire sent me from a private Confederate monument protection group in her county, a number of members expressed anger at seeing a fellow Confederate hold up a sign at a rally on July 11 that read, NO FREE COLORED TVS TODAYpresumably a racist dog whistle. I dont care how you look at this, but to me this is racist period, said one user. People state over and over we are for history and heritage yet make signs like this. Some reiterated this isnt what they stand for, some didnt understand what the big fuss was about, and others were more focused on the signs potential to give fuel to detractors and the liberal media.

But that sort of pushback is dwarfed at times by the amount of hateful speech that persists. Group members often post about landing themselves in Facebook jail for a reason. Even in the public groups, its not unusual to see racial slurs, some of which arent later removed. Last month, for example, a member of Save Southern Heritage used the N-word to refer to people destroying and looting. Im impressed you werent banned for that word on FB, another member replied. I agree with every word though. More common than racial slurs, however, are calls to violencesometimes specific, sometimes more vague. In a group called Save the Confederacy and restore our Confederate heritage flags up, a post on a Black Lives Matter demonstration prompted a few users to say that drivers should run protesters over and take out as many as possible. In Dales Confederate Group, which is now private, a user commented this month that the best thing to do with Democratic cities is to bomb them.

All the examples mentioned here, aside from Squires, come from public groups. Private groups are strict about admittance: Virtually all require you to answer questions about your commitment to the Confederacy, your opinion on the real cause of the Civil War, and what the Confederate flag means to you upon your request to join. Given the content thats visible in public groups, its safe to assume that more borderline-to-outright-hateful speech thrives in these self-contained spaces. One of the eternal problems with Facebook is that if this stuff goes on in a private group, the only way to report the content is to join the group, find the content, and report it. Each report takes 10 clicks. Its putting a lot of work on a user, said Squire. And in private Confederacy groups, those users may not be inclined to do any of that work.

A recent civil rights audit of Facebook, carried out by independent civil rights experts and lawyers over the course of two years, criticized the platform for prioritizing free speech over nondiscrimination. The auditors concluded, among other things, that Facebook needs to be more proactive about identifying and removing extremist and white nationalist content. I dont know if Mark appreciates that hateful speech has harmful results, and that Facebook groups have real-world consequences, Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Times after the civil rights report was released.

Those real-world consequences are worth considering. Before Facebook restricted public access to its application programming interface, or API, in 2018, Squire used Facebooks data to systematically study about 700,000 users across 2,000 hate groups and 10 different ideologies. Of these groups, the Confederates were the least likely to cross over with other ideologies: About 85 percent of them belonged only to Confederate groups. There are two stories here. The first is that Confederate groups are relatively contained and self-sustaining, and that their members dont dabble much in other, more violent ideologies. From that perspective, their threat consists mostly of the speech within their groups. The second story is about the other 15 percent of Confederates who cross over into militia, white nationalist, alt-right, and anti-immigrant groups. The prime example of the dangers of that crossover is the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Although the rally was ostensibly held to protect the Lee monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, it became a gathering for hate groups across the far-right, including neo-Nazis and Klansmen, that left at least 33 injured and one counterprotester dead.

Its not controversial to say that neo-Nazi or Boogaloo groups should go, but its less clear what a mainstream platform should do with heritage not hate groupsgroups that, as the SPLC puts it, in their effort to gloss over the legacy of slavery in the South strengthen the appeal of Lost Cause mythology, opening the door for violent incidents. Even the SPLC, which refers to neo-Confederacy as a whole as a revisionist branch of American white nationalism, doesnt consider a number of Confederate heritage groups, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans, to be hate groups.

When I asked Squiresomeone whos outspoken about her activism and who provides data on far-right extremists to the SPLC and antifa activistswhether she believes Facebook should allow these groups to operate on its platform, she pointed to the fact that their speech isnt illegal. And more than that, she said, their beliefs are not fringe down here in the South. She mentioned that state representatives in her state of North Carolina have ties to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill gave $2.5 million last year to that organization after protesters toppled a statue of a Confederate soldier on campus in 2018. Were fighting it, obviously, but its a very long and uphill battle, Squire continued. And I think Facebook has to bridge both of those realities.

As people continue to call for more robust definitions of hate speech online, it may be helpful to remember that sometimes what we want from Facebook is misaligned with how the platform operates. Facebook can be dangerous not just for its content, but for its lack of public data; for how its (private) algorithms work; for the ways it amplifies certain voices and can lead to deeper polarization and, in some cases, radicalization. Theres a reason researchers are always going on about the dire need for transparency. Outside of calling for Facebook to police its most extreme content, its worth asking what we can reasonably expect from a private company that operates in its own interest.

Sometimes what we want from Facebook is misaligned with how the platformoperates.

After Facebook released the findings of the civil rights audit, the Verges Casey Newton succinctly summed up the problem in his newsletter: The company could implement all of the auditors suggestions and nearly every dilemma would still come down to the decision of one person overseeing the communications of 1.73 billion people each day. The same could be said of the majority of #StopHateforProfits 10 recommendations for Facebook, which demand changes such as further audits, a C-suite civil rights executive, and heightened content and group moderation. This campaign is not calling for Facebook to adopt a new business model, spin off its acquisitions, or end all algorithmic promotion of groups, wrote Newton. Nor is it calling for an overhaul of Facebooks approach to transparency. Yet these sorts of changes may in fact be necessary to addressing the root of Facebooks speech and radicalization problems.

The complexities of Confederate discourse on the platform ultimately show that singling out hate speech as the primary target of public outrage at Facebook is, in part, a distractiona Sisyphean endeavor that has a tendency to obscure more serious issues. Such a focus leaves us with the classic censorship vs. free speech dichotomy, which inevitably leads to some people demanding a return to the First Amendment, and others retorting that the Constitution doesnt pertain to private sites, ad infinitum. What borderline speech can force us to do is to move beyond the terms of that debate, to update the conversation (and call to action) to reflect the platform as it operates today.

But what a better conversationlet alone moderation frameworkwould actually look like is unclear. Newton writes that the best hope for addressing Facebooks role in accelerating and promoting hate speech, misinformation, and extremist views comes not from the campaign or the audit, but from Congress, which has the potential to question the companys underlying dynamics and staggering size. And thats certainly one avenue for change, especially with Zuckerberg testifying before the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee on Wednesday. But informed government regulation often relies on citizen engagement, and in the case of Facebooks speech problems, users must grapple not only with the flashiest and most extreme bits of Facebooks content, but also with the shades of speech that exist just below that, and the mechanisms that allow that speech to flourish.

Update, Aug. 3, 2020: The description of the meme shared in theSave Southern Heritagegroup has been updated.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Confederate Groups Are Thriving on Facebook. What Does That Mean for the Platform? - Slate

David Duke is gone from Twitter.

The social media platform has permanently shut down the account of the 70-year-old white supremacist, former Louisiana legislator and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (1974-1980). Hed joined the platform in 2009.

"[Duke] has been permanently suspended for Twitter Rules on hateful conduct," a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to CNET Thursday night.

The rules, which bar the promotion of violence or harassment against groups and individuals based on their race, ethnicity, nationality sexual orientation, gender, and more, were unsurprisingly violated by Duke numerous times, according to the spokesperson.

Though Twitter did not clarify what Duke posted to earn himself the permanent ban, the Washington Post reports he recently shared anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, including an interview with Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf and false claims that the Jewish media had plans to incite violence against white Americans. Duke also shared misinformation about the spread of COVID-19, calling Americans who refuse to wear masks in public the real heroes.

Duke had over 53,000 followers on Twitter as of Thursday.

Twitter users were ecstatic to see the proud racist leave the platform.

Duke was just suspended from YouTube in June, alongside the likes of Canadian white nationalist Stefan Molyneux and alt-right leader Richard Spencer.

Like many other social media platforms, Twitter has long struggled with policing harmful speech online. But since 2017, Twitter has slowly ramped up efforts to find and punish users for harmful and discriminatory information on its website.

Since the start of the pandemic, however, Twitter hasnt been afraid to bring down the hammer on people who violate its new anti-hate guidelines or contribute to the spread of fake news. In the last month alone, the website has deleted over 7,000 accounts associated with the Q-Anon conspiracy movement, suspended the account of Donald Trump Jr. for tweeting false information about COVID-19, and suspended the accounts of several Black celebrities for disseminating false and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Even President Trump has felt some pressure from the Twitter crackdown. In June, Twitter publicly flagged a tweet from the president as manipulated media in order to prevent the spread of a digitally altered video.

Cover: Former Louisiana State Representative David Duke arrives to give remarks after a white nationalist protest was declared an unlawful assembly, Saturday, Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va. (Shaban Athuman/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP)

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It Only Took Twitter 11 Years to Ban Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke - VICE UK

You might have seen articles or comments on social media lately alluding to sovereign citizens, or SovCits for short, with some reports suggesting COVID-19 government restrictions have driven a surge of interest in this movement.

So, who are these self-styled sovereign citizens, and what do they believe?

Sovereign citizens are concerned with the legal framework of society. They believe all people are born free with rights but that these natural rights are being constrained by corporations (and they see governments as artificial corporations). They believe citizens are in an oppressive contract with the government.

SovCits reportedly believe that by declaring themselves living people or natural people, they can break this oppressive contract and avoid restrictions such as certain rates, taxes, and fines or particular government rules on mandatory mask-wearing.

The SovCit movement arose in America decades ago, with roots in the American patriot movement, some religious communities, and tax protest groups. It has also been known as the free-man movement.

Read more: 'Alt-right white extremism' or conservative mobilising: what are CPAC's aims in Australia?

SovCits see themselves as sovereign and not bound by the laws of the country in which they physically live. Accepting a law or regulations means they have waived their rights as a sovereign and have accepted a contract with the government, according to SovCit belief.

The SovCit movement doesnt have a single leader, central doctrine or centralised collection of documents. It is based on their reinterpretation of the law and there are many legal document templates on the internet for SovCit use to, for example, avoid paying fines or rates they see as unfair.

SovCits tend not to follow conventional legal argument. Some have engaged in repeated court action and even been declared vexatious litigants by the courts.

The SovCit movement has many local variations but there are some key commonalities across the Australian SovCit movement.

A central belief, according to news reports, is that the Australian government, the police, and other government agencies are corporations. Believers feel they must be on guard to avoid entering into a contract with the corporation. They often do this by stating, I do not consent and trying to get the police officer or official to recognise them as a living or natural being and therefore as a sovereign.

SovCits are often careful to avoid showing ID such as drivers licences or giving their name and address. Saying I understand also risks being seen to agree to the contract so SovCits will repeat the phrase I comprehend to show they are refusing the contract.

Many reject their countrys constitution as false and reportedly refer to the Magna Carta of 1215 as the only true legal document constraining arbitrary power.

SovCits often come to the attention of authorities due to driving offences. It is a core belief of the movement that sovereigns have the right to travel freely without the need for a drivers licence, vehicle registration, or insurance.

Until COVID-19, the main threat seems to have been in committing road offences. More recently, actions protesting measures aimed at limiting the spread of COVID-19 have been linked to the sovereign citizen movement.

Read the rest here:

'Living people': who are the sovereign citizens, or SovCits, and why do they believe they have immunity from the law? - The Conversation AU

Its been about two weeks since a bunch of well-intended liberals and lefties wrote an open letter in Harpers Magazine, denouncing intolerance on the left.

Well, if the conservative crowd appreciated the gesture, they have a funny way of showing it. Lets just run down a few of the insulting, degrading, racist, anti-Jewish broadsides emerging from figures on the right over the last few days . . .

Congressman Ted Yoho called congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a fucking bitch. Then when she called him out for it, he said he didnt say iteven though a reporter for the Hill said he did say it.

Senator Tom Cotton said slavery was a necessary evil. When he was called out, he said hed been misquoted and that what hed actually said was that the founding fathers thought slavery was a necessary evil.

As if that clarification is any less offensive. Or historically accuratecause its not at all clear that many slave-owning founding fathers thought there was anything evil about owning slaves.

Tribune columnist John Kass wrote what I call a twofer column in which he dragged out an alt-right, anti-Jewish trope regarding George Soros to malign Black officials like Cook County states attorney Kim Foxx.

Thus, he managed to degrade Jewish and Black people in one swoop.

Meanwhile, Lori Lightfoots right-wing critics have called her a communist whose base, as Tucker Carlson put it, consists of angry Marxist rich kids with spray paint.

All because they didnt agree with her decision to take down the Columbus statues.

In the aftermath, there are no apologies, no regrets. Apparently, theyre proud of what they say and would say it again. As far as I can tell, they feel free to say just about anything they want.

It seems as though there are almost no consequences for right-wingers who spew mean-spirited, hate-filled invective. Tucker Carlson still has his job. As does Sean Hannity. Laura Ingraham. Rush Limbaugh. And John Kass. OK, the Tribune moved Kass from page two to the editorial page.

By the waymuch love to the Tribunes guild for taking a strong stand against Kasss Soros column.

The rights done a masterful job of flipping the switch on free expression. Theyve got the left on the defensive. As though right-wingers are innocent victims whose free speech has been stifled by the lefty political-correct police.

I almost have to give them credit. Theyve rigged the debate so that even many well-intended liberals have been brainwashed into thinking that political correctness exists only on the left.

Well, the right has its own version of rigidly enforced political correctness.

Among other things, you cant criticize Trump supporters for being utterly batshit crazy even when theyre saying things that are, you know, utterly batshit crazy. Like the people in Florida who testified against an ordinance requiring masks in public places. Becauseoh, hell, just watch them if you havent done so already.

But if you criticize them, youre an elitist.

Similarly, you cant criticize Trumpsters for forcing their religious beliefs on everyone else. Like the bakers in Colorado who went to court to win the right not to sell a wedding cake to a gay couple.

Then youre a secular humanist whos intolerant of religious beliefs.

The right recently convinced the Supreme Court to protect the religious rights of corporations to not cover the cost of contraceptives in their employees health-care plans. They even got two liberal justicesElena Kagan and Stephen Breyerto sign on to sending the case back to a lower court.

And they say the left is intolerant? Im still waiting for Justice Brett Kavanaugh to rule that doctors have a First Amendment protected right to talk about abortion with their patients.

Now, I guess were supposed to defend Tom Cottons right to describe slavery as a necessary evil and John Kasss right to employ anti-Jewish tropes. All in the name of free speech.

Generally, Im pretty open to free-speech arguments. But I dont get the feeling that its a two-way street.The obvious case is Colin Kaepernick. I dont recall many (or any) prominent Republicans defending his right to free speech when he got kicked out of the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem.

Similarly, Trump says he supports the rights of his supporters to wave the Confederate flag.

Well, I guess I should say Trump doesnt limit that right to just his supporters. Though lets face itwho else but a Trump supporter would want to wave the Confederate flag?

Trump says waving the confederate flag is freedom of speech, even if that flag symbolizes an evil institution that is offensive to many people.

But then he turns right around and says flag burning should be against the law. "We ought to come up with legislation that if you burn the American flag, you go to jail for one year. One year, Trump said.

He says burning the flag is desecration that many people find offensive.

Oh, so when one group of people are offended, we need a law to protect them.

But when another group of people are offended, itsstop whining, snowflake!

Want another example?

Consider John Catanzara, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police. A few years back he made news when he posted a picture of himself in a Chicago police uniform holding a sign that read: I stand for the anthem. I love the American flag. I support my president. And the 2nd Amendment.

That president he supported was Trump. Well, you didnt think it was Obama, did you?

As a believer in free speech, I defended his right to post that picture.

But now hes threatening to expel any union member who takes a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters.

And so it goes. When it comes to free speech, the right only wants it for themselves.v

Read the rest here:

Yoho and Cotton - Chicago Reader