Category Archives: Zeitgeist Movement

With the modern world in the midst of a serious health crisis and the public conversation about police violence becoming feverish at times, there is one young activist from Everett who hopes to be a positive voice in all of that.

Olushola Shola Bolonduro is the son of Nigerian immigrants and grew up in Tacoma, Washington. He is a nursing student and is trained as a Registered Cardiovascular Invasive Specialist. He is currently studying nursing through an online program at Tacoma Community College and plans to take many of his prerequisites at Everett Community College.

Bolonduro began his activism after moving to Everett. He says, I really wanted to be a part of the Black Lives Matter movement that was happening. I also knew that I wanted to help get things moving in Snohomish County since there wasnt that much networking and organized protests, compared to what I saw happening in King County.

As an African American teen growing up in Western Washington, Bolonduro was keenly aware of the challenges that minorities face in American culture. He says, I developed a strong desire to bring about public awareness of police violence towards people of color. I felt I needed to add my voice to the growing momentum that I saw happening. It became a passion for him and he began organizing different actions and protests around the Puget Sound area.

Over the last several months, he has held an almost daily vigil in downtown Everett, handing out literature from different groups that support victims of hate crimes and bringing attention to national Black Lives Matter efforts.

Everett resident and school district manager, Corinne Flora says this about Bolonduro, his manner is so calm and inviting. I always get the feeling from him that he really wants to help, instead of creating division amongst people. He is really engaging and seems genuinely interested in real dialog with people.

However, not everyone is as happy with his presence in the city. Bolonduro says, I was standing at my normal spot downtown and this old white man came up to me and started yelling at me. He claimed I was saying that white lives dont matter as much; which I never said, and kept pushing the conversation even when I told him I didnt want to engage anymore. The man was eventually escorted away by police, but not before yelling about how the protests need to stop and that Bolonduro and his friends should go home, according to witnesses.

Bolonduro also founded a social media support group called The Dark Side of Everett. He explains, I started this collective as an attempt to bring goths, punks, metalheads, emos and other alternative folks together in Snohomish County and help them find a common positive purpose.

The group has since grown in size and continues to be a support for many young people in the North Sound. This is a safe place for people that step outside the mainstream zeitgeist, says member Jessie Tear. She explains that the group has been a major revelation for her and others. She says, The Dark Side of Everett group has really inspired me to pay more attention to things outside of my own experience. I feel that through this shared aesthetic in music and fashion, I have found some really amazing people who seem to have a real passion for positive change in the world.

Bolonduro hopes that he can inspire younger generations to get more involved in social justice and activism. He says, I really think we have a unique opportunity before us right now. Black Lives Matter is becoming a mainstream idea and with the energy, I see from young people, I feel there is a real opportunity for change.

He explains that he wants his activism to be a major part of his personal and professional life going forward. Bolonduro says, I really hope that through public health and direct activism, I can really make a difference for all vulnerable populations. I want to be a part of a solution, rather than being someone who shouts from the sideline.

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The Voices of a Movement: Young Activism and Social Justice - The Clipper

A new trio of monochromatic quartz-powered Tank Musts (US$2,720) take their cues from their predecessors in shades of navy, burgundy and emerald green with clean dials, sleek stainless-steel cases and a synthetic sapphire cabochon crown. Cartier

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Cartier released a platoon of new Tank Must models last month during the virtual Watches & Wonders Geneva event, including a new quartz piece powered by solar-charged photovoltaic cells. All are scheduled to launch in stores in September, and prices are subject to change.

Louis Cartier, grandson of the maisons founder, created the Tank in 1917, at the dawn of the wristwatch age. Following in the footsteps of the legendary square Santos from 1904, the similar Tanks rectangular case was said to be inspired by a birds-eye view of a Renault FT-17 tank, a game-changing combat vehicle used by the French in World War I.

The vertical bars, or brancards (the French word for "stretcher), extended beyond the central case evoking the tanks treads flanking the turret. The design further established Cartier design signatures: radiating Roman numerals surrounding a central rail track, blued steel hour and minute hands and a knurled crown set with a blue sapphire cabochon.

According to brand lore, the prototype Tank was gifted to U.S. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, in 1918 at the end of World War I. The following year, Cartier produced six Tanks for the market, and production remained fairly limited through the 1960s.

In 1922, Louis Cartier reworked the design, stretching the case, refining the brancards and softening the edges to create the Tank L.C. (Louis Cartier), an enduring classic to this day.

Tank entered the cultural zeitgeist when Rudolph Valentino wore his on screen in the silent film The Son of the Sheik in 1926. Subsequent celeb fans included Gary Cooper, Catherine Deneuve, Jacqueline Kennedy (hers was bought by Kim Kardashain in 2017), Princess Diana, and Andy Warhol, who famously didnt wind his. More recently, Tanks have been spotted on former First Lady Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie, and Meghan Markle.

The latest Tank Musts are named after the Les Must de Cartier Tank, launched in 1977 in response to the downturn caused by the quartz crisis.

Les Must de Cartier was a spinoff brand of more affordable must-have accessories, including watches in gold-plated sterling silver (vermeil) powered by manual-winding ETA or quartz movements. They had modern, minimalist, colored dials in burgundy or black marked only with the Les Must logo and the maisons interlocking Cs, plus matching colored straps. As Cartiers first mass-produced, non-precious watches priced at around US$500, they were a huge hit.

A new trio of monochromatic quartz-powered Tank Musts (US$2,720) take their cues from their predecessors in shades of navy, burgundy and emerald green with clean dials, sleek stainless-steel cases and a synthetic sapphire cabochon crown.

Bold color also infused a pair of new Tank Louis Cartiers (US$13,100) in blue with rose gold and red with yellow gold. Offering a contemporary twist on the original dial design, the rail track moves to the periphery in gold surrounding the Roman numerals and indexes in a colored box with leather straps to match. Both are powered by the manual-winding Manufacture 1917 MC movement.

Another group of classic black and white Tanks are modeled on the original Tank Louis Cartier, staying true to the original with a few tweaks. The steel bracelet with curved links, for example, has been entirely redesigned and is easily interchangeable thanks to Cartiers patented QuickSwitch system.

A range of eight versions in stainless steel are available on interchangeable black calfskin straps in small (US$2,480), large (US$2,610) and extra-large (US$3,550) or on an interchangeable stainless-steel bracelet in small (US$2,840), large (US$2,970), and extra-large (US$3,900). Another duo is set with diamonds on the blancards in small (US$6,000) and large (US$6,850). The two extra-large options are powered by Cartiers 1847 MC mechanical movement with automatic winding, while the others have quartz movements.

A final pair appear traditional, but are anything but. Dont be fooled by the classic-looking dialthe Roman numerals have invisible perforations to allow solar energy to reach photovoltaic cells hidden under the dial that power the watch. Cartiers watchmaking team spent two years developing the quartz SolarBeatmovement, which has an average lifespan of 16 years.

The SolarBeat Tank Musts (US$2,480 in small; US$2,610 in large) are fitted with interchangeable non-leather straps made with 40% plant matter derived from apple waste collected from the food industry in Europe. The strap production process also drastically reduces the carbon footprint while saving water and energy over the typical calfskin strap.

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Cartiers Tank Must Watches Build on the Legacy of an Icon - Barron's

What was the series that you binged during lockdown? From zombies toracing cars to robots battling monsters;our writers reveal their pandemic bingeingKINGDOM

Kingdom was my households escape from Covid for a while last year. The visually stunning Korean zombie series from writer Kim Eun-hee and director Kim Seong-hun tells the story of an infectious outbreak during the Joseon Dynasty. Unlike the Covid pandemic, this is one in which frustrations with a virus can be relieved by stabbing someone through the head with a sword.

Dawn of the Dead was about consumerism; Zombie by the Cranberries was about Northern Ireland; The Walking Dead was about unrelenting boredom (I assume). Like all good zombie art, Kingdom has a potent metaphor at its core. Its zombie plague has its origins in a zombified ruler puppetted by a family of power-hungry lackeys. This sickness at the top of society spreads through the land alongside a pre-existing plague of corruption and famine that appal our virtuous heroes a noble prince (Ju Ji-hoon) and a lowly physician (Bae Doona).

But Kingdom also comes with more optimism than is usual in this genre. Unlike almost all of the more westerly zombie apocalypses, it focuses less on individualistic survival against a backdrop of societal anarchy (which is the main US mode for zombie stories) and more on logical plague containment and a concern with the collective good. It ultimately pans out more like a tense adventure story than a nihilistic gorefest (thought its also a bit of a gorefest) as its likeable heroes battle both zombie armies and malevolent courtiers while trying to find a cure.

They never quite institute a functioning test-and-trace system, largely relying on the old-fashioned stick a sword through the zombies head method of disease repression. But, quite frankly, theres a lot to be said for that too. Patrick Freyne

Kingdom is available on Netflix

The New York-located Scarlet magazine of The Bold Type is based on the glossy flagship Cosmopolitan. Its editor, Jacqueline Carlyle, is based on Cosmos former editor Joanna Coles (notice the initials?), who is the shows executive producer. Carlyle is pretty bold, as are the three twentysomething employees who are best pals Jane, Sutton and Kat.

Jane is a writer favouring telling stories through her personal experiences. Sutton is a fashion assistant aspiring to be a stylist. Kat, who is biracial, is Scarlets social media director, and at one point scolds her two white friends for misappropriating the word woke.

Between whats happening in their own lives and whats being covered in the magazine, the show sharply covers subjects ranging from gender and identity, the Me Too movement, workplace power dynamics, body image, sexuality, ambition and social media difficulties. Scarlet also goes digital along the way, and there are the inevitable media tussles between editorial and advertising.

Theres a lot of terrible CGI throughout, but the material about an evolving media industry, and the zeitgeist for young women, is robust and relevant.

However, at core, The Bold Type is about female friendship. Jane, Sutton and Kat meet up to decompress during work hours, not in the womens toilets, but in the magazines glamorous fashion closet. Outside work, they are the tightest of trios, always challenging and supporting each other. Its refreshing to see a show that celebrates female friendship in all its messiness, without ever resorting to reductive bitchy animosity. Rosita Boland

Available on Netflix; fifth and final season coming later this year.

There are many unexpected personal revelations within lockdown, but becoming fully immersed in a sport I didnt give a damn about until a month ago is definitely a twist. The catalyst for my newfound fandom of Formula 1 is the amazing soap-opera/reality/documentary series Drive To Survive. The Netflix series (there are three seasons, and Ive gone through them at Lewis Hamilton-level pace) is a masterclass in editing and conflict.

The races are high drama, of course, but so is the jostling within and between teams coloured by immaturity, backstabbing, territorial rage, emotional meltdowns, insecurity, jealousy, arrogance, favouritism, vindictiveness, resilience, joy and egomania, in a ludicrous but brilliant sport that makes a virtue of its inequities, running on the fuel of warped capitalism, toxic brand pressure, and self-loathing billionaires. Brilliant.

Then theres the strange, comforting parallels with the pandemic. Drivers dreams are crushed frequently. When an engine explodes, or a car spins off track, these arbitrarily cruel moments remind us that no matter how prepared and focused we are, no matter what ambitions or plans we have, s*** happens.

Finding myself leaping off the couch at the 2020 Italian Grand Prix result, screaming Hes done it! He f***ing did it! I dont believe it! or turning to my girlfriend after another particularly poignant result, tears streaming down my face, saying, No matter what happens, no one can take this away from him, may be part of a broader existential crisis, or it could just be that Drive to Survive presents an opportunity to feel something adrenaline in the emotionally flat desert of the pandemic. Box, box, box! Una Mullally

Available on Netflix

The sequence of authored documentary series made by the BBC from the late 1960s to the late 1970s are among the imperishable jewels of the medium. Kenneth Clark walked us through the history of art in Civilisation. Alistair Cookes America made sense of that nation as it prepared for a bicentennial. Best of all, perhaps, was Jacob Bronowskis still-gripping The Ascent of Man. Now available in a reasonably priced boxed set, the series, first broadcast in 1973, attempted an overview of science from the first plough to the Manhattan Project. Bronowski is the ideal companion for such a daunting journey. A mathematician whose Jewish family moved from Poland to Britain in the 1920s, he was as happy quoting William Blake as talking us through the principles of special relativity. As he reaches the 20th century, he is able to relate personal anecdotes about interactions with distinguished geniuses. (You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that Im right? the late-sleeping mathematician John Johnny von Neuman once berated someone who dared to call before lunch. Please wait until Im wrong.)

Most importantly, Bronowski had a gift for turning his teaching into stories. None ends so powerfully as the episode on quantum mechanics. He wades into the swampy land that absorbed the ashes of so many humans outside Auschwitz and grabs a handful of damp mud. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power, he says, standing amid the remains of his own relatives. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

Among the most powerful moments in television history. Donald Clarke

Available on YouTube

One of the first things I did in lockdown was order a short-story anthology about kaiju those huge, city-ravaging monsters that are a long-time staple of Japanese cinema. If this wasnt the moment to curl up with tales of Godzilla-like terrors plunging humanity into dystopia, when was?

The book was fine but I wanted more. Pacific Rim, Guillermo Del Toros take on the genre, is one of my favourites. Alas, Ive watched it to death and can quote whole chunks of dialogue (Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!, as I shouted at the postman the other morning).

And so I finally went down the rabbit hole. That is to say, I developed an obsession with Neon Genesis Evangelion, the 1995 anime series credited with pioneering the concept of kaiju battling huge robots.

Its great, though the gender politics are of their time. The story, however, holds up wonderfully. The year is 2015 and across the Earth, massive, destructive beings called Angels have awakened. The only line of defence are titanic robots Evangelions.

In Dublin theyd probably be outlawed for detracting from the historic skyline. But in the city of Tokyo-3 Evas are exactly what is required. Enter hero Shinji Ikari, a teenager who reluctantly becomes the pilot of Eva-01.

Episode by episode, we see Shinji conquer his fears, and turn tables on the Angels. A crowning touch is the complicated lore, with the origins of the Angels drawing on Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kaballah tradition.

In short it delivers more excitement than you can shake a giant robot arm at. Across the world the recent Godzilla v Kong has whetted appetites for monster apocalypses. If that includes you, then you owe it to yourself to dive off the deep end and into Neon Genesis Evangelion. Ed Power

Available on Netflix

Excerpt from:

Serial pleasures: The TV series that got us through lockdown - The Irish Times

In a recent interview with BizNews founder Alec Hogg, Helen Zille spoke openly about her book #Stay woke: Go broke and the dangers of wokeness and cancel culture in the South African context (see interviews below). In South Africa where the ratios are inverted [and] black people are the overwhelming majority it doesnt cause any self-reflection about the abuse of power. Quite the opposite. In this piece, Tiffany Markman looks at the origin of the word and how it has evolved over the past decade. This article first appeared on FirstRand Perspectives. Claire Badenhorst

By Tiffany Markman

Considering the origins of this activist byword, has it been diluted into mere online slang by mainstream use?

Do you consider yourself to be woke? If you do, you probably know that this term for being enlightened or aware, particularly about racism and social justice, is a political byword of African-American origin.

But if a) you dont and b) woke just doesnt sound grammatically correct to you, you should know that its a vernacular derivative of the verb to wake.

The Oxford English Dictionary, that arbiter of the linguistic zeitgeist, added woke to its repertoire in 2017 as Originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice (Holliday, 2016).

While woke is today part of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), it is considerably older than its first entry into the Oxford English Dictionary.

Wokes earliest politically conscious usage came in 1962, in The New York Times article If Youre Woke You Dig It by William Melvin Kelley, where it featured as part of a glossary of African-American slang (Holliday, 2016).

Much later, in 2008, soul singer Erykah Badu used the term stay woke in her song Master Teacher (Steinmetz, 2017). Although the phrase didnt have any socio-political connotations at that time or in that context, Badu is largely credited with coining it. Then, in 2012, she and other Twitter users began using woke and stay woke to refer to questions of social and racial justice.

#staywoke started to emerge as a popular hashtag.

So, wait a minute: are woke and cool the same? No.

David Brooks (2018) says that To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures. [Woke] is the opposite of cool in certain respects.

Brooks explains that, unlike cool (which is pretty mellow and hands-off) woke implies social activism, nationalism, and collectivism. It suggests rage, passion, resistance, action; seeking to draw a line against the unacceptable. But what was actually happening back in 2012, to catalyse the trend?

Pulliam-Moore (2016) says that the Woke Renaissance coincided with the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed the 2012 fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.

The courts decision not to convict Zimmerman sparked a public outcry that yielded protests across the country. Thereafter, #staywoke often accompanied social media posts about police brutality and systemic racism, according to Urban Dictionary (2018). It reminded readers to examine their own privilege, or more accurately to resist their lack of privilege.

Calling someone woke during 2012 and 2013 was a signal that they understood systemic injustice and were (or appeared to be) determined to do something about it. It was an acknowledgment; even a compliment.

In 2016, Greys Anatomy actor Jesse Williams released a doccie, Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement, to shed light on racial discrimination directed towards the African-American community (OMalley, 2016).

But, like many phrases that capture a zeitgeist, woke has a meaning that is ever evolving. It has now spread beyond its African-American roots, undergoing a process that Barrett (in Peters, 2016) refers to as semantic bleaching: just as the word terrible conveys hardly any terror today, the modern use of woke conveys less wokeness than it used to.

Yup, in the last few years the political meaning of woke appears to have been removed in at least some contexts, alongside its adoption as a more generic slang term that is often the subject of Internet memes.

Urban Dictionary (2018) even supplies a secondary definition: Getting woke is like being in the Matrix and taking the red pill. You get a sudden understanding of whats really going on and find out you were wrong about much of what you understood to be truth.

But, according to Pulliam-Moore (2016), wokes new meaning allows it to be attached to the ridiculous. Think about it. Twitter urges you (Foley, 2016) to #staywoke about absolutely everything, from the Bill Cosbys and Harvey Weinsteins, through Trumpian conspiracy theories, to Uber price surges.

There are #howwokeareyou? quizzes on Facebook. Celebs appear on tabloid woke-o-meters. And there are woke baes: boyfriends (usually) who are progressive and enlightened; aware of and sympathetic to social issues.

Barrett explains that the term woke has moved from someone who is aware of the true state of racial imbalances [in the USA] and is doing their part to limit their own complicity and make others aware of a general sense of someone whos aware of a minor controversy or difference of opinion.

More critically, says Holliday (2016), woke has now been sanitised for a mainstream audience; removed from its ties to African-American communities, consciousness, and political movements.

And now, we find ourselves in the age of wokeness-used-as-irony. Used to refer, often mockingly, to people whose perspectives on race, socio-economic matters, or gender issues change suddenly after encountering injustice. Harriott (2017), satirically, warns of those who start to use the woke-abulary:

You no longer discuss things; you unpack them. Everything that once made you laugh when your cousin said it at a cookout is now problematic. You suddenly notice how often you are triggered by microaggressions like your boss asking you why you are late to work for the fourth time in a month. You quit your job again and file for unemployment because your workplace wasnt a safe space.

So, what now? Do we use woke? Not use it? Who should use it? And when? Like most elements of a dialect, the meaning of woke actually changes depending on whos saying it, and to whom, about what.

But, whoever you are, just remember the roots of woke if and when you do use it, because theres a lot more to it than a grammatically creative hashtag.

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The real meaning of Woke and what it means today - BizNews

What a difference two years make.

Back in spring 2019, the tabloids were training their gaze on the mental health of pop star Britney Spearswhod recently reemerged from rehab after canceling her latest Vegas show and the rise of a #FreeBritney fan movement rallying for her release from a decade-long California probate conservatorship. Called a guardianship in other states, the arrangement gives a court-approved third-party control over the affairs of an incapacitated, typically elderly, person. In Britneys case, the conservator is her father, Jamie, and hes controlled almost every detail of her finances, healthcare, and personal life since her breakdown in 2008.

The unusual spectacle of constraining a highly functioning young adult stirred the press to weigh in on the issue, with many articles commenting on whether there was reason for Spears to remain under the conservatorship. As Mad in America found in its examination of media coverage of her mental health published since the conservatorships inception, these articles reflected conventional attitudes about mental illness that are stigmatizing and encourage legislation that promotes forced treatment. They also reflected the opinions of everyone but Britney herself (save the postings on her often-cryptic Instagram account).

According to this narrative, Britney despite over a decade of apparent stability and success needs to be in the conservatorship for her own good, allegedly because she is too crazy and too vulnerable to exploitation to manage her own life. Any arguments to the contrary were viewed as conspiracy theories from well-meaning but ignorant fans.

But now things are changing in both Spears world and media coverage of her case. These shifts have brought overdue attention to the larger issue of the rights of people labeled mentally ill or disabled and led to calls for reform.

Since last fall, Spears, now 39, seems to be pursuing a path toward autonomy. Via her court-appointed attorney, Sam Ingham, she has requested that court documents related to her case be unsealed (to make them more accessible to the public) and told a judge that she is afraid of her father and will not perform again if [he] is in charge of her career. US Weekly, which had earlier portrayed her as unstable and in need of TLC, titled an article on her legal motion Britney Spears Is Tired of Being Treated Like a Child and described her as fighting for her freedom.

A few months later, Spears requested that her father step down from managing her finances and be replaced by a professional fiduciary, Bessemer Trust. It didnt happen; Bessemer and Jamie Spears now share that task, but the shift prompted NBC Newss online THINK column to run an opinion piece that addressed the larger issue of guardianship abuse. In the piece, titled Britney Spears Conservatorship Can Be Both Totally Legal and Quite Bad for Her. Many Are, journalist Chandra Bozelko argued that there are emotional costs of a long-term conservatorship, especially to an otherwise capable person, and that damage rarely appears in court evaluations or public records. Bozelko, who was under guardianship for a decade, wrote that to strip a person of her agency cant help but be abusive, even when fiduciaries are doing their jobs.

But that was the last we heard on the subject until the first week of February 2021, coinciding with the 13th anniversary of Spears conservatorship. That week, the documentary Framing Britney Spearswas released on the FX channel. Produced by a team from The New York Times (which had previously reported fairly uncritically about her situation), the film opens with footage of #FreeBritney activists. A few minutes in, New York Times Senior Editor Liz Day asks the films million-dollar question: Is this in her best interest, what she wants?

The film blends archival photos and footage with new interviews with longtime associates, including her close friend and former assistant, Felicia Culotta. It also features #FreeBritney activists, reporters and press photographers who have covered her, and legal experts close to the case. It tells of Britneys rapid rise as a teenaged pop star, the emotional and practical impact of the news medias relentless pursuit, and the often hostile and salacious treatment of her before her famous breakdown.

In so doing, Framing Britney places behaviors often cited as evidence of Spears mental illness in context. Shaving her head and whacking a photographers car with an umbrella are shown as the very human reactions of an overwhelmed, post-partum woman under relentless public scrutiny and beset by private struggles including a custody battle. As Jude Ellison S. Doyle writes in the politics and culture magazine GEN, How could anyone not experience trauma after this sort of treatment? Doyle adds, Britney Spears isnt a formerly happy pop star who lost control, shes a woman who never had control in the first place. Indeed, except for reporting on Britneys stints in psych facilities, the film doesnt dwell on the claim that she suffers from a chronic, debilitating condition, as has so often been stated in the press.

The documentary also explores the uncomfortable realities of living under a conservatorship, including a clip from an MTV documentary in which Britney complains about how stifling it is to be constantly restrained and monitored. When I tell them how I feel, theyre really not listening, she says. Theyre hearing what they want to hear. Its bad, and Im sad. The film also points out irregularities in how she was placed under the conservatorship in the first place and wonders if shell ever get out.

In one scene, Adam Streisand, a lawyer she wanted to hire to fight the conservatorship in 2008, explains that the judge ruled Britney incompetent to do so, citing a medical report that the judge refused to let him see. I felt that based on my interactions that she was capable of retaining and directing me and the judge should have allowed that, Streisand says.

In another scene, attorney Vivian Lee Thoreen admits, Its the conservatee who has the burden to say, I dont need this conservatorship anymore, and heres why, later adding, I have not seen a conservatee who has successfully terminated a conservatorship.

The film also outlines the financial incentives and possible conflicts of interest Britneys conservators might have for keeping her in the arrangement. It notes that her father got a percentage of her high-grossing Las Vegas acts and that her estate is required to pay for her own and her conservators attorneys concerns once portrayed as fan-generated conspiracy theories.

Despite that Spears did not participate in the film (producers claimed they labored unsuccessfully to reach her), Framing Britney is notable for its empathic perspective. It encourages viewers to put themselves in Spears shoes as they watch her rise, fall, and comeback, and her ongoing containment. This is a departure from what we saw in earlier coverage, which tended to favor her fathers and handlers positions. Britneys family, attorney, and inner circle declined to be interviewed for the film, though some of them appeared in archival footage.

Perhaps because her pain is so relatable, the film quickly ignited widespread alarm. Social media were aflame with renewed calls to #FreeBritney, supportive commentary from lawyers, tweets sharing excerpts from court documents, and demands that media figures apologize to Spears. The American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to represent her last summer, reiterated its support in a Tweet:

In tandem, mainstream news and cultural commentators discussed the misogyny portrayed in the film: how Hollywood has exploited and perpetuated dangerous narratives about young stars, how our culture has failed to listen to and center women in their own stories, and how we punish those deemed unruly.

And the press continued to focus on the stars struggles under her unique conservatorship. In late February, Spears father delivered an official retort to Framing Britney on Good Morning America via his now-attorney, Vivian Lee Thoreen. He reiterated that the conservatorship is to protect his daughter and inaccurately stated that Britney has never sought to remove him; Thoreen later wrongly claimed that Britney can end it whenever she wants. Then, at a hearing in March, Britneys lawyer presented her request that her father resign as conservator of her personal affairs and be replaced by Jodi Montgomery, a professional fiduciary who has been temporarily filling that role. Those court papers state, underlined and in bold, that Britney still reserves the right to petition for the termination of this conservatorship.

Soon, the press coverage generated by the film and the Jamie vs. Britney battle moved beyond Britney to another important discussion: the broader issue of guardianship abuse. Op-eds, explanatory pieces, and think pieces called out its overly restrictive nature and documented its potential for abuse. These reports continued for two months in respected magazines on politics and economics as well as in the entertainment press.

For example, journalist Sara Luterman, who covers disability rights, was one of the first to address the darker story just outside the lens. In The New Republic, she wrote that There is a broader, systemic issue at play. Spears isnt an anomaly, and in actuality, conservatorship has few safeguards and checks. Legal personhood is regularly stripped from disabled peopleand nobody blinks an eye. The biggest difference is that Spears is famous. The unusual part of the story is that people are paying attention.

Luterman notes that many people as young or younger than Spears are under the control of guardians, citing a report on a school-to-guardianship pipeline in which conservatorship over students with intellectual and developmental disabilities leaving school is treated as a matter of course. As Zoe Brennan-Krohn, a staff attorney with the ACLUs Disability Rights Project told her, Theres this double standard where, if youre perceived as having a disability, your preferences are subsumed by whats in your, quote, best interest.

Several outlets published articles on how conservatorships work and why they can be problematic for anyone. As an op-ed by law professors Rebekah Diller and Leslie Salzman put it in Business Insider:

After exposs revealed critical problems, many states reformed their laws in the 1990s. Today, in most states, courts are supposed to consider less restrictive alternatives and narrowly tailor any guardianship order to preserve maximum autonomy. Yet these reforms, which are often ignored in practice, have not gone far enough.

They sum up: Because guardianship has traditionally been justified as a protective mechanism, the guardianship system is tainted by a culture of paternalism. As a result, many courts still err on the side of granting guardianship petitions even when less restrictive alternatives would suffice.

Similarly, The Economist published a piece titled Why Are Conservatorships Controversial? It answers that question this way:

An alleged mental illness seems to be the reason for Ms. Spearss situation, but little is publicly known about her diagnosis or condition. A conservatorship strips someone of almost all their rights much as imprisonment or commitment to an asylum does and only a court can restore them. That is rare [italics added].

The article also points out that:

Legal gaps at the state level, where the matter is regulated, make exploitation easier. For example, some states let courts appoint emergency conservators without notifying the person in question or others who may come to their aid. The conservator can often sell assets, such as a house, without extra court approval. Patchy monitoring makes it hard to catch self-dealing.

What didnt we see in these pieces? The idea that Britneys or anyones mental health struggles justify their conservatorship in the first place. Perhaps because having a diagnosis is beside the point. As Doyle opined in GEN, Spears likely does have a mental illness shes undergone psychiatric hospitalizations but a woman who can raise two young boys while holding down a demanding full-time job as a pop star is not incapacitated to the point that she requires an adult guardian.

The momentum generated by Framing Britney and press reports on the impact of guardianships has led to a discussion of alternatives. It has even prompted bipartisan calls for political action to reform the conservatorship system in California and beyond, which have received widespread news coverage. In an era when Democrats and Republicans cant seem to agree on anything, guardianship reform seems to be an exception.

Former Arkansas Governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee launched this trend with his February 27 op-ed at FoxNews online. He wrote: The enormous scope of the conservatorship abuse epidemic goes far beyond Spears, but often gets ignored by mainstream news outlets.

Huckabee cited dozens of guardianship abuse cases across America, such as that of former court-appointed guardian Rebecca Fierle, chargedwith aggravated elder abuse and neglect following the death of a ward in her care. Investigations into Fierle have also allegedly uncovered staggering conflicts of interest and double-billing among hundreds of cases that she handled in the state. He concluded that the topic deserves national bipartisan reform and a grassroots campaign to protect the most vulnerable members of our society entrapped by it.

Less than two weeks later, Congressmen and House Judiciary Committee members Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Jim Jordan (R-OH) took up Huckabees call. Gaetz issued a press release announcing that they had sent a letter to Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, requesting that the House Judiciary Committee convene a hearing to review and examine the plight of Americans trapped unjustly in conservatorships. Gaetz stated, If the conservatorship process can rip the agency from a woman who was in the prime of her life and one of the most powerful pop stars in the world, imagine what it can do to people who are less powerful and have less of a voice. The letter also cited reports by the federal Government Accountability Office and the Justice Department along with commentary from an ACLU attorney on conservatorship as a disability-rights issue.

The move generated headlines in major media including Vanity Fair and the network news as well as the entertainment press. But while the letter spotlighted the stars situation to focus on the larger issue of guardianship reform, the headlines tended to overemphasize the celebrity angle. For example: Republicans Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan Try to Free Britney Spears (CBS); Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz Joins the Fight to Free Britney Spears (ABC affiliate WPAC); Gaetz Joins #FreeBritney Movement, Calls for Hearing on Conservatorships (Fox News). Fox News piece did include a video segment in which two attorneys debated whether to end Britneys conservatorship but passed on the opportunity to discuss the broader pros and cons of the system itself.

Similarly, some media focused mainly on the Britney vs. Jamie angle of this story, and her fathers reaction to the Gaetz/Jordan proposal. Such pieces, including NBCs, leaned pro-conservatorship and mentioned the larger issue only in passing.

Perhaps it is understandable that the press didnt take the congressmens policy proposal too seriously. Gaetz and Jordan are not known for their social-justice credentials. And guardianship laws are made at the state, rather than the federal, level (a point no news outlet bothered to make).

And when allegations emerged linking Gaetz to sex trafficking, the matter dropped from the headlines.

However, legislators in Spears home state of California were already in the process of working on bills that, if passed, may lead to actual conservatorship reforms all inspired by Framing Britney Spears. While headlines about the bills, which appeared in late March, also tended to overemphasize the #FreeBritney angle, the stories themselves explained how the proposed new laws could protect the civil rights of wards and prevent system abuse.

Assembly Bill 1194, introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low (D-28th District), proposes special oversight and training for conservators, imposes penalties for those who dont act in their wards best interest, and guards against conflicts of interest.

Senate Bill 602, by State Sen. John Laird (D-17th District) would increase the frequency of reviews over conservatorships. And Democratic State Sen. Ben Allens Senate Bill 724 passed by the state Judiciary Committee in April and headed for a full hearing would allow a person subject to conservatorship to choose their own attorney, even when their mental capacity is in question.

The Los Angeles Times article even pointed out that some lawyers think the bills dont go far enough, with one seeing a need for court reform as well and another saying they are too focused on people like Spears and need to look at conservatorship more holistically.

MSNBCs coverage, which spanned both Gaetzs proposed hearings and the new state laws, featured an interview with Kathy Flaherty, Executive Director of the Connecticut Legal Rights Project, which advocates for low-income individuals in the mental health system. Flaherty noted that people who struggle with mental health conditions can regain the ability to run their lives. She explained that conservatorships are not necessarily to deprive someone of their rights for their entire life and enumerated less-encumbering alternatives for assisted decision-making.

Lessons Learned

Clearly, Framing Britney has led to a change in the publics view of Spears as somehow incapacitated. And it provided news hooks for many important and overdue conversations. It even prompted political action on guardianship and, by extension, the rights of people with mental illness labels. But these issues are not new. Multiple government reports and investigative article series on problems with guardianship have been published for years the Associated Press did an expos as far back as 1987 only to be forgotten. Why only now are we starting to take both Spears case and guardianship abuse seriously?

Part of the change may be cultural. Greater awareness and concern about social justice is now part of the zeitgeist encapsulated by the social media hashtags #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #CriptheVote and may be lending more credence to the principles animating the #FreeBritney movement and the larger questions it raises.

Also, as P. David Marshall, a professor and research chair in New Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Deakin University in Australia, wrote in The Conversation, A new sense of connection and responsibility to famed individuals is emerging: where once we gawked at the public struggles of Britney, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, now there is a more concerned response. Audiences have become vocal supporters of the vulnerable, exploring cultural issues in new ways.New norms are developing.

Jessica Ford, a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, echoed this line of thinking in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald: Its no longer culturally acceptable to openly ridicule someone for mental health struggles. Or, one might argue, to assume she needs someone else to run her life

In the films aftermath, there also seems to be a realization that when it comes to guardianship, the stories and voices of those subjected to it matter. This side was often omitted in past coverage of Spears struggles, rationalized by the fact that she rarely spoke publicly about her conservatorship as if silence implies acquiescence. Now that she has voiced a desire, through her lawyer, to remove her fathers power over her life, her perspective is finally being acknowledged and even supported. And a different picture is emerging than when the media focused mainly on the perspective of those who sought to control her.

Last week, the BBC released its own documentary about Britney Spears conservatorship. According to a recent Instagram post, the singer feels re-traumatized by such films and wonders why the media focus on her past rather than her future. But if the last few months are any indication, the future of her conservatorship, and the wider topic of guardianship and the civil rights of those deemed mentally ill, will stay in the spotlight and that offers the possibility of real change.

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*Note: Per her request, Britney Spears is scheduled to address the court directly about her conservatorship at a status hearing on June 23.

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Reframing Britney: Press and Public Waking Up to Guardianship Harms - Mad In America - James Moore

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When rioters broke into the US Capitol on January 6, chants of Fuck the police! USA! or Treason! echoed in the marble halls. When Dr. Simone Gold got inside the rotunda, she stepped over a velvet rope and announced to anyone who would listen, I am a Stanford-educated attorney!

Thus she distinguished herself among the motley crew of Proud Boys, MAGA types, and the QAnon shaman who paraded through the Capitol to overturn the 2020 presidential election, an event that left five people dead. Not only is Gold a Stanford-educated lawyer, shes also a board-certified emergency room physician. Neither qualification prevented the FBI from coming to her Beverly Hills house on January 18 and arresting her. Nor did it make a federal grand jury think twice in early February before indicting her on five criminal counts, including entering a restricted building and obstructing an official proceeding.

The arrest marked the end of one chapter in her Icarian trajectory into right-wing fame. Before April 2020, Gold had been just another over-achieving Beverly Hills doctor. But with the arrival of the pandemic, she donned her white lab coat to protest lockdowns and promote President Donald Trumps favorite unproven COVID treatment, the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. It seems thats all it took to find an enthusiastic audience among the MAGA faithful, putting her on a glide path to a certain kind of right-wing stardom. Conservatives who love to bash educated, liberal elites as out of touch quickly embraced Gold and gleefully touted her impressive credentials to support their attacks on public health measures designed to combat the pandemic. She sailed into their well-funded ecosystem, snagging speaking gigs, appearances on cable talk shows, and robust opportunities to fundraise.

Simone Gold, with John Strand (left) uses a bullhorn to address protesters in the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty

Within days of her first media hit, she had teamed up with tea party groups working with the Trump reelection campaign to demand that governors reopen the economy. Fox News put her on national TV to publicly denounce lockdowns and mask mandates as overblown responses to a disease she insisted wasnt fatal to most people. In July, her new right-wing friends ushered her to meetings with members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence. The sudden fame seems to have propelled her right up the steps and into the Capitol on January 6.

Her arrest highlights the role of conservative media in fomenting an insurrection, but Golds personal experience also illustrates what experts on extremism have long known: Education is no defense against radicalization. If you think of who is susceptible of extremist ideology, people tend to think its people who dont have much education, says Don Haider-Markel, a University of Kansas political science professor who has studied extremism and radicalization. Thats not the case at all. It tends to be more middle class and upper class. Those who have spent more time educating themselves tend to think they know better than other people.

In fact, much like the tea partiers of the Obama era, the Capitol insurrectionists were by and large an aging, middle-class mob. Researchers at the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago have dug into the demographic profiles of hundreds of people charged with crimes related to the Capitol incursion. Theyve found that about 30 percent of the arrested rioters are white-collar professionals like Gold. Only about 13 percent were affiliated with traditional far-right militias or extremist groups like the Proud Boys, and only 7 percent were unemployed.

Even so, Gold still stands out from that well-heeled crowd, and not just because shes a woman. (Women make up only about 15 percent of the Capitol defendants.) Of the more than 420 defendants the Chicago researchers studied, she is one of only two lawyers and the only doctor. Thats why its hard not to look at Golds CV and wonder: How does someone go from medical school to Stanford Law School to an FBI wanted poster?

Golds resume doesnt scream budding far-right revolutionary as much as it reflects unusual precocity and ambition. Raised in a wealthy section of Long Island, New York, Gold, 55, likes to say that she trained as a physician at her fathers knee. Reuben Tizes, her father, was a doctor, a medical school professor, and even served as the Orange County, New York, health commissioner in the early 1970s. Her mother, Carol Tizes, was an elementary school teacher.

After graduating from the City College of New York at 19, she claims she was the youngest person in her graduating class at the Chicago Medical School in 1989. She obtained a California medical license in 1990 but then enrolled in Stanford Law School, graduating in 1993. That was my idea of rebellion, she told a religious broadcaster in August, explaining that her father had wanted all his children to be doctors. (They are.) Her legal prowess didnt stand out much in Palo Alto, however. I reached out to a host of her Stanford Law classmates, but none of those who responded could recall much about Gold aside from her red hair.

Stanford Law School class photo

The intervening decades between law school and her indictment were unconventional only in the ambition of her professional endeavors. In January 1997, she was admitted to the New York bar and then completed a residency in emergency medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University. That same year, according to her LinkedIn profile, she served as a congressional fellow in DC and wrote speeches for the late Vermont senator James Jeffords, who famously left the Republican Party to become an Independent in 2001. (Susan Boardman Russ, who served as Jeffords chief of staff for 25 years before retiring in 2004, does not remember Gold.)

Over the past three decades, Gold has practiced emergency medicine at various hospitals in the LA area, but the lure of Washington seems to have endured. According to her LinkedIn page, in 2009, she worked in DC as an assistant to Michael Oren, then Israels ambassador to the US, who credited her in print for stories she helped him research for the Wall Street Journal and New Republic. Oren told Mother Jones that he had no memory of her working for him, nor did anyone on his staff.

In Los Angeles, Gold married businessman Larry Gold and had two children. Active in the Los Angeles Jewish community, she and her husband once provided a glowing testimonial for a local mohel for the bris he performed for their son. A 2003 Jewish Journal article featured Gold and her then two-year-old son in a story about Shalom Time at a local bookstore. She and her husband donated thousands of dollars to their childrens private, conservative Jewish day school in Beverly Hills, where Gold volunteered on the PTA, managing the shabbat swap one year.

But by 2010, Gold had filed for divorce. Los Angeles County court records suggest that her relationship with her ex-husband was somewhat contentious. In 2017, a judge ordered them to attend mediation over child custody and visitation issues. (Larry Gold declined to comment for this story other than to say that he was shocked to learn about his ex-wifes participation in the events at the Capitol.)

In her October 2020 book I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture Gold writes, I have always worked with the poor and underserved, treating ER patients in places like Inglewood, California, which she describes as a low-income, gang-ridden majority-minority city that provided the setting for the tough 1991 drama Boyz N the Hood. She does not, however, include any mention of her services as a pricey concierge physician, which she advertised on her now-defunct personal website: As a C-Suite Physician, Dr. Gold works the same way as a highly effective Fortune 100 CEOall with an eye toward fixing her clients exact problem. Gold charged $5,000 for an initial appointment and between $25,000 and $50,000 for ongoing consultations.

The concierge medical practice is just one of several business enterprises she attempted to launch over the yearsincluding MedicaLife, a short-lived lifestyle magazine for doctors that launched in 2006 and folded in 2008. (Confessions of a Hospital Fundraiser, teased one cover mockup.) In 2017, Gold started a company called Gold Healthcare Solutions that advertises assistance to hospitals facing government audits. Until recently, the company website listed as CEO the venture capitalist Howard Sherman, whos married to the actress Sela Ward and who ran in the Mississippi Democratic primary for the US Senate in 2018.

When I asked Sherman about his role at the company, he replied in an email: I have ZERO relationship with Dr. Simone Golds company. I work in the medical device world and at one time she approached me with an idea she had that I vetted with some of my contacts. I was not able to achieve the kind of interest she wanted so we stopped talking about the project. His name and photo were subsequently removed from the company website.

Lots of people flame out in business, get divorced, and dont end up storming the Capitol. But Haider-Markel says that those who do become radicalized are searching for broader meaning in their lives or a sense of identity. Oftentimes there is a precipitating event. They lose a partner. They have a financial crisis, he says. They develop some grievance around that and connect that to a broader social movement. If Gold was looking for a mid-life reboot, the heady mix of the pandemic, President Trump, and right-wing media provided the perfect catalyst.

The moment that changed my life completely, she told a California KGET TV reporter in January, took place in April 2020. She had been treating COVID patients in Los Angeles emergency rooms with President Donald Trumps favorite unproven COVID cure, hydroxychloroquine, just a few weeks after the president had announced that the FDA would be fast-tracking emergency use authorization for the drug for COVID treatment. Trump called it a game changer, despite warnings from the FDA that the anti-malaria drug may cause heart rhythm problems in some people.

Gold was enthusiastic about the drugs treatment possibilities. In her book, she describes how, after extensive research, she had used hydroxychloroquine to cure a woman suffering from mild COVID. I had expected to get kudos, she writes. Instead I was met with hostility. The hospital medical director challenged her independence and dressed her down for prescribing a drug that wasnt indicated for outpatients. Gold argued she had science to back her up, and cited the drugs long safety profile. Unpersuaded, the medical director threatened to fire her if she ever prescribed the drug to an outpatient again.

For most of her life, Gold doesnt seem to have been politically active. She donated $1,000 to the campaign of Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in 2019, but before that, the only other federal candidate to whom she gave money was a DemocratCalifornia Rep. Raul Ruizin 2011. I have never considered myself a political person. Ive supported both parties at various times in my life, she says in her book. Id fall in the middle of any partisan test. I dont believe in the right-left distinctionThats the trouble with being in the middle of the road. Sometimes you get run over.

But after the hospital threatened to fire her over her prescribing practices, Gold picked a lane. On April 14, she called Dennis Pragers radio show. Prager has been broadcasting in LA since 1982, but he has become an important though underappreciated part of the modern right-wing infrastructure thanks to his online Prager University. Popular with young people and the alt-right, Prager U publishes five-minute tutorials on everything from climate change to economics. The videos are designed to promote Judeo-Christian values. (A sampling: The Dangers of Islam and Just Say Merry Christmas.)

Identifying herself as an ER doctor, Gold described her success at treating patients with hydroxychloroquine and voiced dismay that medicine was becoming so politicized that a perfectly safe drug could not be dispensed by doctors without controversy. The science has taken a backseat to the hatred of the president, Prager commiserated.

A week later, Gold made a series of Twitter videos, a platform that she had rarely before used, to share her experience practicing emergency medicine in this era of the COVID-19 crisis. Standing in her white lab coat in front of Cedars-Sinai Medical Centera hospital she didnt work atGold panned the camera over the quiet grounds. Its really quite empty. The emergency department volume is down, she says. The patient census is down.

Gold wasnt entirely wrong about the hospital census but her causality was off. Hospitals all over the country, including in California at that time, were relatively empty because elective surgeries were canceled and fear of the virus kept people out of the ER. Doctors and nurses would soon be laid off. In her book she describes how her own hospital hours were cut by 30 percent. She doesnt say how much this may have hurt her bottom line, but in June, her medical practice received more than $150,000 in federal bailout loans, suggesting the lockdowns caused a personal budget deficit large enough to turn many a doctor into an activist.

None of her videos garnered more than 12,000 views but they hit a certain zeitgeist, as conservatives and conspiracy theorists alike pushed the idea that virus cases were overblown and some people in the government were using COVID to take away individual freedom and undermine President Trump. Three weeks earlier, Fox News radio host Todd Starnes had gone to a Brooklyn hospital and made a video claiming that the emergency room was empty. Im afraid that the mainstream media has been overblowing the coverage here, he narrated. Theres been a lot of fear mongering going on. With help from a QAnon enthusiast, the video spawned the hashtag #filmyourhospital and prompted a host of right-wing figures like failed California congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine Tesoriero to rush to their nearest hospitals to make their own empty hospital videos weeks before Gold did.

Even in such a climate, Golds white coat stood out, and she managed to catch the attention of one particularly influential audience member: Jenny Beth Martin, the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. One of the largest of the original tea party groups that arose to oppose President Barack Obama, Tea Party Patriots encompasses a trio of nonprofit groups funded by wealthy conservatives and conservative foundations like Donors Trust. A Tea Party Patriots super-PAC also raised $1.2 million to help reelect Trump in 2020.

Martin was dialed into the Trump White Houseso much so that she would later join Trumps Georgia legal team to help overturn the 2020 presidential election, even though shes not a lawyer. Early in the pandemic, she was working with a newly formed Save Our Country Coalition to help oppose lockdowns and defend Trumps handling of the pandemic, along with powerful conservative organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. She is also the executive committee secretary of the Council for National Policy, a secretive but powerful religious-right organization that was working with the Trump reelection campaign to find doctors to help burnish the presidents approval ratings.

Gold was just the sort of surrogate they had been looking for. I reached out to her and said, Hey, Im working on this effort and Id like to talk to doctors, and we started emailing and talking, and as things have developed and she watched the virus, things have evolved, Martin later explained to Yahoo News. The pair met in April, and Gold asked Martin to deliver a letter shed written to Trump, calling the lockdowns a mass casualty event, which shed been urging other doctors to sign. More than 400 had.

With lightning speed, Martin put Gold on the ready-made conservative media grievance circuit. On May 19, Tea Party Patriots hosted a conference call with conservative media luminaries, including Fox News Ed Henry and Breitbart News, featuring Gold and a handful of other doctors who had signed Golds letter to Trump. On the call, Gold described the hidden victims of the lockdowns, including a woman shed treated whod fallen and broken her hip and shoulder while trying to color her own hair because she couldnt go to a salon. I just feel thats theres a very big disconnect between what the average American thinks is going on and whats actually going on, Gold said.

The call sent Gold on a grand round of media hits with all of the biggest names in the MAGA firmamentformer Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Glenn Beck, Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirkand ultimately with some of the major stars of Fox News. In early July, Fox host Laura Ingraham had Gold on her show to promote her favorite drug as an over-the-counter COVID cure. This is like a medical cancel culture applied to this particular medication, Ingraham said sympathetically, conflating some cherished conservative points of fury.

Its probably hard to overstate just how much of a role conservative media played in nudging Gold towards insurrection. University of Maryland psychology professor Arie W. Kruglanski is a co-author of the book The Three Pillars of Radicalization. In his research on extremist networks across the globe, he identified three crucial factors in political radicalization: a need to feel significant, a narrative to follow, and a network that supports and validates that narrative. Its difficult to become very glamorous or glorious as an emergency room doctor, Kruglanski told me. Golds splash into right-wing media, he says, probably fulfilled all three of the pillars. This is sort of an overnight stardom. She has the narrative, and she now has the network that supports her.

Gold really hit the big time in July. After brainstorming with Martin, Gold helped Tea Party Patriots convene an Americas Frontline Doctors summit in DC, an event that resembled the white coat protests Martin had organized back in the tea party heyday to oppose the Affordable Care Act. The two-day summit garnered almost no media attention until the very end, when Gold and about a dozen white-coated physicians appeared on the steps of the Supreme Court to talk about medical cancel culture and spent nearly 45 minutes making misleading claims suggesting that COVID can be prevented and cured with, no surprise here, hydroxychloroquine. Most of them had never treated a COVID patient; ophthalmologists were overrepresented in the group. And one was really out there: Stella Immanuel, a Houston doctor who believes that some gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons. You dont need masks. There is a cure, she said. Nobody needs to get sick.

President Trump and his son Don Jr. retweeted a video of the event and it went viral, receiving more than 16 million views in a matter of hours before Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter took it down for spreading misinformation. Twitter even blocked Don Jr. from using his account for most of the day.

Simone Golds summer media splash included big names: Fox News Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Ed Henry, plus Turning Points USA founder Charlie Kirk, Glenn Beck, and conservative talk radio host Dennis Prager.

Gold has claimed that the California hospital she worked for promptly fired her for appearing in the video, and says she hasnt practiced medicine since. But the episode provided her with instant celebrity as a victim of Big Tech censorship, a credential even more beloved by conservative media than her white coat and fancy law degree. The next day, Gold accompanied Martin to meet with Vice President Mike Pence to press for emergency-use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and talk censorship. The day after that, she appeared on Tucker Carlsons Fox News show, one of the most watched prime-time cable news shows, with more than 3 million regular viewers.

On the show, Carlson expressed outrage that Golds hospital had fired her. Shouldnt you as a practicing physician with a medical degree be allowed to express your views on science as you practice it without being censored? he asked.

Gold agreed and then seized the opportunity to make her case for hydroxychloroquine to Carlsons millions of viewers. Look, I majored in Russian History. I dont know anything about hydroxychloroquine, he told her in response. I do know about the way the country is supposed to work, and physicians should be allowed to explain their experiences, their clinical experiences, treating patients and youre not allowed to because Joe Biden getting elected is more important, and thats scary.

In a sign of how far down the far-right rabbit hole shed already gone by then, Gold told Carlson that because of some negative things people had said since the video aired, she had retained attorney and conspiracy theorist L. Lin Wood to put to rest anything people want to say thats defamatory. Wood would later join with Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to file a host of baseless lawsuits to try to overturn the presidential election.

By early fall, it was clear that Golds original analysis of the pandemic was mostly wrong. The virus spiked across the country and researchers declared hydroxychloroquine useless for treating COVID. Even Trump didnt take it when he got sick. As her prospects in medicine dimmed, Gold seems to have become too toxic even for Fox News, which hasnt had her on the air since July. She had turned Americas Frontline Doctors into a more traditional nonprofit organization, complete with website, spokesperson, and white papers decrying various alleged flip-flops by Anthony Fauci. But in her quest for publicity, Gold had to dive even deeper into the far-right fever swamp.

For the next few months, Gold gave interviews to or public speeches with QAnon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, B-list talk show luminaries, and a few politicians, including Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), a stop the steal movement promoter affiliated with far-right militia groups that were part of the Capitol riots. She even went on the Patriot Radio show hosted by Matt Shea, a former Washington State legislator who has been involved in a number of armed federal standoffs, including the takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016 led by Ammon Bundy. Associated with Christian nationalists, Shea has written a manifesto calling for a fundamentalist holy war, in which non-Christian males would be killed if they didnt submit to Biblical law.

The Jewish doctor chatted happily with him about vitamins and the value of exercise in preventing COVID. Before I was called a quack and a fraud, people used to clap for me for working out there on the front lines, Gold lamented, before encouraging people to give up masks and to freely gather for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.

But Gold found her most loyal audience among evangelical Christian prosperity preachers, many of whom had refused to close their church doors during the lockdowns and were vaccine skeptics. After big tech companies pulled down the doctors video in July, it was rebroadcast by Daystar, the second-largest Christian TV network in the country. Since then, Gold has made at least six different appearances on the network founded by televangelists Marcus and Joni Lamband those visits have paid off.

In mid-August, when she headlined the Lambs program Ministry Now, along with the anti-vaccine activist Robert Kennedy Jr, Marcus Lamb made a surprise announcement: He was issuing a $10,000 matching challenge from Daystar for donations on Golds behalf. I know that you lost your job and now it may be that God has placed something else in your heart to where youre gonna make a stand, Joni Lamb told Gold. Its going to take money to do that. In October, Gold returned to chat with the ladies of Joni Table Talk, Daystars televangelical version of The View. Over coffee with the hosts, Gold thanked the whole Daystar family for being so generous, and talked about the small donations from viewers shed received. It really adds up, she said gratefully. It gave me some breathing room to keep fighting for advocacy.

Evangelical churches were especially receptive to Golds anti-vaccine advocacy, which she pivoted to as hydroxychloroquine faded as a right-wing cause clbre. Three days before the Capitol riot, Gold appeared at a religious revival event in Tampa, Florida, billed as an open air mass healing and miracle service, run by Rodney Howard-Browne. A conspiracy theorist, Howard-Browne has appeared on Alex Jones far-right site InfoWars and has called the mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, a false flag operation. He was arrested in March for holding religious services in violation of a stay at home order. Gold took the stage before a room full of people without masks and gave an hour-long speech, where she decried the evils of the experimental biological agent, better known as the COVID vaccine. She said its being tested on minority communities that have been prioritized for vaccines, which she dubbed pure racism.

They are making an overt and covert attempt to push this heavily on Blacks and browns, she warned. If you take the vaccine, youre signing up to be in a pharmacovigilance tracking system.

For most of 2020, the formerly apolitical Dr. Gold was able to separate her personal crusade for health freedom from the presidential election that provided the backdrop to the fight over lockdowns and hydroxychloroquine. She rarely touched on the subject in public other than to suggest that Orange Man bad and not science drove opposition to the anti-malaria drug. But whether Gold realized it or not, the battle over the drug was less about health care policy and more of a proxy war over Trump and the future of democracy.

Trumps loss to Joe Biden in November was a blow to Golds cause, as polls showed voters resoundingly rejected his handling of the pandemic, which embraced much of what Gold advocated. It also put her on a collision course with the stop the steal movement that metastasized after the presidential election, as her tea party and evangelical benefactors quickly backed Trumps effort to brand the election as illegitimate and overturn the results. Golds Stanford law degree suggests she is smart enough to know a big lie when she sees one, but stop the steal was where the action was, not to mention the speaking gigs and fundraising ops she now relied on for her livelihood since her medical career cratered. Once she started down the MAGA path, there was no turning back.

When Trump supporters first converged in DC on November 14 at the Million MAGA march to contest the election results, Gold was right there with them, along with other Trump die-hards like Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy who helped bankroll the march; Sebastian Gorka, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, the Georgia congresswoman whod expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. You do not give up your inalienable rights just because theres an epidemic, Gold shouted from the Supreme Court steps, warning that the government was using an age-old tactic to seize power by scaring people with a disease that she said causes mostly mild illness. Do not live in fear. Be joyful, be happy, go forward!

The event was advertised on the neo-Nazi website, the Daily Stormer, and drew hordes of militia outfits and white nationalist groups like the Proud Boys and Nick Fuentes Groypers. The rally descended into violence; 21 people were arrested on assault and gun charges, and one person was stabbed.

That didnt stop Gold from coming back to DC to speak with many of the same people at the January 5 stop the steal rally at Freedom Plazathe warmup to the main event at the Capitol, organized by Ali Alexander, a convicted felon and conspiracy theorist. Speakers represented a parade of far-right figures ranging from anti-abortion activists to former Trump adviser Roger Stone. Standing under an umbrella held by a man in a Baby Lives Matter shirt, Gold said to the crowd, Im here to ask you a personal question: Why are you here?I believe the reason you are here is the same reason I am choosing to be here. Because we all have recognized a blatant assault on the rule of law We are sick and tired of being lied to.

Kruglanski isnt surprised that Gold would move from promoting a bogus COVID cure to joining with people who thought the election had been stolen. In many cases the radical groups first shower you with love without you even accepting their ideology, he explains. But once you are accepted by the group, to maintain your good standing in that community youve got to accept their narrative.

The next day Gold was scheduled to speak again at the Wild Protest organized by Alexander near the White House, along with Tea Party Patriots Jenny Beth Martin and Brandon Straka, founder of the Walkaway Campaign that urges Democrats to quit the party. (Straka was also later arrested for entering the Capitol.) But the speeches were inexplicably canceled, and instead, protesters heeded Trumps call to march on the Capitol while Congress and the vice president were certifying the results of the 2020 election. Gold joined them.

She was accompanied by John Strandan international underwear model who serves as the communications director for Americas Frontline Doctors. Strand, 38, had been part of regular Beverly Hills freedom protests against the lockdowns over the summer and now lives with Gold. On the steps of the Capitol, he tweeted, I am incredibly proud to be a patriot today, to stand up tall in defense of liberty & the Constitution, to support Trump & #MAGAforever, & to send the message: WE ARE NEVER CONCEDING A STOLEN ELECTION.

Lawyers generally know that after engaging in a potentially criminal act, its best to stop talking publicly about it. But Gold apparently couldnt resist the siren call of an interview with the Washington Post. In a January 12 story, Gold admitted to being inside the Capitol on January 6. I can certainly speak to the place that I was, and it most emphatically was not a riot, she said, explaining dubiously that she thought it was legal to go inside. Where I was, was incredibly peaceful.

Simone Gold (top left), on the FBI poster that became fodder for internet sleuths, who quickly ID her and posted videos like these online.

Peaceful is not a word the FBI used in court filings to describe where Gold was that day. According to an FBI agent, Gold and Strand were photographed in a large crowd attempting to push past multiple officers blocking the entrance to the Capitol, which had visibly broken windows at the time. One of the officers, who had been pinned near the doors to the Capitol, appears to be pulled down by someone in the crowd and lands near where Strand and Gold were standing. Videos and still photos also show the pair pressed up against the door to the House chamber where law enforcement was trying to block them. Gold told the Post that she worried that those photos and videos would impact her ability to advocate the Americas Frontline Doctors. I do regret being there, Gold admitted.

Her regret is understandable. For days, an image of her standing in the Capitol Rotunda with a bullhorn appeared on an FBI wanted poster seeking help identifying people who participated in the insurrection. Five days after her interview with KGET, FBI agents went to her Beverly Hills house and arrested her and Strand. A DC federal grand jury indicted her on February 5. By then, L. Lin Wood was facing disbarment efforts in Georgia, where authorities have demanded a mental health evaluation after he called for Vice President Mike Pence to be executed. He was thus unavailable to defend Gold.

So why did she do it? Its impossible to know what combination of impulse, exhilaration, and conviction led Gold to follow a mob into the US Capitol. She did not respond to multiple requests for an interview, but there are a few likely dynamics at work. Lets start with her own reflections on what happened, which were surprisingly uncomplicated: When youre crossing the street and the light turns green, you go, she said in an interview with KGET. Shaking her head somewhat ruefully, she added that she came up with the genius idea to give the speech she had planned to deliver at the canceled rally. II just wanted to, she stammered. Someone had a bullhorn. I asked to use it. Those of us who were there believe the election is completely fraudulent. We just kind of wanted to be heard.

Several months before her arrest, she foreshadowed her new militancy. Not everyone can, or should, turn to political activism. I fully understand those who point out the negative consequences this approach can have for ones career and personal life, she wrote in her book. Going along with the crowd in times of fear and uncertainty present their own pitfalls, as we have seen. In Judaism we often ask ourselves, What does God expect of me in this situation? Its this emphasis on action that is essential to the Jewish faith. Trust in God, believe in yourself, and courageous conduct will follow.

It is always perilous to engage in psychoanalyzing a relatively public figure, even one who seems to be having a midlife crisis in plain sight. And yet, Haider-Markel says that while most people dont react to personal existential crisis by storming the Capitol, it might not be that surprising that Gold did. Many people whove spent a long time investing in their own education and status tend to socialize with otherslike, say, in the PTA of an exclusive Beverly Hills private schoolwho have the same or similar credentials. In these circles, they discover that the very qualities that once made them special, all those degrees and awards they worked so hard to attain, are just the ticket to admission. Where will their prestigious resume still stand out?

Simone Gold poses as a hostage for a video she made framing her as victim of government persecution. With co-defendant John Strand (left) and former professional boxer and current Nevada cannabis lawyer Joey Gilbert, a member of the legal eagle dream team at Golds Americas Frontline Doctors.

Few paths to fame are as reliable as switching sides. Conservatives claiming to represent we the people love to dump on professional expertise and fancy pedigrees in latte liberalsjust listen to Foxs Tucker Carlson repeatedly mock MSNBC host Joy Reid for having gone to Harvard. But when someone with fancy degrees and professional credentials abandons their over-educated tribe and converts, the right-wing superstructure will shower them with loveand money.

Others in right-wing politics share similar credentials as Goldsthink Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), or Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), both of whom worked to overturn the election of President Joe Biden. But as senators, Cruz and Hawley are still very much part of the establishment. Their extremism is checked by their need to fundraise and get reelected.

Experts say that far-right radicalism of the sort on display on January 6 and elsewhere over the past year has strong parallels not in Cruzs defund the IRS agenda but in Islamic radicalism, which studies have shown is full of doctors, engineers, and other professionals, even in the United States. In 2017, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats studied more than 100 people in the US, mostly American citizens, whod been prosecuted for perpetrating a domestic attack on behalf of ISIS or going to fight for the Islamic State in Syria. They discovered that, like the Capitol rioters, two-thirds of the defendants had a college education.

Kruglanski notes, too, that many of the leaders of the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, which left one woman dead and scores injured, were college educated, including Richard Spencer, who has a BA from the University of Virginia, a masters from the University of Chicago, and spent two years working on a PhD in modern European intellectual history at Duke University before leaving to pursue a life of thought-crime.

You do not have to be poor and left behind to embrace these theories, Kruglanski told me.

When it comes to real extremism, as opposed to political grandstanding, Gold much more resembles Stewart Rhodes than Ted Cruz. Rhodes is the founder of the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia group of which about a dozen members have been charged with crimes related to the Capitol riot. Rhodes was there that day, too, but unlike Gold, he was smart enough to stay out of the building. If he had gone in, he could have joined her in the rotunda and announced, I am a Yale-educated attorney.

Golds initial regret about her actions at the Capitol has given way to defiance as she returned to the lecture circuit, where she has reframed herself as a victim, and her prosecution as an assault on free speech. On their podcast recently, she told sympathetic Newsmax hosts Diamond and Silk that she looks forward to making her case to a jury. The vaccine rollout has also provided fresh opportunities for spreading misinformation in her ongoing crusade against medical discrimination through Americas Frontline Doctors.

Evangelical groups have continued to shower her with Biblical hospitality. At the end of March, Gold took her anti-vaccine schtick to Coeur DAlene, Idaho, a hotbed of far-right extremism, where she spoke at the Steeling the Mind conference put on by Compass International, a Christian ministry founded by Bill Perkins. Perkins is part of the young earth creationist movement, ties reflected in the conference lineup, where Golds fellow speakers explored such topics as whether When God created the earth in six, 24-hour days, was that 7-day creation week Gods template for 7,000 years of humans on earth?

The evangelical anti-vaccine circuit has put Gold back in close quarters with people who helped set the stage for the siege at the Capitol. In mid-April, Gold appeared at a two-day health and freedom conference in Oklahoma at the Rhema Bible College that ended with a mask-burning ceremony. There, she took the stage along with many others whod been involved in the stop the steal efforts after the election, including Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and L. Lin Wood.

In her speech, Gold announced that her Americas Frontline Doctors was setting up a legal task force to help people fight pandemic-related restrictions and vaccine passports. The audience cheered when she introduced her legal eagle dream team member Leigh Dundas. A Scientologist, an anti-vaccine activist, and far-right agitator from Orange County, California, Dundas also happened to be at the Capitol on January 6. She can be seen in videos not far from the QAnon shaman, yelling Traitor! Traitor! Traitor! at the police. After getting tear gassed outside, she went back to a nearby stage where she implored people to stand the hell up! Because you are far better off fighting on your feet and being prepared to die on your feet than living a life on your damned knees. Fight on.

Like any good victim of cancel culture, Gold is also fundraising. For weeks after her arrest, the Americas Frontline Doctors website featured a popup box that said, Dr. Gold and her Communications Director were arrested by the FBI in an extremely aggressive manner. They need your support. This fight is not just for them, but for you. Clearly this political persecution of a law-abiding emergency physician is designed to threaten and intimidate any American who dares to exercise their 1st Amendment rights. The legal pressures mounting against Dr. Gold require your urgent and generous donations to withstand such aggressive assaults from the ruthless enemies of free speech.

As of May 5, shed raked in $392,000.Top image credit: Mother Jones illustration; Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia; Getty

Go here to read the rest:

Doctor, Lawyer, Insurrectionist: The Radicalization of Simone Gold Mother Jones - Mother Jones

Kasturi Basu, activist and documentary filmmaker, is one of the founders of the No Vote to BJP campaign. Over the past four months, the campaign has reached various districts of Bengal, organising meetings, performing skits, distributing pamphlets and putting up posters with one clarion call vote any party you want but the BJP.

Basu writes about her experience of the past four months on the beaten track with a slogan and zeitgeist of our times.

The warmest message came from Punjab as the poll results were being declared. A picture and a message of the indefatigable farmers at the Singhu border, distributing sweets and lighting candles to celebrate a resounding defeat of the BJP in the Assembly polls in Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

It held out a significant message for the No Vote To BJP campaign in Bengal, a peoples movement I have been part of for the past four months, along with hundreds of fellow citizens.

It carried a message of What is to be Done, particularly for the upcoming electoral battles in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana. It was also a message for the rest of India, which had been watching closely the bitterly contested Bengal polls where a fascist Centre with all its might had launched an arrogant bid for taking over Bengal, with a macho slogan Ebaar Bangla, Parle Samla!

For many of us, we saw our role in the No Vote to BJP campaign as an extension of our involvement in the fierce movement against the NRC-NPR-CAA matrix in Bengal. The crime against humanity thats the Assam NRC had shaken us from our stupor during the Modi 1.0 regime. Then, the passing of the CAA 2019, together with the already-draconian CAA 2003, and the declaration of the NPR process, pulled the last trigger.

Perhaps the Modi-Shah-RSS combine had not anticipated that their reckless moves would end up mobilising thousands of determined activists during the Modi 2.0 era to stand up decisively against the oppressive citizenship matrix.

As the regime in Delhi stayed arrogant about not budging from their citizenship restructuring project, at the core of my heart I felt that the Bengal polls were a kind of referendum on the matter. As much as they were a referendum against the farm bills, the labour code, the massive disinvestment of the public sector and the New Education Policy 2020.

So, we began the campaign and set out on a journey for four months. It was a first for me. No Vote to BJP Endorse anyone but throw out the fascists was our central slogan.

The slogan was intended to strike a chord with the people who were never loyal or traditional BJP supporters, but those who had been blown over by the blitz of the BJP campaign and voted for the party in 2019.

Through our campaign we tried to persuade, reason and talk to these fellow citizens, to wean them away from the influence of the BJP.

Our campaign toolkit included direct mass contact in 19 districts of Bengal, through a couple of hundred street corner meetings, district-wise mobile campaigns on tableaus, auto-rickshaws and totos, about a dozen rallies and some door-to-door campaigning. The red and white poster with BJP ke Ektio Vote Noy written over it was soon all over the place, along with other posters from the campaign, highlighting issues of life, dignity and livelihood reasons for rejecting the fascist party in the fray.

Often, in the dead of the night we would receive disapproving and even threatening phone calls from unknown numbers, asking us to discontinue the campaign. But mostly, it was people calling enthusiastically, wishing to join the campaign.

Our friends sometimes got heckled, attacked and stopped from campaigning by the BJP and RSS workers. I can recall instances in Raniganj, Ashoknagar, Bolpur and Murshidabad. Among the anti-BJP parties in the fray, the TMC was expectedly welcoming of our campaign, and so was a section of the CPM workers who have their ear to the ground.

Unfortunately, the CPM leadership remained cold and indifferent to it, with several of their most ardent supporters turning openly hostile to the campaign and attacking it virulently on social media. I think it was a mistake on their part which they may re-evaluate. The TMC turned out to be the biggest beneficiary of this, possibly as they stood the strongest chance to rout the BJP electorally.

As for our campaign, there is no stopping.

Read more:

Bengal elections 2021: We tried to wean those swayed by BJP blitz - Telegraph India

Fresh Faces of Environmental Action for Earth DayIntroducing Eight Eco-Warriors from Santa Barbara County and BeyondBy Indy Staff | April 22, 2021

The founding of Earth Day in 1970 is inextricably tied to Santa Barbara, where a disastrous oil spill the year before fired up the nations environmental hackles and led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Our region remains a hotbed for Mother Earthminded preservation, planning, and restoration, carried forth by generations of eco-warriors, whove taken the form of every archetype from activist to academic, lawmaker to litigator, farmer to philanthropist.

Today, many of the same battles persist over conserving landscapes, fighting development, cleaning up waterways, saving species, and bringing sustainability to everything. But thanks to the zeitgeist of Black Lives Matter and associated equity-aimed endeavors, the Earth Day movement also encapsulates environmental justice in 2021, an era where racial reckoning extends to all corners of society.

Wed like to introduce you to eight fresh faces of environmental action in Santa Barbara. Some of the following folks are new to town, some are multi-generation residents, and one is working on a more regional goal but all are actively engaged in projects, policies, and programs that matter. We hope their stories inspire the next generation to follow in their footsteps.

Happy Earth Day. Matt Kettmann

Jay Reti first visited Santa Cruz Island as a Paso Robles High student, taking a summer course in field biology on the largest of the Channel Islands. That was my first exposure, he explained. I immediately fell in love with the islands.

Today, hes the director of the Santa Cruz Island Reserve, part of the University of Californias Natural Reserve System. With 41 properties totaling more than 750,000 acres of land, the NRS is the largest research reserve system in the world.

We handle a majority of the research and education that happens on the island, said Reti. The goal I have for the research is to use the island to test conservation and land stewardship methodology, and export that to mainland California and globally. Were really well poised to do that.

While pursuing anthropology degrees at UCLA and Rutgers, where he got his PhD, Reti worked 15 field seasons in the deepest corners of East Africa, but he would visit the Channel Islands every time he came home. He lectured at UC Santa Cruz for a few years until seeing the Santa Cruz Island job posted in 2018, when longtime director Lyndal Laughrin, whos been on the island for 55 years, decided to retire. If Laughrins tenure is any indication, the reserve director role could be a lifetime appointment for Reti, who is planning to move out there into a shipping container house with his wife and daughter in the future.

Im stepping into some tremendously big shoes, and Im really humbled by it, said Reti of Laughrin, who still lives on the island and helps with reserve projects in his retirement. By our standards, the Santa Cruz Island Reserve is a remote field station. But compared to where Ive worked, its not that bad. Plus, you dont have to worry about spitting cobras and puff adders. Despite that remoteness, the island is a very heavily utilized reserve, said Reti, who said 1,000 to 2,000 visitors clock an average 5,000 user days on an average year.

The jack of all trades job involves overseeing a small staff; keeping up relations with The Nature Conservancy, which owns the island, as well as the National Park Service and National Marine Sanctuary; processing research applications from scientists around the world; scheduling stays at the field station, where 40 people can sleep in normal times; and fundraising to pay for maintenance and more.

We get everything from people studying subtidal zones to geologists to entomologists to people studying lichens and different kinds of fungi on the island, said Reti, who noted that even art students use the island occasionally. Its extremely varied, and there is a lot of room for collaboration between all these disparate research groups, which makes it very exciting.

Recent research of note is how the reduction in regular fog is affecting Bishop pines and endemic island scrub jays that have adapted to those trees, and a deeper analysis of the spotted skunk, which seems to be less prevalent than it was when island fox species were much lower. The fox is the fastest to ever go from critically endangered species list to off the endangered species list in the world, said Reti. Thats fantastic, but what happens when it bounces back that quickly. Are they in direct competition with the skunk?

COVID hit soon after Reti started on the job. Over this last year, Ive spent very little time on the island, but Ive been completely swamped with work, said Reti of his pandemic year. Ive been able to dive into some more nuanced aspects of the reserve that, if I was out there managing people, I wouldnt get to do. Theres a silver lining for sure.

Hes most proud of spearheading a regional climate monitoring project, which installed eight weather stations around the island to serve an open-access data system. I would love in the future to see scientific publications that are citing these weather stations by people that dont even have to visit the islands, said Reti.

He hopes more people, especially Santa Barbara residents, will take the chance to see the islands for themselves.

I would encourage everyone to visit the islands, he said. Its very common to meet local people who have never been out here. You have this absolutely world-class, spectacular, stunning place an hour away.

See santacruz.nrs.ucsb.edu. Matt Kettmann

Liz Carlisle grew up in Missoula, Montana, listening to her grandmothers memories about life in the Dust Bowl. I was so compelled by her stories of an agrarian childhood, and I wanted that connection to the land, explains Carlisle, an agroecologist and author who started teaching in UCSBs Environmental Studies program in the fall of 2019. But those stories were ultimately tragic, as mismanagement of the land led to the destruction of countless communities.

After graduating from Harvard, Carlisle hit the road as a country singer and ran into similar reports. There were a lot of farming families all over rural America who had incredible traditions of land stewardship, but were all constrained by essentially the same forces, she explained, pointing to federal farming policies of the early 1970s that directed farmers toward chemical-dependent monocultures of commodity crops. It not only encouraged but really forced farmers, as the Secretary of Agriculture said, to get big or get out.

Motivations were multiple. The oversupply of food became a weapon of the Cold War, while corporations like Ford and Sears, which needed low-wage workers for their urban factories, influenced economic policies that encouraged rural flight.

Carlisle found a savior of sorts in Senator Jon Tester, a flat-topped, missing-fingered Montanan who promoted organic farming and renewable energy over fossil fuels and extractive agriculture. After working in his D.C. office for a year, Carlisle went to grad school at UC Berkeley and then worked for four years at Stanford, along the way co-writing two books: Lentil Underground and Grain by Grain.

At UCSB, Carlisle is inspired by a focus on environmental justice and equity. Its just not acceptable to continue with the food system we have if you care about equity and climate change, explained Carlisle. The students I work with at UCSB understand that 100 percent.

Shes about to publish her third book, Healing Grounds, whose working subtitle explains it all: How Farmers and Scientists of Color are Reviving Ancestral Traditions or Regenerative Agriculture to Combat Racism and Climate Change. Theres beautiful symmetry to it, she said of social and eco causes converging. The land is the place where we need to find healing.

The country may finally be prepared for such. The experience of this global pandemic, as well as the racial reckoning of the BLM movement, has pulled back the veil for some folks on the structure of the food system that supports their everyday consumption of food, said Carlisle. I have seen people raise their voices.

See lizcarlisle.com. Matt Kettmann

Meredith Hendrickss mother grew up on a Santa Barbara ranch. When she was young, shed invite her pig Abigail into the house, they were such good friends. When she was a little older, shed ride her horse through groves of walnuts, apricots, and berries down to the beach.

Within a generation, the century-old family ranch was gone, paved over by the Five Points Shopping Center. Hendricks, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, traces a clear line between that loss and her ultimate career path of preserving natural landscapes and agricultural land. It tugged at my heart, she said.

After studying at UC Davis and protecting open space in Northern California, including as Director of Land Programs for the Save Mount Diablo land trust, Hendricks is now leading the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. She started last fall, smack in the middle of the pandemic, but she hit the ground running the Land Trust is pushing ahead on a handful of major projects, including the finalization of one that will be announced in the coming weeks.

Hendricks, like the organization she now heads, is pragmatic about the complicated pursuit of land conservation. Theres absolutely a place for development in the world, she said. People need a place to live and work and shop. Its mindless urban sprawl that she and trusts around the country push against, instead working with landowners willing to explore long-term options for preservation, including for habitat, recreation, or agriculture.

That effort often means bringing odd bedfellows together, as Hendricks puts it, from environmentalists to estate planners to ranchers to builders. But she enjoys it. I like working with disparate entities to get on the same page and do remarkable things together, she explained. And shes well-suited to it, with a masters degree in environmental business relations and true pride in her work.

After more than three decades of success in the southern parts of Santa Barbara County notching wins for Arroyo Hondo Preserve, the Carpinteria Bluffs, several Gaviota Coast ranches, and several other properties the Land Trust and Hendricks are now casting an eye farther north.

Trails and parks in and around Santa Maria and Lompoc are getting loved to death, she said, as sky-high housing prices push workers out of Santa Barbara. As communities grow and get more complicated, its really important we match that with conservation and open space, she explained. We want to provide meaningful resources to everyone.

See sblandtrust.org. Tyler Hayden

Laurel Serieys knew from a young age that she would need to get all the education she could in order to study and help animals, especially wild cats. As a high school student, Serieys read a scientific paper about how most research, money, and effort is put into large cats, even though theres 33 species of small cats that most people dont invest in. So I was like, okay, maybe I should be a small cat person. Serieys received her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UCLA, where she studied how anticoagulant rat pesticides affected the genetics and disease susceptibility of bobcats in Los Angeles. From there, she went to Cape Town, South Africa, as the project coordinator and founder of the Urban Caracal Project.

After six years in South Africa, her career studying smaller cats brought her back to the West Coast. On the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, where Serieys is now, logging companies are collaborating with nonprofits like Panthera and with Native American communities to promote a more balanced ecosystem in which predators such as bobcats help control the mountain beaver population, which threatens young saplings.

Closer to Santa Barbara, Serieys is hopeful about the impact of the Liberty Canyon Wildlife Crossing, which is scheduled to break ground in 2021. I think its a really amazing, excellent thing. And I know that a lot of thought has gone into it for many years, said Serieys, who worked in that area between 2006 and 2014. I was there when P-12 became the first cat documented as crossing the 101, and when that happened, I was also doing the genetic analysis for the mountain lion project. And we could immediately see his genetic contribution and how that really helped the population.

Serieys believes that if the crossing can facilitate movement of more mountain lions in and out of the landscape, it will relieve multiple pressures on the cats, adding that another leading cause of mortality there is mountain lions killing other mountain lions, presumably over fights for territory. For eco-biologists and lovers of wild cats all over the world, Dr. Laurel Serieys is a source of information and inspiration.

See urbancaracal.org. Paloma McKean

Teresa Romeros career has taken her from nonprofit administration with the San Francisco Symphony to preserving treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather for Michigans Little River Band of Ottawa Indians. It was complex, she said of enforcing an agreement from 1836. But now, shes come home.

Romero runs the Environmental Office for the Santa Ynez Chumash, keeping a dozen grants and myriad programs on track, from monitoring the valley haze to nurturing native plants. If you take care of the resources, they take care of you, she said. We have gathering permits out in the forest, and weve propagated 3,000 plants of 60 different native species. Trial and error is teaching them which need a freeze or a burn to sprout.

Its about stewardship, she explained. When we care for our environment and our resources, our land and our waters, it protects our communities, protects our foods, our medicinal plants.

This extends to trash. At the annual powwow, unlike most festivals, trash bins dont overflow. Romero and her team start with the vendors, explaining the need to avoid single-use items theyve achieved a 90 percent landfill diversion rate. There has been a huge focus on recyclables, but take plastic water bottles, for instance: Why put them in recycling when you can reuse them? said Romero, who provides hydration stations for refills. My hope is that when people observe what were doing, they think about what theyre doing at home.

Romero is a member of the Coastal Band of Chumash and grew up in Montecito on the hill, canyon, and creek named for her family. She laughed as she said, We all have a Jacques story, referring to the infamous lifeguard who once patrolled the Miramar, running off the neighborhood kids who ventured too close to the resort. She left to study anthropology at Oregon State University.

When you study anthropology and archaeology, you dig things up and study whats been left behind. It really opens your eyes, she said. It becomes quite apparent that were leaving an awful lot of stuff behind. Where are those things going?

See syceo.org. Jean Yamamura

Summer Gray stumbled into the world of environmental activism almost by accident, thanks to a friendly push from Mr. Nagler, a high school art teacher. Gray, the first in her family to attend college, grew up a blue-collar kid in the asphalt concrete wilds of Montclair, where San Bernardino County bleeds into Los Angeles. She was into art the environment, not so much. Even so, Mr. Nagler recommended Gray for a collaborative arts and science fellowship in the Bahamas to study coral reefs. Witnessing the impacts of human development on the sea was a lightbulb moment for Gray, turning her on to the miraculous complexities of marine ecology and later to the more complex ecology of power, equity, and access as applied to the aquatic universe.

For the past four years, Grays been teaching environmental studies at UCSB. Along the way, Gray managed to be almost everywhere: monitoring climate-change negotiations in Poland, studying the impacts of sea-level rise in the Maldives, and co-authoring a scholarly treatise proclaiming the emergence of marine justice, a new variant in the realm of environmental justice.

Along the way, she also signed on with UCSB Professor Ed Keller to study what made some people more vulnerable than others to Montecitos catastrophic debris flow in 2017 essentially, why some got out and others didnt. Her role was to interview 25 people who lived, worked, or did business in the upended area.

Im a qualitative researcher, she said. Data is effective, but what Ive learned over time is that people resonate with stories.

As an assistant professor, Gray has found storytelling a critical tool in teaching community resilience. Many environmental studies students, she said, find themselves overwhelmed by the imminent threat of the slow incremental violence posed by climate change. I show little things that people are doing, like the Santa Barbara Soup Kitchen, for example, she explained, that give students a sense that they have a role to play, that show people can be involved in making change.

See summermgray.com. Nick Welsh

Kristen Hislop grew up enjoying California to its fullest the Stockton native and her family would often venture to the Sierra Nevada to camp amid its towering trees and imposing granite peaks and to the stunning beaches on the states coast. These experiences ignited Hislops love for environmental science, and she now manages an extensive portfolio of issues in her role as director of the Environmental Defense Centers Marine Conservation Program.

Hislop, who holds a B.A. in geography from UCSB, was initially interested in pursuing a career in physical therapy, but she changed her path after becoming fascinated by undergraduate human geography and oceanography classes. She graduated from UCSBs Bren School in 2010 with a Master of Environmental Science and Management degree.

Driven by a passion for protecting and preserving Santa Barbaras abundant natural environment, Hislop works mainly on issues related to climate change, like fossil-fuel usage and the safe introduction of renewable energy sources. While renewable energy may sound like a straightforward way to mitigate climate change, inadequate planning could harm environments and communities.

We want to make sure there are no lasting negative environmental impacts of renewable energy, explained Hislop. We take on that role not only as advocates of renewable energy but also in the venue of offshore wind, which is an exciting issue but should be coupled with protection.

Hislop believes offshore wind is a viable energy source that must be thoughtfully implemented, and she is currently working with multiple state agencies to ensure proposed projects including two near Point Conception will be located in areas that reduce the risk to the environment and other user groups, such as fishermen and recreationalists.

We have concerns about nearshore projects because many species are found in higher abundance close to shore, said Hislop, whod like to see them located further offshore and would like to avoid unnecessary environmental and community impacts.

This is part of a bigger picture that we get to contribute to on a local scale, she said of her work at the Environmental Defense Center. Working in this field and this place is such a gift. It takes a long time to influence policy, but Ive been in the field for enough time that Ive seen some wins.

See environmentaldefensecenter.org. Lily Hopwood

Christopher Ragland credited his mother teaching him how to swim young and his early comfort with the beach as allowing him to become interested in pursuing environmental studies at UCSB.

Originally from San Pedro, Ragland said that he was fortunate to have this opportunity because many people of color dont.

I have Black family and friends now that dont like going to the beach; they dont like sand on their feet, Ragland said. They dont like being in the water, and theyre not safe in the water. They dont think that it is for them its just not a Black thing to do.

So after graduating UCSB and searching for his place in environmental work, Ragland eventually found the perfect fit when he combined his love for the ocean and water sports with his passion for environmentalism and social justice. Hes formed The Sea League a year-round ocean sports league that is accessible to low-income youth of color and creates pathways to environmental stewardship. He wants to take it from a fun first approach rather than overloading the kids with facts.

The project began in January and is still small. Ragland has a team of five kids he takes surfing at Leadbetter Beach twice a week for two hours. He hopes to expand once he is able to get more adults involved to help take the kids into the ocean.

Rebuilding relationships between the natural world and communities of color is a central goal of The Sea League. All of the men older than Ragland in his family either are incarcerated or were previously incarcerated, and Ragland believes that he broke that cycle for himself because of his relationship with the ocean and the environment.

Its not like Black people never had a culture with the environment or the ocean, he said. Its just that its sort of been erased and rewritten in a way where many folks dont think theyre welcome.

Follow his progress on Instagram at @_chrisragland. Delaney Smith

The rest is here:

Fresh Faces of Environmental Action for Earth Day - Santa Barbara Independent

As the effects of the coronavirus pandemic have rippled through society, musicians and artists are amongst those whose livelihoods have been significantly affected. With venues closing down and concerts and tours cancelled, many have focussed on channelling their energy into resilience.I didnt write any songs for a good three or four months, says Jeangu Macrooy. The world was so different.

In an exclusive interview with wiwibloggs, the Eurovision star said he struggled to find artistic inspiration throughout the pandemic. I usually get my inspiration from going to the theatre, movies, just meeting friends randomly and having new conversations, Jeangu told our William. Its been interesting. But now, hes ready to bounce back. Representing The Netherlands at Eurovision 2021, Jeangu will perform Birth of a New Age in Rotterdam.

A departure from his Eurovision 2020 entry Grow, Jeangus new song is reflective of his journey with his own confidence and self-worth. When I wrote Grow, I had a long period of time where I was not feeling like myself and I was crawling out of this pit, he explained. I think Birth of a New Age reflects where I am right now.Im more confident, more strong, Im the optimist I always was.

Much of that strength and optimism comes from his heritage. In many ways, Jeangu is an ambassador to Suriname the country of his birth and the place he first discovered music. Rightly so, Jeangu is proud of his identity and incorporates elements of Surinamese culture into his music. I was working on the lyrics a few days before the studio session, he said from his home in Amsterdam. I was thinking about my heritage and the country that is my foundation of who I am as a person. I remembered this old saying which literally means, Im half a cent, you cant break me (because its the smallest denomination of coin). Its a way of saying you may underestimate me, but I know my own worth, I know my own strength and thats what will keep me going.

One of the most undeniably striking features of Birth of a New Age are its lyrics. Many fans have drawn comparisons between Jeangus words and the political climate of Suriname. When quizzed by William, Jeangu explained that this wasnt a direct inspiration. The short answer is no, he said. But I got the association. Because for Suriname, its also the beginning of a new direction, a new age.

However, the song does have a message for the broader atmosphere and current cultural zeitgeist. Its inspired by these movements where people say, weve shut our mouths for too long, Jeangu said passionately. An out and proud gay man, Jeangu remains vocal about his drive for social change. Even here living in Amsterdam, [Black Lives Matter] has had a huge impact because it was a global movement and Im so happy that were living in the time where people have found the courage and the strength to use their voices against these systems of oppression and are fighting for whats right. Whether that be fighting for the Black Lives Matter movement or our queer community. We deserve to be here and we deserve respect.

That sentiment is something that shines through in Jeangus music video and live performance. During the premier performance of Birth of a New Age, Jeangu was joined on stage by his twin brother Xillan and ZO! Gospel Choir singing the your rhythm is rebellion motif.

But Jeangu is planning on a few changes for the Eurovision stage show. Its a different thing, its another chapter. As for the backing vocals, Jeangu plans on using a mix of both pre-recorded live vocals. Its yet to be confirmed whether Xillan will reappear as a backing vocalist, however. I cant reveal that yet, he teased.

What else? Well, Jeangu also gave us his top tips for visiting Rotterdam. He recommends visiting the Kunsthal museum, and grabbing something Surinamese to eat. Rotterdam is a very multicultural city, he said. I must say that I am still discovering Rotterdam myself. And were excited to discover it, too.

His final message for his fans is that hes ready to do them proud at Eurovision. Im ready to hit the stage. Im ready to give it my all, he exclaimed. We wish Jeangu the best of luck, and we know hell do The Netherlands and Suriname proud.

What did you take away from this interview with Jeangu Macrooy? Do you connect with the Birth of a New Age lyrics? Sound off in the comments below.

Read more Eurovision 2021 interviews here

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Interview: Netherlands' Jeangu Macrooy on "Birth of a New Age" | wiwibloggs - wiwibloggs

The intersection of sport and art has long been an interesting conversation. And, as a sector, we sometimes use those statistics to create division, but are art and sport audiences so very different?

Not at all, according to Gerry Bobsien, Director Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG). While we often use those numbers to wedge the two, there is a really basic connection in their use of storytelling and spectacle.

The gallerys new exhibition Shadow Boxer (opening 5 June) will highlight the cultural fascination with boxing, and explore a duplicity of themes from race to gender, physicality and folklore.

Bobsien told ArtsHub: If you scratch the surface a little, so many artists, over so many years have turned to boxing as their subject. Theres a real interest for us in looking at why that is, and the very different perspectives artists offer the compelling stories around sport, rather than conquest itself.

That most literal aspect of narrative is explored by UK writer David Matthews (a journalist-turned-boxer) in a film that sits alongside the exhibition, which includes works by artists Blak Douglas, Fiona McMonagle, Karla Dickens, Keri Glastonbury, Nigel Milsom, Michael Willson, Richard Lewer, as well as boxing champion Bianca 'Bam Bam' Elmir.

-Gerry Bobsien, Director, Maitland Regional Art Gallery

Bobsien says Matthews talks a lot about physicality in his writings. As Bobsien sees it, He talks about similarities, as does Richard Lewer, who draws together the technical aspects of making art in terms of discipline and training.

The Melbourne-based Lewer spends his mornings in the studio and afternoons in the gym training boxers. He has made a series of to-scale steel boxing bags assisted by his crew at the Northside boxing gym. Theyve been shaped and beaten in the most physical way by those he trains.

The physicality of these boxers making marks on the steel is so seductive. Richard speaks fondly about his gym. How everyone gravitates to their own bag, and how the bags take on their own persona. And when all have left the gym, theres still a little movement in the air as though they're embodied in some way, explained Bobsien.

Lewer will also present a number of movement-based drawing workshops during the exhibition period.

The programming around this exhibition is just as important as the artworks, and that really brings out some of those other conversations directly with our visitors, Bobsien told ArtsHub.

Michael Wilson, Harris and coash Faris Chevalier focus on what's ahead, 2018. Courtesy the artist.

Bobsien said the whole narrative around boxing is deeply connected to stories of regional Australia.

The exhibition draws heavily on its collection of personal items from boxing great, the Maitland Wonder Les Darcy. He was a champion, but he was also a musician and a blacksmith. People called him a gentleman he was not a brute, explained Bobsien. There is undoubtably a class aspect around the sport in this region in particular where a lot of coal miners boxed to earn some extra coin and this is an aspect that Nigel Milsom unpacks in his work.

Shadow Boxer also enables the gallery to throw a spotlight onto the participation of Aboriginal champion fighters and the stories of tent boxers that toured country Australia , said Bobsien.

The gallery recently acquired works by Karla Dickens, produced for NIRIN: Biennale of Sydney, offering a moment to interrogate the galleries collection holdings.

Wes Enoch (who directed Roger Bennetts play Up the Ladder) will add his voice to this story in the exhibition publication, Bobsien said.

I suspect many boxing gyms, like those around here have all flags flying, affirming the place of Aboriginal boxers as champions of the sport, and Karla tells that story beautifully through her work looking at celebration and the flipside exploitation.

-Gerry Bobsien, Director, Maitland Regional Art Gallery

First Nations artist Blak Douglas, similarly looks at the idea of the hero and the narratives around David Sands, who also lived in the region and was the first Indigenous boxer to be entered into the World Boxing Hall of Fame.

These stories have a very immediate connection to our visitors and our community being able to tell stories that have a basis here in Hunter Region, but also absolute relevance across the country that is what regional galleries do well, Bobsien told ArtsHub.

That amplification of national zeitgeist through the local is also played out in the involvement of Lebanese-Australian boxer Bianca Bam Bam Elmir, who explores the nuances of gender, cultural diversity and again perceptions of physicality around sport as a Muslim woman.

Elmir says that boxing gives her agency. She doesnt shy away from talking about violence and what this means for her in the ring and this is a challenging subject on so many levels Bianca talks about consent and a level playing field with two people facing off against each other in a highly technical and defensive dance. There is something incredibly powerful in the way she talks about it in her workshops finding your strength and taking power through your body, explained Bobsien.

Elmir uses sport as a platform in her community work with young women, and also young boys, in crisis. She will be part of a panel discussion of artist boxers on 19 June.

One of the challenges for this exhibition has been that it presents so many stories. Its hard to know where to stop and rein things in, concluded Bobsien.

Shadow Boxer is showing at Maitland Regional Art Gallery from 5 June 8 August. Visit the gallerys website for public programs tailored to the exhibition.MRAG is located two hours north of Sydney.

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Bridging the art/sport divide with creative energy - ArtsHub