Chris Hedges's Blog, page 441

Canada Now World’s Biggest Legal Pot Marketplace

MONTREAL — Jubilant customers stood in long lines for hours then lit up and celebrated on sidewalks Wednesday as Canada became the world’s largest legal marijuana marketplace.

In Toronto, people smoked joints as soon as they rolled out of bed in a big “wake and bake” celebration. In Alberta, a government website that sells pot crashed when too many people tried to place orders.

And in Montreal, Graeme Campbell welcomed the day he could easily buy all the pot he wanted.

In the past, it was “hard to find people to sell to me because I look like a cop,” the clean-cut, 43-year-old computer programmer said outside a newly opened pot store.

He and his friend Alex Lacrosse were smoking when two police officers walked by. “I passed you a joint right in front of them and they didn’t even bat an eye,” Lacrosse told his friend.

Festivities erupted throughout the nation as Canada became the largest country on the planet with legal marijuana sales. At least 111 pot shops were expected to open Wednesday across the nation of 37 million people, with many more to come, according to an Associated Press survey of the provinces. Uruguay was the first country to legalize marijuana.

Ian Power was first in line at a store in St. John’s, Newfoundland but didn’t plan to smoke the one gram he bought after midnight.

“I am going to frame it and hang it on my wall,” the 46-year-old Power said. “I’m going to save it forever.”

Tom Clarke, an illegal pot dealer for three decades, opened a pot store in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, and made his first sale to his dad. He was cheered by the crowd waiting in line.

“This is awesome. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this,” Clarke said. “I am so happy to be living in Canada right now instead of south of the border.”

By afternoon, Clarke had sold his entire cannabis supply and had to turn away customers.

The start of legal sales wasn’t the only good news for pot aficionados. Canada said it intends to pardon everyone with convictions for possessing up to 30 grams of marijuana, the newly legal threshold.

“I don’t need to be a criminal anymore, and that’s a great feeling,” singer Ashley MacIsaac said outside a government run shop in Nova Scotia. “And my new dealer is the prime minister!”

Medical marijuana has been legal since 2001 in Canada, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has spent the past two years working toward legalizing recreational pot to better reflect society’s changing opinion about marijuana and to bring black market operators into a regulated system.

Corey Stone and a friend got to one of the 12 stores that opened in Quebec at 3:45 a.m. to be among the first to buy pot. Hundreds later lined up.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing — you’re never ever going to be one of the first people able to buy legal recreational cannabis in Canada ever again,” said Stone, a 32-year restaurant and bar manager.

The stores have a sterile look, like a modern clinic, with a security desk to check identification. The products are displayed in plastic or cardboard packages behind counters. Buyers can’t touch or smell the products before they buy. A small team of employees answer questions but don’t make recommendations.

“It’s a candy store, I like the experience,” said Vincent Desjardins, a 20-year-old-student who plans to apply for a job at the Montreal shop.

Canadians can also order marijuana products through websites run by provinces or private retailers and have it delivered to their home by mail.

At 12:07 a.m., the Alberta Liquor and Gaming Commission tweeted: “You like us! Our website is experiencing some heavy traffic. We are working hard to get it up and running.”

Alberta and Quebec have set the minimum age for purchase at 18, while other provinces have made it 19. Rules vary in different jurisdictions about whether people can smoke pot outside.

Fire and Flower Chief Executive Trevor Fencott brought his wife and three children — 16, 13 and 6 — for the opening of a company pot shop in Edmonton, even though the law forbid his children from going inside.

“Legalization is about daylighting a lot of stuff that used to be in the shadows,” he said. “Our kids are going to inherit this system, for better or worse, and I thought it was important for them to see this sea change in Canadian society.”

No stores will open in Ontario, which includes Toronto. The nation’s most populous province is working on its regulations and doesn’t expect stores to operate until spring. The Pacific Coast province of British Columbia has just one store open, but it’s not in Vancouver, one of Canada’s largest cities.

A patchwork of regulations has spread in Canada as each province takes its own approach within the framework established by the federal government. Some provinces have government-run stores, others allow private retailers, and some have both.

Canada’s national approach allows unfettered banking for the pot industry, inter-province shipments of cannabis and billions of dollars in investment — a sharp contrast with prohibitions in the United States, where nine states have legalized recreational sales of pot and more than 30 have approved medical marijuana.

Many Americans are likely to cross into Canada to buy and use pot, but they can’t take it back. U.S. border authorities have issued reminders that travelers could face arrest if caught with it.

Bruce Linton, CEO of marijuana producer and retailer Canopy Growth, claims he made the first sale in Canada — less than a second after midnight in Newfoundland.

“It was extremely emotional,” he said. “Several people who work for us have been working on this for their entire adult life and several of them were in tears.”

Cam Battley, chief corporate officer of Aurora Cannabis, also one of Canada’s largest cannabis companies, said it’s not every day you get to be involved in the start of a new industry.

“The world trusts Canada to be a leader in this,” he said. “We’re not known as wild and crazy. We’re known for good public policy and I think they will follow our lead.”

___

Rob Gillies reported from Toronto. Tracey Lindeman reported from Montreal. Gene Johnson reported from Seattle. Johnson is a member of AP’s marijuana beat team. Follow him at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattle. Find complete AP marijuana coverage at http://apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana

What Keeps Washington Indefinitely in Bed With Riyadh

It’s time to ask an uncomfortable question: What exactly is the U.S. getting out of its partnership with Saudi Arabia? The answer is: nothing but headaches, human rights abuses and national embarrassment. In the cynical past, the U.S. could at least argue that it needed Saudi oil, but that’s no longer the case, due to the shale-oil boom (though that fact is not necessarily good for an ever-warming planet).

Recently, the crimes of the Saudi government managed to pierce the Trump-all-the-time-Kanye-West-sometimes media-entertainment complex due to Riyadh’s likely murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That the U.S.-Saudi relationship is, however briefly, coming under the proverbial microscope is a good thing. Still, it is astonishing that this incident—rather than dozens of other crimes—finally garnered attention. Even so, President Trump appears reluctant to cancel his negotiated $110 billion record arms deal with the kingdom.

For me, it’s personal. Saudi Arabia’s fingerprints—both of its government and private-citizen donors—have been all over America’s various opponents these past 17 years of war. I patrolled the streets and suburbs of Baghdad from 2006 to 2007. Sunni Islamist insurgents, which were funded by the Saudis, shot a few of my soldiers and paralyzed one permanently. We regularly found Saudi Wahhabi Islamist literature in the homes and caches of our insurgent enemies.

Years later, from 2011 to 2012, I led a cavalry reconnaissance company in Kandahar, Afghanistan. We chased the Taliban—really a collection of disgruntled farm boys—around the fields and valleys of the Zhari district. Guess where those Taliban fighters—who killed three of my men and wounded 30 others—went to school? In Saudi-financed madrassas across the border in Pakistan.

All told, I—like hundreds of other officers—sacrificed young American soldiers fighting an “enemy” too often armed and funded by the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Iraq, my platoon suffered the loss of three lives, the use of a few legs and several gunshot wounds. In Afghanistan, my troop gave up 10 limbs, three lives and endured more than a dozen gunshot wounds. That the Saudis—America’s purported “partners” in the Middle East—have even some of that blood on their hands should be seen as a national tragedy. That it is not reflects poorly on the health and future of this republic.

Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist theocracy and one of the world’s last absolute monarchies. The kingdom (and its private-citizen donors) have regularly supported Islamist jihadis across the Middle East. Heck, 15 of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudis. Many of these groups later attacked the U.S. homeland or American troops overseas. Most recently, Riyadh backed the Nusra Front—the al-Qaida affiliate ensconced in the ongoing Syrian civil war.

All too often, Saudi Arabia backs groups that are anti-American, and overall, Riyadh’s regional policy is utterly counterproductive to U.S. interests. Furthermore, the Saudis’ irrational hatred of Iran has kicked off a veritable cold war and arms race in the Persian Gulf—and that’s where those $110 billion in weapons will be funneled. The last thing the overstretched U.S. military needs is to be pulled by our Saudi “partners” into a new war in the region—this time in Iran.

Then there’s the matter of human rights and U.S. “values.” Here, the Saudi record is atrocious. The kingdom beheads dissidents and executes women for adultery, “witchcraft” and “sorcery.” Only in a place like the Arabian Peninsula could it be considered an accomplishment for women to finally gain the right to drive—in 2017. Finally, and most shockingly, in terms of U.S. complicity, since 2015 Riyadh has unleashed terror bombing and a starvation blockade on Yemen—the poorest country in the Arab world. Tens of thousands of civilians have died, tens of millions are in danger of famine and the worst cholera epidemic in recorded history has broken out.

So what is it that keeps Washington so closely—and inextricably—tied to Riyadh? It’s increasing clear that the profits of the military-industrial complex might provide the best explanation. The United States no longer produces much of value. Deindustrialization crippled our Rust Belt, reoriented America to a service economy and increased the growing gap between rich and poor. These days, guns and bombs—the U.S. is by far the largest international arms dealer—are the one thing Uncle Sam still produces.

Seen this way, we must look again to the $110 billion deal Trump negotiated with Saudi Arabia. It may just be Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell and other such corporations that keep Washington indefinitely in bed with the Saudi king and princes. What’s more, guess who serves on the boards of many of those companies, in a controversial revolving door? Retired generals and admirals. The embarrassing, counterproductive U.S.-Saudi relationship thus appears to reflect a structural flaw embedded in the U.S. economy: its co-option by the ever-stronger military-industrial complex.

Maybe the recent uproar over the Saudis’ alleged murder of Khashoggi will achieve what tens of thousands of dead Yemenis and the loss of thousands more U.S. troops could not—a reboot of U.S. policy toward the kingdom.

As a historian, I wouldn’t count on it.

—

Danny Sjursen is a U.S. Army officer and a regular contributor to Truthdig. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, “Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.” Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

 

Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Fiasco Bodes Ill for All of Us

It should probably concern me—I am a Jew, after all—that our society has replaced calipers with cotton swabs. Still, I’ve got to admit that the whole idea of using perhaps the most remarkable scientific accomplishment in the history of human inquiry—the sequencing of the human genome—to parse individual human pedigrees like some demented, science-fiction Homo sapiens kennel club is just farcical enough to keep me from putting my papers in order and gathering enough cash to flee on the next steamer to Shanghai.

It reminds me of a viral, meme-ified Spider-Man panel in which he confronts the villainous Sauron, a brilliant human geneticist turned evil mutant pterodactyl (really!). “You can rewrite DNA on the fly, and you’re using it to turn people into dinosaurs?” exclaims the heroic web-slinger. “But with tech like that, you could cure cancer!”

“But I don’t want to cure cancer,” the villain replies. “I want to turn people into dinosaurs.”

Those are the shoals on which our contemporary, 23andMe-style personal genomics founder and sink: a uniquely American style of the old Soviet Lysenkoism, in which behavioral and cultural traits somehow pass, sperm to egg, across generations in percentages of inheritance. In 2016, vocal “Never Trump” conservative Ana Navarro famously tweeted: “ZERO% African-Americans support Trump in polls, I knew I had to be black. Took @ancestry test. So excited. 4% black! Explains a lot.” She tagged it with the hashtag “Sistah.”

I don’t want to be uncharitable, and it’s obvious that this regrettable tweet was meant to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it points to the ludicrous nature of the entire enterprise. Four percent black! What can this possibly mean? Will we return to the racial classifications that gave colonial European slave societies an entire taxonomy? “Honey, our results came back and someone in our family is a hexadecaroon!” Its offensiveness is mitigated by its absurdity, but only slightly.

Which brings us to the present politico-genetic kerfuffle, in which Sen. Elizabeth Warren has responded to Donald Trump’s racist “Pocahontas” nickname for her by having a respected geneticist prove that somewhere in her family, “6-10 generations” back, someone was a Native American. I understand the impulse. Warren’s family, like half of the white people in North America, had some half-baked frontier fable—part “Leatherstocking Tales,” part “Dances With Wolves”—about intermarriage with some or other native nation—in the Warrens’ case, the Cherokee. She accepted it unquestioningly. Well, I never saw the passenger manifest that brought my great-grandfather over from Calabria, but I assume my grandmother is telling me the truth.

This bit of legend—“family lore,” we’re now mysteriously calling it, one of those weird anachronisms that become neologisms in our stupid political media—unadvisedly found its way into Warren’s biography when she was still just a professor; it became an issue during her first Senate campaign, and Trump made it an issue again when he decided to start calling her “Pocohontas,” a figure whose actual, disputed history is enthralling and terrible.

The nickname is appalling. Trump’s rage-aholic base of exploding-capillary golf cheats loves it precisely because it gives so much offense. Most people, the sort who are only vaguely aware of politics and find Trump an embarrassing but frankly distant figure, barely know who Warren is at all. These Trumpland taunts seem immensely acute to the folks who marinate in Twitter or cable news all day, but even to  many habitual voters and semi-regular consumers of the news, they appear as the decontextualized flotsam churned up by a storm of gestural shorthand, a system of symbols almost entirely alien to the language of daily concern.

Warren, whose political instincts I’ve often found shockingly OK for a Democrat, stumbled headlong into this one. It was a fight she could not win and ought to have brushed away as more crazy talk from a racist, elderly man. Trump is our protean national id and cannot be trapped by inconsistencies or past utterances. His imaginary halcyon past and made-great-again future exist in a best-president present unmoored from logic, reason or causality. Warren got a DNA test in order to confront Trump, who’d said he would give a million bucks to charity if she got a DNA test proving her ancestry. So what did he do? He stared directly into a camera and claimed he never made such a promise. He then went online to laugh at the idea that the test showed she was “1/1024 [Native American], far less than the average American.”

The Cherokee Nation and other Native American groups also decried the test, having long dismissed genetic descent as a determining factor in their cultural heritage. Chuck Hoskin Jr., the Cherokee Nation secretary of state, said in a statement that “[u]sing a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”

In fairness, Warren had already made a careful, rather legalistic disclaimer to a similar effect in her announcements, noting that distant genetic lineage is not tribal membership, which is up to tribal nations themselves to decide. But she, unlike Trump, is beholden to some form of basic logic, and the obvious rejoinder is: Well, if you believe that, then why did you take the test at all? You’ve proven that you are something that you admittedly cannot be. Which demonstrates precisely what Trump’s been bellowing all along—that you are a phony and a fraud!

Beyond these specific circumstances lies the idea—both terrifying and intensely silly—that we have now entered an era when public figures present their genes as tokens of authenticity, like Aldous Huxley by way of the Marx brothers. It’s incredibly gross. It reifies an absolutely false notion of authentic heritage and gives automatic credence to the neo-eugenicists who argue for immutable, heritable, racialized cultural characteristics and, ultimately, immutable racial hierarchies. It is a form of bullshit biological determinism. Kellyanne Conway, the omnipresent Trump spokeswoman, waved her hand and called it junk science, and for once, she wasn’t wrong.

This will all have a far more negligible effect on either the midterms or the subsequent presidential election than the people paid to squawk about politics would have you believe, or do believe themselves, if it has any effect at all. But I can’t help but feel a twinge of dire anticipation for where this ghoulish obsession with race and pedigree could lead. Blud und Ehre—“Blood and Honor”—was the popular Nazi slogan. What is ours now—blood and error?

The Rats Revolt

There is no American who has fought with more tenacity, courage and integrity to expose the crimes of corporate power and to thwart the corporate coup d’état that has destroyed our democracy than Ralph Nader. Not one. There is little he has not tried in that effort. He has written investigative exposés on the unsafe practices of the auto industry; published best-sellers such as “Who Runs Congress?”; founded citizen action and consumer groups; testified before countless congressional committees; written a raft of environmental and worker safety bills that were passed in Congress under the now defunct liberal wing of the Democratic Party; and, when he was locked out of the legislative process by corporate Democrats, been a candidate for president. He even helped organize the first Earth Day.

His latest assault is a fable called “How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress.” (And though at times the prose can be a bit stilted and the scatological jokes on par with the humor of the average 10-year-old—the rats crawl up out of the toilet bowls as congressional leaders are taking a dump—Nader is deadly serious about the revolt the rats engender.)

The key in Nader’s story to the citizens retaking control of Congress and the government is sustained mass nationwide demonstrations and rallies. These demonstrations, like all protests that are effective, are organized by full-time staff and steadily build in numbers and momentum. The demonstrations are funded by three enlightened billionaires. I don’t share Nader’s faith—also expressed in his other foray into fiction, “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us”—in a renegade wing of the oligarchy funding the overthrow of the corporate state, but he is right that successful movements need to be sustained, grow in size and power, have dedicated organizers and amass significant cash and resources so they do not disintegrate.

Nader writes in his new book:

Protests rise and fall in the ether for the most part. They generally don’t ripple out from the core group of concerned people who originate them. Experts on crowds attribute this to little planning, minuscule budgets, poor leadership, and the lack of focus which induces protest fatigue among the core before they make an impact. The core never convincingly answers the questions, “Just How Far Do the Majority of Our Fellow Citizens Want To Go and How Do They Expect to Get There?”

Another explanation for the lackluster showing of protest movements in this country is that American politicians, over the past twenty-five years, have learned to quietly dismiss big rallies, demonstrations, and even temporary “occupations,” because they have gone nowhere. The lawmakers never consider them when making decisions. Remember, too, that in Washington, giant rallies, such as those against the Iraq War, for the environment or for a jobs program were traditionally held on weekends when neither the members of Congress nor the journalists were around. These crowds are lucky to get a picture in the Sunday newspapers. The lack of publicity curtails any impact they might have had. The smaller gatherings, even those by Veterans for Peace, get zeroed out completely, rating at best a paragraph squib deep in the paper.

The demonstrations for the restoration of our democracy take place in cities around the country. They also see enraged citizens pour into Washington, D.C., to surround and occupy the Capitol and the headquarters of other government agencies and institutions to demand a return to democratic rule. The ruling elites become afraid.

Indeed, it is only when the elites become afraid of us that there will be any hope of destroying corporate power. Politics, as Nader understands, is a game of fear.

As Nader points out, elected officials have surrendered their constitutional power to do the bidding of corporations in return for corporate money. It is a system of legalized bribery. The consent of the governed has become a joke. Politicians in the two ruling parties are the agents of corporate exploitation and oppression, the enemies of democracy. They no longer hold public hearings at the committee level. They govern largely in secret. They pass bills, most written by corporate lobbyists, and appoint judges to protect corporations from lawsuits by those these corporations have wronged, injured or defrauded. They deny our standing in the courts. They divert money from the country’s crumbling infrastructure and social services to sustain a war machine that consumes half of all discretionary spending. They run up massive deficits to give tax cuts to the ruling oligarchs and orchestrate the largest transference of wealth upward in American history. They suppress the minimum wage, break unions and legalize the debt peonage that corporations use to exact punishing tribute from the citizenry, including from young men and women forced to take on $1.5 trillion in debt to get a college education. They revoke laws, controls and regulations that curb the worst abuses of Wall Street. They abolish our most cherished civil liberties, including the right to privacy and due process. Their public proceedings, as was evidenced in the one held for new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, are shameless political theater that mocks the democratic process.

“Congress itself is a clear and present danger to our country,” Nader writes. “It feasts on raw global corporate power and is oblivious to various fateful degradations of life on the planet.” He calls Congress “a concentrated tyranny of self-privilege, secrecy, exclusionary rules and practices.”

Nader warns that any uprising has to be swift to prevent the ruling elites from organizing to crush it. It has to capture the public imagination. And it has to have a sense of humor. He writes of the fictitious uprising in “How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress”:

A contingent from New York and New England, led by nurses and students, delivered a truck load of “Wall Street Rats” with the sign explaining that they would obviously be welcomed by the Congress that had refused to pass a Wall Street speculation tax, such a sales tax would have provided $300 billion a year that might have been utilized to provide healthcare and reduce the student loan burdens. Millions of postcards were being sent showing one giant black rat on the Capitol Dome with a sign saying, “You Didn’t Listen to Them—The People—But Now You’re Going To Listen To Us.” This was only a sliver of the corrosively critical anthropomorphism attributed to the rats and their imagined political agenda. They had become the voice of the public! Little statuettes of [House Speaker] Blamer, [Minority Leader] Melosay, and [Senate Majority Leader] Clearwater, wearing crowns upon which lolled a pompous rat, were selling like hotcakes. Poster art rose to new heights of imaginative, symbolic, and real-life portrayals of what was increasingly being called the perfidious “Withering Heights” of Washington, DC.

The calendar was filled with non-stop street action: rallies, soapbox speeches, marches, and sit-ins at zoos where the protesters said the rats should be given luxury cages as reward for their heroic takeover. The media couldn’t have enough of it. Ratings soared and increasing print, radio, and TV time was being devoted to what was making a very deep impression everywhere. Protests—across the country, red state, blue state, north, south, east, and west—were moving into mobilization stages with overdue specific demands for justice, fairness, and participation qua citizens replacing control qua wealth as the sine qua non of government functioning. And, the most ominous sign of all for incumbents: there were early indications of candidates, holding the same beliefs as the protesters, readying challenges to the lawmakers in the upcoming primaries.

Petitions were circulating on the Internet demanding the members go back to their jobs regardless of the rat infestation. Millions of workers show up every day at jobs far more dangerous. They don’t cower in fear. If they did, they would have their pay cut or be fired by their bosses. The petition pointed out that Members of Congress were getting paid while they stayed home in bed. Outrageous! These petitions contained common left/right demands—the kind that really scare politicians.

No revolution will succeed without a vision. Nader lays out the basics—a guaranteed living wage, full government-funded health insurance, free education including at the university level, the prosecution of corporate criminals, cutting the bloated military budget, an end to empire, criminal justice reform, transferring power from the elites to the citizenry by providing public spaces where consumers, workers and communities can meet and organize, breaking up the big banks and creating a public banking system, protecting and fostering labor unions, removing money from politics, taking the airwaves out of the hands of corporations and returning them to the public and ending subsidies to the fossil fuel industry while keeping fossil fuels in the ground to radically reconfigure our relationship to the ecosystem.

He writes of the popular convergence on the centers of power:

Meanwhile, by car, bus, rail, plane and even by bicycles and by foot, people of all ages, backgrounds, and places continued to pour into Washington. They filled the restaurants and the motels. They usually had to find a room in a city where there were few affordable apartments but many large, under-inhabited houses whose longtime owners wanted to make some money to pay for their property taxes and repairs. So they were renting to the new arrivals.

The ways these visitors made their voices heard were quite imaginative. There was a cavalcade of horseback riders in a procession down Constitution Avenue resplendent with the signs, “Pass this …” or “Pass that …” always ending with the ominous “or Else.” One horseman was using his trumpet to raise the emotional level of the demonstration, which was fully covered in the press. Others joined the daily “resign … or else” rally going on at the backside of the Capitol while mini-demonstrations were becoming daily events in front of the White House and at other major government buildings containing departments and agencies. Even those agencies in the suburbs, such as the Pentagon, the CIA, the Patent Office, or the Food and Drug Administration, where the employees had thought they would be beyond reach, did not escape the rallying.

It is a wonderful vision. I hope it comes to pass. But even if it does not, we should try. Appealing to the ruling elites and the two corporate political parties, as well as attempting to have our voices and concerns addressed by the corporate media, which has blacklisted Nader, is a waste of time. The corporate state will be overthrown by a citizens’ revolt or we will continue to barrel toward a political and ecological nightmare. Nader dares to dream. We should too.

Georgia Officials Order Black Seniors Off Bus Headed for Early Voting

Deepening concerns over widespread voter suppression in Georgia ahead of a closely-watched gubernatorial race, dozens of black senior citizens were forced off a bus that was taking them to vote in the midterm election this week after government officials raised concerns about the trip.

As Think Progress reported, the non-profit group Black Voters Matter had hosted a get-out-the-vote event at a senior center in Louisville, Georgia on Monday, and was preparing to take about 40 senior citizens to the polls on the state’s first day of early voting, when the center’s director told the riders to exit the bus on the orders of the Jefferson County clerk.

LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter, called the order a clear “intimidation tactic.”

“This is voter suppression, Southern style,” Brown told Think Progress. “I’m very upset. I’m angry.”

Yesterday, we experienced voter suppression in Louisville, Georgia.

We had a whole busload of beautiful black elders ready to go vote when the County Commissioner shut us down and made our elders get off the bus without having the chance to vote. Share this to spread the word! pic.twitter.com/fvULloAz4J

— Black Voters Matter (@BlackVotersMtr) October 17, 2018

Unreal: In Georgia today, 40 elderly black voters were literally ordered off a bus that was taking them to vote early.

This is what we’re up against: they’ll stop at nothing to try and suppress voters. https://t.co/XmGGvecCAe pic.twitter.com/zblsOCNRNv

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) October 17, 2018

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the county clerk had been alerted to the bus trip, which allegedly violated a law banning “political activity” at county-run facilities like the senior center. But according to Brown, there are no laws in majority-black Jefferson County prohibiting third-party groups from transporting voters to polling places.

Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brett suggested to the Journal-Constitution that the effort to stop the residents from voting was indeed politically motivated:

The county government considered the event political because Jefferson County Democratic Party Chairwoman Diane Evans helped organize it, County Administrator Adam Brett said in a statement.

“Jefferson County administration felt uncomfortable with allowing senior center patrons to leave the facility in a bus with an unknown third party,” Brett said.

Evans called the incident “discouraging.”

“When they’re suppressing votes, they’re going to come up with any kind of excuse about what your problem is,” she told the Journal-Constitution.

The residents were ordered off the bus amid mounting concerns that Secretary of State Brian Kemp—also the Republican candidate for governor—has actively suppressed votes by purging more than 50,000 majority-black voters’ names from the state’s rolls. Kemp is running against Democrat Stacey Abrams, who would be the country’s first black female governor.

“During this electoral season, we all should be committed to ensuring that more, not fewer, eligible voters can participate and exercise their fundamental right to vote,” wrote Leah Aden, the NAACP’s deputy director of litigation, in a letter to the county on Tuesday. The group has demanded an “immediate investigation” into what it called “an unacceptable act of voter intimidation.”

Robert Reich: Trump Is America’s Most Dangerous Export

Donald Trump is not only undermining democracy here at home, but he’s also emboldening dangerous authoritarian movements around the world. Trump’s presidency has become America’s most dangerous export.

FIRST: Trump has provided cover for authoritarian leaders around the world who are actively attacking the media and suppressing the truth to entrench their power.

He congratulated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on his electoral victory, despite Orban’s efforts to undermine democracy and stifle freedom of the press.

On Twitter, Trump vowed to join with Polish President Andrzej Duda to “fight the fake news.” Duda has placed media outlets under strict government control.

Trump welcomed to the White House the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who has locked up tens of thousands of his political opponents and decimated the human-rights community there.

Trump reached out to Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, who has invoked Hitler’s mass extermination of Jews as a model for how he would like to dispose of drug dealers and addicts.

He has courted Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has imprisoned critics and human-rights activists, caused thousands of civilian deaths in Yemen, and – evidence increasingly suggests – is responsible for the gruesome death of Washington Post journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.

And, of course, Trump infamously made excuses for Vladimir Putin when asked about the murder of Russian journalists.

SECOND: Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric have lent legitimacy to racist and xenophobic political parties across Europe.

His success playing on racial fears and stoking nationalist sentiment has been a model for their efforts.

Look at Italy’s new deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who campaigned on mass deportations and has evoked the language of Benito Mussolini.

And Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has demanded tighter border security, expedited deportations and financial “sanctions” on immigrants.

Close behind them, although not yet in power, are France’s Marine Le Pen and Britain’s Nigel Farage, who Trump has complimented on Twitter.

THIRD:  Trump has undermined the international institutions committed to protecting human rights and defending democracy.

Unlike former U.S. presidents, Trump doesn’t publicly mention human rights.

In a break with decades of U.S. foreign policy, Trump has attacked NATO, weakening the alliance as Putin threatens to undermine democracies in Western Europe.

He has also called the European Union a “foe,” playing into nationalist movements.

As in the 1930s, economic strains are fueling the rise of demagogues who direct anger and resentment toward scapegoats such as immigrants and minorities—lying about them with impunity.

But the truth is still getting through to most people, and democracy is still alive. Yet in sharp contrast to the 1930s, when the president of the United States defended our democratic ideals, Trump is now helping lead the charge against them.

Read the Full Transcript of Trump’s Wild Interview With AP

A transcript of an Oval Office interview Tuesday with President Donald Trump by AP White House reporters Catherine Lucey, Zeke Miller and Jonathan Lemire. “OFF THE RECORD” indicates where portions of the interview occurred that were not for publication.

___

President Donald Trump: How is the business of the news? We’re keeping you busy?

AP: Yes, sir, you are.

AP: Thank you for doing this.

Trump: What are you going to do in 6½ years with a normal boring person here?

AP: It has certainly been a busy two years.

Trump: It’s going to be different, going to be different.

AP: We’re hoping to cover a lot of topics today, but before we get started on some other things, we want to talk news of the day first. Obviously, the Saudis and the missing writer. AP is reporting that police searching the consulate found evidence that Jamal Khashoggi was killed there. What did the crown prince tell you today, exactly, and what is your intelligence telling you?

Trump: Well, I just put this out, I guess you saw it. I just have it here. I spoke to the crown prince, so you have that. He said he and his father knew nothing about it. And that was very important. And I spoke to him with Mike Pompeo there. And the crown prince. I spoke to the king yesterday, the crown prince today, wanting to know what was going on, what was happening, and he said very strongly that he and his father knew nothing about it but they are starting a major, they’ve already started a major investigation to find out. And so the answers will be forthcoming.

AP: Did they raise this idea of rogue killers in any of those conversations?

Trump: Well, the concept of it, I guess. Yesterday, when I spoke with the father, not so much today, but when I spoke to the father, it just sounded to me like he felt like he did not do it. He did not know about it and it sounded like, you know, the concept of rogue killers. But I don’t know. I think the investigation will lead to an answer. And they’re going to do a very thorough investigation. I believe they’re working with Turkey.

AP: But he didn’t bring up that? That was something you came up with after the conversation?

Trump: Just the concept of it. No, that was just from my feeling of the conversation with the king, not with the crown prince but with the king.

AP: Do you believe, sir, do you believe the king and the crown prince? I mean do you find them … do you find them sort of trustworthy here? And there’s been a lot of talk, including from Sen. Graham, who I know is an ally of yours in many ways, that this is the moment that perhaps the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia should be re-evaluated, that things should be done differently going forward. What do you think of that?

Trump: Well, I think we have to find out what happened first. You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way. So I was unconcerned. So we have to find out what happened and they are doing a very major investigation. So is Turkey. Plus, they’re putting themselves together and doing it. And hopefully they’ll get to an answer as to what happened. But I will say they were very strong in their denial about themselves knowing.

AP: Did they give you any sense of the timetable?

Trump: I would say within a week. That’s my impression. He said two weeks. But they’re going to try and do it in less than a week.

AP: So moving to the midterms, you’re hitting the road for Republicans, obviously.

Trump: A little bit.

AP: And the White House political office has said, and you have said, that Republicans face headwinds this fall, it’s a tough year for Republicans historically. If Republicans were to lose control of the House …

Trump: It’s a tough year. … The midterms are very tough for anybody the opposite of president, for whatever reason, nobody has been able to say.

AP: So my question is, if Republicans were to lose control of the House on Nov. 6 — or a couple of days later depending on how long it takes to count the votes — do you believe you bear some responsibility for that?

Trump: No, I think I’m helping people. Look, I’m 48 and 1 in the primaries, and actually it’s much higher than that because I endorsed a lot of people that were successful that people don’t even talk about. But many of those 48, as you know, were people that had no chance, in some cases. We look at Florida, you look at Donovan in Staten Island. He was losing by 10 points, I endorsed him and he won. I could give you a long list of names. Look at Georgia, governor of Georgia. And many, many races. And I will say that we have a very big impact. I don’t believe anybody’s ever had this kind of an impact. They would say that in the old days that if you got the support of a president or if you’ve got the support of somebody it would be nice to have, but it meant nothing, zero. Like literally zero. Some of the people I’ve endorsed have gone up 40 and 50 points just on the endorsement.

AP: Eight years ago, Barack Obama said he got shellacked, so you know, taking the outcome of the election as a referendum on himself.

Trump: So I think we’re going to do well. Look, it feels to me very much like ’16. I was going out and making speeches and I was getting tens of thousands of people. And I was getting literally tens of thousands of people, also, more than Hillary in the same location. And I said, ‘Why am I going to lose?’ I mean, I go out, I make a speech like I have, you know, 25 times more people than she gets. And I didn’t need Beyonce to get them. I didn’t have to have, you know, entertainment and entertainers to get them. And then they’d all leave before she made the speech after the entertainer was finished. Honestly, it feels very much like it did in ’16.

Now, I’m not sure that that’s right. And I’m not running. I mean, there are many people that have said to me, ‘Sir, I will never ever,’ you on the trail when I’m talking to people backstage etcetera, ‘I will never ever go and vote in the midterms because you’re not running and I don’t think you like Congress.’ Well, I do like Congress because I think, and when I say Congress I like the Republicans that support me in Congress. We’ve had tremendous support. I mean, we’ve got the taxes with 100 percent Republican votes and we don’t really have much of a majority. You know when you say majority, I always say, ‘If somebody has a cold, we have to delay the vote.’ So I get along, you know, very … people have no idea how low how well I get along with Republicans in Congress. I get along well with a lot of the Democrats in Congress, but I’ll never get their vote.

AP: You just mentioned Justice Kavanaugh. And I know, we’ve all been to your rallies, and you’ve suggested that fight was as hard as …

Trump: I will say, that fight because he was treated so viciously and violently by the Democrats. That fight has had an impact on energy, and it’s had an impact on the Republican Party, a very positive one in terms of getting out and voting. I think, but I’ll let you know in three weeks.

AP: Along those lines, in the days before the actual vote was held, former President George W. Bush made a number of calls of senators also sort of lobbying on Kavanaugh’s behalf. Does he deserve any of the credit here? Have you spoken to him, have you given him a thank you for that?

Trump: I did speak with him, I did. No, I didn’t say thank you, per se. But I did speak to him before it and we had a great conversation about Kavanaugh, what an outstanding person he is, which is what he told me. And we had a very pleasant conversation, a very good conversation.

___

OFF THE RECORD

___

AP: There are a number of phone calls that you got from folks in that critical period. Did you hear from anyone who serves in the Supreme Court who serves alongside now, the justice?

Trump: No, I didn’t. Nobody called from the Supreme Court. It’s a very august body. It’s a group of people that, once you’re elevated to that level, you really tend to be in a different place, in a different world. No, I didn’t, I never got a call. As an example, I did not get a call from Justice Gorsuch, who would be the most likely, or Justice Thomas. Or Alito. I’ve got no calls.

AP: Are you prepared for what will happen to your presidency if the Democrats do take back the House?

Trump: Sure.

AP: How will you handle investigations, impeachment prospects?

Trump: I think I’ll handle it very well. I’m handling already. We have a witch hunt now going on, and I handle it very well, and there was no collusion. Everyone knows it. It’s … People laugh. People are laughing at the concept of it.

AP: What if they go after your tax returns? Is that something that would …

Trump: They have to do whatever they do, and I’ll do whatever I do. But I’ve had the most successful two years. I would say, without question, first two years of office, I’ve had the most successful two years in the history of this country as a president. And we’re not even close, actually, if you think about it. It’s not until Jan. 20 so we’re not even really close to two years. And, would get me the list? Would you get me the list, please?

AP: Do you think you have the legal team necessary?

Trump: I have the most successful. Nobody has done what I’ve done, and nobody has come close in the first two years of office. And that’s despite the fighting, the Democrats’ obstruction.

Unidentified: I have extra copies …

Trump: Here, these are just some. I just put them down rough. But take a look at that. You all set?

AP: Yeah, yeah.

Trump: I mean, you go point after point, each point is a major event, but you just take a look. Confirmed more circuit court judges than any other new administration. Soon it will be than any administration in history. Who is the one, who’s the one president that percentage-wise has done better than me? There’s only one. George Washington — 100 percent.

(Laughter)

Trump: Nobody has gotten that yet.

AP: That is a good piece of trivia. On another topic: Michael Cohen was your personal attorney for many years. He testified under oath in federal court that you directed him to commit a crime. Did you, sir?

Trump: Totally false. It’s totally false.

AP: So he’s lying under oath?

Trump: Oh, absolutely he’s lying. And Michael Cohen was a PR person who did small legal work, very small legal work. And what he did was very sad, when you look. By the way, he was in trouble not for what he did for me; he was in trouble for what he did for himself. You do know that? Having to do with loans, mortgages, taxicabs and various other things, if you read the paper. He wasn’t in trouble for what he did for me; he was in trouble for what he did for other people. He represented me very little. It’s a very low level. And what he was is also a public relations person. And now if he wants to try and get a little bit lighter sentence for what he did … totally uninvolved. I wasn’t involved and he had other clients, No. 1. And No. 2, he was a contractor to a large extent. But Michael Cohen, if you take a look at what he did, this had to do with loans, and I guess the taxi industry is something that I have nothing to do with, he did this on his own time.

Go ahead.

AP: You were tweeting today about Stormy Daniels …

Trump: I won a case yesterday, a big case. They sued. Got thrown out. And not only did they get thrown out, but I get legal fees, which is quite unusual, because the case is so obnoxious and so wrong. And I give tremendous credit to the judge. And not only that, we go by Texas law. Texas law says you get every penny that you spent. Texas law is very tough for the legal fees.

AP: Sir, as the president of the United States, is it appropriate to call a woman, and even one who is making serious allegations and who you are in litigation against, to call her a horseface?

Trump: You know what? You can take it any way you want.

AP: How should we take it?

Trump: Did you see the letter? She put out a letter. I had nothing to do with her. So she can lie and she can do whatever she wants to do. She can hire a phony lawyer. You take a look at this guy, a stone-cold loser. Take a look at his past. They can say anything about me. I’m just saying, I just speak for myself. You take a look, and you make your own determination.

AP: There’s two cases with Stormy Daniels aside from the one yesterday that the judge invalidated, but the hush-deal case continues. Did you ask the lawyer to invalidate the agreement?

Trump: Well, you’d have to speak to the lawyers. I don’t even know what the lawyers are doing, but they are very good lawyers. They’ll figure it out.

AP: In your interview with ’60 Minutes’ over the weekend, you were asked about climate change, and you said you believe it, but that also, it could go back. And one of the things … (crosstalk)

Trump: I said the worst hurricane was 50 years ago, far worse than what this one was. Then, in 1890, they had one that was even worse. This was No. 3 or 4 or 5. We had worse hurricanes in 1890, we had worse, a worse hurricane 50 years ago. We’ve gone through a period, actually, fairly recently, where we have very few. I live in Florida to a large extent and spend a lot of time in Florida, and we had a period of time where we went years without having any major problem. And then you have a problem and it goes in cycles, and I want absolutely crystal clear water and I want the cleanest air on the planet and our air now is cleaner than it’s ever been. Very important to me. But what I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows. And you have scientists on both sides of the issue. And I agree the climate changes, but it goes back and forth, back and forth. So we’ll see.

I mean, you know, I am a person that believes very, very strongly in the environment. I am truly an environmentalist. I know some people might not think of me as that, but I’m an environmentalist. Everything I want and everything I have is clean. Clean is very important — water, air. But I also want jobs for our country. And if we would have, as an example, entered certain agreements with other countries, I actually think that we’re doing it so they could have an economic advantage. Because we would have had a tremendous— we would have been at a tremendous economic disadvantage if we entered into certain agreements.

AP: But scientists say this is nearing a point where this can’t be reversed.

Trump: No, no. Some say that and some say differently. I mean, you have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at MIT for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.

OK, what’s next?

AP: Sir, you mentioned, you mentioned more than once that your inclination is not to interfere with the Department of Justice as the special counsel probe continues.

Trump: Well, the probe is ridiculous. OK. That that probe was even started. Jeff Sessions should have never recused himself. He did it for … and he did it immediately. He should have told me that. And he recused himself. And even people that are not my friends say that was a horrible thing that he did to the president, a horrible thing. He should be ashamed of himself for doing it. He should have told me that beforehand. And if he would have told me that beforehand, I probably would have put somebody else in the Department of Justice. But Jeff Sessions should never have recused himself.

AP: I mean, you can fire him now. Would you want to do that? Will you do that?

Trump: I haven’t said I was going to fire him or not.

AP: You could, I’m saying.

Trump: I can fire him whenever I want to fire him, but I haven’t said that I was going to.

AP: Why don’t you, sir?

Trump: I just haven’t said I was going to fire him. We’ll see what happens. But if you ask me: Am I thrilled? No, I am not thrilled.

AP: You’ve said in the past, also, on the probe, that you felt like there were certain lines that it shouldn’t cross. How concerned would you be if it perhaps crept close on targeting your family, perhaps your eldest son?

Trump: Well, I can say this. I knew nothing about the meeting that you’re talking about. My son’s a good young guy. He did what every other person in Congress would do if somebody came up to them, said, ‘Hey, I have information on your opponent.’ I don’t know of any politician. And I think I can speak for the people in this room that would have said, ‘Oh, gee, information on my opponent and it’s bad information?’ Name me a politician that would have turned that down. There is no such thing as that kind of a politician. So that’s what they heard. They heard it was about Hillary Clinton. They had a meeting or he had a meeting with some people. The meeting became about a different subject and they couldn’t get out of the meeting fast enough.

Now here’s the important thing. After the meeting, nothing happened. It was like, ‘Hey, let’s get together next week. Let’s get together tomorrow. Let’s get together.’ Nothing happened out of that meeting. Absolutely nothing. He did absolutely nothing wrong. And there’s nobody harder on my son than I am. And I would tell you, the press has made a fake news deal out of that meeting. If he did something wrong, I would have been livid. I could never really blame him because I’ve had people come up to me, senators. I’ve had a lot of political people say, ‘Your son didn’t do anything wrong. That was just a meeting. It was called oppo research.’ A lot of the politicians would call it opposition research. There was nothing wrong with that. But here’s more important. Nothing from the day of that meeting. It ended. And if you listen to people, it sounded like it ended like they couldn’t get out fast enough. There was nothing wrong with having an opposition research meeting and nothing happened from the meeting. If that meeting went, ‘Oh, let’s have another meeting next week or let’s have a meeting tomorrow or let’s start doing this or that or a hundred different things,’ that’s different. That’s totally different depending on what they were going to do. But nothing happened.

AP: The special counsel has submitted written questions to your lawyers. Have you read those questions? Have you been involved in drafting the response?

Trump: I won’t respond, but you’re right — we are looking at certain questions having to do with the word collusion. Of course there was no collusion. So we are looking at that, and we’ll make a determination.

AP: Would you prefer to have an in-person interview or do it this way?

Trump: We’ll see how that works out. You know that’s in process. It’s a tremendous waste of time for the president of the United States. To think that I would be even thinking about using Russia to help me win Idaho. We’re using Russia to help me win the great state of Iowa or anywhere else is the most preposterous, embarrassing thing. And I will say that the Democrats know it and they wink. They’re all laughing. And you know if I often hear that Russia likes to sow discord. The word is sow, an old English term. They like to sow chaos and discord. Well, if that’s the case, you gave it to them on a silver platter because this is ridiculous. This was an excuse made by the Democrats for the reason they lost the electoral college, which gives them a big advantage — a big advantage. Very different than the popular vote. The popular vote would be much easier to win if you were campaigning on it. You know, it’s like running the 100-yard dash versus a 10-mile run. You train differently. Nobody explained that to Hillary Clinton, by the way. Someday she’ll figure it out. But winning the electoral college is a tremendous advantage for the Democrats. And this was an excuse for how they lost the election. How they lost an election they should have won. And one of the reasons they lost because I happened to be a great candidate. And another reason they lost is that Hillary forgot to campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and I guess she needed a lot more time in North Carolina, a lot more time in South Carolina and a lot more time in a place called — a beautiful, sunny, wonderful place— called Florida.

AP: If I could turn to immigration and the families separated at the border.

Trump: Sure.

AP: There are children who have now been reunited with their families who are now showing signs of trauma from their separation experience.

Trump: By the way, many of the children — and this is unfortunate, I covered it so nicely on ’60 Minutes,′ but they only put on pieces of it, and they were fine but you know they cut, cut, cut because I guess they have so much time, although I heard that they did very nicely on the show. Did they do well?

AP: They just put out some ratings.

Trump: So congratulations to them, but I wish they would have left the entire answer. When people enter our country illegally, there are consequences to pay. But despite the consequences, you have many children that, sadly, are there without parents. Then you have people that grab children and use them as a prop and it’s a disgrace. And they come in with a child and they don’t even know who the child is five hours before. And that’s a shame. That’s a terrible thing what they do.

AP: There are also children whose parents have been deported.

Trump: They take children and they use them to try and come into our country. There are many, many bad things going on on the border. We have the worst laws in the history of the world on immigration, and we’re getting them changed one by one. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks even, but we’re getting them changed one by one. But you have children that we’re taking care of, that don’t even have parents at least anywhere within hundreds of miles of the border, and we’re taking those children, caring for those children, and in many cases sending them back to their parents in countries where their parents didn’t even make the journey up with them, incredibly. And some of those children are really young. And we are, actually, in fact, today there was a beautiful statement put out by the Washington Examiner congratulating us on the great job we do with children. Now President Obama had the same law; he did the same thing. And, in fact, the picture of children living in cages that was taken in 2014 was a picture of President Obama’s administration and the way they handled children. They had the kids living in cages. They thought it was our administration and they used it and then unbeknownst to them and the fake news, they found out, ‘Oh my God, this is a terrible situation.’ This was during the Obama administration.

AP: Do you have any regrets or any remorse about how this has impacted children, though?

Trump: Here’s the thing. I think we’ve done an incredible job with children. As I just said, we’ve taken children who have no parents with them standing on the border. We’ve taken many children, and I’m not talking about a small percentage, I’m talking about a very large percentage where they have no people, no parents. In addition to that, we’re separating children who are just met by people that are using them coming into the border, not their parents. They are using them coming into the border. The one thing I will also say is that when a person thinks they will not be separated, our border becomes overrun with people coming in. So that’s another problem. With all of that being said, we’re getting the laws changed so that catch and release, so that visa lottery, so that chain migration and every other form of incredible stupidity can be taken out of our system.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: I’ll send you guys the DHS report that has the numbers that show that, like, 75 percent of the kids were actually self-separated. Their parents chose to go back and signed the paperwork to leave their kids behind.

Trump: The parents would sometimes come up with their kids, leave them at the border and go back. So we’re in this position where we have an innocent young child at the border; there are no parents. We take them in, we care for the child and then we get horrible publicity. We should be getting great publicity, and the Washington Examiner did a great piece today on the fact that we’ve done a great job. And President Obama had the same law. And, by the way, he separated children and there are many pictures of jail cells where the children were separate from the parents.

___

OFF THE RECORD

___

Trump: We should be getting credit for the job we’ve done.

AP: Turning to foreign policy, you ran the campaign on bringing American troops home and the America First policy.

Trump: Yes.

AP: But today there are more American troops serving in Afghanistan and in Syria and Iraq, in Africa, in harm’s way than when you took office. How do you explain to people at home?

Trump: The main thing I have to see is, I have to see safety at home and — not a vast difference, by the way — but a little bit more. But it’s not a lot more, it’s a little bit more. I have to see safety at home. And if I think people are likely to do some very bad things in faraway places to our homeland, I’m going to have troops there for a period of time. But we’ve done an excellent job. We’ve defeated ISIS. ISIS is defeated in all of the areas that we fought ISIS, and that would have never happened under President Obama. In fact, it is going the other way. And I think we fought extremely effectively on everything I’ve wanted to do. Now there will be a certain point where that takes place.

AP: John Bolton, though, told us, told my colleague Jon a couple of weeks ago that troops aren’t going to come out, aren’t going to leave Syria, until Iran is fully out of Syria.

Trump: We’re going to see what happens. We’re going to see what happens. I want, No. 1, the safety of our country. And if that means knocking the hell out of them, of terrorists, long before they can ever get here, that’s OK with me. And if I could help Europe and other places by doing it, that’s OK with me. And they’re starting to pay us for that, by the way, much more substantially than they ever paid before. You understand that’s an important thing because it’s unfair that the burden is all on us. As it has been. But we are … we’ve made … we’ve had tremendous success there. We’ve had tremendous success in North Korea, tremendous success in North Korea.

___

OFF THE RECORD

___

AP: On the subject of American soldiers and military overseas, why have you not yet visited a military base in a combat zone like in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Trump: Well, I will do that at some point, but I don’t think it’s overly necessary. I’ve been very busy with everything that’s taking place here. We have the greatest economy in the history of our country. I mean, this is the greatest economy we’ve ever had, best unemployment numbers. Many groups are, you know, we’ve never even been close to these numbers. I’m doing a lot of things. I’m doing a lot of things. But it’s something I’d do. And do gladly. Nobody has been better at the military. Hey, I just got them a pay raise. I haven’t had a pay raise in 11 years. I just got them a substantial pay raise. ‘They’ meaning our military people. I just got them new equipment. They have stuff that was so old that the grandfathers used to fly it. I have done more for the military than any president in many, many years.

___

OFF THE RECORD

___

AP: Can you give us any update as to the plans for your next meeting with Kim Jong Un?

Trump: Yeah, we will have one, but it is going to be after the midterms because I want to stay around here.

AP: Will it be here, in the United States, sir?

Trump: I want to stay around and help people get elected.

AP: Do you think that meeting would be here? In the U.S.?

Trump: No, I don’t think so. I mean, we haven’t set it up yet, but I would think not yet. At some point, that will happen, too.

AP: You saw the numbers, the coverage in the last couple of days about deficits. That the projected deficit is a trillion dollars. You railed on President Obama over deficits.

Trump: Excuse me. No. 1, I had to take care of our military. I had no choice but to do it, and I want to take care of our military. We had to do things that we had to do. And I’ve done them. Now we’re going to start bringing numbers down. We also have tremendous numbers with regard to hurricanes and fires and the tremendous forest fires all over. We had very big numbers, unexpectedly big numbers. California does a horrible job maintaining their forests. They’re going to have to start doing a better job or we’re not going to be paying them. They are doing a horrible job of maintaining what they have. And we had big numbers on tremendous numbers with the forest fires and obviously the hurricanes. We got hit in Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, Georgia. Georgia was hit very hard this time. Nobody even, you know, treats that one fairly. The farmers got hit very, very hard.

AP: Mitch McConnell said he wants to consider entitlement reform.

Trump: Wants to consider what?

AP: Entitlement reform — changes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

Trump: That I haven’t heard.

AP: OK.

Trump: I haven’t heard that. I’m leaving Social Security. I’m not touching Social Security.

AP: I know we are quite short on time. We were looking to do kind of a lightning round.

AP: You’ve spoken about security clearances. Do you have any plans to take any more clearances away any time soon?

Trump: Yeah, I do.

AP: From whom?

Trump: People I don’t trust.

AP: Any updates on the White House counsel?

Trump: Yes. I’ve made a decision. He’s … you’ve been reading a little bit about it. A very fine man, highly respected by a lot of people: Pat (Cipollone).

AP: And for the U.N. perm rep? For Ambassador Haley’s job? Have you made a decision?

Trump: I have many people that want the job. I have such a good relationship with Nikki. And I’ve talked to her about it, too. I will be talking to her about it. But I have many people that want the job, and I would say I’ll be making that decision over the next week or two. They’re going to work with Nikki for a little while. She going to go till the end of the year, and they’ll be working with Nikki.

AP: You’ve been very critical, the last year or so, of the NFL. This year, actually, ratings are up a little bit. What do you make of that? What does that say about …?

Trump: Hey, look, I did the NFL a big favor. You know that, right?

AP: By calling attention to it?

Trump: No. You didn’t know this? You didn’t know this?

AP: Tell us, sir.

Trump: So the NFL was having a tremendous problem with Canada on the Super Bowl and advertising and all sorts of things — very complicated subject. And in about two seconds, I got, in about 30 seconds, I got that one fixed up for the NFL. They’re going to make a tremendous amount of additional money because of what I did for them. It was a favor for them and it wasn’t for NFL, it was that this is a great American company. I was negotiating against Canada. And one of the things, I said ‘I want the NFL fixed,’ because it had to do with them keeping revenues from advertising and for not allowing the NFL to advertise in Canada. And it was very unfair and everybody knew that and Canada knew it, too. And Canada plays a very tough game. So I said I want that fixed and nobody wrote a story about it because why would they ever write about it? And, by the way, Commissioner Goodell called me last week and he, ‘thank you very much.’ But I settled that for the NFL. It took me literally about a minute because that’s a small deal compared to the big deal. And Canada knew it was the right thing to do. So I helped a great American corporation. You have to understand, I like the NFL. I want the NFL to do well. I have many friends that are in the NFL, owners and others. I want them to do very well. I also want them standing for the American flag, not kneeling, but I just helped the NFL settle a problem that they couldn’t settle for 15 years or something. This has been going on, a vicious battle with Canada, for years. I settled it. And not one person has written about it. Why don’t you call what you call Commissioner Goodell and ask him. Roger. He called me last week. I thought he was calling me about the flag to say ‘ceasefire.’ But he didn’t. He called me just to thank me, and I said, ‘That was very nice.’ It was a very nice phone call. You should do something about it if you want.

AP: Do you plan to pardon Paul Manafort?

Trump: Who?

AP: Paul Manafort.

Trump: I never even was asked about it. I haven’t thought about it. But, you know, I think it’s a very sad, sad situation. And there’s another thing that had nothing to do with me. That was from years before. You do understand that, right? Do you understand that? Do you know these Russian hackers you’re talking about from Moscow? They have nothing to do with me. How many people are they? Only 28 people? They have nothing to do with me. They were hackers from Moscow. Some of them supported Hillary Clinton. They had nothing to do with me. You look at all the stuff, it’s just nothing to do with me.

AP: Knowing what you know today, is it still appropriate for Secretary Mnuchin to be going to Saudi Arabia next week?

Trump: Well, it depends on what we find out over the next couple of days. He doesn’t have to make that determination until Friday, and I think we’ll also be guided by what other countries are doing. You know, we’ll look at that.

AP: What’s your responsibility?

Trump: I do think this. I do think that they have ordered billions, one of the largest military orders in the history of the country. I think that we hurt ourselves far more than we hurt Saudi Arabia when we cancel an order like that.

AP: You’ve seen American business leaders, though, pull out of that conference. Do you endorse that move?

Trump: Too early to say. I have to find out what happened. Once they find out what happened, I’ll be able to tell you exactly.

AP: Would you only serve one term, Mr. President, if you felt like you had done everything you set out to do?

Trump: No. Because the other term … first of all, there’s always things to do. Actually, it’s a very nice question because I have done so much. People have said that, ‘You’ve done so much. You may have it all put back together. And our country: Make America Great Again.’ And they do ask me that question. So if you do all of the things that you’re doing and you’re given another two years, which is a lot of time because I’ve done this in far less than two years, and those papers pretty much say it, they do ask that question. There’s always something to do. And you know, the new motto is Keep America Great. I don’t want somebody to destroy it because I can do a great job. But the wrong person coming in after me sitting right at this desk can destroy it very quickly, if they don’t do the right thing. So no I’m definitely running.

AP: Is there someone in particular you’d like to run against?

Trump: So far, all of them. So far, all of them. I don’t see any talent. No talent.

AP: No one you’re worried about?

Trump: I see no talent.

AP: Vice President Biden? Or Sen. Warren? Or anyone?

Trump: Well, Biden ran twice and actually a lot of people think he really ran a third time, but he was so low in the polls that he never registered. But he ran twice. And I call him One Percent Joe because you know he did very poorly and then Obama took him off the trash heap and made him vice president. And in a sense he did a good job as vice president, in my opinion, because Obama liked him, and if President Obama didn’t like him, you would have been hearing about it. So in that sense, he, I think, he did actually a nice job because the president of the United States felt very comfortable about him. Like, I like my vice president very, very much. That’s an important function.

AP: Thank you very much, Mr. President.

Trump: Thank you all.

Tornadoes Are Spinning Up Farther East in U.S.

WASHINGTON — Over the past few decades, tornadoes have been shifting — decreasing in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas but spinning up more in states along the Mississippi River and farther east, a new study shows. Scientists aren’t quite certain why.

Tornado activity is increasing most in Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Iowa and parts of Ohio and Michigan, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Climate and Atmospheric Science. There has been a slight decrease in the Great Plains, with the biggest drop in central and eastern Texas. Even with the decline, Texas still gets the most tornadoes of any state.

The shift could be deadly because the area with increasing tornado activity is bigger and home to more people, said study lead author Victor Gensini, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University. Also more people live in vulnerable mobile homes and tornadoes are more likely to happen at night in those places, he said.

Even though Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma get many more tornadoes, the four deadliest states for tornadoes are Alabama, Missouri, Tennessee and Arkansas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“More folks are generally at risk because of that eastward shift,” Gensini said.

Because tornadoes sometimes go undercounted, especially in the past and in less populous areas, scientists don’t like to study trends by using counts of tornadoes. Gensini and tornado scientist Harold Brooks of the National Severe Storms Lab looked at “significant tornado parameters,” a measurement of the key ingredients of tornado conditions. It looks at differences between wind speed and direction at different altitudes, how unstable the air is and humidity. The more of those three ingredients, the more likely tornadoes will form.

The increases in this measurement mirrored slightly smaller increases found in number of twisters.

The study looked at changes since 1979. Everywhere east of the Mississippi, except the west coast of Florida, is seeing some increase in tornado activity. The biggest increase occurred in states bordering the Mississippi River.

Overall there is a slight increase in tornado activity, but it’s not too much and not nearly like what’s happening in the east, Gensini said.

Why is this happening?

“We don’t know,” Gensini said. “This is super consistent with climate change.”

As the Great Plains dry out, there’s less moisture to have the type of storms that spawn tornadoes, Gensini said. Tornadoes form along the “dry line” where there are more thunderstorms because there’s dry air to the west and moist air from the Gulf of Mexico to the east.

That dry line is moving east.

“This is what you would expect in a climate change scenario, we just have no way of confirming it at the moment,” Gensini said.

Gensini said unless there are specific detailed studies, he and others cannot say this is caused by global warming, just that it looks like what is expected.

Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor Paul Markowski, who wasn’t part of the research, praised the study as careful and well done.

____

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

USA Gymnastics Leader Quits After Four Days

When former California Congresswoman Mary Bono took over as the interim president for USA Gymnastics last week, she pointed to the opportunity to “reconnect” with a sport she loved growing up.

The connection lasted all of four days.

Bono stepped down on Tuesday, saying she felt her affiliation with the embattled organization would be a “liability” after a social media post by Bono criticizing Nike and former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick drew widespread scrutiny within the gymnastics community.

She posted a picture on Twitter in September of herself drawing over a Nike logo on a golf shoe. Bono, who was at a golf tournament for families who have lost members of the armed services at the time, called the tweet “an emotional reaction” to Nike’s use of the phrase “believing in something even if it means sacrificing everything.”

“I regret that at the time I didn’t better clarify my feelings,” Bono said in a statement.

Bono defended her right to express her beliefs, though she later deleted the tweet and the USA Gymnastics board of directors expressed its disappointment while pledging its support.

Not everyone, however, was won over by the surprise decision to hire Bono to help USA Gymnastics navigate its way through the fallout of the Larry Nassar scandal. More than 200 women have come forward over the last two years claiming they were sexually abused by Nassar under the guise of treatment during the former doctor’s time at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, including current or former members of the organization’s elite program.

Olympic champion Simone Biles, who is among Nassar survivors, quote-tweeted Bono’s photo concerning Kaepernick on Saturday and wrote: “(asterisk)mouth drop(asterisk) don’t worry, it’s not like we needed a smarter usa gymnastics president or any sponsors or anything.”

Biles, a Nike-sponsored athlete who will compete at the 2018 world championships in Qatar next week, said on Monday she felt compelled to speak up.

“Being a Nike athlete, you have to stand up for your brand,” Biles said.

Six-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman, herself a Nassar survivor, has been a strident critic of USA Gymnastics for what she considers to be its continually tone deaf response to herself and other victims of abuse. Shortly after Bono was brought on, she questioned Bono’s association with a law firm that advised the organization on how to handle portions of the Nassar scandal.

Raisman tweeted Tuesday night her objection to Bono was not “personal.”

“The stakes are high in our sport right now, (and) it’s essential new leadership be disconnected from the influences that allowed these terrible things to happen,” Raisman posted.

Bono appeared ready to weather the initial storm, stressing she looked forward to “telling my gymnastics story, my vision for the future of the sport and why I wanted the job.”

It never came close to getting that far, leaving USA Gymnastics on the search for its fourth president in the last 18 months. Steve Penny resigned under pressure from the United States Olympic Committee in March, 2017. Penny’s replacement, Kerry Perry, took over December 1, 2017 but stepped away in September after USOC president Sarah Hirshland said the organization “is struggling to manage its obligations effectively and it is time to consider making adjustments in the leadership.”

USA Gymnastics is facing dozens of civil lawsuits filed by Nassar victims and its long-term viability is uncertain. The board of directors, however, said it is committed to continuing its search for a permanent president.

“We remain steadfast in our efforts to fundamentally transform the organization at all levels to ensure athlete safety and well-being is at the heart of everything we do,” the board said in a statement. “We are also committed to making sure that the focus remains on the athletes.”

Bono said she wanted to be part of the solution. She pointed to her own experiences as a young gymnast, when she says she witnessed “assaulting behavior” by a coach, as a way to help facilitate the change USA Gymnastics is looking for.

“I would have brought a fire in the belly to ensure that no one as taken as I was with gymnastics at that age should have to choose between abuse or ambition, or between properly speaking out and promoting personal success,” Bono said.

The mission ended before it began and USA Gymnastics finds itself leaderless and rudderless once more.

How to Tell Nobel Winner Nadia Murad’s Story Without Trading on Her Pain

What does it take, in an era wracked by war and trauma, to get the world’s attention? Put another way, whose suffering is worthy—of airtime, relief, simple notice?

Our collective field of vision is already crowded with footage of bombed-out zones leveled by man-made, natural, and man-made natural disasters. From them have sprung endless streams of refugees—pouring into tent cities, spilling over dinghies, loading into makeshift jails at U.S. border towns—their suffering clear even if its cause is obscured. If it weren’t for the unholy synergy between media barons, pundits and politicians who no longer bother with such stuporous relics as conflict of interest or deliberative democracy while staging their cage matches, there would be little else to see on the news.

Meanwhile, the arena of nonprofits, NGOs and global relief organizations has become infused with flash as well as cash, as concepts that read like oxymorons—venture capitalism, celebrity advocacy, billionaire philanthropist—not only track but sell big in an economy in which both money and attention count as currency. Seems like it takes a skilled team of media handlers, not to mention the backing of the United Nations and at least one worried celebrity, to even register on the scale of global crisis.

For her part, Yazidi refugee-turned-activist Nadia Murad had access to all of the above. She found high-profile help in the form of her lawyer, Amal Clooney, plus support from international agencies, governments, and filmmaker Alexandria Bombach, whose documentary “On Her Shoulders” takes the 24-year-old crusader as its focus. Murad’s campaign to save family and community members under the control of Islamic State propelled her on an international speaking tour and into some of the world’s most exclusive spaces—Davos, Canada’s Parliament Hill, the U.N.

It also made her into a reluctant kind of star whose fame, judging by many of the interviews and encounters she endures in “On Her Shoulders,” appears to depend upon the degree to which she has suffered. Murad is asked to tell her story over and over again in horrifying detail: how some 18 members of her family, including her mother, had been killed or were missing since Yazidis in Iraq and Syria were targeted for genocide in 2014 by Islamic State. Other hot topics for her interviewers include how long she had been enslaved, just how many times she was violated by her captors, and how she had escaped. Murad has other, forward-looking questions in mind that she wishes she would be asked instead, such as: “What must be done so Yazidis can have their rights?” Those close to her mention how telling her story takes a piece of her every time.

As Murad’s own form of fame grows along with the crush of onlookers, foreign dignitaries and well-wishers in her personal space, Bombach follows along with her camera at a respectful remove. An accomplished cinematographer and editor as well as a director, Bombach (in contrast with not only those around Murad, but also with many other documentary filmmakers) practically disappears from the film as she zooms in on Murad, taking care not to exploit her even when recording her in states of acute distress. The result is still a strikingly intimate portrait that invites viewers to notice, as Bombach plainly did, Murad’s vulnerability as well as her grit. In one memorable scene, Murad allows herself the mundane pleasure of picking out a dress with a gauzy skirt that spins nicely when she twirls—and yet it is a black dress in a store full of colors.

In another, side-by-side conversations play out between two pairs of people watching Canadian soldiers run through drills on what seems like a mellow afternoon. On the right, Murad watches solemnly with Murad Ismael, her devoted helper and executive director of the Yazidi advocacy group YAZDA; on the left, two Western women smile and laugh as they chat, clearly having a very different experience of the military display before them. Murad remarks about how a soldier in her homeland would have blown himself up by that point in the exercise. Ismael agrees, offering that certain parts of the world are “hell for no reason.”

The same global flows—of information, technology, displaced bodies—make for just these situations, in which two parties briefly share the same space at the same time, with varying degrees of mobility and very different prospects once they leave, if they can leave. Now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, Murad has become an expert in managing such contradictions, as she is greeted with awe and awards in the same rooms where decisions are made that spark the conflicts that affect millions of lives like hers. But she keeps going, taking their questions and photos, still talking about her home—because that’s what she can do to get the world’s attention.

Bombach recently spoke with Truthdig as she began her press tour for “On Her Shoulders.” She won an award for documentary directing at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, and the film’s profile is no doubt signal-boosted, along with Murad’s message, by the news of the Nobel prize. Judging by how Bombach approached this project, though, that all seems to be a bit beside the point for her, too.

Kasia Anderson: My first question, to take it from the beginning, is how you became aware of the subject, of Nadia and her story, and how the project came together.

Alexandria Bombach: RYOT, the production company, reached out to me in the middle of July of 2016 and said that they had gotten the [go-ahead] to do a documentary about Nadia. They wanted to make a short film, and they had seen my work and [we had] worked together. So, it wasn’t even two weeks after that that I flew directly to meet Nadia and Murad [Ismael]. I packed my bags actually to go be in Kurdistan for a month, but as soon as I got there, they said they were going to Canada instead, which kind of threw me for a loop.

But it was pretty instantly that I could feel just who Nadia was and who Murad was and what they were doing and the nature of the work, and that the character of this was going to be a much more complicated story than could fit into a short. So I advocated from the beginning for it to be a feature and ended up making the film in secret for a while in post-production because the production company hadn’t made a feature yet before and just wanted to make a short. Thankfully, after I showed them the feature … they were convinced. So that was a little risky, but it turned out well in the end.

KA: Had you been aware of the Yazidis’ story from 2014 at that point? How quick of a study did you need to do once you knew what you were going to be tackling?

AB: I definitely knew all about the genocide in 2014. I had been following that whole thing that happened on Sinjar Mountain … most of my work has been in Afghanistan; I’ve been pretty . But I remembered seeing Nadia on that Facebook video in 2015 doing her speech at the U.N. Security Council, and that was in December 2015—just eight months before I met her in person. And the film I made in Afghanistan was definitely a film about storytellers, about Afghan photojournalists. I’m really interested in stories and how we tell them and who gets to tell them and our perspective, and I was very interested in working with Nadia on this film because there’s a lot to be said for how we package stories of trauma and are treating them and sensationalizing them. We’re really just taking a critical look at advocacy.

KA: Right, and there is a definite sense from the viewer’s point of view, or at least this viewer’s point of view, that unlike some documentaries, your presence as the filmmaker is not as palpable. I’m wondering how you approached your role in telling her story.

AB: Well, immediately after meeting her, I saw her preparing for a speech and having conversations about what was important in that speech, and that was an interesting behind-the-curtain look at trying to get people to listen to a story. Then [we] went to Canada, and I pretty immediately saw the interview that she was doing with CBC. And that struck me really hard because I have a little bit more a different role, in a lot of ways, than a journalist does in how I’m approaching story and what I’m able to do as an independent documentary filmmaker.

And, you know, I don’t think that it’s black or white, or that that interview was damning against the CBC—I actually felt like that was one of the more gracious interviews. But it was completely eye-opening in the questions that they felt they needed to ask and seeing it take the toll in front of my eyes on Nadia and realizing how much she had done that in the past and how much was ahead of her. It made me really question everything about what we are doing as storytellers and our responsibility towards stories of trauma, especially when asking survivors of such an intense trauma to repeat their stories, and what our responsibility is. So, in a way, that question is not just for journalists but also for myself and was a huge reason why the film is shaped the way it is.

KA: In light of how you saw journalists handling her story and—either by default or by the questions they were choosing—how they were positioning themselves, was there anything that you decided that you would not include in the documentary?

AB: Yeah, I mean, I think that was a week into shooting, and I knew pretty immediately that I would not be putting her through one of those interviews and that that was not necessary, and that I did not want to focus on the story of her captivity or her escape. And I think a big part of the film is I want people to be questioning why they even need to know that in the first place. Where that want is coming from and how disturbing that actually is. First it was like wanting to know what can be done and what the next steps are for Yazidis, especially given that there are still women in captivity.

I think the whole film for me was … people go in thinking that this is a film about Nadia, but for me and for a lot of people, it’s a film about us and how we’re reacting to a lot of stories of trauma. But there’s a fatigue around the migration crisis and the refugee crisis, and I think the storytelling has kind of been on a difficult path where people are trying to grab attention through sensationalism. And that can be a very dangerous way to teach people how to be interested in what’s going on around the world.

KA: Right, because it also puts a premium on trauma in a way, in that if some kind of narrative like that is not in someone’s personal history, then do they get the floor in the same way?

AB: It’s interesting, too, that—this was a pretty good example of it that was cringe-worthy to me—that people were really focused on and wanted to know exactly how much time she was in captivity. To weigh against other women. That kind of stuff was blowing my mind. I was very shocked at the world I was entering into and how they had to basically figure out how to market, use marketing as a tool. But that’s not just them; that’s what they’ve been guided to do and became a larger reality—bringing people like Luis Moreno Ocampo into the film and Amal Clooney— t’s the world that they had to navigate.

KA: Right—a bit about the Amal Clooney element, if I could call it that for shorthand purposes, in a minute—but I wonder if you got a sense for what parts of Nadia’s story she felt were the most important as opposed to what she seemed to get the most questions about?

AB: I think … I don’t know—I couldn’t speak for Amal, but I think it was apparent from the interviews that I see with her that she’s very conscious of trying to navigate away from questions about George and putting Nadia at the forefront but also very aware of her power as a celebrity. And she’s a brilliant human being who navigates that very well and uses that power for good in a lot of ways, but … I don’t know exactly how she feels about specific questions.

It’s interesting to me, and I think that Amal is just incredibly brilliant, and I know that Nadia and everyone is very thankful for her attention on this case and her continued work on it, but it’s up to me as a filmmaker to give a bigger-picture look. It’s so sad—the same reason that Amal Clooney is so powerful is kind of the same reason that nobody cares about the genocide [of the Yazidi people]. It’s just on an opposite spectrum of celebrity-ism and that fame, and people are just not caring about this marginalized community unless [Nadia’s] involved with someone like Amal. It’s a bad state of affairs, but at the same time, I’m very thankful. … A big part of the film is kind of pointing out good intentions but also just how wrong those can go sometimes or feel very tactless—just like, you know, people wanting to take pictures with Nadia in the Parliament hall or … it’s like good intentions gone astray.

KA: Yes, and some of that is out of the hands of people who have the intentions. That’s something I think you captured very well.

There was that whole Davos and Tina Brown vignette with Tina Brown hosting and Amal Clooney bringing Nadia into that setting, and there’s this juxtaposition of this world of glamour and fashion onto these really intense, acute humanitarian crises, and how that all comes together … or not.

AB: One thing that gave me a little bit of peace, at least about Nadia’s specific experience of having to tell her story over and over again, is the fact that she was, and is, still so interested in makeup and hair. And there was something—I mean, obviously, she’s so sharp and very aware and conscious and smart about people trying to exploit her story now and navigating that in such a better way, and I’m really proud of her for really owning that stuff, but I think she really does love the fashion of Amal. Amal’s makeup person actually was training Nadia in New York for a couple days and just giving her a little bit of a break. …That’s a whole other layer of observing all this and trying to absorb it and being like, wow, that’s actually something that Nadia loves—you know, that side of it.

KA: And that scene in which you capture her with her new dress after trying on clothes, and as a viewer it was like a sigh of relief—here’s someone who gets a moment of just aesthetic enjoyment which is kind of like a little glimmer of “normalcy” in all the other really heavy stuff that she’s constantly having to move around in, live her life in the midst of …

AB: Exactly, and this is a really subtle thing, though: She was looking for a black dress. I don’t know if people pick up on that. She was in a room full of all these colorful clothes, and feeling very out of it, and Nadia, especially when I was with her, never wore anything but black out of survivor’s guilt … and respect. But she bought a dress, and she was happy about the way it looked, but it was a long, black, very conservative dress. I’m sure she would love to burst out in, like, a pink dress.

KA: It had a little bit of a floaty fabric to it, though, so at least there was that.

AB: Yeah, it was really powerful to see her come out in it and kind of wave it around.

KA: So, you’ve mentioned the journalistic side of things—how about global bodies like the U.N. who seemed very invested in hearing Nadia and sponsoring her and having her sponsor them—works both ways—and then the special session is no longer in meeting, and she’s moved on and they’ve moved on to other engagements. What has been the response of those Canadian Parliament members who have heard her out—what now? What has the follow-up been?

AB: It seems to be a very slow-moving train, and different objectives come to light that seem to be the most important thing and then fall away—something else seems to become really important. I know that Nadia’s and that investigative team that was created by the U.N. was a huge point for them, a turning point, it took them a really long time to send out the team. I think it was only about a month and a half ago or something like that when the team was actually sent out to investigate these gravesites and assess the atrocities. I hear stuff daily … some days I’ll hear really great things from one person, and the next day it’s someone else telling me that all of that was not really that important, so it’s hard for me to assess from afar.

The thing that I do know is that Nadia has completely shifted her work into focusing on the Sinjar Action Fund, and she has her own initiative now called Nadia’s Initiative, and the meetings that she’s taking are very specific. She’s not doing interviews like she was before. She’s choosing specific stuff, which is great. And the whole goal of the Sinjar Action Fund is to get people back into Sinjar, and for there to be security and infrastructure put back in. ISIS was planting mines when they were leaving; de-mining is a huge part of her work now. In one of the last shots [in the documentary], she was shaking hands with [French] President [Emmanuel] Macron, and that was a really big turning point as well, because the French government is hopefully putting a lot of weight behind that de-mining process, and hopefully getting other European countries on board with it.

KA: Do you, either consciously or since you wrapped filming—do you see the documentary itself as a form of advocacy?

AB: I would hesitate to say that just because I’ve been personally been questioning. … I mean, a lot of people want to dump documentary into the advocacy of awareness, and as a human being and as a storyteller I’m kind of questioning that whole line of thinking. Because it doesn’t really matter if a soccer mom in Texas is more aware of the Yazidis—she can’t do anything to help them. I think there is a consciousness of awareness that I want people to have that thinks more critically about the simplification of stories and charity and our understanding of, you know, countries in the Middle East and putting women up on pedestals in order to feel better about ourselves and that situation—there’s a lot to unpack there.

But as far as the Yazidis, there are specific screenings that I know people who work with Nadia are very happy to have at the U.N. and in Vienna and New York and with certain funders. I hope that this can raise money for specific causes. But as far as a more typical call to action or something like that for the public, no, I don’t think this film is that. I’m trying to get people not to see it that way, because I think that’s one of the problems. There’s some tropes and tendencies of putting Nadia in a position where she’s almost like a Malala [Yousafzai], and I think that’s really problematic.

KA: I agree about the awareness factor—it’s kind of a squishy term, and it’s hard to know what that term means—you can’t quantify it, and so forth.

AB: Yeah, and it’s kind of forgiving all sins right now. …

KA: Exactly. Along celebrity lines, my last question is whether it seemed to you that it’s necessary for people who want the proverbial mic or the platform on a global scale right now—that they need to either be celebrity-adjacent or made into a kind of celebrity themselves in order to be granted access to certain spaces, in order to be heard in a certain way.

AB: I mean, I think it’s a hard question because it’s putting such a responsibility all on them. I think that questioning our own way of how we’re telling stories and how we’re listening and how we’re accessing empathy about such traumatic things. Also, I want to stop looking at [celebrities] and instead have people focus on the U.N. and the justice system and the ICC turning down this case, and seeing how are we holding people accountable versus just telling stories for sensational reasons. I hope that we’re turning the camera the other way and being like, why are we doing this at all? Why is this system even existing?

As far as recommendations to people trying to have a voice, it terrifies me, especially coming from working and making films in Afghanistan for a long time. People have such fatigue around these issues and are addressing them in certain ways. That’s a super-complex question, and I hope someone watching this film will tell me the answer.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.