Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 180

Healthy to eat, unhealthy to grow: Strawberries embody the contradictions of California agriculture

(AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) (Credit: AP)

Agricultural abundance is a pillar of the California dream. In 2016 the state turned out more than US$45 billion worth of meat, milk and crops. Long before nutritionists agreed that fresh fruits and vegetables should be the center of American diets, California farmers had planted much of their land in these products, and today they produce half of the nation���s fruits, vegetables and nuts.

But although fruits and vegetables are vaunted as healthy foods, their impact as crops is quite different. On many California produce farms wages are low, working conditions are poor, and farmers use enormous quantities of pesticides and precious water. This is the central contradiction of California agriculture.

For the past five years I have been studying California���s strawberry industry, which currently is the state���s sixth most important commodity in terms of the value of crops sold. Strawberries are attractive, reasonably nutritious and occasionally tasty fruits and can be grown and eaten within California nearly year-round. But the industry���s growth has relied on heavy use of toxic chemicals and now growers face heightened restrictions on some of their most favored chemicals: soil fumigants. Unfortunately, less toxic or non-chemical strategies that would allow strawberries to be grown for a mass market, maintaining affordable prices, are elusive and likely to remain so.

Chemical dependence

Although strawberry production once was scattered throughout the state, by the 1960s it had concentrated in coastal zones to take advantage of sandy soils and mild temperatures. Thereafter, the industry saw tremendous growth in productivity. In Monterey and Santa Cruz counties alone, acreage more than tripled and production increased tenfold from 1960 to 2014. Much of this growth was enabled by advances in plant breeding and use of plastic tarps to absorb heat, allowing growers to increase the length of strawberry seasons.

But the main driver of growth has been the use of pre-plant chemical fumigants. Growers hire pest control companies to fumigate soils before planting strawberries in order to kill soil-borne pests ��� most importantly, plant pathogens such as Verticillium dahliae and Macrophomina phaseolina. Without such treatment, these pathogens cause strawberry plants to wilt and die.

Now, however, the industry���s fumigant of choice ��� methyl bromide ��� can no longer be used in strawberry fruit production. In 1991 methyl bromide was banned under the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer. The United States was supposed to phase out use by 2005, a deadline that was extended to 2015 and didn���t really take effect until two years later. Even so, this toxic chemical can still be used in nursery production to ensure that starter plants are virus- and pathogen-free.

One potential replacement, methyl iodide, was approved for use in late 2010. But it was withdrawn from the market in 2012, following an activist campaign and lawsuit that accused California regulators of performing an inadequate review of potential health risks to workers and the general public. Among other things, the chemical is a known neurotoxin and carcinogen.

Other fumigants are still allowed, but their use is increasingly restricted by buffer zones and township quotas. Consequently, growers are contending with heightened levels of plant disease, some from pathogens that had never before been evident in California strawberry fields.

An embedded system

Can California find a less toxic way to raise 90 percent of the nation���s fresh strawberries? Although the strawberry industry is investing significant resources into non-chemical alternatives to manage soil-borne disease, the obstacles are formidable. The entire production system, including reliance on fumigants, is embedded into the cost of land.

Fumigation has allowed growers to plant on the same blocks of land, year after year, and not worry about soil disease. With fumigation available to control pathogens, strawberry breeders have emphasized productivity, beauty and durability rather than pathogen resistance. Meanwhile, nursery production has shifted away from prime fruit growing regions along the coast to take advantage of different environments for plant propagation, enabling coastal land to be used solely for growing fruit.

Together these innovations have allowed growers to keep prime strawberry land in production every year for much of the year, yielding exceptional amounts of fruit. High land prices reflect these expectations and make it unprofitable to grow strawberries using less intensive methods. The Pacific Ocean���s natural summer air-conditioning is attractive to suburbanites as well as strawberries, so coastal development is putting additional pressure on the cost of strawberry land while at the same time increasing public pressure to control use of fumigants.

Chemical-free strawberries for the few

Informed and concerned consumers ingrained with California���s deep culture of environmentalism have turned to organic strawberries, which they see as a more sustainable option. As conventional growers took note of this vibrant market, organic strawberry production rose fivefold between 2000 and 2012, to reach about 3,300 acres planted in 2017, which represents 12 percent of all strawberry acreage.

But although organic growers use non-chemical soil fumigation methods or rotate strawberries with crops that have a mild disease-suppressing effect, such as broccoli, few of them fundamentally alter the production system in other ways. In my research, I have observed that some growers are finding land away from prime areas that can be quickly certified for organic production, but have no long-term plans to manage soil diseases when they inevitably arise ��� a practice that is not in the spirit of organic production.

A small but dedicated set of growers have learned how to raise strawberries for the long haul without fumigants. However, even they use starter plants produced on fumigated soil, since no nurseries produce organic plants. Crucially, for these growers strawberries are a minor crop in what are otherwise highly diversified systems. And most of these producers are located outside of prime strawberry growing regions, where land is cheaper. Their approach therefore is not nearly replicable for growers producing for the mass market.

These exceptions tell us as much about the limits of California strawberry production as does mainstream production. Consumers who want organic strawberries must be willing to live with compromises, pay premium prices ��� and eat their broccoli. For others, the dream of affordable year-round strawberries grown without toxic chemicals is already an impossible one.

Julie Guthman, Professor of Social Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz

Satire in the age of Alex Jones: Inside Jordan Klepper’s war on the war on reality

Jordan Klepper on "The Opposition w/ Jordan Klepper" (Credit: Getty/Brad Barket)

Jordan Klepper launched his new show ���The Opposition��� on Comedy Central just over four months ago.����In a similar format to ���The Colbert Report,��� Klepper performs in character. But this time his role model isn���t Bill O���Reilly, as it was for Stephen Colbert; it is fringe far-right personas like Alex Jones.

With less than a year on air, ���The Opposition,�����which airs��Monday��through��Thursday��at��11:30 p.m., is already a critical part of the satire landscape. Klepper���s character offers��an essential comedic perspective��that had been missing since Colbert transitioned to ���The Late Show.��� ���The Opposition��� even made��lists of the best late-night moments in 2017����� a noteworthy achievement since it debuted September 25, 2017.

Salon spoke with Klepper about the challenges of embodying an alt-right persona and of launching a satire show in the Donald Trump era, when parody and exaggeration are already a standard part of our political reality. We also talked about what it will be like to do his first live episode after Trump���s State of the Union address on��January 30.

The interview was edited for length.

When Stewart and Colbert were the ���dynamic duo��� of satire on Comedy Central, they basically owned the field. Now we have a wide range of satire choices. What do you think is the special draw of your show?

I think there are a lot of really talented and thoughtful comedians out there who are commenting on the day to day. What we do is��show��the day to day. We ironically take the side of these things a lot of people are shaking their fist at and play in that logic, heighten that logic, and hopefully people will find the fun in the carnival show that we create. There are plenty of talented people who will point their finger and tell you what is so frustrating about the world. We don���t comment on it; instead we show it in a slightly more ridiculous way.

In-character satire, where you embody a persona, is the hardest form of political satire to master. What made you choose that type of comedy?

Well, for me, I’ve always had a fun time showing what is ridiculous and absurd. I think in-character satire does exactly that. As somebody who came from the improv world and the sketch world, that’s sort of the way in which we worked through many topics and ideas. You would find something, whether it was a political story, a news story, or a cultural story, and you would find what you thought was ridiculous about it and instead of commenting on it, you would show it and heighten the attributes, the peccadillos, or the outlying attitudes. From that, hopefully you can show an audience the little flaws that we all have. That’s always been really appealing to me.

That���s the hard part of your particular character though, right? One of the key elements of satirical parody is ironic exaggeration, but your character is modeled on figures that already are ironic exaggerations. Even��Alex Jones’ attorney suggested he was a performance artist playing a character. So how hard is it to play a performance of a performance?

It’s the perfect question of this time. Are we so heightened that you can’t heighten how heightened we are right now?����We live in a time when our president tweets about the size of his genitalia in regards to potentially starting a nuclear war. Each day, I’m constantly surprised by how heightened it can become. As far as my character, we look at these people who have outsized personalities. What we try to heighten is not necessarily the personalities themselves, but we focus on their attitudes, their position of utmost certainty. We try to heighten the logic games they use to defend strange takes on the news and to justify the ravings of a mad man who may or may not be in charge of the free world.����We get inside the mindset of that logic and work through its obsession with conspiracy.

But it isn’t just the style of your show that is unique in the satire world today; it’s the content too. You guys are sort of looking in the dumpster, in places that other comedians aren’t.

[Laughs.] Yeah, absolutely! We’re satirizing voices that are not only on the right, but are on the far right and also even off the deep-end����� the fringe. Some of that fringe has become mainstream and some of it still lives in that fringe, but it’s really starting to influence the political conversation and direction of this country. We look to those fringe sources that many other shows don���t cover. For example, when we had the fight between Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, we looked at the mainstream media sources, but we also looked to the blogs. We’re looking to the Roger Stones. We’re using that for material in a way that other shows rarely touch.

What���s it like trying to do your style of show when the content you’re mining is from sources as extreme as Infowars, Breitbart, and fake news hoax sites?

We’re not creating a show that is a one to one to any particular source, but we are starting to see this trend where Sean Hannity is going more and more fringe, almost just a mouthpiece for Donald Trump. Alex Jones still seems completely in sync with Donald Trump. The internet and social media feeds are also affecting the conversation. What we’re trying to parody on the show is a dystopian fringe mouthpiece.

I think those days where it does feel like the show goes a little off the rails, it goes a little wild, it goes too much into conspiracy, it feels too fast, too outrageous, too loud, too certain, too bullshitty, I think that���s when we’re playing in the mud that we want to be playing in. If we do this thing right, we are pigs covered in shit rolling around like you wouldn’t believe. Hopefully we get the audience in the mud with us.

I don’t know if I’m selling this joke correctly. I think I’ve just said our audience will be covered in shit by the time they watch the show.����Now that I say that out loud, I totally did sell it correctly.

Your point about how Fox News is shifting is important to emphasize because the news media landscape is also in the process of moving into even more extreme ridiculousness.

We were a little bit surprised by this shift. Even as we started the show, we were looking at these fringe sites and how they are affecting things. We saw how they affected Donald Trump and the people I would talk to on the campaign trail who were going to these sources and then watching some Fox shows, the pundit shows, that were embracing the same extreme views. Fox News and Breitbart are trading tactics right now.

The 4chan, Reddit conspiracy theory mindset seems to be governed by what you’ve referred to as ���f**kism.��� Describe that mentality and how it fits with your show’s mantra, “May you only hear from others, which you’ve already been telling yourself.”

I think as a culture we’ve done a really good job of surrounding ourselves with people, voices, and devices that reflect the things that we want to believe. We really have created these airtight echo chambers. For us, it was really fun to jump into an extreme echo chamber and create a show that really considers itself always right. But we do that comically. We’re hopefully showing the audience how we’re knowingly picking the things that make us look smart and don’t challenge what we believe.

We’re kind of in a dangerous place right now where we get to choose our own reality. Donald Trump, he’s been very effective at bringing down institutions that both sides used to be able to agree or turn to. Now there’s so much distrust of information that comes from a different point of view that it’s only feeding the echo chamber mentality. That’s where our show lives. We’re reflecting what we feel is only getting more and more entrenched.

One of the most brilliant concepts of your show, in my view, is this idea that it’s parodying mental nationalism. You sarcastically described it as trying to ���close down the open borders of our minds.��� Tell me about the special irony of using satire to parody a closed, paranoid mindset.

Mental nationalism is the idea that we’re choosing the things that make us feel good. I’m borrowing this idea that, if we’re all about borders, then let���s have fun with that idea since a lot of us are putting up borders to things we don’t want to hear. We’re poking fun at the irony that the Trump administration is literally about building walls, even walls around worldviews. This is now something that’s worn as a badge of pride. ���I don’t trust the media. I don’t trust outside sources. I don’t trust intellectuals.��� To me, those sorts of mental borders are very scary and frightening. We also think it can be very funny. That���s what we are trying to play with on the show ��� all of the mental border walls, even those on the left.

Some of the show���s most successful bits are field pieces. For instance, you’ve done great segments at��Trump rallies��and especially��in Puerto Rico. Do you plan to keep incorporating field pieces on the show and what are the challenges and benefits of doing them in character?

We have citizen journalists who go out into the field. It’s really important for the show to interact with real people. That’s why I have guests on every night who can shut down some of my bulls**t with their credibility in the real world. Our citizen journalists go out in-character, as do I when I have the time. I try to get out into the field to go to rallies, to do sit down interviews, to go face to face with people. It’s really fun to do something like that in-character. You get to play through blind spots and you get to see somebody interacting with a character. I think often because of that, you don’t get pat responses. You get somebody who’s trying to suss out where you stand and then you get a lot of honesty and interesting moments from it.

As you get more visible, this gets harder to pull off though. Have you had people recognize you out in the field and still play along?

I think they see it as a challenge. People are like, “Oh, you’re that guy. Regardless, I want to be on TV, I want to get my point across. Let’s go. Let’s talk.” A lot of times at rallies I’m just seen as a person who is walking around with a camera crew. I’d be in a worse position if I were seen as a comedian. To them I’m part of the MSM. They think I’m fake news. And the truth is, I am fake news! They’re not completely wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast where he worried about what he called��the satire paradox, where the funnier the satire is, the less likely, in his view, it’ll have any sort of impact. He also worried that satire exacerbates social divisions. What’s your take on that line of critique?

I think comedy is such an effective tool in commenting on shared experiences. When the show���s team comes together in the morning we explore what we’re passionate about and where we see bullshit. From that, we put it through the filter of the show. If you watch ���The Opposition,��� hopefully you see the critical edge. I think if you’re watching this and you connect with the show, then you’re also making those similar connections that we’re making. I hope at the very least it provides a moment of joy. But more than that, it’s a moment of connection. When audiences respond to comedians, or any kind of performer, we���re building a connection.

At a time where we’re all ingesting crazy news all day, I think finding that connection is reaffirming. It shows you that you’re not alone. It’s really easy to sit there looking at your phone alone, but if you see somebody else share your view you think, “Oh, they think that’s bullshit too? Oh, cool. I feel empowered. I’m not just screaming into a void.” I think that is powerful. What you do with it is up to you. We’re not trying to be instructional with what to do about it, but hopefully it shows you that some of those points of view are validated.

The show is now in its fourth month. Do you feel like it’s starting to hit its stride? Have you seen any significant adjustments in the way it’s working since its premiere?

We’re figuring out the machine of putting up a daily show and how to comment quickly and efficiently on the stories of the day. Early on we were doing longer pieces in the first act, more traditional essays. What we started to find was that everybody is ravenous for the 20 stories of the day. So to be able to comment on more range we’re starting to put together little pockets of stories where we can talk about three different stories as opposed to one for the first act. That also lets us be malleable for a story that breaks later in the day so we can get it out quickly.

On your first show, you launched a really funny website. Are you going to be continuing to work beyond the borders of the show and play with hashtags, websites, etc.?

Definitely. Our digital component is something we’re really excited about. That’s helping us find the voice of the show and the ways in which we can connect. We’re constantly putting out content. We have this idea that this is the televised late night version of the show, that there are also Opposition Radio shows that go on all day. Our digital presence puts out snippets and little pieces here and there from fake radio shows, creating content and poking fun at conspiracies. We’re looking to continue to kind of merge those two sides of the show because it mirrors what is happening in fringe media. We want to play both in the TV realm and also the internet.

You and Trevor Noah are planning to air live after the State of the Union on Tuesday evening. How would you describe the synergy between the two shows, and what are your plans for your very first live show?

The one plan I have ��� I’m going to do it sober. I really am. If I’m going to do it live, I’m not going to be able to do it��ten more times, so I’m going to go dry for this one.

We’re keeping the content under wraps. We have a fun surprise for the live show. I’m excited about it.

I love Trevor. Trevor and I got to work together for about a year and a half over at ���The Daily Show��� and right from the get go, I think we hit it off. He’s the kind of guy who is a great boss but also really great friend.

Sometimes we do little pieces back and forth between the shows and anything that connects is really fun, but our show sees itself as the opposition to ���The Daily Show.��� The character Jordan Klepper, loves Trevor Noah, has been friends with Trevor Noah for years, thinks he’s a great guy, but thinks he’s totally wrong in almost everything and that his show is full of fake news.

Sorry Trevor. You’re my friend, but you don’t see the light.

Morgan Jerkins: What a “voice of the generation” sounds like

This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America by Morgan Jerkins (Credit: Harper Collins/Sylvie Rosokoff)

The truth about a writer being anointed��a Voice of��the Generation is that it���s also a curse. On one hand, it means this young talent captures with singular insight the burgeoning zeitgeist in a way that the elder generation of literary gatekeepers no longer can. On the flip side, it also means an immediate casting of odds on whether the precocity can hold up under the extra critical scrutiny, the pressures of a public life and the��follow-up demands in a merciless world that ��� especially in the case of young women ��� is half-expecting them self-destruct first.

Who needs that extra pressure? But humans like to classify, to rank, and one way that need manifests itself in the books world is to elevate an author out of the already-elite pool of emerging writers of promise to next-level glory and attention. Guilty, I guess: I hope it���s not too forward of me to nominate the 20-something New York-based writer Morgan Jerkins, whose��exhilarating new essay collection ���This Will Be My Undoing��� makes her a leading contender for the title ��� and the writer most likely to rewrite the rules for it, too.

The label has long been applied mostly to breakout novels ��� though by the ���90s, memoirs like Elizabeth Wurtzel���s ���Prozac Nation��� (1994) and Dave Eggers��� ���A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius��� (2000)��were also name-checked �����by white male writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Jack Kerouac, Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis, who had captured, as TIME critic Lev Grossman wrote in 2006, a certain something of the times, which he describes as ���the yearning and the rage of the contemporary, embodied in some poor sad sack of a character who’s mad as hell and just can’t get no satisfaction.���

“I think youth has a lot to do with it,” Ellis, himself such an anointed Voice, told Grossman. “Being the first �����and not necessarily the best, just the first �����to capture what it feels like to be a member of your generation catapults you forward . . .���

One thing social media has done in the decade-plus since��Grossman’s story, let alone in the years since Ellis hit the scene, is demolish the expectation that anyone can be ���first��� in this particular way. And the thriving genre of young-adult��fiction is brimming with excellence, so the sweet relief of finding a fictional protagonist who gives voice to a heretofore-unarticulated��new tone and mood in the culture isn���t quite so rare anymore. It makes sense, then, in a digitally connected world where everyone who wants a platform has one, that the essay �����where a writer���s voice is unmistakably her own �����would be where we find it now.

If you can no longer be the first �����especially given the ubiquity of the 20-something-year-old essay writer, primarily in online spaces �����you can��be among the best. Excellence and clarity of vision are what put Jerkins��� essays ahead. In an attention economy often dominated by the messy exhibitionist, Jerkins instead employs scalpel-like precision to her ten essays on, as the book���s subtitle states,��life at the intersection of being black, female and feminist in (white) America. These essays cover an ambitious amount of ground, including but not limited to body image, gentrification, mental health, class, race and racism, misogynoir, religion and faith, Russia and Japan, Beyonc�� and Michelle Obama, sexuality, joy, anger, grief and sensuality. Her poet���s eye for the unexpected, perfect connection pushes her intellectually rigorous and expansive blend of memoir and cultural criticism to surprising places.

One of the central themes uniting Jerkins�����collection is the emphatic assertion �����which is still maddeningly necessary �����of black women���s essential humanity. The heart of the book is a riveting 44-page essay titled ���Black Girl Magic,��� which explores what it means, and what it can take, for a black woman in America to heal �����psychologically, emotionally,��physically����� rather than continue to bear pain.��These connections flow freely but with a sense of purpose and momentum, and the essay never spins out of control.

The essay begins with anxiety, which crept into her life as her stepfather���s health deteriorated during her sophomore year at Princeton. Despite his career as a psychologist, she writes, ���Black people do not do therapy. . . . We go to God with our problems. Therapy is for white people with money. It is a pastime, a hobby, a luxury.��� From there,��she turns to how the medical field has throughout our history exploited black people through unethical, immoral experiments and unequal treatment��and how that torture has contributed to the imagining of the Strong Black Woman, which ���dehumanizes us by not acknowledging our human weakness and needs.��� This she connects to the concept of ���Black Girl Magic,��� an idea and an ideal celebrating the positivity and genius of black women and girls, and she critiques her own evolving understanding of how ableism has left some black women and girls out. This leads her to physical pain, which she connects to her own labiaplasty, the personal history of and experience which��she renders with both delicate vulnerability and defiance.

Words often associated with women���s writing, especially concerning��their pain: unflinching, fierce, brave. But these terms of praise are often��code for��the��literary equivalent of battlefield surgery crossed with bedroom voyeurism. Later, that willingness to scar on the page for the thrill of the reader, once valued,��can be used against them. This demand��has to be even more treacherous territory for black women, who are also, as Jerkins explores deeply in her work, writing within an economic system that has a long and disgraceful history of dehumanizing black women and their bodies. (Witness the Los Angeles publishing party Jerkins describes in the essay, where she conducts herself with self-conscious decorum amidst ���the kinds of behaviors that I only saw in decadent HBO series, or read about in personal essays written by white women,��� despite wanting ���to f**k up . . . to see what it was like to be so carefree, so white.���) That Jerkins decides to write about such an intimate part of her personal history as a labiaplasty with��as much��self-compassion as she does ��� not pity, compassion �����is downright revolutionary, and can provide a model for writers of any age.

If being called a Voice of��the��Generation is a curse,��it is��a curse that Jerkins is well-positioned to conquer by doing the��work of constantly pushing herself to top her last effort, not through sheer luck of the zeitgeist.��If this collection is any indication,��her blueprint for a��lifelong intellectual and��creative enterprise will continue to challenge, thrill, and delight her readers throughout a long career. In��the essay ���Who Will Write Us?,��� which examines Beyonc�����s ���Lemonade,��� the French film ���Girlhood��� and the picture book ���A Birthday Cake for George Washington��� in an exploration of why black women need to tell black women’s stories, Jerkins writes:

I want to know, I want to know, I want to know. I want to know, but not just to know. I want to realize that anger metamorphosing into power, that power channeling into humor, that humor gliding past white consciousness, and that white consciousness never being able to fathom what that humor entails. My idea of a black narrative is one that subverts, flips, and undermines rule until that final product cannot be duplicated by anyone other than one with black hands.

She closes��the essay with��a��thought about voicing��the experience of black women in America: ���there isn���t just one; there are many. Millions, to be exact. I can add only one.��� That simultaneous fidelity to giving voice to her own specific experiences and��insistence on��spaces for other black��women to do the same��encapsulates one of��the most��urgent and��admirable qualities��of this��generation of young adults.��But��Morgan Jerkins doesn’t need me, a 40-something-year-old white critic, to tell her or the world��who she is or who she speaks for. Her book, and those to come, are more than up to that job.

The right-wing war on dissent: Ousted “white genocide” professor speaks

George Ciccariello-Maher (Credit: YouTube/Fox News)

With the help of the Republican Party, the right-wing news media, and his legions of followers, President Donald Trump has attempted to silence dissent. Part of this campaign involves a coordinated assault on the concept of critical thinking and those individuals who dare to protest against his policies.

The right-wing assault on the American people and their capacity to resist Donald Trump and his movement has many elements: delegitimizing the free press; harassing and imprisoning political protesters and others who dare to exercise their constitutionally-protected rights of free speech and assembly; creating a malignant alternate universe through propaganda; supporting Christian fascism;��cultivating ignorance and stupidity;��eliminating restraints on corporate power; destroying the social safety net; growing the culture of cruelty and the surveillance and punishment state; and encouraging violence against liberals, progressives, and any other group or individuals whom conservatives view as “un-American.”

Donald Trump and the broader right-wing movement have singled out America’s educational system as a particular target of interest. Educated and literate citizens are a bulwark against the type of authoritarianism which afflicts sick and weakened democracies. To that end, across the United States, the right-wing movement is engaging in an expansive campaign of harassment, intimidation and other threats of violence against college professors and other educators��they view as “radical” and “dangerous.” As envisioned by Trump and his right-wing allies, the American school system should produce drone-like workers who are compliant and efficient, lacking the ability to function as democratically engaged citizens who hold their leaders accountable.

What is it like when the full force of Trump’s movement comes crashing down on you? How does the right-wing mob target and mobilize against professors and other educators it views as the enemy? How are racism and white supremacy channeled in the war against American higher education?

In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with political scientist George Ciccariello-Maher, currently a visiting scholar at New York University. Ciccariello-Maher was targeted for more than a year by Fox News and other parts of the right-wing echo chamber. This followed a series of comments he made online mocking conservatives’ obsession with “white genocide” and calling attention to the connections between toxic white masculinity and mass shootings in America. This outpouring of death threats of murder and other forms of abuse eventually forced Ciccariello-Maher out of his previous tenured position at Drexel University.

As Ciccariello-Maher, the tweets that got him in trouble “were really straightforward analytic points about white mass shooters in the United States.”

[These are] conclusions and observations that are well grounded in research, findings that have had seen thousands of pages of academic and other literature dedicated to them. In other words, white male entitlement and how potentially explosive and dangerous it is. This is not controversial. There are disagreements about some of the dynamics surrounding white men and mass shootings. But my conclusions are not that controversial. Yet my comments were enough in this moment to be turned into a call for violence and harassment against me.

The right-wing mob works as follows:

It begins on Twitter. Then the hate mails start. If you���re a college or university faculty member like myself, maybe you���ll get an email from an administrator or your chair saying, ���We���re receiving all these messages.��� These things begin to grow and in the worst case scenario what happens is that Fox News makes this into a story and runs with it for days. These faux-scandals and witch hunts are not about just reporting the news. It is about creating, inventing and amplifying this fake news. That���s when the real death threats begin because you now have people watching Fox News, getting all riled up and sending off threatening emails or phone calls.

On this week’s show, I caution the public to remain focused on the real issues instead of being mesmerized by Donald Trump’s sexual escapades and other antics. To close out this week’s episode, I highlight the connections between “white trash” and Trump’s racist slurs against nonwhite countries and immigrants.

After Sean Hannity’s Twitter is hacked, fans blame “Deep State” conspiracy

Sean Hannity (Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphotos.com)

Radio host and Fox News fixture Sean Hannity had his Twitter account hacked over the weekend, leading it to be temporarily suspended by the service. His fans, however, suspected something far more sinister: That their hero had been banned at the behest of the secretive and all-powerful “Deep State.”

Their conclusions were based in part on the fact that Hannity’s account had posted a junk tweet during the time it was compromised which read “Form Submission 1649 | #Hannity.”

With all the conspiracy theories that Hannity has been hyping lately, it was no surprise that the nonsensical tweet and his sudden suspension almost immediately became a hot topic among fans of “The Storm” conspiracy theory. None of them seem to have considered that publicly censoring a political commentator with a nationally syndicated radio show and a nightly cable news program without explanation would go unnoticed.

https://twitter.com/IWillRedPillYou/s...

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https://twitter.com/Amish_Frog_Guy/st...

"Sean Hannity's Twitter" #FormSubmission1649 TWITTER needs to provide an answer now as to why the most watched & listened to political commentator in the USA for the last 25 years has no account #Twitler #maga pic.twitter.com/FSCFjnzJ8H

— RedNationAlive2 (@rednationalive2) January 27, 2018

Hannity's #FormSubmission1649 tweet, which has resulted in the suspension of his account, was reference to power struggle within English Parliament, in years after English Civil War, to try King Charles I for high treason. Hannity was using it to send a mesage

— Robert Albo (@Bob02911) January 27, 2018

Jerome Corsi, a fringe journalist known for��promoting��the “birther” conspiracy theory, told his Twitter followers what was going on:

Hannity was attacked by DEEP STATE for posting #FormSubmission1649 – a reference suggesting BARACK OBAMA and HILLARY CLINTON guilty of TREASON. #QAnon #Qanon8chan warns DEEP STATE in panic will attack conservative libertarian red-pilled journalists. https://t.co/CEoDkojgJ2

— Jerome Corsi (@jerome_corsi) January 27, 2018

Even WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was once a leftist but has since morphed into a Fox News fanboy, expressed his concern:

The most watched TV host in the U.S., @SeanHannity has his Twitter account (3.3 million followers) mysteriously disappear after tweeting "Submission Form 1649" https://t.co/jIw0Lq5K1m pic.twitter.com/Op3b2h24Zu

— Julian Assange ��� (@JulianAssange) January 27, 2018

Despite the fervid imaginations of his fans, Hannity’s account access was soon restored. In a public statement, Twitter confirmed that Hannity had been hacked.

���While we normally do not discuss individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons, we have permission from the account owner to confirm that account was briefly compromised. We are working with the owner to restore access,��� the company said in a statement.

Hannity���s access was soon back to normal. He did not bother to tell fans what had happened, however.

I���m baaaccckk… a lot to say- Thanks for the support all you deplorable, irredeemables. Can���t get rid of me that easy. Too much work to do exposing #deepstategate—Monday���s a big day���tick tock.

— Sean Hannity (@seanhannity) January 28, 2018

Hannity is one of several cable news pundits who have had their Twitter accounts compromised in recent weeks. Security research company McAfee disclosed last week that the hackings appear to be the work of a private Turkish group calling itself Ayyildiz Tim,��which has��been using��compromised��accounts for their own propaganda purposes.

���Once the accounts were compromised, the attackers direct-messaged the account contacts with propaganda for their cause or with a link to convince them to click on a phishing site that would harvest the Twitter credentials of the victim,�����Ayyildiz Tim��members��Christiaan Beek and Raj Samani wrote in a blog post.

According to BuzzFeed, both liberal and conservative American commentators have been targeted, including former Fox anchor Greta Van Susteren, and Eric Bolling, CNN host Brian Stelter, New York Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi, and NBC reporter Ken Dilanian.

Once compromised, several of the hacked accounts have posted images purporting to show screen captures of direct messages sent and received from President Donald Trump.

Trump rages at the Department of Justice for not protecting him from Russia probe: report

(Credit: Salon/Ilana Lidagoster)

On a Thursday flight to a conference of world leaders in Switzerland, President Donald Trump went into a rage against law enforcement officials working inside the Department of Justice whom he sees as not doing enough to protect him from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian activities during the 2016 presidential election and the post-election byproducts of��their meddling.

According to Bloomberg News reporter Jennifer Jacobs, Trump was upset about a letter that Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd had written to several House Republicans warning them that releasing a classified memo alleging large-scale deception within the FBI and DOJ about the Russia probe would be “extraordinarily reckless.”

In Trump’s view, this marked the latest in a series of slights from the DOJ, an agency which has not permitted him to interfere in law enforcement affairs.

In a December interview with the New York Times, Trump made clear that he believed that Attorney General Jeff Sessions should be conducting his affairs with an eye toward keeping the president safe from legal jeopardy.

“I don’t want to get into loyalty, but I will tell you that, I will say this: Holder protected President Obama. Totally protected him,” Trump told the Times, referring to former attorney general Eric Holder. “When you look at the things that they did, and Holder protected the president. And I have great respect for that, I’ll be honest.”

According to Jacobs, Trump has directed Chief of Staff John Kelly to hold meetings and phone calls with several senior DOJ officials informing them of the president’s displeasure with the agency’s oversight of the investigation. He has seemingly tempered these conversations with a statement that the White House does not wish officials to engage in illegal or unethical behavior. Jacobs also reported that Trump had not issued a formal directive to fire Mueller but rather that he had discussed the possibility and believed he had the authority to do so.

On Monday, the FBI announced that deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe would be effectively resigning from the agency, serving out the remainder of his career on “terminal leave” until his formal retirement in March.

Several news outlets reported that McCabe had told colleagues last week that he intended to stay in office until he retired so the Monday news came as a surprise. According to the New York Times, McCabe had been asked about moving to another agency position but had decided to resign instead.

McCabe had come under increasing criticism from Trump and several right-leaning political commentators who had accused him of being biased against the president, because��McCabe’s wife had accepted money from a political action committee linked to former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

McCabe is one of several high-profile DOJ and FBI officials who have been fired or forced to resign their positions since Trump became president, including FBI director James Comey, deputy attorney general Sally Yates, and former federal attorney Preet Bharara.

Beyond privately discussing the idea of firing Mueller, Trump has also talked publicly about sacking Sessions as well as his deputy Rod Rosenstein, both of whom he has accused of letting the Russia investigation run amok.

Although congressional Republicans have warned Trump that firing Mueller would be the end of his presidency, a number of popular conservative and far-right media sources have been urging Trump to do so for months. Some of the more extreme pundits have even called on the president to execute people involved in the Russia probe for “treason and sedition.”

The Koch brothers are now happily aboard the Trump Train

Charles Koch; David Koch (Credit: CBS/AP/Photo montage by Salon)

After sitting out the 2016 presidential election due to discomfort with Donald Trump’s populist campaign trail rhetoric, the network of conservative super-donors organized by mogul brothers Charles and David Koch announced over the weekend that they’ve made their peace with Trump and intend to help him and other Republicans in elections later this year.

In media interviews, attendees at a Koch-sponsored semi-annual conference for donors (who must commit to giving a minimum of $100,000) indicated that while they would prefer that Trump behave himself like a mature adult, they were more than happy with the policies he has enacted as president.

Rather than��the hard-charging populist policies that Trump had backed on the campaign trail ��� such as a higher minimum wage, increased taxes on “carried interest” income, and withdrawals from major foreign trade treaties ��� thus far the new administration has hewed remarkably close to the Koch ideal.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Tim Phillips, the long-serving president of Americans for Prosperity, said that he and his colleagues regard 2017 as ���the most productive year .���.���. in the existence of this network,��� at least at the federal level. He also claimed that the Koch policy apparatus had been invited to take part ���from day one��� in formulating the tax code changes that the GOP pushed through in December.

That is not exactly a surprise considering that Marc Short, the former president of the Koch network’s Freedom Partners investment fund, has been serving as the director of legislative affairs from day one of the Trump administration. It also hasn’t exactly harmed the libertarian billionaires that their favorite legislator, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, is currently serving as the Speaker of the House.

The conference also attracted a number of Republican politicians who wanted to boost their own donor profiles, including Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin. ���You���re the modern day John Hancocks. You���re a room full of them,��� he told them, referring to the famously wealthy��signatory to��the Declaration of Independence.

Ryan addressed the group via a video message, telling the donors that ���your network has been instrumental for allowing us to reach so many milestones that have long been talked about, but until this year, have not been achieved.���

Others present included Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, and Rep. Mark Meadows, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, a far-right group of House members who frequently scuttle Republican leaders’ attempts to compromise on must-pass legislation.

Keeping quiet when Trump says or does something they don’t like seems to be the new modus operandi for the Koch network.

Even on the topics of criminal justice reform and immigration, two of the few issues on which Trump has hewed to his right-populist rhetoric, the Kochs are emphasizing that they want to keep the conversation going with the administration.

���We think this is progress, and we want to be a part of the progress,��� Brian Hooks, the president of the Charles Koch Foundation told the Post. ���We intend to continue to play a productive role .���.���. to find a solution to the DREAMers.���

With things mostly patched up��between Trump and the (now���fully Trumpified) Republican Party, the Koch brothers announced that they plan to spend up to $400 million in upcoming state and local elections.

Americans aren’t buying the GOP’s tax plan

(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump and the Republican Party may want their tax reform bill to carry them through the 2018 midterm elections, but a new poll suggests that it isn’t making much of an impact on voters.

Fifty-eight percent of American adults believe that Trump’s tax bill will primarily help corporations and the wealthy, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Only 13 percent believed that the middle class would be the primary beneficiaries of the tax reform bill, while only two percent��could say that they had directly received a raise, bonus or comparable benefits as a result of the legislation. Similarly, 27 percent of respondents believe that the tax reform law will increase their taxes, with 24 percent saying they think it will decrease their tax bracket and 23 percent anticipating that it won’t change things for them at all.

While the bill may be broadly unpopular, however, it doesn’t seem likely that it will impact either party’s fortunes in the midterm elections. Only 9 percent of Republicans and 19 percent of independents said they would be more likely to support Democrats as a result of the tax reform bill, while only 8 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of independents said it would make them more likely to support a Republican.

As the bill was being pushed through, Trump and other Republicans predicted that the legislation’s benefits would be so significant that they would convince voters to support it.

“They’re going to start seeing the results in February. This bill means more take-home pay. It will be an incredible Christmas gift for hard-working Americans. I said I wanted to have it done before Christmas. We got it done,” Trump proclaimed during a public event with congressional Republicans in December.

Economic experts don’t share Trump’s optimism.

“The biggest losers are probably families kind of in the upper-middle class, that maybe they have a house that costs several hundred thousand dollars and they have a mortgage that they’re able to deduct interest payments on on their taxes today,” Josh Bivens, Director of Research at the Economic Policy Institute, told Salon in November.

NRATV host: Preventing the Vegas shooter from buying 47 guns would have been “unacceptable”

NRATV Host Grant Stinchfield (Credit: nratv.com)

NRATV host��Grant Stinchfield doesn’t believe there is any “common sense” in passing legislation that would have stopped Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, who purchased 33 guns in the last year of his life, from buying more weapons. He noted that any such proposals would also be unfair to the public, and gun owners.

“There is no law, or proposed law today that would have stopped him from getting his firearms,” Stinchfield said. “He would have passed every background check, there was no evidence of mental illness, not one new law would have stopped him.”

Stinchfield is, of course, wildly wrong. In a society where the National Rifle Association doesn’t have its claws deep inside the pockets of Republican lawmakers, Congress could easily pass legislation that would have prevented Paddock from buying 33 guns in a single year, or a bill that would have prevented him from collecting a total of 47 guns ��� essentially a cache of weapons. All told, Paddock’s arsenal, 23 of which were with him in his hotel room along with unreal amounts of ammunition, gave him the opportunity to slaughter 58 people, and injure over 500 more in under 12 minutes.

To Stinchfield, that would be overstepping Paddock’s Second Amendment rights. He cited a recent interview President Donald Trump did with Piers Morgan, who questioned��the��president about gun control in America. Stinchfield praised Trump for his dedication to gun owners. In the interview, Trump refused to back down, and said he was a “Second Amendment person” for the purposes of “security.”

 

“So ‘make it harder for him to get his firearms’ means make it harder for all of us to get our firearms. And that is simply unacceptable,” Stinchfield said. “It is our right in America to keep and bear arms.”

He added, “The left wants to get in the way of that right, and they do it under the guise of somehow being called common sense gun control. There was nothing common sense about where Piers Morgan was going there, I want to make that clear.”

Since the Las Vegas massacre in October, there have been dozens of mass shootings in the U.S. and Congress has not even so much as attempted to pass a single law in hopes of reining in the nation’s gun-obsessed culture. In the first 23 days of 2018 alone, there were 11 school-related shootings. In fact, lawmakers on Capitol Hill have actually made things easier to bear arms in public,��passing a bill in December, “requiring states that permit individuals to carry concealed guns to allow out-of-state residents to do so as well, if they can legally carry in their home state.”

Watch the full clip of Stinchfield via Media Matters for America below:

 

There is a major CEO tax con job going on

(Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced this week that the company would repatriate $252 billion, give or take a few billion, then create some American jobs and invest in America ��� for a change.

This is a result of the massive tax cut Congressional Republicans awarded corporations like Apple that were hoarding trillions in profits overseas.

Corporate lobbyists told Congress to lower the tax rate on those overseas caches or companies like Apple wouldn���t pay a cent of the taxes they owed on those profits. Congress complied. That is highly productive corporate extortion.

As a result, Apple���s announcement that it would invest some of the repatriated profits in U.S. operations is tainted. Also sullied are the brags by other corporations that they���ll use small parts of their annual tax savings to pay workers one-time bonuses and tiny wage increases ��� only to turn around and lay off thousands of workers.

��The corporate extortion and maltreatment of workers defy the advice that BlackRock CEO Laurence D. Fink offered the CEOs of the world���s largest companies��in a letter delivered Jan. 16. Fink���s words carry some weight since his firm is the largest investor in the world with more than $6 trillion. The letter described as flawed the CEO-favored philosophy of shareholder capitalism, under which corporations shirk responsibility to everyone but shareholders.

Fink said stakeholder capitalism, under which corporations are accountable to employees, customers and communities, as well as shareholders, is a more effective long-term strategy. ���To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society,�����he counseled.

But CEOs at the likes of Apple, AT&T and AFLAC don���t want to hear that. These executives want their corporations to be considered people for the legal perks. But they don���t want their firms to assume humans��� citizenship obligations. These CEOs are trying to make Americans think corporations should get good citizenship awards because a handful of the nation���s 30 million employers are paying bonuses to workers from the gargantuan tax savings Congress gave them.

But it���s a con. The bonuses are fine, but they���re one-time events and trivial compared to the bountiful and permanent tax breaks corporations reaped from their years of lobbying Republicans.

In addition, the President���s Council of Economic Advisors said that slashing the corporate tax rate would boost the average American���s��wages between $4,000 and $9,000 a year. A one-time bonus of $1,000 doesn���t get close to that.

Apple, for example,��held $252 billion��in profits off shore, refusing for years to pay the 35 percent corporate tax rate that would be required to return it to the United States. Now, however, Republicans in Congress have slashed the rate corporations will have to pay on overseas profits to 15 percent. Republicans also cut the rate that corporations must pay on U.S. profits to 21 percent, giving firms like Apple that moved work offshore a better deal than corporations that remained exclusively American.

It means Apple will pay only��$38 billion in taxes��on its overseas profits and get to keep $43 billion that it otherwise would have owed the federal government. For actual-human American citizens, as opposed to corporate-humans like Apple,��that means the federal government will have $43 billion less��for important services like the Children���s Health Insurance Program, opioid addiction treatment, federal school funding for special-needs children, adoption services for foster kids and workplace safety inspections.

Cook tried to sound like a Boy Scout in��a statement��about bringing the money home: ���We have a deep sense of responsibility to give back to our country and the people who help make our success possible.��� But if the corporation really had a deep sense of responsibility to the United States, it would have paid the taxes it owed and not moved all of its manufacturing off shore.

��But, hey, Apple will invest its ill-gotten gains in the United States, right? Well, maybe not so much.

Apple,��which had more money stashed overseas��than any other American corporation, projected that its direct impact on the U.S. economy over the next five years would be more than $350 billion, but the��New York Times determined, based on Apple���s past spending and projections, that its investment would be only about $37 billion more than what Apple would be expected to spend over that time in the United States. That���s good.��But it���s not $350 billion in new dollars. It���s a con.

Apple says its investment will include a new headquarters and 20,000 new hires. And that���s great too. But it pales before Amazon, which had 10 percent of what Apple did overseas. ��Long before any tax break, Amazon���s CEO Jeff Bezos promised a second headquarters and��50,000 new high-paid positions.

BlackRock CEO Fink told Apple���s Cook and other large company CEOs this week that they have a duty to explain to investors and shareholders what they will do with the extra cash that the Republican tax break will afford them and how they���ll use it to create long-term value.

Fink, whose investment firm is looking for sustainable, enduring growth, not illusory, short-term profits, warned, ���Without a sense of purpose, no company, either public or private, can achieve its full potential. It will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders. It will succumb to short-term pressures to distribute earnings, and, in the process, sacrifice investments in employee development, innovation, and capital expenditures that are necessary for long-term growth.���

But the vast majority of executives who announced they���d share the bounty of the Republican tax breaks with their employees didn���t explain how they���d spend their windfalls or offer workers long-term value.

The conservative group Americans for Tax Reform, which supported tax breaks for the rich and corporations, compiled��a list of about 125 companies��that announced their workers would benefit this year from some portion of the corporate tax break.

The overwhelming majority of these are one-time bonuses. It���s true that the average worker will appreciate an extra $200 to $1,000. But none of the companies promised that $1,000 would arrive in workers��� paychecks every year, even though corporations will enjoy the tax breaks every year.

Some firms, mostly banks, said they would increase the wages of their lowest-paid workers to $15 an hour. That bank workers, responsible for the correct calculation of savings and withdraws and for safekeeping depositors��� life savings, are making starvation wages of less than $15 an hour, is frightening.

In addition, the list of financial institutions includes big ones like Wells Fargo, Capital One and PNC Financial, all of which pay their CEOs more than $12 million a year, raising the question of why those fat cats made sure they got the big bucks but never got around to paying the workers who handle the money a living wage.

Other big names that have announced one-time bonuses or pathetic wage increases are Walmart, AT&T, Comcast, Boeing and AFLAC. Again, it���s great any time additional money finds its way into the pockets of those whose labor creates corporate profits. But all of these companies were involved in a massive public relations con.

Comcast and AT&T announced $1,000 bonuses, then laid off workers.��Comcast dumped 500��and��AT&T dumped thousands.

Walmart pulled the same trick. It boasted of��bonuses ranging from $200 to $1,000 and raises��for its lowest-paid workers to $11 an hour. That���s still not a living wage and was done only to keep up with��Target, which announced in September a base wage of $11. And Walmart topped it off with layoffs. About��11,000 former Walmart workers��won���t be around��to get those raises.

AFLAC said it would place a��one-time contribution of $500��in workers��� 401(k) accounts amid��allegations in lawsuits��that it lied to applicants about the pay they would receive and failed to give workers commissions they had earned.

Boeing got in on the good publicity by saying��it would spend $300 billion on workers, but its workers will see no new money. Instead of raises or bonuses, Boeing will spend the money on worker training, upgrading its factories and matching workers��� donations to charities ��� for which, of course, it can claim another tax break.

Clearly, none of these con men CEOs actually care about their workers. Maybe, however, they will care about what activist investor BlackRock thinks. And its CEO has made it clear he believes good corporate governance takes into consideration worker, community and environmental needs.