Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 238

Wake up and smell the coffee pods: The “Hannity” ad boycott means nothing

Sean Hannity (Credit: Getty/Nicholas Kamm)

It has been a mind-plaiting week for critical thinkers who are in the habit of trying to understand Fox News Channel. The folks engaged in the quixotic battle to get Sean Hannity off the air must be experiencing that in addition to feeling winded, or adjusting their high-blood pressure medication.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping up with the nonsense involving Hannity, accused child molester and Alabama’s Republican candidate for the United State Senate Roy Moore, and popular hotel guest room coffee dispenser Keurig — first off, congratulations! This means you are engaging in self-care, and we love that. Good for you! If you intend to keep that up, stop reading now.

Because what I’m about to say will harsh whatever mellow you may have carved out in this insane world: No amount of “Hannity” battling will get him off of Fox’s airwaves.

I can picture a number of you shaking your heads in distress. “How can you make such an anti-#resistance statement?” you cry. “We must keep fighting.” You’re right. Team Reason needs voices of sanity and reason to continue contradicting the ravings of that neck-free menace. Just know that despite your efforts, Fox can probably get along just fine if “Hannity” loses advertisers, as long as Hannity doesn’t drive away his Keurig-crushing audience. Based on his faithful’s support of Roy Moore, it would take quite a bit for that to happen.

Here’s a summary of the situation. Last Friday, Hannity invited Moore on his radio program to answer the accusations of Leigh Corfman, a woman interviewed by The Washington Post who alleges he initiated sexual contact with her in 1979. At the time Corfman was 14 years old and Moore was 32, which, as Lorelai Gilmore might point out, makes him more than old enough to be her father.

Basically, Hannity granted Moore, a grown man who more probably than not fantasized about Marcia and Jan while “The Brady Bunch” was still in production, an uncontested forum to contradict Corfman and the claims of others who came forward. “What do you want to tell people — and I’ll just give you the microphone — about how they should view the Washington Post, these people making these charges and your denial,” Hannity generously offered at one point. “How should people see it?”

Understandably, folks who aren’t fans of grown men fondling females on the younger side of Tiger Beat’s target readership were alarmed at the Fox host’s support of Moore. Media Matters and other organizations mounted an effort to pressure advertisers to pull their support from Fox’s “Hannity,” and it was quite successful. When Keurig declared its ad-spending withdrawal on Twitter, Hannity’s horde reacted by posting films of angry people destroying the Keurigs they had already purchased by tossing them off balconies, hitting them with golf clubs or throwing them into pools.

Observers might marvel at how nice it must be to have the disposable income to afford to golf, have an in-ground pool or one’s own balcony and a premium coffeemaker.

But when Keurig’s CEO circulated an internal memo apologizing to his company’s employees about the public kerfuffle, the right-wing host, a Fox employee, accepted this mea culpa even though it wasn’t directed toward him. Keurig has not confirmed that it will resume advertising with the show. Others, including Realtor.com, said it will continue running ads on Fox’s most popular shows.

Anyway, following the company’s “Sorry-Not-Sorry,” Hannity defended Keurig, calling it the victim of “a group with a radical agenda,” before leaping across the line of scrimmage to give Moore 24 hours to “immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation” for what, as of Tuesday, became “[Moore’s] inconsistencies.”

Presumably, nobody in their right mind is twisting their knickers over this about face, because we know the score: Hannity only sticks with winners, as is the way of his leader Donald Trump. Moore doesn’t seem to be winning in the court of public opinion, thus the Great Worm’s half-turn. Plus, speaking of inconsistencies, this change of tune allows Hannity to continue berating liberal Hollywood’s sexual harassers, including Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton (of course!) without being a demonstrable hypocrite by defending Moore.

These days, Hannity is more or less the mug of Fox News’s brand, although, like the network’s previous standard bearer Bill O’Reilly before him, Hannity is a propagandist as opposed to a journalist. Which is silly to point out because Fox viewers honestly don’t care. To them he’s the General Lee in the war for their minds, Fox’s sane-appearing alternative to Alex Jones. And as soon as the bottom drops out of Jones’ supplement dust empire, he’ll be wandering the media wastelands with Michael Savage, and Hannity probably will still be with us.

Seriously, go back to your ear plugs and “la-la-la-la-la!” land of self-care.

Still here? Yep, it is depressing to realize that at this point in Fox’s lifespan it is replenishing its audience ranks by catering to “alt-right” loons, as opposed to adopting a sensible conservative viewpoint, and know that I laughed as I typed that. Such a slant would cement Fox as part of the establishment, and isn’t the establishment the enemy?

Fox still has a reasonable conservative voice in Shepard Smith, who is doing his level best to hold back the “alt-right” wave washing over his network, and who still clings to the notion that he’s practicing some version of actual journalism. To wit: his break with the rest of Fox News’ efforts to legitimize the Uranium One conspiracy by — gasp! — citing facts, and few things anger Fox viewers as mightily as data that does not support their worldview. To them, news is a team sport.

Smith is one guy with a midday timeslot. Fox News makes its real money at night, which still makes the channel the greatest revenue generator for its parent company 21st Century Fox.

The company’s co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch recently confirmed in a call to investors, cited by CNBC, that news and sports comprise more than half of the company’s advertising revenues because both kinds of programming are more likely to be viewed live than entertainment programming. It beat earnings expectations in its recent fourth-quarter fiscal report — months after O’Reilly’s very public ouster — and only slightly missed projected revenues.

Still, for Fox News’ parent company, that translates to a two percent revenue increase during that quarter, which ended in June, to the tune $6.75 billion. A main engine of that growth is Fox News.

Months before this, a post-election Fox News had to respond in earnest to murmurs that it was losing its audience not merely to the rising competitive threats posted by Breitbart and an expanded Sinclair Broadcast Group, but to the Grim Reaper. Fox has the oldest viewership in cable news, with a median viewer age of 66. The median age of CNN’s primetime audience is 59, while MSNBC’s has ticked upward to 64.

That number is an improvement over data reported a year ago, which placed the typical Fox viewer around 68. And it means that Fox’s swerve to serve hardcore Trumpers via Hannity and conspiracy-loving nativists with Tucker Carlson seems to be working.

In October, Fox hit the milestone of being the most-watched cable news network for 190 consecutive months — 15 years and 10 months. It’s the second most-watched cable network in primetime behind ESPN, and the most watched basic-cable network in total days. And “Hannity” became October’s most-watched cable news show — up 15 percent in total viewers and 27 percent in the 25-54 demo.

In second place? “Tucker Carlson.” In October’s total viewers race, Fox programs held eight of the top 10 cable news slots; only “Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell” (eighth place) and “The Rachel Maddow Show” (third place) cracked the ranks. Maddow, by the way, held only to the number one cable news slot during the third quarter of 2017. Even then, “Hannity” still managed to eke out the top slot in the channel’s 25-54 demographic for his network.

Hannity is maddening, truly, and his popularity and influence should aggravate anyone who values honesty and facts and fears the necrotizing effects his campaign of misinformation has on American democracy. But his high viewership ensures the current advertiser exodus is likely to only be temporary; other companies will step in, and former customers will likely follow Realtor.com’s lead and return.

The current departure is largely symbolic, understand. Unlike Hannity’s viewers, his show’s sponsors and his employer have no intention of tossing away an asset they’ve already paid for many times over.

I’ve seen the future of tech, and she’s female

Founders Panel at the Women in Product Conference, Sept 17, 2017 (Credit: Ab@alishabrook.com)

This fall, I was invited to moderate a panel for a conference put on by Women In Product, a non-profit formed to create a strong community of women builders and leaders in the tech industry.

My panel included four female founders of technology companies: Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy, Heather Fernandez of Solv, Selina Tobaccowala of Gixo and Aarthi Ramamurthy of Lumoid.

When I walked into the main area of the San Jose Convention Center, the room had an energy you could practically taste.

Also, it was lunchtime.

It was surreal. A tech conference . . . with not a man in sight. The typical scenario, as you may have experienced yourself, is a large hall, with mostly white guys everywhere, giving you, the female attendee, the once-over — whether it’s “will she buy my product?” or “will she have a drink with me?” None of that here.

And, unlike most other conferences I’ve been to, in addition to an impressive lineup of speakers and panelists, there was also a makeup booth, a photographer offering headshots, and a lounge area with puffy white couches where women watched an entrepreneur demonstrating the power of a new product she had invented: a briefcase meets purse meets backpack. So, yeah, some girly stuff.

But there is something about bringing together a whole lot of powerful, ambitious women in one place where they can feel free from interruptions, mansplaining and awkward gender-based power dynamics.

And on the panel that I led, the speakers did not hold back. We talked about what surprised them about starting a company, the pros and cons of running a company while female, from leadership style to sexual harassment and gender bias — and ultimately as business-people what it takes to scale.

This panel took place on September 19th, 2017 and we had a full house. You can listen to our conversation here:

Women In Product was founded by a group of senior women product leaders working at a variety of Silicon Valley tech companies including Facebook, Google, Intuit, Jet.com and Trulia.

Meet the panelists:

Heather Fernandez is the founder of Solv, a marketplace for same day doctors’ appointments. Before founding Solv, she was head of business services at Trulia.

Aarthi Ramamurthy launched her company Lumoid in 2014. It’s a try-before-you-buy service for consumer electronics. Before starting her own company she was a product manager at Netflix and Microsoft — she also built an app while on her honeymoon, called Bubblegum, just saying.

Selina Tobaccowala was President and CTO at SurveyMonkey, and she co-founded Evite in 1997 and was Senior Vice President of Product & Technology at Ticketmaster. Her new company Gixo, is a workout app that offers online fitness classes.

Cheryl Contee is the CEO and co-founder of Fission Strategy, co-founder of Attentive.ly and co-founder of #YesWeCode. Attentive.ly, a social listening and marketing automation tool for nonprofits, is the first tech startup with a black female founder on board to be acquired by a NASDAQ company.

For more stories of how women rise up, subscribe to the Inflection Point podcast.

Jared Kushner didn’t disclose emails about Wikileaks, and Russia, Senate panel says

Jared Kushner (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

The top-ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner had not turned over emails about Wikileaks and a “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite” and demanded that Kushner now produce them.

In a letter to Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote that based off of other documents provided to the panel by other witnesses, Kushner had not disclosed “several documents that are known to exist,” and demanded they be turned over, the Washington Post reported.

“You also have not produced any phone records that we presume exist and would relate to Mr. Kushner’s communications,” Grassley and Feinstein wrote in the letter.

The documents Kushner failed to disclose include a series of “September 2016 email communications to Mr. Kushner concerning WikiLeaks,” that Kushner then forwarded to another campaign official, the Post reported. The details of those communications, or what was discussed in regards to Wikileaks, is not clear at the moment. However, the news comes as it was revealed this week that Donald Trump Jr. and the organization had exchanged direct messages through Twitter during the campaign.

But Kushner, who has already established a track record for not disclosing the requested information, also did not turn over “documents concerning a ‘Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,'” which he had forwarded to other campaign officials, the Post reported.

Kushner was also made privy to “communications with Sergei Millian” a Belarusan American who claims to have close ties to Trump and was a source on the dossier containing lewd details about the president, the panel leaders said, according to the Post.

The panel leaders informed Kushner he had until Nov. 27 to produce what they were looking for, however, there was no threat to subpoena the information if he failed to cooperate.

The Senate panel is also seeking transcripts from Kushner’s interviews he previously had with members of the Senate and House intelligence committees.

In online forum, Trump judicial nominee defended KKK, statutory rape

Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Chris Carlson/John Bazemore/Photo montage by Salon)

It turns out Brett Talley’s inexperience in a court room was not the only factor that should have precluded him from a federal judgeship nomination. The 36-year-old lawyer, who has no trial experience, apparently spent a lot of time on a sports message board where he crudely debated issues of race and sexual misconduct with minors.

Ever since Republicans in the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Talley’s nomination, damning information has come to light regarding his character. First, the Trump nominee failed to disclose that he is married to a White House staffer.

To make matters worse for Talley, he was unable to hide his activity on an Alabama sports message board. Talley was a frequent commentator on a web forum devoted to the University of Alabama’s athletic department. Talley posted to the message board more than three times a day, BuzzFeed first reported, and routinely commentated on sports, politics and culture. It was in these posts that he revealed his strange views on race and sexual misconduct.

In a forum thread about Mississippi proposing to honor Nathan Bedford Forrest — the first Klu Klux Klan Grand Wizard — with a license plate, Talley defended the origins of the KKK, claiming they were different from future iterations:

Heaven forbid we let the facts get in the way of your righteous indignation, but Forrest, when he decommissioned his men, told them to make peace with the men they had fought and live as good citizens of the United States. It was only after the perceived depredations of the Union army during reconstruction that Forrest joined (it is highly unlikely that he founded or acted as the Grand Wizard) the first KKK, which was entirely different than the KKK of the early 19th Century. When the Klan turned to racial violence, he distanced himself from the organization as he had long supported the reconciliation of the races. In fact, he often spoke to black organizations.

Talley’s revisionist history is disputed by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which claims that the KKK immediately sought to impose white supremacy in the American South.

“Little more than a year after it was founded, the secret society thundered across the war-torn South, sabotaging Reconstruction governments and imposing a reign of terror and violence that lasted three or four years,” the SPLC said.

In another thread, Talley appeared to express contempt that he was not the victim of statutory rape at the hands of a 20-year-old female babysitter, similar to the allegations in a Daily Mail story headlined, “Nanny Diaries: Confiscated Journals Reveal 20-Year-Old Babysitter’s Love for Boy, 14, and ‘Amazing’ Sex.”  “Why not me!” Talley allegedly wrote in the thread.

While Talley has already made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee, his nomination still needs to be confirmed by the entire Senate body.

Into the Afghan abyss (again)

Men bury a victim of a suicide attack on the Supreme Court in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2017. (Credit: AP)

After nine months of confusion, chaos, and cascading tweets, Donald Trump’s White House has finally made one thing crystal clear: the U.S. is staying in Afghanistan to fight and – so they insist – win. “The killers need to know they have nowhere to hide, that no place is beyond the reach of American might,” said the president in August, trumpeting his virtual declaration of war on the Taliban. Overturning Barack Obama’s planned (and stalled) drawdown in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced that the Pentagon would send 4,000 more soldiers to fight there, bringing American troop strength to nearly 15,000.

In October, as that new mini-escalation was ramping up, the CIA leaked to the New York Times news of a complementary covert surge with lethal drone strikes and “highly experienced” Agency paramilitary teams being dispatched to “hunt and kill” Taliban guerrillas, both ordinary fighters and top officials. “This is unforgiving, relentless,” intoned CIA Director Mike Pompeo, promising a wave of extrajudicial killings reminiscent of the Agency’s notorious Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War. CIA paramilitary officers, reported the Times, will lead Special Forces operatives, both Afghan and American, in expanded counterterrorism operations that, in the past, “have been accused of indiscriminately killing Afghan civilians.” In short, it’s game on in Afghanistan.

After 16 years of continuous war in that country, the obvious question is: Does this new campaign have any realistic chance of success, no less victory? To answer that, another question must be asked: How has the Taliban managed to expand in recent years despite intensive U.S. operations and a massive air campaign, as well as the endless and endlessly expensive training of Afghan security forces? After all, the Afghan War is not only the longest in U.S. history, but also one of the largest, peaking at 101,000 American troops in country during President Obama’s surge of 2010-2011.

Thinking About the Taliban

Americans have been hearing about the Taliban for so long that most fail to appreciate just how relentless that movement’s growth has been in recent years. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Bush White House unleashed a lethal combination of U.S. airpower and CIA-funded Afghan warlords to crush the fundamentalist Taliban and capture the Afghan capital, Kabul, with stunning speed. Not only was that Islamist movement and its government defeated, but it lost so many dedicated militants to those devastating air attacks that it was seemingly smashed beyond repair or revival. Nonetheless, within five years, the Taliban was back in force, already fielding 25,000 fighters. By 2015, it was in control of more than half the countryside, had captured district capitals, and was even pounding at the gates of major provincial cities like Kunduz.

As with any movement, there are multiple reasons for the Taliban’s success, including the failure of the government in Kabul – a cesspit of corruption – to deliver anything like rural prosperity, the country’s martial tradition of fighting foreign occupiers, and Pakistan’s sub-rosa support, as well as the wide-open sanctuaries in its tribal backlands along the Afghan border. But there is one other factor, more fundamental than all the rest: the opium poppy.

The Taliban guerrillas are, like many insurgent armies, largely made up of teenagers who fight, at least in part, for cash to feed their families. Every spring for the past 15 years, as snow melts from mountain slopes across that country, new crops of such teenage recruits emerge from impoverished villages ready to take up arms for the rebel cause. Each of them reportedly makes at least $300 a month, far more than they could possibly hope to earn from the usual agricultural wages.  In other words, it takes an estimated $90 million in salaries alone for the Taliban to field its 25,000 strong guerrilla army for a single fighting season. With an overall budget approaching a billion dollars annually, the cost of the insurgency’s 15-year war rings in at something close to $15 billion.

So where, in that impoverished, arid land, has the Taliban been getting nearly a billion dollars a year? According to the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, a single Afghan province, Helmand, “produces a significant amount of the opium globally that turns into heroin and… provides about 60 percent of the Taliban funding.” The country’s president, Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official, agrees. “Without drugs,” he’s said, “this war would have been long over. The heroin is a very important driver of this war.”

The Taliban’s rise has paralleled the relentless growth of Afghanistan’s opium production from a mere 185 tons when the U.S. invaded in October 2001 to a still-unequalled yield of 8,200 tons in 2008, a harvest that provided an unprecedented 53% of the country’s gross domestic product and 93% of the world’s illicit heroin supply. That same year, the U.N. stated that Taliban guerrillas were extracting “from the drug economy resources for arms, logistics, and militia pay.” A study for the U.S. Institute of Peace also found that, in 2009, the Taliban already had 50 heroin labs in its territory and controlled 98% of the country’s poppy fields, collecting $425 million in “taxes” levied on the opium traffic.

By the time Obama’s 2010 surge segued into an exit strategy four years later, observers were unanimous in their assessment that opium had become central to the Taliban’s survival. Despite a succession of “drug eradication” programs sponsored and funded by Washington, the Pentagon’s Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, concluded in 2014 that, “by every conceivable metric, we’ve failed. Production and cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.”

The 2013 opium crop covered a record area of 209,000 hectares, bringing the harvest back up to a substantial 5,500 tons. This massive crop generated some $3 billion in illicit income, of which the Taliban’s tax alone took an estimated $320 million – almost half that movement’s revenues. The U.S. Embassy corroborated this dismal assessment, calling the illicit income “a windfall for the insurgency, which profits from the drug trade at almost every level.”

The Failure of Antinarcotics Efforts

As 2017 ends, with the White House poised for another four-year plunge into the Afghan abyss, has anything changed that might weaken the Taliban and so spare Washington from a defeat foretold? To answer this question, John Sopko has been armed with a Congressional mandate to probe all forms of failure there and already has five years of experience in this difficult mission.  Recently, he drafted a scathing review of Washington’s failed 15-year effort to reduce Afghan opium production and thereby defeat the Taliban. This 150-page draft report, “Counternarcotics: Lessons from Afghanistan, 2002-2016,” depicts a drug-policy disaster only likely to ensure an ever-increasing income for the Taliban to fight an endless war. When read in tandem with the U.N.’s annual opium surveys, Sopko provides ample evidence that Trump’s decision to double down in that country is almost certainly doomed to failure.

Over the past 15 years, all counter-narcotics efforts by the U.S., Great Britain, and the U.N. have failed to slow the country’s drug production. “Opium remains the country’s most valuable cash crop,” says Sopko, “worth around $3 billion per year at border prices.” It provides, he adds, “up to 411,000 full time equivalent jobs, more than the number of people employed by the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces.”

Despite the expenditure of nearly $9 billion on its counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan, Washington has presided over what Sopko calls a “dramatic expansion of opium poppy cultivation from less than 8,000 hectares grown in 2001 to 200,000 hectares in 2016.” By then, the opium crop represented more than two-thirds of the country’s agricultural output. Meanwhile, 11% of the population is now estimated to be using illicit drugs, one of the world’s highest addiction rates.

The U.N.’s crop survey for 2016, compiled by hundreds of Afghan enumerators who regularly walked through the poppy fields – and corroborated by sophisticated satellite imagery – adds yet more somber strokes to this picture. That year, at 5,600 tons the opium harvest was again up substantially (by 43%). In the same period, opium eradication efforts fell by 91% to a mere 355 hectares of the crop destroyed, or less than 2% of all illegal poppy fields in the country.

Since the start of its intervention in 2001, Washington and its drug war allies have tried every possible counter-narcotics option. All, without exception, have failed. The bulk of the U.S. budget ($4.3 billion) was allocated to interdiction efforts, but ample funds were left for more experimental approaches, none of which seem to have worked.

As much as Washington’s drug policies failed, the U.N. efforts were, in Inspector Sopko’s view, even less effective. During the first decade following its 2001 invasion, Washington was obsessed with counterterror operations and so outsourced the drug war to others. It delegated opium suppression to the British and police training for interdiction to the Germans. In this critical period, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) maneuvered to fill the leadership void.

In what was then seen as a clever political gambit, the U.N. argued, according to Sopko’s report, that “it was necessary to destroy 25 percent of the standing poppy crop each year in order to deter future planting,” in the process justifying the employment of thousands of Afghan peasants to pull up poppy plants. Defending that crop suppression program, Antonio Maria Costa, the Soviet-trained Italian economist who then headed UNODC, declared, according to Sopko, “that there was no relationship between poppy cultivation and poverty.” From his high modernist headquarters in Vienna, Costa pledged “to reduce poppy cultivation by 70 percent in five years and eliminate the crop altogether in ten years” – a claim that soon proved laughable.

Near the start of Washington’s Afghan adventure in 2002, the U.S. military, the CIA, and the country’s American-supported president, Hamid Karzai, had little interest in or next to no knowledge of the drug problem. Other actors with far less power – the U.S. embassy in Kabul, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the World Bank, and the European Commission, among others – all made periodic forays into antinarcotics work. Funds for such operations ebbed and flowed, while new initiatives were regularly launched without significant analysis of or thought about past policies.

In this chaotic process, as Sopko points out, “interdiction efforts failed to fundamentally alter or impact the Afghan drug trade in a meaningful way. In 2017, poppy cultivation and opium production seemed destined to reach a record high and the Taliban continued to derive funding from the drug trade.”

A Short-Lived Military Solution

Amid this succession of policy failures, only one program, in Sopko’s view, had a discernible impact on drug production: the launching of a massive occupation of the country’s key southern opium districts by the U.S. military and the Afghans they were training.  Checkpoints were set up at almost every road crossing. “In Marjah,” he reports, “located in the opium poppy heartland of Helmand Province, the share of agricultural land dedicated to poppy was almost 60 percent prior to the major influx of U.S. and Afghan forces. After Operation Moshtarak, in which 15,000 U.S. Marines and the ANDSF [Afghan National Defense and Security Forces] occupied the district in February 2010, the amount of land dedicated to poppy fell to less than 5 percent.” By the end of that year, 20,000 leathernecks in 50 fortified bases, backed by 10,000 British troops, had temporarily wrested control of the province from the Taliban guerrillas and checked the opium traffic that had sustained them.

Apart from their omnipresent checkpoints, the Marines also introduced the Marjah Accelerated Agricultural Transition program.  It offered opium farmers an incentive package of cash, wheelbarrows, shovels, new water pumps, and all-important safe-conduct passes to move securely through this war zone. Despite the Taliban’s “night letters… forbidding locals from interacting with coalition forces,” the Marines were encouraged that more than 1,000 local farmers signed up for the program.

In the end, however, it wasn’t sustainable.  Four years later in 2014, as American troop levels in the country were beginning to fall, General Daniel Yoo stood before his Marines at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province and announced that they would all soon be heading home, leaving the province’s security in the hands of their Afghan allies. “I am cautiously optimistic that they will be able to sustain themselves,” the general said, “but they’ve got to want it more than we do.”

Within a year, the Taliban were back, stronger than ever. Amid a nationwide offensive, the guerrillas focused, above all, on recapturing the poppy heartlands of Helmand Province, because, as the New York Times put it, “the lucrative opium trade made it crucial to the insurgents’ economic designs.” By December 2015, after overrunning checkpoints and winning back much of the province, they came close to capturing Marjah itself. Had American Special Operations forces and airpower not intervened to relieve “demoralized” Afghan troops and police, the town would undoubtedly have fallen.

Farther north, in the fertile poppy fields astride the Helmand River system, insurgents captured most of Sangin district, forcing the retreat of government soldiers who, hobbled by the endemic corruption of their government and military, were reportedly “fighting with lack of ammunition and on empty stomachs.” By 2016, President Obama was forced to reverse his drawdown and launch a mini-surge of hundreds of new U.S. troops to deny insurgents the economic prize of the world’s most productive poppy fields.

Despite support from American airpower and 700 Special Operations troops, in February and March 2016 embattled government forces retreated from Musa Qala and Khan Neshin, leaving the Taliban largely in control of 10 of Helmand’s 14 districts. After 3,000 government troops died in that Taliban offensive, the remaining demoralized forces hunkered down inside provincial and district capitals, leaving the countryside and the opium crops that went with it to the heroin-funded guerrillas.

In the midst of all that fighting, Helmand’s farmers managed to expand their poppy cultivation to 80,000 hectares by 2016, which represented 40% of the entire country’s drug production.

Sophisticated Methodology

Not only did this problematic drug war fail to curtail the traffic, but it also alienated the rural residents the government so desperately needed to win over. Worse yet, in the end it actually encouraged illicit opium production – a frequent outcome in Washington’s worldwide drug war that I once called “the stimulus of prohibition.”

Using sophisticated satellite imagery, Sopko’s team, for example, found a troubling disconnect between areas that received development aid from Washington or its allies and those that were subjected to opium eradication programs. In strategic Helmand and Nangarhar provinces, for instance, satellite photographs clearly reveal that the various drug eradication projects ripped through remote areas where “the population was highly dependent on opium poppy for its livelihoods,” rendering poor farmers destitute.  The development aid was, however, lavished on more accessible, largely drug-free districts near major cities elsewhere in Afghanistan, leaving countless thousands of farmers in critical rural areas angry at the government and susceptible to Taliban recruitment.

Even liberal development alternatives to those rip-up-the-poppies programs, claims Sopko, only served to stimulate opium production in surprising ways. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), for instance, spent $36 million on irrigation for a showcase Food Zone project, meant to promote the growing of legal crops in southern Kandahar Province.  As it happened, though, this important infrastructure program actually turned out to contribute “to rising levels of opium poppy cultivation” – an unintended outcome that could be seen in similar “irrigation projects in provinces like Nangarhar, Badakhshan, and Kunar.”

Next door to Kandahar in central Helmand Province, another Food Zone program initially helped reduce the opium crop by 60%. But as British agronomist David Mansfield reports, by the spring of 2017 an “unprecedented” proliferation of poppies covered up to 40% of the farmland targeted by that project; guerrillas were back in force; and farmers felt, as one put it, that “the Taliban is better than the government; they don’t ban poppy, they just ask for tax.” By now, of course, given all the years of bungled anti-drug programs, Mansfield concludes that the Kabul government has little hope of wresting “back control of central Helmand.”

USAID programs that emphasized increased wheat production proved similarly counterproductive. “With higher-yielding varieties and improved agricultural technologies,” writes Sopko, “households in the well-irrigated central valleys of rural Afghanistan would be able to meet their family wheat requirements with a smaller part of their land,” allowing “a larger area… to be allocated to [the] high-value… opium poppy.”

An Uncertain Future

Corroborating Sopko’s pessimism, a recent report by Mujib Mashal of the New York Times depicted the worsening Afghan drug situation as the product, in part, of Washington’s failed policies. Fueled by a booming opium harvest, the Taliban has recently expanded from poppy growing into large-scale heroin production with an estimated 500 labs refining the drug inside Afghanistan – part of a strategy aimed at capturing a greater share of the $60 billion generated globally by the country’s drug exports.

Out of the whole opium eradication project, the National Interdiction Unit, an Afghan outfit trained by U.S. Special Forces, is more or less what’s left when it comes to hopes for reducing the traffic in drugs. Yet their nighttime helicopter interdiction raids on mobile, readily reconstructed heroin labs are proving futile and their chief, reports Mashal, was recently sacked for “probably leaking information to hostile forces.” U.S. military commanders now realize that local Taliban bosses, enriched by the heroin boom, have nothing to gain from further peace negotiations, which remain the only way of ending this endless war.

Meanwhile, the whole question of opium eradication has, according to Mashal, gotten surprisingly “little attention in the Trump administration’s new strategy for the Afghan war.” It seems that U.S. counter-narcotics officials have come to accept a new reality “with a sense of helplessness” – that the country now supplies 85% of the world’s heroin and there’s no end to this in sight.

So why has America’s ambitious $9 billion counter-narcotics program fallen into failure again and again? When such illegality corrupts a society as thoroughly as opium has Afghanistan, then drug trafficking comes to distort everything – giving even good programs bad outcomes and undoubtedly twisting Trump’s headstrong plans for victory into certain defeat.

Think of the never-ending war in Afghanistan as Washington’s drug of choice of these last 16 years.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of the now-classic book The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power” (Dispatch Books).

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,” as well as John Dower’s “The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,” John Feffer’s dystopian novel “Splinterlands,” Nick Turse’s “Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead,” and Tom Engelhardt’s “Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.”

 

Why Nevada’s new lethal injection protocol is unethical

(Credit: Wikimedia)

Nevada has temporarily called off its first inmate execution in 11 years. Scott Dozier, sentenced for the 2002 murder of his 22-year-old drug associate, Jeremiah Miller, was to be put to death on Nov. 14. Dozier instructed his lawyer in August not to file any more appeals.

On Thursday, Nov. 9, however, Judge Jennifer Togliatti temporarily postponed the execution. Judge Togliatti said she was “loath to stop” Dozier’s execution, but she did so because she was concerned about the untested and controversial drug protocol that would be used to put him to death. She wanted to give the state Supreme Court a chance to evaluate.

From my perspective as a scholar of capital punishment, Nevada’s new drug protocol sheds a glaring light on the troubled state of lethal injections in the United States. It also raises some serious ethical questions.

Lethal injection’s crisis

The first lethal injection protocol was developed by Oklahoma’s medical examiner, Jay Chapman, in the late 1970s. Back then, Oklahoma was looking for an alternative to electrocution, which was considered inhuman and brutal.

The protocol Chapman developed called for the use of three drugs: The first, sodium thiopental, would anesthetize inmates and put them to sleep before the lethal drugs were administered. The second drug, pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant, was meant to render the inmate unable to show pain. The third drug, potassium chloride, led to a cardiac arrest and eventual death. This protocol soon became the standard and was adopted by all death penalty states — now numbering at 31.

However, by the start of this decade, pharmaceutical companies, “citing either moral or business reasons,” refused to allow their products to be used in executions.

The difficulty of securing the drugs that had been part of the standard protocol led death penalty states to experiment with many different drugs in many different combinations.

States likes Alabama and Arkansas, for example, maintained the three-drug protocol but replaced sodium thiopental in the standard drug cocktail with midazolam or pentobarbital, which doctors normally use as sedatives or for anesthesia. Other states, including Arizona and Ohio, started using a two-drug protocol, while a few, such as Georgia, Missouri and South Dakota, adopted a single drug.

Nevada’s new protocol involves a three-drug combination — the sedative diazepam (better known as Valium), the muscle relaxant and paralytic cisatracurium and the opioid fentanyl.

My research on methods of execution reveals that this combination of drugs has never been used in an execution.

What is the problem with this?

Execution by a lethal injection, even when it follows the standard protocol, is a surprisingly complicated procedure. Finding usable veins and getting the drug dosages right has proved to be particularly difficult. As I found out, it has often been an unreliable method of execution. Since its introduction, 7 percent of all lethal injections have been botched.

Those complications and difficulties increase when states try out new, untested drugs or drug combinations. Convicts have taken a leading role in opposing such experimentation. In February 2017, a death row inmate in Alabama appealed to the United States Supreme Court saying that he preferred death by firing squad to an injection of midazolam. While it recognized lethal injection’s history of problems, the majority held that since Alabama did not offer the firing squad as an execution method, his preference could not be honored. In a dissenting view, however, Justice Sonya Sotomayor called the use of new drugs in lethal injection the “most cruel experiment yet.”

Nevada’s Dozier too has said that he is opposed to “the state’s plan to kill him using a drug protocol that has never been used in an execution.”

There are other troubling issues as well. Using fentanyl, a drug that is killing thousands of Americans annually during the current opioid crisis, is horrifying, to say the least.

In addition, figuring out the right dosage of diazepam and fentanyl in Nevada’s new protocol will not be easy. And if this is not done correctly, Dozier could even wake up in the middle of the execution, as Susi Vassallo, a New York University professor of emergency medicine, has written on lethal injection notes. In the words of Judge Togliatti, he could be “aware of pain” and struggle to breathe.

Employing the powerful paralytic cisatracurium in this new drug protocol raises other ethical concerns.

If the combination of diazepam and fentanyl fails to work, cisatracurium will prevent Dozier from signaling to his executioners that they are botching the execution even as it happens. As David Waisel, an anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, claimed, “Cisatracurium can hide signs of inadequate anesthesia.” That is its only purpose.

In other lethal injection protocols, the muscle relaxant was also designed to stop the heart. Thus, those who conduct the execution and those who witness it will not be able to see the visible signs of Dozier’s suffering if it occurs.

Do citizens have a duty?

In my view, if Nevada and other death penalty states insist on experimenting with new drugs to keep the machinery of death running, citizens and government officials alike need to take responsibility to prevent any cruelty.

Writing about the use of the guillotine in France more than half a century ago, Albert Camus, philosopher, author and journalist, said,

“Society must display the executioner’s hands on each occasion, and require the most squeamish citizens to look at them, as well as those who, directly or remotely, have supported the work of those hands from the first.”

While lethal injection is different from the guillotine, in modern times the imperative remains the same.

Austin Sarat, Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College

How the GOP tax bill will destroy the finances of average Americans

(Credit: AP Photo/Seth Perlman)

The House and Senate Republican tax bills continue the GOP’s war on financially vulnerable Americans, underscoring yet again that the GOP will stop at nothing to take away benefits from any person, in any state, who might vote blue.

Both chambers’ slightly differing proposals eliminate the current federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes, hitting hard at blue high-tax states such as New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California, and amounting to a big transfer of wealth to lower-tax red-state America. In addition, the mean-spirited and brazenly partisan fine print would deny deductions for fire and earthquake victims (California), but keep them for hurricane losses (Florida and Texas).

But most of all, the poster child for the GOP’s latest version of “I’ve got mine, go get yours” public policy is the House bill’s proposal to end a federal income tax deduction for medical expenses if those costs exceed 10 percent of one’s adjusted gross income. Should that measure, or some version of it, emerge in the final bill—such as imposing a cap limiting deductions — it would be devastating to households with disabled family members or those who incur high medical costs, such as seniors or children.

“By taking away medical deductions from personal income taxes, the Republican proposal would hurt older citizens with greater medical needs, people with disabilities and chronic medical conditions, and families with children who have congenital or genetic disorders and disabilities,” said a fact sheet from Sen. Bob Casey, D-PA, the top Democrat on the Senate Special Committee on Aging. “Almost 8.8 million households claimed the medical deduction in 2015. The average deduction claimed was close to $10,000 and the cost of deducting long-term care could be ten times that amount.”

The real-life implications of ending this deduction would be nightmarish for people with disabilities, seniors facing mounting chronic conditions, their families and caregivers, noted Elizabeth Picciuto in tThe Daily Beast.

“Depending on individual circumstances, people who pay out-of-pocket for personal care assistants and durable medical equipment would be among those experiencing the most calamitous repercussions,” she wrote. “Someone who needs a new power wheelchair to get to work and recreational events may have to fork over tens of thousands of dollars. A caregiver who can only maintain a full-time career if she hires a personal care assistant to provide care for an aging parent may be forced to quit her job. A disabled person who can live independently in the community so long as he has a personal care assistant may have to live in a nursing home instead.”

These scenarios are exactly the opposite of what the Trump administration’s salespeople are saying in their scripted appearances across America.

“President Trump believes the time has come to cut taxes across the board for working families, small businesses and family farms,” Vice President Mike Pence said at a tax forum on Friday in Plainfield, Indiana, his home state. “Congress is making steady progress on what President Trump believes will be nothing short of a ‘middle-class miracle.’”

“It’s going to be tax cuts that’s focused on working families, small businesses and family farms,” he continued. “It’s going to be tax cuts that are focused on making American businesses more competitive by lowering the corporate tax rate in America so companies here in Indiana and around this country can compete with companies anywhere in the world.”

The Senate Special Committee on Aging Democratic staff have looked at how the proposed tax bills, in tandem with the GOP’s budget plan, would impact the healthcare expenses of typical households. It would not be a miracle, but a medical, emotional and fiscal disaster, depending on one’s personal health and savings, because Republicans want to offset their $1.5 trillion tax cut by cutting about the same amount from government healthcare safety nets for seniors and the most vulnerable.

“This tax scheme is part of a two-step plan: cut taxes for the wealthy now and pay for tax cuts later,” the Senate Democratic analysis said. “The Republican tax plan increases the deficit by $1.5 trillion, and the Republican budget plan would cut approximately $1 trillion from Medicaid [the state-run program for low-income people, including those receiving Obamacare assistance] and $470 billion from Medicare [the federal healthcare program for those age 65 and older].”

“To realize these cuts, Medicaid per-capita caps or block grants could be instituted, requiring states to increase taxes or cut needed care, like nursing home services and home care,” the Senate analysis continued. “Proposals to cut benefits or shift higher health care costs to older adults and people with disabilities could also be used to pay for tax cuts, such as turning Medicare into a voucher program, raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67, or increasing cost-sharing.”

The GOP’s tax-cut salesman like Pence are talking in broad strokes with bumper-sticker generalities. They know that’s not how government programs work. In real life, these programs are interconnected and layered, especially when it comes to taxes and healthcare. The GOP knows what it is doing and wants to gut federal social safety nets or force states to pay for these programs — especially blue states.

This juncture is where the GOP tax proposals and budget plan are particularly insidious. The GOP proposal to end the local and state deduction would not just raise taxes for residents of those states. (The House bill caps it at $10,000; the Senate bill ends it). Ending this deduction in tandem with a GOP budget that reeled in federal safety nets would leave the hardest-hit states facing additional local tax increases to keep current government-supported services.

“Removing the deduction would make it harder for states to raise revenues, further squeezing already tight budgets that help pay for Medicaid, education, transportation, and other local services important to older Americans, people with disabilities, and families,” the Senate Democratic analysis said.

If states don’t raise taxes to make up this loss — and nobody in power in blue California proposed that earlier this year when the GOP was pushing its Obamacare repeal — then families would pay.

People in affected states would be left with no choice but to tap life savings — many of which were set aside in pre-tax accounts, the Senate analysis said, which would then be subject to taxes. Thus, if the GOP tax plan and budget become reality, it would not be a “middle-class miracle.” It would become a middle-class bludgeoning.

“If older Americans and individuals with disabilities can’t deduct their medical expenses, many will likely need to draw down more resources from tax-deferred accounts,” the Senate analysis said. “Distribution from this type of account is considered income. The more income reported, the more an individual’s Social Security benefit could be taxed.”

Congressional Republicans are so desperate for a political victory built around their pledge to cut corporate taxes that they are doing exactly what they did in last summer’s Obamacare debacle: throwing anyone who might be served by federal safety nets — people they assume are more likely to vote for Dems—under the bus. They are also trying to seize tax revenue from blue states to send to red states.

However, anyone with an elderly family member who has serious medical needs or a disabled relative or child with chronic conditions is about to get slammed — if these tax and budget plans pass as is.

It remains to be seen if the Democrats will mount as forceful and personally resonant an opposition as they did with Obamacare, where House members noted how many tens of thousands of people in Republican districts would be hurt if the GOP’s bill passed. But the Democratic staff analysis by the Senate Special Committee on Aging suggests that the party grasps the big picture and how harsh it is.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including America’s democracy and voting rights. He is the author of several books on elections and the co-author of Who Controls Our Schools: How Billionaire-Sponsored Privatization Is Destroying Democracy and the Charter School Industry (AlterNet eBook, 2016).

“Black-ish” grandma Jenifer Lewis confronts her sex assaulter

Jenifer Lewis on "black-ish" (Credit: ABC/Eric McCandless)

“It’s been going on since the dawn of time,” singer and actor Jenifer Lewis told me on “Salon Talks” of sexual misconduct in Hollywood.

Lewis has been an entertainer for decades, first on Broadway, and then in hundreds of appearances in TV and film. She currently plays the spirited grandmother Ruby Johnson on the ABC sitcom “Black-ish.” Lewis is also the author of a new book “The Mother of Black Hollywood: A Memoir.”

On “Salon Talks,” she commented on the flood of sexual harassment coming from Hollywood. “All I can say about that is I’m so proud of all the men and women who are coming forward,” Lewis said. “You know these men are so sick, and women, too. They gotta go get help.”

She continued, “A sexual addiction is one thing, evil is another.” Lewis was candid in her book about her own sex addiction as a young entertainer. “Unfortunately most of these men are evil, but mostly sick,” she said. “They can’t stop themselves, and you know, that’s a disease. And if we don’t speak up, it will continue.”

Lewis speaks from experience: “My whole thing in the book is we are as sick as our secrets.” In her memoir, she describes her own encounter with sexual violence growing up. Watch the video above to hear Lewis talk about confronting her abuser.

And, watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook for more on how Lewis talked herself out of a rape and her experiences playing a mother on-screen.

Tune into SalonTV’s live shows, “Salon Talks” and “Salon Stage,” daily at noon ET / 9 a.m. PT and 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT, streaming live on Salon and on Facebook.

WTF is wrong with Roy Moore?

Roy Moore (Credit: Getty/Scott Olson)

Roy Moore, who was a West Point classmate of mine, was elected twice as Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, first in 2000, then again in 2012. He was removed from office by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary, first in 2003 for defying a court order to remove a stone monument displaying the Ten Commandments from his courthouse, and the second time in 2016 for defying a court order to implement same-sex marriage in the State of Alabama.

Before the voters of Alabama sent Roy Moore to the state capital twice; before Roy Moore took the position that the freedom of religion clause of the First Amendment applied only to Christians; before Roy Moore announced that Keith Ellison, who was elected to Congress from Minnesota, should be barred from taking office because he is a Muslim; before Roy Moore made numerous speeches promoting the conspiracy theory that President Obama was secretly a Muslim and was not born in the United States and was not qualified to be President; before Roy Moore rejected the theory of evolution, saying “we came from a snake? No I don’t believe that.”; before Roy Moore announced on national television that homosexual acts should be made “illegal”; before Roy Moore called for impeaching judges who issued rulings supporting homosexuals and same sex marriage; before Roy Moore announced that “transgender people don’t have rights”; before Roy Moore announced  that the attacks of 9-11 were “punishment from God”; before Roy Moore said that the shootings at Sandy Hook, which killed 20 children and eight adults, happened “because we’ve forgotten the law of God”; before Roy Moore told Time magazine that NFL players taking a knee during the National Anthem “is against the law, you know that? It was a act of Congress that every man stand and put their hand over their heart. That’s the law.”; before Roy Moore called pre-school “totalitarianism”; before Roy Moore argued in a column for WND.com that God is the “sovereign source of our law”; before Roy Moore gave a speech in Mississippi arguing that “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” came from the Christian God and that “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures”; before Roy Moore began running for Senator from Alabama, he parked his car next to a dumpster behind the Olde Hickory House Restaurant in Gadsden, Alabama one night in 1977, and according to a statement by Beverly Young Nelson, who was a 16-year-old girl at the time, he sexually assaulted her by groping her breasts and grabbing her by the neck and attempting to force her head into his crotch.

With everything else Roy Moore has done and said in his life that argues against electing him to the United States Senate, what have we ended up talking about? Moore’s sexual transgressions against teenage girls that happened some 40 years ago. Indeed, with every passing day, we learn more and more about the citizens of the state of Alabama who have known exactly who Roy Moore is, and they haven’t done a thing about it. On Monday, The New Yorker and AL.com, an Alabama news website, both published deeply reported stories about Moore’s reputation in Gadsden, Alabama, (where he was an Assistant District Attorney) for pursuing teenage girls at high school football games, in restaurants, and on Friday and Saturday nights at a local mall where teens were known to hang out. In fact, The New Yorker reported that “Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls.” AL.com reported that “Roy Moore’s penchant for flirting with teen girls was ‘common knowledge’ and ‘not a big secret’ around Gadsden.”

Moore was also accused in a Washington Post story last week of sexually assaulting Leigh Corfman. It was two years after the assault on Beverly Young Nelson when in 1979, he picked up 14-year-old Corfman in his car outside of her home and drove her to his house and took off his clothes, felt her breasts and tried to make her touch his penis. Moore was also accused by three other teenage girls, then 16, 17 and 18, of flirting with them repeatedly and pursuing them for “dates.” (The age of consent is 16 in Alabama. The drinking age at the time was 19.) Two of the girls reported that he picked them up at the same mall in Gadsden he had been banned from in the late 70s and early 80s. One of them, Gloria Thacker Deason, said that Moore picked her up after football games where she was a cheerleader and that on their “dates,” he gave her cocktails and Mateus Rose wine.  

Alabama hasn’t had much of a problem with Moore. He was running 11 points ahead in his race for the Senate the day before the story broke, and a poll over the weekend had 37 percent of evangelicals more likely to vote for Moore after hearing revelations of his sexual misconduct.

I didn’t know Roy Moore well when we were cadets. I was aware that he had a reputation at West Point as a stickler for the rules. Later, in the Army, as a Military Police company commander in Vietnam, his troops called him “Captain America” because he was so strict about rules of behavior and appearance. In a biography he wrote, Moore claimed that he slept on sand bags in Vietnam because he was afraid he would be “fragged” by one of his men rolling a grenade under his canvas cot. At West Point, we used to call guys like Moore straight arrows.

That was the Roy Moore we knew as cadets, the Roy Moore despised by his fellow MPs in Vietnam. But all the while, there was another Roy Moore, a man who espoused strict fundamentalist religious beliefs while concealing his appetite for teenage girls, including underage girls. According to the reports we have so far, he “dated” and sexually assaulted teenage girls over at least a three year period, from 1977 to 1979. The New Yorker reported that people who hung out at the Gadsden mall and mall employees remember him pursuing teenage girls there through “the early eighties,” so there is a chance that Moore’s pursuit of teenage girls went on for nearly a decade. (Moore got married in 1985.) Something tells me there are more tales about Roy Moore and teenage girls that will be coming out of Alabama.

Moore has mounted a peculiar defense since the charges first surfaced last week. Appearing on the Sean Hannity radio show, Moore admitted that after returning home from the military, “I dated a lot of young ladies.” Asked if it was his habit to date teenage girls, Moore paused before he answered, “not generally.” By Monday, Moore was claiming that he didn’t know either Leigh Corfman, the 14 year old he sexually assaulted, or Beverly Young Nelson, the 16 year old he attempted to rape.

Moore appeared before the press with his wife at his side and said, “I want to make it perfectly clear, the people of Alabama know me, they know my character, they know what I’ve stood for in the political world for over 40 years. And I can tell you without hesitation this is absolutely false. I never did what she said I did. I don’t even know the woman. I don’t know anything about her.” His claims rang hollow, however, after Beverly Young Nelson produced her 1977 high school yearbook, which Moore had inscribed, “To a sweeter more beautiful girl I could not say Merry Christmas. Christmas 1977. Love, Roy Moore, DA.” Below the inscription, Moore wrote “Olde Hickory House.” Nelson said Moore had asked if he could write in her yearbook one day when he saw it on the counter of the restaurant where she was working a shift as a waitress. This week, Moore claimed that he never went to the Olde Hickory House restaurant and doubted it even existed.  Reporters found numerous ads for the restaurant in old issues of the local newspaper.  

By denying the claims of the women who have come forth, Moore is calling them liars. On Saturday at a campaign appearance, Moore called the claims being made by the women “fake news” and said the Democrats and the Republican establishment would “lie, cheat and steal” to keep him from being elected. This statement had a peculiar ring to me as a West Point graduate, because Moore used words taken straight from the Honor Code to attack his opponents and accuse them of lying. The West Point Honor Code states, “A cadet will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do.” As cadets, we were taught this was the bedrock upon which the Academy stood. Violating the Honor Code had only one punishment: expulsion.

Moore reached back over 50 years to call upon the words of the West Point Honor Code to defend himself against charges of sexual assault and attempted rape of teenage girls and to call his accusers liars. Even reading this as psychological projection doesn’t do justice to Moore’s desperate reversal of the Honor Code of West Point, using its words against the women he damaged as teenage girls.

Roy Moore and Harvey Weinstein, and the others who have been accused recently of sexual harassment and assault, are two sides of the same male coin. While Weinstein and others like Louis C.K. and Kevin Spacey have been supporters of liberal causes and women’s rights, Moore and political commentator Mark Halperin have supported Donald Trump and conservative causes of various stripes. What they did to women, however, has no political cast. Sexual harassment, sexual assault and attempted rape are crimes. When they are committed by men against others much younger and far less powerful than themselves, they are especially egregious.

Real courage has been shown by those who were assaulted, abused and harassed in coming forward. If my guess is correct, we’re going to hear more and more in days to come. Attorney Paula Cobia, who represents one of the women in Alabama who has accused Roy Moore, promised as much when she went on Don Lemon and said, “You will never have the benefit of our silence again.”

Moore has attacked the women accusing him for waiting 40 years before speaking out. The people attempting to defend Spacey and Louis C.K. have attacked their accusers for the same reason. (I couldn’t find any defenders of Harvey Weinstein.) When it comes to this stuff, it doesn’t matter how long it took for the truth to come out or whether your politics are red or blue. What counts is the yellow stripe running down the backs of bullies and sexual predators. Trust me, Roy: stealing the West Point Honor Code to defend yourself and crying persecution and quoting the Bible isn’t going to work. We know a coward when we see one.

In Trump’s America, Blake Shelton is your “Sexiest Man Alive”

Blake Shelton (Credit: AP/Jordan Strauss)

On Tuesday, People magazine announced that it was granting its hoary, issue-selling honorific “Sexiest Man Alive” to country singer and star of NBC’s “The Voice,” Blake Shelton. In response, the native Oklahoman said he couldn’t “wait to shove this up [‘The Voice’ co-star Adam Levine’s] ass.” Swell.

Regardless of how hollow the very idea of granting the title of “sexiest” anything to anyone at any time is — if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, sexiness is somehow even more so — it was a particularly problematic pick for the checkout-rack rag.

Shelton’s specific, debatable physical charms and his bro-ish, recovering meathead comportment and personality are very much an acquired taste that has turned many, many noses as we’ve learned from the swift internet reaction to his installation as the nation’s nominally hottest fella. That’s a matter of personal apetites. Yet, there are there are significant cultural and political questions here — questions that have taken center stage following the election of President Donald Trump.

First off, Shelton, through no fault of his own, is the 27th white man declared by People to the the “Sexiest Man Alive.” This would be fine except for the the fact that there have been only 29 men granted the title in total (while the honorific has been around for 32 years, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Richard Gere have all won more than once). The profoundly charming Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, whose parents are of black and Samoan descent, got the nod in 2016. The undeniably hot Denzel Washington, who is African American, was deemed sexiest in 1996.

At at time where inclusion is in the foreground — and under attack by the party that currently controls all three branches of government — and a rising generation of stars of color seems more relevant and, well, sexy within the contemporary cultural zeitgeist, it’s an off-rhythm pick in the broader context. Of course, People has its own specific audience to cater to, one that may not care all that much for what the kids or the coastals talk about. Regardless, the decision to offer another white man two-inch headlines for being moderately okay in a few limited respects lands with a certain thud.

But none of that is specific to Shelton. His own history, however, is.

Shelton has used his Twitter account to forward some fairly unenlightened comments that show tendencies towards homophobia, sexism, xenophobia and other unsavory positions. He’s expressed his desire for an underage Dakota Fanning, wished aloud that the person in the hotel room next to his would “learn some English so I would at least know what he’s planning to bomb!!,” and offered up the anti-queer jokes below.

Here are Some more extremely homophobic tweets by @BlakeShelton . He’s disgusting. pic.twitter.com/Qo8UwXQfqF

— THE MUSIC TEA (@MusicFactsTea) August 13, 2016

None of these are particularly outstandingly horrible things compared to, say, white men walking through the streets of Charlottesville with Tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us,” but they don’t have to be. They’re part and parcel of a long tradition of blithe, relaxed intolerance that assumes not only the worst of anyone who falls outside the norm, but presumes that everyone white, straight and male agrees with those assumptions. It seems People’s choice for “the sexiest man” demonstrates a very unsexy easiness with, or unawareness of, the supremacy.

And then there’s the overall problem that, y’know, maybe we’re just not up for declaring any man — be he a puffy game-show host or lithe Oscar-winning actor — the “sexiest” at this present moment. Right now, there’s just no escaping the damage some men do with their libidos. While, yes, most of us — men, women and nonbinary, queers and straights — still enjoy contemplating a good, sexy guy of own choosing in our own time and way, reinforcing standards of male desirability in the media is nauseating when accompanied by headlines that read “denies allegations of sexual abuse.”

But there’s a greater turn-off at work here.

All of the things we can see with People’s pick — the reinforcement and celebration of sometimes-toxic cisgender male sexuality, the elevation of an underwhelming white man to a position of public acclaim, the ignoring of people of color, the positive positioning of a regressive personality, the top-down attempts to prescribe a series of cultural and social norms that are past their expiration date on a popular level, the privileging of “heartland” tastes and values, the trumpeting of a reality-TV star — are par for the horrible course in the America that voted Trump into office.

That’s not to say Shelton, a roundly passable bro with some easy charms, is in any way as noxious or dangerous as our current commander-in-chief. But it’s easy to say that at least some of the same impulses and systems that compelled the media to give Trump the coverage that helped get his campaign rolling are at play here.

Here there are echoes of the reactionary tendency of some conservative (or even mainstream) outlets and individuals to grab on to objectively underwhelming totems of the supremacy in response to progressive ideas and items that challenge the entrenched hierarchy with excellence. “Blackish” is a hit? Let’s rally for “Last Man Standing.” Trump is under fire? Let’s vote for Roy Moore. Black people are beginning to dominate pop culture and the Rock was the “Sexiest Man Alive” in 2016? Let’s all get behind the dopey, Walmart-approved Blake Shelton in 2017.

In that tendency is the frightening prospect that for every step forward America makes towards a better, more colorful, more accepting future, there’s a looming regression not just to the mean, but to something even less worthy. Look at history of “Sexiest Man Alive” and you’ll see that in our polychromic 2017, we’re putting a crown on the least popularly attractive, least talented dude since the magazine chose Harry Hamlin in 1987 (and that guy’s cheekbones could cut glass).

Okay, so maybe it’s unfair to lay this all at the feet of Shelton and People. Maybe it’s unfair to politicize this. Yet, the conservative-directed culture wars that gave birth to the Trump presidency have forced us all into a very unfair zero-sum game with clearly drawn sides. In it, the singer and the magazine may very well be on the wrong one.

Look, whether you think Shelton is fire in bluejeans or not, on these terms, his installment as America’s official supreme plate of beefcake is no turn-on.