Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 247

Virginia school board candidate targets high school student in transphobic campaign ad

John Kinchen (Credit: Facebook/John Kinchen for School Board, Campbell County VA)

As if politics in 2017 couldn’t get any weirder, a local school board candidate in Campbell County, Virginia, released a campaign ad in which he targeted a high school student — though not directly by name — and went on a strange transphobic rant, making heavy use of right-wing dog-whistles.

John Kinchen, a Republican-endorsed Campbell County school board candidate, posted the ad to his campaign’s Facebook page and quickly saw a strong public backlash. “I am concerned about our Campbell County values in our schools, and how we are communicating those values to our children,” Kinchen starts. Kinchen then quickly begins explaining how “transgender issues” are something that “we don’t need to make an issue.” “We have more important issues, or ‘real issues,’ to deal with,” Kinchen insists, while “real issues” in scare quotes flashes on the screen.

In the video, Kinchen makes reference to a Brookville High School student, Mikel Jenkins, by reading a page from the school’s yearbook featuring Jenkins. In the video, Kinchen says:

Several students were given focus for a specific ability, talent, or achievement, which is normal for any yearbook. Each was given a two-page spread and a nice paragraph describing their accomplishment, but on pages 18 and 19, one student was highlighted for staying true to himself. This means wearing makeup and dressing in feminine clothing. He says, ‘I wish people would teach their children to be open minded about things because that would save a lot of problems.’ He goes on to say, ‘If I could do one thing to change the world, it would be to teach acceptance.’

Kinchen cites the language in Jenkins’ 2-page yearbook spread as an example of how words like “acceptance” are “code words” used by “liberal activists.” “This is what is going on right here… today it is seeking approval, tomorrow it is transgender education, because it is currently being accepted and promoted in the schools.”

Jenkins, however, is not even transgender.

“I like to wear makeup. I identify myself as a male,” Jenkins told a local ABC News affiliate.

Several comments on the video also criticize Kinchen for targeting Jenkins, and the student agreed.

Brookville H.S. Student Mikel Jenkins (left, w/ mom) says he was singled out & inaccurately labeled as transgender instead of gay in video. pic.twitter.com/1O6s9F43PD

— Valencia E. Jones (@vjreports3) November 7, 2017

“I’m glad it was me, because I’m accepting of myself and I’m strong,” Jenkins said.

In the video, Kinchen explained that his religious views served as a motive for his reasoning.

“It begins with persuasion then acceptance then approval where leaders and influencers condone the behavior and that way of thinking,” Kinchen said. “The leaders of the school should have given more guidance to this publication. But by allowing such a piece they have tacitly condoned this way of thinking and this lifestyle. Lastly, once these ideas find their way into approval, it is normalized.”

The grueling, cringe-worthy video is nearly four minutes in length and, in the end, makes little. But it follows a pretty normal right-wing playbook: take those who express some sort of difference (in this case it is presentation of gender), suggest that they have an agenda that they are trying to impose on a tight-knit community, and then force the idea of said group as a big “other” that is inherently hostile or different to the community’s values. The video itself is full of these sorts of right-wing dog whistles, phrases like “liberal activists,” “common sense,” and “homosexual marriage equality” that subtly marginalize the LGBTQ community and mark them as inherently odd.

“These are not national issues, these are local issues that affect… our society here in Campbell County,” Kinchen concludes. “Join with me to reaffirm our values.”

There’s no guidebook to help the unfaithful

(Credit: Getty Images)

Is it easier to leave or to be left? It’s an ongoing debate, one that has no real end because every partnership is so unique. What’s not debatable is that there’s a particular of loneliness that comes with being broken up with, and there’s another kind of loneliness that comes with being so unhappy in a relationship that you end it.

In this episode of “The Lonely Hour,” writer Samantha Silva talks about her loneliness, as the leaver.

“Well, five years ago, after 23 years with my husband and in the middle of raising three children, I fell in love with a man who was a very good friend of ours, a very close friend of my husband’s and the husband of my close friend,” she told the show. “It was a spectacular betrayal. We live in a small enough city that these were two very public marriages, a long strong mutual friendship, close-knit friends and five kids between us. I was told it was like I had dropped a bomb in the middle of two families and left everyone running for their lives.”

“When you find yourself in this position quite unexpectedly, I discovered there are hundreds of books and articles about how to survive infidelity, how to rebuild your marriage, and remake your life when your spouse cheats, but there is nothing, no guidebook at all for the unfaithful, for the person who actually cheats and decides to leave,” she said. “After much thought, I thought mine should be called ‘This Is the Memoir of a Lying, Cheating, Wretched B**ch W**re of a Woman Who Annihilated the Universe as We Knew It.'”

Of course, Samantha anticipated that ending her marriage would be difficult, but she decided that staying in it was ultimately more so. What surprised her, even though she lives in a small, tightly-knit community in the Midwest, was the degree to which she was shunned. Yes, her marriage was a high-profile one; yes, she and her now ex-husband have children together. And what’s more, the two couples involved in this scenario were longtime friends. But people who Samantha had thought were her people straight-up rejected her. My friends love me — warts and all, so to speak. Samantha thought hers did, too.

“What I didn’t anticipate at all was the kind of public shunning that I experienced,” she said. “People averting their eyes in the grocery store, crossing the street to avoid me, not answering my emails and phone calls, completely ghosting me, unfriending me, even abandoning games of Words With Friends, mid-game, and never playing with me again, telling lies about me, telling things, saying things that are false, spreading rumors.”

Samantha said it was like a real-life enactment of “The Scarlet Letter.”

“My best friend told me, well, you’re just a pimped-up, postmodern Hester Prynne,” she said. “It was really stunning to me . . . I knew it was meant to be punishing and isolating and in some ways it was meant to annihilate me, to cast me out, to make me a pariah, to remove me from the social fabric so I was no longer a threat to it, and it was very effective. It was hard to live in a place that I’d loved, among people that I’d known and loved.”

Listen to find out how things shook out for Samantha:

The iPhone X’s new camera has many people feeling really insecure

(Credit: Getty/Justin Sullivan)

Some people feel that the front-facing camera on the new iPhone X is capable of taking such high quality pictures that it’s making them brutally self-conscious.

As Apple acolytes know, iPhone X, which launched last week, comes with a better screen than the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. It also supports the new Portrait Lighting camera effects, unlike iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, according to The Verge.

TIME Magazine elaborated:

Apple’s Portrait Mode, which isolates a picture’s subject and artificially blurs the background, has been moved from beta to the primetime. A new feature called Portrait Lighting imitates studio lighting setups, with options for contour lighting, stage lighting and more. The lighting effects can be applied either while taking an image or after the fact.

The X’s dual-lens rear camera and its video recording capability, are the same as on the 8 Plus. However the minor difference is that the X has “dual optical image stabilization,” which just means it works on both rear lenses, while the 8 Plus only has “optical image stabilization,” according to Macworld.

But this is all about that front-facing camera, which is also considerably improved. If you want to get all techie with it, the specs on the iPhone X’s camera include 12MP wide-angle and telephoto cameras, with a wide-angle ƒ/1.8 aperture, and a telephoto of ƒ/2.4 aperture, optical zoom, digital zoom up to 10x, Portrait mode, Portrait Lighting, dual optical image stabilization, a six‑element lens, a quad-LED True Tone flash with Slow Sync, a panorama mode and sapphire crystal lens cove according to Apple.

For the rest of us Luddites, all those numbers and branded terms mean that, more or less, the iPhone X’s camera is one of the best on the current smartphone market (the exception perhaps of the Google Pixel 2). For those of us who have issues with the way we look, however, it means that taking selfies is a new kind of nightmare.

Over the last few days, iPhone X users have been griping all over Twitter about the new device’s tendency to capture them, warts and all. “But seriously the camera on the iPhone X makes me 100x more ugly,” one user tweeted.

But seriously the camera on the iPhone X makes me 100x more ugly.

— Trevor Velasco (@Tvelasco34) November 6, 2017

“why the iphone x camera quality better than my actual eyes,” another wrote.  

why the iphone x camera quality better than my actual eyes https://t.co/FNjm9c4lsK — GRACE MORRIS (@garcemorris) November 4, 2017

“iPhone X front camera is too good for my mug,” another tweeted.

iPhone X front camera is too good for my mug pic.twitter.com/e5BYKWqt7R

— COURTNEY ‍♀️ (@hufflepuggs) November 6, 2017

“me using the iphone x camera for the first time,” a user wrote, with a less-than-flattering picture of Spongebob that’s way too close to his face.

me using the iphone x camera for the first time pic.twitter.com/VqFVV2kXy5

— nico lort (@lordnicolass) November 6, 2017

“you can’t look ugly in the front facing iphone x camera if you can’t afford the iphone x in the first place,” one person tweeted.

you can’t look ugly in the front facing iphone x camera if you can’t afford the iphone x in the first place pic.twitter.com/fkGFQnX7Cf

— ali (@unlitblurry) November 7, 2017

Even if the majority of these cries from users are sarcastic — which they likely are — complaining that the features of a $1,000 tech product are too good is still one of the more pronounced #FirstWorldProblems to date. We love it.

New report suggests Trump may have lied about ties to mob-linked Russian businessman

(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)

President Donald Trump has long insisted that he doesn’t know Felix Sater, a Russian businessman with a number of shady ties to organized crime. Yet a new report suggests that Trump and Sater not only know each other but hung out together just as the former was celebrating his upset victory in the 2016 election.

Courtesy of GQ‘s account of Trump’s war room during election night:

11:55 P.M.—Among the well-wishers and Trump associates eager to join in the celebration is Felix Sater, a Russian-born entrepreneur and sometime business partner of Trump’s, who’s helped locate potential real estate deals in the former Soviet Union. (Since the election, Sater’s links to Russia have come under scrutiny as it’s been revealed that he offered, in 2015, to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin—one that he said could win Trump the White House. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Mr. Sater wrote to Trump’s lawyer.) . . .

From his home on Long Island, Sater orders a late-night ride from a car service. His destination: the invite-only victory party at the Midtown Hilton.

Trump has become notorious for downplaying his association with Sater. During a court deposition in 2013, Trump said, “I mean, I’ve seen him a couple of times; I have met him.” He was also reported as saying, “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.” This continued to be Trump’s position in 2015, when he responded to a question about Sater by saying, “Boy, I have to even think about it.”

Despite these denials, neither Donald Trump Jr. nor Ivanka Trump deny that they were personally escorted around Moscow by Sater. Sater has also claimed to have helped Trump with some of his business deals, even bragging in 2015, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.”

Trump’s Trojan Horse tax cut

The goal of Trump and the Republican leaders is to pull off a giant redistribution of over $1 trillion from the middle-class, working-class, and poor to the rich, who are already richer than ever.

They’re selling this to the public with a false claim that the middle-class will benefit from their tax cut plan. It’s a gigantic Trojan horse.

For most Americans, the proposed tax cuts are tiny and temporary. That’s right – temporary. They will shrink in just a few years. And some middle class Americans will actually get a tax increase.

Meanwhile, the top 1 percent will get a gigantic tax cut. The Tax Policy Center estimates that the current plan will save the bottom 80 percent between $50 and $450 in taxes per year, but that it saves each person in the top 1 percent an average of $129,000 a year. For people at the very top, like Trump himself, the tax cuts are humongous. And the corporations they own will also get a massive tax cut.

Republicans say economic “growth” will pay for the tax cuts, so there’s no need to cut social programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

But Republicans have just passed a budget that would cut nearly $1.5 trillion from Medicare and Medicaid to pay for these tax cuts. Pell Grants, housing assistance, and even cancer research are also on the chopping block.

Now, they say we shouldn’t take their budget resolution seriously. It was just a device to get the tax bill through the Senate with 51 votes.

But once these tax cuts are passed, the budget deficit will explode. The Tax Policy Center predicts that it will cut federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years.

When that happens, the only way out of the crisis will be something dramatic – exactly the cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and maybe even Social Security – that Republicans have wanted for years.

By this time, any talk of raising taxes on the rich will be dismissed.

Using the promise of middle-class tax cuts as a Trojan horse for a tax windfall for the rich and deep spending cuts is a tactic dating back to the Reagan administration.

But the version they’re aiming for now is “YUGE.”

We must see the strategy for what it is. And it must be stopped.

5 ways hard-right is fighting a fake war on Christmas

(Credit: AP/Kathy Willens/Shutterstock/Salon)

Bill O’Reilly, who paid $32 million to keep sexual harassment charges quiet, spent a significant amount of time pretending there is a war on Christmas. Over the course of several years, in the rare moments when he was not allegedly harassing women on his staff, O’Reilly was piously calling for more holiness in the holidays. His heir apparent in this charade is Donald Trump, who has also been accused of harassing multiple women, but who suddenly gets religion when he has a gullible listening audience. Last month Trump promised a room of religious zealots that, “We’re saying Merry Christmas again.” As if anyone had ever prevented anybody ever from saying those words.

In prior years, this fictional war has led easily fooled, overwhelmingly white conservatives to become indignant over Starbucks cups and factual Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets. Though it’s not even Thanksgiving yet, the outrage machine is already firing on at least two cylinders. Here are five ways Christians are fighting the totally imaginary war on Christmas.

1. Creating anti-inclusive wristbands and selling them for a profit.

The American Family Association is a hard-right Christian organization dedicated to “combating the homosexual agenda,” while showering praise on a man who brags about criminal sexual assault. Each year, the group is among the most deafening voices decrying the imaginary war on Christmas, and 2017 is no different. To those who are tired of the welcoming inclusiveness of the phrase “Happy Holidays,” the AFA offers its “Keep Christ in Christmas” wristband. “These wristbands are great conversation starters,” the site notes, which is true if you’re only looking to talk to other Christians with a persecution complex! The first hit . . . er, wristband is free but if you want more it’ll cost you, because capitalism is the reason for the season.

2. Insisting on putting up nativity scenes everywhere.

Fun fact: there’s a group called American Nativity Scene that has the singular goal of putting up (yep) nativity scenes “in every state capitol throughout the United States during the Christmas season.” It is helped in this endeavor, particularly on the legal front, by the Thomas More Society, a law firm whose main gig is fighting reproductive justice, but which also dabbles in the “free expression of religion in the public square.” (It is also about “restoring respect for marriage as the sacred union of one man and one woman” because one can multitask at being awful, apparently.) The collaborative duo buys and ships nativity sets to people willing to form a committee and go through the proper chain of protocols to display the scenes in their local statehouse. They’ve successfully placed nativity scenes in 14 state capitals, though they hope to add more to the list this year. It’s unclear who’s underwriting it all, but the group says the effort is funded by a “special benefactor/angel.”

3. Getting angry at children’s books.

The publisher describes the children’s parody book “Santa’s Husband” as a “a fresh twist on Kris Kringle” about “a black Santa, his white husband, and their life in the North Pole.” As you might guess, some people are going apeshit. Megyn “Santa Just Is White” Kelly is probably annoyed. And author Daniel Kibblesmith says that a broad coalition of right wingers have launched attacks on social media. In an interview with Vice, Kibblesmith said that outraged commenters have demanded he “stop rewriting history,” as if the book deviates from the biographical life details of a real person. Pearl-clutching conservatives have tweeted that the book ruins “an innocent childhood experience…[with] PC crap” and suggested Kibblesmith be “sued for defamation of character.” He has “even found his picture on a white supremacist’s blog trying to ‘out’ him as Jewish.” Snowflakes are easily triggered, it seems.

4. Making naughty and nice lists of stores based on how Christmasy they are.

The Liberty Counsel claims that in 2003, it began to notice that “people wanting to celebrate Christmas were told to sit down and be quiet.” (This has never actually happened.) In response to this fantasy, it began categorizing retailers as “nice” or “naughty,” with the latter category reserved for businesses that don’t remind customers they prioritize Christians all the time. The American Family Association maintains a similar list and invites its followers to rat out stores that aren’t Christmas-focused enough.

5. Making (reportedly) terrible movies.

Full transparency: I have not yet seen “Let There Be Light,” the “faith-based film” executive-produced by bloviating gas bag Sean Hannity, nor is there enough money currently in circulation to pay me to see it. The movie stars ex-Hercules actor Kevin Sorbo, on an apparent break from tweeting about how the Jews killed Jesus and calling black protesters “animals.” The holiday release reaches its giant closing scene on Christmas Eve, and credits roll to a soundtrack of children singing “Silent Night.” The New Yorker describes the film (the full plot of which sounds like formulaic Bible-beating pap) as “pious, xenophobic fun for the whole family”; the LA Times calls it “melodramatic” and “unevenly acted” with a “seeming fixation with the Islamic State”; and the Hollywood Reporter writes “even believers will find it unconvincing.”

Taxpayers are subsidizing hush money for sexual harassment and assault

(Credit: Getty/kali9)

Many of the recent stories about sexual abuse claims against disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly and other powerful actors, journalists and executives mention settlements either they or their employers made to silence women who accused them of misconduct.

These settlements often require alleged victims to sign a nondisclosure agreement — essentially a pledge of secrecy — in exchange for a cash payment. They are designed to keep the reputations of allegedly abusive high-flyers intact, an arrangement that can allow repeated wrongdoing.

As a law professor who focuses on white-collar crime, what I find striking about these contracts is how they can be treated as tax-deductible business expenses. That means American taxpayers are helping foot the bill for keeping despicable behavior in the shadows.

I don’t believe that secret payments to settle sexual abuse claims should be tax-deductible. Here’s why.

Secret settlements

Sexual harassment becomes a crime only when there is a nonconsensual touching or sexual contact that can be prosecuted.

Victims of sexual harassment in the workplace usually can pursue personal injury claims by seeking damages from the executive or colleague responsible for it — or their employer — to compensate for emotional distress and any physical injury the abuse caused. These cases are mostly litigated at the state level, if they ever reach a courtroom.

The broader cost of these confidential agreements to society is that they leave perpetrators free to prey on new victims who are unaware that they may be walking into a trap when they meet privately with a powerful executive or someone who simply has greater seniority and influence.

Some states have tried to stop or at least curb this practice.

For example, Florida’s Sunshine in Litigation Act prohibits courts from entering an order that conceals information related to a public hazard, which is defined as something or someone “that has caused and is likely to cause injury.”

Other states with anti-secrecy laws include Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, New York, Oregon and Georgia.

That kind of solution, however, only goes a short way toward protecting the public because it is limited to cases that go to court. For example, a former Weinstein Company employee withdrew her complaint to management without ever resorting to a legal filing by accepting a settlement in 2015. A total of eight women have collected between roughly US$80,000 and $150,000 each due to secret agreements not to disclose Weinstein’s alleged misconduct, The New York Times reported in October.

When settlements stave off the filing of a sexual harassment complaint in court, the agreements aren’t subject to mandates like Florida’s Sunshine in Litigation Act.

California State Sen. Connie Leyva plans to introduce a bill that would go even further. Her legislation would ban all secret nondisclosure agreements in financial settlements that arise from sexual harassment, assault and discrimination cases.

Ordinary business expenses

The payments associated with these settlements can be treated as a business expense. That means they are tax-deductible, as long as they are related to the conduct of the company’s ordinary operations.

Although it might seem odd to say that sexual harassment is within the realm of a company’s business, the many accusations against Weinstein involved encounters that were at least purportedly related to future movie productions.

Either an employer or the person accused of harassment can pay the money required by these settlements. In O’Reilly’s case, Fox has said it knew that he had reached a new settlement with an accuser before it renegotiated his contract earlier this year. Fox’s insistence that the company was unaware of the size of the settlement — $32 million — makes it clear that O’Reilly wrote the check.

Even the attorney’s fees for negotiating the settlement are deductible as another ordinary business expense.

Until about 50 years ago, payments related to violations of what the courts deemed violations of “public policy” were not tax-deductible. Congress changed that in 1969. Section 162 of the U.S. tax code now only explicitly prohibits the deduction of bribe payments, health care kickbacks, lobbying expenditures and any fines or penalties paid to the government for violating the law.

Just about everything else is deductible. But most victims of sexual harassment and abuse do not get a break. That’s because the law exempts payments only for physical injuries, not for payments related to emotional distress.

Who else gets to deduct their settlement payments for misconduct?

One good example is BP. The oil giant got to write off over $15 billion of its $20.8 billion settlement with the federal government over its massive Gulf Coast oil spill, allowing it to potentially shelter years of income from federal taxes.

Another is JP Morgan. Its $13 billion settlement for faulty mortgages allowed the company to deduct about $7 billion from its taxes. A similar settlement by Goldman Sachs for subprime mortgages it packaged into securities resulted in a $5 billion settlement of which over half was tax deductible.

Changing the law

One way to discourage corporate misconduct is to raise the cost of engaging in it.

Congress is now weighing whether to close many loopholes as part of a broad tax package. In my opinion, that makes this the ideal time to stop allowing deductions for secret settlements of sexual abuse claims from corporate or personal income taxes.

Ending this tax break would make this kind of confidentiality agreement more costly for perpetrators and the companies that let them off the hook. That would give corporate accountants and human resources departments a powerful incentive to root out the problem.

There are no surefire ways to end sexual harassment and assault in the workplace. But making it cost more to hide this misconduct might help make it less commonplace.

Peter J. Henning, Professor of Law, Wayne State University

Another American nightmare — and more cynical lies from gun cultists

A law enforcement officer helps a man change a flag to half-staff near the scene of the shooting at the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Nov. 6, 2017. (Credit: AP/Eric Gay)

On Sunday, Devin Patrick Kelley allegedly killed 26 people during a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas. He also wounded 20 others. On his personal Facebook profile, he displayed a picture of an AR-15-style assault rifle. This was the weapon of choice he used to kill 7 percent of the population in a town of only 362.

Because of this tragedy, it is now time to once again partake in a unique American ritual.

To participate, you will need a mass shooting bingo card. If you do not yet have one, it is readily available for free from various sites on the internet.

Your mass shooting bingo card lists various options for the narratives that are trotted out when a mass shooting occurs in the United States. For example, you will likely hear phrases such as “guns don’t kill people,” “don’t politicize a tragedy,” “it’s too soon to talk about gun control” and “pray for the victims.”

The mass shooting bingo game is a dreadful form of gallows humor. It is also an accurate representation of how mass murder by gun is all too often discussed in American society.

If a Muslim or someone of Arab or Middle Eastern ancestry had killed 26 white Christians in church, President Donald Trump would demand that the perpetrator be executed, describe him as human garbage and argue that “extreme vetting,” along with banning immigration from certain parts of the world, will keep Americans safe.

If a black person or another nonwhite person had killed 26 white Christians in church we would hear loud demands from Donald Trump, the Republican Party and the right-wing media to get tougher on crime, and complaints that somehow America’s police are unfairly restrained.

But if a white man such as Devin Kelley kills dozens of people at a church (or 58 at a country music concert), then it is somehow in poor taste to “politicize” such tragedies. That person is a “lone wolf.” He is not a terrorist. His actions are “outliers,” and perceived as unpreventable. He is described as mentally ill, or affected by other types of emotional or psychological problems.

Some would try to use creative math to deny or deflect from this fact, but white men and boys commit a disproportionate number of the mass shootings in America.

There will be no “extreme vetting” for white men who want to buy guns in America.

There also will be no practical limits on purchasing the military-style rifles that seem to be a favorite weapon for deranged individuals who want to commit mass murders, such as the one Sunday in Sutherland Springs or the one several weeks ago in Las Vegas.

Why? Because historically and through to the present, for white American men the gun is a birthright. It is a symbol, totem and means of enforcing group power and authority over others. Whoa to anyone who attempts to deny white American men this “sacred” privilege.

For too many Americans, the gun is God. The ammosexuals worship it.

In this religion, the National Rifle Association is the church hierarchy. The Republican Party is the rank-and-file clergy.

“Gun violence is the price of freedom” is the chorus of the hymn. The ambiguous words of the Second Amendment are holy scripture, to be interpreted only by the church fathers.

In this worldview, mass shootings are viewed as inexorable acts of God or nature. They are inevitable. The blood spilled is a painful gift that sustains the inviolate pact with the American Gun God. America is often described as a “Judeo-Christian” society. I have often wondered if perhaps tens of millions of Americans are really pagans at heart and the fetish object they worship is the gun. It is only through this logic that hundreds of mass shootings a year can result in no federal action that could make such crimes less likely. Only that logic can empower such myths as “gun laws only hurt the good guys” or sustain the illogical belief that the solution to gun violence is more guns.

Faith is a belief in that which cannot be proven by ordinary means. Faith is also the stuff of superstition and magical thinking. As such, the Republican Party’s approach to gun control is zealotry and religious mania. Their logic is unknowable to those us who are rational. That does nothing to stop the Gun God’s holy warriors from claiming many lives, the faithful and the infidel alike.

Far-right leaders have double standards for immigrants

(Credit: Getty/Spencer Platt)

The rise of right wing nationalism comes with a massive side dose of bad faith arguments. So argues Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of “Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy,” which examines the explosion of far-right anti-immigration politics in both Europe and the United States.

People like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are reactionaries, Polakow-Suransky told me on “Salon Talks,” but they like to hide behind liberal values like equality and secularism when launching attacks on Muslim immigrants.

“What these parties are doing, especially in France and Holland, is they’re telling gays, they’re telling feminists, and they’re telling Jews even, ‘We are the only ones who will protect you,” he said. “The threat all of you face is from Islam and Muslims and we’re the only party that can stand up to that.’”

These politicians want voters to believe they’re not neo-Nazis and skinheads, he continued, but in reality, they’re “weaponizing secularism to target a specific group.”

Polakow-Suransky, who is an Open Society Foundations fellow and has held previous positions as an op-ed editor at the New York Times and as a senior editor at Foreign Affairs, says he sees similarity in how “our president reacts to a horrible terrorist attack,” such as the murders in New York City on Halloween, and other crimes.

“You see a real gulf between the reactions to any crime perpetrated by an Islamic extremist and crimes committed by white nationalists or other groups,” Polakow-Suransky said. “I think that shows they’re targeting a specific group rather than talking about universal values that we all share.”

Watch our full “Salon Talks” conversation on Facebook.

Tune into Salon’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.

A matter of perspectives: “Mr. Robot” takes a long shot

Rami Malek and Carly Chaikin in "Mr. Robot" (Credit: USA/Michael Parmelee)

Viewing life and consciousness as another version of code is the only way the work makes sense to Elliot Alderson. The hero of “Mr. Robot” lives with a severe dissociative disorder that makes it difficult to interact with other people, or even to know if what or who he’s seeing is real.

The only entity he can trust is the audience, the invisible entity collectively confided in and referred to as his friend. Elliot, played by Rami Malek, trusts that we’re hovering just over his shoulder, listening in as he analyzes the bewildering, annoying behavior of those around him and wonders silently (and aloud to us) what his next move will be.

This approach adds a seductive intimacy to “Mr. Robot,” airing its third season episodes Wednesdays at 10 p.m. Eliot’s genius and his fractured psychological state allow series creator Sam Esmail to mold the USA drama’s narrative in ways that fascinate and challenge viewers — sometimes a bit too much, especially if you’re among those so frazzled and confused by season 2’s mind warp that you jumped ship.

But if you’re caught up with the story — and you should be if you’re still reading this, unless you want to be spoiled — prepare to be wildly rewarded with Wednesday night’s installment. In it, Esmail and the show’s director of photography, Tod Campbell, embed us even deeper with Elliot and Angela during a single-take episode aired without interruption.

“Point of view is incredibly important in any form of storytelling, but I think it’s particularly important here because we are very subjective in our filmmaking when it comes to perspective and point of view,” Esmail told Salon.

The single-take approach facilitates this, he added, because it enables the viewer to take each step with Elliot and others as they stumble upon several game-changing revelations. The title, “Eps3.4_runtime-error.r00,” refers to the standard protocol for code. For Elliot, it also sums up the average day for a corporate drone on auto-pilot: “When code runs,” he says, “it should run straight through without interruption until all of its tasks have been completed.”

The moment he senses something is off marks a turning point in a season that has layered the characters’ conflicting agendas into a teetering stack, especially with regard to Elliot, who is more at odds with Mr. Robot than ever before. Elliot’s alter ego, played by Christian Slater, only shows up for a moment in this new episode; there’s more than enough conflict to navigate between Elliot, his sister Darlene (Carly Chaikin) and his deceptive best friend Angela (Portia Doubleday).

Esmail has always designed “Mr. Robot” as a work that smoothly interfaces with our tech-driven world, but in this episode he and Campbell created the illusion of a continuous shot that lasts nearly 46 minutes for a purpose beyond merely showing off their cinematic expertise.

The long take is a time-consuming directorial approach known for its relatively high level of difficulty, even when engineered. It was a more common practice when live TV was a broadcast standard. Nowadays, directors of photography employ them as a technical feat allowing the camera to forward the plot in concert with an episode’s writing. Think of Cary Joji Fukunaga’s celebrated, magnetizing long shot in the “True Detective” episode “Who Goes There.” A person might not recall everything that happened in that episode, but if you saw that final sequence it’s tough to forget it.

That consisted of a few minutes and was a genuine single take. “ Eps3.4_runtime-error.r00” is the product of smoothly joining 30 tracking shots filmed at several locations over the equivalent of nine days. Esmail also had to choreograph the casts’ movements and timing with precision. (Without spoiling anything, adding to the impressiveness of this particular one-shot feat is that the episode employs a lot of extras.) The final product creates the sensation of smoothly flying beside Elliot and Angela, or just a few steps behind, as each races against time.

“We knew from a writing perspective that it needed to be real time,” Esmail explained. When he and Campbell started to map out the episode’s filming, “it really became clear that the best way to really get in was to be on Elliot’s journey, and then switch to Angela’s, and make it feel as seamless as possible. We don’t even want people to know that they’re in a single take. We want people to just be along for the ride and really be embroiled in what Elliot’s going through.”

As the action kicks off, Elliot implores us, his unseen friend, to help him figure out what he’s up against. “Do not leave me,” he says. “Stay focused.” Trust me: that directive is simple to executive.