Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 64

Neighborhood social media platform Nextdoor makes us regret the internet

Twitter/bestofnextdoor

Back in the 90s, before the internet ruled every facet of social life, Americans possessed a ready-made stereotype of what a "neighbor" archetype might look like: nosy, yet endearing; occasionally nettlesome, yet happy to loan a cup of sugar. Fictional neighbors like Ned Flanders on "The Simpsons" or Wilson on "Home Improvement" embodied the stereotype, often doling out unsolicited advice to those series' protagonists.

Yet unlike these TV neighbors of yore, kept at a safe distance by a physical fence, social media has shifted the neighborhood dynamic. Enter Nextdoor, a Silicon Valley-based social network for neighborhoods that beams your neighbors' worries directly to your eyeballs. It's a place where neighbors can swap goods, issue “urgent alerts” about neighborhood security, and, well, complain about each other. Users join communities based on their neighborhood, while the data-hungry company solicits existing users to reveal their neighbors' identities and addresses so it can mail them invitation postcards.

Nextdoor had ambitions of being a sort of digital community center. But pretty quickly, it devolved into a breeding ground for petty grievances: complaints about pets, reports of wild animals stealing newspapers, and bizarre queries over how to "unvaccinate" children, to name a few. Nextdoor's reputation for cranks and fringe characters provided the inspiration for a hilarious parody Twitter account, called "Best of Nextdoor," that documents the best of the worst of the "local" community platform. Nextdoor's reputation, evidently, precedes itself: the Best of Nextdoor Twitter account has far more followers than the company's official Twitter account — 76,000 to 28,600, as of this writing.

Best of Nextdoor’s creator, Jenn Takahashi, was living in the Glen Park neighborhood in San Francisco when she discovered that Nextdoor was a reliable source of humor (and schadenfreude).

“It would make my day, refreshing the app,” Takahashi told Salon. Takahashi recalled the saga of a neighbor who would take to Nextdoor to grumble about people touching her lawn ornaments: “She would freak out if you touched one of her lawn gnomes, and since she named the individual lawn gnomes, she would also explain who in the lawn gnome family was offended.”

When Takahashi moved away from the lawn gnome family's neighborhood, she felt there was a void that needed to be filled. In her new environs, San Francisco’s South of Market District (SoMa), the conversation on Nextdoor had a more serious tone, reflecting the spirit of the more crime-heavy neighborhood.

“I missed being able to get an escape and laugh at the trivial things, I would always find them so fascinating, “ she said. “I decided to create the account because my mom would send me submissions, and my friends, to fill that void after leaving Glen Park, and so I just started tweeting them not expecting it to blow up.”

Eventually users and lurkers around the country started sending Takahashi their submissions. Then, in April 2018, the Best of Nextdoor account reached full-fledged internet fame thanks to an absurd, Nextdoor-inspired brawl in a Seattle neighborhood. The parody account's followers dubbed the now-infamous incident "The Seahawks Cannon."

“There was a neighbor who would fire a cannon every time the [Seattle] Seahawks scored a touchdown,” Takahashi explained. “Someone posted a photo in Nextdoor of their dog, scared, in a bathtub, asking to please stop [firing the cannon] because he gets upset.”

This thread became a focal point of discussion on Nextdoor Seattle. As neighbors chimed in, it accumulated 283 comments, and things started getting ugly. According to reports, a user named Dan got banned from the conversation for using the term "Washingtardians."

One well-meaning neighbor suggested sorting out the lively digital debate in person at the local library. That ended in a violent altercation in which the police were called. Takahashi provided updates to her followers throughout the day, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote about it. (Salon reached out to Nextdoor for comment, though they did not respond.)

Epilogue/

The thread caught the attention of @seattlepi, who did a story on it: https://t.co/dM0bdWGuSP

Patty shared the article on Nextdoor. Other than that, it's been relatively quiet.

Yesterday was the first Seahawks game post-brawl.

The cannon still fired. pic.twitter.com/159Jueh3Ta

— Best of Nextdoor (@bestofnextdoor) December 12, 2017

While it was humorous to those observing from afar, for those involved it was disheartening.

"Very sad that this situation devolved to this ugly altercation,” one user said. “We are lucky no one pulled out a weapon last night."

It is baffling to think this all started on a digital platform. While this incident is not your average day on Nextdoor, it is worth wondering if it the internet enabled its outcome. Nextdoor was supposed to provide users a sense of community, but under the anomic influence of online communication (a condition known academically as the online disinhibition effect), Nextdoor sometimes more resembles 4chan.

Perhaps that explains the appeal of Best of Nextdoor: it shows the levity of the oft-charged online world. Some of the finest Best of Nextdoor posts consist in non-urgent "urgent alerts" that users receive on their phones, including a recent "urgent alert" from a worried mom asking if the neighborhood should be concerned about the song “Gucci Gang” by Lil Pump.

Vaping has also been a hot topic; a concerned mother recently posted a list of "signs to look out for” that might hint that their middle schooler was vaping.

These trivial anxieties have made Best of Nextdoor more popular than the original.

“Every neighborhood has its quirks... no matter where you live there is some kind of unity [in] that we all have crazy neighbors,” Takahashi said. “It is interesting how these trivial petty complaints are universal.”

If you are wondering, yes, Nextdoor has reached out to Takahashi.

"They actually congratulated me when I surpassed them in Twitter followers, but then they said they received a couple complaints and asked if I would start censoring [names],” she said.

Typical neighbor complaint.

Rachel Dolezal faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of felony charges for welfare fraud

AP

Rachel Dolezal, the infamous former NAACP president of the Spokane, Washington chapter who officially changed her name to Nkechi Diallo in 2016, is facing felony charges for first degree theft by welfare fraud, perjury in the second degree and false verification for public assistance, according to the Spokane County Prosecutor’s office. If convicted, she could face up to 15 years in prison.

Diallo made national news when she was outed as a white woman by her family in 2015. For years, she told people she was black, which she still claims today despite being born white. Prior to her ouster, she was president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane and a part-time instructor at Eastern Washington University in the Africana studies department. Amid the controversy and outcry, Diallo stepped down from both of her posts.

While Diallo, a mother of three, changed her name, she is still commonly referred to as Rachel Dolezal in the media, where she has maintained a significant presence. She published an autobiography in 2017, "In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World" and did a massive press tour, including an interview at Salon. She was also the subject of the Netflix documentary, "The Rachel Divide," released this year.

Apparently, Washington state’s Department of Social and Health Services began an investigation into Diallo after learning that she had published a book; the sales were reportedly dismal. She had been receiving public assistance from the department.

"The investigator found that Dolezal’s book publisher typically offers contracts that include payments of $10,000 to $20,000 ― but a review of her records revealed that she’d only reported an income of $300 per month in the form of gifts from friends, according to court documents published by KHQ-TV," HuffPost reported. "The Spokane County prosecutor’s office accused Dolezal of being overpaid a total of $8,847 for food assistance and child care assistance from the state’s Department of Social and Health Services between Aug. 1, 2015 and Nov. 30, 2017."

During that same period, bank statements showed that approximately $83,924.96 had been deposited into Diallo's bank account, according to the investigation.

"The state of Washington seeks prosecution and restitution in this matter," court documents say. "In addition, the department requests Nkechi Diallo be disqualified from receiving Food Assistance for at least a 12-month period for breaking a food assistance rule on purpose. This is known as an intentional program violation."

Diallo now admits that she was born white, but she describes herself as "transracial" or "trans-black," attempting to compare her racial identity to trans people. (It's not the same thing.)

"Maybe we will evolve and grow, and racial fluidity will become a thing in 20 years?" she asked on Salon Talks last year. "I do hope that inclusivity does expand to all people of all stripes."

Diallo also denied the charge that with her continued media presence, her book and the new documentary profit from a stolen experience.

"People have constantly accused me of somehow profiting from my identity or exploiting this and it's, like, well, I'm very deliberately not exploiting myself further," she said. "It was also insulting to be accused of somehow exploiting the beautiful culture that I love and worked so hard to support and always will."

It took Jennifer Fox 35 years to be ready to make “The Tale,” an intimate portrait of abuse

Kyle Kaplan/HBO

When she was a young teenager, Jennifer Fox had an older boyfriend. So transformed was she by the experience that she wrote a fond account of the relationship for a class project. No, wait, that's not right. When she was a young teenager, Jennifer Fox was groomed and sexually abused by an adult. And she wrote a message for her future self to find.

"The Tale," debuting Friday on HBO, is the dramatized version of filmmaker Fox's real experiences. Its impact comes from showing the story from the point of view of both the trusting 13-year-old Jenny and the adult Jennifer (a devastating Laura Dern) coming to terms with what really happened to her at the hands of her coach (Jason Ritter) and his predatory accomplice Mrs. G.

Ignited by her mother's (Ellen Burstyn) horrified discovery of "The Tale" she wrote years earlier, Jennifer begins to confront the reality of a situation she had — for her own emotional protection — romanticized, and sees how vulnerable the girl who thought she was mature really was. A pivotal moment comes when it sinks in as Jennifer listens to someone else explain it to her: "If he abused . . . if you had a relationship . . . it usually means there were others. There's never only one."

The film was hailed as "of the biggest movies" at Sundance when it debuted earlier this year, for its complex, vivid exploration of a difficult subject. But "The Tale" is often a tough watch, even if you know the painstaking work the production team did to protect its cast, especially Isabelle Nélisse, who plays Jenny. It's also a deeply cathartic one. Watching it reminded me of my own pre-teen conviction that the attentions of men three times my age were somehow a sign of my own sophistication, instead of their pathology. It forced me to think about the heroin-addicted musician I'd known in my twenties who was "dating" a 14-year-old club kid and how I'd let myself believe that their so-called relationship could be somehow consensual. The reckoning is here, and for the sake of my own teen daughters, thank God.

I spoke recently to writer and director Jennifer Fox via phone about her tale, my tale and "The Tale." Here's what she said.

I grew up with Love’s Baby Soft and Brooke Shields and her Calvin Klein jeans. I had friends who were part of groupie culture. I was young in an age where the overt sexualization of very young girls was culturally not considered unusual, really.

A couple of months ago I interviewed Dianne Lake. She was one of the Manson girls, and she was fascinating  because she joined the Family when she was 14. S he was able to articulate being a 14-year-old girl who was adolescent, who was appropriately sexually curious, who had even been sexually active in her way, and to identify that that is normal and appropriate and healthy. No one is going to question that. But then having a sexual relationship with Charlie Manson is not OK.

Yes. It’s so funny because I was looking at a script based on Susan Atkins' life, and I was thinking exactly the thing you’re saying. There’s so much similarity between cult leaders and [sex abuser] grooming.

This was a process for you that was a very long time in coming. "The Tale" really starts with you about ten years ago, rereading an old story.

I was making a film called “Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman.” That film is not about sexual abuse. It’s actually investigating what does it mean to be free. In doing so, I just had one conversation after another where it would just turn up that the woman had been sexually abused.

What I was hearing sounded so much like my own little private story that I called a relationship, there was this seismic crack in my body. Suddenly I realized what I protected in my mind as special and unique was not unique at all. It was the paradigm of sexual abuse. So that just opened up my eyes suddenly, and I did a major shift.

Then soon after, my mom did find "The Tale," and called me, hysterical about it. So it was a combination of things that I was finally ready to see the story anew. When I read "The Tale," I was just shocked again because there was sexual abuse all over it, but as a child I didn't see that.

So many of us have experienced that, where we have told ourselves one story or convinced ourselves of one narrative in order to not have to acknowledge that something far worse occurred, and that someone we trusted did something wrong.

Exactly. It happens over and over again. I think it’s because these events are not one thing. If you trust someone, there's love, there’s feeling. It’s a relationship, and one gets caught in the confusion of that.

We certainly see this again and again with the abuse of boys, too, that just because you have a physical response or just because you even have an emotional response, that does not mean that you were asking for it. Even if you, as you did, return to your abuser, that doesn't mean you are participating in it. That gets very tangled up in the minds, I think, of people who don't understand the way that abuse works, particularly long-term abuse.

When you were revisiting a story, I imagine that it was like discovering another room in your house. It seems to me that you read this story, and suddenly it's this thing about myself that I knew, it turned out I didn't know.

It isn’t one room. It’s many, many rooms. I think the act of writing "The Tale" was discovering one room after another, after another. They weren’t all about abuse. They were also about concepts of self.

I, first of all, discovered that I wasn’t the same self anymore. I always thought I was one continuous self. I realized I didn't know who that 13-year-old was any more, and I had to go back and reinvestigate her. Then another discovery was how much she determined who I would become by her decision of what she believed. Then discovering these people, and discovering the predatory nature I didn’t see or the narcissism, for example. It was really quite a journey writing the script, and rewarding and exciting artistically to think, well, how do you show these things?

I’ve read that it was challenging for the cast and the crew to then come into it fresh when you had already gone through the experience of processing this and reframing this information. It's so difficult, I would imagine, for people working on a story like this to get their heads around, “How do I approach this in a way that is authentic and not exploitive?”

I think we just had the most courageous cast. Each of them jumped in these roles and swam in these parts in a way that was amazing. Laura Dern — to say, "I'm going to tell a story about this kind of taboo. I'm going to go on this journey from denial to eyes wide open." Jason — to play a role like this which is so antithetical to who he is. Isabelle Nélisse — who plays young Jenny. I don’t know how the gods aligned to choose these people to work with, but I am so blessed.

One of the things in this film that got me thinking about immediately was when a friend of my husband was having a “relationship” with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early 30s. Thinking how I was disgusted by him, but I also, maybe ignorantly, didn't think, "Someone needs to help this girl." I really didn't.

I think it's the times. Our worlds have shifted. I had teachers, albeit they weren't that much older than us, who were going out with my friends of mine in high school. Fifteen-year-old friends. I think there's been a huge awakening, especially with #MeToo and #TimesUp, that's cracked open the question of what these relationships were, and what power does. Now we're moving into the taboo of child sexual abuse, which is even a further taboo than assault and violence with adults. I’m so happy that we’re in a time where finally things can be looked at. I think actually that "The Tale" is rising now because people are ready to face these very difficult topics in a way they weren’t even a year ago.

With this film coming out at this watershed moment, it does feel like this is a bigger conversation that we are ready to have as a culture. This is an issue that we are willing to look in ways that are nuanced and do acknowledge the complicity around abuse and the circumstances that permit it to happen.

I always wanted to make a film about it when I became a filmmaker, but I just didn’t know how. I didn’t have the maturity. It wasn’t until this wakeup moment in my 40s when I was making "Flying," that I thought, "OK, now I’m ready." For me, it was a lot of things. Suddenly I was ready to see it differently. I was also ready as an artist to fictionalize my own story. When I was making “Flying,” I was in it, so I learned learned the craft of turning myself into narrative, which I felt that I could do with this film.

It took me basically 35 years to be ready to make this story, t0 be strong enough, mature enough. I think it’s quite common, by the way, that people face these things in middle age. Only in middle age did I feel like I had the ego strength to face some of the darker issues and some of the darker things that I had put aside. It was when I was in my 40s that I knew I could look at these things without destroying myself, actually.

What has it been like for people who see this film, and what is it like for you hearing these other stories?

We're getting this groundswell. It sort of goes to two categories. One, if it’s from a person that hasn’t had this touch their life — which is only about 50 percent of the people — it's, "Now I understand the first time how these things happen." I think it is because the film is told so inside two characters at different ages, myself in different ages, that it can really answer it and go through the journey from inside, and people really understand.

Also, I get a response that, "This is so much about memory, and it helped me understand what I think was my divorce, or how I dealt with my father dying. Or didn't deal." It also makes people think about how they tell themselves stories. For people who have had abuse or assault in their lives, I think what I’m really hearing is a lot of, “Thank you. Now I can finally explore what happened to me. I didn’t think that it could be told in all its complexity and nuance."

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Tori Amos on #MeToo
"This time has to be different"

American anti-choice groups are trying to stop Ireland from repealing its abortion ban

Getty/Jeff J Mitchell

Anti-abortion groups in the United States are trying to prevent Irish voters from repealing their country's abortion ban.

The vote on whether to repeal the Eighth Amendment — a 35-year-old constitutional ban on abortion in nearly all circumstances — will reveal how attitudes have shifted in a country that was once a projection of Roman Catholic conservatism.

The Roman Catholic Church was the main force behind the passage of the 1983 referendum. In the decades since, however, the church's power has been substantially weakened by a number of scandals, most notably clerical child abuse.

Speaking at a news conference, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar noted that the minister of health is working on a proposal to allow unrestricted access to abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and later in cases of rape, incest or fetal abnormality, the New York Times reported.

Varadkar also said that more than 2,000 Irish women and girls were taking abortion pills each year without proper medical direction, and that this would certainly lead to medical tragedies.

"I don’t think we can persist with a situation where women in crisis are risking their lives for the use of unregulated medicines," he said, "and I don’t believe the Constitution is the place for making absolute statements about medical, moral and legal issues."

The proposal will be presented to Parliament if the country votes to repeal the constitutional ban. But there is concern about potential foreign meddling in the vote.

Craig Dwyer, co-founder Transparent Referendum Initiative, an election transparency group which is advocating for new campaign disclosure laws for digital advertising, compiled a database of hundreds of online ads that have surfaced about Ireland’s abortion referendum. Many of the ads were shared on Facebook from undisclosed locations and buyers who couldn't be traced.

"With social media in this campaign, our democracy is up for sale to the highest bidder and we're blindfolded at the auction," Dwyer told the New York Times.

With undisclosed campaign-related content on the rise, Facebook and Google took offensive stances this month to limit outside interference ahead of Ireland's vote. In May, Google announced a ban on all referendum-related ads and Facebook blocked spots related to the abortion campaign from groups outside Ireland. Most recently, Facebook introduced a new labeling system, which will show users who paid for a political ad and demographic information for audiences who were targeted by it.

Dwyer also said that while Facebook's blockage of abortion ads purchased by international groups had limited the number of such ads on the social network, abortion-related content from foreign organizations continued to appear on other digital platforms and was still being posted on Facebook by users.

Felicia Cravens, a Texan who runs a Facebook page called Unfakery that helps track down fraudulent accounts, told Salon she's concerned about the list of items Facebook is considering "political" and "how they could possibly intend to fairly and equitably review the massive amounts of political advertising that will be purchased for candidates and issues at all levels."

Additionally, political advertising is prohibited on Irish television and radio, but the digital world presents a different case.

"There is no law against someone anywhere else in the world signing a commercial contract with a British company to use foreign money or unknown money, that is not going through any official regulated campaign, in order to influence an Irish vote," Liz Carolan of the Transparent Referendum Initiative told the Times. "There's a serious vulnerability in our democratic system. And it’s now being exploited by incredibly sophisticated campaign techniques, and Facebook doesn’t have to tell us who’s doing it."

In the wake of revelations about the misuse of Facebook data collection tools to sway Britain's vote on European Union membership in 2016, and the presidential election in the United States, there is growing concern that similar gambits might be used in Ireland's abortion campaign.

"The broader question is what information is flowing through the system and how much of that information is pollution and what is not," Gavin Sheridan, a co-founder of the media agency Storyful, who tracked foreign ad spending for the Irish vote, told the New York Times. "We can’t really know."

"We didn't elect Mark Zuckerberg to make decisions about how our referendum should be run," Sheridan added, referring to Facebook’s chief executive.

John McGuirk, a representative for the Save the 8th campaign, which defends the abortion ban, said the organization was preparing to spend 40,000 euros on YouTube ads, or the equivalent of about $47,000, but since Google had blocked all referendum-related ads, they were no longer able to do that, the New York Times reported.

"It's frightening the extent to which they can make a decision on the basis of something and be answerable to nobody," McGuirk said.

Ireland's divisive campaign experience is encouraging some Irish politicians to advocate for laws that would require companies to reveal who is paying for ads, even on social media. A bill they wrote is drawing attention and, if passed, would be the world's first campaign-finance law to account for digital advertising. In the United States, a similar measure, the Honest Ads Act, has lost steam.

"We need to know who is running the ads and who's paying for the ads," James Lawless, the legislator who sponsored the bill, told the New York Times.

Governments globally must set tougher laws surrounding disclosures of digital campaign ads so voters know who is paying for the material that's appearing in places online including Facebook, Google and YouTube.

“Iggy at his most Iggiest”: Rock heroes like you’ve never seen them before

James Fortune/Smithsonian Books

Bill Bentley has been a drummer, a record store clerk, a DJ, concert promoter, music producer, the former A&R director at Concord Music Group and a Vice President of Warner Brothers Records. His new book “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen," is a photography book of rock 'n roll pictures.

Bentley sat down for an episode of "Salon Talks" to talk about Prince, Joni Mitchell, Iggy Pop, Sly and the Family Stone and so much more.

Most photography books are put together by a professional photographer or feature professional photographers, but this book is a little different. Tell me how it came about?

Smithsonian contacted me. The man who’s the director of books there used to be the road manager for the Flaming Lips and I was their publicist at Warner Brothers. He called me up and asked me if I wanted to write a book about crowd sourced pictures — and I’m kind of older, I didn’t know what crowd sourced meant — but he told me it would be a process where people would submit their photos to the Smithsonian website and then we will go through and pick the photos and pick the bands we want to cover. And we got close to 5,000 pictures, which is quite a bit.

He and I started whittling it down to which bands we think really needed to be in the book. We came up with about 200 bands and we had to knock that down by 50. We started to go through all the pictures and finding photos of those bands and then the ones that we didn’t have photos of, that were very important bands, then we had to go to professional photographers and see if they had things that hadn’t been used much. I’d known a lady at Magnum Photos named Susan Brisk, a photo researcher.

She was like a blood hound. [We asked her to] find a great Dead picture that hadn’t been seen a million times or an Iggy Pop picture, anything that’s not over-used to illustrate a certain group. That’s how we did it. We really tried to get all crowd sourced, but the ones for the bands we didn’t have, we went to the professionals and then got off-road to find things they hadn’t sold and over-used too many times.

People who buy this book, they’re never going to have seen these pictures before.

That was the hope. I looked through every photo book, almost, that comes out and I know the difference between every minute you look at the pictures now for over 50 years and you go, “oh, that’s a great picture, but I’ve seen it a hundred times.” The idea was to find the photos that were new to most people. I mean, they’ll be a few in here that have been seen before, I’m not saying everyone, but I’d say 95 percent of the pictures are things that most people had never seen.

Watch our full conversation
Bill Brentley collected rock 'n roll's rarest photographs

Photography has always been a huge part of rock music. Why do you think rock is such a visual medium, for being a musical form?

One reason is because the audience for rock is a very visual audience. I mean, it’s the baby boomer kids who grew up in TV which was visual and then they started reading magazines about music which had never existed really. That’s visual. Then this whole industry of photography grew up because it’s the look of rock 'n roll, it's something that helps sell it.

I remember the first time in '56, I saw Elvis. I’m like, I’m buying that record because it’s just the look that gets you, it’s almost as much as the music. I kind of always had this theory that you look and listen with your eyes and your ears at the same time.

If I look at a picture, it reminds me of the music. Almost every time I’ll look at a photo like that one of Iggy Pop that’s in the book and I’ll go like, “God, I remember seeing him. I remember what he did. It’s just like it was yesterday.” The picture evokes that feeling.

Digital technology is great in many ways, but how do you think people are missing out not having record covers and fold outs? It’s kind of a lost art. But speaking of, back in those days, I’m an enormous fan of '70s punk and glam. I was stoked to see pictures of Blondie, David Bowie, Lou Reid, Iggy Pop in here. Why do you think that sort of grimy punk, like all these pictures kind of look dirty and grimy? Why do you think that was glamorous in the '70s? What was so glamorous about that?

I think the punk era was really glamorous because it was reaction against the real processed pictures of coliseum rock from the '70s. Everything had gotten so big and nothing against any of the bands that were huge, but at some point all the fans of true hard core music went like “enough of that. We don’t want to be sold a mega group. We want to find the things that we find that nobody had seen.” All that comes out of a very gritty dark place.

I mean, if you look at CBGBs, those bands, I mean, forget it. And then we had the Sex Pistols and it was almost like the uglier you were, the bigger you were going to get. I mean, I saw the Sex Pistols. It was just like, “what in the world is going on?” These guys look like they just gotten out of jail. Just gotten beat up. They had no visual sense at all, but by reversing the norm, they made that the visual sense which is kind of genius. It really was.

One of the pictures is Iggy Pop covered in blood. Tell me about this picture.

If you saw Iggy back ‘76, ‘77, ‘78, that was part of his deal. I mean, he liked to cut himself up and then he liked to climb up on the speaker scaffolding. He liked to do everything that had never been done. That’s kind of how he made his name, really. We felt like that is Iggy at his most Iggiest. We found the picture from somebody. I think that picture is from the Whisky A Go Go that had never been seen and he was like, cut up to the max.

It’s almost like it was right before he gave himself open heart surgery, that he really cut himself up. I remember the first time I saw him. He climbed up probably at least 15-yard scaffold to the top of the Armadillo World Headquarters. I thought he was going to die. We really did. He was up at the top, jumping around. He’s a contortionist. But he had no fear. He never did. I saw him a couple of years ago, same thing. He never slowed down and to me that’s the essence of rock 'n roll. You do it because you have to. He’s not trying to do a show or impress somebody. That’s where it drives him: to the top of the scaffold full of blood.

I really like this photo of Joni Mitchell. She’s at the piano and it's kind of a casual. She has her hand over her eyes, kind of obscuring her face. Why did you pick this particular photo? What about Joni Mitchell do you think it captures?

Joni basically is a very shy person, but wanted to be a mega-star because she knew how good her music was. I was her publicist for a few years. It was just this real dichotomy when you talk to her and listen to her music, it’s like very inward and all about her deepest feelings and the pain she’s going through or what she senses in the culture that’s strange and you think like, “this woman is lucky she ever gets out of bed.” But when she’s out there doing it, it’s like, “Well, I’m as good as Bob Dylan. I’m as good as anybody. Why don’t they know me as much as they know the superstars?”

With Joni, I think that picture is sort of her staring into the audience almost like where am I? But [actually] she’s like, I hope that’s a big audience out there. She really knew show business. She knew what it's about and she went for it. I mean, it was hard for her because if you listen to those songs, you’d almost go like, “How can anybody get to do this in public?” Because they’re so personal, but she did it for thousand and thousands of people.

She was a big influence on Prince and of course, you have a photo of Prince in here. The photo's from 1984, when he was going from more obscure to being a real superstar. What about this particular photo spoke to you about Prince?

When I first saw Prince, it was right when he was really getting big probably ‘79, ‘80. He freely came out in women’s fishnet hose and high heels and very little less. I felt like, OK, that’s very controversial and it’s going good. But then I think, he realized he needed to move in just a little more normalcy. But he was still not all the way sure of himself on stage. Because he started just making songs in his basement of his father’s house. He didn’t even play live. This picture with the guitar showed me he’d finally cross that road where he could just be a guitarist and be really like a rock star.

I think, it showed sort of Prince’s flowering into the artist he became. Because when he started he wasn’t that artist. He was a solo. He did everything himself, getting on stage, playing guitar and the band opening for the Rolling Stones was a huge leap for him. It took a lot of guts for him to do it because naturally that one what he was, we used to see Prince walking down the hall at Warner Brothers, the word from on top was don’t talk to him and don’t look at him. He’s too shy. He would walk by you, lovely short man. You couldn’t say anything to him. You can’t look at him but he would walk by you and do this. He’d be acknowledging you but he didn’t want to see you because he didn’t know what to say. That’s how shy he was. But this picture shows that when he’s on stage, not shy.

When you think about people like Joni Mitchell and Prince who are shy or introverted and their art can often be very personal and then they go out on stage and they just become these big stars. What do you think it is that drives somebody to need that? To want to expose themselves to some people in that way?

The great artists that I’ve known, and a lot of the artists in this book, they have an inner drive to be somebody. They know that their music is saying something. They want people to hear it. They want it to matter to the people. They really want to change the people with their music. Those are the people that off stage could be almost wilting violets. But on stage, they become another person.

Most of the great artists on stage are completely different than they are off stage. Really, true. I’d say the ones that you’d get the most trouble are people like Jim Morrison because he’s the same on and off. I mean, he never knows how to shut it down. But you can’t be what you are on stage all the time off stage. It will kill you. Unfortunately, that’s why people off stage, if they’re different, they might take drugs to medicate themselves or they just get into all kinds of things that aren’t really good for them because they feel like they should be the on stage person. You really almost have to be two separate people, to really do it all the time because who could live like that 24/7. You couldn’t do it.

You have a really great picture that I loved in here of Sly Stone, of Sly and the Family Stone. Tell me about his place in music in the '70s, because I think he was kind of in a unique spot.

Sly came out of the tradition. I mean, he grew up in the Bay Area. He was a record producer. He was around the whole psychedelic movement in the mid-'60s and that wasn’t him at all. But he took some of the visual outlandish elements that have those, those artists dressed however they wanted. They kind of broke all the rules. They weren’t like show business. I mean, the Beatles used to wear nice suits if you remember. But then when you saw the Grateful Dead or the Jefferson Airplane or Big Brother, it was sort of like these costumes to the max.

But I think Sly kind of took the visual of that era, the '60s San Francisco rock. and put it into what was basically soul music, amped up with rock beats and rock guitars and everything, and really mixed it up in every which way. It came out unique. Nobody had ever done the soul and the hippy together except Sly and then he kind of threw in almost like a circus aspect to it. That was the way he thought. He was a very, very imaginative person.

But again, another artist that had trouble I think living off stage like he was on stage. He couldn’t find that center where he could be both and relaxed. It kind of drove him [away] after what, five or six albums. He went away. Because it was a hard life. But he, he amped it up as much as anybody did and really mixing the genres together.

One of the things that’s interesting about this book is it’s called "Smithsonian Rock & Roll," but you’ve included artists that might be classified as funk or hip hop, or genres that weren’t exactly rock in here. How did you determine what bands to include and what bands not to include?

The first rock 'n roll artist who I loved was Elvis Presley. In my life, I started with him, but as I got into music, Elvis and the Rolling Stones led me to blues. I mean, really hard core blues. They totally influenced rock 'n roll people. And you move on a little bit, Sly and the family Stone or Al Green or then you get into hip hop. I looked to artists that could express the freedom that really is the basis of rock 'n roll. To me, rock 'n roll has always been about setting the artist free and hopefully the listener free. An artist for sure like N.W.A. or Run DMC or Al Green or back then, Otis Redding, I mean, I get to see Otis Redding. It was as powerful as anything I’ve ever seen in my life and that’s what the rock 'n roll experience is.

Coming from Texas, things are all mixed up anyway. I just never liked the idea, “oh no, that’s not rock 'n roll, that’s not this.” I think the music that expresses it might not be exactly rock 'n roll but it shares the passions of rock 'n roll and sometimes exceeds it. I mean, there’s never a greater live performer than Otis Redding. I don’t care who it was. No matter what rock 'n roll artist it was. I felt like he belonged in there too because maybe those early artists saw him and thought, we can do that. The Rolling Stones covered him on their first albums. I know that they loved him because he did his songs. Mick Jagger probably watched Otis Redding. It is all kind of related. The fact of rock 'n roll is it’s not rigid and once you get rigid you ruin it.

We have a couple of photos from the 21st century in this book. We have the White Stripes and the Alabama Shakes. And what’s striking about these two photos is they're from small spaces, like really intimate settings. What is it about that kind of small intimate settings that spoke to about rock music in the more recent years?

As rock got huge, the arena and stadium experience — and those are all wonderful things, I mean, if you’re in a stadium watching the Rolling Stones it’s electrifying — but when bands start out, especially bands like the ones you’ve mentioned, I think their personal relationship to the artist and how the artist can really almost touch them or feel them, I think that’s how they learned the power to then maybe extrapolate that to big venues. I mean, I’ve seen so many great young artists, once they get in the big setting, they’re not as effective. You really have to be careful. But, I like to show artists kind of at the start of when they’re first learning how to reach out and touch the audience.

I remember the first time I saw the Grateful Dead, it was 1968, it was a small club in Houston. You had to be under 21 to get in. I sat in a chair and it could touch Jerry Garcia’s microphone. That electrified me and completely blew my mind in a way that I never got over it. I felt like when music does that to you, that’s as good as it gets. While I love all the big shows, when it really gets down to that essence of being right there next to the audience and you feel that you’re one with them, that’s when it changes you in a way that you’ll never get unchanged.

The book is laid out in a chronological order. Why did you decide to go that direction?

Being a Virgo, I didn’t really figure out any other way to do it. One, I sort of like orderly, right? Once you get into it trying to do it by genres just like we just spoke about, the genres are all melt together. You can’t really do that. The only other way I saw doing it, plus I wanted to start at a point with Elvis and 56. I wouldn’t say Elvis invented rock & roll by any stretch, but he blew the doors off. Once, he was popular, everybody heard it. I kind of wanted to do that where it’s almost like a train trip through rock & roll country where you get on at the start, of where you live and then you go to the end or where it is right now, with the Alabama Shakes which was a young band in the South like Elvis was from. Almost unknown when those pictures were taken. But are making a huge impact on the culture in a way that will change everything that comes after it. I mean, I think young bands that are inspired by the Alabama Shakes and their singer Britney Howard, I think we’re going to seeing those bands soon4 because that was a huge seat change. Nobody had really sounded like that. Nobody looked like her in rock & roll for a long time.

I think when those things happen like I wrote in the introduction, people say, is rock dead or what’s going on? It’s like, you’ll never know. We have no idea what’s coming. It’s like the world. You don’t know what’s coming. I mean, and there’s no reason to know. In fact, it would be boring if you did know. I’d say keep yourself open to surprises. Don’t judge things now like, “oh, my God, it’s over or it’s not good anymore” because it’s going to change. What I’ve learned in what 60 something years, you will listen to it, I didn’t have a clue that starting with Elvis that we’d end up with the Sex Pistols or we’d end up with anybody like Alabama Shakes. But if you stay open to what’s happening, you’ll dig it a lot more.

 

America’s missing children: Over 1,000 immigrant minors have vanished since October

AP/Evan Vucci/Getty/Herika Martinez/Salon

Nearly 1,500 migrant children were apprehended by authorities in the United States... only to later go missing.

Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families, told a Senate homeland security subcommittee that 1,475 migrant children had gone missing since being taken in by authorities, according to The New York Times. He also reported that most of the children were taken in after being found alone on America's southwestern border, having usually fled from domestic violence, gang violence or drug cartels from Central American nations like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The concern is that the missing children could have been turned into unpaid laborers or are being used by human traffickers.

"H.H.S. has a responsibility to better track these children so they aren’t trafficked or abused, and so they show up to their court hearings," Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio and chairman of the subcommittee, declared upon learning that the fate of these 1,475 children remained unknown.

After human traffickers forced eight migrant children to work an Ohio egg farm in 2016, the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments agreed to establish joint procedures within one year to prevent such incidents from recurring. They failed to do that by their deadline and still have not established such policies, raising questions about whether they could have protected the migrant children who were discovered on the border if they had done so.

As the Times explained:

Children who show up at the border by themselves are usually apprehended by Border Patrol agents or turn themselves in to customs officers at the Department of Homeland Security. Once they are processed, they are turned over to the custody of the Department of Health and Human Services’ refugee office. The office runs more than 100 shelters around the country where it houses children and provides care until they can be turned over to a sponsor while awaiting their immigration hearings.

The sponsors are usually parents or family members already residing in the United States. The sponsors are supposed to undergo a detailed background check.

After the children have been placed with sponsors, workers at the department follow up with calls to ensure that the minors continue to live with the sponsors, are enrolled in school and are aware of their court dates.

Yet many experts are claiming that the Department of Homeland Security rarely conducts the kinds of follow-ups necessary to make sure the children aren't exploited. President Donald Trump himself made it clear earlier this week that he doesn't sympathize at all with migrant children, telling a roundtable at the Morrelly Homeland Security Center that "we have the worst immigration laws of any country, anywhere in the world. They exploited the loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors.”

He added, with the intent to imply that many of the children grow up to gang members, "They look so innocent. They’re not innocent."

In related news, a new report by the ACLU accused American border authorities of verbally, physically and sexually abusing hundreds of undocumented immigrant children between 2009 and 2014, according to NPR. The allegations include running over a 17-year-old with a patrol vehicle before punching him, denying medical attention to a pregnant minor who claimed she was in pain and ultimately delivered a stillbirth, sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl and threatening a male minor with sexual abuse from another detainee after discarding his birth certificate.

"These agencies have taken no meaningful action to hold federal officials accountable for abusing children or to ensure that such abuse never occurs again," Mitra Ebadolahi, staff attorney with the ACLU's Border Litigation Project, told NPR.

Despite these harrowing stories, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made it an official policy to separate the children of undocumented immigrants from their parents if they are apprehended, which he has characterized as a deterrent against illegal border crossings. This is a policy that has unofficially been in place for months, but earlier this month he traveled to Tennessee (where 97 workers had been arrested during an immigration raid at a meat processing plant) to make it clear that he had no sympathy for the afflicted parents.

"If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law. If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border," Sessions proclaimed.

Ironically enough, the leader of a union representing members of the U.S. Border Patrol has recently been very critical of Trump's immigration policies. National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, who represents roughly 15,000 border agents, described the measures implemented by Trump last month to improve border security as "a colossal waste of resources," according to the Los Angeles Times.

He added, "When I found out the National Guard was going to be on the border, I was extremely excited," even though the policy has not made the Border Patrol's job easier as it had done in the past.

Trump, it is worth remembering, focused on immigration during the 2016 presidential campaign, even kicking off his candidacy with a speech that included this infamous (and factually incorrect) assertion about undocumented immigrants from Mexico:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

As the ACLU study clearly demonstrates, abuses toward American immigrants hardly began during the Trump era. Yet considering that he has made stopping illegal immigration into one of his central causes and has failed to deliver on it — and considering that there is abundant evidence that our system often mistreats the people it apprehends, perhaps it's time to reevaluate whether the narrative that Trump kicked off three years ago is the one that America really needs right now.

Why this border patrol agent quit
Hear haunting stories about working on America's southern border.

“Arrested Development” returns and there’s something rotten in the banana stand

Netflix/Saeed Adyani

This is weird, right? It’s weird.

“Arrested Development” will return to Netflix next Tuesday after a five-year absence that, in itself, was preceded by a seven-year absence following its cancellation on Fox.

This series has been in existence for 15 years, and a few of its elaborate in-jokes are still rolling even after all this time, which is either impressive or played out or well, weird.

Revivals are very much in season, I’ll grant you, and that makes this second second coming of “Arrested Development,” coming to Netflix on Tuesday, completely in line with what the rest of the television industry is doing. Ostensibly it’s what the audience wants: When Netflix and series creator Mitch Hurwitz announced the fifth season in 2017 the media and fans met the news with febrile elation and zero questioning of its relevance.

That’s because “Arrested Development” still kind of works. After all these years there’s still nothing really like it on television. No comedy has proven as successful in linking the multiple limited perspectives of of profoundly myopic, silly individuals, asking us to laugh at their misinterpretations of events and their disastrous near misses. And no comedy can get away as successfully with recurring gags that reference incest, awkward liaisons and “never nudity.”

Who’s up for a fresh round of French farce-style physical humor and new parades of puns? We can’t tell, because Netflix doesn’t release viewership data; all we know is that the reaction was underwhelming.

Anyway, who cares? Netflix doesn’t. Hurwitz and his fellow executive producers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (who serves as the series' narrator) were not deterred. Hurwitz recently released a re-cut version of the long and narratively wandering fourth season that smooths out the plot, earning praise for doing so but, beyond this, not exactly setting the world aflame.

The average pop culture consumer enjoys the stars of “Arrested Development” together and separately — these days, mostly separately.

Jason Bateman, who plays Michael Bluth, is better known as a theatrical comedy A-lister, recently starring in “Game Night.” Michael Cera (George Michael Bluth) keeps busy in the film world too, in addition to popping up in the odd TV cameo, notably last year’s revival of “Twin Peaks."

Alia Shawkat (Maeby Fünke) has been killing it on TBS’s “Search Party.” David Cross (Tobias Fünke),  Will Arnett (Gob), Tony Hale (Buster Bluth), Portia Rossi (Lindsay Bluth Fünke) are all busy with other projects. Most fabulously Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth) has been slaying it as Archer’s mother on FX’s “Archer” with just her voice.

We love Jessica Walter’s voice.

A lot of stuff happens in 15 years, as Bateman observed in a recent conversation we’re about to dig into. Hell, a lot can change in a year.

This brings us back to, you know, that weirdness. Jeffrey Tambor is back in the fifth season as well,  reprising George Bluth Sr. and his twin Oscar.

As a reminder, Tambor was accused last fall of inappropriate behavior on the set of Amazon’s “Transparent.”  He was fired from that series following a multiple season run that earned him several Emmys and Golden Globes, and praise and criticism alike for his portrayal of Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman and head of the dysfunctional Pfefferman clan.

Tambor’s dismissal from “Transparent" stemmed from sexual harassment allegations made by Van Barnes, Tambor's former assistant, and cast member Trace Lysette. Both are transgender women.

A few weeks ago The Hollywood Reporter ran a profile of Tambor in which he insists on his innocence and is contrite about being verbally abusive on past projects, naming “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway and another executive producer among the targets of his abuse. “She told me recently she was afraid of me,” Tambor says of Soloway.

In that story Tambor also confesses that one of the people to whom he was verbally abusive was Walter.

On Wednesday, the New York Times published an article by Sopan Deb featuring a Q&A with members of cast, during which the conversation circled around to the Hollywood Reporter article’s mention of Tambor’s past behavior towards Walter.

Here’s one of the most telling section in context. Deb says to Tambor, “You talked about how you yelled at directors, assistant directors, the 'Transparent' creator Jill Soloway. You even said at one point you lashed out at —”

Walter interjects to finish the sentence: “Jessica Walter.” The response to this according to the transcript:

[LAUGHTER]

“Which we’ve all done, by the way,” Bateman says.

“You’ve never yelled at me,” Walter rebuts.

“Not to belittle what happened,” continues Bateman, leading Walter to say, again, "You’ve never yelled at me like that.”

Bateman keeps going:

“But this is a family and families, you know, have love, laughter, arguments — again, not to belittle it, but a lot of stuff happens in 15 years. I know nothing about “Transparent” but I do know a lot about “Arrested Development.” And I can say that no matter what anybody in this room has ever done — and we’ve all done a lot, with each other, for each other, against each other — I wouldn’t trade it for the world and I have zero complaints.”

Yes. We're all very relieved that he has no complaints. Walter, as Deb notes, wept at the memory of the incident. “In like almost 60 years of working,” she says, “I've never had anybody yell at me like that on a set."

This important declaration cuts to the heart of the question, and the nagging problem of witnessing this show in the wake of it. Even if Tambor didn’t sexually harass anyone on “Arrested” he’s still getting a pass from his male co-workers for verbally berating his female co-star so brutally that the memory of it makes her weep.

“Let me just say one thing that I just realized in this conversation,” Walter says at one point, as the transcript notes, through tears. “I have to let go of being angry at him. He never crossed the line on our show, with any, you know, sexual whatever. Verbally, yes, he harassed me, but he did apologize. I have to let it go.”

And in that moment, with Walter crying in front of them, Bateman, Hale, Cross and Arnett do somersaults to mansplain away the gravity of the situation and to reinforce their support for Tambor. Some award-winning actors are just passionate, they say in so many words (“But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable,” Shawkat interjects before the men slide her to the back burner ) but it’s all good now!  So let’s all just watch the fifth season and enjoy new versions of those classic in-jokes we all love.

Awkward. Just not in a ha-ha, “Arrested Development” way.

Admittedly a number of “Arrested Development” fans may choose to know only the vaguest outlines of Tambor’s story, and take the New York Times article at face value, if they read it at all. This is in line with the way we’ve approached previous seasons. The less we know about the overall direction of any “Arrested” arc, the funnier the experience of watching its slow-motion car crash of jokes becomes.

If you’re one of those people, simply apply your approach to the art to the artists themselves.  Because the more you know about what’s happened with Tambor over the past 12 months and the cast’s attempt to reframe it, the emptier the comedy’s absurdist spectacle becomes.

That said, even if you only have the faintest idea of what has transpired with the cast, our first view of Tambor’s George Sr. is a visual gag meant to pay homage to his success on “Transparent.” It probably lands best with mild amnesiacs.

Get past that, and a few other details, and what stands out is the sameness of the scenario and the extent to which season 4 stampeded so far afield of common sense as to require more extensive set-up and narration throughout these new episodes to set up the latest iteration of a joke.

The assumption seems to be that the audience is so enamored of rekindling old times that the writers don’t have to work very hard to freshen its framework or take a whetstone to its signature wit. They do get some mileage out of a few obligatory guest star cameos, and a storyline revolving around a proposed wall at the Mexico border that ran in those 2013 episodes. See? It actually used to be ahead of its time.

Beyond that, the only innovation in these new “Arrested Development” episodes is how the story processes tensions between Michael and George Michael, who remain in love with the same woman (Isla Fischer), leading to one confrontation that is, I’ll admit, fairly amazing.

Otherwise what Netflix has shown reviewers of this fifth season (seven of the eight to be released on May 29 were made available to critics, with eight more coming later) doesn’t justify the continued revisitations to the Bluths. Michael is still trying to leave but keeps getting pulled back; Gob can’t figure himself out, a quest he’s been on since the George W. Bush administration; Lindsay is as selfish and needy as ever; Maeby still teases and tempts her cousin George Michael. And Lucille, bless her forked tongue and all its utterances, remains devoted to her “anytime is the right time for a cocktail” ethos.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could think of “Arrested Development” as a time machine? But we can’t. Even if we can get past the weirdness and the knowledge that we’re watching a showbiz family pretending everything is OK playing a sitcom family pretending everything is OK, there’s still no way to ignore the perfume of overripeness to this banana stand.

Then again, some people think old fruit makes for the best desserts. Those folks are welcome to these new episodes of “Arrested Development” and their conventional comfortableness.  Others may simply notice that the squeamish weirdness of the show comes of as a relic of a different time. And I may have to let it go.

 

Actress Alia Shawkat wants to be heard
The star of "Arrested Development" and "Search Party" reflects on how women are treated on set.

“Witch hunt!”: Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy and the dark history of the president’s war cry

AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta/Getty/Keystone/Hulton Archive

When Robert Mueller began his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump proclaimed on Twitter, "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" That phrase -- "Witch Hunt!" -- has been his go-to war cry ever since, bolstered only by his near-meaningless "No collusion!"  claim, even as Mueller has racked up indictments, guilty pleas and cooperating witnesses. 

Trump's defense is working, to some extent, given that a recent poll found that 59 percent of respondents didn't believe Mueller has uncovered any crimes so far, notwithstanding all those guilty pleas. Such is the power of a relentlessly repeated narrative over mere facts.

Now we're about to see what a real witch hunt looks like, as Trump tries to force the Department of Justice to investigate the investigators, looking for imaginary wrongdoing or "infiltration" in what was an entirely normal, non-intrusive FBI method of information-gathering.

This is a classic example of Trump gaslighting, à la "Hillary Clinton started birtherism and I ended it," trying to convince us that up is down and we're crazy for thinking otherwise. Only now it's not just Trump. Increasingly, it's more and more of the Republican leadership.

It’s not the first such effort, by a long shot, as David Corn recently tweeted:

For those of you keeping score at home:
* Unmasking is the real scandal. Uh, no.
* Obama bugged Trump is the real scandal. Uh, no.
* FISA warrant is the real scandal. Uh, no.
* Uranium One is the real scandal. Uh, no.
* FBI informant in Trump campaign is the real scandal. Uh, no.

— David Corn (@DavidCornDC) May 24, 2018

 

 

With the midterms fast approaching, congressional Republicans seriously falling in line, and the DOJ starting to buckle under pressure, this effort looks much more serious.

It's fitting that Trump should choose this path, since his mentor, the infamous Roy Cohn, was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's lead investigator during his witch hunts, which also began based on absolutely nothing — a supposed “list” of 57 “communists” that McCarthy waved in the air, but that actually didn’t exist, as explained by University of Washington professor Joe Janes in an episode of his “Documents that Changed the World” podcast series:

It was on Feb. 9, 1950, that McCarthy — who had dubbed himself “Tailgunner Joe” for acts of World War II bravery he did not in fact commit — told a crowd of 275 at the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club that the U.S. State Department was “thoroughly infested with communists” and brandished papers he claimed were a list of 57 such subversives.

“My primary interest here was as an example of a document that didn’t actually exist, and which still had great impact,” Janes said when discussing the podcast. “So far as we can tell, for all McCarthy’s bluster, his ‘list(s)’ were mainly numbers either taken from other sources or misremembered or just made up. Yet people believed them, and acted as a result of what he said he had."

McCarthy was a fake war hero, and Donald Trump may well be a fake billionaire (and is definitely a fake business genius). Both presented themselves as persecuted by vast conspiracies, and both excel at smelling blood, and getting others to follow. McCarthy didn’t start the post-World War II red scare that made him famous, he just dialed up the paranoia to 11, much as Trump did with birth-certificate mania during Barack Obama’s first term.

Even though there was no there there, most of the Republican Party went along with McCarthy's massive commie-hunt. A handful of internal dissenters quickly melted away. So it's hardly surprising that it's happening again. Four months after McCarthy’s speech, on June 1, 1950, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith, R-Maine, gave the most memorable speech of her career, denouncing McCarthy’s tactics — but not naming him — and introducing a "Declaration of Conscience," signed by herself and six other GOP senators.

But when the Korean War broke out later that same month, any chance of them prevailing over McCarthy vanished. Only one — Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon —remained thoroughly outraged, eventually leaving the Republican Party to become an independent in 1952, and then a Democrat in 1955. Later, Morse would cast one of only two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, which greatly expanded the U.S. military role in Vietnam. There were no one else like him at the time -- and there certainly isn't now. 

For the rest of the Republican Party, supporting McCarthy made sense in the short run: The GOP gained a Senate majority in the 1952 election for the first time in 20 years, though it was a short-lived and unstable triumph. Democrats regained their majority two years later — the year McCarthy was finally censured — and won 12 Republican-held seats in the wave election of 1958, beginning another two decades of legislative hegemony. Today's Republicans are clearly taking a similar political risk by going all-in on Donald Trump. But will they take the whole country down with them?  

Connecting Trump to McCarthy is the figure of Roy Cohn. As summarized by Politico last year, their connection was forged  in 1973, when Cohn defended the 27-year-old Donald Trump and his father against a federal racial discrimination lawsuit: “Cohn filed a $100-million countersuit against the federal government, deriding the charges as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘baseless.’” In later filings, “Cohn accused the DOJ and the assisting FBI of ‘Gestapo-like tactics.’ He labeled their investigators ‘undercover agents’ and ‘storm troopers.’” Does any of this sound familiar?

There’s more. At one point Cohn reportedly called a senior figure at the DOJ in Washington “and attempted to get him to censure one of the lead staffers” on the Trump investigation. It's almost uncanny: There’s virtually no move Trump has tried against Robert Mueller that wasn’t prefigured in Cohn’s first outing defending Trump. And Trump got some pretty good licks in himself.

Of course the Trumps finally settled that lawsuit — just as the Justice Department had originally offered. But the younger Trump bristled at any admission of guilt, and was bitter about the advertisements he was forced to place, “including those targeted specifically to minority communities — saying they were an ‘equal housing opportunity’ company.” Then, foreshadowing Trump's future campaign pledges that “Mexico will pay for the wall,” came this petulant tidbit:

At one point, flouting the formality of the court, Trump addressed one of the opposing attorneys by her first name: “Will you pay for the expense, Donna?”

Not much has changed in more than 40 years. But what about the term “witch hunt,” itself? Last year, the New York Times sketched out a history of its recent usage, noting: “The central paradox of modern witch hunts is that those who claim to be the victims, like Nixon, are often the ones most enthusiastic about carrying them out.”

That’s not actually a paradox at all. It’s a natural consequence of choosing to fight dark feelings—projecting them onto others—rather than facing hard facts. As this overview of the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s reveals, there were a multitude of complex social and political threats facing the Massachusetts colonists. Salem’s residents were overwhelmed by their situation — against which they were ultimately powerless, since the English crown was ultimately pulling the strings. But they were also overwhelmed by their feelings, and those they could do something about: They could hunt witches, and pour all their fears and frustrations onto the most vulnerable members of their small and isolated society.

Modern America is not like Salem. We may be overwhelmed by both circumstances and feelings, but we are not powerless at all. The choice is ours: We can confront difficult facts and deal with them, or we can retreat into dark emotions, projecting them outwards onto others and tweeting “Witch Hunt!” to the world.

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Salon political reporter Amanda Marcotte on the decline of conservatism and the rise of "Troll Nation."

Roger Stone should be worried about Robert Mueller

AP/Seth Wenig/Getty/Jack Taylor

Roger Stone, the former adviser to President Donald Trump, has now been revealed to have sought information about Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

In September 2016, Stone asked Randy Credico, a New York radio personality who had previously interviewed Assange for his show, to reach out to the ostensible whistleblower for information about Hillary Clinton that could damage her presidential campaign, according to The Wall Street Journal. Because Assange was known at that time to be in possession of emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee (and which he is believed to have acquired from Russia), Stone asked Credico by email to look into whether Assange could find anything about then-Secretary of State Clinton's involvement in allegedly ruining a supposed Libyan peace deal in 2011.

"Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30--particularly on August 20, 2011," Stone wrote to Credico. After the radio host speculated that any damning emails would already be on WikiLeaks' website, Stone asked "Why do we assume WikiLeaks has released everything they have ???"

Credico can be seen in the exchange asking that Stone allow him to have a "little bit of time," before adding a few hours later, "That batch probably coming out in the next drop...I can’t ask them favors every other day .I asked one of his lawyers...they have major legal headaches riggt now..relax."

Stone told the Journal by text message that Credico "provided nothing" to him and that WikiLeaks likewise never gave him anything. Credico also told the Journal that he had never relayed Stone's message to either Assange or his lawyers but lied and said that he had so that the political adviser would stop "bothering" him.

Stone also told the Journal that "I never had possession or access to any Clinton emails or records," and insisted that his testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in September had been "complete and accurate" — even though Stone had told the committee members that he had contacted Assange because he "merely wanted confirmation" that they actually had information about Clinton.

"If there is such a document, then it would mean that his testimony was either deliberately incomplete or deliberately false," Adam Schiff, D - Calif., and the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, told the Journal about the possibility that Stone's emails revealed he had sought information about Clinton from Assange.

Stone has a history of interactions with WikiLeaks. Less than one month before the election, he exchanged angry direct messages with WikiLeaks over Instant Messenger on Twitter over what he seemed to perceive as their lack of appreciation for his work on their behalf, according to The Atlantic.

"Since I was all over national TV, cable and print defending wikileaks and assange against the claim that you are Russian agents and debunking the false charges of sexual assault as trumped up bs you may want to reexamine the strategy of attacking me — cordially R.," Stone wrote to WikiLeaks on Oct. 13, 2016.

"We appreciate that," WikiLeaks responded. "However, the false claims of association are being used by the democrats to undermine the impact of our publications. Don't go there if you don't want us to correct you."

Stone clearly was not reassured.

"Ha!" he replied. "The more you 'correct' me the more people think you're lying. Your operation leaks like a sieve. You need to figure out who your friends are."

Although Assange later had his internet cut off by the Ecuadorian embassy where he lives due to his publication of the Democratic emails stolen by Russian hackers, this didn't stop WikiLeaks (whether with Assange's knowledge or not) from openly acknowledging to Stone that their relationship was going to improve after Trump was elected.

Following Trump's victory, WikiLeaks sent Stone a pair of messages:

"Happy?"

"We are now more free to communicate."

Donald Trump Jr. was also revealed to have corresponded with WikiLeaks at various points during the 2016 election, according to The Atlantic. This included WikiLeaks notifying Trump Jr. that a website linking his father to Russian President Vladimir Putin was about to launch, WikiLeaks and Trump Jr. talking about the Trump campaign sharing various news stories that served WikiLeaks' best interests and WikiLeaks asking Trump Jr. to leak part of his father's tax returns to them ("it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality").

Perhaps the most notable exchanges occurred during and after Election Day when WikiLeaks encouraged the Trump campaign to not concede if they lost to Clinton and even asked that Trump request for Australia to appoint Assange as its ambassador to the United States.

WikiLeaks didn’t write again until Election Day, November 8, 2016. “Hi Don if your father ‘loses’ we think it is much more interesting if he DOES NOT conceed [sic] and spends time CHALLENGING the media and other types of rigging that occurred—as he has implied that he might do,” WikiLeaks wrote at 6:35pm, when the idea that Clinton would win was still the prevailing conventional wisdom. (As late as 7:00pm that night, FiveThirtyEight, a trusted prognosticator of the election, gave Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.) WikiLeaks insisted that contesting the election results would be good for Trump’s rumored plans to start a media network should he lose the presidency. “The discussion can be transformative as it exposes media corruption, primary corruption, PAC corruption, etc.,” WikiLeaks wrote.

Shortly after midnight that day, when it was clear that Trump had beaten all expectations and won the presidency, WikiLeaks sent him a simple message: “Wow.”

Trump Jr. did not respond to these messages either, but WikiLeaks was undeterred. “Hi Don. Hope you’re doing well!” WikiLeaks wrote on December 16 to Trump Jr., who was by then the son of the president-elect. “In relation to Mr. Assange: Obama/Clinton placed pressure on Sweden, UK and Australia (his home country) to illicitly go after Mr. Assange. It would be real easy and helpful for your dad to suggest that Australia appoint Assange ambassador to [Washington,] DC.”

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Matthew Rozsa grills Roger Stone about his connections to Russia.

How China’s winemakers succeeded (without stealing)

AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

Joint ventures between Western and Chinese companies are in the news over accusations — including those of President Donald Trump — that China uses them to steal intellectual property from foreign competitors in industries like cars and technology.

Less well known, however, are the joint ventures between French and Chinese winemakers, which offer a notable counterpoint to this narrative of international rivalry — or foreign exploitation, depending on your perspective.

Unlike for cars and electronics, there are no secret technologies in the making of wine. The millennia-old fermented drink is primarily a product of the land where the grapes are grown. What differentiates the best from the rest is not proprietary technology but experience in combining agriculture, science and art.

During research visits to China’s major wine regions — from beach resorts in Shandong and Ningxia’s rocky and arid landscapes to the lush mountains of Yunnan — we encountered a blend of local and foreign winemakers, farmers, wine scientists and local government officials, all committed to establishing local wines on the world stage.

Winemaking succeeds on the back of such international collaboration. And in our experience, it’s helping Chinese wine producers overcome their biggest obstacles to success.

No secret technology to steal

China is currently the sixth-largest wine producer, bottling 11.4 million hectoliters in 2016, just behind Australia’s 13 million. China is fifth in terms of consumption.

A few years ago, as we explained in The Conversation, China’s wine industry was focused on overcoming the rising cost of labor, dealing with difficult climates and improving grape quality.

Now, the biggest obstacles Chinese vintners have to overcome are the country’s image problem and growing competition from foreign wine. And that’s where the foreign ventures have proven so valuable.

China has long had a reputation for counterfeiting and food safety scandals. At the same time, the wine industry has become less protected from foreign competition after bilateral trade deals with countries such as Chile and Australia eliminated some tariffs. And although there are still such barriers in place with Europe (as well as the U.S.), Chinese wine lovers still drink a ton of French wine, despite the higher prices.

That has meant Chinese makers of premium wines have had to raise their game to compete with skilled foreign competitors. And perhaps ironically, some of those foreign rivals have been only too happy to share knowledge and skills.

Unlike for cars, making good wine doesn’t require proprietary technology. Any serious student can learn the techniques, whether they are traditional or cutting edge, by reading, going to school or finding a mentor. Becoming a good winemaker requires experimenting with a range of tried and true methods, both in the vineyard and the cellar. There is no secret recipe, only hard work and problem solving.

Such collaborative partnerships have been essential to helping China wine producers overcome the image problem and better compete.

Enter the French

It might surprise readers that French Cognac producer Remy Martin was one of the first Western companies to form a joint venture in China, in this case with the city of Tianjin in 1980 to set up a winery.

The French brought winemaking skills and, in exchange, got a foot in the door into a promising market for imported Cognac. The result, Dynasty Winery, is now one of the largest Chinese wine producers.

Remy and other Western companies brought not only skills but also their brand name. Chinese wine enthusiasts – vulnerable to the same stereotypes Westerners have — might question how good a wine from an unknown domestic company might be. But if is made by a famous French wine group, whose wines they enjoy, they might give it a chance.

While Dynasty is a mass market brand, other more recent French-Chinese partnerships have focused on developing premium wines. One involved LVMH and a state-owned enterprise in Ningxia, a poor province often hailed as China’s most promising wine region. In 2013, the French luxury conglomerate launched Chandon China, the latest offspring in the global Chandon family of sparkling wine.

Unlike in other sectors, such as clothing or electronics, Western winemakers are not in China to take advantage of low costs. Chinese wine is expensive to make, due to the rising cost of labor, and, in some regions, the need to bury the vines to protect them from cold winters and dig them out every spring.

Moreover, you can’t outsource the production of wine to another country. Champagne can only be made in the Champagne region of France. Napa Valley wine can only be made in the Napa Valley. If a wine is made in China, it becomes Chinese wine.

Soaring wine quality

The result, for Chinese winemakers, has been soaring quality.

Not long ago, really good Chinese wines were very hard to find. Mass market wine brands, like Changyu, Great Wall or Dynasty, were ubiquitous in supermarkets and convenience stores around the country. But most award-winning boutique wineries you read about in the media were too small or lacked marketing skills and deals with distributors that could put their wines in front of consumers.

Today the best boutique Chinese wines are far more available in major cities because the major distributors have begun to include more Chinese producers in their porfolios of primarily imported wines. This has made the best Chinese wines available in local shops frequented by wine enthusiasts, like Pudao Wines in Beijing and Shanghai, and on a few restaurant wine lists.

At a hotel restaurant in Guangzhou’s main airport in 2016, for example, we were able to order an glass of Pretty Pony, an Ningxia red by Kanaan winery — something we couldn’t have done just a year earlier.

Next stop: exports

So how easy is it to pick up a bottle of Pretty Pony at your local supermarket if you don’t live in China?

Although exports of Chinese wine are still quite low, at just US$1.2 million in 2016 compared with $15 million for Argentina and $3.2 billion for France, a growing number of supermarkets and wine shops in Europe and the U.S. are stocking some of the best Chinese wines, from Seattle and Melbourne to London and Madrid.

While it’s unlikely Chinese winemakers will be threatening their French peers anytime soon, they are now decidedly on the world’s wine map.

Cynthia Howson, Lecturer, University of Washington and Pierre Ly, Associate Professor, University of Puget Sound

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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