Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 675

#AmnestyDon: Joe Scarborough releases parody song mocking Donald Trump

“Morning Joe” namesake Joe Scarborough on Wednesday put out a song called “Amnesty Don” mocking GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump. The song makes light of Trump’s self-described “softening” on his primary promise to deport 11 million illegal immigrants.

The song and accompanying lyric video — on Scarborough’s Facebook page — conveniently dropped just hours before Trump is scheduled to meet with Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico City. And on Wednesday evening, Trump will further define his immigration policy during a rally in Phoenix.

Scarborough and Trump have historically had a turbulent relationship. This latest dig from Scarborough is sure to ruffle the real estate mogul’s fragile feathers.

Watch below:

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Bad girls, big trouble: The self-destructive young woman as feminist archetype

Morgan Saylor in "White Girl;" Natasha Lyonne in "Antibirth" (Credit: FilmRise/IFC Midnight)

Half a century or so after the birth of the modern feminist movement, female sexuality and sexual agency — indeed, female autonomy in any form — remain an explosive cultural force. We can insist that shouldn’t be true and observe that women have made tremendous strides toward equality in many areas of life. But so many of American society’s political disputes and so much of the on-and-off “culture war” of the last several decades boil down to profound unease over the nature of female power.

At least three of the year’s most widely discussed film-festival premieres address this issue head-on, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be the only examples. In terms of genre, flavor and sensory experience, these movies are quite different: Danny Perez’s “Antibirth” is a grotesque indie horror film starring Natasha Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny, heavily dosed with black humor and bad acid. Elizabeth Wood’s “White Girl” is closer to urban social realism mixed with a cautionary drug-abuse fable. Andrea Arnold’s “American Honey” is a whole bunch of things, including a classic road-trip movie, an exploration of contemporary youth culture and a Bonnie-and-Clyde tale of doomed love.

But all three are rooted in the archetype of the Bad Girl, the young woman who gets high and has lots of sex and makes questionable decisions and does not conform to anyone’s idea of a model citizen. All three make the still-revolutionary point that such a person is just as entitled to be the protagonist of her own story as generations of reckless and self-destructive men have been.

I’m not going to say much more right now about “American Honey,” which is the first U.S.-made feature by the abundantly talented British director Andrea Arnold (who made “Fish Tank” and the magnificent, nearly wordless 2011 adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”). It’s a 162-minute road odyssey shot in numerous American locations that stars Shia LaBeouf and the spectacular newcomer Sasha Lane. It was a sensation at Cannes and might end up being the magnum opus in this particular vein, as well as one of the most memorable films of 2016. It will open in North America at the end of September, and you’ll definitely be hearing more about it before then.

“Antibirth” and “White Girl” both premiered at Sundance last winter and (presumably by coincidence) both are opening this week in New York theaters, with wider national releases and streaming video to follow. Having finally seen both films, I can see why so many tweets out of Park City mentioned them in the same sentence. To put it bluntly, both of these ambitious debut features are stories about young women with impressive libidinal appetites, unleashed upon an unsuspecting world as forces of anarchy. Lou, the permanently hammered dead-end Michigan hotel maid played by Lyonne in “Antibirth” (who finds herself pregnant after a sexual encounter she can’t remember) expresses herself this way: “Let me tell you what I need: candy, money and whippets. Hey, do my tits look bigger to you?” By the way if you don’t know what she means by “whippets,” she’s not referring to a breed of dog and you clearly haven’t been living right.

Both films feature a whole bunch of drugs and a whole bunch of sex. Interestingly enough, it’s the gruesome horror movie made by a man that portrays those subjects with the most ironic distance and the least desire to titillate, not the gritty urban drama made by a woman. (Maybe there’s some larger point about gender and authorship to make there but also maybe not.) Wood, the writer and director of “White Girl” (which was apparently based on her own experiences), walks a fine line between social portraiture and exhibitionism in her portrayal of Leah, the gorgeous and self-destructive gamine played by Morgan Saylor. I’m troubled by the question raised in one particularly debauched scene in “White Girl”: Can one really snort coke off a male acquaintance’s erect member? So much chaos theory is invoked thereby that it just seems like it wouldn’t work. Anyway, in both cases, a female character who in more traditional tales might be presented as an innocent victim, seduced by masculine power and her weakness, becomes something else entirely: for better or worse, the actor rather than the acted-upon.

“Antibirth” and “White Girl” mark the arrival of two immensely promising young writer-directors with an obvious flair for the medium and a feeling for cinema history: Every time I think that new filmmaking talent is inexorably drawn into episodic television, I am proven wrong. One could build a case that “Antibirth,” in which Lyonne and Sevigny play a pair of losers in downscale exurban Michigan — women who are (probably) well north of 30 but steadfastly refuse to grow up — is a more subversive and more deeply feminist work than “White Girl,” which is more conspicuously a young woman’s coming-of-age story. Something tells me I’d be better off not making pronouncements like that. At any rate, “Antibirth” is a hallucinatory, visionary and profoundly deranged tale of deepest Trumpian America. Perez bounces off the politics of rape and abortion and ingrained male privilege and media hypnosis, in between scenes involving an unfortunate new drug that may be a flesh-eating alien monstrosity or medical experimentation performed by fur-clad characters from children’s TV.

Lou is a thoroughly amoral character with a nonexistent moral compass, oriented almost exclusively to gratifying desires that probably shouldn’t be gratified. When she begins to show obvious signs of pregnancy, despite lacking a clear memory of having had unprotected sex (or any other kind), she complains, “I can barely take care of myself, let alone some weird Immaculate Conception shit.” It would be untrue to the spirit of “Antibirth,” whose conceptual grandfathers may include David Cronenberg, Darren Aronofsky and John Waters, to claim that Lou’s redeeming characteristics outweigh her flaws or that pluck and sisterhood will carry her through her bizarre ordeal. But Lyonne’s performance is a marvel of humor and compassion. Consigned to a mock-Dante realm of pimps and drug dealers and unnatural or supernatural phenomena, she refuses to be consumed by self-pity. As for being consumed by other things — who among us can prevent that?

“White Girl” is also an arresting and well-told tale but in a far more familiar vein. It’s the story of a middle-class refugee drawn into the inner-city drug trade and the overly mythologized lifestyle that supposedly accompanies it. Leah (played by Saylor, a magnetic 21-year-old actress) is a white college sophomore from somewhere in middle America who is presumably attending NYU or Columbia and follows a familiar New York pattern, moving into a neighborhood of black and brown people in pursuit of a bigger apartment and cheaper rent. She and her roommate Katie (India Menuez) are no doubt paying more than whoever lived in their place before but a lot less than the professional couple with Manhattan jobs who will move into the same building two or three years hence.

Leah is immediately drawn to Blue (Brian Marc), a handsome young Latino man who sells drugs on her corner in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens. (Indeed, during the time it took this movie to reach the public, Ridgewood has become well established as a gentrification frontier.) If anything, writer-director Wood goes out of her way to make clear that Blue is not the villain of this story. Whether their “West Side Story” romance is destined to last, Blue consistently gives Leah good advice: Don’t take the drugs I sell, stay away from the crazy and dangerous people in the neighborhood, and don’t get involved in selling to white people in Manhattan. Of course she doesn’t take any of his advice and neither does he, once he figures out that the people she knows who go to media parties in Chinatown will pay triple the Ridgewood street price for bags of cocaine or heroin.

Wood creates a compelling portrait of an effervescent young woman with zero impulse control who is torn between competing social worlds, and Saylor gives a star-is-born performance, playing Leah as a half-evil elf princess who has wandered out of the magical forest to drive the human race crazy. Rather too quickly, they end up in “What could possibly go wrong?” territory, when fate entrusts Leah with a large amount of narcotics and then a large amount of cash, both of which of course belong to other people who would like to get them back.

If both these stories have a moral agenda, well, why shouldn’t they? Storytelling almost always involves crafting or embedding a moral message, visibly or otherwise. But in ways large and small, these films also make the point that women are still judged differently for pursuing heedless pleasure and violating the moral code. Their Bad Girl heroines stand astride the globe, bong in one hand and crumpled $100 bill in the other, demanding liberty or death.

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100 percent bananas? Meet the fruitarians, who believe we can live on raw fruit alone

Freelee the Banana Girl in her video "Watch me eat 51 BANANAS today!!!!!" (Credit: YouTube/Freelee the Banana Girl)

Last week almost 600 people trekked to the Adirondacks to upstate New York’s Camp Walden, the site of the annual Woodstock Fruit Festival. If the name Woodstock evokes indulgent images of hedonism and hallucinogens, think again. The only type of high at this gathering is a fructose high. The festival, dubbed the “Super Bowl of Health, Fitness, and Social Events,” is an annual assembly of fruitarians, health-obsessed followers of a diet that some call revolutionary and others consider a new extreme eating cult.  

The eight-day Woodstock Fruit Festival was started in 2011 by Michael Arnstein, a lithe 39-year-old former ultra marathoner who had adopted a fruit-based diet three years earlier. Arnstein has credited his practice of eating almost entirely fruit (as much as 30 pounds a day, as he told the late Details magazine in 2012) to improving his eyesight, lowering his body fat and staving off illness. As a competitive athlete, he had originally tried the diet to improve his stamina and cross the finish line faster, and it worked. And within a few months, he had shaved 17 minutes off his previous personal best time in the marathon. Now Arnstein is a cornerstone figure in the world of fruitarianism, most often considered raw veganism at its most extreme, the kind of diet that makes hard-core paleo and vegan regimens seem like a fast food binge.

While there’s no single way to be a fruitarian, generally the diet requires making 75 percent or more of your daily food intake raw fruit, which includes everything from acid fruits like citrus and pineapple, to sweet fruits like bananas to various dried fruit. The consumption of seeds and nuts, though tolerated, is frowned on by hard-liners.

After launching his informational site The Fruitarian (which is geared toward athletes like himself), Arnstein founded the Woodstock Fruit Festival to connect with like-minded fans of fruitarian eating. The festival’s attendance has grown from 150 people in its inaugural year to almost 600. The fest might be thought of as adult summer camp for fruit fanatics or, say, a sweet, wholesome, unpeeled Burning Man (sans salt, alcohol or caffeine). With some exceptions, the crowd is made up of mostly lean, dreadlocked drum circle leaders and aspiring yogis with whimsically painted faces. And though you don’t have to be in aspirational shape to attend, it helps.

Activities include everything from the expected exercises (yoga, meditation) to lectures (for example, “Are You an Angry Vegan?” and “How to Use the Right Herbs and Supplements to Overcome Nutritional Deficiencies and Thrive in Your Raw Food Lifestyle”), and social activities (late-night dance parties and speed dating but no Bananagrams). One of the festival’s most popular events is the “Midnight Durian Vampire Party,” a near-Dionysian ritual where carts of the pungent Durian fruit are wheeled out in the middle of the night to ecstatic revelers like the man who swore that “your body craves that sulphur flavor. . . . If there’s something you miss eating, durian starts to taste just like it.” 

Fruitarianism is hardly a formal practice. It can be traced back to 1918, when an Australian newspaper wrote about it, and Steve Jobs tried it out in the 1970s when it first started gaining a following in the U.S. But the trend didn’t take off until 2006, when Douglas Graham self-published “The 80/10/10 Diet,” which posits that a person’s consumption of 80 percent of his or her calories from fruit-based carbohydrates, 10 percent from fat and 10 percent in protein will result in weight loss, increased energy and mental clarity and all around better health.

The uncomplicated nature of the fruitarian diet (no difficult to find ingredients, cumbersome calorie counting or nutritional equations) and the fact that its staples taste good and available at every supermarket make it stand out among diet fads.

“The fruitarian diet is based on what we’re designed to eat as opposed to a diet that will produce health improvements,” Don Bennett, director of the Health 101 Institute, told Salon. Bennett has been following an all-fruit diet for 25 years and is a mainstay at the festival, counseling others on the power of fresh produce.

“Personally, my body was able to heal permanent nerve damage and my vitality increased noticeably,” Bennett added. “Those who . . . have transitioned to the diet and who are doing it successfully don’t tend to go back to what they once ate. So the recidivism rate is far lower than any other diet. It provides the best odds of never getting a serious diagnosis.”

That may not matter to the more than 700,000 people who follow the notorious Freelee the Banana Girl on YouTube. Freelee, who has claimed to eat as many as 51 bananas a day, has brought attention — and controversy — to the movement in recent years. One of the most recognizable figures of fruitarianism, Freelee is regularly accused of bullying others into adopting the lifestyle. She is a social media star, yes, but she has her share of haters.

Fruitarianism has been criticized for its extreme and cultish nature. It’s not surprising perhaps that it has begun to flourish at a time when orthorexia, a recently identified eating disorder characterized by an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating, has moved into the vernacular.

Some experts have expressed concerns over what seem like obvious nutritional deficiencies. “Don’t think a fruitarian diet is a safe or beneficial eating plan,” LeeAnn Weintraub, a Los Angeles-based registered dietitian nutritionist told Salon. “Although fruit is healthy, it’s primarily carbohydrates, and the body requires protein and fat, as well as micronutrients like iron, calcium and some B vitamins, which cannot be obtained in adequate amounts from fruit alone.”

“I’m also concerned about the high sugar content of this kind of diet without the balance of protein and healthy fats,” she said.

Ashton Kutcher experienced this firsthand, when he found himself in the hospital after adopting a fruitarian diet to play Steve Jobs in the 2013 biopic “Jobs.” Kutcher told reporters, “My insulin levels got pretty messed up and my pancreas kind of went into some crazy, the levels were really off and it was painful. I didn’t know what was wrong.”

None of that seems to make a difference to the devotees who eagerly consumed 100,000 pounds of raw fruit at the Woodstock Fruit Festival. To be sure, the fruitarian movement certainly offers more exotic retreats for the ultra committed like Costa Rica. But if you’re intrigued at the prospect of spending a week opening a thousand coconuts, peeling twice that many bananas and bonding over the joys of a bottomless fruit salad bar that never closes, the Woodstock Fruit Festival is now taking reservations for next year.

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Bring back camp! Why “The People v. O.J.” and “The Get Down” point to its possible — and much-needed — rebirth

"The People vs. O.J. Simpson;" "The Get Down" (Credit: FX/Netflix)

I miss camp.

You’d think I wouldn’t, since I, like most hip consumers of pop culture, am surrounded by a banquet of irony these days. For more than a decade now almost all the best comedies, from the early days of “The Office” to Amy Schumer’s sketches, have had a tone of arch irony. Irony is also the preferred tone of the internet, as best personified by the recently departed Gawker and its anti-smarm stance.

Sarcasm is the lingua franca of the 21st century, which would make one think that camp — the aesthetic that invented giving the ironic side-eye towards smarmy middle-American bullshit — would be everywhere.

But it’s not. No, the preferred form that today’s irony takes is snark: a stance of ironic detachment, a form of irony that puts the purveyor in a position of overt superiority to his or her object of derision.

Camp, in contrast, is a form of humor that loves to wallow. The snarker sees a collection of Hummel figurines and issues a sharp witticism connecting their cloying aesthetic to, say, the Trump campaign. But the camp aficionado gathers the Hummel figurines to his breast, brings them into his home and artfully arranges them to suggest that the tots with umbrellas are engaged in orgiastic worship of the little boy reading a paper on the potty.

It was at the Republican National Convention (where else?) when it hit me how hard it is to really indulge my campier sense of humor these days.

Only Las Vegas can deliver the levels of sublime bad taste available on the first night of the RNC, when Three Dog Night played at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But my appreciation for the glorious shittiness of it all had no audience. My video of fireworks exploding over Cleveland while “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.” blared on the speakers got no Instagram likes. My desire to own a pair of flag-festooned women’s cowboy boots seemed to confuse my social media followers more than delight them. These people probably wouldn’t enjoy a ’70s John Waters movie, I thought to myself, as I shifted the tone of my RNC social-media coverage toward the more internet-friendly snark.

It makes sense, of course. Camp is subtle and indirect form of humor, and we live in an era of bluntness. Camp gave marginalized people a way to needle the middlebrow world without direct confrontation — most normies are more confused by camp than offended by it — but direct confrontation is now in vogue. Camp embraces ambiguity; it’s refusing to draw a hard line between mocking and genuinely enjoying the Lifetime weepie movie you are watching. But we live in an era where people want clear, delineated lines so they know whether they should take offense at someone’s joshing.

But two recent TV shows heavily lean on elements of camp, showing that American culture shouldn’t be so hasty as to leave it behind: Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” on FX and Baz Luhrmann’s portrayal of the dawn of hip-hop in “The Get Down” on Netflix.

Both shows deal with complex, real-life historical events involving a number of sensitive issues regarding race, gender, media and economics and thus would seem to forbid approaching the subject matter through a lens of pure nostalgia, as is found in a show like “Stranger Things.”

A gritty, overly serious tone for “The Get Down” or “The People vs. O.J.” would not serve the material well, either. It would elide the undeniable weirdness of the Simpson trial and the circus around it. It would also tragically conceal the genuine joyfulness and freedom of the early days of hip-hop, removing the fun and humanity from the story in the name of “realism.”

But camp, an aesthetic that lives in the liminal area between mocking a thing and loving a thing, gives Murphy and Luhrmann space to play around with these stories, creating more textured narratives than you’d get with a more straightforward approach.

Take the last scene in the second episode of “The Get Down,” where aspiring diva Mylene (Herizen Guardiola) rebels against her fundamentalist Christian preacher father (Giancarlo Esposito) by ripping off her choir robes in church to reveal a sexy dress and singing a disco-fied version of a Pentecostal hymn while the congregation flails around in religious ecstasy.

Needless to say, if that scene had been played straight, it would have been at best cringeworthy in the earnestness of the feminist message or more likely completely incoherent. But when properly viewed as an exemplar of camp, which is mostly indifferent to plebeian concerns about coherence, the scene is wondrous. The ecstasy of the worshippers is both mocked and envied. The over-the-top dress underlines the power of female sexuality while also sending up the objectification of women in pop music. Viewers are laughing at the ridiculousness of this scene, but in their laughter they are also rooting for Mylene. Some things do not fit neatly into boxes, and unlike snark, camp doesn’t ask them to.

“The People vs. O.J. Simpson” pulled off a similar trick in its “Marcia Marcia Marcia” episode, which dealt in large part with the bizarre nationwide controversy over prosecutor Marcia Clark getting a bad haircut. The whole incident, which happened in real life, is portrayed under a thick layer of campy humor. The heightened promises of the hairdresser, Clark’s giddily naive hopes that this is going to be fabulous, the hostile reactions of the men around her: It’s all played up for humor, but it’s also deeply sad.

Without that humor, the extent of Clark’s suffering over a haircut would be too absurd, and many viewers would reject believing that this even happened. (It did.) But camp creates space to mock the situation while still siding with Clark and her horrible haircut. We’ve all been there, girl, though most of us were lucky enough not to be on national television on our worst hair day.

That these examples both center around stories of women trying to find their way in a man’s world is not a coincidence; that theme has always been the bread and butter of camp. The sublime ridiculousness of the straight world is easiest to see when mocking the impossible situations that women are put in by it.

There are other campy scenes in the O.J. Simpson film but I won’t spoil them for you.

Perhaps these examples represent the last gasps of camp as it goes gently into that good night, overwhelmed by American culture’s increasing intolerance for ambiguity, especially when it comes to humor. Or maybe these shows are seedlings, evidence of a rebirth of humor and art that lives the gray areas, that sees the beauty in bad taste and resists a plain meaning that can be crammed into 140 characters.

I certainly hope it’s the latter, because I have a 50-piece Hummel figurine collection sitting in storage, just waiting to be put on display with my lunchbox collection and set of Brady Bunch memorabilia.

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Colin The Lionheart: Kaepernick is pushing the envelope for black male athletes

Colin Kaepernick (Credit: AP/Ben Margot)

In November 2014, I along with the rest of Black America learned that a 12-year-old black boy in Ohio had been gunned down while playing in the park with a BB gun within less than 2 seconds of police arriving. Ohio was and is an open carry state.

As with any tragic death that lies on the on the same path of others in America, Tamir Rice’s made our world stand still. I still remember attempting earnestly to council my nephew about what he could possibly do in the face of a police encounter.

In December 2015, post-Ferguson, post-Baltimore I along with the rest of Black America learned that the officers who approached Rice in their police cruiser and opened fire were not going to be indicted, and that the state prosecutor fought fervently for that conclusion.

Confused and overcome with a certain clarity of mind, I expressed my concerns on Twitter. I thought about who could possibly shed light on such an injustice. There were many organizations, agencies and names that floated in my head. There had to be somebody who was influential enough to call a crime against humanity out for what it was.

Without a doubt, Ohio native LeBron James was the first person to come to mind. He had the platform, the influence and the history of being vocal, to do something. I started the campaign #NoJusticeNoLeBron to urge him to discontinue play for whatever amount of time he saw useful, as a method of showing the severity of the what is destroying lives across the U.S.

The backlash I received was uncanny. I was accused of starting a race war, of myself not having any skin in the game of change agency, and outright laziness. When asked about the Tamir Rice verdict and the calls for a sit-out, James said: “I don’t have enough information on the subject.”

I lost respect for James answering in that fashion but I still admire his philanthropy, greatness as an athlete and service as a role model. The death Muhammad Ali came months after. We collectively sighed in anguish because a man who stood for more than what his body was capable of was no longer with us. The world would never be the same. What his passing confirmed to me is that the occasion I called for required a different breed of athlete to rise to. I just didn’t expect it would be an NFL star.

***

Colin Kaepernick, a mixed race, foster-child of white parents who’s the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, has decided to not stand any more for the national anthem unless America addresses its addiction to oppressing people of color.

For the last few preseason games, Kaepernick has quietly sat during the song written by slavery advocate Francis Scott Key. Here is his third verse reference championing the industry.

Last Friday, the mainstream media finally caught wind of his silent protest. Since then, Kaepernick has teetered on the side of being a hero for the voiceless masses who’ve rarely drank from the wells of justice, and the razor-sharp teeth of Americans who’ve called his stance near treason.

Kaepernick, 28, explained to the media that he has taken more time to watch and learn about the current state of America, saying with conviction, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”

He decided that protest an anthem authored by a slavery protagonist that lays a fragile promise of freedom and equality was his best option. America is proving him right. Kaepernick has been called the N-word more times than ever before. Fans once dazzled by his fearless play and handsome smile are hanging his jerseys from trees setting them ablaze on video, with the anthem playing in the background. Twitter users are urging Kaepernick and his supporters to go back to Africa if they feel their country is too oppressive. The punishment he is poised to undergo doesn’t come as a surprise. A few months earlier this year WNBA players stood unmoved when they were fined for wearing T-shirts that supported the Black Lives Matter movement and the police who were killed in Dallas. In a response to their aesthetic protest police usually on guard at Minnesota Lynx games vowed to not protect the team. Their fine was later rescinded by the league president. Still members of the team took their protest further deciding not to answer any post-game questions that weren’t about the pressing issues in society. Clearly, athletes have also realized that the suffering is far too acute.

 

***

 

Kaepernick’s protest means more than the fence-riding rhetoric of other athletes. And it is not meant to pit them against each other. But, they should notice that he took a side. He wasn’t shamed into respectability politics that forces black athletes to mention intra-communal crime in the same breath as state-sanctioned violence, every time. Kaepernick is calling into account a system of inequality that fills prisons with black and brown people; floods narcotics into the neighborhoods of black and brown people; kills whites at the hands of police six times less than black and brown people; and intentionally floods the water systems used by black and brown people with lead.

He is addressing the most poignant manifestation of white supremacy, it’s rogue police forces. This stance took the type of bravery Scott-Key fantasized about when he wrote his ballad of love for what was then a chattel slaving nation. The moment we’ve arrived at is necessary. It was brewing. Recently in an interview for Vox.com acclaimed olympian John Carlos remarked, “And so I’m really frustrated with a lot of today’s stars, who have an opportunity to speak up but don’t. They think they’re secure in their little bubbles of fame and wealth. They think racism and prejudice can’t touch them because they’ve achieved a certain level of success.”

 

An argument consistently made for athletes who join struggles is their risk of losing money. Which begs the question, how much is silence about oppression worth? Are endorsements the duct tape over the mouths of those with the largest platform? Money will be lost. He’s aware of that. But unlike many others in his position, he’s going outside the realms of respectable dissent. Money can’t bring the justice that he believes people of color need here. The fact that he’s now in this position proves it. Black NBA players became the wealthiest group of black people in America this year and this also happens to be the same year that Philando Castile was killed by a police officer in Minnesota with his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter in the car. His killer didn’t ask what his socioeconomic status was. The class argument is a mute one.

Kaepernick has made many difficult decisions in his life. His latest goes far beyond which receiver to go to on third down. He’s chosen to tread the waters of Ali, Paul Robeson, and many others.

We all know that football is nothing less than America’s game. Right now America is hemorrhaging, as it always has. We need people like Kaepernick to do just what he did, raise awareness. His story is far from over. Kaepernick is used to making plays. He’s done it all his life. But in a place where blind patriotism silently condones indifference to suffering, there are those who make the plays for justice. This is where he stands, possibly all alone, for something.

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Ryan Lochte’s redemption tango: Can “Dancing With the Stars” turn “America’s idiot sea cow” back into a hero?

Ryan Lochte (Credit: AP/Martin Meissner)

Hollywood is full of roads to redemption for those who have committed the most egregious of sins. For many, the journey can be twisted and rocky and tends to involve a fair amount of time spent away from the klieg lights of celebrity.

That is, unless that person happens to be U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte. As of Tuesday morning, Lochte is officially a contender on Season 23 of the hit reality competition “Dancing with the Stars.” He’ll be hoofing it alongside 12 more beloved celebrities, including Maureen McCormick, aka Marcia Brady; Marilu Henner, who unlike Lochte has a highly superior autobiographical memory; model (and Kardashian-adjacent personality) Amber Rose; Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, and interesting enough, another U.S. Olympian, gymnast Laurie Hernandez.

Lochte’s dancing partner is Cheryl Burke, who has previously been paired with Antonio Sabàto Jr., an actor lately known for his roles in direct to DVD films and who recently opined at the GOP convention that Obama is a Muslim, and Tom DeLay, the former congressman who was indicted for money laundering. We’re just going to leave that one right there.

Reports of Lochte’s participation began circulating last week, but that was before the news broke that Brazilian authorities were charging the athlete with falsely reporting a crime during the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.  This was the result of his having “overexaggerated” allegations of being held at gunpoint along with three other U.S. swimmers and robbed by a man impersonating a police officer.

Reasonable human beings would not be out of line for thinking that ABC may have had second thoughts about incorporating the 32-year-old Lochte into the 23rd season of its highest-rated series, especially given the extent to which his behavior cast a shadow over U.S. participation in this summer’s Games. Ralph Lauren and Speedo thought better of continuing to associate with him; both nixed their endorsement deals.

Never mind all that: ABC is moving ahead with its decision and why not? Lochte, whose actions inspired HBO’s late-night host John Oliver to dub him “America’s idiot sea cow,” is the second most decorated male Olympic swimmer of all time after Michael Phelps. “Dancing with the Stars” loves its Olympians: Gymnast Shawn Johnson, ice dancer Meryl Davis, figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno each won their respective “Dancing” seasons.

This season features two Olympians, and it’s nice to see Hernandez get a shot at prime-time glory in a different setting. Nevertheless, a person may wonder why ABC went with Lochte as this season’s second Olympic contender as opposed to anyone else who honorably represented the United States in Rio.

Part of the answer lies in the unstated role of “Dancing with the Stars”: It grants faded celebrities a shot at redemption with the public. Mind you, most “Dancing” competitors don’t need to salvage their reputations. Rather, they have been asked because they’re beloved by fans, are representatives of pop culture nostalgia or their careers could use a jumpstart.

Plus, every “Dancing” roster includes a few contenders who raise eyebrows. Past rounds have featured such polarizing figures as Paula Deen, Nancy Grace and Bristol Palin, but none of them competed while facing criminal charges in a foreign country.

Therefore, the controversial swimmer’s current notoriety makes him the perfect heel in a season that will also feature Vanilla Ice, who has restyled himself as a home-improvement host, and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose shattered presidential hopes link the fall premiere of “Dancing” to the election cycle.

In the end, Lochte’s odds of going the distance will be up to viewers. Historically athletes have done well on “Dancing with the Stars,” but its victors tend to be experts in executing a perfect tango that pairs demonstrable charisma with physical skill. Lochte already suffers from a serious deficit in one of those areas, which portends that redemption may not be on his dance card.

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Three former Trump models reveal they were encouraged to work illegally on tourist visas in “sweatshop”-like conditions

Rachel Blais; Donald Trump (Credit: Getty/Matt Carr/AP/Carolyn Kaster/Photo montage by Salon)

Three former models who worked for Donald Trump’s modeling agency say that the GOP nominee’s company regularly broke immigration laws by getting them into the U.S. and having them do work without obtaining proper visas.

According to an explosive new exposé from Mother Jones, Tump Model Management, the modeling agency which was founded by the GOP nominee in 1999, was a scam operation that employed undocumented models, paid meager salaries and forced its models into in “sweatshop”-like conditions.

“[Trump] doesn’t want to let anyone into the U.S. anymore,” one model, identified by the pseudonym “Kate,” told Mother Jones. “Meanwhile, behind everyone’s back, he’s bringing in all of these girls from all over the world and they’re working illegally.”

“Kate” and another unnamed model said they never received work visas through Trump Model Management. One woman claims she worked in New York for three months in 2009 for Trump’s agency without a work permit:

Each of the three former Trump models said she arrived in New York with dreams of making it big in one of the world’s most competitive fashion markets. But without work visas, they lived in constant fear of getting caught.

“I was there illegally,” one model, identified by the pseudonym “Anna,” revealed. “I was pretty on edge most of the time I was there.”

Both “Anna” and “Kate” said Trump Model Management “encouraged them to purposely deceive Customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and to lie about their intended place of stay,” according to Mother Jones.

“If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings,” one model said an agency representative told her.

Rachel Blais, another one of the models, told Mother Jones that she began working for Trump Model Management in March 2004. According to financial documents and a letter from an immigration attorney cited in the report, the Canadian model did not secure a work visa until six months later, although she appeared as a model on episodes of Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” before securing the work permit.

While Blais eventually got a work visa, both “Anna” and “Kate” eventually left the country — but not before Trump Model Management pressured them into churning through their earnings by forcing them to live in expensive Manhattan apartments, often under cramped conditions.

“We’re hoarded into these small spaces,” “Kate” told Mother Jones. “The apartment was like a sweatshop.”

“I was by far the oldest in the house at the ripe old age of 18,” Anna added.

“I only got one check from Trump Models, and that’s when I left them,” another model claimed, describing her working conditions at Trump’s agency as “like modern-day slavery.”

“I got $8,000 at most after having worked there for three years and having made tens of thousands of dollars.”

This comes after a Jamaican model said she “felt like a slave” in a lawsuit against Trump’s agency, alleging that business violated labor and immigration laws and lied in a H1-B visa application about her salary. Her lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year after the judge found that the model had not exhausted all her options with the Department of Labor or state court before filing the suit.

Trump has since made his opposition to the H1-B visa a centerpiece in his tough on immigration campaign platform.

“The H-1B program is neither high-skilled nor immigration: These are temporary foreign workers, imported from abroad, for the explicit purpose of substituting for American workers at lower pay,” Trump said in a March 3 statement still on his campaign website. “I remain totally committed to eliminating rampant, widespread H-1B abuse. I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers for every visa and immigration program. No exceptions.”

To Trump’s credit, however, Susan Scafidi, founder of the Fashion Law Institute in New York, told Mother Jones that Trump’s alleged practice of skirting the immigration rules for models is “very common” in the industry.

“Honestly, they are the most crooked agency I’ve ever worked for, and I’ve worked for quite a few,” one model said of Trump Model Management.

“He doesn’t like the face of a Mexican or a Muslim,” another noted, identifying the source of the discrepancy in Trump’s apparent new stance on undocumented immigration. “But because these models are beautiful girls, it’s okay? He’s such a hypocrite.”

The GOP nominee still holds an 85 percent stake in Trump Model Management.

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“Life was always a financial hellscape”: Gaby Dunn’s “Bad With Money” wants to break the “secret shame” of money talk

Gaby Dunn (Credit: Robin Roemer)

Los Angeles-based YouTube star Gaby Dunn has never been good with money. Her difficulty with saving isn’t unique; a 2015 Google consumer survey found that more than 60 percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in their bank accounts, and 20 percent don’t even have a savings account at all. Having been in the former category myself plenty of times in my adult life, I was excited to see that Dunn isn’t just bemoaning her cash flow but doing something to further the often hidden cultural conversation about what money means to us.

The 28-year-old writer and actress, who stars in her online show “Just Between Us” with Allison Raskin, has taken her financial issues and turned them into our gain with her newly launched 24-episode podcast “Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn” on Panoply. On the show, she interviews everyone from her parents, best friend and boyfriend to guests ranging from Sydney Leathers (the infamous paramour of Anthony Weiner), former child actor Mara Wilson, Hello Giggles co-founder Molly McAleer and Vidcon co-founder Hank Green about what they learned about money growing up and how this has affected their approach to saving and spending.

Salon emailed Dunn about her worst money mistakes, the economics of vlogging and why it’s important to get rid of the shame about money.

When did you first realize your family approached money differently than other families?

My dad tells a story on the podcast about me being 17 and convincing him during a freak snowstorm in Chicago to buy cheaper coats, even though we desperately needed them to keep warm.

But I think it started in second grade. I switched from a public school to a private school which I attended on an academic scholarship. It was then that I encountered rich kids for the first time. I didn’t really know anything about how my family handled money per se, but I knew we didn’t have the same house, or jewelry, or even hair styles as the other kids. Straightening your hair was a big thing when I was in middle school and all the girls had hair straighteners and my mom ironed my hair for me with a literal iron. For real.

Have you been “bad with money” since as far back as you can remember? Do you recall a time when you were ever good with money?

I’ve always been bad with it. Though, like I said, my dad seemed to think I was more cautious about it than he or my mom were and that came from worrying about the two of them. I definitely would yell at them for spending or tell them they were overspending for no reason, while doing pretty much the same thing in my own life.

So I knew it was wrong, but I kept doing it. Largely because I thought anyone who wasn’t a Wall Street trader or an international arms dealer was living like me, paycheck to paycheck. Since no one talked about it, I presumed we were normal and life was always a financial hellscape unless you were super wealthy.

What’s the worst money mistake you’ve ever made?

Oh, there’s been a few. I sink so much money into repairs for my car, which I am constantly damaging. I wasn’t keeping good track of my taxes so I owed the IRS $7,000 one year. I had to get emergency dental surgery and that was such a big expense, thousands of dollars, that I feel like I’m going to have to keep paying for it as more issues arise. (I think fixing my teeth is just a never-ending saga due to genetics and also working in Hollywood on-camera.)

I’m constantly over-paying for things because I get too worked up or anxious and I think just throwing money at the problem will fix it, like parking tickets I could fight but I don’t because time/energy is money.

How did you get the idea for the podcast? Did you have any hesitation about talking so openly about your money issues?

The idea for the podcast came from the Fusion article I wrote called “Get Rich or Die Vlogging.” And that article came out of frustration with comments on my YouTube channel claiming I was a sell-out for doing sponsored videos when honestly, the brands were never really paying me that much and that was often my sole source of income. The misunderstanding that YouTube fame equaled millions of dollars and therefore meant I was deserving of public scorn was a sharp contrast to my real life of looking through my car for spare quarters.

So I was mad. And I wrote about it. And apparently, this was a topic that no YouTuber had ever covered before? Because the response was insane. People really appreciated it. So then a friend of mine named Andrea Silenzi, who worked in podcasting at Slate/Panoply, approached me about turning it into a podcast in November 2015. Andrea paired me with Sam Dingman, my producer, who has been a God among men in terms of putting this together.

I didn’t really have any hesitation about talking about money, except I wasn’t interested in being mansplained to. I think men see a woman who is figuring something out on her own and they’re like “DAMSEL IN DISTRESS MUST SAVE.” So the only annoying thing was opening my email and DMs to men I didn’t know sending me long condescending messages about what I should be doing. Many of them were like, “If I were you, here’s how I’d easily become a billionaire.” And like, that’s great, Trevor, but if you’re so smart, why not do it for yourself? (I named them all Trevor.)

Has monetizing YouTube videos and having a sustainable career as a vlogger gotten easier since you wrote that piece?

For me it has gotten easier, because we’ve become more notable and famous. So the deals are bigger now. But we don’t subsist just on YouTube. Allison and I have sold two television shows to networks in the last year. We sold a digital series. We’re working on a book. She writes for Fullscreen. I have this podcast. We both take writing and acting gigs. So we do a lot of things outside YouTube to make money.

The problem is we were never vloggers. “Just Between Us” isn’t a vlog. So placing brands into a scripted web series is a bit of a bigger challenge, other than like, Allison drinking a soda in the beginning going, “I love this soda.” Which fans see coming a mile away. Luckily, there have been brands who get our humor and let us do weird sponsored videos but those are fewer and more far between than what a traditional vlogger would get offered. But yes, the YouTube stuff has parlayed itself into better paying gigs. After two years of making videos for free.

Do you have any sense of whether millennials generally view money differently than Generation X or their parents’ generation?

I don’t know! My parents are Baby Boomers. They have a very Yoko-and-John view of money which is, “Hey, man, you can’t take it with you.” Millennials actually seem pretty responsible money-wise because they have the confidence to ask for more money or to get paid for their work. There’s this big push for valuing yourself and your time. Boomers and Gen X got these singular jobs and stayed there for 40 years and hoped for promotions and bonuses and deferred to their bosses.

Millennials are like, “My boss doesn’t pay me enough or treat me well, so see ya.” And yeah, it’s the old “entitled” argument but also for women? For marginalized people? For black people? For gay people? This sort of attitude toward feeling enough self-worth to ask for money? That’s revolutionary and should be celebrated. It’s bomb to know your worth and be confident!

In the first episode, you interview your parents, and confront them on what you see as some of their deep-seated money issues, from your dad spending without regard for saving to your mom bartering her lawyering skills for a haircut. Do you understand their approaches to money better after having done the podcast?

I do understand it, even if it’s frustrating. I knew my dad was an addict and spent recklessly and wracked up hospital and other bills. I knew my mom bartered instead of got paid for her job. And it’s funny, my mom on the show comes off equally sweet and wonderful and also too much of a martyr, if that makes sense. She’s a fantastic woman but she puts people above herself to her own detriment. Which I know is probably something from her own childhood. It’s all cyclical.

Your parents say that you’re their retirement plan, and it’s hard to tell how much they’re joking. Does that sentiment feel like pressure to you?

I just spoke to my dad about that yesterday and he claims they’re joking. I am skeptical! I do know there are people in my family who think I am a money pot. And that sucks. Whenever I see like, US Weekly with Jen Aniston being like “She doesn’t talk to her family anymore!” I sort of am like, “I get it Jen. I get it.” (Not my parents. They don’t ask for anything from me now.) But also, you know, I wanna be Kanye buying his mom a house. I wanna be that for them. They deserve it.

You also talk to your best friend and fellow “Just Between Us” star Allison Raskin about what it was like for her to grow up with money, and that it’s not as perfect as it may seem from the outside. Do you think our culture conflates having money with being happy in dangerous ways?

Definitely. Money can’t buy happiness. Now, it can buy other things, like therapy and doctors and things to help you with happiness. But also, it’s lucky that Allison had attentive parents who also cared to give her those things. So it had to be a perfect storm. It couldn’t have just been the money. She needed to be loved too.

Did anyone turn you down? Was it challenging to get people to open up as much as you are about money?

Some people did turn me down. A big reason was “I’m okay talking about it but my partner would not be.” (Partner as in husband, wife, spouse.) It’s not something they felt okay to share on their own because the information affected someone else. Many people were stoked to talk about it.

It felt like, as I did the interviews, people had been waiting for these questions all their lives. Molly cried. Sydney was very proud of how she’d made a living for herself and become independent, paying for college through sex work. YouTubers just wanted haters to know their jobs are real work. It was something people were passionate about and just needed a platform to speak about it. Hence, the podcast.

What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about money by talking to such a wide range of people? Has doing the podcast changed your relationship to money and work?

It has changed the way I feel about money, definitely. It feels less like this big scary, secret problem in my life that I have to hide from everyone. I feel like I can ask for help and no one will shun me for being a fool. Just talking about something takes away its power little by little. I believe Hermione Granger taught us that.

You close the first episode by asking strangers to tell you their favorite sexual position followed by how much money is in their bank accounts. Nobody told you both; they were more squeamish about telling you about their financial details than those about their sex life. Why do you think that is? Is that reticence to talk about money something you want to change with the podcast?

That idea came from the reality that there are so many sex and dating podcasts. So many. And people are called brave all the time for making work about sex or their bodies, which is great and I love that. I’ve been praised a lot for sex-positivity and sex is obviously still a shameful topic for women. So it’s dope for women to be taking that shame back, but I think because we’re paid less than men generally (and minority women even less so), there’s another, even more secret shame, which is money.

So I’ve always felt very comfortable talking about my sex life or my body, but I’ve never been comfortable talking about money and why is that? Why is money the thing I won’t touch when I share everything else? So now I’m a woman with a money podcast. And hopefully there will be 10 more women with 10 more money podcasts and then this becomes a cliché topic too. And then everyone has equal pay.

Of course I have to ask: What’s your favorite sexual position? How much money is in your bank account?

My favorite is the one where a woman is using her hand. What’s that one called? Is it just “lesbian stuff?” With dudes, it’s dude on top. I am a traditional lady, thank you.

I have the most money I’ve ever had in my life right now, which is about $20,000 all told. I can’t even look at that number because it’s insane to me. I have had two dollars before. I didn’t even know my account could hold that much. I had to call and ask if it could because I didn’t know. That’s between savings and checking. I put $11,000 in savings and I’m not touching it. I’m trying to grow it, I guess. The rest I kept to pay bills and my rent and my car. I still have an $8,000 auto loan so even if I have $9,000 dollars in checking right now, I feel like I only have $1,000 until that auto loan is paid off. See, it’s so complicated!

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Redundant Donald: America is already great (at terrorizing immigrants)

Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Gerald Herbert)

Donald Trump may have gone too far this time. Sure, pundits have frequently said that and just as frequently they’ve been wrong. But Trump is now trying to pull off an impossible feat: simultaneously appealing to moderates and hard-liners on immigration. This will fail. For proof one need look no further than President Barack Obama, whose orchestration of mass deportations utterly failed to entice Republican support for reform legislation that included a path to citizenship for undocumented people. That legislation is now as dead as it ever was, thanks to far-right xenophobic forces, which the president’s hard-line policies helped legitimate and have now fueled Trump’s rise.

Trump, that great border-wall builder and deportation force comandante, is not only Obama’s opponent on immigration but also, so to speak, his id. Mass deportation and border militarization have been bipartisan policy for decades, and the virulent tone of the debate only serves to obscure the important ways in which Trump’s proposals and his purportedly moderate critics’ policy records converge.

This isn’t some jeremiad seeking to make the case that both major parties or their candidates are the same. They’re not. But a cursory look at the history and reality of immigration enforcement and border policy make it clear that Trump’s fantastic pronouncements, however offensive, take the status quo enforcement regime’s logic to its most absurd and violent ends.

As Todd Miller wrote for TomDispatch, “Donald Trump’s United States doesn’t await his presidency” because “it’s happening every single day” on international boundaries policed by a Border Patrol that boasted nearly 21,000 agents in 2014 — a rise from just 4,139 agents in 1992 and 9,212 in 2000.

The media and pollsters have explored what voters think about Trump’s proposal to build a “big, beautiful, powerful wall” and his strangely compelling pledge that Mexico is going to pay for it. The southern border, however, not only already has an army of agents on patrol but also hundreds of miles of fencing. Instead of stopping migrants, that already-existing wall of enforcement has forced them into dangerous desert regions where extreme heat endangers their lives. The Border Patrol has reported finding the dead bodies of roughly 6,029 migrants from October 1997 to September 2013 alone.

Trump says and proposes horrible things. And the moderate consensus, known as “comprehensive immigration reform,” is a horrible if not equally repugnant euphemism for precisely this: a path to citizenship coupled with a doubling down on more of the same border militarization, deportation and guest worker programs to provide business with a second-class labor force. Legislation that’s been under consideration in recent years would add yet more fencing and more Border Patrol agents, bringing the total force to an astounding minimum of 38,405. Simply put, this would cause more deaths.

For many Americans, the border with Mexico is less a real place than a fantastic canvas upon which to plaster billions of dollars in resources and limitless apocalyptic dread. Really, that’s been the case for decades as the country’s changing demographics have become the scapegoat for the unsettling vicissitudes of global capitalism.

In reality, the two factors — the restructuring of economies and movement of capital and migration of people, or labor — are inextricably bound together. Mexican immigration to the United States began to rise modestly beginning in the 1960s, picked up its pace over the next two decades and then skyrocketed in the 1990s. And so just as borders sprung open for business under the North American Free Trade Agreement, they slammed shut for human beings. The pushes (in Mexico) and pulls (in the United States) that caused the mass influx of Mexican migrants are complex and heavily debated. But many scholars credit the role played by NAFTA, and business-friendly reforms in Mexico like the privatization of collective land, for decimating domestic agriculture and sending people northward in search of economic security.

Then came the attacks of Sept. 11, and anti-immigrant sentiment and border insecurity hysteria reached a new fever pitch. The attacks were perpetrated not by desert-crossing migrants but by a group of mostly Saudi men who arrived legally on tourist and business visas and in one case a student visa, that random people will always be able to use. U.S. immigration policy, however, has never had much to do with the reality of immigration. And Immigration and Naturalization Services became Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border policy was subsumed to the “war on terror.” A deportation machine with gargantuan funding, facilitated by President Bill Clinton’s 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, roared into life.

As sociologists Patricia Fernández-Kelly and Douglas S. Massey wrote, “Homeland Security was established with a clear mandate to protect the nation from terrorist threats, but its principal effect has been to terrorize immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America.”

Ironically, militarization of the border didn’t dissuade migrants from coming to the United States. In fact, it played a role in dissuading them from returning to Mexico: Those who in the past may have engaged in “circular migration” (frequently traveling back and forth) became long-term or permanent residents in the States instead. Although one wouldn’t know it from the state of political discourse, the recent undocumented migration wave from Mexico has long been over. Arrivals to the United States have declined so significantly since their 2007 peak that the net flow of unauthorized migrants is now negative. From 2009 to 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 870,000 Mexican immigrants came to the U.S. while roughly 1 million headed in the other direction.

Now the U.S. is reaping more of what it has sown from Central America, where U.S.-backed dirty wars during the 1980s sent a wave of refugees northward. Mass deportations, facilitated by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, have sent many of their descendants back south. Members of Los Angeles-born street gangs were deported, which in turn created violent and transnational criminal organizations that have helped plunge much of Central America into bloody chaos — and today propel new waves of terrorized migrants back north.

Trump’s unfiltered xenophobia and muscular nationalism is alarming. It also crowds out serious discussion of the fact the Customs and Border Protection already runs a police state, not only at the border but also across huge swaths of the interior. Despite recent moves toward reform, the agency also has an ugly history of excessive force, secrecy and impunity. That includes operating a huge network of Border Patrol checkpoints within the U.S. that subject everyone, regardless of immigration status, to regular interrogation and search by federal agents in the course of everyday domestic travel.

Meanwhile, what Trump might dub a “deportation force” deported a record 435,498 people in 2013 (depending on the numbers one uses). Deportations decreased significantly last year, thanks to widespread protests from immigration activists. But even as the deportation machine has slowed, it has not stopped. The Obama administration has continued to rely on local law enforcement personnel to serve as proxy immigration agents, part of an emphasis on deporting “criminal aliens” instead of hardworking people with families. That obscures the reality that criminals aren’t always what they seem, however. As I wrote in June, they include people like Garfield Kenault Lawrence, convicted on low-level marijuana charges, who came to the United States as a child and is now forced to live in poverty in Jamaica, separated from his American wife and son.

Obama, like the previous president much demonized by Democrats, has not only cracked down on so-called criminal immigrants but also criminalized immigration. His administration has prosecuted illegal entry and reentry as federal crimes en masse and turned border crossings into major components of federal mass incarceration. Trump’s conflation of public safety and immigration makes sense to people in part because it is the premise of current public policy.

Similarly, when Obama and Hillary Clinton call for securing the borders, they ratify far-right propaganda that the region is a lawless war zone and render invisible the unprecedented and militarized infrastructure already in place. Trump’s proposals are absurd, cruel and contradictory but they are grounded in a mainstream consensus on immigration that is likewise all of those things.

On immigration, there are important differences between the two major parties. But the most important difference is that Democrats are now more susceptible than ever to the pressure exerted by mobilized immigrant communities. Immigrant activists deserve credit for the Obama Administration’s two programs protecting undocumented immigrants from mass deportation: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which has protected hundreds of thousands of youth; and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, which has been put on hold by a federal judge whose ruling was affirmed by a split Supreme Court.

The moderate consensus is a proposal for legal status for some in immigrants in exchange for the deportation of those deemed undesirable and billions more to further militarize a border administered by well-connected private contractors. The fact that Trump and the white racist anti-immigrant fringe call for yet worse should not distract from this ugly reality. Trump is dangerous, and immigration activists are in no way deluded in believing that Hillary Clinton can deliver a better deal (and must be forced to). Trump’s demagoguery is frightening. But if we open our eyes it’s clear that the nightmare already exists.

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“Crazy folks,” “Potty breaks” and “climate control”: A look at some of the best complaints from Trump University seminars

FILE- In this May 23, 2005 file photo, real estate mogul and Reality TV star Donald Trump, left, listens as Michael Sexton introduces him at a news conference in New York where he announced the establishment of Trump University. A federal judge who has been a target of Donald Trump’s unending scorn must decide whether to release videos of the presumed Republican presidential nominee testifying in a lawsuit about the now-defunct Trump University, images that Trump’s attorneys worry will be used to tarnish the campaign. () (Credit: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

The Washington Post on Tuesday made available 397 documents “comprising thousands of pages of interview transcripts, court filings, financial reports, immigration records and other material” used in writing “Trump Revealed,” a newly released biography of the GOP presidential nominee, co-authored by WaPo’s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher.

One such document — almost 300 pages long — contains the analyses of surveys completed by Trump University seminar attendees. These seminars were three days long, held in various cities throughout the country, and covered topics like foreclosure training and real estate investing.

At the conclusion of the seminar, “students” were invited to complete an optional survey, which asked for suggestions of room for improvement. And, having read through all of them, I can say unequivocally that — no matter the season or climate — the thermostat was almost always set too low.

An incomplete list of attendees complaining about the temperature:

San Diego, CA (Dec. 19-21, 2008): “Need the room to be more comfortable…too cold”

Atlanta, GA (Feb. 13-15, 2009): “Temperature in the room, too cold”

Riverside, CA (Mar. 27-29, 2009): “The air-conditioning was cold”

Orlando, FL (Apr. 3-5, 2009): “As usual a warmer room would be great”

New York, NY (June 12-14, 2009): “Climate Control — My wife suffered because the AC was too powerful (she has Titanium Screens in her spine)”

Philadelphia, PA (July 17-19, 2009): “Keep the thermostat at a comfortable level”

Los Angeles, CA (July 24-26, 2009): “Too cold — my throat hurt”

Chicago, IL (Oct. 9-11, 2009): “The room was extremely cold, it was a distraction”

And some other non-room-temperature-specific gems:

Boston, MA (Nov. 21-23, 2008): “Potty breaks”

Houston, TX (Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 2009): “Make us aware of the cost of mentorship early enough to opt out of the entire program”

Miami, FL (Feb. 6-8, 2009): “Need to focus on the Spanish speakers, too”

Baltimore, MD (Feb. 20-22, 2009): “Tell Steve to stop saying, ‘Hello?'”

Las Vegas, NV (Apr. 9-11, 2009): “Make the certificate a little more official with nicer ‘gold’ seal, like a university diploma”

Orange County, CA (May 15-17, 2009): “Wireless internet access” (was there seriously no wifi?)

Las Vegas, NV (June 5-7, 2009): “Larger conference room for the size of the students”

Charleston, SC (July 31-Aug. 2, 2009): “Throw [out] the crazy folks!”

Lafayette, LA (Aug. 7-9, 2009): “I would rather another hotel”

San Antonio, TX (Oct. 23-25, 2009): “Don’t block the screen when discussing what is on the screen”

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