Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 685

“This is the anti-Christ of ‘Law & Order'”: Stars and creators of “The Night Of” weigh in on the making of HBO’s engrossing crime drama

Riz Ahmed and Michael Kenneth Williams in "The Night Of" (Credit: HBO)

Since its on-air debut in July, HBO’s “The Night Of” has become one of the summer’s most passionately discussed dramas. Heralded as an example that the premium cable channel can still deliver engrossing, challenging storytelling, the eight-part limited series has taken viewers into the labyrinth of a murder case steeped in racial and political undertones through the eyes of its prime suspect, Nasir “Naz” Khan (Riz Ahmed) and his low-rent attorney Jack Stone (John Turturro).

As the series heads toward its penultimate episode, Naz has sharply transformed from a wide-eyed kid into a tragic figure made feral by the vicious culture inside Rikers’ Island, where he benefits from the protection of the jail’s top dog Freddy (Michael K.Williams).

“The Night Of” isn’t a perfect drama; following the first episode, a number of people were baffled by the notion that an intelligent young man like Naz could have made so many idiotic mistakes on the hazy, drug-addled evening in question. Of greater interest, however, is the show’s veneer of staggering realism and its sense of timeliness.

As “The Night Of” explores the ramifications of race, ethnicity and class upon perceptions of guilt or innocence within our justice system, viewers may get the sense that this series was influenced by recent national news headlines. In reality, “The Night Of,”  a creation of writers Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, who also directed seven episodes, has been in the works for seven years. It also is based on the BBC drama “Criminal Justice.”

Salon recently sat down with Zaillian, Price, Ahmed and Williams to discuss how a drama that so accurately dissects some of today’s most pressing and difficult social issues actually came to be developed a better part of a decade ago — and how, according to Price, it is “the anti-Christ” of ‘Law & Order.’” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This series arrived at a really interesting time, because it talks a lot about what it’s like to be an outsider, both from Stone’s perspective and Naz’s. I’m curious to hear what feedback you guys have gotten, or if you’ve heard anything about how viewers have reacted to it.

Steven Zaillian: I just read a bunch of great reviews. In terms of the timing of when it arrived…what people don’t realize is we’ve been at this for close to a decade. What that says is, this is not something brand new. This is something that is maybe getting, is now becoming part of the news, but this has been going on for a long time. The stuff that we were talking to people about and basing this upon was going on when we started.

Richard Price: What specifically are you referring to, in terms of timing? Are you referring to Black Lives Matter?

I’m referring to Black Lives Matter. I’m referring to the choice of having Naz’s character be Muslim. I’m referring to this whole idea of the outsider facing the establishment, in terms of both Stone’s work with Naz, and Stone navigating the legal system given his lower professional status. There’s a lot going on in the series that inadvertently reflects what’s going on in American culture right now, at this moment.

Price: These issues were in the works for a very long time. Black Lives Matter, maybe about four hundred years? Police brutality, the police as occupying army in poor neighborhoods, Islamophobia since way before 9/11. Whatever you write, if it’s realistic, it’s automatically going to touch on stuff that’s everywhere. When you make things up, you can’t escape that, unless you’re writing science fiction.

Michael K. Williams: From my perspective, I just look at it like, “The Night Of” has become a voice. It’s becoming a voice for people who have been railroaded in the judicial system, or who have been slighted because they didn’t have the finances to pay for a high-powered lawyer. The slim pickings was a lawyer like the character that John Turturro’s playing, which… happened with my nephew’s real life.

… You can’t buy this type of timing. These topics [were] an issue ten years ago, and unfortunately it seems to be an even stronger issue now with … What’s different, ten years to what’s happening now, is that the chickens have come home to roost. You’re seeing now, with these police getting killed now, this is gotten way out of hand. What do you do? When people, when a people — and it’s not about a race, for me it’s more about class — when you keep oppressing a class of people, and generalizing a race of peoples, it’s only but so long before that retaliation’s going to arouse. This time, and this injustice is a huge part of that, a huge part of that.

When this project first began, though, did you guys feel as if you were writing about stories that were not “top of the headlines?”

Price: I just feel like it’s what I always have written about. Unless you’re writing about being vaguely unhappy in Connecticut, it’s really hard to write about the city and not [include] an examination of social justice. How could you not? Especially if you’re writing about the underdog. “Underdog” equals the issue of social justice, inequity, like Michael said. Those who have money have lawyers. Those who don’t, well… “Bye.” It’s ubiquitous. The subject begs to address social justice.

Riz Ahmed: I would also say that I think it’s interesting that certain projects get tagged with a label of “political,” or being socially conscious, and other ones don’t. All art is political. All stories have a point of view on the world. You got a perspective on the world, that’s politics… Who you focus on itself is a political decision, so then that carries a certain kind of resonance. I just think it’s interesting that certain projects get tagged as, “Oh, that’s political,” when maybe just because they focus on the underdog, they’re challenging the status quo just in doing that.

Let’s talk about your portrayal of Naz for a moment, Riz. Watching you in these episodes, one can really sense Naz’s fear and fragility, and you’ve made his decline feel poignant and real.

Ahmed: That’s very kind of you to say, but.. I’m not just trying to be humble here, but that is really down to the world and the set that Steve created. What don’t you see is all the takes I did that suck. Straight up. Behind any performance someone says is a great performance is a great editor, and a great director filtering that.

Williams: And the writer. It all begins with the writer.

Ahmed: He was really orchestrating the whole thing … He had that attention to detail that meant he was really reining in the performance, finding the realism in it, finding these little moments, and that was affecting on the set, down to the extras that we cast, which added a huge amount. The extras at Rikers, [to Williams] I know you know some of them, right?

Williams: Yeah, a few of, actually, it’s the prisoners. I know a few of them.

Zaillian:  It’s a fictional story, but we’re going to treat it as if it really happened. We’re not doing something where we say, “Okay, we want to go tell a story about Rikers and what’s wrong with Rikers,” or, “We want to say what’s wrong with the justice system.” We let the characters take us to these places. Meaning, when [Richard was] saying, “Well, he should be Pakistani, the son of Pakistani immigrants,” that wasn’t said so we could go to Jackson Heights and examine Jackson Heights. That was said by a realistic impulse which then opened up that possibility.

If I recall, one of the first reviews called it “a great ‘Law & Order’ episode.” Richard, I think was it you who said, “This is not a ‘Law & Order’ episode.”

Price: This is the anti-Christ of “Law & Order.” “Law & Order” is the anti-Christ of this.

Can you explain what you mean by that? I can see how some would see this as a premium cable examination of the police procedural genre.

Price: Everyone is trying to find labels for everything. Toni Morrison was asked, “Do you want to be known as a great American writer, or a great African-American writer?” She said, “Depends on what day of the week it is and who I’m talking to.” At the time you’re doing it, you’re not thinking about, “Where do we fit in? What slot do we fit into?” When it’s all done, the reviewers will say, in their opinion, where this fits in, or if this doesn’t fit in anywhere, which is the best possible thing they could say. They will say, “Well, it’s a police procedural,” or, “It’s a variation on ‘Law and Order,'” or, “Oh, there’s a new trend regarding ‘Serial’ and ‘American Crime.’  Nope. It’s not like that. It’s not like we studied anything.

Michael, earlier you said that you based your character, Freddy, on the experiences of one of your family members.

Willliams: Of my nephew.

Yes.

Williams: If I went to jail — or God forbid, prison — I would probably be some version of Naz. Maybe just not as educated as he was.

I know my nephew has a heart like Freddy does. He has that type of temperament to take care of anybody. My nephew was always like that, took care of people when he was a kid. I just imagined, and what started happening is, that’s where the affection, Freddy’s affection for Naz, came from. In my mind, I was seeing myself and my nephew, so it was instant affection.

Then I started seeing what it must be like, what my family has dealt with. I have a cousin who spent 27 years in prison, who just came home. My nephew’s still in prison. Both of them went in for murder. This show, if nothing else, gave me a glimpse into what they deal with on a daily basis. I wrapped … How long was this shoot?

Zaillian: 150 days.

Williams: Yeah, 150 days of this shoot, I was clinically depressed. It was so fucking dark. It was so dark and so real. That was 150 days. I needed a warm, fuzzy hug. Here people do this for the rest of their lives, for years.

Zaillian: By the way, I saw none of that on the set. You never talked about this. I never heard anything about your nephew or any of that.

Williams: No, I was in the zone. I was for sure in the zone. What we talked about today, something as simple as my ride to work, coming from Brooklyn, the route they take, that’s the route you go when you visit your family upstate. We call it “up north.” When you go to prison, all our prisons in New York are up north. We go, “Oh, they sent him up north…” The ride to work set the tone for me. When you get there, the base camp looked like the yard. The set was a prison.

The other set was the men’s detention center in Queens. We were in a real jail. … The pain that permeates out of the walls, it’s like… The bathroom scene? I can’t give it away, but there was a scene in the bathroom, a shower scene … That’s a real bathroom. That wasn’t built. You can feel that some of these things probably really happened here once upon a time. You can’t fake that. That does something to you.

Riz, how did the shoot emotionally affect you?

Ahmed: It was quite tough, actually, man. Just using the script as a jumping off point, I spoke to a lot of people who have been through the system. Those stories, they stay with you, man. When people open up to you and share their stories, you feel a sense of real responsibility. I felt like I was, at least in my own mind, I felt like I was carrying that with me a little bit… You don’t want to disappoint them, in a way. You know what I mean?

One last question, about the possibility of season two. I know that the second season of “Criminal Justice” explores a totally different case.

Zaillian: I never saw season two.

Price: I never saw it either.

My question is, if there is a season two, would you go ahead with a completely different case or continue this story?

Price: The problem with a season two, or the demand on a season two, is that it would be as good as, if not better than, season one… I have a good notion for something for season two, but HBO is involved, whatever’s going to happen with HBO is in terms of how they’re going to prioritize shows. Right now, there’s a wish for season two, but the bar is very high.

Zaillian: I think the same way this story grew out of this simple decision that [Richard] made, to make this character Pakistani, which really informed the entire show, the second season will have to be informed by something, too. It has to be something that we all feel is worth doing. If it’s not, then none of us will do it.

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How 9/11 chilled musicians: “They were trying to push back against the new status quo. … Some of them got smacked back”

Dixie Chicks (Credit: AP/Urs Flueeler)

Every attack, war, and disaster leads to shifts in society, and the disaster of Sept. 11, 2001, engendered some powerful ones. A sense of national unity emerged, along with a rise in xenophobia and jingoism, and some of those shifts worked their way into popular music. Musicians who had been critical of American society found themselves censored or charged with anti-Americanism. The Strokes postponed a debut album, and a song called “New York City Cops” was left off the U.S. version. The outspoken rap group The Coup had to change its cover art for “Party Music” album, which originally showed a gleeful destruction of the World Trade Center, and the release was delayed. And in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Dixie Chicks expressed opposition to President George W. Bush’s martial ambitions and were met with a boycott of album sales and a major snub by the country radio establishment. (Singer Natalie Maines said at a concert in London that her band was “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas.”)

Duke University scholar Mark Anthony Neal, who teaches English and black history, has been thinking about the upcoming 15th anniversary of the attacks that took down the towers of the World Trade Center. We spoke to Neal from Chicago, where he was traveling. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

So let’s talk a little about the way 9/11 shaped popular music. This was an event that had an effect on a bunch of different genres. Where did you see it most acutely? Was it country music that took the hardest hit?

In particular country music was the place that if you were going to go someplace after 9/11 to have the values of America reaffirmed, that’s where you would have gone to. And I think that’s where the Dixie Chicks really kind of cut against the grain, in that particular way. They’re already kind of in a tenuous space there because they’re not the traditional country music group at least in terms of presentation. So that when they start raising questions about the war afterwards and the buildup, it makes sense that country music would push back the way it did.

Remind people who weren’t paying attention back then what the conflict was with the Dixie Chicks after September 11th.

They raise questions about what became this immediate spin into the war. I’m always reminded of Congresswoman Barbara Lee out in California who was the only member of Congress who voted against the war immediately after 9/11. And it wasn’t so much in her mind a question ever about patriotism but to have some pause and be more thoughtful in terms of response. The Dixie Chicks echoed that, not so much in their music but in some of their commentary afterwards regarding the run-up and also [by] raising questions about what it was about American foreign policy at the time that might have even instigated the attacks.

Immediately after, the six months after 9/11, there wasn’t a whole lot of wiggle room for people to raise those kinds of questions. People who were, generally speaking, kind of anti-war progressives, a lot of those folks fell in line very quickly. I think we saw the same kind of dynamic for musicians; they were trying to push back against the new status quo that emerged after 9/11; some of them got smacked back.

Right. So what I think you’re mostly talking about is there was a period of jingoism and maybe xenophobia after 9/11. And there were some musicians who tried to resist it and they paid a price as far as radio play and sales.

Absolutely. I’d be curious to see what record sales were for Lee Greenwood immediately after 9/11. Because I know, as someone who doesn’t listen to country music, [an event after 9/11] was my intro to Lee Greenwood. My family and I — we had gone to one of these Yogi Bear camps in upstate New York. It was probably a week and half, two weeks after the attacks. And at some point, they gathered everybody who was there to kind of pledge allegiance to the flag . . . and then they started blasting Lee Greenwood, and I’m like, “OK, what the hell is this?”

So I think folks were clearly looking for a way to kind of rally. And it makes sense, [it’s] very human to rally around your flag at this particular moment. It gave pop music a pause.

You think about artists in the 1960s attempting to speak back to politics. If you think about N.W.A. and “Fuck Tha Police,” there was a feeling at that point in time that artists had much more of a freedom to express what they were feeling politically than in any other period of time. And it’s like 9/11 put that on pause.

So besides country, where else was this sort of chilling effect?

Hip-hop, obviously.

If you’re thinking about Bush I as the kind of lead-up into Bush II, you have an artist like Paris, who a decade earlier had recorded a track in which he depicted the assassination of a U.S. president on the album cover and in some ways had to disappear from the scene after that.

A group like The Coup, they do cover art for “Party Music” in which they are literally detonating a bomb on top of the World Trade Center on the cover art. . . . Hip-hop is in an interesting moment there where, when you think about it, being a group like The Coup, it tended to be the more progressive, underground artists that were making those kinds of critiques at the time.

This was the beginning of hip-hop’s salad days. Most mainstream artists were so invested in the bling at this point in time that most artists weren’t going to speak back to what was happening politically.

So you had these kinds of groups that were much more underground and in some ways, I think, they were much more protected because of that because mainstream audiences didn’t know who they were.

Did other genres see the kind of jingoism or censorship?

I can’t speak to that directly because of what I was listening to at the time. I do remember distinctly some of the policing of the airwaves. Particularly folks like Clear Channel wanting to make sure that they didn’t play any songs that might trigger things in folks after the attacks.

The one that stands out to me is “Dust in the Wind” by Kansas, which for me has always been, both in terms of the content and just the style of the song, just the most innocuous thing. It’s the epitome of late-1970s soft rock. And the fact that [radio stations] were policing to that level was very surprising to me.

The thing that we often forget about in these moments: All of these artists at one point or another are gathering in huge stadiums and stuff like that to kind of do tribute stuff. And I think everybody was invested in that.

If you’re a mainstream artist, regardless of genre, you’re showing your patriotism at this particular moment because you don’t want to be called out for not showing your patriotism.

I remember there were a bunch of folks who did something in Yankee Stadium. So you do those kinds of things. If you can write a check, you write a check. I don’t think it dramatically changed how pop audiences thought about their music, unless you were talking about more kind of fringe artists, like a Steve Earle. Just generally speaking, [at] the arc of his career, you might expect some pushback from an artist like that, but that had been his thing anyway.

So radio didn’t play “Dust in the Wind”?

At least Clear Channel instructed their programmers not to play “Dust in the Wind,” Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move.” There was a series of really innocuous songs. And they released it fairly quickly after the attacks, you know, “Don’t play these songs until further notice.”

Was there an increase in the process after the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan? Was there a further tightening up on what musicians could sing and what radio could broadcast?

The bigger issue was not so much that artists felt [like] I can’t say what I want to say. But their success was so tied to other forms of commercial branding. The best way to think about it is to think about it in comparison to professional athletes. And I’ll use Michael Jordan as a good example of this.

You’re Jim Brown in the 1960s. You can be a radical. You can be progressive. You can be political because all you do is play football; that’s [the] only expectation. By the time we get to Jordan in the early ’90s, he’s not just simply representing himself as a ballplayer or the Chicago Bulls. He’s representing Nike; he’s representing Gatorade; he’s representing Hanes.

Artists themselves — because the recording industry itself doesn’t play them or make a lot of money— they make their money being on the road and if they can translate that into a relationship with Coca-Cola or someplace like that.

That’s where the relationship with some of these corporate entities that themselves are going to all buy into this moment of patriotism. I think that’s where artists had to be very careful in terms of what they expressed because it could in fact hurt their brand more than anything else.

Are there other historical periods we can remember where there was the same kind of pressure put on musicians and artists? You were saying something about how relationships to the marketplace have changed. Are there other times, whether Vietnam or the Kennedy assassination or other big moments where artists had to be self-conscious?

One of the best stories around this is an artist by the name Eugene McDaniels,  a singer-songwriter, African-American. Most folks know him because he wrote Roberta Flack’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love.” But he also was an artist with more traditional pop stuff, and he gets very political in the late 1960s, records two albums: One is called “Outlaw.” Another one is called the “Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse.”

And so he does this second album “Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse” that is very critical of Richard Nixon. And as the story goes, folks at Atlantic Records get a call from someone in Spiro Agnew’s office, the vice president at the time, raising questions about McDaniel’s music. McDaniel got dropped from the label immediately afterwards.

If we could look at where we are now, musically, could that kind of tightening up that you describe happen now. Or would it matter if it did? There are so many ways music can circulate. The gatekeepers don’t have the same control.  It’s not a handful of record labels and a few programmers anymore.

You think about the moment when Kanye said what he said about George Bush in 2005 after Katrina. And on the one hand, he faced very real criticism. On the other hand, I remember rumors circulating that he had a small deal with one of the two soda companies. And there were these rumors that he lost his deal because he was political. And I always thought that those rumors served the purpose of really dampening down on other artists deciding whether they were going to use their voice at this particular point in time also.

But if you think of the Kanye moment and just think about how Chaotics uses “Gold Digger” on YouTube to offer this critique of George Bush, you begin to see the elements of the technology that’s going to shift this conversation. By the time we get to this particular period of time now, radio doesn’t play that same sort of important role in terms of breaking music.

Artists — besides the fact that they no longer have to deal with traditional distributors, they can go directly to iTunes and whatever and upload their music. They have access to SoundCloud, YouTube and what have you and the ability for them to say what they need to say. And [to] not have to rely on these more traditional corporate interests allows them a certain amount of freedom.

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Trump’s “alpha-male” paradox: How gender bias makes his behavior seem manly, no matter what

Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

An excessively tanned person with an elaborate hairstyle stood onstage, waving his hands with exaggerated theatrics. Donald Trump had arrived at a key moment in his performance during a July 25 event in Roanoke, Virginia: a show of catty humor to mock people he does not like. “Why did Hillary get rid of her middle name?” He asked with a smirk, wobbling his hand back and forth like a tiny seesaw. “Hillary Rotten Clinton, right? Maybe that’s why. It’s too close.” The audience laughed. At another moment he complained about the temperature in the room, threatening to stop payment to the hotel’s owners: “I pay my bills so fast with somebody good. But here we are in a ballroom, and I’m like, I feel like I’m in a sauna!”

For a minute someone might mistake this performance for that of a vapid, self-obsessed character in a 1950s movie, one of those sexist or homophobic caricatures. But this is Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president. This is also the man who conservatives claim is an “alpha male” and “tough guy” who could “bring masculinity back” to American politics.

In what is among the most baffling contradictions of the 2016 election, Trump’s behavior on the campaign trail is sometimes a cartoonish execution of these throwback stereotypes that have been unfairly, prejudicially and hatefully associated with women, teenage girls and gay men. Hateful stereotypes of women as thin-skinned and hysterical, and gay men as dramatic gossips, have helped scaffold and maintain centuries of sexist and homophobic harassment, mistreatment and exclusion from institutional authority and leadership positions. Yet Trump enjoys macho hero status with his (largely male) followers, benefiting from a “masculine” (and, thanks to gender bias, a positive) reading of his public persona. 

James Hamblin, the usually brilliant health correspondent at the Atlantic, recently wrote an essay chastising Trump as the “climax of America’s masculinity problem.” Hamblin’s evisceration of Trump’s vulgarity, borderline sociopathy and misogyny is accurate and made with ample evidence. But at the same time, the Twitter tough guy’s demeanor bears little resemblance to “masculinity” in its traditional American sense.

Ernest Hemingway, a prominent icon of American masculinity, famously defined courage as “grace under pressure” and depicted his masculine heroes as stoics – stonelike and steely men who maintained control and composure in the wake of loss and in the trauma of war. The Hemingway model of American manhood lost its nuance and depth but kept its core when Hollywood made this laconic archetype the familiar cowboy, soldier and action hero of cinema. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Steve McQueen mastered the masculine persona and their respective incarnations who made bold and brave moves, without any hint of emotion, have inspired updated performances from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson.

Of course, the idea that manhood means self-censorship and constant invulnerability created discord in countless marriages and led to discontent in countless lives. Human beings require emotional intimacy and honesty. To equate personal expression with weakness is to lay the foundation for dissatisfaction, frustration and confusion. This conception of masculinity also produces hatred and hostility toward women — who at least appear to have more comfort and confidence speaking about their feelings and showing their emotions — since it codes emotional vulnerability as feminine and therefore weak. 

At the same time, demonstrating “grace under pressure” is not considered a gendered characteristic but rather a quality that serves leaders well. To contemplate Trump facing the challenges of previous grace-under-pressure presidents — FDR after Pearl Harbor, JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis — is to welcome weeks of night terrors.

But no one is questioning Trump’s alpha-male status (or even playfully smirking — remember Marco Rubio’s ankle boots and Ted Cruz’s show tunes?) because of America’s antiquated gender biases. As a billionaire and a boss, Trump projects macho virility because wealth and authority are still gendered as masculine in American culture.

 The subtle prejudices against women — and advantages for straight men — in the workplace are playing out in national politics with a male CEO running against the first female nominee for president. Donald Trump is an alpha male by default; he is a father figure. His name on buildings and planes signifies patriarchal dominance. His behavior is irrelevant. When many Americans see an executive, they think of a strong, straight man and react positively by default.

Far from demonstrating “grace under pressure,” Trump cannot even withstand the frustrations of ordinary questions from journalists, rebuttals from political opponents or criticism from celebrities on social media. Rather than keeping calm and strong in the presence of adversaries, he throws tantrums, whines about how everything is “rigged” against him and appears juvenile and cruel by mocking anyone who disagrees with him. It is impossible for Trump to focus on anything other than himself and his personal feuds longer than the duration of one news cycle. He is more addicted to drama than any Real Housewife.

Hillary Clinton’s line about “a man who can be baited with a tweet” was effective precisely because it undercut the myth of Trump as alpha male and shifted the spotlight onto her as the candidate in the race with the strength and stability necessary to command the U.S. military and manage the federal government.

Carly Fiorina, who rose from ranks as a secretary to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, did not benefit at all from her identification as “Washington outsider” and “business leader” in the Republican presidential primary. Even a child would find it obvious that she was vastly superior to Trump as a political candidate in every category, but Republican voters who claimed to be enthused about an anti-establishment insurgency never bothered to give her a look. She did not play to the racism of the Republican base, but her failure to register may be attributable to chauvinism. Trump was the tough guy. Fiorina was just some boring, smart lady.

Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg has found the implicit workplace bias in favor of men as central to her case for women to “lean in.” The only way to demolish the old assumptions that leadership is natural for men, but uncomfortable for women, is to publicly spotlight more women acting and succeeding as leaders. Sandberg often refers to the wealth of data indicating that “success and likability” are positively correlated with men but negatively correlated with women. Voters never seem to hold Trump’s wealth and accomplishment against him, whereas Hillary Clinton is politically damaged by the assumption that she is self-centered, corrupt and concerned only about the advancement of her career. Sandberg suggests the solution to the problem of soft sexism is to get “more women at the table.”

The “beautiful” and “tremendous” irony — to use two of Trump’s favorite macho words — is that the exact stereotypes that benefit Trump and men, and hurt Clinton and women, are the ones that Clinton would help destroy with a presidential victory in November.

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Ticket to happiness: Research says people who go to concerts feel better about life

(Credit: Nikada via iStock)

I began covering live music in the autumn of 2012, and it didn’t take long before I was hooked. Nights spent at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., promised crisp sound, killer bands and a distinct sense of community. The work didn’t feel anything like a groan-inducing job, even when I started writing for bigger magazines and covering major festivals. The experience of being at a concert always seems to produce a distinct level of near euphoria — and now science is finding out why.

According to a recent study in the journal Psychology of Music, live-music events have been found to be positively correlated with a person’s sense of well-being. For the study, researchers at Deakin University in Australia administered a survey to 1,000 respondents and discovered that those who attended community music events — including live shows at local cafés, clubs, concerts and festivals — or even simply danced in a crowd reported higher levels of overall life satisfaction.

The researchers focused on self-reported degrees of subjective well-being to determine a person’s level of happiness and found that the sense of community experienced at a live-music event was one of the most important factors. Think about how many people you know who travel the country to see a Phish concert or those who have attended multiple Blink 182 shows this summer. (I have a friend who’s been to at least five.) They go for more than the music. The study suggests it’s not so much which band or DJ is observed. Part of the experience of listening to live music is the engagement between artist and fan, as well as the connection fostered among audience members. There’s something extremely powerful in knowing you are not alone, even if only for a 90-minute set.

By highlighting the interpersonal benefits of seeking out live music, the researchers hope that this can spur the development of new interventions to help treat anxiety and depression. Further investigation into how music affects emotional regulation could prove beneficial for musicians and fans — and encourage people to attend more live shows.

I won’t go as far as to write that music “heals,” but evidence and experience suggest there are worse places to seek happiness than a dark club with a cool band playing. And that really rocks.

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Retreating into the bubble: Donald Trump turns his campaign over to Breitbart

Steve Bannon; Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Danny Moloshok/Richard Shiro/Photo montage by Salon)

For the second time since June, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has reshuffled his campaign leadership team. Corey Lewandowski, the first man to helm the Trump campaign, was fired in June after losing a power struggle with campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who took over the day-to-day operations. And now Manafort is apparently on the outs, too — not because of mounting evidence of his intimate involvement with the massively corrupt former regime in Ukraine but because he had been trying to force Trump to act a bit more polished on the campaign trail and stop picking fights with people who aren’t Hillary Clinton. He’s been supplanted in his leadership role by pollster Kellyanne Conway and Breitbart News’ executive chairman, Stephen Bannon.

Just to reiterate that last point: One of the top executives of a conservative media outlet has taken control of the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign. And this follows (disputed) reports that the ousted chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, is also offering advice to Trump. It’s no longer an issue of a Republican campaign moving in sync with conservative media: They’re merging into a single entity. And this is not just any conservative media outlet but Breitbart News, the right’s premier destination for explicit racial grievance, poorly argued conspiracy theories and (more recently) a virulent strain of white nationalism.

Anyone who’s been following Breitbart’s coverage of the 2016 campaign knows the organization has functioned as a de facto communications arm of the Trump campaign. For every lunatic statement of Trump, every wild falsehood, there’s a Breitbart News article earnestly vouching for its accuracy and political deftness. Breitbart’s obeisance to Trump is total: After Corey Lewandowski (while still on Trump’s payroll) physically assaulted Breitbart News reporter Michelle Fields and then accused her of lying about the incident, Breitbart News instructed staffers to not defend Fields and instead published a piece defending Lewandowski and undermining Fields’ version of events. (Fields and several other staffers resigned in protest, and video footage later proved Fields was right.)

Trump’s seizure of the Republican nomination has precipitated Breitbart’s embrace of an absurd form of anti-journalism that frequently parrots in tone and style the propaganda arms of authoritarian regimes. Just prior to the Republican primary in Wisconsin’s 1st congressional district, which saw House Speaker Paul Ryan go up against a (Breitbart-backed) far-right challenger, Breitbart News’ Washington political editor wrote a piece arguing that Ryan “has been brought to his knees, bowing down before the almighty nationalist populist movement.” (Ryan defeated his opponent by nearly 70 percentage points.) Another Breitbart reporter wrote admiringly of Fox News’ Sean Hannity for defending Trump and standing with “the Populist Nationalist Champions of the New and Better Republican Party Borne [sic] in Cleveland That Will Reign Supreme For Years To Come.”

Given that Bannon’s organization is already fully invested in Trump’s mythology, his transition to working for the campaign isn’t all that surprising. It’s the ultimate expression in echo-chamber politics: Trump was frustrated by the reality of a cratering presidential campaign, and his response is to withdraw deeper into the alternate universe that Bannon and crew have been fabricating in which a “nationalist populist” wave is poised to lift Trump to power.

What that means in practical terms is that a campaign that is already uglier and meaner than anything seen in recent history will likely get uglier and meaner.

As one would expect from a person who helms a news organization that participated in a politically motivated gaslighting operation against one of its staffers, Bannon has no scruples and no inclination to let accuracy or propriety get in the way of ambition. And he has a special obsession with the Clintons —with Bill Clinton’s past sexual exploits in particular. “There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were 7 or 8 years old when [Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky] happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff,” Bannon told Bloomberg’s Joshua Green last year. Now that he’s in charge of a campaign tasked with denying Hillary Clinton the presidency, it seems likely that the Trump strategy will involve dredging the swamps of Clinton-scandal lore.

And Breitbart News will be right there, ready to amplify and “corroborate” every outlandish accusation the Bannon-led Trump campaign can think up.

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No, they don’t support Trump: Smeared left-wing writers debunk the myth

Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Salon)

For the last time: No, leftists are not supporting Donald Trump.

There has been no dearth of lies spread about left-wingers who refuse to obediently march behind Hillary Clinton in this election cycle, from the ludicrous “Bernie bro” trope to the McCarthyite “Kremlin shill” smear and beyond.

The myth that leftists are planning to support the far-right, demagogic GOP candidate to “heighten the contradictions” in society is precisely that — a myth. It is not just an intentional misreading of Lenin; it is a bold-faced lie.

But it just won’t die.

Clinton-supporting neoconservative pundit James Kirchick published an article in The Daily Beast this week titled “Beware the Hillary Clinton-Loathing, Donald Trump-Loving Useful Idiots of the Left.”

“There may be no weirder phenomenon than the rise of the progressive Donald Trump supporter,” Kirchick began the piece.

He proceeded to name more than a dozen left-wing writers, journalists and scholars who criticize the militaristic U.S. foreign policy he and Clinton share, falsely calling them “Trump’s left-wing admirers.”

Salon reached out to everyone targeted in the piece. Not a single one “loves” Trump, despite the headline, nor do any “admire” him.

(The writers’ responses to Kirchick’s hit piece follow in full below.)

Fourteen writers were singled out as supposed Trump aficionados. Thirteen of them told Salon they do not support Trump.

Many of the writers said they were “smeared.” Historian Jeremy Kuzmarov called Kirchick’s article “an atrocious, McCarthy-type smear job.”

Russia scholar Stephen Cohen accused Kirchick of using “McCarthy-like slurs” in order “to shut off any substantial debate about foreign policy.”

Washington Post reporter Ishaan Tharoor described “Kirchick’s smear” as “pathetic and laughable.”

Journalist Rania Khalek added, “The suggestion that I harbor admiration for Trump is an incredible smear.” She noted that she has written at length how “Trump is an unhinged and dangerous demagogue who is whipping up fascist sentiments that should concern us all.”

Kirchick is just the latest in a long line of pundits in this election cycle who have (maliciously or not) conflated criticism of Clinton with support for Trump.

Many of the individuals Kirchick cited have voiced legitimate grievances with Clinton’s extremely hawkish foreign policy, and, in some cases, have even agreed with Trump on a specific issue or two — although certainly not with the bulk of his policies. But Kirchick has unfairly used these few points of agreement to tar them with the blanket label of Trump “fans,” “admirers” and “defenders” — a characterization they disavow with near-uniformity.

In fact, just one of the 14 writers mentioned in the article, Christopher Ketcham, said he will vote for Trump — and not because he “loves” or “admires” him, but precisely because he says the GOP nominee “is an ignorant, vicious, narcissistic, racist, capitalist scumbag, and thus an accurate representative of the United States.”

The other 13 disagreed with Ketcham. Journalist Stephen Kinzer called Trump one of “the most destructive politicians to emerge in the modern United States, although the competition is stiff.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald said Trump opposes everything he has devoted his career to defending, such as “civil rights for Muslims and adherence to the laws of war.”

The Nation publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel likewise stressed that the U.S. needs a new foreign policy, but called Trump “the worst messenger for that alternative foreign policy.”

Kirchick did not reach out to any of these writers for comment.

To be clear, Kirchick is by no means neutral in this debate; he has an axe to grind. In June, Kirchick penned another column in The Daily Beast in which he endorsed hyper-hawkish Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Kirchick favorably called Clinton “the clear conservative choice” and “the candidate of the status quo, something that conservatives, by definition, are supposed to uphold.”

Several of the people attacked in his latest article told Salon they think the piece by Kirchick, whom one called “a professional liar,” is clearly politically motivated — part of a “concerted media campaign to advance Hillary Clinton to the White House” by using “the obviously false premise that anyone who criticizes Clinton is pro-Trump.”

It also bears mentioning that Kirchick, for whom “anti-imperialist” is a dirty word, is paid by the U.S. government. He is included in the USASpending database, which says he received $10,000 from the Broadcasting Board of Governors in 2015. After this article was published, however, Kirchick told Salon that he was paid $1,000, not $10,000, adding, “I imagine USASpending reports payments in increments, and that $10,000 is the lowest.”

The Broadcasting Board of Governors is an independent propaganda agency of the U.S. government that says its goal is to pursue a “mission vital to U.S. national interests: inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It oversees Voice of America, where Kirchick writes columns that vilify left-wing leaders Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, condemn Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and applaud NATO.

Salon reached out to Kirchick for comment. He replied, “I’m just going to quote my own article to you, as it appears you haven’t read it.”

He cited a passage from his article: “Unlike the aforementioned wannabe revolutionaries, most of these progressives haven’t endorsed Trump. But they nonetheless embrace the radical departure in American foreign policy that his presidency promises.”

Salon asked Kirchick numerous detailed questions, pointing out that 13 of the 14 writers he named oppose Trump.

“The piece stands for itself,” Kirchick said, refusing to answer. Salon asked if he could comment any further. “Nope,” he wrote back.

Salon also reached out to The Daily Beast with a request for comment. Harry Siegel, a senior editor, replied, “The Daily Beast’s columnists run the gamut from liberal to libertarian.”

He cited the exact same two-sentence passage highlighted by Kirchick, adding, “We understand that the figures whose comments are quoted in his column find it controversial; readers can judge for themselves.”

The article is not as nuanced as Kirchick and The Daily Beast implied in their statements, however. In fact, in the very same paragraph Kirchick and Siegel cited to Salon, Kirchick falsely described the left-wing writers he criticized as “progressive Trump fans, subtler in their sympathies.”

After briefly and very weakly conceding that these writers have not actually endorsed Trump, Kirchick still went on to misrepresent their views, calling them “Trump’s left-wing admirers” and “the candidate’s progressive fans” a few paragraphs later. Kirchick later continued to dub them “progressive Trump defenders” and “the Republican nominee’s left-wing sympathizers.”

In his piece, Kirchick loosely delineated two groups: “wannabe revolutionaries” who supposedly will vote for Trump, and “progressive Trump fans” who have not endorsed him.

Three people were named in the first group. Just one of these, freelancer Christopher Ketcham, who penned the piece “Anarchists for Donald Trump—Let the Empire Burn,” is actually going to vote for Trump — and not because he likes him in any way, but rather because, with a Trump presidency, “the veil would be off the monstrousness of the empire.”

Writer Walker Bragman, another of the three ostensible Trump endorsers (whom Kirchick also misidentified as “Walter”), in fact strongly opposes Trump. Bragman told Salon he is voting for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, and pointed out that, in an interview on CNN, he called Trump an “intolerable” choice.

The third person Kirchick named is not a writer, journalist or scholar; it is actress Susan Sarandon, the 15th person targeted in the piece. Salon was unable to reach Sarandon for comment, yet she has publicly stressed multiple times, “I’m absolutely not voting for Trump.”

“I said some people think Trump would bring revolution faster,” Sarandon explained on Twitter, referencing her now infamous MSNBC interview, which Kirchick cited. “I am not voting Trump.”

In fact, when Bernie Sanders was running, Sarandon constantly emphasized that one of the best reasons to support him was because poll after poll showed he would beat Trump by a much bigger margin than Hillary Clinton.

Twelve more writers are named in the what Kirchick calls the “subtler” group of “progressive Trump fans.” Not a single person in this group is a “fan,” nevertheless.

The Intercept reporter Zaid Jilani, whom Kirchick dubbed one of the “progressive Trump defenders,” bluntly told Salon, “I am not a Trump supporter,” and characterized the GOP leader as a bigoted troll.

Salon columnist Patrick Lawrence (who sometimes writes under the name Patrick L. Smith) stressed, “James Kirchick gets no further than labels and name-calling.”

Sherle Schwenninger, of the New America Foundation, said, “I do not support Trump or Clinton.” He also pointed out that his think tank, which Kirchick incorrectly described as “left-wing,” is actually non-partisan.

Political scientist Corey Robin characterized Kirchick as a dishonest inventor of stories.

The New Republic editor Jeet Heer told Salon Kirchick’s piece is “built on the obviously false premise that anyone who criticizes Clinton is pro-Trump.”

To review, then, 14 of the 15 people smeared in Kirchick’s article as Trump “fans” actually oppose Trump.

Yet The Daily Beast has helped spread the myth. On social media, the publication describes the Trump opposers as “Trump supporters.”

In this weirdest year, there may be no weirder phenomenon than the rise of the progressive Donald Trump supporter: https://t.co/YeyE9xgHXa

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) August 15, 2016

The Daily Beast, the home of Kirchick’s misleading article, came under fire earlier this month for questionable editorial standards regarding a controversial piece that outed several LGBT Olympic athletes whose lives could potentially be threatened in their home countries. The Daily Beast later retracted the article, in the midst of widespread public backlash.

In many ways, Kirchick’s anti-leftist screed serves a larger ideological purpose, like much of the neoconservative foreign-policy coverage in The Daily Beast. His hit piece stigmatizes critics of U.S. militarism as “supporters,” “admirers” and “defenders” of fascistic billionaire Donald Trump and tools of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Given Kirchick did not allow the writers, journalists and scholars he falsely accused of being Trump fans to respond to the smears, their own words follow.

Glenn Greenwald

“I’ve devoted my entire career in journalism to defending the precise political values Trump is assaulting, beginning with civil rights for Muslims and adherence to the laws of war.

“Almost six months ago, I wrote an article urging the US media to abandon their feigned neutrality constraints to more aggressively and overtly denounce Trump’s extremism.

“What The Daily Beast published is an outright lie in stating or implying that I’m a Trump supporter, but because it’s The Daily Beast, nobody expects them to retract or even correct it because that’s what they are.”

Ishaan Tharoor

“Kirchick quoted one tweet of mine where I expressed joking appreciation of Trump’s rejection of the concept of ‘American exceptionalism’ — something Trump has clearly not even thought through properly. He then twisted it to try to suggest I support the Republican nominee.

“You don’t even need to read a year’s worth of my articles — just look at other tweets — to know how a pathetic and laughable Kirchick’s smear is.”

On Twitter, Tharoor added, “how I can be labeled a Trump admirer is beyond me,” and called out Kirchick and The Daily Beast for printing a “baseless smear.”

Katrina vanden Heuvel

“I believe — as does The Nation which I edit and publish — that Trump’s bigotry, his visceral contempt for immigrants, Muslims, women and facts, his trafficking in insults rather than ideas, make him unfit for office.

“Kirchik has for several years now smeared those, including my husband — an esteemed Professor of Russian & Soviet Studies for five decades — who warn of a new Cold War and argue that we need a serious debate about America’s role in the world.

“My interest is in seeing a serious challenge to a failed bipartisan foreign policy establishment and the development of an alternative foreign policy.

“But Trump is just about the worst messenger for that alternative foreign policy. And tragically he may make it less likely that genuine alternatives will get a fair hearing.”

Stephen Kinzer

“Trump is among the most destructive politicians to emerge in the modern United States, although the competition is stiff.

“Nonetheless it has been an utter delight to watch the screams of outrage he elicits from the encrusted foreign policy establishment.

“Common-sense ideas like fighting ISIS rather than the Assad regime in Syria, reducing our subsidy for European security, recognizing Russia as a potential partner rather than an enemy, and treating Palestinians and Israelis equally have never been pronounced by a person in Trump’s position.

“Warmongers consider this heresy unforgivable, and are flocking to the Democratic side.”

Zaid Jilani

“Donald Trump’s quote-unquote ‘campaign’ seems designed to be like one long internet comment thread, designed to shout obscenities and absurd accusations at the loudest volume simply to get attention.

“He sometimes says reasonable things, and because he’s a major party presidential candidate, that merits some attention — but that doesn’t make his overall effort any less nihilist.

“I am not a Trump supporter.”

Sherle Schwenninger

“Kirchick is correct that I have not endorsed Trump, and as a non-partisan analyst of U.S. foreign policy and as a convener of thinkers on the world economy, I try to steer away from taking partisan positions, and as such I do not support Trump or Clinton.

“I view it to be my responsibility to analyze as honestly as I can underlying political and economic trends and the likely effects of different policies on the broad public interest. As a relatively insignificant figure in the political world, that is the only value I can offer. As an analyst, there are aspects of both Clinton’s and Trump’s international policies that I would be critical of and aspects that I believe are or could be made to be in the public interest.

“In this respect, the quote from my short contribution to a Nation forum should be seen as an unremarkable analytical statement — I think that even Kirchick would agree that Trump’s economic nationalism would bring an end to the globalist agenda that has guided US foreign policy and international economic policy for the last 25-30 years. That is his real complaint.

“Do I believe that the muscular interventionism associated with the globalist agenda has caused serious damage to the international order and to the interests of middle class America? I certainly do.

“Do I think it is important to re-think certain aspects of the foreign policy orthodoxy of the past 20 years? I certainly do.

“There is one thing Kirchick wrote I would like to correct. New America is not a left-wing foundation. It is a non-partisan think-tank and civic enterprise. On most issues, it has a variety of viewpoints, including on issues of foreign policy and international economic policy as anyone familiar with New America would know.”

Jeet Heer

“James Kirchick’s article is absurd, basically built on the obviously false premise that anyone who criticizes Clinton is pro-Trump.

“I’ve been criticizing Trump’s racism going back to his birther days in 2011 — and criticized the Republicans for embracing him in 2012.

“I would say that James Kirchick misrepresents not just me but almost everyone he writes about in this article.”

Rania Khalek

“The suggestion that I harbor admiration for Trump is an incredible smear.

“As I’ve stated repeatedly and written about at length, Trump is an unhinged and dangerous demagogue who is whipping up fascist sentiments that should concern us all.

“But I expect nothing less from neoconservative propagandist Jamie Kirchick, a professional liar who seeks to liberate the world through American bombs and perpetual warfare, much like Hillary Clinton, the candidate he’s endorsed for president.

“If anything, Trump is a disaster for the left. Fear of his incoherently isolationist posturing has led to a convergence of the various pro-war factions in Washington, DC. They’re all backing Hillary Clinton, which means that regardless of how dangerous Trump is, we have to push back against her disastrous foreign policy agenda.

“That’s not pro-Trump. It’s pro-peace.”

Corey Robin

“All I have to say about Jamie Kirchick and his article I said right here,” Robin said, linking to the following tweet:

.@ggreenwald @RaniaKhalek @ishaantharoor @KatrinaNation @ZaidJilani All U need to know re @jkirchick is right here. pic.twitter.com/XYL42msDHU

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) August 15, 2016

“All the rest is commentary,” Robin added.

Walker Bragman

“The piece James Kirchick is referring to argues that the hysteria over Trump is overblown because he and Clinton are both awful.

“It says something that people like Kirchick — people who characterize American interventionism over the past half-century as ‘America using its power for good’ — are backing Clinton so fervently.

“I think ultimately what we’re seeing is a realignment — the GOP fading and the Democratic Party rushing to swallow up its voters —which will split the party.

“And one more thing: the first Clinton presidency was awful for the poor and minority communities. There’s no guarantee, given her record, that the second will be any different.

“He totally missed the point.”

Bragman pointed to an interview he did on CNN in which he discussed why he supports Jill Stein.

I was just on @CNN talking about the 2016 election and my choice, @DrJillStein! https://t.co/fx1xTsGlSM

— Walker Bragman (@WalkerBragman) July 31, 2016

“Jill Stein represents my values. I don’t think Hillary Clinton does. I definitely don’t think Donald Trump does,” Bragman said in the interview.

He called both Clinton and Trump “intolerable.”

Patrick Lawrence

“James Kirchick gets no further than labels and name-calling.

“This piece is at bottom sheer politics. Kirchick here take his place in the concerted media campaign to advance Hillary Clinton to the White House. There’s little more to it.

“He has nothing to contribute otherwise apart from an implicit assertion that things must remain as they because they are as they are. It’s not a position.

“The consistent point in my pieces is simply to urge that we get beyond all hyperbole, listen with open ears, and think for ourselves. Hillary Clinton has a few good things to say and a lot of bad. It is the same for Trump.”

Lawrence also pointed out that the line Kirchick quoted — “Trump opposed Iraq. Hillary voted for war: Let’s take his foreign policy vision seriously” — was not something that he wrote. Rather, it was the headline of the article, and he did not choose that headline.

Christopher Ketcham (the lone Trump voter)

“Trump, who I’ll still vote for, is an ignorant, vicious, narcissistic, racist, capitalist scumbag, and thus an accurate representative of the United States.

“With him as president, the veil would be off the monstrousness of the empire. Let’s have a real asshole run an asshole of a country.”

Jeremy Kuzmarov

“What an atrocious, McCarthy-type smear job.

“In that essay I said right up front that Trump ‘may be a bigot’ — my point was that his invocation of the unfairly maligned America First organization was not part of his bigotry.

“The America First committee was the largest antiwar organization in American history with support from dozens of congressmen and celebrities, famous writers, and even former and future presidents and was supported by midwestern socialists and isolationists.

“As I explained in the article, it grew out of the post world war I environment in which much of the public felt they had been lied to into a war that yielded great destruction and suffering, and only exacerbated the divisions among the European powers in the face of the flawed settlement at Versailles, which blamed Germany for everything and fueled German nationalism and desire for revenge. The organization also warned that in the effort to destroy totalitarianism through violence, America would become totalitarian itself.

“The organization was smeared because of a speech given by Charles Lindbergh that did have some anti-Semitic undertones in his insinuation of Jewish ownership and influence in the media and government. However that speech was condemned by the America First leadership and Lindbergh did not speak for the whole organization.

“After Pearl Harbor, it should be noted, the organization disbanded and some of its members became liberal internationalists. At this particular historical moment, I don’t think America First is a bad tradition to invoke, and Trump is tapping into deep discontent with current American wars. This does not mean I support Trump in any way.

“I advocated at the end for progressives to try and reach out and educate Trump’s supporters rather than simply ridiculing them or anything Trump says, when there is a deep discontent with pervading policies he is tapping into and not everything he says is terrible (only perhaps 60 to 70 percent of what he says maybe; free trade he has made some sense too even if his own company exports jobs).

“In a later column, I suggested that Trump’s use of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad to introduce him for a big speech showed the inconsistency and double standards of his rhetoric.”

Stephen Cohen

“Since mid-2000s I have been warning we were drifting into new and more dangerous Cold War with Russia due largely (not only) to U.S. policy. This has certainly been in play since Georgia in 2008 and very dangerously since the Ukraine confrontation began in 2014.

“The mainstream media — NYT, WP, WJS, cable and broadcast TV have deleted, refused to discuss, this fateful and exceeding dangerous development. Those of us who understand it and want a different US policy have had to resort to alternative media, such as they are on foreign policy.

“Then, unexpectedly, along came Trump, a most imperfect messenger but one who seems to be proposing an end or diminishing of the new cold war with Russia (eg, in Syria, possibly in Ukraine).

“I am not a Trump supporter and have no ties to his campaign (or to Clinton’s), but I have seen Trump’s remarks, properly formulated, as a way to instigate media/elite discussion of 25-years of unwise bipartisan DC policy toward post-Soviet Russia. (I have two books on this.)

“Instead, we get McCarthy-like slurs hurled at people like me — ‘Putin apologist,’ etc. — and Trump himself (‘Putin’s puppet,’ etc.) all meant, it seems, to shut off any substantial debate about foreign policy, even in a presidential election year.

“Kirchick has been in the forefront of this slurring (certainly versus me) since 2014, so am not surprised he is at it again versus everyone. Only somewhat different in his new Daily Beast piece is his full-throated defense of the basic canons of that bipartisan consensus: e.g., democracy promotion, nation building, military intervention, boundless NATO expansion, American ‘exceptionalism’ in world affairs, etc.

“Fine, let us debate these principles and their policy record since the 1990s, but instead Kirchick (not only) slurs those of us who think our nation needs and has democratic right to such a full public debate, and by the candidates.

“He wants to intimidate and marginalize us, and in the latter he and the others have succeeded to a large degree. What he and the others do is undemocratic and if we are a democracy, un-American.”

Cohen added that, while he has published in The Nation for many years, and long before Katrina vanden Heuvel became an editor, “This does not mean I am a ‘left-wing’ scholar or media presence.”

“Substantial parts of my thinking are not comfortably ‘left-wing,’ whatever that means. But this is another label Kirchik and others throw around for their own political purposes,” he added.

“My bottom line is factology, not ideology.”

 

(This article was updated after it was published with Kirchick’s statement on the money from the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors.)

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El Chapo’s son kidnapped at gunpoint, signaling decline of once-powerful Sinaloa Cartel, report says

FILE - In this Jan. 8, 2016 file photo, Mexican drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by army soldiers to a waiting helicopter, at a federal hangar in Mexico City, after he was recaptured from breaking out of a maximum security prison in Mexico. The History channel says it's developing a drama series focusing on Guzman's story. Last year, Guzman had broken out of prison and was on the run when he had a secret meeting with Mexican actress Kate del Castillo and Sean Penn. The actor wrote about it for Rolling Stone. (AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File) (Credit: AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell, File)

Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, the son of notorious drug cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán Loera — better known as El Chapo — was kidnapped at gunpoint in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, early Monday morning, according to a New York Times report.

Gunmen abducted Jesús Alfredo, 30, a higher-up in the Sinaloa Cartel — which his father headed before his arrest in January — along with five others from an upscale restaurant in the Pacific Coast resort town.

Jesús Alfredo and his older brother Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar — the current leader of the Sinaloa Cartel — are wanted in the United States on federal drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

Early reports credit rival Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) with the kidnappings.

In June, 150 gunmen reportedly pillaged El Chapo’s mother’s house in the remote village of La Tuna, in Sinaloa.

Recent affronts by rival gangs signal structural woes within the once-powerful Sinaloa Cartel following El Chapo’s third arrest and ongoing extradition proceedings. After his very public escape from a maximum-security prison in July 2015, El Chapo was recaptured and is now under 24-hour surveillance at a prison near Ciudad Juarez, near the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Without doubt it’s bad news for security conditions in Sinaloa and the north-east of the country,” Adrián López, editor of Sinaloa-based newspaper El Noroeste told The Guardian. “If it is confirmed that the kidnapping of one of Guzmán’s sons … [was carried out] by the [CJNG] we would add a new and powerful enemy for the Sinaloa cartel.”

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Minnesota’s Bernie voters turning Green: Jill Stein courts progressive voters in an uncommonly independent-friendly state

Jill Stein speaks at the Asian American Journalists Association and APIAVote 2016 Presidential Election Forum in Las Vegas, August 12, 2016. (Credit: AP/Erik Kabik)

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein swooped into Minnesota on Tuesday, speaking at two events in Minneapolis to make a case for voting green. Promising to abolish student debt, Stein urged a crowd at the First Universalist Church to “forget the lesser evil, fight for the greater good” in her pitch for voters to say no to politics as usual.

One way she plans to win votes is to woo the 43 million people with student loan debt. “The average student debt is something like $35,000,” she said at a press conference before her first speaking event in south Minneapolis. “It’s a very disabling debt in the current economy.” Stein is calling for a $1.3 trillion bailout to cancel student debt. She hopes to get the word out to millennial voters, encouraging them to use social media to spread her message about student debt and other issues. 

“The good news is that 43 million people locked in debt is a winning plurality of a presidential race in a three-way vote, ” she said. “Forty-three million is more than enough to win the election.” 

Promising a New Green Deal that would create jobs in renewable energy, Stein also pledged to bring about a “peace offensive” in the Middle East to end terrorism by placing arms embargoes on countries like Saudi Arabia that supply terrorist groups with weapons. And like Bernie Sanders, Stein vowed to take money out of politics, touting her candidacy as rejecting any money for super PACs.

While Minnesota has long been known as a blue state, it also has a history of welcoming third parties. Minneapolis had a socialist mayor, Thomas Van Lear, from 1917 to 1919, for example. The state’s chapter of the Democratic Party, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, resulted from the 1944 merger of two different parties: the left-leaning Farmer-Labor Party (which has been home to three governors, four senators and several members of Congress) and the Democratic Party. Minnesota has also had a third-party governor with Jesse Ventura and recently elected four Green Party candidates as local officials, including Cam Gordon, a Minneapolis City Council member. In 2000, Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won 5.2 percent of the state’s vote.

Some Minnesotans, like Chicana studies scholar and activist Jessica Lopez Lyman, vote third party as par for the course. “I vote Green or Socialist [Party], depending on who’s on the ticket,” she said. “For me, it’s a political vote to not play the game of lesser of two evils and really try to dismantle the two-party system.”

Bernie Sanders won big in Minnesota (61.6 percent to Clinton’s 38.4 percent) during the Democratic caucuses earlier this year, and both Stein and the Green Party are hoping to cash in on the momentum of the Sanders campaign during the primaries.

“We are so happy there are former Berners out there,” Brandon Long, the chair of Green Party of Minnesota, said at the First Universalist Church. “We are thrilled to be working with you. We welcome you with open arms.” Already the Green Party has submitted 6,700 signatures (three times the requirement) to put Stein on the ballot in Minnesota in November.

And while Bernie Sanders received unfair media coverage, the coverage of Jill Stein has been even worse, Long said: “If you thought the Bernie Sanders blackout was bad, it was was nothing compared to this.”

Nearly 200 people showed up for the first event at the First Universalist Church in south Minneapolis’s Uptown, with about half of them raising their hands when Stein asked for a showing of Sanders supporters. There were young millennials considering voting for the Green Party for the first time, activists and progressives drawn to its platform and longtime Democrats who felt betrayed by what transpired during the primary season.

JoAnn Norheim, a 62-year-old retired nurse, said she was “coming out” for the Green Party in this election, after spending a lifetime in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. “I’m officially exiting the Democratic Party,” she said. “I was torn between trying to reform the party from within, because I’m nobody, or go green.”

James Farnsworth who just turned 18 is now deciding whom to vote for in this election. He and his friend, Madeline Rice, also a first-time voter, carried a sign declaring, “Abolish Student Debt.” Said Farnsworth: “As a person my age, that’s really important and something my demographic cares about,”

Pepper Branstner has voted for a Green Party candidate before — for Ralph Nader in 2000. Jill Stein’s platform more closely aligns with Branstner’s beliefs than the positions of Sanders, whom she previously supported. But Branstner’s current support for the Green Party hasn’t made her any friends, with people now shaming her on social media, she said. 

Tess, 28, also came out to see Stein. Inspired by Sanders, she donated $5 twice to his campaign. She hasn’t decided whom to vote for now but is not comfortable with either the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, or the Republican choice, Donald Trump. “I feel confident that Minnesota will go to Clinton,” she said. “We’re a very blue state, but I would vote for Clinton if I thought it was going to be close between her and Trump.” Still, she said she’d prefer to vote for someone who truly excites her about what the future can be. 

After concluding her south Minneapolis speech, Stein headed to north Minneapolis for a forum on black America hosted by Neighborhoods Organizing for Change. Speaking before an audience that was predominantly people of color (the opposite was true at the earlier event), Stein called for reparations to African-Americans for slavery as well as building political power within communities.

“I am the only presidential candidate out there that is advocating for reparations,” Stein said. Calling the current issue of police violence just “the tip of the iceberg,” Stein said in order to fix it, the surrounding issues of racism and white supremacy should be addressed.

Advocating for civilian review boards and independent investigators to keep police accountable, Stein also decried inequity in schools, saying that more needs to be done to counteract the “school-to-prison pipeline.” She would put an end to high-stakes tests, bringing in more social workers and art as well as take care of health care and housing disparities.

“The president and vice president need to play a role here in sharing a vision and helping to drive that vision towards a new society founded on racial justice,” she said. “That means having a very outspoken advocate in the White House so that the president isn’t just the commander in chief, but the president is the organizer in chief to help lift up that vision and how we achieve that vision.”

Bryan Bevell, a Minnesotan Sanders supporter reached by phone, said he doesn’t believe Stein will win but is considering casting a vote for her as a form of protest. “The only circumstance where I could bring myself to vote for Hillary is if Trump had a chance to win,” he said. “I really can’t go there again with these neoliberal Democrats,” said Bevell, who voted for Bill Clinton in his first presidential bid. “As candidates they don’t represent my interest or the majority of the American people’s interests.”

Another Minnesotan Sanders supporter reached by phone, Russ Forga, will be opting for the Green Party for the first time in November. Forga said he doesn’t trust Hillary Clinton right now. “When Bernie stepped down, all of a sudden she’s going after the top 1 percent,” Forga said.

Forga briefly considered Gary Johnson but after researching Jill Stein, he made his choice. “I thought, holy crap! She represents me more than any other candidate.” While he’s been told this will be a waste of his vote, he doesn’t think that’s necessarily true: “Jill Stein has a very solid chance in Minnesota,” he said.

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How Univision’s purchase of Gawker could alter the future of online journalism

FILE - In this Wednesday, March 16, 2016, file photo, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton arrives in a courtroom in St. Petersburg, Fla. Gawker Media has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, about three months after pro wrestler Hulk Hogan won a $140 million lawsuit against the online gossip and news publisher. (AP Photo/Steve Nesius, Pool, File) (Credit: AP)

On Tuesday, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision successfully purchased the remains of Nick Denton’s Gawker media empire for $135 million — and in so doing, may have changed the landscape of online journalism.

The sale represents yet another incursion by Univision into predominantly English-speaking markets, as earlier this year the company purchased the satirical site The Onion, as well as The Root, a site aimed at a predominantly African-American audience. It also became the sole proprietor of Fusion, which produces content aimed at millennials.

Univision will maintain Gawker’s current stable of properties — the flagship site, the feminist oriented Jezebel, the sports site Deadspin, and the tech site Gizmodo among them. All of these sites, as well as those purchased earlier this year, are designed to appeal to a generation of largely sarcastic digital natives who prefer their news delivered with knowing smiles and occasional fits of profanity.

According to Denton, that ethos will be maintained under new ownership. “I am pleased that our employees are protected and will continue their work under new ownership—disentangled from the legal campaign against the company,” Mr. Denton said in a statement. “We could not have picked an acquirer more devoted to vibrant journalism,” although what he means by “vibrant journalism” could be debated.

Put differently, what remains unclear is whether Univision collected these properties in order to acquire credibility with a younger, more racially and culturally diverse audience, or is attempting to lend some of its gravitas to sites which occasionally mistake aggression for political acumen and insult for advocacy.

Pay Pal founder Peter Thiel’s personal vendetta against Denton and his company — he bankrolled the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that led to its dissolution, citing as his rationale the fact that Gawker maliciously outed him in 2007 — was a product of the very newsroom environment Denton now claims Univision will leave intact. But if Univision’s ability to purchase Gawker Media teaches the conglomerate anything at all, it’s that regularly risking a company in order to maintain a brand isn’t a sound financial plan.

Such a decision would be especially risky in the new media environment Denton and Thiel unwittingly collaborated in creating — one in which a Silicon Valley venture capitalist can silence media outlets who production offends him simply by funding lawsuits against them. As ethically dubious as Gawker’s decision to publish the Hulk Hogan sex tape was, Thiel’s “investment” in Hogan’s lawsuit represents the very oligarchical mindset sites like Gawker exist to deflate — a task that could be far more easily accomplished with the muscle of Univision behind them.

A better way to test these new waters could scarcely be imagined, what with the Republican candidate declaring that it’s past time to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

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UPDATED: 3 in 5 Trump-supporting Texans think their state should secede under President Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik)

Public Policy Polling results released Tuesday reveal three out of every five Texans who support GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wants the state to secede from the United States should Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton become president.

The poll found “only one out of four Texans support seceding from America generally. But when faced with the possibility of a President Hillary Clinton, a majority of Texans said they’d rather leave.”

Secession was ruled illegal in the 1869 Supreme Court case, Texas v. White, but the Texas Nationalist Movement — a secessionist (#Texit) advocacy group — has gained minor legislative momentum this year.

The PPP poll also showed GOP nominee Donald Trump (44%) leading Clinton (38%) in the historically deep-red state.

“Older voters are overwhelmingly responsible for the Republican advantage in Texas,” the poll’s accompanying write-up notes. “And generational change is likely to help Democrats become more competitive.”

Among voters under 45, Clinton clobbers Trump (60% to 35%) in a head-to-head race.

(h/t The Houston Chronicle)

Correction: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said 3 in 5 Texans support secession in the event of a Hillary Clinton presidency. The actual statistic is: 3 in 5 Trump voters in Texas support secession …

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