Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 739
June 24, 2016
Trump and Brexit: Right-wing populism of the two is rooted more in base nationalism than in economic insecurity
Donald Trump, Nigel Farage (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik/Reuters/Vincent Kessler/Photo montage by Salon)
Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party that just helped lead Great Britain to a disastrous vote to leave the European Union, is a man with a fondness for race-baiting rhetoric that will be quite familiar to Americans who’ve endured a year of the Donald Trump campaign.
Like Trump, Farage blames crime and disease on immigrants and loves telling audiences that unemployment is a direct result of immigrants taking their jobs. He argues that Great Britain has “frankly become unrecognizable” and looks “like a foreign land.”
In one memorable interview, Farage complained about riding in a train through suburban London and hearing all the chatter in foreign languages on it. “It was a stopper going out and we stopped at London Bridge, New Cross, Hither Green. It was not until we got past Grove Park that I could hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage,” he whined.
(The host, James O’Brien, dryly pointed out that this cacophony of foreign voices must include his own wife’s, who is German. But, as with Trump, who is also married to an immigrant, it’s only the dark-skinned ones that are scary.)
This anxiety about not being able to eavesdrop on other people because they aren’t speaking English is a common trait among Trump supporters in the U.S., as well. A recent study from Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution demonstrates exactly how out of control the how-dare-they-speak-Spanish-near-me attitudes are in the Trump camp.
The language issue is an important one because it’s so fundamentally irrational. Many of the arguments against immigration — they are taking our jobs, they bring crime and disease — are untrue, but it’s easy to see why people who believe these arguments might have cause to be afraid. If you really do think immigrants are taking your jobs or bringing diseases, the anxiety seems rational, if still distasteful.
But the language thing betrays the anti-immigration forces. There’s simply no rational argument for why it should matter to you if people you’re sitting next to in public are having a conversation in a language you don’t understand that doesn’t include you.
Sure, they could be talking about you — though what a narcissist you must be to assume that — but that’s also true of people sitting across a room that are speaking in volumes you can’t hear. It’s anxiety unmoored from any rational justification, however tenuous. It’s hate for its own sake, fury that people dare to be different than you without apologizing for it.
In both the U.S. and the U.K., a lot of digital ink is being spilled analyzing the rise of right wing anti-immigrant populism. There are two general arguments over its cause. One is the economic argument: Our changing economy, coupled with the damage done by free trade and declining government investments in infrastructure and social services, causes skyrocketing economic anxiety, especially in areas outside of urban centers. This, in turn, causes people to look for villains to blame, and they settle on blaming immigrants, people of color, and liberal urban “elites”.
The other is a culture war argument: The right wing populists are petty, resentful people who dislike change, and their hatred of immigrants, feminists, and urbane people generally is neither complex nor particularly tied to economic insecurity. They’re just small-minded and ugly to anyone that isn’t like them.
This is an admittedly over-simplified take on the issue. Most people — I count myself amongst them — who closely follow the rise of right-wing populism would argue that it’s some combination of these two factors. It would be foolish to pretend that racist white people are okay with darker-skinned people sharing in the bounty if the economy were more robust. But it’s also foolish to deny that it becomes much easier for a racist to feel justified in blaming the immigrants for all their problems if the quality of local social services is in decline.
(This is but one example. Daniel Davies at Vox has a really good explanation of how economic anxiety and culture war intertwine when it comes to the issue of anti-cosmopolitanism in England, since people living in more depressed coastal areas are seeing their children stampede to places like London, where they become more urbane, and therefore different, than their parents.)
Still, it matters how much this kind of right-wing populism is due to cultural resentments vs. economic anxieties. Many on the left see the high levels of opposition to free trade among Trump supporters or Leave voters and optimistically conclude that this provides a way to ameliorate their ugliness and hate. If their nastiness really is a reaction to economic anxiety, after all, there are options here. Perhaps they can be educated about a more liberal path towards their economic goals. Perhaps a return to more robust social spending or more restrictive trade policies will help restore economic health to their communities, reducing their anger and hatred.
But if this kind of right-wing populism is rooted in hate, and the economic stuff is just slathered on top, then it makes it much harder to conceive of a solution to this problem. If people hate immigrants and urban “elites” not because they are reacting poorly to economic insecurity, but just because they really don’t like difference, there’s not much you can do about that.
Unfortunately, there’s a significant amount of evidence that right-wing populism is rooted more in plain old small-minded bigotry than it is a form of economic anxiety that simply expresses itself in nationalist, bigoted terms.
In Great Britain, voters were continually warned that a vote for Leave was a vote for economic devastation. Yes, a lot of people rationalized that away, accusing the Remain folks of fear-mongering. But people who are truly worried about their economic status would probably hesitate more to gamble with the future this way. Instead, you had Farage saying things like he would happily give up economic growth in exchange for less immigration.
Breitbart writer User Milo Yiannopoulos, who has been eagerly trying to wed European right populism to American right wing populism, echoed this sentiment on Twitter Thursday:
Fuck the global economy. We have to save our civilisation.
— Milo Yiannopoulos ✘ (@Nero) June 24, 2016
While there was no exit polling, the widespread belief is that Leave folks skew older and are more likely to be retired, just like right-wing populists in the U.S. The decline of the pound has got to be hitting people on a fixed income hard. So, this is a fairly ugly example of people choosing to screw themselves over economically rather than accept cultural change.
One of the strongest predictors of whether an area of England voted Leave was how few immigrants actually live there, bolstering the sense that this is largely about culturally isolated people lashing out at abstract fears about the unknown foreign Other.
In the U.S., there’s similarly troubling evidence that right-wing populism might be more about base bigotry than economic insecurity, starting with the fact that the rise of Trump coincided with an improving economy and dropping unemployment. The assumption that Trump is mainly appealing to economically unstable white people appears to be more driven by urban journalists mistaking the cargo shorts-and-baseball-caps aesthetic of his followers for actual working class status.
In reality, as Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight showed, “As compared with most Americans, Trump’s voters are better off.” Not by a small amount, either. The average Trump household draws a median income of $72,000, which is $16,000 more a year than the average American household. Both Clinton and Sanders supporters have a median household income of $61,000.
None of this means that liberals should abandon the cause of economic justice, better trade regulation, stronger unions, or more robust social spending. These things are good in and of themselves, and help stabilize the economy and the lives of people across the demographic and political spectrum.
But we should let go of the hope that liberal economic policies will do much to end nationalism and racism. God knows American red states, which keep electing Republicans who impose austerity measures so serious that it’s causing their governments and school systems to collapse, proves the point. A lot of right-wingers would rather burn their own homes to the ground rather than share them fairly with people of color. I wish I had an answer to that problem, but if the threat of economic devastation doesn’t change their minds, apparently nothing will.
June 23, 2016
Unveiling the international tickle-porn conspiracy — it’s not as funny as you think
"Tickled" (Credit: Magnolia Pictures)
How much do you know about tickling — as a phenomenon in itself and, just to throw this out there, as a sexual fetish and a subgenre of pornography? How much do you want to know? Your first answers to those questions might be “nothing” and “absolutely nothing,” but the deeply strange rabbit-hole documentary called “Tickled,” from the New Zealand duo David Farrier and Dylan Reeve, may persuade you otherwise. This movie begins as a lighthearted exploration of a peculiar online spectacle known as “competitive endurance tickling,” in which athletic young men are paid to tickle each other on camera. But before “Tickled” ends it has become something entirely different, a globetrotting investigation in pursuit of a shadowy figure who can never be pinned down and may not exist, like the Orson Welles character in “The Third Man.” Except with tickling.
It might seem impossible to position “Tickled” as any sort of commentary on larger cultural or political concerns. For once, it doesn’t have anything to do with Donald Trump, although the story gets so bizarre and has so many switchbacks that I halfway expected him to show up at some point. (It definitely wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the international tickling-porn kingpin unveiled in this movie — no spoilers, I promise! — knows Trump or has done business with him at some point.) But there are farcical echoes of all kinds of bigger things in “Tickled,” from the money trails of the super-rich revealed in the Panama Papers to Hillary Clinton’s email ineptitude to the enormous gullibility of Americans in general. And perhaps young male Americans in particular.
As Farrier, the Auckland journalist who serves as the deadpan Kiwi-Michael Moore centerpiece of “Tickled,” observes late in the film, this isn’t a story about tickling. It’s a story about power and more specifically (I would add) about how easily ordinary people can give in to delusions and surrender power over their own lives. Wait, did I say this movie wasn’t about Trump? I take that back.
But before we get to the heavy lifting, let’s deal with important questions of taxonomy or epistemology first. Can something be porn if everyone involved in it has their clothes on? And if no form of on-screen nudity or penetration or orgasm is involved? I don’t claim there’s a singular answer to that, and surely the tickling videos produced under the auspices of someone sometimes known as Terri Tickle and sometimes as Jane O’Brien would not be deemed obscene or illegal in any jurisdiction. But under the famous Potter Stewart definition that you know it when you see it, I suspect most people would say yes. As another tickling impresario and aficionado explains in the film — someone who has nothing to hide and definitely isn’t Terri or Jane — tickling porn is basically a subset of BDSM, with the intensity dialed down. The ticklee is consensually restrained and submissive; he’s kind of into it and kind of not; the whole thing walks the boundary between pleasure and pain. In other words, it’s about power.
When Farrier, who typically reports on whimsical entertainment and lifestyle stories for New Zealand television, first noticed “competitive endurance tickling” on the internet, he assumed it was the sort of odd mini-trend that fit into his natural wheelhouse. Groups of young American guys, mostly in the college-wrestler or swim-team vein, were showing up in videos tickling the heck out of each other in motel rooms, apparently at the behest of a company called Jane O’Brien Media. Maybe it was for money and maybe it was for kicks, but it seemed like a strange but essentially harmless pastime. Farrier sent an ordinary journalistic query to Jane O’Brien Media and received a stream of vicious emails in response, insisting that the company did not want to associate its wholesome videos with a “homosexual journalist” and his “homosexual lifestyle.” Its wholesome videos of handsome, athletic young men tied down and tickled on hotel beds. (Farrier is gay, but it’s not much of an issue in his professional career. He doesn’t work in LGBT media and does not focus on LGBT material in particular.)
Any journalist, and indeed any human being, would have the same reaction at that point: What in the name of the living Christ is going on here? Arguably Farrier and Reeve, his slightly truculent sidekick and co-director, play dumb vis-à-vis the audience a bit longer than they should, so I’ll cut to the chase: It becomes obvious early on that Jane O’Brien is at best a ghost or a fiction, but the slowly unfolding question of who is really funding and producing these bizarre tickling videos, and why, is like opening a Russian nesting doll stuffed with layers of used condoms.
The notional O’Brien or her notional assistant or whoever sends three representatives all the way to Auckland on first-class tickets to dissuade Farrier and Reeve from pursuing the global tickling empire any further. And those guys are, well, remarkable. What do you think the people hired to shield an international tickling-porn kingpin would be like? Lawyers are engaged to threaten and harass the filmmakers, in California and New York and New Zealand, and so are private investigators. It’s like the weirdest and least plausible imitation-Hitchcock thriller of all time: You start by asking questions about an innocent-seeming online fetish site, and you wind up months later in the frozen post-industrial wasteland of Muskegon, Michigan, talking to a former mixed martial-arts fighter with a pencil mustache who spent several years as the chief recruiter for Jane O’Brien’s secret “tickle-torture cell.”
It’s not at all clear that tickling is ultimately the point for the person who, under various names and premises, has been soliciting and funding guys-getting-tickled videos online since at least the mid-1990s. It seems like it’s more about what happens after the tickling stops, which is also when “Tickled” stops being hilarious. Terri-Jane’s original model worked like this: She gets the attention of some bored college athlete at a sub-elite school who wouldn’t mind having a new laptop or an Xbox or some concert tickets or just $1000 in cash. She says she’s going to send him that stuff, and she does. Oh, by the way: Is he ticklish? What about his buddies? Would he mind making a video in the dorm with a few of them? Sure, it’s a little weird, but it’s definitely legal and it’s definitely not gay. Oh no, no, no. If the videos come, more gifts follow.
By the current decade, Terri-Jane’s operation has moved on to professional adult-film production facilities in L.A. and, according to the Muskegon MMA informant, outsourced tickle-shops in at least five American states and three foreign countries. But in all cases the endgame remains the same: If you announce you want out, or complain about your name and likeness showing up all over YouTube and various porn-related sites as a notable tickle-enthusiast, all hell breaks loose. Links to your tickle videos will be sent to your mom, your girlfriend, your athletic coaches and your actual or potential employers. Denial-of-service attacks, apparently emanating from your IP address, will be launched against your company, your school, your sports program. Numerous websites will pop up, apparently established by you, proclaiming your unquenchable passion for guy-on-guy tickling. Only one former ticklee was willing to go on camera with Farrier and Reeve, a former college wide receiver from Southern California named T.J., who says his attempts to catch on in pro football were stymied by the fact that any Google search of his name reveals widespread evidence that he’s out and proud as a gay tickle fetishist. Tolerance in sports has come a long way, but … you get the point.
Farrier and Reeve only hint at the question that a lot of internet denizens of the 21st century will be asking themselves: Is this whole thing some kind of feminist revenge plot against the frat-boy/college-athlete demographic, cooked up by a woman or at least someone who claims to be a woman? Is it like “rape culture” symbolically turned against itself? You’ll have to answer that question for yourself by seeing “Tickled,” I’m afraid, but as with the questions I asked at the beginning of this article, the answer isn’t necessarily obvious. In any case, the tickling kingpin’s true goal is less to watch dopey dudes who have forgotten what their mothers told them about taking candy from strangers get tied up and tickled than to humiliate them later for their weakness and vulnerability, to make them pay over and over for drinking so deep from the poisoned chalice of tickledom. Is that a stupid metaphor for the stupid Trump electorate, or what?
“Tickled” is now playing in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., and Toronto. It opens July 1 in Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Mich., Kansas City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Providence, R.I., San Diego, Seattle and Washington, with more cities and home video to follow.
Paul Giamatti and Ethan Hawke break down their good cop/bad cop roles in “The Phenom”
Paul Giamatti in "The Phenom" (Credit: RLJ Entertainment)
The title character in the sleeper indie “The Phenom” is Hopper Gibson (Johnny Simmons), a teenage pitcher who is being groomed for the major leagues. As writer/director Noah Buschel’s (“Glass Chin”) modest but powerful film opens, Hopper is talking to Dr. Mobley (Paul Giamatti), a mental skills coach. Mobley helps players with “issues” regain their focus, and many of Hooper’s issues stem from his being bullied by his abusive ex-con father, Hopper Sr. (Ethan Hawke).
Giamatti and Hawke play “good cop/bad cop” throughout “The Phenom.” Buschel stages the film as series of mostly two-handed exchanges between the main characters, generating tremendous emotion in the process. “The Phenom” scores because Giamatti and Hawke are deeply immersed in their roles. As Hooper Sr., a character described as a “warped, macho man,” Hawke gives a vivid, indelible performance as the film’s villain who taunts his son—as when he makes Hopper run suicides for smiling on the pitcher’s mound. In contrast, Giamatti is like a comforting blanket, coaching Hopper to relieve some of his pressure and get his bliss back. However, Mobley is masking some buried pain himself.
The two actors spoke with Salon about their characters and “The Phenom.”
Was there ever a baseball player you followed passionately?
Giamatti: I was obsessed with the Detroit Tiger’s Ron LeFlore. He went to prison for armed robbery and played in prison!
Hawke: My favorite player was a catcher for the Texas Rangers, Jim Sunberg. I had his poster on my wall as a kid. I don’t know why.
Paul, you have played twitchy characters that get all worked up, but here you play a man who helps Hopper calm down. How do you manage your pressures and emotions in your life?
Giamatti: Is that all I play? It’s curious with actors. You channel something specific, and it doesn’t have anything to do with your real life. Maybe I get it all out in my parts? I just try to ride out anxiety. Sure, I get nervous, but I think I manage fine.
Ethan, your character is all big emotion. But he restricts his son from showing emotion. As such, your performance, while showy, is really scary. How did you tap into playing Hopper Sr.?
Hawke: Whenever I’m at my best, it’s because the writing is high quality. Noah wrote this part really well. When I read it, I wanted to play it. I knew it would be easy, because there’s something true about this character and it was alive in my imagination immediately. What’s hard is generating that in your imagination yourself.
“The Phenom” has the title character working through failure. How do you deal with that as an actor?
Hawke: As a performer, I relate to the pressures athletes feel. They are performing in a similar way. It’s a pleasure to watch them excel and overcome fear and anxiety, and tortuous to watch them not play as well as they can.
Giamatti: Their success is so stark: It’s measured in if you won or lost. It’s harsher, I can identify with that…
Hawke: With us, as actors, there is flexibility and interpretation. One person might hate my performance but another person might love it.
Giamatti: Yes. It’s all a matter of interpretation…
What about pleasure? One of the questions Mobley has for Hopper is about finding the enjoyment of the game. What do you enjoy about acting, and what do you enjoy that is not acting?
Giamatti: What I like about acting…that is a big, hard question… I don’t have hobbies… Traveling? I‘d rather be working than doing a hobby. As an actor, you pick up a hobby when you’re not working that much.
Hawke: My family and friends. All the really simple stuff. We [actors] are in a luxurious position. Others have passion for hobbies because they don’t have passion for their work. My dad was good at what he did, but he didn’t love it. I love what I do.
Both Mobley and Hopper Sr. want to bring out the greatness in Hopper. But they have different approaches. What do you think about the approach each one takes to help Hopper?
Giamatti: I think with Mobley, the approach is dealing with Hooper’s loss of joy, and the way to make him effective is to give him back something that gave him pleasure, so it doesn’t matter if the team wins or loses. Give back the dimension of when he was younger and enjoying the game, things that were chipped away by money, and pressure. He needs to be more relaxed. I think the kid is not a machine. He’s a lovely, sensitive guy. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but a good guy. [Mobley’s] a good prescription, a nice way to gain control of him. That approach doesn’t always work. The alternative, the sweat and hammer approach, has had good results in history.
Hawke: People learn so many of the wrong things—they have so many blind spots. Hopper Sr. believes he’s doing the right thing because he finds the world cold, harsh, and horrible. He’s trying to prepare his son to be the best. Would I parent my son that way? Absolutely not! But I know that man.
The film has long talky scenes that are really compelling. How did you approach these very theatrical speeches and interactions?
Giamatti: I find long, single takes, where you get to act, very pleasurable. You see more of our body [language]. I find it not easier, but more enjoyable than when they chop scenes up.
Hawke: It lets your self-conscious work; you disappear into your part.
Giamatti: It allows everything to flow…
Ethan, your character has trouble with the law. Have you had any brushes in real life that you drew on for that for playing Hopper Sr.?
Hawke: Not that I want to talk about. I have four kids. I can’t talk about sex or crime. I have to be a role model.
Paul, your character is a therapist. Have you ever sought counseling that you drew on that experience for playing Mobley?
Giamatti: I don’t want to talk about it, but I had a therapist once, and he was very helpful.
Hawke: Was that after working with me?
Neverending stories: Franchise thirst explains how sequels like “The Purge: Election Year” get made—but not why they’re in theaters
"The Purge: Election Year" (Credit: Universal Pictures)
Hollywood has come down with a bad case of sequelitis. This summer’s box office is down a hefty 22 percent from last year, dragged down by a glut of underperforming franchise misfires. These will include “X-Men: Apocalypse,” “Neighbors: Sorority Rising,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Ooze,” and “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” all of which will significantly underperform their predecessors. At the time of writing, these five movies trail their previous installments by a combined $673 million.
Disney’s “Finding Dory” and “Captain America: Civil War,” both which earned high marks from critics, are some the few sequels in 2016 to improve on previous opening weekends in their respective series; even solid openers like “Now You See Me 2” and “The Conjuring 2” have been seeing much steeper week-to-week declines than the originals.
This is a huge problem when the number of sequels produced continues to climb. At this point last year, 17 sequels, spinoffs, remakes, and movies based on pre-existing properties (see: the “Entourage” movie) were released. This year, we’re up to 21, many of which no one actually wanted. Was there much of a demand for “London Has Fallen” or “Mother’s Day,” yet another entry in Garry Marshall’s never-ending series of star-studded holiday movies? How about the decade-too-late “Zoolander 2” and “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2?”
Birth.Movies.Death’s Devin Faraci explains that the problem is that the demand for what sequels are has changed in recent years: Audiences crave sagas, which treat each entry as a new chapter in an ongoing story, not a retread of what we already saw.
The scariest thing about “The Conjuring 2” was how closely it resembles the previous film: They’re both movies about an adorable family with lots of adorable children who are haunted by a demonic presence. Last time an evil dummy terrorized our heroes; this time, it’s a satanic nun. The preteen girls who have the most contact with the havoc-wreaking succubus in question even look remarkably similar: Madison Wolfe and Joey King could pass as twins. They even have the same haircut.
While The Hollywood Reporter noted that the recent slew of flops is making studios more cautious about sequels—with Universal pushing back “Pitch Perfect 3” to get the script right—that won’t stop the industry from pushing even more franchises, reboots, and follow-ups: Currently, there are 163 sequels in the works. James Cameron, for instance, is planning four more “Avatar” movies.
Part of that is due to a studio system that’s grown more cautious in recent years, banking on pre-existing properties that seem like safe bets in an uncertain film market. “We have projects at six studios, and ninety per cent of their attention goes to the ones that are superhero or obviously franchisable,” director Shawn Levy (“Night at the Museum”) told the New Yorker. “And every single first meeting I have on a movie, in the past two years, is not about the movie itself but about the franchise it would be starting.”
The other reason, though, that so many theatrical sequels are being greenlit is because of the erosion of the home video market. With the disappearance of video stores, the rapid decline in DVD sales, and sluggish VOD numbers, movies are being pushed into theaters that have no business in a multiplex. They simply don’t have any other choice.
“Finding Dory,” which is earning high marks from critics, would have been treated very differently by the Mouse House two decades ago. Like “Monsters University” and the poorly received “Cars 2,” it would have been a straight-to-video release.
Although these movies vary greatly in quality, they are built on the exact same template as Disney’s “Balto II,” “The Little Mermaid II,” and “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.” The trailer for the latter, which was released directly on video in 1998, promised “a new epic chapter from the Pocahontas.” The jovial narrator boasts: “Pocahontas and her friends embark on a fun-filled adventure in the New World of England, where they’ll meet new friends and fight for the future of her people.”
While the phrase “direct-to-video” has a pejorative connotation, the “new friends!” + “new adventure!” formula boded very well for Disney in the 1990s and early 2000s, as the studio launched a number of franchises on VHS and DVD, including “Tinker Bell” and the long-running “Air Bud” series. The modestly successful 1997 release, starring Kevin Zegers, spawned a mind-boggling 13 direct-to-video sequels. Those abruptly ceased in 2013.
For studios, the halting of that gravy train means they’re missing out on a whole lot of sauce.
These movies are cheap to make, market, and release and can be extremely profitable for studios. “Return of Jafar” and “The King of Thieves,” the two direct-to-video sequels to Disney’s smash hit “Aladdin,” did very well for themselves, earning a combined $280 million on the home video rental and sales market. Those numbers would be extremely difficult today: The biggest selling DVD of the year so far has been Disney’s “The Good Dinosaur,” which has pushed just 1.2 million copies. It has earned $21 million dollars at the time of writing.
To say DVD sales are bleak these days is a massive understatement: To date, the top 10 biggest-selling DVDs in 2016 have brought in just over $125 million. That’s less than half of what “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” earned on video a decade ago.
That market erosion means that if they aren’t picked up by streaming platforms like Netflix—as in the case of “Beasts of No Nation” or this month’s “Tallulah,” starring Ellen Page—there’s almost nowhere for non-theatrical (or limited for-awards-eligibility) releases to go. When stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood video went the way of the dodo, Redbox was poised to reap the spoils. Those DVD kiosks, though, have likewise fallen on hard times, with rental figures plummeting by 17 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015.
One might assume that consumers ditched physical DVDs for more rental convenient options, like video-on-demand. Back in 2015, Steven Soderbergh predicted that VOD would save the cinema. The prolific auteur’s divisive doll-factory thriller “Bubble” pioneered the simultaneous release strategy—in which movies were released in theaters the same day they were available for purchase through your local cable provider.
But VOD has yet to come to Hollywood’s rescue. In 2016, video-on-demand sales are expected to increase by 12 percent from last year’s numbers—which seems healthy at first glance. Those figures, however, are deceptive. While revenue from streaming has surpassed both theatrical box office and DVD sales in recent years, the VOD market itself has experienced sluggish growth since 2012, when revenue shot up 20 percent from the prior calendar year. Between 2015 and 2016, growth in the VOD market is projected to drop by 20 percent.
That decline may be as due to a generational divide as it is competition from subscription services: VOD options primarily appeal to digital natives, not the kind of people who traditionally purchase direct-to-video movies. For instance, can you imagine your stepdad renting “Universal Soldier 27” off Amazon Video?
The year before Disney pulled the plug on the “Air Bud” series, Variety noted that because of the difficulty of getting VOD-only releases to consumers, increasingly fewer studios were bothering with making direct-to-video movies at all. After Universal greenlit four sequels to “Bring It On” in six years, there hasn’t been another since 2009. The “Wrong Turn” horror franchise, in which hillbilly cannibals feast on a new crop of helpless teenagers in each installment, chewed its final corpse in 2014.
It’s extremely hard to find any hard numbers on direct-to-video releases by year. But when Fox dropped “Marley & Me: The Puppy Years” in 2011, one estimate suggests that 40 movies were released directly in stores, as well as at your local Redbox and on streaming platforms. This year, just 10 will follow the same path.
Few of us out there will mourn the loss of DVD-only releases like “Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2” or “Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven,” but without a variety of viable releasing options, studios will continue pushing sequels the old-fashioned way—on the big screen. That has led to a number of shoddy franchise fillers (see: “Paul Blart Mall Cop 2”) getting a major release, when they would have been better served by your local Blockbuster. “The Purge: Election Year,” “Ice Age: Collision Course,” “Underworld: Blood Wars,” and “Ouija: Origin of Evil” will all bow in theaters before the end of 2016.
If Hollywood hopes find a remedy for the plague of sequels infecting the multiplex, the industry needs to do so soon—because the sickness is about to get a lot worse.
Despite 4 years trapped in embassy, Assange says WikiLeaks has “very big year” ahead
WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange speaking via videostream at an event in New York City on June 22, 2016 (Credit: YouTube)
June 19, 2016 marked the fourth year that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of whistleblowing journalism organization WikiLeaks, has been trapped in the Ecuadoran embassy in London.
Several events were organized this week in cities throughout Europe, Latin America and the U.S. to commemorate this anniversary, and to bring attention to the escalating war on whistleblowers and journalists.
Assange spoke via videostream at an event in New York City on Wednesday (video below).
He stressed in his message that he has been effectively detained by the U.K. for five and a half years, even though he has never been charged with a crime.
In February, the U.N. ruled that Assange is being arbitrarily and illegally detained, and is due compensation for the “different forms of deprivation of liberty.”
Despite the hardship, nevertheless, Assange was excited about the months ahead. “It’s going to be a very big year for WikiLeaks,” he said.
Assange implored the audience to “get ready to gather around” in order “to protect our ability to be publishing.” “It will be very necessary in the coming months,” the WikiLeaks editor stressed.
Many of the upcoming releases, he said, concern Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“I’ve come to know Hillary quite well,” Assange joked. WikiLeaks has released thousands of Clinton’s emails, and he has read many of them.
“She is an extremely ambitious liberal interventionist hawk,” he explained. This is, of course, no surprise, he added, but the extreme degree of her belligerence is often not understood.
Clinton “was the leading figure behind the destruction of Libya,” he said, echoing comments he said in an interview with Salon in February.
“If Hillary Clinton gets into office, it means endless war,” Assange warned. “We are in fact already, under Obama, in endless war, but I think it will significantly ramp up under Hillary Clinton.”
And “with a Democratic president in office, there is no strong Democratic opposition” to these policies, he noted.
Assange added that, at the end of the day, the differences between Clinton and her opponent, presidential candidate Donald Trump, will not have a big impact on the U.S. empire.
“I’m not sure it makes much difference which president” is in office, he said. Rather, the roughly 3,000 people appointed by the president are those who control how the U.S. empire operates. And the people whom Clinton chooses to surround herself with are hawkish liberal interventionists themselves.
Of those who work under her, Assange said, Clinton demands “total sucking up” and constant flattery. She “surrounds herself with people who don’t really challenge her.”
It’s “a liberal interventionist who surrounds herself with liberal interventionists,” he described it, citing figures like Anne-Marie Slaughter, another so-called humanitarian interventionist.
The New York Times, which endorsed Clinton for president, pointed out that she is even more hawkish than her Republican rivals. The U.S. newspaper of record described her as “the last true hawk left in the race.”
A digital Library of Alexandria
Assange was joined at the event by a panel of renowned journalists and activists, including Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, Democracy Now founder Amy Goodman, The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, among others.
Amy Goodman, who moderated the discussion, said it is amazing that, despite the sanctions, assassination threats and effective imprisonment Assange has endured for years, WikiLeaks remains strong.
“How have you kept WikiLeaks going?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Assange joked in reply. He said it has only been possible thanks to the help he has gotten from the WikiLeaks staff and from people throughout the world.
Assange added that he has had many “false friends,” who have betrayed him or were cowardly and timid in time of need. But he also thanked those who have supported WikiLeaks’ work.
Besides, if he weren’t doing it, someone would take his place and continue the work, Assange argued.
Goodman followed up, asking him what he is proudest of. Assange said it is simply keeping Wikileaks alive.
“We have built a grand project, in some ways a grand dream,” he said, likening it to a contemporary digital Library of Alexandria.
WikiLeaks has actually now published more documents while Assange has been detained than it did before. “And we have not fired a single person,” he added.
Assange also spoke highly of The Intercept, the publication co-founded by Jeremy Scahill and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, who worked with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“It’s use it or lose it,” Assange told Scahill, expressing support The Intercept’s work.
The media
Assange had pretty harsh words for the rest of the media.
He noted that the Pentagon has 20,000 people involved in public relations. The defense department writes thousands of propaganda stories each year “that they give away for free to the press.”
Meanwhile, WikiLeaks’ documents have largely been ignored by the English-language press, although they are much more frequently cited in the international media, Assange said.
“We’re happy to accept the ‘bad boy’ label,” he joked.
“We are completely beyond the pale as far as a lot of the mainstream” press goes, Assange continued. But “we perceive those outlets to be beyond the pale” too.
“They destroy history; they contain it in themselves; they privatize it.”
“History does not belong to journalists; history does not belong to a media organization,” he argued.
Assange added, “history does also not belong to whistleblowers,” even though they can be “the most important part” in helping to create it.
“History belongs to human civilization to understand in order to better itself,” he stressed.
The U.S. government
The WikiLeaks editor vociferously challenged the U.S. government’s claim that his organization’s work has harmed national security.
“It’s all rubbish; it’s just all garbage,” Assange said. “The information that we have published has never led” to anyone facing violence.
The government has tried “desperately” to find a single case of a U.S. official being harmed, he noted, but has come up with nothing.
In a lighter moment, Assange also noted that, while he has major problems with the U.S. government, the U.S. “does have some good things going for it.”
He said he quite likes U.S. culture, and applauded the country’s enormous diversity.
“London is a city-state” on the other hand, he lamented; it’s an “inbred system.”
When asked about the June 23 vote on Brexit, the referendum on whether the U.K. should leave the E.U., Assange said it might not be so bad to do so.
He noted the E.U. frequently acts “in service of transnational capital.” He read from a 2008 cable released by Wikileaks in which William Hague, then shadow foreign secretary for the Conservative Party and later first secretary of state and foreign secretary, stressed that any prime minister inevitably “learns of the essential nature of the relationship with America.”
“We want a pro-American regime. We need it. The world needs it,” Hague said.
Assange also criticized Sweden, noting that, while it is sometimes applauded for its social democratic government, it is one of the world’s largest per capita exporter of arms, and the only country that does rendition on its own people.
Aaron Schwartz
Someone in the audience asked about electronic activist Aaron Schwartz. Assange said he had empathized a lot with Schwartz, and understood the pain he went through.
The government’s harsh crackdown on Schwartz, after he made millions of documents and scholarly articles freely available on the internet, ultimately led to his suicide.
“Aaron Schwartz was largely the victim of the crackdown against WikiLeaks,” Assange said.
Assange recalled being afraid of speaking with Schwartz during the government’s investigation, because “there was such intense focus on me,” and he didn’t want to bring it to Schwartz. Assange said he regrets that now.
Civil rights activists have spoken of how the effect of COINTELPRO, grand juries and FBI investigations was to “atomize people,” Assange noted. “There can be terrible side effects of that.”
“An unusual power”
Assange remains optimistic, however. He even managed to find a silver lining in his unfortunate situation.
“There are some consolations to being an accused person and detained unlawfully,” Assange said.
People who are accused develop “an unusual power” — and, he added, “there is no more severe accusation than being accused by a superpower.”
– – –
The video of the event can be watched below:
Enough with the spectacle: How about we just ban all assault weapons instead?
Detective Barbara J. Mattson, of the Connecticut State Police, holds up a Bushmaster AR-15 rifle, the same make and model of gun used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook School shooting, Jan. 28, 2013. (Credit: AP/Jessica Hill)
“They know that we will not bring a bill that takes away a person’s constitutionally guaranteed rights…without due process,” said Paul Ryan, dismissing the recently terminated Democratic sit-in for legislation that would bar those on government terror watch lists from purchasing guns as a “publicity stunt.”
Clearly, Republicans don’t actually care about civil liberties except where it concerns their distorted reading of the Second Amendment, or about civil rights aside from a twisted conception related to the interests of the white majority. But it’s true that the sit in, and the entire campaign to bar those on the terror watch lists, is nothing more than a really bad idea generated at the intersection of social-media-era public relations, a partisan general election, bloody tragedy and the grinding war on terror.
The legislation would not stop the vast majority of shooters, minor and major, from buying guns and would bolster the legitimacy of Orwellian watch lists that are discriminatory and entirely fail to give those trapped on them anything resembling due process rights.
“We oppose the Terrorist Firearms Prevention Act of 2016 because it appears to limit the ban on firearms purchases to American Muslims and seems to be more concerned about an appeals process to obtain a firearm, instead of creating a similar process for listed individuals to challenge watch list designations,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement. “It would seem the Senate is willing to only apply constitutional limitations on the American Muslim community, which is disproportionately impacted by federal watch lists.”
The campaign isn’t about gun control. Banning assault weapons would be gun control. Instead, this is a ploy born of election-season opportunism: how better to flip the script on Republicans than by accusing them of facilitating the transfer of weaponry to ISIS? “Who’s soft on terror now?” the advertisements will say.
The Democrats’ campaign, however, should inspire nothing but cynicism. The terror watch lists, as the ACLU has tried to argue amid deafening liberal war cries, are brazen rights violations.
Gun violence in America, by and large, has nothing to do with suspected terrorists buying guns. Rather, it is rooted in the fact that far too many ordinary Americans have guns, including high-powered assault rifles like those used in Orlando and Sandy Hook. And the vast majority of gun deaths, of course, occur in poor, non-white neighborhoods, often as a result of internecine feuds fomented by poverty and marginalization.
But the imagination of gun control advocates is all the time warped by America’s worst policy instincts. Measures to deal with urban gun violence by toughening sentences for illegal gun possession fuel the long-term growth of the prison system and fail to address the issues underlying street conflicts. Attempting to stem mass shootings by leveraging despotic watch lists and scapegoating Islamic terrorism will likewise evade root causes and ideologically legitimizes the treatment of terrorism suspects, broadly conceived in the hundreds of thousands by a voracious security state, as bona fide terrorists.
The Democrats are trying to beat Republicans at a war-on-terror contest that has always played to the right’s advantage. It’s a fight that can’t be “won” because the only possible winner is the security state and a war on terror that will emerge more resilient and less vulnerable to challenge. Liberals briefly insisted that the Orlando attack be viewed through the prism of homophobia and guns, and not primarily as an act of critical-thought-stopping terrorism. That, apparently, has changed. And that’s profoundly sad. If the goal is to ban assault weapons, the demand should be that they be banned. Taking a ban off the table in the face of Republican intransience, in exchange for these absurd and harmful half measures that will also go nowhere anytime soon, strictly limits the possibility that a real debate will go anywhere in the future.
This is not gun control. Democrats are sitting in to give up real gun control and also the slightest pretense that the war on terror has been an unmitigated disaster that must be brought to an end.
Led Zeppelin not guilty: “Stairway” verdict is a modest victory for creativity
Jimmy Page, Robert Plant (Credit: AP/Mario Suriani)
At times, it looked like it was going to bend the other way. But a Los Angeles federal jury has decided unanimously that Led Zeppelin did not break copyright law in the composition of its song “Stairway to Heaven.” The suit brought by a trustee of the estate of the late Randy Wolfe, singer and songwriter for the group Spirit, had alleged that the classic-rock warhorse stole an arpeggiated progression from a Spirit instrumental, “Taurus.”
“We are grateful for the jury’s conscientious service and pleased that it has ruled in our favor, putting to rest questions about the origins of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and confirming what we have known for 45 years,” songwriters Robert Plant and Jimmy Page said in a statement. “We appreciate our fans’ support, and look forward to putting this legal matter behind us.”
The decision isn’t entirely shocking, but some of the music community had worried that the similarity of the opening of “Stairway” to a plucked passage in “Taurus” would lead to a guilty verdict. And that, some feared, could open up a flood of suits of this kind – justified or otherwise. The $40 million the plaintiffs were asking for, and the song’s status as perhaps the most famous in the classic-rock canon, meant it was likely to have a serious impact. The decision against Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” which was based on a far-less famous Marvin Gaye song and settled for a much smaller amount, has already provoked similar cases (including, indirectly, this one.) A win for Spirit’s camp could have led to a huge number of ambulance chasers.
So what’s likely to be the effect of the judgment? This is probably a case where a process that seems to be accelerating will halt for a little while. A case against Zeppelin might have opened the door to a huge number of out-of-court-settlements, which get far less attention than court trials with superstar bands, but could easily inhibit the songwriting process if they become too casual. And because the suit over decades-old songs eluded a statute of limitations because of a remastering, bands could become shyer about putting out new editions of old work, which is good news for neither artists nor fans.
Was justice served here? I have mixed feelings about the case. It’s not that I think the single passage – as memorable as it is – makes the entire song a rip-off. But Zeppelin has taken almost entirely songs from blues songwriters, including Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. “Dazed and Confused” is one of Zeppelin’s very best songs, but go listen to the original, by folksinger Jake Holmes, and ask if the British band might have heard this one before. Legally, this kind of evidence was ruled inadmissible in the “Stairway” trial, but it’s hard to see Plant and Page as entirely credible in the issue of musical originality. Did they hear the Spirit song before writing “Stairway?” Could the phrase have stuck in their memories? I’m still not sure.
The larger issue, though, is that artists of all kinds, especially songwriters in popular music, need to be allowed some measure of borrowing. Here’s Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s classical music critic, who documents how the passage in question goes back at least as far as a Henry Purcell opera from the 1680s:
The latter-day insistence on unambiguous originality in musical composition—or in literature, for that matter—betrays a small-mindedness about the nature of creativity. T. S. Eliot famously commented, in 1920, that “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal,” and added that the “good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique.” In other words, a borrowed idea can become the kernel of a wholly original thought. This is what Bach does in the Passacaglia and Fugue; it’s what Shakespeare does throughout his plays. These days, though, we seem to want geniuses who play by the rules and give due credit to their colleagues; we want great art executed in the manner of a scholarly paper, with painstaking acknowledgments and footnotes. Small wonder that in the absence of such art, we keep falling back on the past.
There needs, of course, to be a balance, so that musicians can become known for, and profit from, their work. But as irresponsible as Zeppelin has been in other cases, they seem here to be guilty of taking a fragment, and perhaps not even that. This ruling may help set a precedent that recognizes the way musical creativity really works.
Son of Sam pleads his case for parole: “I’ve done a lot of good and positive things”
David Berkowitz at Attica Prison, N.Y., Feb. 22, 1979. (Credit: AP)
A 63 year-old man looks back on his life and work and achievements and says with pride. “I’ve really done wonderful,” he says. “I was constantly putting myself out there to help other individuals, with kindness and compassion. I mean, I feel that’s my life’s calling, all these years. My evaluations, and so forth, should show that to be true. I’ve done a lot of good and positive things, and I thank God for that.” Interesting perspective there, coming as it does from one of America’s most notorious serial killers. But you do you, David Berkowitz.
Between 1976 and 1977, as he terrorized New York City during a rampage that left six people murdered,Berkowitz was known by the name he taunted police with — the Son of Sam. Back then, as he racked up a total of 13 either dead or wounded shooting victims in his wake, he took pride in his accomplishments too. As he bragged, in a letter to the Daily News, “I love my work.” That came to an end when he was caught in August of 1977. He confessed, and was sentenced to six sentences of 25 years to life. At the time, Justice Tsoucalas said, “As is obvious by the sentences of this court, it is the object of this court that the defendant be incarcerated for the rest of his natural life.”
The horror of his crimes and the severity of his sentence means that is likely exactly how David Berkowitz’s story will play out. But his “25 to life” sentence also means that he now routinely comes up for parole. Four years ago, in an interview with the Daily News, the man once dubbed the .44 Caliber Killer spoke out against gangs and gun violence and said that while he tries not to dwell on his actions, “I continue to pray for the victims of my crimes. I do wish them the best in life. But I’m sure the pain will never end for them. I regret that.” And he said that he would not seek parole, deeming that the “proper road to take” out of respect for his victims and their families. Yet in 2015, he told the prison board he thinks about life past prison, saying, “Of course there would be a lot of restrictions, and so forth. But I would actually be very, very involved with ministry,” and adding, “I spoke to God and I told him how sorry I am.”
Now, the New York Post reports of his latest parole hearing, last month, revealing that the former postal worker refers to his past deeds as a “terrible tragedy” and that he says, “I feel I am no risk, whatsoever.” Right, but when you’ve also said that you were killing people because you were under demonic influence, there’s a lot about that entire situation that’s going to be permanently damaging to your credibility. His attorney, meanwhile, calls him “wonderful model prisoner.”
Berkowitz says that now, “For many years I have worked as… just like a caregiver. I have a heart for helping and reaching out to inmates, offenders, who have psychiatric problems, who have a lot of depression, and things like that… so, I feel that’s my calling in life.” And he says he knows some “outstanding members of society” who could help him get on his feet on the outside. Yet even with all that apparently going for him, he recognizes that “The crimes were so serious and the damage so severe, and so many people I’m sure are still hurting and grieving, that, realistically, something like parole, in my situation, would be very unusual.”
Berkowitz’s plea has been predictably turned down. He can try again in two years. If he’s used the past four decades to learn and to atone, that’s fine. But if he meant what he said earlier about being respectful to his victims, he’ll recognize that his “life’s calling” involves staying exactly where he is, until the day he dies.
Corey Lewandowski, fired Trump campaign manager, now set to join CNN
(Credit: CNN)
According to Politico, recently fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski has been thrown a new job opportunity after only two days of unemployment.
CNN has offered Lewandowski a position as a salaried political commentator.
Of course, after a criminal investigation into his manhandling of a female reporter, abysmal fundraising and failure to present any sense of a “presidential pivot,” Lewandowski was finally dumped by the Trump campaign at the behest of the candidate’s adult children and close advisers Monday morning.
Lewandowski appeared on CNN later that afternoon for an extended, and at times awkward, exit interview (and apparent test-run) of sort:
The network already features controversial Trump supporters like Jeffery Lord and Kayleigh McEnany — sometimes at the behest of the candidate.
“He certainly gave CNN my name, but I had to take it from there,” Lord recently told PennLive after explaining that Trump was frustrated by what he believed was a lack of on-air pundits who “get” him.
CNN has come under criticism for its decision to feature some of Trump’s most vile backers in the past.
In February, the network was forced to announce that it would no longer host Roger Stone, a notorious Republican “dirty trickster” who found himself booted from the Trump campaign early on, after he went after other CNN personalities.
Why do all the make-up people and hair-stylists at CNN New York HATE @anaNavarro ? Entitled Diva Bitch
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) February 19, 2016
GOP "consultant"Anna Navarro– Black beans and rice didn't miss her @marcacaputo
— Roger Stone (@RogerJStoneJr) October 7, 2011
To be fair, CNN is hardly the first or only network to provide sanctuary for failed political campaign operatives.
Earlier this campaign season, MSNBC was quick to snap up former Ted Cruz communications director Rick Tyler as a political pundit after he was fired from the campaign in February.
“We shall overcome”: 10 highlights of the House Democrats’ dramatic gun control sit-in
A photo tweeted from the House by Rep. Donna Edwards shows Democratic members staging a sit-in "to demand action on common sense gun legislation," June 22, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/U.S. Rep. Donna Edwards)
House Democrats decided to end their historic sit-in to call for a vote on gun control Thursday afternoon, CNN reports, after a dramatic day-long protest that disrupted business-as-usual on Capitol Hill and caused chaos in the House chamber.
Republicans effectively ended Democrats’ hopes of forcing an immediate vote on gun control early Thursday morning by adjourning the House until after the July 4 holiday, but Democrats have vowed to continue their fight when Congress reconvenes.
Some highlights from the sit-in:
1. Democrats led by Georgia Rep. John Lewis began the sit-in Wednesday morning in an effort to force a vote on the “no fly, no buy” bill, which would prevent suspected terrorists on government watchlists from purchasing firearms. Dozens of representatives joined Lewis to sit directly in front of the House rostrum, declaring their intention to occupy the floor until House Speaker Paul Ryan allowed a vote on the bill:
2. Republican leadership immediately gaveled the House into recess when the sit-in began, preventing C-SPAN from broadcasting the protest using the feed from House-controlled cameras. C-SPAN, however, circumvented the blackout by broadcasting live video from inside the chamber provided by House members using streaming services such as Periscope and Facebook Live.
3. During the recess, participating Democrats held the House floor and took turns speaking on gun violence. At one point, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz emotionally read aloud an open letter of support penned by her friend and former colleague Gabby Giffords, who suffered near-fatal gunshot wounds in a 2011 shooting that killed six. “I’m so proud of our friend today,” Wasserman Schultz said through tears. “I’m so proud to stand with all of you.”
4. House Speaker Paul Ryan appeared on CNN Wednesday evening and called the sit-in “nothing more than a publicity stunt”:
4. Sen. Elizabeth Warren showed up to deliver Dunkin’ Donuts to hungry House members as the sit-in continued into the night:
Massachusetts knows: America — and #NoBillNoBreak — runs on @DunkinDonuts. #birthdaydonuts #holdthefloor pic.twitter.com/XG1wzU5q41
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) June 23, 2016
A supporter from California called in a Domino’s delivery for the protesting members of Congress:
Someone in California paid $344 to deliver 10-12 Domino's pizzas to John Lewis. This woman is excited to deliver em. pic.twitter.com/sIaAP0Rwg5
— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) June 23, 2016
5. A crowd of hundreds gathered outside the Capitol building to support the sit-in, chanting “Do your job!” at Republican representatives.
Hundreds of people are outside of the @uscapitol at 9:30 PM. Men, women & children, standing & sharing pic.twitter.com/S37lpv2bWI
— Alex Howard (@digiphile) June 23, 2016
"Do your job! Do your job!" #NoBillNoBreak pic.twitter.com/xta19KZXVi
— Eric Conrad (@EricConradFL) June 23, 2016
6. Paul Ryan took the podium late Wednesday night and attempted to regain control of the chamber, but Democrats holding signs with the names of gun control victims and chanting “No Bill! No Break!” and “Shame! Shame!” refused to yield the floor:
7. During a vote on a measure unrelated to gun control, Democrats began singing the civil rights hymn “We Shall Overcome,” at one point changing the lyrics to “We shall pass a bill someday“:
JUST IN: House Democrats sing "We Shall Overcome" on House floor. Tune in to MSNBC for the latest. https://t.co/HOtELgWSfo
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) June 23, 2016
8. Tempers flared when Republican congressman Louie Gohmert angrily confronted Democrats speaking in the House during a recess, yelling, “Radical Islam killed these people!” Democrats shouted back at Gohmert, chanting “No Fly! No Gun!” Gohmert engaged in a heated argument with Rep. Corrine Brown, a Democrat whose district includes the site of the Orlando mass shooting, during which the two reportedly had to be physically separated.
9. Ignoring the protest, Republicans eventually forced a vote on an unrelated appropriations bill, which passed after no debate at about 3:00 AM. Republican leadership then adjourned the House until after the July 4 holiday, to the jeers of still-protesting Democrats.
10. A number of representatives spent Wednesday night on Capitol Hill to continue the sit-in, and minority leader Nancy Pelosi vowed to hold the House floor “until hell freezes over,” but CNN reported Thursday afternoon that Democrats would end the protest and continue the fight after the recess.
“We are going back to our congressional districts — we are going to engage our constituents on this subject, and we will not allow this body feel as comfortable as in the past,” Rep. Jim Clyburn told CNN. “On July 5, we will return, and at that time we will be operating on a new sense of a purpose.”
