Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 741
June 22, 2016
Fact-checking Trump’s garbage truck of lies: His speech accusing Clinton of corruption is riddled with fiction and conspiracies
Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/Mike Segar)
Donald Trump’s long-awaited speech Wednesday supposedly detailing the dirt he has on Hillary Clinton turned out to be exactly what critics expected: A diatribe of right-wing paranoia seemingly cribbed off all-caps email forwards sent to you by your grandfather. Much of it assumed an audience that already has spent years poring over anti-Clinton urban legends and that gets almost all its news from the Drudge Report.
It is also a fact-checking nightmare, a garbage truck of lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. It’s as if Trump is trying to overwhelm the fact-checkers with so many lies they simply give up. Indeed, it’s impossible to really deal with all of it, but I went over the speech and checked some of the most prominent claims in it against the public record.
Claim: “Hillary Clinton who, as most people know, is a world-class liar….”
Fact: “As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates,” Jill Abramson, writing for the Guardian, explained earlier this year. “She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president.”
Fact: The biggest liar in this election cycle is Donald Trump, by a long shot. Politifact rates 76% of statements made by Donald Trump to be false, compared to 27% by Hillary Clinton. 19% of Trump’s untruths are rated “pants on fire” lies, compared to only 1% of Clinton’s statements. Of the 3 Clinton “pants on fire” statements, two were from the 2008 election cycle. Twenty-seven of 31 of the “pants on fire” statements from Trump come from this election cycle.
Claim: “But here is the bottom line: I started off in Brooklyn, New York, not so long ago, with a small loan and built a business worth over 10 billion dollars.”
Fact: “But that ignores the fact that he joined his father’s thriving real estates business after college and that he relied on his father’s connections as he made his way in the real estate world,” the Washington Post explained when Trump made this same claim in a debate. “Nor does it count the estimated $40 million he received as an inheritance in 1974.”
Fact: There’s almost no way Trump is worth $10 billion. No one can figure out the true number, since Trump jealously guards that information, but various investigations have cast doubt that Trump is even worth a billion dollars, much less $10 billion. Ironically, if he had simply taken what he got with his father’s help in the 70s and invested it in a standard index fund, he would be worth an estimated $6 billion now. Instead, he tried to manage his own money and now appears to have much less than he would have had by basically doing nothing.
Claim: “Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments – perhaps even by her financial backers in Communist China – putting all of America in danger.”
Fact: “A former aide to Hillary Clinton has turned over to the FBI. computer security logs from Mrs. Clinton’s private server, records that showed no evidence of foreign hacking, according to people close to a federal investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails,” the New York Times reported.
The insinuation that Clinton has “financial backers” sneaking into her email is more conspiracy theory mongering from Trump, similar to his insinuations that President Obama is secretly working for ISIS.
Claim: “Just look at her pathetic email and server statements, or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack but the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers.”
Fact: It’s telling that this is literally the best Trump has got, and it’s basically nothing. Clinton has definitely been dodgy on the email situation — Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post notes she uses “careful language” that argues “her case on narrow, technical grounds”, but admits that did not break the law. Rules-lawyering and political weaseling, sure, but tiddlywinks compared to the true “world class” lies Trump tells, many in this speech.
Fact: In 2008, Clinton took a true story — that she flew into Bosnia during reports of sniper fire — and exaggerated many of the details to make the threat seem graver than it was. She swiftly apologized for the error, after her exaggeration was discovered.
Generally speaking, it’s hard to care much about a bit of political embroidery 8 years ago when the candidate in question is facing an opponent as fundamentally dishonest as Trump.
Claim: “She has pledged to grant mass amnesty and in her first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders in the United States.”
Fact: Clinton proposes reforming our immigration system to make it easier for families to stay together, but there is no plan for “mass amnesty” or “open borders”.
Claim: “Under her plan, we would admit hundreds of thousands of refugees from the most dangerous countries on Earth – with no way to screen who they are or what they believe.”
Fact: Clinton does support helping more refugees, though she put the number at 65,000 rather than “hundreds of thousands”, but she wants to do so with “the mechanisms for vetting the people that we would take in”. The vetting process under Obama is already incredibly onerous, taking an average of 18-24 months.
Claim: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20% of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while 9 investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.”
Fact: “Hillary Clinton’s State Department was one of nine U.S. agencies to approve of the transfer of the 20% of the U.S. Uranium reserves to Russia,” NBC reports. Clinton simply couldn’t be taking bribes to do this, unless Trump is accusing all 8 other agencies of taking bribes, as well.
Claim: “Among the victims is our late Ambassador, Chris Stevens. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed — that’s right, when the phone rang at 3 o’clock in the morning, she was sleeping. Ambassador Stevens and his staff in Libya made hundreds of requests for security. Hillary Clinton’s State Department refused them all.”
Fact: The right-wing conspiracy theory known as “Benghazi” has been debunked over and over and over again. But the facts: Clinton was not asleep when alerted to the attack on the embassy in Benghazi, but was in her office. That’s because the alert was sent at 3:45 PM — that’s the afternoon, not the morning. (It’s also beyond weird how outraged conservatives are at the idea that someone might be sleeping at 3AM.) Rather than blowing them off, Clinton worked incredibly hard at trying to coordinate a response amidst all the chaos.
Clinton did not deny anyone anything. “Quite the contrary: the safe evacuation of all U.S. government personnel from Benghazi twelve hours after the initial attack and subsequently to Ramstein Air Force Base was the result of exceptional U.S. government coordination and military response,” an independent accountability board created by the government found.
Claim: “It all started with her bad judgment in supporting the war in Iraq in the first place. Though I was not in government service, I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and yes, even before the war ever started.”
Fact: Trump was not an early critic of the Iraq War, and most of his public statements at the time are moderately supportive of it. He only really started criticizing the war in 2004.
You know who was, however, an early critic of the invasion of Iraq? Hillary Clinton. As Fred Kaplan of Slate reported, Clinton spent much of 2002 making very public demands that the Bush administration try diplomacy and treat invasion as a last resort. “I believe the best course is to go to the United Nations for a strong resolution,” she said, one that calls for “for complete, unlimited inspections with cooperation expected and demanded” from Saddam Hussein.
She only voted for the authorization using force because “bipartisan support for this resolution makes success in the United Nations more likely and war less likely”, but she firmly argued that there should be no invasion unless Hussein stopped letting in weapons inspectors.
Was her vote a mistake? Yes, she has said so repeatedly. But the public record is clear: She voted for the authorization not because she wanted war, but because she bought into President Bush misleading Congress about his intentions to pursue a diplomatic solution first.
These are just some of the more overt lies that Trump told during this speech. Just as bad were some of the implications. The speech relies heavily, perhaps almost entirely, on right wing conspiracy theories. By stringing together a bunch of disparate and false accusations, Trump is clearly trying to paint a picture of Clinton as some kind of double agent who is secretly working for nefarious “foreign” cabals “who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death”. Again, it’s quite similar to the way that Trump winks-and-nudges Obama supposedly being up to no good.
Trump wants people to watch this speech and be alarmed over the idea of Clinton as president. Hopefully, most people will walk away with the opposite reaction: Realizing that it would be a disaster to let a man who is so indifferent to fact and so enamored of lurid conspiracy theories to get anywhere near the White House.
June 21, 2016
“Brexit” is British for Trump: Why the U.K.’s anti-Europe surge should scare us
Donald Trump; Leave supporters in London, June 15, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/L.E. Baskow/AP/Matt Dunham/Photo montage by Salon)
Imagine an election that purports to be about something specific but is really about larger and more amorphous questions of national identity or psychology. An election that divides the downtrodden working classes of the heartland, “Hunger Games”-style, from the educated elites of the big cities. An election that, just below the surface (or not below the surface), is a referendum on immigration policy, on racial anxieties and the fear of Islam, on a perceived loss of national stature and a yearning for a lost golden age of homogeneity and widely shared prosperity. An election in which many people on the left share many of the concerns that have energized a new populist demagoguery on the right, but feel compelled, however reluctantly, to side with the mainstream political establishment.
An election, finally, that has been irredeemably tainted by episodes of real violence, and by the threat of worse violence to come. Am I talking about the 2016 American presidential campaign, the long-running soap opera of Bernie and Donald and Hillary, whose third act is about to begin? Or am I talking about “Brexit,” this week’s unexpectedly dramatic vote on whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union? As you have figured out by now, I’m talking about both.
Last week the Brexit campaign took an unexpected turn into American-style darkness with the murder of left-wing Labor Party M.P. Jo Cox, a Brexit opponent, apparently by a deranged British nationalist. Some Brexit supporters have actually employed the Trumpian slogan “Make Britain great again,” although you more often encounter “Let’s put the Great back in Britain,” a feeble pun on their home island’s official name. (Since you asked, Great Britain is a landmass comprising three nations — England, Scotland and Wales — that is most but not all of the U.K. OK, you didn’t actually ask.)
Despite the enormous differences in tone and content between British and American politics (and British and American culture more generally), Brexit is Trumpism translated across the Atlantic, into the slightly more polite or at least more veiled discourse of the Sceptered Isle. While Trump seems unlikely, at this writing, to be elected president, many observers now believe the pro-Brexit campaign is likely to prevail in Thursday’s referendum. No major nation has departed the E.U. since it was first created on 1958 (as the European Economic Community), and even a decade ago such an outcome would have sounded wildly unlikely. (We need to allow an asterisk for Greenland, a semi-autonomous nation of 58,000 people that bailed out over a fishing dispute in 1985.)
If that happens, it will be because the E.U. is a deeply flawed institution that is increasingly difficult to defend. It has become associated with crippling policies of economic austerity, with multiple layers of faceless and unctuous bureaucracy, with favoring multinational corporations over its own citizens, with unpredictable waves of migration and immigration and with the creation of a deeply boring and self-satisfied managerial caste capable of delivering business-school jargon in five languages. It has delivered on few or none of its grand promises of universal social justice and shared prosperity. (Although, to be fair, economic inequality is many orders of magnitude less dramatic in the E.U. nations than in the United States.)
While the whole question may seem distant and irrelevant to most Americans, Brexit could mark the beginning of a political earthquake that will reshape the globe. Donald Trump evidently didn’t know what Brexit was when journalist Michael Wolff asked him about it in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview, but he was in favor once it was explained to him. That’s not surprising on any level: Trump may be ignorant but he’s no dummy; he understands that President Trump plus Britain untethered from Europe represents the unraveling of the Western political order of the past six or seven decades. To the extent he believes in anything, he believes that’s a good idea.
One could just as easily turn the equation around and say that Trump is a crude American manifestation of the xenophobia, bigotry and “Little England” closed-mindedness driving the Brexit campaign. Or, more accurately, that both things are symptoms of a political and cultural crisis that has unfolded across the developed Western nations with dizzying speed, fueled by economic stagnation, the threat of terrorism and the recent influx of migrants from Syria and elsewhere. Economists and social scientists have begun using the neutral-sounding term “deglobalization” to capture the various phenomena implicated therein, from the rise of anti-immigration right-wing parties across Europe to a deep (and justifiable) popular suspicion toward free-trade agreements to the resurgence of various forms of nationalism that the E.U. was specifically designed to contain or counteract.
Like a lot of people of various political orientations — like you, probably — I’m not sure that deglobalization, considered in the abstract, is such a bad thing. If it means rejecting the consumer-capitalist fantasy of a fully globalized market for labor and commodities, which conquered the world during the “End of History” years that followed the Cold War, then sign me up. But the Trump-Brexit movement finds its alternative to that fantasy in another fantasy, a reversion to tribalism and barely concealed racism and ahistorical or anti-historical nationalist nostalgia. That’s where comparisons to old-school fascism of the Mussolini-Hitler type are not inflated, because the nature of Trump-Brexit’s popular appeal, and their sunny, upbeat and nearly content-free rhetoric, are strikingly similar to the demagoguery of the 1930s.
Indeed, by lumping together all forms of resistance to the world economic and political order sometimes called the “Washington consensus” under the label of deglobalization, the social scientists and their accomplices in the mainstream media are none-too-subtly implying a moral equivalence. If Trump and pro-Brexit Conservative Party rebel Boris Johnson and French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen represent unacceptable alternatives to the status quo, then so does the Syriza government in Greece that tried to defy Europe’s central bankers last year, or the Podemos party in Spain, which hopes to do so in the future. Do I even need to bring up Bernie Sanders, who dared to point out the naked-emperor fact that the Democratic Party had sold its soul to Wall Street and no longer represented the interests of poor people or working people below the upper middle class?
There’s a certain ironic justice at work in the possibility that the “Remain” or anti-Brexit campaign in Britain has scuttled itself by refusing to address the elephant in the room, which is that the E.U. pretty much sucks and most ordinary people hate it. You can certainly argue that perception is unfair, and that people in Britain and many other countries tend to blame the Brussels bureaucracy for larger forces it can’t possibly control, like the global economy or the United States’ incompetent foreign policy or the Syrian refugee crisis. You can argue that British mistrust of the European mainland is deeply encoded in the national DNA, going back past Henry VIII to the Hundred Years’ War.
All that is true. But as a citizen of another E.U. nation — the smaller island directly to Britain’s left — I can testify that anti-E.U. sentiment is far broader than the Brexit campaign. Membership in the E.U. has without question been an economic boon for Ireland over the last 40-odd years, producing endless amounts of highway upgrades and office-park developments. Any Brexit-style referendum in Ireland would be easily defeated, and might not get more than 40 percent of the vote. Still, Irish people complain about the E.U. all the time, for a lot of the same reasons British people do: It creates endless paperwork, it has diluted our national identity, it has filled up the suburbs with craptastic American-style tract housing and flooded the upscale property market with Germans and Italians.
During this campaign, the cosmopolitan center-left of British politics — the leadership of both major parties, Labor and the Tories, officially opposes Brexit — has slowly sunk under the heavy task of persuading voters to support an unloved institution that virtually everyone sees as somewhere between a major disappointment and a massive con game. They have largely done that by avoiding talking about the E.U. at all and focusing on the potential negative consequences of Brexit, from a near-certain medium-term recession to rapid wage and price inflation to the possibility of a Scottish counterrevolution and the ultimate breakup of the U.K. Voters in Scotland are nearly certain to back staying in the E.U., and the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party has vowed to pursue a post-Brexit retake of Scotland’s recent independence referendum (which failed) in hopes of rejoining Europe as a separate country.
I don’t need to lean too hard on the fact that Hillary Clinton’s principal theme for the fall campaign seems to be “at least she’s not Donald Trump,” do I? The problem in the Brexit campaign, and maybe in our presidential campaign too, is that the disgruntled downscale voters of Middle England who want to stick it to the poncey Europeans couldn’t be arsed, to lapse into the vernacular, about any of that stuff. They don’t think things can get much worse for them (about which they are wrong), they are highly likely to do the opposite of whatever a bunch of Oxbridge-educated Londoners tell them to do and they don’t give any part of a crap about bloody Scotland. They have halfway convinced themselves that Estonians have taken their jobs, that the local imam wants to blow them up or at least ban Christmas and that there must be some magical pathway that leads back to the way things supposedly were in Granddad’s time. At least there hasn’t been any talk (so far) about building a wall and making the Scots pay for it. Maybe because, as every British child learns in school, the Romans tried that and it didn’t work.
Expanded trust made the sharing economy: “It creates the possibility of getting into a stranger’s car”
(Credit: Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)
The so-called “sharing economy” – the term applied to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, and other platforms – has changed the lives of many urbanites. It’s made it easier to get around, to vacation, to get household work done. But what else has it done? Have non-brick and mortar platforms like these, which are often barely regulated, contributed to New York congestion, made apartment buildings louder, and put people out of work?
New York University professor Arun Sundararajan, who teaches in the Stern School of Business, has considered the issue from all angles, and has just published, with MIT Press, “The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism.” Sundararajan is an optimist, for the most part, but not a blind one: He’s considered a huge amount of data, and thought about the criticisms of the new arrangement. Still, the British economist Christopher May, writing in the LSE Review of Books, describes him as part of “a long history of technological utopians who either willfully ignore, or have little interest in, the actual economic relations they are examining.”
We spoke to Sundararajan from Toronto; the interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
So has the new sharing economy developed because an older economy has ended, or is in the process of ending?
I think it’s an evolution of the 20th century economy of industrial capitalism converging with the new technology. But I wouldn’t say that industrial capitalism has ended. What I call crowd-based capitalism, what others call the sharing economy, will co-exist with some form of industrial capitalism for many decades to come: It will sit aside the traditional organization of full-time employees and industrial capitalism.
It will be in real estate accommodation, mobility/ transportation, health care and energy sectors: There will be dominant companies that have a sharing economy models – but the transition will be slow. Many forms of economic activity will still be organized the way they were in the 20th century.
So in some sectors, the old style of capitalism is fading out –why is that happening? Did it become less efficient? Was it never efficient?
The fundamental underlying reason is the progress of technology. We now have a greater set of choices in how we organize our economic activity. We have a greater set of choices as to how consumers use things. The constraints that we faced with 20th century capitalism no longer exist.
Another key driving factor: Every time a society invents a new way for the population to feel trust, that enables economic activity in different ways, and in different kinds. It used to be we would trade only with people we knew really well, in our villages, because those were the only people we could trust. The government became a source of trust: If you called it milk, it had to be milk, if you say it weighs 10 pounds, it had to weigh 10 pounds, and that expanded your commercial possibilities. Many countries created institutions – the ability to own property, to go to court, to sign a contract – that separated social trust from economic exchange.
And over the last 50 years we’ve relied on brand-based trust for most of our everyday economic activities. You let your kid ride the roller coaster at Six Flags but not at the park by the side of the road. You feel comfortable drinking a Coke in a foreign country…
Now we are digitizing a lot of social capital, learning from the experience of others. And with that infrastructure comes new peer-to-peer commercial activity.
In your book you call it, I think, the “digitalization of trust.” That creates more economic possibilities.
Yes. It creates the possibility, for example, of renting a room in a person’s home instead of going to a branded hotel. It creates the possibility of getting into a stranger’s car and driving to another city rather than taking the train.
You’ve had this for 20 years, starting with eBay, but the trust infrastructure was fairly thin. The stakes are a lot higher when you get into a stranger’s car or rent out your apartment.
Is it fair to call this “the sharing economy?” In what ways does it make sense? In what ways doesn’t it?
These models are at their heart trying to share access or capital or labor more efficiently. Airbnb is about sharing assets; to some extent Uber and Lyft are about sharing mobility.
There’s another reason: Over the 20th century, as we got good at managerial capitalism, it seemed we have taken out some of the social and intimate aspects. There’s a personal sense to being in someone else’s home, there’s a connection you form when you sit beside someone and get a ride with Lyft. Which is very different from sitting behind a barricade with a credit-card machine in a taxicab. Capitalism evolved in the 20th century in a manner that really de-personalized commercial exchange. Part of what this new generation of peer-to-peer is doing is re-integrating some form of connectedness into an economic system.
So even though people know that the exchange is commercial and that the Uber driver is getting paid, there’s something personal about it. I think that’s part of the reason the term “the sharing economy” has stuck. It’s not a great term – this is commercial activity.
Yeah, it’s not sharing blocks at the playground or something.
This is part of the reason I favor the term “crowd-based capitalism.”
Your book documents some of the good things about the sharing economy – the efficiency, the convenience, and so on. But what are some of the externalities and destructive things about it? And how do we resolve or remedy them?
When on-demand mobility through Uber and Lyft and Didi becomes affordable and convenient and high-quality, this may shift people away from using the subway and mass transportation. This introduces an externality. There’s an adjustment period we’ll have to go through as the lines between personal and professional blur. We’ve developed from the industrial era the notion of residential and commercial zoning, and we’re starting to create new forms of mixed-use residences, mixed-use transportation (sometimes personal, sometimes transporting other people). For those people who still see the apartment building as a personal space, they may see an externality being imposed, as commercial activity comes into their personal space.
The resolution of that is going to be buildings deciding if they’re going to be Airbnb-friendly or Airbnb-free. Too much handing down of rules about things like that from a city or state government… What’s going on in New York is really unfortunate at this point. Airbnb is something incredibly well-suited to New York, and I haven’t seen any strong evidence of a detrimental effect.
But there is a different set of society concerns: A central tenet of managerial capital was the full-time employment model. And 85 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed full-time… I believe that the crowd-based model, the relation between the individual and the institution, is superior, fundamentally. A full-time employee is labor; a sharing economy provider is in some small way an owner of the means of production. There’s a range here: The Uber driver is less of a small-business owner… But the construct is fundamentally shifting from labor provider to part owner.
Full-time employment doesn’t look the same today as it did 100 years ago: It looks a lot better. There have been unions, labor laws, which have wrapped a whole bunch of protections and a funding model and other good things. And now we’re faced with the independent-provider model which offers none of those protections, and for which we have no stability plan.
And things like healthcare and retirement plans and other things were part of that arrangement.
So we’re going to have to figure out rapidly, over the next decade – and it’s not hard – what’s the new funding model. The old funding model was you dedicated yourself to one company, and they paid you the same amount every month, no matter how much work you did. They ensured your income flow with a certain contract.
Now, we don’t have an equivalent model for the independent provider. It’s likely we’ll come up with a more efficient one, which spreads the risk around more people. But it’s not there yet, and the funding model isn’t clear yet, and the government laws aren’t there yet. So for someone who is an independent provider today, things don’t look as good as they do for a full-time employee, and they bear a cost that is unfair, to my mind.
Most independent contractors who want to be a full-time employee don’t want the employment model, they want the good things that go with it. So for me, the challenge comes from saying, How do we attach the good things that come with the full-time employment model to the independent-provider…. Figure out which ways they were attractive, and replicate them in the new world of work. So you have a happy and protected workforce in the future.
Spielberg’s “The BFG” is a return to family-friendly form — and to a less-cynical movie time
"The BFG" (Credit: Disney)
Steven Spielberg has ventured far afield from the sort of family-friendly adventures that spurred his rise to cinematic fame and fortune. He’s won two directing Academy Awards, for films about the Holocaust and World War II, and he’s made movies about other decidedly adult subjects such as Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for a 13th Amendment and the Israeli government’s efforts to avenge the Munich Olympics murders.
That the man once commonly referred to as Hollywood’s “boy wonder” has shown a propensity for these and other serious topics — to great success in movies from “Schindler’s List” to last year’s “Bridge of Spies” — can have the effect of making a film like “The BFG” seem to be yesterday’s news. Surely, one might assume, this titan of his industry and accomplished multi-tasker has better things to do than adapt a 1982 Roald Dahl children’s book about the friendship between a young orphaned London girl and the friendly giant that snatches her away after she sees him sneaking through the streets late one night.
Yet the movie plays with an unexpected sense of urgency. It stresses exactly why Spielberg remains in a realm of his own when it comes to filmmaking for families and stands out because it offers a more authentic form of nostalgia than the big-screen norm. Nostalgia, of course, is in these days. Most of the big tentpole movies during this and, well, every recent summer, are either sequels or remakes, with 2016 witnessing everything from a new “Independence Day” to the modern take on “Ben Hur” that nobody wanted, and a parade of superhero movies to add to the increasing glut. While there are plenty of worthwhile entertainments in this group, and movies like the upcoming all-women “Ghostbusters” that actually find a higher purpose for existing, as a general rule they misconstrue fidelity to source material and a series of in-jokes and otherwise sly references with genuine nostalgic spirit.
In this world, “The BFG” is an anomaly, a movie that would be all but inconceivable were it not for Spielberg’s filmmaking skills and behind-the-scenes clout. Dahl’s book has not permeated the public consciousness in the fashion of his “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda” or “James and the Giant Peach.” The narrative is subdued and quiet compared to the macabre delights of gluttonous children being consumed in a candy wonderland, or a telekinetic child getting revenge on an oppressive teacher, or the surreal milieu of the inside of a gigantic peach. It doesn’t lend itself to the sort of flashy pizzazz, the slam-bang moments, ideal for a trailer or a sizzle reel.
In some respects, the movie is quite literally a relic from another time. It’s a film project Spielberg’s longtime producers Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy had developed for more than two decades before it finally went into production, and its script comes from the late Melissa Mathison, who also wrote the filmmaker’s iconic “E.T.” and understood how to craft engaging family-friendly screenplays and three-dimensional children characters as well as any of her peers, though her previous film was Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun” in 1997.
The collective effect is to be freed from the tyranny of the 21st century franchise; box office expectations are not particularly high and there’s little chance we’ll ever see a second “BFG.” The movie therefore resists any pressures of modernization. It is a fairytale in every sense of the word, without any discernible opportunity for that most fundamental family movie component, one especially perfected by Disney, the movie’s distributor: product placement and endless commercial spinoffs.
It remains steadfastly faithful to the spirit of Dahl’s work and to themes that have pre-occupied Spielberg throughout his career: loneliness, the sacredness of friendship, the intersection of the magical and ordinary worlds. The familiar tropes extend to the iconic “Spielberg Face,” a close-up on a character in wordless awe as her or she considers the magnitude of what’s being witnessed, be it a collection of dinosaurs, the arrival of aliens, or, in this case, the super-sized universe of the land of the giants. Spielberg focuses less on the plot than the mood and the atmosphere of the piece, utilizing advanced technological tools to warp the perspective of regular-sized Sophie (Rudy Barnhill), as she is brought to this otherworldly milieu, and to transport the audience to the wondrous universe of the creatures, with its lush landscapes and swirling supernova bursts of light that are the movie’s representation of dreams, which the Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance) is tasked with capturing.
Make no mistake: This is a commercially-oriented movie, with cutting edge CGI and performance-capture effects, made by a man who has built a brand worth a reported $3.6 billion that obviously transcends his work as a director. Spielberg, in the fashion of his longtime friend George Lucas, has skillfully diversified his interests and amply cashed in on all the off-screen financial possibilities allowed by his level of sustained success. But while Lucas appears to have settled happily into a life of semi-retirement, forever talking about making “personal films” without actually doing them, Spielberg chugs along at a considerable pace. When picking movie projects to direct, “I look for things that will scare me,” he recently told The New York Times. “Fear is my fuel.”
That’s a radical notion for a filmmaker working on this scale, even one at the top of his field and impervious to the sort of career-crippling failure that typically drives what projects are made in Hollywood. In the interview, Spielberg appeared to have been referring to the technical challenge of mounting the project, which involved elaborate set-ups to allow newcomer Barnhill to consistently work opposite Rylance rather than an empty screen, while achieving enough of a technological advance in performance-capture technology to retain as much of the Oscar winning actor’s humanity as possible under the CGI mask.
But he might as well have been referring to the narrative itself, imbued with a humanist streak that links it with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and, especially, “E.T.,” and stresses exactly why Spielberg’s family movies remain every bit as essential as the films that earned him a new measure of artistic credibility. The movie finds Sophie and the BFG developing a close and gentle bond after an initially hostile beginning, one characterized by their shared propensity for nonsense language and powerfully communicated in the movie’s centerpiece sequences, in which the BFG aggressively protects Sophie from his cannibalistic counterparts.
Spielberg and Mathison treat Sophie seriously, without the condescension that typically characterizes movies about children. They maintain a high regard for the honesty and earnestness of a young girl who grows to love and care for her friend no matter how big or scary or awkward he might come across, and it is that connection that carries each scene forward. There’s no higher motivation that that. There are not many films imbued with such a total lack of cynicism these days. Much as Elliot and E.T. once bicycled against the moon, in the ultimate gesture of friendship and the image that sums up Spielberg’s career perhaps more than any other, so too does Sophie step into the BFG’s large and outstretched hand for a journey directly into their shared heart.
Don’t get used to it: Queer literature in a time of triumph
Justin Torres (Credit: Gregory Crowley)
I think of all the toughs through history
And thank heaven they lived, continuously.
— Thom Gunn, “Lines for a Book”
1.
In preparing remarks to introduce this anthology, I am, as usual, overcome by a stymying ambivalence. On one hand, I am tempted to use this space to take the literary world—publishing, the MFAs and AWPs—to task for so often misrepresenting, underrepresenting, sidelining, or even erasing, queer lives and queer voices. Lord knows I have anecdotal material. I would follow that by saying—ok, I am saying it now—that the writers contained herein represent the immense talent, the vast breadth, and the future, of queer literature today. Yet on the other hand, I’m exhausted a bit, by task-taking. And while I think it is necessary and right and good to critique the systems of power, and that enervation is hardly an excuse—I also long to write something enlivening, and to be enlivened in return. Underneath the ambivalence, I know only this—I love queer literature, it has sustained me. I don’t even know what my definition of queer literature is beyond, the books I love.
2.
This was on the radio. I was asked, Do you consider yourself a queer writer? I answered yes. Do you consider your book a queer book? Yes, again. But don’t you run the risk of your work being relegated to the gay section of the bookstore? Aren’t you—by calling yourself queer, by calling your book a queer book—complicit in your own ghettoization? I stumbled. I don’t remember how I answered. I ought to have been prepared. Being a queer writer means being asked, constantly, whether you consider yourself a queer writer—but I hadn’t yet learned that. Now I know. Folks listen to me speak, at literary festivals, on panels, at conferences, in bookstores, and while I am speaking, naming myself queer, they might interrupt. They might suggest I am limiting myself. More likely they will sidle up after, at the signing, or at a semi-mandatory dinner, and take it upon themselves to educate me about progress. A well-intentioned woman said to me once, not to worry, soon will come the day when it’s all just writing, just writers, no labels—and won’t that be nice? Aren’t you tired, she asked, of the gay ghetto?
3.
Am I tired of the ghetto? What even is the queer ghetto in literature, today? Is it cause for anxiety? Celebration? And if, as is claimed, it is disappearing, what might it be replaced with? To that end, it might be helpful to ask, what was the queer ghetto?
4.
Once upon a time, no babies were born in the queer ghetto. The queer ghetto was arrived at willfully, a radical choice, or through expulsion, an absence of choices. The families in the queer ghetto were chosen families, and notions of lineage, roots, were imagined—not in the sense of unreal, but unfixed. Queer lineage was brought into reality through the work of imagining backward; queer ancestry was fungible. Many of the writers anthologized in this book were born into ethnic ghettos, economic ghettos, the flavor and sounds of those places and those people concretely affected the consciousness of the forming self from the moment of birth. For all but very, very, few of us, the hands that touched us and raised us up, spanked and soothed us, were not queer hands, the voices that taunted and cajoled, were not queer voices. Families of origin, childhood itself, and the world of childhood, always exert a seemingly outsized influence on the adult—or as my boyfriend puts it much more succinctly, Childhood lasts a long time. If queers can be likened to wildflowers among the wheat, it is well to remember that on a subterranean level all our roots are tangled together. And well, too, to remember that the root is an active thing; the work of the root is more than anchor, the root pulls.
5.
Once upon time, the queer arrived to the ghetto, to queer culture, with a sense of disorientation—pushed out, despised by the straight world, but below the surface, those tangled roots, constantly pulling backward. One arrived stigmatized. One arrived at pride not as antidote to shame, or inoculation against shame, but as resulting vision forged in shame’s long fever. The hallmark protest chant, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used it to it!” was directed at a straight world that insisted on queer invisibility. Yet it has always seemed to me as equally applicable when looked at as a slogan the queer community speaks to itself. (Toto, Dorothy says, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.) Not being born in the queer ghetto, not being raised to be queer, it does take some getting used to.
6.
Life takes getting used to—that is, any life worth living takes getting used to. The seduction of mainstream culture is the promise that by remaining obedient to the models of life handed down, one will be freed from the difficulties of making meaning for oneself. One can stay in the garden and eat the unforbidden fruit; one will not be banished to queer ghetto. Rejecting authority, rejecting that which constricts, and making something of your life, that’s what queerness has always been about. Audre Lorde says, “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
7.
Of course to speak of a singular queer ghetto is itself an act of imagined history—the gay, lesbian, and trans communities, themselves further divisible along gendered, racial, kink, or political lines—were at times varyingly ignorant, supportive, dismissive, ashamed, and fed up with one another. But in the particular quality of stigma reserved for those who don’t conform to gender and/or sexuality expectations—they were united. They dared to act.
I think of those exclusive by their action
For whom mere thought could be no satisfaction—
This from Thom Gunn’s poem, “Lines for a Book,” the same poem used as epigraph to this essay. The poem is paean to macho activity, and a warning against the seductive, narcissistic, consolations of an inert self-consciousness (though the mind has also got a place / It’s not in marveling at its mirrored face), but can also be read as a poem about respectability, and about the way history treats those who act, who dare to fight, either by killing and forgetting them, or fundamentally altering them, desexualizing them, and making them respectable, before placing them on a pedestal.
The athletes lying under tons of dirt
Or standing gelded so they cannot hurt
The pale curators and the families
By calling up disturbing images.
8.
I claim as lineage, as ancestry, as queer, all those who dared to fight, who engaged with this stigma, who moved through it, or lived in it. When I read, “I think of those exclusive by their action / For whom mere thought could be no satisfaction—” I am thinking about those early queers who made the ghetto, all the queer writers who make queer literature, those who gave up any claim on straight world respectability, or straight world validation, and fought, wrote, screwed, acted.
9.
What is Queer Literature? What is Queer? The word itself is insult. I once went to a gay barbershop, and the gay barber damn near cut my ear off when I used ‘queer’ in conversation. We had a discussion, of sorts, about the reclamation and policing of language. He lectured and hated me and likened my using the word queer to spitting in his face. Needless to say I left with a fucked-up haircut. Queer is vague; queer hurts. Yet the word’s very vagueness means it depends less on a specific sexual orientation or gender-identity, than on a style that would make room for any ideas, any identity.
10.
Now, these days, things have changed in the ghetto. Now, respectability is within our grasp. Now gay marriage. Now babies. Now progress. Now pride. Leo Bersani writes, “I think that when (Foucault) told gays not to be proud of being gay, but rather to learn to become gay, he meant that we should work to invent realities that no longer imitate the dominant heterosexual model of a gender-based and fundamentally hierarchical relationality.” Even those who disparage Log Cabin Republicans and Andrew Sullivan’s yappings, often fall victim to the rhetoric of respectability politics. Triumphalism is the scourge of the gay rights movement.
11.
Have we won? How can we have won when there are still so many devalued positions we could make cause with? To my mind, queer literature resists, corrects, queers, triumphalist narratives. Queer literature is still becoming. Queer literature lends specificity to a conception that will always evade specific definition. Every queer story is an attempt to define queer life, and at the same time is an expansion of the definition of queer life. To my mind, queer literature is about the respect of difference, not the seductive respectability of sameness. To my mind, queerness has always been about identification and solidarity with the abjected and the devalued, the tossed off. Queerness has always been attracted to the forbidden. The first queer literary heroine I encountered was Eve, who dared to live a life beyond obedience. Eve, that witch, willing to take on all the shame, the stigma, the expulsion—not just to know, but to taste.
12.
Turn on the radio in these days of triumph. “Finally,” says a gay voice, “we’re just like everybody else. Finally my government recognizes my love as equal to anyone else’s.” I understand the sentiment, but the rhetoric is troubling. To focus on the state’s validation, or the validation of the church, or the validation of heterosexual society—is to give those institutions an awful lot of power of one’s sense of worth. According to Adam Phillips, “Freud says, don’t think about gods, think about parents: and then, when you forget about parents, see what you come up with.”
13.
Must we retreat? The official name for the assembly, the gathering, that united us all for one week, and which repeats itself yearly, is the Lambda Literary Emerging Writer’s Retreat. There is something both corporate and defeatist in the word retreat—but of course, there is also religion, spirituality. I’m not sure the title gives any sense to the emotional power and kinetic ferocity of gathering sixty talented queer writers together. This year, I overheard someone calling it The Annual Lambda Coven; I liked that.
14.
The morning the Supreme Court essentially legalized gay marriage I was in Los Angeles, teaching at The Annual Lambda Coven. Every author in this book was there along with me. The decision was expected, of course, the country and the court itself had been moving piecemeal, but decidedly, toward marriage equality. Of course, one never knows with the Supreme Court, so it was remotely possible they might “punt” as the pundits say, or shoot down same-sex marriage. Had they punted, I would not have been surprised, had they voted “no” I would have been furious. But that does not mean I felt victorious or uplifted by their saying yes. That morning I felt, as ever, ambivalent. I knew this was a landmark moment that deserved discussion, and as I walked to class I tried to imagine how that discussion might go—I didn’t want to insult the married, nor did I want to alienate the radicals. I needn’t have worried. I sat down with twelve queer fiction writers, some the most talented writers I’ve met, and I was reminded how diverse we are in our opinions, how ambivalent. I had twelve minds in front of me, each thinking for themselves what this moment meant, each teaching me.
15.
Respectability Anxiety. (Look, I’m a hypocrite. I’ll probably get married. My boyfriend is a foreigner, for one. But also, my desires are capacious—I want the marriage plot, I want the prince, I want adoptive fatherhood, and I want radical nonmonogomy and anonymous hedenonism. I want life. Legalize fucking life—and the hypocrisy it requires.)
16.
A dear queer writer friend accuses me of nostalgia. (Another accuses me of being a party-pooper). She asks, What’s the difference between feeling nostalgic for bygone eras and romanticizing suffering? Maybe she’s right. It is possible to look at the past with such a distorted sense of triumphalism—such schlocky, careless, ahistoricism and sentimentality—that you end up making the movie “Stonewall.”
17.
But maybe there is a difference, maybe there is a way, a backward glance, a queer nostalgia that is not restorative in its aim, but bent, reflective, critical. Heather Love says, “Insofar as (queer) identity is produced out of shame and stigma, it might seem like a good idea to leave it behind. It may in fact seem shaming to hold on to an identity that cannot be uncoupled from violence, suffering, and loss. I insist on the importance of clinging to ruined identities and to histories of injury. Resisting the call of gay normalization means refusing to write off the most vulnerable, the least presentable, and all the dead.” I like that.
18.
No well-intentioned person has ever suggested to me that real progress is a day when it’s all queer writing, queer writers—but that’s the only future I’m working toward. Sure that day isn’t coming, but nor is the imagined future in which queerness dissipates into the normal, when queerness is no longer necessary. The difference between our competing visions of progress is that the well-intentioned, straights, let’s call them, mistakenly believe their vision is an inevitability, while I know myself to be fighting for an impossibility. The only future worth dreaming is an impossibly queer future, a backward future. By that I mean a future that accounts for injustice, for hurt, for agitation—a future where injury is expected, and lived with. A future capable of looking at the past without scrubbing that hurt away, a future scarred by the past, and one that makes space for the scarred, for the backward-looking, the bent. To put it another way: Fuck progress. Fuck this relentless bettering. Fuck triumphalism. When it comes to making art, backwardness is as essential as vision.
19.
Do you remember the first time you read Zami? Trash? Or Stone Butch Blues? Or City of Night? Or Dancer From the Dance? Or Gender Outlaw? Or Girls, Visions, and Everything? Or Close to the Knives? I do—it was 1999. I was nineteen and had endured forced hospitalization, followed by a suicide attempt that left me in a coma, followed by further hospitalization. I took a queer literature class—I suppose you might call it Queer Ghetto Studies. For me it was an oasis. I remember the queer worlds, the ghettos, those books described. I remember feeling both nostalgic for bygone eras, some eras that I had barely missed, and wounded by all the hurt contained in those pages. I remember being nostalgic for even the hurt, even the wound—for the clarity, the call to action, that hurt provided, and the toughness required to survive. I think of all the toughs through history / and thank heaven they lived, continuously.
20.
This is book is an assemblage of toughs. To the queer reader I say, this is your family. These are your laughing aunties, your drunkles, your impossibly cool cousins. The imagined resemblances are real. You’ve got the book in your hands; welcome home.
“Emerge: 2015 Lambda Literary Fellows Anthology (Volume 1)” is out June 23.
That’s not how racism works: Newscaster fired for racist remarks claims she’s the victim of racism
Wendy Bell (Credit: WTAE)
Anybody can make idiotic remarks on social media. It’s pretty much a rite of Internet passage. But it takes a very special person to make remarks so idiotic that they are career-ending. And it takes a really, special person to turn around and claim victimhood for doing just that. Congratulations, then, former WTAE news anchor Wendy Bell — you’re in a class practically all by yourself.
The Pittsburgh journalist began this year as 21-time regional Emmy Award winning anchor with a long and distinguished track record. That went off the rails this spring, when she shared a lengthy Facebook post on her thoughts and feelings regarding a horrific mass shooting in Wilkinsburg that killed five adults — including an eight-months pregnant woman, along with her baby. and are currently being held on previous charges.
But back in March, Bell decided she’d already halfway cracked the case, writing on Facebook, “You needn’t be a criminal profiler to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday. I will tell you they live within 5 miles of Franklin Avenue and Ardmore Boulevard and have been hiding out since in a home likely much closer to that backyard patio than anyone thinks. They are young black men, likely teens or in their early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers and their mothers work multiple jobs. These boys have been in the system before. They’ve grown up there. They know the police. They’ve been arrested. They’ve made the circuit and nothing has scared them enough. Now they are lost. Once you kill a neighbor’s three children, two nieces and her unborn grandson, there’s no coming back. There’s nothing nice to say about that.” The suspects are indeed black, in their twenties and have previous drug and weapons charges. They are also still just suspects, in a crime in which, by the way, the victims were also young and black.
In her post, Bell then went on to contrast the killers with an African American teenager she witnessed working and “hustling like nobody’s business” in a local restaurant, and pondered “I wonder how long it had been since someone told him he was special.”
Her post provoked an inevitable number of dropped jaws, and she soon edited it, then deleted it, then apologized on Twitter, then briefly ghosted on social media entirely. In a March interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she admitted that her words had been “insensitive and could be viewed as racist” but also that she hadn’t been given “a fair shake.” Writing soon after for Very Smart Brothas, Damon Young expressed that he didn’t want Bell to be fired, but that her “abject obliviousness” qualified her as “a White privilege turducken.” She was subsequently dismissed from her job.
In April, she launched a new Facebook page, and claimed to be “#PittsburghStrong” — a self diagnosis local blogger Virginia Montanez countered with “You are now the Queen of Self-Centered.” On Tuesday, she posted another message on Facebook, reminiscing about her early career and declaring, “Today’s going to be a tough day for me. But — like that monster ball pit and the plastic jungle gym — I’m taking off my sneakers and going in.” She was immediately greeted with hundreds of supportive comments. And now we know what she was cryptically referring to — on Monday she filed a lawsuit against WTAE, claiming she’d been dismissed “because of her race,” in violation of her civil rights.
In her lawsuit, her attorneys say that “Had Ms. Bell written the same comments about white criminal suspects or had her race not have been white, Defendant would not have fired her, much less disciplined her. Ms. Bell’s posting of concern for the African-American community stung by mass shooting was clearly and obviously not intended to be racially offensive.” Okay, I’m not a lawyer but, ha ha ha ha ha.
For starters, the “This wouldn’t have happened if someone here were a different race” argument is pretty much the definition of racism, so there’s that. You don’t get to talk about other races the way you would about your own — especially you’re a member of a race that has historically held all the cards. But even if we cast that absurdity aside, there’s the matter of whether she really would have been disciplined had she been making comments about members of her own race. Here’s a tip — it’s not responsible for anyone, and certainly not a professional journalist, to mouth off based on zero actual information about what color you imagine murderers to be. That is just a bad professional strategy, period. The problem was then exacerbated in her snap judgment about the kid she saw at the restaurant, whom she assumed had not experienced enough praise before she generously bestowed it. And as for the part of her lawsuit where that argues comments were “clearly and obviously not intended to be racially offensive” — again, that’s how racism usually works. It doesn’t really matter if you intended to be ignorant and offensive; it only matters if you were. And what looked like a single incident of tone deaf behavior a few months ago has now become, absurdly, a full blown legal proceeding of one.
Neo-Nazi suspected killer of British MP said “the white race will prevail” in “bloody struggle”
A woman leaves flowers at a memorial to Jo Cox in London, June 17, 2016. (Credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth)
The white supremacist suspected of killing a left-wing British lawmaker last week published at two least letters in a pro-apartheid magazine, in which he demonized “White liberals and traitors,” “collaborators” and “anti-apartheid morons.”
“I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and in South Africa, but I fear that it’s going to be a very long and very bloody struggle,” he wrote in 1999.
The alleged killer also attended a meeting of white supremacists in London in 2000, where he openly espoused extremist right-wing views.
On June 16, a man shouting “Britain first!” repeatedly stabbed and shot Labour Party MP Jo Cox at an event with her constituency, killing her. Cox was known for her pro-refugee and pro-immigration views.
Thomas Mair, the suspected shooter, was an avowed white supremacist and a longtime supporter of a neo-Nazi group, although British media outlets described him simply as a “loner” with a “history of mental illness.”
When Mair appeared before court, and it asked what his name was, he replied, “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain!”
The Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading monitor of hate groups, revealed that Mair bought more than $620 in books from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group. Among his purchases were “Ich Kämpfe,” an illustrated handbook issued in 1942 to members of the Nazi Party, and periodicals and manuals with instructions on how to build guns and make explosives.
Police also found Nazi regalia and far-right literature at the suspected killer’s home.
Mair was a faithful subscriber to the pro-apartheid magazine South African Patriot in Exile, which described him as “one of [its] earliest subscribers and supporters.” The Southern Poverty Law Center, the leading monitor of hate groups, obtained two letters that Mair wrote for the magazine in the 1990s.
In 1991, Mair wrote a letter railing against “the British media’s propaganda offensive against South Africa,” claiming, “Almost every ‘news’ bulletin contains at least one item about South Africa which, needless to say, never fails to present Whites in the worst possible light.”
He condemned “anti-apartheid morons” and their “hatred,” and said he “was most impressed” with the white supremacist magazine. Mair wrote that he had received copies of the publication from the British National Front, a white-only neo-fascist party.
“The nationalist movement in the U.K. also continues to fight on against the odds,” Mair concluded. “Despite everything I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and in South Africa, but I fear that it’s going to be a very long and very bloody struggle.”
In 1999, after apartheid had been overthrown in South Africa, Mair wrote another letter the white supremacist magazine. “It was heartening to see that you are still carrying on the struggle. I would not have blamed you if you had given up in despair,” he said.
“I was glad you strongly condemned ‘collaborators’ in the White South African population,” Mair added. “In my opinion the greatest enemy of the old Apartheid system was not the ANC [African National Congress] and the Black masses but White liberals and traitors.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center also revealed that, in 2000, Mair attended a meeting of white supremacists in London. An informant who was present recalled that “Mair was loosely affiliated with the Leeds chapter of the National Alliance,” the neo-Nazi group he supported for well over a decade.
The informant told the Southern Poverty Law Center that Mair discussed a book he had read by David Irving, a British Holocaust denier.
The informant also said that, when he mentioned Winston Churchill to Mair at the white supremacist meeting, “he kind of made a face and he referred to Churchill as a kike-loving bastard.”
Once Mair “got going — i.e., discussing blacks, Jewish people and other minorities — he was what I’d call ‘all in’ — just like everyone else who attended that gathering,” the informant recalled.
These revelations only further confirm “that Mair, whose alleged victim was a liberal, pro-immigrant member of Parliament, was a dedicated neo-Nazi,” the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote.
At the meeting, William Pierce, the head of the National Alliance — who was barred from entering the U.K. — sent a message to the white supremacist attendees. Pierce said he would soon be releasing an electronic game titled “Ethnic Cleansing,” in which the player wins points by shooting people of color in New York City subways.
Baylor University “a hunting ground for sexual predators,” says new lawsuit
FILE - In this Dec. 5, 2015, file photo, Baylor helmets on shown the field after an NCAA college football game in Waco, Texas. Baylor University will look to rebuild its reputation and perhaps its football program after an outside review found administrators mishandled allegations of sexual assault and the team operated under the perception it was above the rules. (AP Photo/LM Otero, File) (Credit: AP Photo/LM Otero, File)
Another lawsuit was filed Monday against Baylor University, marking the third since an entrenched rape scandal revealed rampant mishandling of sexual assault cases within the school’s administration.
In March, student Jasmin Hernandez reported she’d been raped by Tevin Elliot, a linebacker on the school’s football team. Elliot was found guilty and is currently serving a 20-year sentence.
Hernandez said that after she’d been raped, “The school completely neglected my needs and I didn’t realize they were federally required to sort of address these issues.”
In May, Baylor’s president, Ken Starr — himself famous for investigating Bill Clinton’s sex scandal — was subsequently demoted to Chancellor, and head football coach Art Briles was fired.
A second lawsuit was filed by three anonymous women last week.
Monday’s lawsuit was filed by an anonymous Jane Doe who says she was drugged and abducted from an off-campus house belonging to members of the club rugby team. The alleged victim said the perpetrator was not a member of the rugby team, according to a CBS News report.
The latest lawsuit claims, “Baylor and the Baylor regents had created a hunting ground for sexual predators to freely prey upon innocent, unsuspecting female students, with no concern of reprisal or consequences.”
WATCH: Elizabeth Warren reveals the “one lie that helps sum up what Donald Trump is all about”
(Credit: MoveOn)
In a new video released on Wednesday, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren tore into Donald Trump and revealed the “one lie that helps sums up” what he is all about.
“I have to be honest: It’s hard to talk about Donald Trump,” Warren admitted to open the four-minute video released by MoveOn on Tuesday. “Between his ignorance, racism, sexism, lies—it’s hard to know where to start.”
But harkening to the message of Americans “paying their fair share” that catapulted her to national prominence, Warren said, “today I want to focus on one lie that helps sum up what Donald Trump is all about: his taxes.”
The popular progressive who has ramped up her attacks on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in recent weeks, repeatedly insisting he will never be president of the United States, then laid into Trump’s continued avoidance of releasing his tax returns — an issue Democratic rival Hillary Clinton also mentioned in a speech targeting Trump Tuesday:
We don’t know what Trump pays in taxes because he is the first Presidential nominee in 40 years to refuse to disclose his tax returns. Maybe he’s just a lousy businessman who doesn’t want you to find out that he’s worth a lot less money than he claims—we can’t know for sure. But, here’s what we do know. The last time his taxes were made public, Donald Trump paid nothing in federal taxes—ZERO. Zero taxes before, and for all we know he’s paying zero taxes today. And he’s proud of it. A few weeks ago he said he’s more than happy to dodge taxes because he doesn’t want to throw his money “down the drain.”
The video, like a similar one released by the Clinton campaign earlier in the day, also featured the words of prominent Republicans hitting Trump over his refusal to release his tax returns.
Trump's gotten rich driving companies into the ground. What will he do to the U.S. economy?
Oh wait—we know:https://t.co/MOPrGekYtZ
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 21, 2016
Warren, who the New York Times reported over the weekend has shot to the top of Clinton’s vice presidential shortlist as her attacks on Trump have grown more forceful and frequent, went after the businessman as “a fraud and a cheapskate.”
“He inherited a fortune from his father,” Warren said of Trump’s claims of unsubstantiated wealth, “and kept it going by scamming people, declaring bankruptcy, and skipping out on what he owed.”
Predicting and then quickly dismissing the inevitable Trump attacks to come, Warren urged viewers to demand that the candidate release his tax returns and spread the news about his refusal to anyone who will listen — “even your Fox News-loving Republican uncle”:
Whatever Donald Trump says, whatever scam he tries to pull, whatever disgusting thing he thinks he can say because he’s Donald Trump — speak out. Talk to the person behind you in the grocery store. Talk to the person pumping gas next to you. And yes, share this video with your friends. Ask your Fox News-loving Republican uncle: Why do you pay your taxes but Donald Trump doesn’t?
Watch below via MoveOn:
.@elizabethforma takes on @realDonaldTrump‘s refusal to release his tax returns via @MoveOn. #UniteAgainstHatehttps://t.co/7RFqgnD0OT
— MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) June 21, 2016
Trump’s staff are truly “Mad Men”: They shilled out 35K to a mysterious Draper Sterling ad firm, report says
Jon Hamm as Don Draper on "Mad Men;" Donald Trump (Credit: AMC/AP/Chris Carlson/Salon)
Within its latest Federal Election Commission filings, GOP nominee Donald Trump’s cash-strapped campaign reportedly paying $35,000 to Draper Sterling, a company with the same name as the ad agency in AMC’s “Mad Men,” for web advertising.
Draper Sterling’s listed address leads to a residential home in Londonderry, New Hampshire, an unassuming suburb of Manchester. The Londonderry home belongs to Jon Adkins, the registered proprietor of Draper Sterling.
According to New Hampshire secretary of state documents, Draper Sterling is a real, “foreign limited liability” company that registered in in the state earlier this year.
Adkins co-founded a medical device startup with Paul Holzer, according to a ThinkProgress report. In May, the Trump campaign paid Adkins and Holzer each $3,000 for consulting.
Holzer’s brother, Adam McLain, runs Patriots for America, a super PAC that, according to a complaint filed to the FEC by University of Missouri economics professor Aaron Hedlund, owed a “highly unusual” $56,234.89 to the “mysterious” Draper Sterling, LLC., for “business consulting,” despite listing no receipts or disbursements in its filings, according to ThinkProgress.
ThinkProgress called Patriots for America’s number, which it says “forwards to a voicemail for Grace’s Grantham Cafe, a New Hampshire coffee shop.”
Grace’s is registered under Jon Adkins. When ThinkProgress called the number listed on the cafe’s website, McLain picked up and declined to comment on the matter.
Trump’s recently sacked campaign manager Corey Lewandowski perhaps not so coincidentally grew up less than 20 minutes away from Londonderry, in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Want some Trump news? The campaign is doing a forensic audit on all of Corey Lewandowski's spending.
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) June 21, 2016
“The campaign was seeded with lots of people who were personally loyal to Corey and had ties to Corey,” New Hampshire State Representative Fergus Cullen told Huffington Post. “I don’t doubt at all that Corey genuinely wanted to see Donald Trump’s political prospects advance. But I don’t doubt at all that he saw this as a windfall opportunity to line his own pockets and feather his own nests.”
