Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 810

Bernie Sanders keeps on surging: Beats Hillary Clinton in Wyoming caucus

Put Wyoming in the victory column for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Sanders won the state's caucuses over Hillary Clinton, but the win isn't likely to help him make up much ground against in the delegate race that will decide the nomination. Sanders has won eight of the last nine contests, but still trails in the delegate count. Wyoming awards just 14 delegates overall, and he picked up at least seven delegates to Clinton's six. One delegate remains to be allocated, pending the final vote tally. Sanders has dominated in states where Democrats make their presidential preference choice in a caucus — but there are only a few caucuses left on the election calendar. Most of the states still to vote will hold primaries — contests where Clinton has generally performed better. He picked up at least seven delegates to Clinton's six. One delegate remains to be allocated, pending the final vote tally. That means little change to the overall delegate count, in which Clinton leads by a large margin. To date, Clinton has 1,286 delegates based on primaries and caucuses to Sanders' 1,037. When including superdelegates, or party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton has amassed even more delegates, 1,755 compared to 1,068 for Sanders. Sanders still needs to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates if he hopes to take the Democratic nomination. It takes 2,383 to win.Put Wyoming in the victory column for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Sanders won the state's caucuses over Hillary Clinton, but the win isn't likely to help him make up much ground against in the delegate race that will decide the nomination. Sanders has won eight of the last nine contests, but still trails in the delegate count. Wyoming awards just 14 delegates overall, and he picked up at least seven delegates to Clinton's six. One delegate remains to be allocated, pending the final vote tally. Sanders has dominated in states where Democrats make their presidential preference choice in a caucus — but there are only a few caucuses left on the election calendar. Most of the states still to vote will hold primaries — contests where Clinton has generally performed better. He picked up at least seven delegates to Clinton's six. One delegate remains to be allocated, pending the final vote tally. That means little change to the overall delegate count, in which Clinton leads by a large margin. To date, Clinton has 1,286 delegates based on primaries and caucuses to Sanders' 1,037. When including superdelegates, or party officials who can back any candidate, Clinton has amassed even more delegates, 1,755 compared to 1,068 for Sanders. Sanders still needs to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates and uncommitted superdelegates if he hopes to take the Democratic nomination. It takes 2,383 to win.

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Secrets of the penny candy jar: From Tootsie Rolls to Necco wafers, the real story behind every nostalgic treat

One of the beauties of the penny candy store was how you collected your stash. Some candies were unwrapped, and you picked these up with a small scoop, a set of tongs, or, at the beachside shops when no one was looking, your bare hands. Others were individually wrapped. These candies were what got penny candy out of the apothecary and grocers and into mainstream shops. Wrapped and ready, these candies were labeled, sanitary, and above all, self-contained. What better way to end our penny candy search than with a few favorite wrapped selections. TOOTSIE ROLL: AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY WRAPPED IN CHOCOLATE The history of the Tootsie Roll began with an Austrian immigrant named Leo Hirshfield. The rumor—actually a published and respected rumor—was that Hirshfield started making his candy in a little shop in Brooklyn, New York. He named his penny candy the “Tootsie Roll” because it was a roll of toffee-like chocolate and his daughter Claire was nicknamed “Tootsie.” Later, a larger company, Stern & Staalberg, bought Hirshfield out. Somewhere along the way, Hirshfield hand-wrapped his candy so it was clean, hygienic, and could travel from one store to another without needing to be poured and weighed. Hirshfield, the immigrant candymaker, was the American dream and success story all rolled into one. That’s the story I love, and I’ll stick to it. But the truth is more like this: Leo Hirshfield really was an Austrian immigrant, but he was an inventor at the confectionery company Stern & Staalberg with numerous patents to his name. He worked his way up the company ladder, eventually becoming a vice president. He did invent the Tootsie Roll and likely named it for his daughter, although “Tootsie” had been a term of endearment since the early 1900s as well as a loving name for a young one’s foot. As for Hirshfield, after some wrangling with Stern & Staalberg, he either lost or left his job. He attempted to start another, but that, too, failed. The wealthy but defeated inventor went on to shoot himself in a New York hotel. See why I like the first story better? Other Tootsie Roll insights: The Tootsie Roll was a heat-safe chocolate that held up well all year round. Among the many candies appearing in the rations of World War II soldiers, it was so durable and dependable, soldiers used “Tootsie Roll” as another name for bullets. Stern & Staalberg later became known as the Sweets Company of America, then Tootsie Roll Industries, which it remains today. STICKY CANDIES WRAPPED IN WAX PAPER HELD IN A BAG Caramels are an American invention that emerged from the European caramelized sugar of the seventeenth century. They are the essence of the praline, which the French brought to Louisiana in the 1760s. The caramel came into its own in the late 1800s, around the time when Hershey started the Lancaster Caramel Company. The Encyclopedia of Food and Beverages, published in 1901, gives this definition of caramel: “Sugar and corn syrup cooked to a proper consistence in open stirring kettles, run out in thin sheets on marble slab tables and cut into squares when cooled.” That recipe is not an industry standard: Hershey, compliments of his Denver caramel-making employer, knew to substitute milk for paraffin wax. Either way, caramel played a welcome part in candy where, with nuts, a chocolate coating, or simply solo, it is one of America’s favorite candies today. MILK DUDS BECAUSE IT IS ONE Milk Duds were invented by the F. Hoffman Company of Chicago in the 1920s and later made by Holloway. This was at a time when marketing was becoming ever more sophisticated, and marketers knew that a product’s name meant everything. No more putting the candymaker’s name on the label—it worked for Hershey, the Smith Brothers, and Oliver Chase, but times were changing. The name needed zing! But how do you give zing to a candy you intended to be a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel ball that sagged and dented? It wasn’t a ball. It was a dud. And that’s when someone in the company came up with a great idea. Let’s call it “Milk Chocolate Duds!” Too long? OK, then just “Milk Duds!” It’s too bad that person’s identity has been lost in the annals of history. It was the first and only time, as far as I know, that a candy was named for its liability. Another caramel favorite with a spicy name was the Sugar Daddy, invented by Robert Welch, a chocolate salesman for the James Welch Co. The Sugar Daddy was named for the other sugar daddy, an older gentleman who obliges a younger woman—his wife, his mistress, or whoever she may be—with all the comforts his fortune can supply. Apparently, that sugar daddy originated with one Alma Spreckels. It’s the pet name she gave her considerably older husband, heir to the Spreckels’s sugar fortune in 1908. Originally, the candy was called the “Papa Sucker.” We’re all glad they changed it. Can you imagine calling it “Papa Sucker” today? It’s almost too embarrassing to talk about. TOFFEES OR TAFFY OR TURKISH TAFFY? The Mary Jane was one of the earliest toffees, and its beginnings in Paul Revere’s former home is beyond the greatness any toffee can reasonably expect. Still, a rush of other toffees followed, such as the Bit-O-Honey, first made in Chicago in 1924, using honey instead of the standard corn syrup and sugar. It’s not clear if the name was influenced by Clarence Crane’s increasingly popular Life Saver family with the pronounced “O.” Another old timer is the sassy Squirrel Nut Zipper, which has one of the most perplexing names in candy history. The Squirrel Nut Company, then called the Austin T. Merrill Company, started in 1890 in Boston, Massachusetts. The business soon moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the new owner Mr. Perley G. Gerrish sold his freshly roasted nuts throughout the Boston area by horse and carriage. The company produced candy as well as nuts and came out with the Squirrel Nut Zipper in 1926. The name “Squirrel Nut,” is for the company, obviously. The “Zipper” was an illegal Prohibition-era cocktail. Remember how the temperance crowd claimed candy would lead to alcoholism in kids? Well, the candy companies had their say, putting a humorous twist on the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Eventually the Squirrel Nut Company’s nuts went to south to Antarctica with Admiral Richard Byrd, alongside its stateside neighbor’s NECCO Wafer. Also like the wafer, the nuts were also sent out during World War II. A soldier stationed in the Philippines wrote home: “I received a Christmas box with a pack of your peanuts in it. They were the only nuts that arrived without worms.” Today, the company, now called Squirrel Brand and Southern Style Nuts, is based in McKinney, Texas. The Zipper is still in Massachusetts, where it’s now made by none other than NECCO. HEATH TOFFEE LAXATIVE? In the penny candy store, the toffee found itself in places in-between its naked self and fully dressed in candy bar chocolate. One example is the Heath Toffee Bar, a candy quite different in nature from the other misbehaving Prohibition-era candies we’ve discussed. The Heath Toffee Bar was started by a school teacher, L. S. Heath, in Illinois. Heath was actually looking for a line of work for his two oldest sons when he found a small confectionery for sale. In 1914, the shop opened selling ice cream, fountain drinks, and sweets. One thing lead to another, and soon candy salesmen were hanging around Heath’s store, talking, as they do, about candy. One of them was raving about another candymaker’s toffee recipe. The Heath brothers were intrigued. I bet you know what happened next. They called it Heath Toffee. In 1931, L. S. Heath quit his job teaching school after twenty years and joined the candy business, as did his two sons. It was the younger generation who thought up a great marketing idea: Why not sell our candies through dairymen who went from house to house with their milk, ice, and cheese? Just add Heath Toffee to the list, and customers will add it to their purchases along with other products. And, of course, they did. But the Heath Toffee Bar was different from other bars, which initially caused confusion. First, the bar was one ounce, while others were four; this convinced consumers they were buying a penny candy and not a five-cent bar. Second, the design had a large “H” at either end, with the “eat” in small caps in the middle: HeatH. Shoppers thought the name of the company was H&H with the “eat” telling them what to do with it. A third problem was that the packaging, name aside, made it look like the laxative Ex-Lax. Salesmen weren’t sure what they were supposed to sell. The Heath Toffee Bar took off anyway and is made by Hershey today. THE BOSTON CHEW Don’t be deceived by the title. We really are talking about the Charleston Chew, which is not exactly a taffy and not exactly a toffee, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly sure what it is. But I can tell you this: the Charleston Chew, that dense marshmallow-taffy-toffee substance covered with chocolate is more like the Squirrel Nut Zipper, in spirit anyway, than the Heath Toffee Bar. It was first made in 1925 and spent most of it life in Boston, which is one Zipper connection, although most people think its name refers to Charleston, South Carolina. I imagine it has a pretty good following there. The other connection is that the Charleston Chew is tied to Prohibition, named for the dance, the Charleston, which showed up in movies with flappers dancing merrily in-between sips of the Zipper (quite possibly) and other speakeasy drinks. While we’re discussing theater and dancing, the Fox Cross company that invented the Charleston Chew began when Donley Cross, a Shakespearean actor in San Francisco, fell from the stage, injuring his back and ending his career. The logical next step for Cross was to start a candy company with his friend, Charlie Fox. I know, it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s candy. TAFFY DUD The Turkish Taffy was another flop that rose in stature to become a pop-culture favorite and, after a brief hiatus, remains so today. I remember eating it as a kid and feeling the sticky sweetness warm my mouth. Bonomo Turkish Taffy was not made by a Turkish candymaker but by Austrian immigrant Herman Herer in 1912. At the time, he was trying to create a marshmallow candy for M. Schwarz & Sons of Newark and added too many egg whites. The candy was a dud. But it got Herer thinking. He experimented with the recipe, then sold his business to M. Schwarz & Sons who hired Herer back. Herer kept experimenting and finally succeeded in making the only flat taffy in the world. Its name was Turkish Taffy. In nearby Coney Island, the Bonomo family was looking for something new to do. Albert, who really was Turkish and had immigrated to the United States in 1892, started his career selling candy from a pushcart in Coney Island. He then owned an ice cream company, where he sold ice cream from a horse-drawn covered wagon. Eventually he opened a candy and ice cream factory on the first floor of his house, living on the second floor and housing about thirty workers on the third floor. In 1919, Bonomo’s two sons, Vic, who had just returned from World War I, and Joe, a bodybuilder and football player, joined the business. In 1936, Bonomo bought M. Schwarz & Sons and with it the Turkish Taffy, making the taffy truly Turkish. Eventually the brothers took over and ran the company until Joe left to pursue a career in Hollywood as an actor, stuntman, strongman, and health writer. Vic then ran the company on his own. The Turkish Taffy remained a mainstay of American confections, thanks in part, to its signature tag line “Crack it up,” and instructions on the packaging: “Crack It Up!—Hold Bar in Palm of Hand—Strike against Flat Surface—Let It Melt in Your Mouth.” Tootsie Roll eventually bought the candy and ran it into the ground. But only temporarily. The Turkish Taffy is back, now owned by a company called Bonomo. There is no relation between the company and the Bonomo family, but the taffy still tastes good. SOFT STUFF AND PIXY STIX SWITCH AND BANANA-FLAVORED PEANUTS Another centerpiece of the candy store was the wild flavors, colors, and textures that promised kids a culinary (of sorts) experience. The endurance of these sprightly selections has much to do with their flexibility, sometimes shifting purpose as well as packaging and taste. One example is Pixy Stix, the paper straws filled with sugar so powdery and light it practically vanishes when eaten. Originally a drink flavoring, much like Kool-Aid, the sugar powder was made in the 1930s and called “Frutola.” But when inventor J. Fish Smith found that kids preferred eating it, he turned it into an eating candy, which he sold with a spoon. In the 1950s, Sunline Inc. made it the fun-lover’s candy it is today. Outside of its straw-like wrapper, it would just be another tasty but highly processed sugar. But who cares? Another candy that is perplexing in flavor, texture, and history are the much loved (and loathed) Circus Peanut. This curious candy originated in the 1800s. It was quite possibly for sale at travelling circuses but was also found in candy stores, general stores, and other places where penny candy was sold. The texture is soft as a sponge, spongy as a marshmallow, and flavored like a banana. The circus peanut was never what you’d call prestigious and various versions entered the candy arena for decades. One in particular is a surprise. AS FOR THAT SURPRISE In 1963, General Mills used the circus peanut as a prototype for the charms in Lucky Charms. Today, knockoff Charms are cropping up at candy stores everywhere, minus the flakes. As you may remember, I sampled a few on my way back from Wilbur’s. Very satisfying in a lighthearted way. CHICKEN BONES TO CHICK-O-STICK Is Chick-O-Stick another Life Saver rip off with the “O” at its center? If so, that’s about all the two sweets have in common aside from their presence in candy stores. The orange- and coconut-speckled Chick-O-Stick began its life in Canada, known as Chicken Bones. It was invented by Frank Sparhawk, an employee of brothers James and Gilbert W. Ganong, who opened their shop in 1873. The candy was a cinnamon-flavored candy shell filled with bittersweet chocolate, that looked like chicken bones. The Ganong’s company is still operating today and is still family owned. So successful were Chicken Bones that they spread south, all the way to Texas, where another family-owned business, Atkinson Candy Company, apparently found them. The Atkinson Candy Company began in 1932 after Basil Atkinson was laid off from his job at a foundry. He borrowed a truck, dug up some cash, and loaded his wife and sons into the cab for the two-day drive to Houston. There he loaded up on candy and tobacco. He began selling these items to small shops, eventually setting up a wholesale distribution center. Eventually, Basil realized he could make candy just as well, make that better, than the other guys. With help from his wife, he got to work. In the late 1930s, he came up with a candy that looked like Southern-fried chicken bones (and the Chicken Bones candy that already existed). Basil decided he should name them “Chicken Bones,” but Ganong decided he shouldn’t. Atkinson renamed his candy Chick-O-Stick, with the Life Saver-esque “O” in the middle. It was a southern favorite for years and is nationally known today. PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: WILMA GREEN, CHICK-O-STICK IN CHICAGO Wilma Green is an artist whose life could be her own portrait. She is an activist, a community organizer, a mother, a teacher, and a friend. This is her candy story. When I was a kid, my mother would send my twin brother, William, and me to Star Foods Grocery with empty RC Cola bottles and some money. We’d exchange the bottles for more RC for her and two Chick-O-Stick; one for her and one for my brother and me to share. They had to be Chick-O-Stick. She loved Chick-O-Stick. I don’t know if it was her background coming from the South, but she did. That was in the ’60s in Chicago. We lived in the largest public housing development in the world—the Robert Taylor housing project. People had migrated from the South during the Depression and built these communities over the years. It was a black metropolis. We did everything there—went to school, saw the doctor. Everyone who went to the Star Foods Grocery knew the owners and everyone got credit. Some people say it was segregation, but I don’t know. I always felt good. . . . I always knew everyone was watching out for me there. My mom was raising ten kids on her own since my father had died. My brother and I were the youngest. The three oldest were in Arkansas picking cotton with my grandparents. All of us went there in the summer to help out, but my brother and I were too young to pick. It was because of that work my grandparents were able to buy their own house. During WWII, when my mom was a teenager, she had the opportunity to work at a plant that made parts for bombs like Rosie the Riveter. She paid someone else to pick the cotton; the owners didn’t mind because they didn’t know the people who worked there—just the number of hands. They weren’t really people to them. Eventually she worked at an electronics company that was right next to a candy company. She would go there and get the second-rate candy, you know like broken pieces of chocolate, which she’d also give to us. My brother and I would sell it to other kids and get the good stuff for ourselves, like Now and Laters. But, as I said, once a week, my brother and I would take the RC bottles and get more RC for my mother and Chick-O-Stick for all of us. I think the candy originated in the south—it was probably a piece of her memory. It’s amazing how candies bring up memories. It’s nice to revisit those memories. I really love that. AND, AT LAST, THE LOLLIPOP No one knows when people started enjoying lollipops, although Charles Dickens wrote about hard candy on a stick in the 1800s. In the United States, around the time of the Civil War, people started sticking pencils into hard candies to eat them. At home, people basically dropped a mound of hard candy onto parchment or wax paper, stuck in a stick, let it dry, and then enjoyed the treat. But commercially not a lot was going on. Then, in 1895, Chicken Bones owners Gilbert and James Ganong began inserting sharp wooden sticks into their hard candy, creating one of the first commercial lollipops in the northern hemisphere. They called it an “all day sucker.” That changed in 1908 when the Bradley Smith Company starting manufacturing the “Lolly Pop,” which was named after George Smith’s favorite racehorse. Their inspiration was a chocolate-caramel taffy on a stick, made by Reynolds Taffy of West Haven, Connecticut, that resembled the Sugar Daddy. George Smith attempted to get ownership of the name “Lolly Pop,” but the US Patent Office turned him down, as the term was listed in an English dictionary of the early 1800s, spelled “lollipop.” There it was described as “a hard sweetmeat sometimes on a stick.” Eventually, Smith got the rights to “Lolly Pop” with that specific spelling, but it was negligible. People began using both names interchangeably and have ever since. By the 1920s, numerous lollipops seemed to appear in penny candy stores and other places. There was the Dum Dum, made in 1924 by the by the Akron Candy Company, which evidently knew the marketing potential of a name; the company’s salesman named the lollipop “Dum Dum,” thinking kids could easily remember it and ask their parents to buy some. Obviously, he was right. The Tootsie Pop, essentially a panned Tootsie Roll, came around 1931, and, in the 1940s, after parents expressed concern that kids would choke on the stick, the Saf-T-Pop, with a round holder, was released. Excerpted from "Sweet as Sin" by Susan Benjamin. Published by Prometheus Books. Copyright 2016 by Susan Benjamin. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.One of the beauties of the penny candy store was how you collected your stash. Some candies were unwrapped, and you picked these up with a small scoop, a set of tongs, or, at the beachside shops when no one was looking, your bare hands. Others were individually wrapped. These candies were what got penny candy out of the apothecary and grocers and into mainstream shops. Wrapped and ready, these candies were labeled, sanitary, and above all, self-contained. What better way to end our penny candy search than with a few favorite wrapped selections. TOOTSIE ROLL: AN ENIGMA WRAPPED IN A MYSTERY WRAPPED IN CHOCOLATE The history of the Tootsie Roll began with an Austrian immigrant named Leo Hirshfield. The rumor—actually a published and respected rumor—was that Hirshfield started making his candy in a little shop in Brooklyn, New York. He named his penny candy the “Tootsie Roll” because it was a roll of toffee-like chocolate and his daughter Claire was nicknamed “Tootsie.” Later, a larger company, Stern & Staalberg, bought Hirshfield out. Somewhere along the way, Hirshfield hand-wrapped his candy so it was clean, hygienic, and could travel from one store to another without needing to be poured and weighed. Hirshfield, the immigrant candymaker, was the American dream and success story all rolled into one. That’s the story I love, and I’ll stick to it. But the truth is more like this: Leo Hirshfield really was an Austrian immigrant, but he was an inventor at the confectionery company Stern & Staalberg with numerous patents to his name. He worked his way up the company ladder, eventually becoming a vice president. He did invent the Tootsie Roll and likely named it for his daughter, although “Tootsie” had been a term of endearment since the early 1900s as well as a loving name for a young one’s foot. As for Hirshfield, after some wrangling with Stern & Staalberg, he either lost or left his job. He attempted to start another, but that, too, failed. The wealthy but defeated inventor went on to shoot himself in a New York hotel. See why I like the first story better? Other Tootsie Roll insights: The Tootsie Roll was a heat-safe chocolate that held up well all year round. Among the many candies appearing in the rations of World War II soldiers, it was so durable and dependable, soldiers used “Tootsie Roll” as another name for bullets. Stern & Staalberg later became known as the Sweets Company of America, then Tootsie Roll Industries, which it remains today. STICKY CANDIES WRAPPED IN WAX PAPER HELD IN A BAG Caramels are an American invention that emerged from the European caramelized sugar of the seventeenth century. They are the essence of the praline, which the French brought to Louisiana in the 1760s. The caramel came into its own in the late 1800s, around the time when Hershey started the Lancaster Caramel Company. The Encyclopedia of Food and Beverages, published in 1901, gives this definition of caramel: “Sugar and corn syrup cooked to a proper consistence in open stirring kettles, run out in thin sheets on marble slab tables and cut into squares when cooled.” That recipe is not an industry standard: Hershey, compliments of his Denver caramel-making employer, knew to substitute milk for paraffin wax. Either way, caramel played a welcome part in candy where, with nuts, a chocolate coating, or simply solo, it is one of America’s favorite candies today. MILK DUDS BECAUSE IT IS ONE Milk Duds were invented by the F. Hoffman Company of Chicago in the 1920s and later made by Holloway. This was at a time when marketing was becoming ever more sophisticated, and marketers knew that a product’s name meant everything. No more putting the candymaker’s name on the label—it worked for Hershey, the Smith Brothers, and Oliver Chase, but times were changing. The name needed zing! But how do you give zing to a candy you intended to be a perfectly round chocolate-covered caramel ball that sagged and dented? It wasn’t a ball. It was a dud. And that’s when someone in the company came up with a great idea. Let’s call it “Milk Chocolate Duds!” Too long? OK, then just “Milk Duds!” It’s too bad that person’s identity has been lost in the annals of history. It was the first and only time, as far as I know, that a candy was named for its liability. Another caramel favorite with a spicy name was the Sugar Daddy, invented by Robert Welch, a chocolate salesman for the James Welch Co. The Sugar Daddy was named for the other sugar daddy, an older gentleman who obliges a younger woman—his wife, his mistress, or whoever she may be—with all the comforts his fortune can supply. Apparently, that sugar daddy originated with one Alma Spreckels. It’s the pet name she gave her considerably older husband, heir to the Spreckels’s sugar fortune in 1908. Originally, the candy was called the “Papa Sucker.” We’re all glad they changed it. Can you imagine calling it “Papa Sucker” today? It’s almost too embarrassing to talk about. TOFFEES OR TAFFY OR TURKISH TAFFY? The Mary Jane was one of the earliest toffees, and its beginnings in Paul Revere’s former home is beyond the greatness any toffee can reasonably expect. Still, a rush of other toffees followed, such as the Bit-O-Honey, first made in Chicago in 1924, using honey instead of the standard corn syrup and sugar. It’s not clear if the name was influenced by Clarence Crane’s increasingly popular Life Saver family with the pronounced “O.” Another old timer is the sassy Squirrel Nut Zipper, which has one of the most perplexing names in candy history. The Squirrel Nut Company, then called the Austin T. Merrill Company, started in 1890 in Boston, Massachusetts. The business soon moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the new owner Mr. Perley G. Gerrish sold his freshly roasted nuts throughout the Boston area by horse and carriage. The company produced candy as well as nuts and came out with the Squirrel Nut Zipper in 1926. The name “Squirrel Nut,” is for the company, obviously. The “Zipper” was an illegal Prohibition-era cocktail. Remember how the temperance crowd claimed candy would lead to alcoholism in kids? Well, the candy companies had their say, putting a humorous twist on the old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Eventually the Squirrel Nut Company’s nuts went to south to Antarctica with Admiral Richard Byrd, alongside its stateside neighbor’s NECCO Wafer. Also like the wafer, the nuts were also sent out during World War II. A soldier stationed in the Philippines wrote home: “I received a Christmas box with a pack of your peanuts in it. They were the only nuts that arrived without worms.” Today, the company, now called Squirrel Brand and Southern Style Nuts, is based in McKinney, Texas. The Zipper is still in Massachusetts, where it’s now made by none other than NECCO. HEATH TOFFEE LAXATIVE? In the penny candy store, the toffee found itself in places in-between its naked self and fully dressed in candy bar chocolate. One example is the Heath Toffee Bar, a candy quite different in nature from the other misbehaving Prohibition-era candies we’ve discussed. The Heath Toffee Bar was started by a school teacher, L. S. Heath, in Illinois. Heath was actually looking for a line of work for his two oldest sons when he found a small confectionery for sale. In 1914, the shop opened selling ice cream, fountain drinks, and sweets. One thing lead to another, and soon candy salesmen were hanging around Heath’s store, talking, as they do, about candy. One of them was raving about another candymaker’s toffee recipe. The Heath brothers were intrigued. I bet you know what happened next. They called it Heath Toffee. In 1931, L. S. Heath quit his job teaching school after twenty years and joined the candy business, as did his two sons. It was the younger generation who thought up a great marketing idea: Why not sell our candies through dairymen who went from house to house with their milk, ice, and cheese? Just add Heath Toffee to the list, and customers will add it to their purchases along with other products. And, of course, they did. But the Heath Toffee Bar was different from other bars, which initially caused confusion. First, the bar was one ounce, while others were four; this convinced consumers they were buying a penny candy and not a five-cent bar. Second, the design had a large “H” at either end, with the “eat” in small caps in the middle: HeatH. Shoppers thought the name of the company was H&H with the “eat” telling them what to do with it. A third problem was that the packaging, name aside, made it look like the laxative Ex-Lax. Salesmen weren’t sure what they were supposed to sell. The Heath Toffee Bar took off anyway and is made by Hershey today. THE BOSTON CHEW Don’t be deceived by the title. We really are talking about the Charleston Chew, which is not exactly a taffy and not exactly a toffee, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not exactly sure what it is. But I can tell you this: the Charleston Chew, that dense marshmallow-taffy-toffee substance covered with chocolate is more like the Squirrel Nut Zipper, in spirit anyway, than the Heath Toffee Bar. It was first made in 1925 and spent most of it life in Boston, which is one Zipper connection, although most people think its name refers to Charleston, South Carolina. I imagine it has a pretty good following there. The other connection is that the Charleston Chew is tied to Prohibition, named for the dance, the Charleston, which showed up in movies with flappers dancing merrily in-between sips of the Zipper (quite possibly) and other speakeasy drinks. While we’re discussing theater and dancing, the Fox Cross company that invented the Charleston Chew began when Donley Cross, a Shakespearean actor in San Francisco, fell from the stage, injuring his back and ending his career. The logical next step for Cross was to start a candy company with his friend, Charlie Fox. I know, it doesn’t make much sense, but that’s candy. TAFFY DUD The Turkish Taffy was another flop that rose in stature to become a pop-culture favorite and, after a brief hiatus, remains so today. I remember eating it as a kid and feeling the sticky sweetness warm my mouth. Bonomo Turkish Taffy was not made by a Turkish candymaker but by Austrian immigrant Herman Herer in 1912. At the time, he was trying to create a marshmallow candy for M. Schwarz & Sons of Newark and added too many egg whites. The candy was a dud. But it got Herer thinking. He experimented with the recipe, then sold his business to M. Schwarz & Sons who hired Herer back. Herer kept experimenting and finally succeeded in making the only flat taffy in the world. Its name was Turkish Taffy. In nearby Coney Island, the Bonomo family was looking for something new to do. Albert, who really was Turkish and had immigrated to the United States in 1892, started his career selling candy from a pushcart in Coney Island. He then owned an ice cream company, where he sold ice cream from a horse-drawn covered wagon. Eventually he opened a candy and ice cream factory on the first floor of his house, living on the second floor and housing about thirty workers on the third floor. In 1919, Bonomo’s two sons, Vic, who had just returned from World War I, and Joe, a bodybuilder and football player, joined the business. In 1936, Bonomo bought M. Schwarz & Sons and with it the Turkish Taffy, making the taffy truly Turkish. Eventually the brothers took over and ran the company until Joe left to pursue a career in Hollywood as an actor, stuntman, strongman, and health writer. Vic then ran the company on his own. The Turkish Taffy remained a mainstay of American confections, thanks in part, to its signature tag line “Crack it up,” and instructions on the packaging: “Crack It Up!—Hold Bar in Palm of Hand—Strike against Flat Surface—Let It Melt in Your Mouth.” Tootsie Roll eventually bought the candy and ran it into the ground. But only temporarily. The Turkish Taffy is back, now owned by a company called Bonomo. There is no relation between the company and the Bonomo family, but the taffy still tastes good. SOFT STUFF AND PIXY STIX SWITCH AND BANANA-FLAVORED PEANUTS Another centerpiece of the candy store was the wild flavors, colors, and textures that promised kids a culinary (of sorts) experience. The endurance of these sprightly selections has much to do with their flexibility, sometimes shifting purpose as well as packaging and taste. One example is Pixy Stix, the paper straws filled with sugar so powdery and light it practically vanishes when eaten. Originally a drink flavoring, much like Kool-Aid, the sugar powder was made in the 1930s and called “Frutola.” But when inventor J. Fish Smith found that kids preferred eating it, he turned it into an eating candy, which he sold with a spoon. In the 1950s, Sunline Inc. made it the fun-lover’s candy it is today. Outside of its straw-like wrapper, it would just be another tasty but highly processed sugar. But who cares? Another candy that is perplexing in flavor, texture, and history are the much loved (and loathed) Circus Peanut. This curious candy originated in the 1800s. It was quite possibly for sale at travelling circuses but was also found in candy stores, general stores, and other places where penny candy was sold. The texture is soft as a sponge, spongy as a marshmallow, and flavored like a banana. The circus peanut was never what you’d call prestigious and various versions entered the candy arena for decades. One in particular is a surprise. AS FOR THAT SURPRISE In 1963, General Mills used the circus peanut as a prototype for the charms in Lucky Charms. Today, knockoff Charms are cropping up at candy stores everywhere, minus the flakes. As you may remember, I sampled a few on my way back from Wilbur’s. Very satisfying in a lighthearted way. CHICKEN BONES TO CHICK-O-STICK Is Chick-O-Stick another Life Saver rip off with the “O” at its center? If so, that’s about all the two sweets have in common aside from their presence in candy stores. The orange- and coconut-speckled Chick-O-Stick began its life in Canada, known as Chicken Bones. It was invented by Frank Sparhawk, an employee of brothers James and Gilbert W. Ganong, who opened their shop in 1873. The candy was a cinnamon-flavored candy shell filled with bittersweet chocolate, that looked like chicken bones. The Ganong’s company is still operating today and is still family owned. So successful were Chicken Bones that they spread south, all the way to Texas, where another family-owned business, Atkinson Candy Company, apparently found them. The Atkinson Candy Company began in 1932 after Basil Atkinson was laid off from his job at a foundry. He borrowed a truck, dug up some cash, and loaded his wife and sons into the cab for the two-day drive to Houston. There he loaded up on candy and tobacco. He began selling these items to small shops, eventually setting up a wholesale distribution center. Eventually, Basil realized he could make candy just as well, make that better, than the other guys. With help from his wife, he got to work. In the late 1930s, he came up with a candy that looked like Southern-fried chicken bones (and the Chicken Bones candy that already existed). Basil decided he should name them “Chicken Bones,” but Ganong decided he shouldn’t. Atkinson renamed his candy Chick-O-Stick, with the Life Saver-esque “O” in the middle. It was a southern favorite for years and is nationally known today. PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: WILMA GREEN, CHICK-O-STICK IN CHICAGO Wilma Green is an artist whose life could be her own portrait. She is an activist, a community organizer, a mother, a teacher, and a friend. This is her candy story. When I was a kid, my mother would send my twin brother, William, and me to Star Foods Grocery with empty RC Cola bottles and some money. We’d exchange the bottles for more RC for her and two Chick-O-Stick; one for her and one for my brother and me to share. They had to be Chick-O-Stick. She loved Chick-O-Stick. I don’t know if it was her background coming from the South, but she did. That was in the ’60s in Chicago. We lived in the largest public housing development in the world—the Robert Taylor housing project. People had migrated from the South during the Depression and built these communities over the years. It was a black metropolis. We did everything there—went to school, saw the doctor. Everyone who went to the Star Foods Grocery knew the owners and everyone got credit. Some people say it was segregation, but I don’t know. I always felt good. . . . I always knew everyone was watching out for me there. My mom was raising ten kids on her own since my father had died. My brother and I were the youngest. The three oldest were in Arkansas picking cotton with my grandparents. All of us went there in the summer to help out, but my brother and I were too young to pick. It was because of that work my grandparents were able to buy their own house. During WWII, when my mom was a teenager, she had the opportunity to work at a plant that made parts for bombs like Rosie the Riveter. She paid someone else to pick the cotton; the owners didn’t mind because they didn’t know the people who worked there—just the number of hands. They weren’t really people to them. Eventually she worked at an electronics company that was right next to a candy company. She would go there and get the second-rate candy, you know like broken pieces of chocolate, which she’d also give to us. My brother and I would sell it to other kids and get the good stuff for ourselves, like Now and Laters. But, as I said, once a week, my brother and I would take the RC bottles and get more RC for my mother and Chick-O-Stick for all of us. I think the candy originated in the south—it was probably a piece of her memory. It’s amazing how candies bring up memories. It’s nice to revisit those memories. I really love that. AND, AT LAST, THE LOLLIPOP No one knows when people started enjoying lollipops, although Charles Dickens wrote about hard candy on a stick in the 1800s. In the United States, around the time of the Civil War, people started sticking pencils into hard candies to eat them. At home, people basically dropped a mound of hard candy onto parchment or wax paper, stuck in a stick, let it dry, and then enjoyed the treat. But commercially not a lot was going on. Then, in 1895, Chicken Bones owners Gilbert and James Ganong began inserting sharp wooden sticks into their hard candy, creating one of the first commercial lollipops in the northern hemisphere. They called it an “all day sucker.” That changed in 1908 when the Bradley Smith Company starting manufacturing the “Lolly Pop,” which was named after George Smith’s favorite racehorse. Their inspiration was a chocolate-caramel taffy on a stick, made by Reynolds Taffy of West Haven, Connecticut, that resembled the Sugar Daddy. George Smith attempted to get ownership of the name “Lolly Pop,” but the US Patent Office turned him down, as the term was listed in an English dictionary of the early 1800s, spelled “lollipop.” There it was described as “a hard sweetmeat sometimes on a stick.” Eventually, Smith got the rights to “Lolly Pop” with that specific spelling, but it was negligible. People began using both names interchangeably and have ever since. By the 1920s, numerous lollipops seemed to appear in penny candy stores and other places. There was the Dum Dum, made in 1924 by the by the Akron Candy Company, which evidently knew the marketing potential of a name; the company’s salesman named the lollipop “Dum Dum,” thinking kids could easily remember it and ask their parents to buy some. Obviously, he was right. The Tootsie Pop, essentially a panned Tootsie Roll, came around 1931, and, in the 1940s, after parents expressed concern that kids would choke on the stick, the Saf-T-Pop, with a round holder, was released. Excerpted from "Sweet as Sin" by Susan Benjamin. Published by Prometheus Books. Copyright 2016 by Susan Benjamin. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Donald Trump’s disastrous free ride: Finally, The New York Times commands the obvious

Donald Trump has been a disaster for political journalists, but he has also been an incredible boon for those of us who teach journalism. Questions of ethics and practice, for instance, particularly in interview situations, are no longer simply academic. They become matters of the moment; students can see, unfolding in real time, the consequences of journalism without a firm professional base, the descent into entertainment of a field whose prime focus is supposed to be information. Chuck Todd’s phone interview with Trump for "Meet the Press" on November 29, for example, allowed my student to hear Todd pull back from lines of questioning that got too touchy and then humble himself, asking Trump to come on for an in-person interview. The students then debated the responsibility of the journalist when interviewing a subject of continuing interest. Do you ask the hard questions at the risk of losing access to the subject? Or do you back-pedal or toss in a few softballs in order to make the subject comfortable — and available in the future? These questions were suddenly right before them. If Chuck Todd, one of the most successful journalists in America, feels he has to grovel at the feet of an interviewee, imagine, I asked my students, how a young journalist must feel. Losing access can mean losing a job. Professional ethics and standards have to be jettisoned, many journalists learn, in order to stay in the field. Once the pattern is set at the first rung of the professional ladder, it is not going to change later. Commitment to professionalism disappears. What is more important, the story or the number of readers? My students always talk about this, and it is also made present by Trump. By the middle of last semester, my students had gotten sick of seeing Trump everywhere — my current students (it is about midterm) are beginning to feel the same way. Almost everything we look at in the political press tends to circle back to the presidential primaries and, in particular, to Trump. When we met a week ago Tuesday, I had my students (they are following particular candidates in groups) begin to research candidate reactions to the Brussels bombing, secure in the knowledge that the news stories would quickly turn in that direction — they did, with Trump and Cruz getting the biggest headlines. Even in a disaster, the sure-fire way to increased viewers and readers is to find the most outrageous reactions — and Trump and Cruz were sure to give them. From the start, Trump’s campaign has been entertainment, not politics as we have known it. Journalists dismissed it as unserious, seeing no way it could be sustained. But Trump was operating as a seasoned TV pro: High ratings, he knew, beget high ratings. A day he could keep before the public ensured another day in the same spot. Reporters covering Trump didn’t bother to do the real work they should have been doing, looking at the whole of the phenomenon Trump was creating instead of simply covering him as another politician. He knew they wouldn’t. Trump has been laying the groundwork for his campaign for years. His “birther” activity was not accidental, though reporters tended to dismiss it as a sideshow. His was not (and is not) quite the seat-of-his-pants operation he lets journalists believe. Sure, he has a relaxed attitude toward policy, but he has spent time learning about his audience — something that the reporters following him have neglected to do. Research is an important aspect of journalism — and stopping in at a diner in Iowa just doesn’t count as real research on the voting population. My students recognized this quite quickly, even if the press did not. All of us who write about Trump — including me and the dozens of others whose articles have appeared here on Salon — need to be careful that we are not more interested in ‘click bait’ than in our subject. There’s a fine line: Salon writers have been at the forefront on exploring just who Trump’s supporters are and why they like him (something the national reporters forgot in their focus on the candidate himself), but we also can be swayed by the lure of increased readership. My students, aware of this pull, have identified three types of Trump stories: those on Trump solely because he, himself, is news; those on issues highlighted by the Trump candidacy that also inform; and those that try to avoid the phenomenon and focus only on relevant issues. In the national political press, the first of these has predominated and the third has died away. The second has had belated impact on national discourse, the cable networks only recently seeing that the Trump phenomenon is not simply about the man, but that it arises from the failures of a political party out of touch with its "base." Recently, too, the opinion leaders of the political press have finally begun to add their own voices to the criticisms of their profession that my students, like so many others, saw as early as the beginning of the semester last September. Nicholas Kristof, writing in The New York Times, admits that “we in the media screwed up.” Though he’s a little late to the party, Kristof does make three important points, all of which my students could have pointed out to him six months ago. First, Trump adroitly manipulated the press into giving him free publicity. That includes even those of us who, like me, see ourselves as using Trump to bring attention to points we have long been trying to make about rightwing America. Brilliantly, Trump has given the media room to further their own agendas in the process of making his own blossom. Political writers often love the Trump phenomenon even while loathing the man himself. No one in the media has ever held Trump’s feet to the fire. They continue to let him slip away, to continue to dance in the shadows and reflections of the flames. No one has effectively called Trump on his lies, “leaving many voters with the perception that Trump is actually a straight shooter.” The ‘he tells it like it is’ image comes from the fact that he always has a simple, understandable response — whether it makes sense or not. Reporters have yet to find a way to effectively follow up. Kristof’s second point is that the press did not take Trump seriously quickly enough: "We wrongly treated Trump as a farce.” That was simply poor journalism: The clown has been an important force in politics for a long time, both in terms of politicians themselves and the press covering them. If nothing else did, the continuing popularity of Sarah Palin should have alerted members of the press to the seriousness of the Trump phenomenon. Kristof’s third point is one that writers on sites like Salon have been making for quite some time (and that my students have been making for six months): No matter how much we may make fun of Palin and her references to the "lamestream media," the media have been out of touch with the lives of most Americans for years. “We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.” No shit, Sherlock. Kristof ends by saying, quite rightly, that “we in the media empowered a demagogue and failed the country. We were lap dogs, not watchdogs.” It’s nice that he’s come to that realization. My students could have told him so months ago, had he or anyone else in the media bothered to ask. I suspect that most Americans could have.

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Uber is a nightmare: They’re selling a big lie — and the New York Times keeps buying it

Uber has been slowly rolling out its latest “trust me, I’m saving the world” product, this one a service that allows its Uber-taxis to pick up multiple passengers in serial fashion. Much like a commercial airport shuttle, strangers share part of the same ride and pay a reduced fare for just their part of the ride. It’s called UberPool, as in carpool, and CEO Travis Kalanick touted its alleged environmental and labor positives in a recent interview with the New York Times, saying that “reducing traffic was part of Uber’s mission.” If true, this is a welcome change from the CEO whose previously stated mission was to flood the streets with Uber cars to win his war for market share with Big Taxi and ridesharing competitor Lyft. Before going into the considerable labor, environmental, consumer and public transit downsides to this latest blitz of Uber hype, I can’t help but say that it has been puzzling to see the New York Times consistently offer up its pages to Uber as a genteel and uncritical forum for promoting its private interest. Much of the latest article from its tech columnist Farhad Manjoo reads like a press release from Uber, without a single comment from a critic or transportation expert on the impact of UberPool. To be fair, Manjoo has written some excellent articles about technology – his series on the impact of robots and automation for Slate a few years ago was first-rate – but that’s what makes his “Uber blind spot” all the more baffling. No question, taxi service in most U.S. cities has been sub-par for many years, and if Uber and Lyft have demonstrated nothing else, it’s that there were not enough taxis on the road to service all the customers (in Berlin, where I am currently living for a few months, taxi service has always been pretty good and Uber has had a hard time gaining traction). Properly regulated, there could be room for app-driven ridesharing in the overall transportation matrix. Despite its considerable downsides, Uber has become popular in the U.S. because it’s filling that “taxi gap,” and that makes it harder for many well-meaning people to figure out what to make of a service like UberPool. So let’s break it down, sector by sector: Labor issues. Uber drivers are complaining that with UberPool they are working a lot harder for no more, and possibly even less, income. A website called TheRideshareGuy, which is run by Uber driver Harry Campbell and is chock-full of insightful advice and discussion for fellow drivers, provides a helpful example of what’s wrong with this picture. Imagine two Uber drivers each carrying a single passenger along the same route which results in a fare of $11. After Uber takes its brokerage cut as well as its “safety fee” (even though the company still has the poorest driver background checks in the taxi industry), each driver ends up with $8 each in her or his (usually his) pocket, while Uber ends up with $6, a 27% commission for Uber. Now along comes UberPool, and these same two serial riders get picked up by a single driver. Since UberPool offers passengers a substantial discount for sharing a ride, that means each passenger now pays $6 (in this example). After Uber takes its commission, including the safety fee, the payout to the driver is $4 for each passenger, or a total of $8. So the driver makes the same amount, but Uber’s take of the overall $12 for this ride is also $4 – a 33% overall commission. So Uber makes a higher percent on UberPool rides, yet the driver makes about the same amount. But it turns out driving passenger after passenger, picking up and dropping off in a serial fashion, is a grind. Christian Perea, a longtime Uber and Lyft driver says, “Drivers end up doing a lot more work for the money.” Experienced drivers, he says, know that pickups and drop-offs are the most stressful part of each ride, and adding in a second or third rider only compounds the difficulty. “As people get added into your ride or cancel along the way, it becomes frustrating having to change direction every few minutes while constantly checking your phone while in traffic,” he says. “It’s honestly kind of a safety hazard.” Uber’s response is that drivers will benefit because they will have less downtime waiting for the next fare. By picking up passenger after passenger, the driver won’t have any idle time and the meter (so to speak) will keep rolling, resulting in steadier earnings. But another Uber driver, Frank, disputes that. “We are using more gas hauling more weight. More weight is a harder wear and tear on the vehicles and it increases the insurance risk if there is an accident... more distractions [from] more Pool pings in the middle of driving, now changing directions or U-turns making it more dangerous overall for everyone... the little money return is not a justifiable risk.” Driver-support websites like UberPeople.net and various Facebook groups have lit up with complaints from drivers that UberPool is not worth the extra hassle and stress. It feels like a classic case of assembly-line “speed up,” in which you are working harder but not getting any further ahead. Consequently, some drivers have begun declining the second or third passenger ping. If they truly are “independent contractors,” and not Uber employees (soon to be settled by a federal lawsuit which begins in June), shouldn’t they have the right to refuse? In theory, yes, drivers can refuse. But in practice, Uber has fired drivers whose “acceptance rate” of rides falls below acceptable levels. Consumer confusion. Passengers, of course, love having their fare cut in half, but they don’t necessarily like having other passengers in “their” car. So they are deploying tactics like pinging for an UberPool and jumping into the car with another two or three buddies, so there’s no room for other paying passengers. What a deal – their own private car pool at discounted rates! And the driver doesn’t earn any extra money since this situation would be counted as a single ride. Other passengers, after pinging UberPool, have pressured drivers not to pick up too many additional passengers. Perea says “Some Uber drivers have complained that passengers have rated them poorly for actually accepting too many Pool requests.” The situation becomes especially severe when the first passenger picked up ends up being dropped off third or fourth, because the UberPool requests can keep flooding in all along the route, as long as there's room in the car. Drivers live in fear of the rating system because if their rating falls too low, the Uber algorithm automatically cuts them off the platform — it’s a firing squad by computer, employment-wise. A Los Angeles Uber driver says, “Pool riders invariably want no interaction whatsoever with the other passengers and are expressly disappointed when there is another rider already in the car or will be picked up next. This fact kills me, because it was them that requested the Pool ride.” Yet if the driver refuses a second or third passenger to keep the first customer happy, then their acceptance rate falls too low and they get in trouble with Uber. It’s a classic Catch-22, caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the rating system and acceptance rates. “Negative ratings are inevitable,” says the L.A. driver.  “UberPool is a lose-lose proposition for drivers and riders.” Environmental issues.  There is no question that Uber and Lyft are adding to traffic congestion, despite these companies implausible claims to the contrary. Ed Reiskin, director of transportation for San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, says, “[Uber and Lyft] have put a lot more vehicles on the streets,” an estimated 15,000 autos in San Francisco alone. Not all of those vehicles are on the street at any one time, but thousands typically are, many of which double-park in bike lanes and bus stops when dropping off passengers, further snarling traffic flow. “They’re all contributing to the increased traffic,” Reiskin says. In London, a study by the Department for Transport found that the rise of taxi apps such as Uber has played a part in worsening congestion. The number of private-hire vehicles has jumped 26 percent in the past few years, according to the city agency. In New York City, where there are now twice as many Uber and Lyft cars as yellow taxis, transportation analyst Charles Komanoff has crunched Uber’s own numbers and estimated that Uber-caused congestion has reduced traffic speeds in the central business district by about 8 percent. Urban cores, which have already been operating at or near traffic capacity, cannot simply add thousands of additional cars to already-crowded streets and not expect dramatic knock-on effects. That’s just common sense. Yet in Farhad Manjoo’s glowing review of UberPool, he cites a new report from the American Public Transportation Association that suggests the opposite. Other media outlets also uncritically cited this report with puffball coverage, despite glaring methodological shortcomings. The APTA surveyed more than 4,500 people about their transit and travel habits. The average household income of survey respondents was $90,926, which is nearly twice the average household income of all Americans – hardly a representative sample. Among the respondents, only 10% used ridesharing, which was used far more for socializing than other needs like getting to work. Nevertheless, the report’s grand conclusion was that those who use ridesharing are more likely “to use public transit, own fewer cars, and spend less on transportation overall.” But is that a causal connection or mere coincidence? Perhaps those with brown hair or blue eyes are also more likely to use public transit, own fewer cars, etc. The researchers didn’t even attempt to probe deeper and figure that out. And neither does Manjoo, who reports the results uncritically.  Indeed, he doubles down and claims that “Uber’s data bears this out,” which points to one of the most glaring shortcomings of his article. Anyone who has been following Uber (as well as other “sharing” economy companies like Airbnb) knows that this is a company that plays fast and loose with the facts. Princeton economist Alan Krueger discovered this, much to his embarrassment, when he co-authored an Uber-funded study with an Uber executive that was panned by other economic experts and critics. Indeed, relying on Uber’s data is like trusting the tobacco companies to do their own studies. We’ve already seen numerous examples of manipulation, such as CEO Kalanick at one point saying with a straight face that his full-time drivers make $100,000 per year, which if true would put them in the upper 10% of income earners in the United States. That was reported at face value by media outlets that should have known better, such as the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. But that claim bit the dust when some enterprising journalists took a ride with Uber drivers and asked to see their pay stubs, only to discover that most of them don’t make much more than taxicab drivers. Some drivers claim they make less than minimum wage, once you subtract their considerable driving expenses. Now Uber’s chief PR flack David Plouffe – yes, the same strategist who ran Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008 – has changed the Uber hit tune, saying that the service is “saving the middle class” by mostly creating part-time jobs where people can make a few extra dollars. Their boasts about six figure incomes are gone. Despite Uber’s data being thoroughly suspect, throughout his article Manjoo cites it as a credible source. He includes information about the number of “pooled trips” taken so far (allegedly 100 million, an enormous number since this service is still fairly new), the percentage of overall Uber trips that now occur via UberPool (allegedly 50%, a figure that has skyrocketed in an unbelievably short time) and the number of automobile miles (21 million), gallons of gas (400,000) and metric tons of carbon dioxide (3,800) allegedly eliminated by UberPool – just in the first three months of 2016, claims Uber via Manjoo. Meanwhile, another study from the  University of California Transportation Center of ride-sharing customers in the San Francisco area found that nearly half of respondents said that if they had not had the option of using a ride-sharing service, they would have instead used a public bus, train, bike or simply walked, reports the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell. This study indicates that ride-sharing is taking away business, not just from traditional taxis, but also from more low-carbon modes of travel. Undermining public transit. Not only is ride-sharing flooding the streets with cars and increasing traffic congestion, but it also may turn out to be a direct threat to public transportation, particularly in its latest UberPool incarnation. The economics of public transit systems are built around the busiest bus or train lines, which are heavily used and profitable, subsidizing other routes which are not so full. That equation is crucial in allowing a public transit system to be citywide and serve less-populated neighborhoods. If Uber and Lyft begin offering a service that sprints up and down the busiest and most profitable routes, such passenger poaching could destroy revenue for public transit. Indeed, the Eno Center wrote a report that examined the impact of new technologies on transportation, and warned about the transit tragedy that will result if Uber and Lyft end up forcing traditional modes like public transit and taxis out of business. “Lower income travelers that do not have access to a smartphone or cannot afford the new services might be left worse off as the traditional transit services they rely upon lose market share,” concluded the report. So it’s alarming that Kalanick has described UberPool as “a private bus-type service.” Can UberVAN be far behind, in which Uber provides loans to Pool drivers to buy their own 15 passenger vans? Kalanick has always said his “enemy” is Big Taxi, but having won that battle, now it appears that he has set his bull’s-eye on his real competition in this transit space: public transportation. It’s unfortunate that the New York Times can’t bring a more critical and healthy skepticism to its reportage – is it really that hard to say to Travis Kalanick, “OK, prove your claims?” The Times does publish some solid “new economy” reporting from several of its writers, such as “Your Money” columnist Ron Lieber about Airbnb, with Lieber writing several exposés about the considerable liability issues, data manipulation and lack of corporate accountability associated with that home-renting service.  So this is not an issue of some general infatuation with the so-called “sharing economy” at the Times. No, for some reason, Uber gets the kid gloves treatment. But lest I sound too overly carping, I will end this by praising a new service announced from Lyft called Lyft Carpool. Despite Lyft recently revealing (unintentionally) that it is, in fact, a taxi company, not a “technology” company, with the launch of yet another service in which it will rent cars to drivers who don’t have their own vehicles, Lyft Carpool shows real potential. It uses app technology to connect a person who is already commuting to work with a passenger traveling along the same route. The driver gets to make a little extra money (up to $10) while driving her or his regular course. The service could help fill up some of the scandalous number of empty seats in cars driving back and forth to work, and that would be a good thing. It could help revive the practice of carpooling to work, which has been slowly dwindling in the U.S. to levels that are less than half those in 1980. Lyft Carpool charges a service fee, though in its Terms of Service, the specific amount is left oddly unspecified. Regardless, it seems like a worthy undertaking – and also one bound to not be a moneymaker for Lyft. Not only are other companies such as Carma already inhabiting this space more responsibly, but once a driver and passenger are connected and have begun regularly carpooling together, why would they need to continue to use the Lyft app? Cut out the middleman, cut out the service fee. What this points to is that this app-based technology has great potential and opportunity, once the for-profit incentives and greed of venture capitalists are removed from the equation. I can think of no good reason why nonprofit organizations, as well as the government, shouldn’t create its own versions of transportation apps that would be offered to the public for minimal cost. Where are the techies out there looking to make a difference, rather than gobs of money? Public service awaits your talented contributions. Don’t make us hold our breaths too much longer.

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“Party unity” is bogus: The Hillary-Bernie debate is crucial, and won’t doom the Democrats in the fall

With the renewed outbreak of hostilities between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders following the latter’s big win in the Wisconsin primary last week, we are once again hearing the mantra that all the discord and name-calling and surrogate warfare must end “for the good of the party,” lest the Democratic nominee be fatally injured before the fall campaign begins. A number of things should be obvious about this discourse, starting with the fact that we’re only hearing it within one of the two parties this year, and that compared to the amateur zombie-dentist convention on the Republican side, Bernie and Hillary are one of history’s great romances. Even so, party-unity rhetoric has been a constant refrain in the Democratic race ever since it became clear that Sanders presented a real threat to the Clinton coronation, and wasn’t just another hapless left-wing sacrifice in the Dennis Kucinich vein. (I don’t mean to bash Kucinich! He’s a terrific guy, whose timing was off by a decade or so.) It’s an old melody, rendered somewhat more compelling this year by circumstance: If we don’t get over this childish idealism and rally around the normal, sensible and “electable” candidate, we’ll bring on the Reign of Eternal Night, otherwise known as Republican control of all three branches of government. It must be admitted that when you’re talking about the mathematical possibility of President Trump (or, even worse, President Cruz), it’s a prospect to take seriously. It’s also worth noticing that calls for comity and party unity, for mellowing the tone and dampening the disagreements and standing aside to let the leading candidate win by acclamation, are in themselves tools of political warfare. The only people who ever bring those things up are those who stand to benefit. As you may have noticed, the Republican leadership and its financial backers are taking the opposite tack; they’re eager to drag the primary campaign on as long as possible and inject it with cobra venom, in the hope that something or someone can wake them from their Trumpian nightmare. Party unity is at best a question; it isn’t an answer. It makes for incoherent political philosophy and inconsistent results in practice, and rests on various premises that fall somewhere between unproven and downright false. As various commentators have pointed out (including Salon’s Jack Mirkinson), by the standards of the 2008 race between Clinton and Barack Obama, this year’s Democratic primary campaign has been relatively cordial. Obama, of course, was so badly damaged by the enduring outrage of Clinton supporters that he lost to John McCain in a landslide. (No, not in reality. But probably in someone’s unpublished alternate-history novel.) That’s a relevant data point, and one that should remind us that a bitter primary contest doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what happens in November. As the current Democratic frontrunner cannot possibly have forgotten, Bill Clinton emerged from a brutal, mud-slinging primary campaign in 1992 and won easily in the fall. John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and both George Bushes prevailed in memorably heated primary contests and then won narrow elections. (OK, only the elder Bush was actually elected: Oh, snap.) You can cite counter-examples of candidates who sailed through the primary season and won in November, like Ronald Reagan in 1980. But John Kerry’s relatively smooth path to the Democratic nomination in 2004 didn’t help much. Even the supposedly classic examples of parties ripping themselves apart with ideological infighting yield mixed results. Hubert Humphrey nearly won the 1968 election, despite not even having run in the primaries and garnering the Democratic nomination through backroom deals at the most disastrous convention ever. (Paul Ryan is reading up on this right now!) Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, vanquished the GOP establishment with the insurgent conservative crusade of 1964, and then got less than 39 percent of the popular vote, which remains the most lopsided defeat in history. In short, there is no consistent pattern to suggest that a contentious primary campaign leads to electoral doom. The only pattern I see, in fact, is that the party-unity argument, and the threat that winter is coming, is consistently used as a club to bash dissidents. It seems wildly unlikely that the Democrats are heading toward any version of a Goldwater scenario in 2016, or even a Humphrey scenario. Which of our two parties faces that prospect, or something worse, is abundantly clear. But I think this entire line of argumentation undersells the symbolic and ideological significance of the Clinton-Sanders battle, which is exactly what the advocates of mandatory party unity are trying to deflect or deny or ignore. Clinton and Sanders are now heading into a climactic April 19 showdown in New York — one candidate’s current home state, and the other’s birthplace — that will likely determine whether the 2016 primary campaign begins to wind down or drags onward into June and beyond. As a matter of cruel political fact, Sanders probably can’t win the Democratic nomination even if he prevails in New York. But he clearly raises his odds to a nonzero number, and makes the endgame complicated and painful for his opponent. Win or lose, Sanders’ continued presence in the campaign — and his sharpened rhetoric about Clinton’s connections to corporate money and her warmongering foreign policy — has exposed Clinton’s fundamental contradictions, and those of the Democratic Party. That’s what the party-unity crowd finds unacceptable. For the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Party establishment and their media boosters (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman), the suggestion that it’s time to pour some serious cold water on the Bern is both standard-issue politics and something larger than that. This week a Los Angeles attorney named Dana Perlman told The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication, that he was “disappointed” by Sanders’ harsher tone in recent days, and worried it would be “destructive for the party, which must unite behind our nominee and retain the White House.” Well, sure. Perlman is one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest California fundraisers, and stands at the intersection of two elite groups that have bankrolled the Democratic Party since its reinvention under her husband’s administration, meaning the legal profession and the entertainment industry. What else is he going to say? What Perlman means, in English, is that the Sanders campaign is destructive for the Democratic Party as he understands it, which must unite behind his preferred candidate and retain the White House on behalf of the interests he represents. There’s nothing wrong with a rich dude arguing his case; ideological combat is the essence of politics. But let’s not insult each other by pretending that a millionaire Beverly Hills lawyer’s vision of the Democratic Party has much in common with that of the Bernie Sanders electorate. Party-unity rhetoric, and the argument that “we” will lose in November if we let our dirty laundry be seen in the spring, has been used for decades in both parties to quell internal dissent and rally support for an establishment-ordained frontrunner. It’s how they wind up with dismal nominees like Kerry or Mitt Romney, known quantities who are exciting to no one and disheartening to many in the party’s base, but are deemed acceptable to broad swathes of the population. Perhaps the single most striking fact of the 2016 presidential campaign so far is that one party has staged a spectacular grassroots rebellion against this model, and the other has tried to. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the people who like him really, really like him, and the same is true of Bernie Sanders. There were too many “why Trump is like Sanders” articles early in the campaign season (yeah, mea culpa), but that’s where they contained a chewy nugget of truth. I have repeatedly argued that the outcome of the Clinton-Sanders race (which was pretty much ordained in advance) is less important than the yawning ideological gulf it reveals within the Democratic coalition, and what it tells us about the party’s future. It’s only overstating the case a little to say that some version of the Republican civil war lies ahead for the Democrats, and that we see it in embryo right now. Still, there is also the matter of electing a president who will take office next January. I am not so cynical as to pretend that’s irrelevant, or that a Cruz or Trump administration (each in its deliriously different way) couldn’t make a bad situation immeasurably worse. Hillary Clinton’s backers and supporters, I suspect, will ultimately get some version of the party unity they’re clamoring for, and most likely the president they want too. Against a fractious and divided opposition, she is far more likely to emulate the historical example of Bill Clinton, or even Lyndon Johnson, than that of Humphrey. But all along the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has appeared to gird itself for defeat rather than victory, and has prepared in advance to blame a possible Humphrey-geddon on too much internal opposition, too much dissent and too much immoderate left-wing zeal. That anxiety is not about 2016 at all. It’s about realizing that their days are numbered.With the renewed outbreak of hostilities between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders following the latter’s big win in the Wisconsin primary last week, we are once again hearing the mantra that all the discord and name-calling and surrogate warfare must end “for the good of the party,” lest the Democratic nominee be fatally injured before the fall campaign begins. A number of things should be obvious about this discourse, starting with the fact that we’re only hearing it within one of the two parties this year, and that compared to the amateur zombie-dentist convention on the Republican side, Bernie and Hillary are one of history’s great romances. Even so, party-unity rhetoric has been a constant refrain in the Democratic race ever since it became clear that Sanders presented a real threat to the Clinton coronation, and wasn’t just another hapless left-wing sacrifice in the Dennis Kucinich vein. (I don’t mean to bash Kucinich! He’s a terrific guy, whose timing was off by a decade or so.) It’s an old melody, rendered somewhat more compelling this year by circumstance: If we don’t get over this childish idealism and rally around the normal, sensible and “electable” candidate, we’ll bring on the Reign of Eternal Night, otherwise known as Republican control of all three branches of government. It must be admitted that when you’re talking about the mathematical possibility of President Trump (or, even worse, President Cruz), it’s a prospect to take seriously. It’s also worth noticing that calls for comity and party unity, for mellowing the tone and dampening the disagreements and standing aside to let the leading candidate win by acclamation, are in themselves tools of political warfare. The only people who ever bring those things up are those who stand to benefit. As you may have noticed, the Republican leadership and its financial backers are taking the opposite tack; they’re eager to drag the primary campaign on as long as possible and inject it with cobra venom, in the hope that something or someone can wake them from their Trumpian nightmare. Party unity is at best a question; it isn’t an answer. It makes for incoherent political philosophy and inconsistent results in practice, and rests on various premises that fall somewhere between unproven and downright false. As various commentators have pointed out (including Salon’s Jack Mirkinson), by the standards of the 2008 race between Clinton and Barack Obama, this year’s Democratic primary campaign has been relatively cordial. Obama, of course, was so badly damaged by the enduring outrage of Clinton supporters that he lost to John McCain in a landslide. (No, not in reality. But probably in someone’s unpublished alternate-history novel.) That’s a relevant data point, and one that should remind us that a bitter primary contest doesn’t necessarily have much to do with what happens in November. As the current Democratic frontrunner cannot possibly have forgotten, Bill Clinton emerged from a brutal, mud-slinging primary campaign in 1992 and won easily in the fall. John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and both George Bushes prevailed in memorably heated primary contests and then won narrow elections. (OK, only the elder Bush was actually elected: Oh, snap.) You can cite counter-examples of candidates who sailed through the primary season and won in November, like Ronald Reagan in 1980. But John Kerry’s relatively smooth path to the Democratic nomination in 2004 didn’t help much. Even the supposedly classic examples of parties ripping themselves apart with ideological infighting yield mixed results. Hubert Humphrey nearly won the 1968 election, despite not even having run in the primaries and garnering the Democratic nomination through backroom deals at the most disastrous convention ever. (Paul Ryan is reading up on this right now!) Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, vanquished the GOP establishment with the insurgent conservative crusade of 1964, and then got less than 39 percent of the popular vote, which remains the most lopsided defeat in history. In short, there is no consistent pattern to suggest that a contentious primary campaign leads to electoral doom. The only pattern I see, in fact, is that the party-unity argument, and the threat that winter is coming, is consistently used as a club to bash dissidents. It seems wildly unlikely that the Democrats are heading toward any version of a Goldwater scenario in 2016, or even a Humphrey scenario. Which of our two parties faces that prospect, or something worse, is abundantly clear. But I think this entire line of argumentation undersells the symbolic and ideological significance of the Clinton-Sanders battle, which is exactly what the advocates of mandatory party unity are trying to deflect or deny or ignore. Clinton and Sanders are now heading into a climactic April 19 showdown in New York — one candidate’s current home state, and the other’s birthplace — that will likely determine whether the 2016 primary campaign begins to wind down or drags onward into June and beyond. As a matter of cruel political fact, Sanders probably can’t win the Democratic nomination even if he prevails in New York. But he clearly raises his odds to a nonzero number, and makes the endgame complicated and painful for his opponent. Win or lose, Sanders’ continued presence in the campaign — and his sharpened rhetoric about Clinton’s connections to corporate money and her warmongering foreign policy — has exposed Clinton’s fundamental contradictions, and those of the Democratic Party. That’s what the party-unity crowd finds unacceptable. For the Clinton campaign, the Democratic Party establishment and their media boosters (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman), the suggestion that it’s time to pour some serious cold water on the Bern is both standard-issue politics and something larger than that. This week a Los Angeles attorney named Dana Perlman told The Wrap, a Hollywood trade publication, that he was “disappointed” by Sanders’ harsher tone in recent days, and worried it would be “destructive for the party, which must unite behind our nominee and retain the White House.” Well, sure. Perlman is one of Hillary Clinton’s biggest California fundraisers, and stands at the intersection of two elite groups that have bankrolled the Democratic Party since its reinvention under her husband’s administration, meaning the legal profession and the entertainment industry. What else is he going to say? What Perlman means, in English, is that the Sanders campaign is destructive for the Democratic Party as he understands it, which must unite behind his preferred candidate and retain the White House on behalf of the interests he represents. There’s nothing wrong with a rich dude arguing his case; ideological combat is the essence of politics. But let’s not insult each other by pretending that a millionaire Beverly Hills lawyer’s vision of the Democratic Party has much in common with that of the Bernie Sanders electorate. Party-unity rhetoric, and the argument that “we” will lose in November if we let our dirty laundry be seen in the spring, has been used for decades in both parties to quell internal dissent and rally support for an establishment-ordained frontrunner. It’s how they wind up with dismal nominees like Kerry or Mitt Romney, known quantities who are exciting to no one and disheartening to many in the party’s base, but are deemed acceptable to broad swathes of the population. Perhaps the single most striking fact of the 2016 presidential campaign so far is that one party has staged a spectacular grassroots rebellion against this model, and the other has tried to. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but the people who like him really, really like him, and the same is true of Bernie Sanders. There were too many “why Trump is like Sanders” articles early in the campaign season (yeah, mea culpa), but that’s where they contained a chewy nugget of truth. I have repeatedly argued that the outcome of the Clinton-Sanders race (which was pretty much ordained in advance) is less important than the yawning ideological gulf it reveals within the Democratic coalition, and what it tells us about the party’s future. It’s only overstating the case a little to say that some version of the Republican civil war lies ahead for the Democrats, and that we see it in embryo right now. Still, there is also the matter of electing a president who will take office next January. I am not so cynical as to pretend that’s irrelevant, or that a Cruz or Trump administration (each in its deliriously different way) couldn’t make a bad situation immeasurably worse. Hillary Clinton’s backers and supporters, I suspect, will ultimately get some version of the party unity they’re clamoring for, and most likely the president they want too. Against a fractious and divided opposition, she is far more likely to emulate the historical example of Bill Clinton, or even Lyndon Johnson, than that of Humphrey. But all along the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has appeared to gird itself for defeat rather than victory, and has prepared in advance to blame a possible Humphrey-geddon on too much internal opposition, too much dissent and too much immoderate left-wing zeal. That anxiety is not about 2016 at all. It’s about realizing that their days are numbered.

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Ignorance, racism and rage: The GOP’s transformation to the party of stupid started long before Donald Trump

The top leadership of the Republican Party expresses horror at the popularity of Donald Trump as though his positions and values are somehow alien from their own. This is disingenuous. As other commentators have observed, the presidential candidacy of the bigoted, misogynist, ignorant Trump is a creature of the party’s own making. This Frankentrump was not fashioned in a mere eight years, however. The Obama administration suffered only from an acceleration of Republican partisanship, not a change in its character. Instead, the transformation of the Republican base from the conscience-driven party of Lincoln to the anger-driven party of Trump has been a half-century in the making. No political party neatly reflects political philosophy, of course. Parties always aim to mobilize diverse — and therefore conflicting — constituencies in order to win. But the original Republican Party, formed in 1854 after the Democrat-sponsored Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned decades of federal policy against the spread of slavery, came close to embodying the political philosophy behind it. And the founding Republican philosophy was liberal. Not liberal in the sense the term came to be used in the twentieth century, to signify commitment to the type of federal welfare policies enacted in the New Deal of the Democrats. Not liberal as either epithet or fixed policy commitment. And certainly not liberal as in morally loose. To be liberal in the nineteenth century meant to be devoted to freedom of thought above all. Above tradition, the American liberals who helped found the Republican Party valued the freedom to choose what is right and the freedom to develop socially, intellectually, and morally toward the highest possible potential. This is why liberals favored public schools for all children, which started in Massachusetts in the 1830s and only got established in the South thanks to Reconstruction. The liberal principle of “moral agency,” as they called this divine right and duty to choose, also lay behind Republican opposition to slavery. Slaves cannot choose if they are coerced by their so-called masters, and if slaves have no moral choices they cannot develop. The liberal moral ethic centered on independent, open-ended thinking, constructive dialogue across differences, and a belief in the divine potential of every human being. Even slaves. “Liberty of conscience” is how the Republican Party platform of 1856 gestured to its liberal roots. The phrase came from old Protestant arguments over whether Christians are free to believe non-Calvinist ideas, but it developed secular, political uses over the nineteenth century and lay behind the opposition to the expansion of slavery for which Republicans originally stood. Lincoln stated the liberal faith most robustly, perhaps, at the end of his famous Cooper Union Address of 1860: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." This got the Republican Party boycotted in the (white) South, not only during the years of the Confederate rebellion but long after. Most Republicans, including Lincoln, were unsure just how equal African Americans could be, but some Republicans in Congress favored complete civil equality for the former slaves and their descendants. They drove the first civil rights legislation, including the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and providing the rights of voting and due process under the law regardless of race. The first African-American members of Congress were Republican. The Democrats ran the party of white supremacy. Woodrow Wilson — the Virginian who segregated the federal government — knew how to keep the South in the Democratic fold. So did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who allowed his New Deal policies to be administered in such discriminatory ways that one historian claims they amounted to affirmative action for whites. The Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower is the leader who submitted civil-rights legislation to Congress to combat Jim Crow in 1957. It was Democrats in Congress who watered the bill down. The partisan poles of the United States changed after the dramatic activism of the 1950s and early ‘60s prompted the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sending white Southern and white working-class Democrats into Republican arms. The Republican wooing of these voters took time and delicacy. Never did its strategists aim to become the party of blatant racism. Instead, they created concepts like the “moral majority,” “religious right,” “family values” and even color-blindness in order to attract white voters concerned about African-American socio-economic and political gains. And in so doing, they betrayed their moral roots in three ways. First, Republicans allowed bigotry safe haven under the guise of morality, in the very name of morality, by broadcasting scary tales of black urban life as though it were proof of the irredeemable inferiority of African Americans. From the Southern Strategy of Nixon to the cynical electioneering of Lee Atwater, the campaign manager for George H. W. Bush, the line was straight. In 1981, Atwater explained that by 1968, the N-word repelled voters rather than attracting them, so he trained Republicans to “say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” Reagan acted his part in disdaining welfare queens and “young bucks,” a phrase straight out of the antebellum South. In 1994, Charles Murray broadcast pseudo-scientific racism in "The Bell Curve" — amazingly, Murray is still in service today — arguing that so-called blacks simply are less intelligent and moral, if more athletic, than whites. Donald Trump’s retweets from white supremacist origins are consistent with this Republican precedent. Second, the Republican Party adopted fixed positions on issues. The nineteenth-century liberal commitment to open-mindedness had meant that any position was only provisional, awaiting the testimony of further evidence or wider viewpoints for modification. For many decades now, the Republicans have insisted that lowering taxes, beefing up the military, and cutting social programs are what America needs. They oppose abortion because they need white evangelical voters, so Republican politicians claim that the resemblance of a fetus to a baby is more important than the resemblance of a criminal to a human being — Republicans favor the death penalty, after all, which they have to reconcile with their so-called pro-life conviction. Along comes Trump, calling for women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished. Finally, the Republican Party has increasingly refused to engage in meaningful dialogue with its opponents. It has betrayed its origins in the culture of learning by attacking higher education in the United States — the colleges and universities all too liable to teach young people how to think critically — and by trying to privatize public education in the names of meritocracy and religious freedom. At the very least, Republican strategists have undermined public schoolteachers and pathologized urban schoolchildren. By deploying the language of culture wars, left versus right and liberal versus conservative, Republican strategists have fed a polarization allegedly too extreme to tolerate constructive dialogue toward consensus. No wonder Frankentrump cannot even tolerate debate with his fellow Republican contenders for the nomination. Since 2008, it seems that the top Republican leadership has realized that it must curry favor with voters other than white evangelicals, white workers and the moneyed elite. But it is too late for Trump’s enthusiasts to get the memo. Whenever thinkers concoct slogans, they produce culture. And the culture Republican strategists produced is decidedly illiberal. To echo the words of Malcolm X in 1963, the Trump candidacy is as clear a case of chickens coming home to roost as ever history did see.    The top leadership of the Republican Party expresses horror at the popularity of Donald Trump as though his positions and values are somehow alien from their own. This is disingenuous. As other commentators have observed, the presidential candidacy of the bigoted, misogynist, ignorant Trump is a creature of the party’s own making. This Frankentrump was not fashioned in a mere eight years, however. The Obama administration suffered only from an acceleration of Republican partisanship, not a change in its character. Instead, the transformation of the Republican base from the conscience-driven party of Lincoln to the anger-driven party of Trump has been a half-century in the making. No political party neatly reflects political philosophy, of course. Parties always aim to mobilize diverse — and therefore conflicting — constituencies in order to win. But the original Republican Party, formed in 1854 after the Democrat-sponsored Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned decades of federal policy against the spread of slavery, came close to embodying the political philosophy behind it. And the founding Republican philosophy was liberal. Not liberal in the sense the term came to be used in the twentieth century, to signify commitment to the type of federal welfare policies enacted in the New Deal of the Democrats. Not liberal as either epithet or fixed policy commitment. And certainly not liberal as in morally loose. To be liberal in the nineteenth century meant to be devoted to freedom of thought above all. Above tradition, the American liberals who helped found the Republican Party valued the freedom to choose what is right and the freedom to develop socially, intellectually, and morally toward the highest possible potential. This is why liberals favored public schools for all children, which started in Massachusetts in the 1830s and only got established in the South thanks to Reconstruction. The liberal principle of “moral agency,” as they called this divine right and duty to choose, also lay behind Republican opposition to slavery. Slaves cannot choose if they are coerced by their so-called masters, and if slaves have no moral choices they cannot develop. The liberal moral ethic centered on independent, open-ended thinking, constructive dialogue across differences, and a belief in the divine potential of every human being. Even slaves. “Liberty of conscience” is how the Republican Party platform of 1856 gestured to its liberal roots. The phrase came from old Protestant arguments over whether Christians are free to believe non-Calvinist ideas, but it developed secular, political uses over the nineteenth century and lay behind the opposition to the expansion of slavery for which Republicans originally stood. Lincoln stated the liberal faith most robustly, perhaps, at the end of his famous Cooper Union Address of 1860: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." This got the Republican Party boycotted in the (white) South, not only during the years of the Confederate rebellion but long after. Most Republicans, including Lincoln, were unsure just how equal African Americans could be, but some Republicans in Congress favored complete civil equality for the former slaves and their descendants. They drove the first civil rights legislation, including the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and providing the rights of voting and due process under the law regardless of race. The first African-American members of Congress were Republican. The Democrats ran the party of white supremacy. Woodrow Wilson — the Virginian who segregated the federal government — knew how to keep the South in the Democratic fold. So did Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who allowed his New Deal policies to be administered in such discriminatory ways that one historian claims they amounted to affirmative action for whites. The Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower is the leader who submitted civil-rights legislation to Congress to combat Jim Crow in 1957. It was Democrats in Congress who watered the bill down. The partisan poles of the United States changed after the dramatic activism of the 1950s and early ‘60s prompted the Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964, sending white Southern and white working-class Democrats into Republican arms. The Republican wooing of these voters took time and delicacy. Never did its strategists aim to become the party of blatant racism. Instead, they created concepts like the “moral majority,” “religious right,” “family values” and even color-blindness in order to attract white voters concerned about African-American socio-economic and political gains. And in so doing, they betrayed their moral roots in three ways. First, Republicans allowed bigotry safe haven under the guise of morality, in the very name of morality, by broadcasting scary tales of black urban life as though it were proof of the irredeemable inferiority of African Americans. From the Southern Strategy of Nixon to the cynical electioneering of Lee Atwater, the campaign manager for George H. W. Bush, the line was straight. In 1981, Atwater explained that by 1968, the N-word repelled voters rather than attracting them, so he trained Republicans to “say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” Reagan acted his part in disdaining welfare queens and “young bucks,” a phrase straight out of the antebellum South. In 1994, Charles Murray broadcast pseudo-scientific racism in "The Bell Curve" — amazingly, Murray is still in service today — arguing that so-called blacks simply are less intelligent and moral, if more athletic, than whites. Donald Trump’s retweets from white supremacist origins are consistent with this Republican precedent. Second, the Republican Party adopted fixed positions on issues. The nineteenth-century liberal commitment to open-mindedness had meant that any position was only provisional, awaiting the testimony of further evidence or wider viewpoints for modification. For many decades now, the Republicans have insisted that lowering taxes, beefing up the military, and cutting social programs are what America needs. They oppose abortion because they need white evangelical voters, so Republican politicians claim that the resemblance of a fetus to a baby is more important than the resemblance of a criminal to a human being — Republicans favor the death penalty, after all, which they have to reconcile with their so-called pro-life conviction. Along comes Trump, calling for women who terminate their pregnancies to be punished. Finally, the Republican Party has increasingly refused to engage in meaningful dialogue with its opponents. It has betrayed its origins in the culture of learning by attacking higher education in the United States — the colleges and universities all too liable to teach young people how to think critically — and by trying to privatize public education in the names of meritocracy and religious freedom. At the very least, Republican strategists have undermined public schoolteachers and pathologized urban schoolchildren. By deploying the language of culture wars, left versus right and liberal versus conservative, Republican strategists have fed a polarization allegedly too extreme to tolerate constructive dialogue toward consensus. No wonder Frankentrump cannot even tolerate debate with his fellow Republican contenders for the nomination. Since 2008, it seems that the top Republican leadership has realized that it must curry favor with voters other than white evangelicals, white workers and the moneyed elite. But it is too late for Trump’s enthusiasts to get the memo. Whenever thinkers concoct slogans, they produce culture. And the culture Republican strategists produced is decidedly illiberal. To echo the words of Malcolm X in 1963, the Trump candidacy is as clear a case of chickens coming home to roost as ever history did see.    

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#Notalltrumpvoters: The media’s new big lie lets racist Donald Trump backers off the hook

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank took on white racism and support for Donald Trump in a recent column. In “Trump’s Bigoted Supporters” he writes:

A Pew Research Center national poll released Thursday found that 59 percent of registered voters nationwide think that an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes the United States a better place; only 8 percent say this makes America worse. But among Trump backers, 39 percent say diversity improves America, while 42 percent say it makes no difference and 17 percent say it actually makes America worse. Supporters of GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich were significantly more upbeat on diversity. This was no anomaly. The week before, my Washington Post colleagues Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement reported on a Post/ABC News poll that asked whether people thought it more of a problem that African-Americans and Latinos are “losing out because of preferences for whites” or whether whites are “losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics.” Trump had the support of 34 percent of Republican-leaning voters overall, but among those who said that whites are losing out, 43 percent supported Trump.

In the weeks and months to come, there most certainly will be additional polling data and other research which confirms the great role that racism has played in Trumpmania. Of course, this information is important. However, it should not be surprising. The influence of racial animus on public opinion and other political behavior is one of the most-repeated findings in all of the social sciences. Unfortunately, just as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf did in his recent piece “How Emory's Student Activists Are Fueling Trumpism,” Dana Milbank makes the choice to offer the following qualifier:

That ugly moment comes to mind in describing how many of Trump’s supporters have bigoted motivations: Not all — but a lot of ‘em. Just as it’s unfair to paint all Trump backers as prejudiced, it’s impossible to ignore a growing volume of public-opinion data showing that a large number of his supporters are indeed driven by racial or xenophobic animus.

As I explored in an earlier essay here at Salon, Milbank’s caveat is part of a larger pattern among the American commentariat where too many of its members are afraid to publicly (and correctly) label Donald Trump and his supporters as racists. Why this anxiety? Why are so many members of the chattering class dancing around the clear and obvious truth that Donald Trump’s political movement is largely driven by white racial resentment, overt racism, bigotry and nativism? Part of this answer lies in how telling the truth about white racism in the post-civil rights era is considered worse than the harm it does to people of color. Moreover, to suggest that a given white person is a racist — or alternatively, that white people as a group either benefit from institutional racism or are active racists — is an indictment of both their personal character and the various myths (meritocracy; American Exceptionalism; individualism; equality, etc.) that the country’s political culture rests upon. Together, these answers form a type of electrified third rail in American political discourse that few members of the chattering classes are willing to stand on. This is a profound failure of moral leadership. The unwillingness by Milbank, Friedersdorf and others to plainly and directly state that Donald Trump and his supporters are part of a racist political movement is an example of what sociologist Robin DiAngelo has described as “white racial fragility” on a massive scale:

This systemic and institutional control allows those of us who are white in North America to live in a social environment that protects and insulates us from race-based stress. We have organized society to reproduce and reinforce our racial interests and perspectives. Further, we are centered in all matters deemed normal, universal, benign, neutral and good. Thus, we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable…Not often encountering these challenges, we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium. I term that push back white fragility.

White fragility manifests itself in conversations about race and racism when white folks often use a rhetorical strategy of making themselves the center of the dialogue as opposed to listening to and accepting the experiences of people of color as valid. White fragility also makes itself known in moments of extreme anger, sadness, tears or complaints about “hurt feelings,” as opposed to practicing critical self-reflection about one’s own behavior, and plays a broader role in maintaining systems of white privilege as well as personally benefitting from them. White fragility is the shorthand “not all white people." (The phrase, “not all white people” has many cousins. “Not all men” and “Not all straight people” draws from the same defensiveness about acknowledging one’s own power and privilege.) On a societal level, white racial fragility takes what should be a basic fact given American’s history and present (white racism is real; the United States is founded on and continues to be orientated around protecting inter-group white advantage and privilege) and makes it into something subjective, a mere opinion, that subsequently can be accepted or rejected based on one’s own personal whims and convenience. The practical effect of this dynamic is that the bar of evidence is raised so high for what constitutes racism that often anything short of the public lynching of a black or brown person by white supremacists is subjected to the qualifier that “We ought not to jump to the conclusion that racism was involved.” This mobilization of white racial fragility silences truth-tellers, punishes people of color who are victims of racism, and ensures that the “problem of the color line” will continue well past the 20th century and into the 21st. Imagine the following scenarios. If a Nazi was running for public office, the chattering classes would not allow his or her voters to defend their choice by saying “I am not a Nazi or a ‘bad person,’ I like this candidate because they will give us full employment and better roads.” Likewise, if an avowed member of the Ku Klux Klan was seeking public office, his supporters would not be allowed the out of saying that “we aren’t racists but like the fact that the KKK offered charity to the white poor.” In both examples, the supporters of those candidates would be publicly shamed by the American news media. Many members of the American commentariat remain in denial about the power of Donald Trump and his racist allure for the most backward and bigoted parts of the American electorate. Now, Trump is months away from becoming the likely Republican presidential nominee. The Fourth Estate helped to create this mess. The Fourth Estate should take responsibility for solving it.The Washington Post's Dana Milbank took on white racism and support for Donald Trump in a recent column. In “Trump’s Bigoted Supporters” he writes:

A Pew Research Center national poll released Thursday found that 59 percent of registered voters nationwide think that an increasing number of people from different races, ethnic groups and nationalities makes the United States a better place; only 8 percent say this makes America worse. But among Trump backers, 39 percent say diversity improves America, while 42 percent say it makes no difference and 17 percent say it actually makes America worse. Supporters of GOP rivals Ted Cruz and John Kasich were significantly more upbeat on diversity. This was no anomaly. The week before, my Washington Post colleagues Max Ehrenfreund and Scott Clement reported on a Post/ABC News poll that asked whether people thought it more of a problem that African-Americans and Latinos are “losing out because of preferences for whites” or whether whites are “losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics.” Trump had the support of 34 percent of Republican-leaning voters overall, but among those who said that whites are losing out, 43 percent supported Trump.

In the weeks and months to come, there most certainly will be additional polling data and other research which confirms the great role that racism has played in Trumpmania. Of course, this information is important. However, it should not be surprising. The influence of racial animus on public opinion and other political behavior is one of the most-repeated findings in all of the social sciences. Unfortunately, just as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf did in his recent piece “How Emory's Student Activists Are Fueling Trumpism,” Dana Milbank makes the choice to offer the following qualifier:

That ugly moment comes to mind in describing how many of Trump’s supporters have bigoted motivations: Not all — but a lot of ‘em. Just as it’s unfair to paint all Trump backers as prejudiced, it’s impossible to ignore a growing volume of public-opinion data showing that a large number of his supporters are indeed driven by racial or xenophobic animus.

As I explored in an earlier essay here at Salon, Milbank’s caveat is part of a larger pattern among the American commentariat where too many of its members are afraid to publicly (and correctly) label Donald Trump and his supporters as racists. Why this anxiety? Why are so many members of the chattering class dancing around the clear and obvious truth that Donald Trump’s political movement is largely driven by white racial resentment, overt racism, bigotry and nativism? Part of this answer lies in how telling the truth about white racism in the post-civil rights era is considered worse than the harm it does to people of color. Moreover, to suggest that a given white person is a racist — or alternatively, that white people as a group either benefit from institutional racism or are active racists — is an indictment of both their personal character and the various myths (meritocracy; American Exceptionalism; individualism; equality, etc.) that the country’s political culture rests upon. Together, these answers form a type of electrified third rail in American political discourse that few members of the chattering classes are willing to stand on. This is a profound failure of moral leadership. The unwillingness by Milbank, Friedersdorf and others to plainly and directly state that Donald Trump and his supporters are part of a racist political movement is an example of what sociologist Robin DiAngelo has described as “white racial fragility” on a massive scale:

This systemic and institutional control allows those of us who are white in North America to live in a social environment that protects and insulates us from race-based stress. We have organized society to reproduce and reinforce our racial interests and perspectives. Further, we are centered in all matters deemed normal, universal, benign, neutral and good. Thus, we move through a wholly racialized world with an unracialized identity (e.g. white people can represent all of humanity, people of color can only represent their racial selves). Challenges to this identity become highly stressful and even intolerable…Not often encountering these challenges, we withdraw, defend, cry, argue, minimize, ignore, and in other ways push back to regain our racial position and equilibrium. I term that push back white fragility.

White fragility manifests itself in conversations about race and racism when white folks often use a rhetorical strategy of making themselves the center of the dialogue as opposed to listening to and accepting the experiences of people of color as valid. White fragility also makes itself known in moments of extreme anger, sadness, tears or complaints about “hurt feelings,” as opposed to practicing critical self-reflection about one’s own behavior, and plays a broader role in maintaining systems of white privilege as well as personally benefitting from them. White fragility is the shorthand “not all white people." (The phrase, “not all white people” has many cousins. “Not all men” and “Not all straight people” draws from the same defensiveness about acknowledging one’s own power and privilege.) On a societal level, white racial fragility takes what should be a basic fact given American’s history and present (white racism is real; the United States is founded on and continues to be orientated around protecting inter-group white advantage and privilege) and makes it into something subjective, a mere opinion, that subsequently can be accepted or rejected based on one’s own personal whims and convenience. The practical effect of this dynamic is that the bar of evidence is raised so high for what constitutes racism that often anything short of the public lynching of a black or brown person by white supremacists is subjected to the qualifier that “We ought not to jump to the conclusion that racism was involved.” This mobilization of white racial fragility silences truth-tellers, punishes people of color who are victims of racism, and ensures that the “problem of the color line” will continue well past the 20th century and into the 21st. Imagine the following scenarios. If a Nazi was running for public office, the chattering classes would not allow his or her voters to defend their choice by saying “I am not a Nazi or a ‘bad person,’ I like this candidate because they will give us full employment and better roads.” Likewise, if an avowed member of the Ku Klux Klan was seeking public office, his supporters would not be allowed the out of saying that “we aren’t racists but like the fact that the KKK offered charity to the white poor.” In both examples, the supporters of those candidates would be publicly shamed by the American news media. Many members of the American commentariat remain in denial about the power of Donald Trump and his racist allure for the most backward and bigoted parts of the American electorate. Now, Trump is months away from becoming the likely Republican presidential nominee. The Fourth Estate helped to create this mess. The Fourth Estate should take responsibility for solving it.

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From Siri to sexbots: Female AI reinforces a toxic desire for passive, agreeable and easily dominated women

A recent article titled “Why is AI Female?” made the connection that gendered labor, in service professions in particular, is fueling our expectations for gendered AI assistants and service robots. Furthermore, the author argues, this “feminizing — and sexualizing — of machines” signals a future with a disproportionate use of feminized VR and robots for a male-dominated sex industry. Monica Nickelsburg writes:

“Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we’ve largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars.”

Not sexualized, but certainly sexed. Herbert Televox and Mr. Telelux, the early 20th century robots made by Westinghouse, were both male. When Elektro the Westinghouse Motoman debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, he smoked a cigarette, called the presenter “toots” and made entertainingly crass jokes about his brain being composed of electrical relays and the “good numbers” he saw out in the audience. Somehow, though certainly not through sentience, Elektro could assert himself by dominating and sexualizing the human women in attendance. At least his programmers made sure he could command with a charismatic robot-noir masculinity appropriate to contemporary Hollywood standards. If such assertiveness is a territory traditionally understood as a heteronormative masculinity ascribed to the male sex, does mass culture know how to assert control over technology in other terms yet? Or are we forever doomed to the gendered male subject position in technology, either dominating it or allowing ourselves to be seduced and led by it to our future downfall, as with the masses duped by the maschinenmensch robot “Maria” in Metropolis? With our generational advent of plausible problems in AI, questions at the intersections of democratic posterity and dangerous technology persist despite being very, very old. Our concerns over power, meanwhile, certainly retain a gendered vocabulary. How unsurprising, then, that the infamous 1984 commercial for the Apple Macintosh, which unleashed the personal computer revolution, featured a sexy, skimpily-clad woman shattering the gray political passivity of scores of lonely, propaganda-watching men. “The hardest part to cast, the rebellious blond, went to a British discus thrower named Anya Major because she could spin around to launch her liberating mallet at the video image of Big Brother without getting dizzy,” the L.A. Times blithely announced. Yet the predominantly male audience and the sexualized, heteronormative nature of this “liberation” are all implied in her powerfully feminine (and jiggly) standout role — that and the phallic hammer smashing the manipulative screen. What is a user? What is an interface? Do we presume that the user is male and the passive interface female? Is this is how we see or expect to find heteronormative sex? Almost instantaneously, the '80s personal computer unleashed a libertarian anti-censorship digital culture of ripping and sharing heteronormative pornography. “Interactive erotica” games like MacPlaymate, created at risk of lawsuit with new graphics software,  allowed presumably male users to assert sexual power on the interface of highly feminized digital bodies, taking advantage of user features designed to conceal (and encourage) its use as a fake spreadsheet in public workplaces. “A user can strip Maxie garment by garment, force her to engage in a variety of sex acts, some with another woman or with any of six devices from a ‘toy box.’ They can gag, handcuff and shackle her at her spike-heel-shod ankles," reported a journalist in 1988 on women protesting the use of MacPlaymate and other office pornography. Unlike office life, the computer erotica interface affirmed (given Maxie’s pleasurable reactions and lack of autonomous requests) that whatever the user chose to do to Maxie was permissible, hindered only by unseen technical incompatibilities, not her unsmiling or displeased avatar. Co-ed coworkers were another story. “In a meeting room at a Silicon Valley computer firm, it left a group of men ‘giggling and hiding the computer’ when a woman executive walked in unexpectedly,” the complaint reported. Sexualized cultures of power in cyberspace could trump the complex reality of spaces where women could sometimes be in charge and where interest and consent were negotiables requiring two-way communication, not unspoken, entitled givens. Or, you know, someone marginalized had a case of the Feminazi Mondays. Sometimes the sexualized interface enters 3-D space. As April Glaser points out, Ricky Ma’s Scarlett Johansson robot, Mark 1, is different from a celebrity wax figure or action figure: "Mark 1 moves, smiles, and winks.” There’s something uneasy about this transfiguration from action-figure fan culture to the commodified use of a gendered interaction, and it’s not just the uncanny valley. Glaser is apt to point out the relationship between the ripped image on a homemade “ScarJo bot” and possessive celebrity cyberstalking, but there is also a connection to the commodifications of women’s appearance and interactive behavior that everyday victims of street harassment know all too well. (Yes, all women). Pornography definitively changes when you Photoshop a coworker’s face onto it and brag about doing so. As the age-old problem of women’s bodies-as-public-property collides with both our gendered use-value of female celebrity and the private robot commodity-body, we should be concerned about what, exactly, our tech is supposed to be gloriously democratizing. (But don't worry — smile!) The ways we have failed to acknowledge how gender exploitation operates culturally in popular tech history appears to be culminating in our development and cultural receptiveness to gendered AI. As Monica Nickelsburg points out, female AI sells. Consumers must not see the harm in it. But even before the feminized AI problem, the disembodied female voices of telephone operators and secretaries historically serviced male-dominated spaces of business and commerce. Although telephonic technology became feminized in order to take advantage of a category of low-wage earners with more maturity and skill than teenage boys, the cultural requirements on telephone workers' age, attractiveness and marital status — as well as their depiction as feminine heroes in company propaganda — helped to control and ease male anxieties about women being in the public sphere in the first place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEy7Z... Even scarier were the prospects that the same telephonic technology networking the city to liberate growth could also permit anonymous collusion, subversion and crime. The female operator’s disembodied voice, which underwent strict industry training for proper inflection, politeness and eradication of class or ethnic accents, resulted in a naturalized feminine commodity that women were “suitable” for, representing male authority and continued order within modern technological upheaval. Independent of labor and economics, this cultural hierarchy was reflected in corporate etiquette literature cautioning naughty girls against calling boys or talking too much. (Don’t worry, dating is, like, totally different now). It is important to distinguish here that feminine or feminized tech doesn't necessarily improve gender inequities in any meaningful way (like closing the gender pay gap would). Our understanding of technological comfort and propriety still goes to the invisibly gendered and heteronormative ways through which we have historically seen the user, the control of technology, and public and private space. And as widespread problems with the online harassment of women in social media and gaming has illustrated, female voices aren’t comforting in and of themselves, especially when they have something autonomous to say that’s not in the manual. It's plausible that tech is funneled into passive, agreeable female interfaces because we want our women — like our interfaces — to be passive and agreeable. Along the way, a compliant, servicing female voice establishes comfort with AI. Perhaps the largest danger in the ubiquity of women’s voices used in AI is in its ability to conceal the fact that women online “are being attacked for speaking out, as has happened since the beginning of times in our society”;  meanwhile, an astonishing number of countries choose to do nothing about the intimidation of vocal women. Beyond the technologized spectrum, from online harassment to unthinking reach for a pleasant female AI, assertive communication by women continues to draw a cultural spectrum of norm-policing — ranging from the life-threatening to the colorfully gendered and (even sometimes polite) ad wominems, shamings, and discussion avoidances of Liberalism. Perhaps our concerns for female AI in the tech world creates the illusion that we care personally, politically and policy-wise, about what women think and have to say in ways that would require reflection of us, even mining our own subjectivities of fear and control. In terms of a jump from Siri to soliciting sexbots without abandon, service and sexual labor is indeed traditionally feminized and born of gendered inequalities, and this is being reflected in our technologized upgrades. I personally don’t care much about a future of men having sex with robots, but rather the norms and biases of women that gendered and heteronormative tech comes from and perpetuates, how it seeps outside boundaries to culturally reinforce pay gaps, feminized professions, unequal relationships and orgasm gaps, the power dynamics of sex work, disproportionate violence and poverty, and the ways we react to assertive women with misogynistic fear, hatred and scorn. These are some of the ways that gendered and heteronormative culture cuts off basic agency, respect and opportunities. As Gloria Steinem so aptly pointed out, on the science fiction work of Octavia Butler, “a future based on new science and new technology ... also shows the results of old human behavior that guides them.”A recent article titled “Why is AI Female?” made the connection that gendered labor, in service professions in particular, is fueling our expectations for gendered AI assistants and service robots. Furthermore, the author argues, this “feminizing — and sexualizing — of machines” signals a future with a disproportionate use of feminized VR and robots for a male-dominated sex industry. Monica Nickelsburg writes:

“Sex with robots is a big leap from asking Siri to set an alarm, but the fact that we’ve largely equated artificial intelligence with female personalities is worth examining. There are, after all, few sexualized male robots or avatars.”

Not sexualized, but certainly sexed. Herbert Televox and Mr. Telelux, the early 20th century robots made by Westinghouse, were both male. When Elektro the Westinghouse Motoman debuted at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, he smoked a cigarette, called the presenter “toots” and made entertainingly crass jokes about his brain being composed of electrical relays and the “good numbers” he saw out in the audience. Somehow, though certainly not through sentience, Elektro could assert himself by dominating and sexualizing the human women in attendance. At least his programmers made sure he could command with a charismatic robot-noir masculinity appropriate to contemporary Hollywood standards. If such assertiveness is a territory traditionally understood as a heteronormative masculinity ascribed to the male sex, does mass culture know how to assert control over technology in other terms yet? Or are we forever doomed to the gendered male subject position in technology, either dominating it or allowing ourselves to be seduced and led by it to our future downfall, as with the masses duped by the maschinenmensch robot “Maria” in Metropolis? With our generational advent of plausible problems in AI, questions at the intersections of democratic posterity and dangerous technology persist despite being very, very old. Our concerns over power, meanwhile, certainly retain a gendered vocabulary. How unsurprising, then, that the infamous 1984 commercial for the Apple Macintosh, which unleashed the personal computer revolution, featured a sexy, skimpily-clad woman shattering the gray political passivity of scores of lonely, propaganda-watching men. “The hardest part to cast, the rebellious blond, went to a British discus thrower named Anya Major because she could spin around to launch her liberating mallet at the video image of Big Brother without getting dizzy,” the L.A. Times blithely announced. Yet the predominantly male audience and the sexualized, heteronormative nature of this “liberation” are all implied in her powerfully feminine (and jiggly) standout role — that and the phallic hammer smashing the manipulative screen. What is a user? What is an interface? Do we presume that the user is male and the passive interface female? Is this is how we see or expect to find heteronormative sex? Almost instantaneously, the '80s personal computer unleashed a libertarian anti-censorship digital culture of ripping and sharing heteronormative pornography. “Interactive erotica” games like MacPlaymate, created at risk of lawsuit with new graphics software,  allowed presumably male users to assert sexual power on the interface of highly feminized digital bodies, taking advantage of user features designed to conceal (and encourage) its use as a fake spreadsheet in public workplaces. “A user can strip Maxie garment by garment, force her to engage in a variety of sex acts, some with another woman or with any of six devices from a ‘toy box.’ They can gag, handcuff and shackle her at her spike-heel-shod ankles," reported a journalist in 1988 on women protesting the use of MacPlaymate and other office pornography. Unlike office life, the computer erotica interface affirmed (given Maxie’s pleasurable reactions and lack of autonomous requests) that whatever the user chose to do to Maxie was permissible, hindered only by unseen technical incompatibilities, not her unsmiling or displeased avatar. Co-ed coworkers were another story. “In a meeting room at a Silicon Valley computer firm, it left a group of men ‘giggling and hiding the computer’ when a woman executive walked in unexpectedly,” the complaint reported. Sexualized cultures of power in cyberspace could trump the complex reality of spaces where women could sometimes be in charge and where interest and consent were negotiables requiring two-way communication, not unspoken, entitled givens. Or, you know, someone marginalized had a case of the Feminazi Mondays. Sometimes the sexualized interface enters 3-D space. As April Glaser points out, Ricky Ma’s Scarlett Johansson robot, Mark 1, is different from a celebrity wax figure or action figure: "Mark 1 moves, smiles, and winks.” There’s something uneasy about this transfiguration from action-figure fan culture to the commodified use of a gendered interaction, and it’s not just the uncanny valley. Glaser is apt to point out the relationship between the ripped image on a homemade “ScarJo bot” and possessive celebrity cyberstalking, but there is also a connection to the commodifications of women’s appearance and interactive behavior that everyday victims of street harassment know all too well. (Yes, all women). Pornography definitively changes when you Photoshop a coworker’s face onto it and brag about doing so. As the age-old problem of women’s bodies-as-public-property collides with both our gendered use-value of female celebrity and the private robot commodity-body, we should be concerned about what, exactly, our tech is supposed to be gloriously democratizing. (But don't worry — smile!) The ways we have failed to acknowledge how gender exploitation operates culturally in popular tech history appears to be culminating in our development and cultural receptiveness to gendered AI. As Monica Nickelsburg points out, female AI sells. Consumers must not see the harm in it. But even before the feminized AI problem, the disembodied female voices of telephone operators and secretaries historically serviced male-dominated spaces of business and commerce. Although telephonic technology became feminized in order to take advantage of a category of low-wage earners with more maturity and skill than teenage boys, the cultural requirements on telephone workers' age, attractiveness and marital status — as well as their depiction as feminine heroes in company propaganda — helped to control and ease male anxieties about women being in the public sphere in the first place. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEy7Z... Even scarier were the prospects that the same telephonic technology networking the city to liberate growth could also permit anonymous collusion, subversion and crime. The female operator’s disembodied voice, which underwent strict industry training for proper inflection, politeness and eradication of class or ethnic accents, resulted in a naturalized feminine commodity that women were “suitable” for, representing male authority and continued order within modern technological upheaval. Independent of labor and economics, this cultural hierarchy was reflected in corporate etiquette literature cautioning naughty girls against calling boys or talking too much. (Don’t worry, dating is, like, totally different now). It is important to distinguish here that feminine or feminized tech doesn't necessarily improve gender inequities in any meaningful way (like closing the gender pay gap would). Our understanding of technological comfort and propriety still goes to the invisibly gendered and heteronormative ways through which we have historically seen the user, the control of technology, and public and private space. And as widespread problems with the online harassment of women in social media and gaming has illustrated, female voices aren’t comforting in and of themselves, especially when they have something autonomous to say that’s not in the manual. It's plausible that tech is funneled into passive, agreeable female interfaces because we want our women — like our interfaces — to be passive and agreeable. Along the way, a compliant, servicing female voice establishes comfort with AI. Perhaps the largest danger in the ubiquity of women’s voices used in AI is in its ability to conceal the fact that women online “are being attacked for speaking out, as has happened since the beginning of times in our society”;  meanwhile, an astonishing number of countries choose to do nothing about the intimidation of vocal women. Beyond the technologized spectrum, from online harassment to unthinking reach for a pleasant female AI, assertive communication by women continues to draw a cultural spectrum of norm-policing — ranging from the life-threatening to the colorfully gendered and (even sometimes polite) ad wominems, shamings, and discussion avoidances of Liberalism. Perhaps our concerns for female AI in the tech world creates the illusion that we care personally, politically and policy-wise, about what women think and have to say in ways that would require reflection of us, even mining our own subjectivities of fear and control. In terms of a jump from Siri to soliciting sexbots without abandon, service and sexual labor is indeed traditionally feminized and born of gendered inequalities, and this is being reflected in our technologized upgrades. I personally don’t care much about a future of men having sex with robots, but rather the norms and biases of women that gendered and heteronormative tech comes from and perpetuates, how it seeps outside boundaries to culturally reinforce pay gaps, feminized professions, unequal relationships and orgasm gaps, the power dynamics of sex work, disproportionate violence and poverty, and the ways we react to assertive women with misogynistic fear, hatred and scorn. These are some of the ways that gendered and heteronormative culture cuts off basic agency, respect and opportunities. As Gloria Steinem so aptly pointed out, on the science fiction work of Octavia Butler, “a future based on new science and new technology ... also shows the results of old human behavior that guides them.”

Continue Reading...

X’s John Doe gets spiritual: “I believe in things that you can’t see acting on the way things turn out”

For four decades, John Doe’s been the sturdy and surly voice of Los Angeles punk, as singer and songwriter in the genre’s finest band, X. His lengthy solo career has revealed him to be more of a wanderer, exploring various sounds and landscapes. He’s also been a hard-working character actor and poet and will release his new book, "Under the Big Black Sun," (also the title of X’s classic third album) a collaborative memoir, in May. For his new album, "Westerner," Doe ventured to Tuscon, Arizona, home of his late friend Michael Blake (screenwriter of the Oscar-winning epic "Dances with Wolves") and the studio of producer and performer Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, to achieve his unique rootsy, spacious quality. The result recalls the quieter Doors, various psychedelic Nuggets and a healthy amount of Americana folk. Here, Doe discusses the album, the book, the West and X’s upcoming fortieth anniversary (yes, fortieth anniversary). You’re originally from the East Coast, but you’ve been on the West Coast for about 40 years now. Do you identify as a “Westerner”? Compared to the East Coast, it’s like a different planet out there. [Laughs] Spoken like a true Easterner. I love Los Angeles, but I feel like I’m from space when I visit. Do you feel like a native? Is the title of the album autobiographical? Yes, it is. I identify as a male, first. [Laughs] I’m joking. What is it about the West that you identify with? Any place that has that kind of vista and horizon. That’s what first struck me about it. But I would agree with you: Los Angeles, especially the emotional state that it puts me in now, is totally another planet. A lot of it had to do with the space and the light. When I first went to L.A. in early ‘76, it just hit me like a brick, just walking out of the airport terminal. There’s a certain texture to the album that reminds me of space and sky and heat. It feels geographically specific. I’m glad that translates, because it was intentional. That’s why I wanted to work with Howe. I think "Hal" has done a really great job in refining that kind of sound. What does your late friend Michael Blake mean to the record? Michael and I met probably 30 years ago. He’s most famous for writing “Dances with Wolves.” He wrote the story and the screenplay and won an Oscar for that, but he also wrote several other historical fiction books that were really simple and all about telling a story. His favorite writer was Jack London, and he was in somewhat the same camp as him. Michael wasn’t quite the adventurer. Michael and I were like brothers. We talked about art, we talked about writing, we talked about everything, our relationships, character or narrator, in most of the songs. The songs are autobiographical too, it’s not just about him. The Native American presence in the Southwest is palpable. I would say that’s what he dedicated his life to. Some people don’t like that movie as much as others, and some people like to poke fun at it. But regardless of your opinion of the movie, it completely changed the modern perception of what Indian culture was like at the time. Before that, it was pretty simple. That was such a commercial success that people had to look at Native American culture in a different way, like, “Oh! Shit!” It’s come around. I really think that Michael is still helping me with this project. It sounds very “woo-woo,” and I don’t care, to be honest. [Laughs.] I saw this image that’s on the cover, and that is also helping Native American causes, because it was a collaboration between Aaron Huey and Shepard Fairey. The photograph was taken up at the Rosebud Reservation, and it’s helping that cause, called “Protect the Sacred” or “Honor the Treaties.” Does playing music allow you to open up more to those kinds of spiritual influences? Yeah, that’s really true. I think it’s something that you either develop as you get older or you choose to ignore. Even though I’m not religious, I’m more and more spiritual. I believe in spirits and I believe in things that you can’t see acting on the way things turn out. Anytime you’re being open, anytime your guard is down, anytime you’re using the right side of your brain I think you’re more open to different ways of explaining things or experiencing things. There are a lot of harmonic vocals on the record, almost reminiscent of what you and Exene [Cervenka, of X] would do. Was this intended to bring out a certain quality? Yeah. Exene and I taught each other great lessons. Exene was also a true friend to Michael, and he actually patterned the main female character in “Dances with Wolves” after Exene and dedicated the book to her. I like singing with somebody else, and I’ve done that a lot. Which song is Chan Marshall on? She's on that song “A Little Help.” And Debbie Harry is on “Go Baby Go.” In Blondie, she is usually a lead singer, but here she’s definitely a little bit more in the background, which was interesting. What was that like in the studio? Debbie is a great singer, but, like you say, she’s not used to singing harmonies that much. So she was asking me, “Is that OK?” And I’m saying, “Look, you can just read the phone book and it’d be fine." It took her a minute to understand and get the line, but then the crazy thing is, she said, “Ok, well, what if I just doubled that?” And I thought, “Sure, why not?” And she did it in one take. It was like she knew exactly what she’s done. And if you think of Debbie’s voice on a lot of Blondie stuff, a lot of it is doubled. So she knows that like the back of her hand. So it took her maybe 45 minutes to work out the part and to get the phrasing right and stuff like that, but then, once that was done, she doubled her own voice in, like, one take. It was insane. It was like totally uncanny. Like, “What did I just experience?” And that was pretty awesome. Have you known her for a long time? Well, yeah, we met a long, long time ago, and then X was lucky enough to do a tour with Blondie; I think it was 2012. She was coming over to our dressing room quite a bit because she really wanted to hang out with Exene, and we kind of hit it off, and I asked it if it would be OK if I called her when I was making a record. Then I found that song, and that song has kind of a '60s garage rock n’ roll vibe to it. There are some sparse songs and some rockers on the album. “Get on Board” really reminded me of The Doors. Really? I take that as a compliment. I’m thinking of the scene in the Oliver Stone film where they go to the desert to take peyote and commune with the spirit world. You have a connection with The Doors through Ray Manzarek, your old producer. Did you think of them at all when you were working on this? I was a big fan of Jim Morrison — his ability to channel that Dionysus thing that people have written about a lot. Someone just asked me about The Doors because I did a tribute to Ray. The question was, “Why did The Doors get a pass in the punk rock world?” And I said, “Because they just represented chaos and they didn’t give a fuck about anything and they were really dark.” Brendan Mullen once told me that it was because Iggy Pop was such a Doors fan. [Laughs] Yeah. But to answer your question, about whether I did think of The Doors: It’s just there. I don’t have to. On the other hand, in that song: a little bit, but more so in another song called “My Darling, Blue Skies.” I heard some of Ray Manzarek (Doors keyboardist and producer of classic era X albums) in the organ. I heard some of The Doors in, just, the beat of it. It sounded a little bit like “Break On Through.” So I thought, “Yes, let’s go for that more.” I’d give a nod to The Doors on that, “My Darling, Blue Skies.” Maybe if you listen to that again you’ll hear it. How did Ray Manzarek’s death affect you? It hit us pretty hard. I thought of Ray as kind of a father figure or, at least, a mentor. At the very beginning, we were completely dumbstruck that he wanted to work with us. It was a dream come true. I think the most difficult part, which would be for anybody with any close, or just a friend passing, it seemed really sudden. No one ever said, “Oh, by the way, Ray’s sick.” Somebody kind of mentioned it to me at a gig and said, “Oh, I heard about Ray.” And I said, “What did you hear about Ray?” And then three weeks later he was gone. The album’s been getting a lot of attention. You’ve seen the business change; is it easier to be heard now? I don’t know. I’m confident that I’m going to do as much as I can and I’m confident that I’ve made the right choice in working with Howe Gelb, and I give him a lot of credit, along with Dave Way, who mixed it. But the biggest challenge now is to rise above the static. There’s so, so much going on. I think it is harder, but I also don’t care ... there is no breakthrough, there. Some people thought that there were X songs that should have been big hits and they didn’t end up getting played on Top 40 radio. Because we were still too weird. You know? People like The Pretenders or Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello, they were a little bit more like ... people could wrap their heads around it, but we were just too weird, and that’s fine. Tell me about your upcoming book, “Under The Big, Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk.” Which is obviously the title of an X record. Is it a memoir or is it more poetic?
 It’s a memoir, but I didn’t do it on my own, mainly because the L.A scene was so collaborative. I used that same sense of collaboration. I wrote four chapters: the beginning, the middle and the end, and then a bunch of inner/additional pieces. Then I enlisted Exene, Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, Jane Wiedlin and El Vez and Dave Alvin, all different people that had been in the scene at the time, and asked them to write a chapter, so they had three to 5,000 words to tell their story. But I also gave them a topic, because I felt like they were expert in certain things . What’s the status of X now? Is Billy Zoom’s health OK? [Zoom was recovering from cancer.] Billy’s health is good. We’re playing a little less this year, just so I can work on the solo record. Because we played quite a bit last year, and then 2017 is our 40th anniversary, so we’re going to do a lot of stuff then. I don’t know if we’ll record, but we’re going to be touring live, and we’ve got a different kind of set going on now, where we call it “in concert,” so some of it is a little more sit-down oriented. But then we also play loud and fast, and so it’s a broader range of X. 40 years is really something... I know. I know! And you know what? Five years ago, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, “Oh my God, that’s so long.” And now it’s celebratory, so you have that to look forward to. I’m assuming you’re younger than I am. After you pass a certain milestone of either age or your perception, it’s like “Yeah! Fuck yeah!”For four decades, John Doe’s been the sturdy and surly voice of Los Angeles punk, as singer and songwriter in the genre’s finest band, X. His lengthy solo career has revealed him to be more of a wanderer, exploring various sounds and landscapes. He’s also been a hard-working character actor and poet and will release his new book, "Under the Big Black Sun," (also the title of X’s classic third album) a collaborative memoir, in May. For his new album, "Westerner," Doe ventured to Tuscon, Arizona, home of his late friend Michael Blake (screenwriter of the Oscar-winning epic "Dances with Wolves") and the studio of producer and performer Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, to achieve his unique rootsy, spacious quality. The result recalls the quieter Doors, various psychedelic Nuggets and a healthy amount of Americana folk. Here, Doe discusses the album, the book, the West and X’s upcoming fortieth anniversary (yes, fortieth anniversary). You’re originally from the East Coast, but you’ve been on the West Coast for about 40 years now. Do you identify as a “Westerner”? Compared to the East Coast, it’s like a different planet out there. [Laughs] Spoken like a true Easterner. I love Los Angeles, but I feel like I’m from space when I visit. Do you feel like a native? Is the title of the album autobiographical? Yes, it is. I identify as a male, first. [Laughs] I’m joking. What is it about the West that you identify with? Any place that has that kind of vista and horizon. That’s what first struck me about it. But I would agree with you: Los Angeles, especially the emotional state that it puts me in now, is totally another planet. A lot of it had to do with the space and the light. When I first went to L.A. in early ‘76, it just hit me like a brick, just walking out of the airport terminal. There’s a certain texture to the album that reminds me of space and sky and heat. It feels geographically specific. I’m glad that translates, because it was intentional. That’s why I wanted to work with Howe. I think "Hal" has done a really great job in refining that kind of sound. What does your late friend Michael Blake mean to the record? Michael and I met probably 30 years ago. He’s most famous for writing “Dances with Wolves.” He wrote the story and the screenplay and won an Oscar for that, but he also wrote several other historical fiction books that were really simple and all about telling a story. His favorite writer was Jack London, and he was in somewhat the same camp as him. Michael wasn’t quite the adventurer. Michael and I were like brothers. We talked about art, we talked about writing, we talked about everything, our relationships, character or narrator, in most of the songs. The songs are autobiographical too, it’s not just about him. The Native American presence in the Southwest is palpable. I would say that’s what he dedicated his life to. Some people don’t like that movie as much as others, and some people like to poke fun at it. But regardless of your opinion of the movie, it completely changed the modern perception of what Indian culture was like at the time. Before that, it was pretty simple. That was such a commercial success that people had to look at Native American culture in a different way, like, “Oh! Shit!” It’s come around. I really think that Michael is still helping me with this project. It sounds very “woo-woo,” and I don’t care, to be honest. [Laughs.] I saw this image that’s on the cover, and that is also helping Native American causes, because it was a collaboration between Aaron Huey and Shepard Fairey. The photograph was taken up at the Rosebud Reservation, and it’s helping that cause, called “Protect the Sacred” or “Honor the Treaties.” Does playing music allow you to open up more to those kinds of spiritual influences? Yeah, that’s really true. I think it’s something that you either develop as you get older or you choose to ignore. Even though I’m not religious, I’m more and more spiritual. I believe in spirits and I believe in things that you can’t see acting on the way things turn out. Anytime you’re being open, anytime your guard is down, anytime you’re using the right side of your brain I think you’re more open to different ways of explaining things or experiencing things. There are a lot of harmonic vocals on the record, almost reminiscent of what you and Exene [Cervenka, of X] would do. Was this intended to bring out a certain quality? Yeah. Exene and I taught each other great lessons. Exene was also a true friend to Michael, and he actually patterned the main female character in “Dances with Wolves” after Exene and dedicated the book to her. I like singing with somebody else, and I’ve done that a lot. Which song is Chan Marshall on? She's on that song “A Little Help.” And Debbie Harry is on “Go Baby Go.” In Blondie, she is usually a lead singer, but here she’s definitely a little bit more in the background, which was interesting. What was that like in the studio? Debbie is a great singer, but, like you say, she’s not used to singing harmonies that much. So she was asking me, “Is that OK?” And I’m saying, “Look, you can just read the phone book and it’d be fine." It took her a minute to understand and get the line, but then the crazy thing is, she said, “Ok, well, what if I just doubled that?” And I thought, “Sure, why not?” And she did it in one take. It was like she knew exactly what she’s done. And if you think of Debbie’s voice on a lot of Blondie stuff, a lot of it is doubled. So she knows that like the back of her hand. So it took her maybe 45 minutes to work out the part and to get the phrasing right and stuff like that, but then, once that was done, she doubled her own voice in, like, one take. It was insane. It was like totally uncanny. Like, “What did I just experience?” And that was pretty awesome. Have you known her for a long time? Well, yeah, we met a long, long time ago, and then X was lucky enough to do a tour with Blondie; I think it was 2012. She was coming over to our dressing room quite a bit because she really wanted to hang out with Exene, and we kind of hit it off, and I asked it if it would be OK if I called her when I was making a record. Then I found that song, and that song has kind of a '60s garage rock n’ roll vibe to it. There are some sparse songs and some rockers on the album. “Get on Board” really reminded me of The Doors. Really? I take that as a compliment. I’m thinking of the scene in the Oliver Stone film where they go to the desert to take peyote and commune with the spirit world. You have a connection with The Doors through Ray Manzarek, your old producer. Did you think of them at all when you were working on this? I was a big fan of Jim Morrison — his ability to channel that Dionysus thing that people have written about a lot. Someone just asked me about The Doors because I did a tribute to Ray. The question was, “Why did The Doors get a pass in the punk rock world?” And I said, “Because they just represented chaos and they didn’t give a fuck about anything and they were really dark.” Brendan Mullen once told me that it was because Iggy Pop was such a Doors fan. [Laughs] Yeah. But to answer your question, about whether I did think of The Doors: It’s just there. I don’t have to. On the other hand, in that song: a little bit, but more so in another song called “My Darling, Blue Skies.” I heard some of Ray Manzarek (Doors keyboardist and producer of classic era X albums) in the organ. I heard some of The Doors in, just, the beat of it. It sounded a little bit like “Break On Through.” So I thought, “Yes, let’s go for that more.” I’d give a nod to The Doors on that, “My Darling, Blue Skies.” Maybe if you listen to that again you’ll hear it. How did Ray Manzarek’s death affect you? It hit us pretty hard. I thought of Ray as kind of a father figure or, at least, a mentor. At the very beginning, we were completely dumbstruck that he wanted to work with us. It was a dream come true. I think the most difficult part, which would be for anybody with any close, or just a friend passing, it seemed really sudden. No one ever said, “Oh, by the way, Ray’s sick.” Somebody kind of mentioned it to me at a gig and said, “Oh, I heard about Ray.” And I said, “What did you hear about Ray?” And then three weeks later he was gone. The album’s been getting a lot of attention. You’ve seen the business change; is it easier to be heard now? I don’t know. I’m confident that I’m going to do as much as I can and I’m confident that I’ve made the right choice in working with Howe Gelb, and I give him a lot of credit, along with Dave Way, who mixed it. But the biggest challenge now is to rise above the static. There’s so, so much going on. I think it is harder, but I also don’t care ... there is no breakthrough, there. Some people thought that there were X songs that should have been big hits and they didn’t end up getting played on Top 40 radio. Because we were still too weird. You know? People like The Pretenders or Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello, they were a little bit more like ... people could wrap their heads around it, but we were just too weird, and that’s fine. Tell me about your upcoming book, “Under The Big, Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk.” Which is obviously the title of an X record. Is it a memoir or is it more poetic?
 It’s a memoir, but I didn’t do it on my own, mainly because the L.A scene was so collaborative. I used that same sense of collaboration. I wrote four chapters: the beginning, the middle and the end, and then a bunch of inner/additional pieces. Then I enlisted Exene, Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, Jane Wiedlin and El Vez and Dave Alvin, all different people that had been in the scene at the time, and asked them to write a chapter, so they had three to 5,000 words to tell their story. But I also gave them a topic, because I felt like they were expert in certain things . What’s the status of X now? Is Billy Zoom’s health OK? [Zoom was recovering from cancer.] Billy’s health is good. We’re playing a little less this year, just so I can work on the solo record. Because we played quite a bit last year, and then 2017 is our 40th anniversary, so we’re going to do a lot of stuff then. I don’t know if we’ll record, but we’re going to be touring live, and we’ve got a different kind of set going on now, where we call it “in concert,” so some of it is a little more sit-down oriented. But then we also play loud and fast, and so it’s a broader range of X. 40 years is really something... I know. I know! And you know what? Five years ago, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, “Oh my God, that’s so long.” And now it’s celebratory, so you have that to look forward to. I’m assuming you’re younger than I am. After you pass a certain milestone of either age or your perception, it’s like “Yeah! Fuck yeah!”For four decades, John Doe’s been the sturdy and surly voice of Los Angeles punk, as singer and songwriter in the genre’s finest band, X. His lengthy solo career has revealed him to be more of a wanderer, exploring various sounds and landscapes. He’s also been a hard-working character actor and poet and will release his new book, "Under the Big Black Sun," (also the title of X’s classic third album) a collaborative memoir, in May. For his new album, "Westerner," Doe ventured to Tuscon, Arizona, home of his late friend Michael Blake (screenwriter of the Oscar-winning epic "Dances with Wolves") and the studio of producer and performer Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, to achieve his unique rootsy, spacious quality. The result recalls the quieter Doors, various psychedelic Nuggets and a healthy amount of Americana folk. Here, Doe discusses the album, the book, the West and X’s upcoming fortieth anniversary (yes, fortieth anniversary). You’re originally from the East Coast, but you’ve been on the West Coast for about 40 years now. Do you identify as a “Westerner”? Compared to the East Coast, it’s like a different planet out there. [Laughs] Spoken like a true Easterner. I love Los Angeles, but I feel like I’m from space when I visit. Do you feel like a native? Is the title of the album autobiographical? Yes, it is. I identify as a male, first. [Laughs] I’m joking. What is it about the West that you identify with? Any place that has that kind of vista and horizon. That’s what first struck me about it. But I would agree with you: Los Angeles, especially the emotional state that it puts me in now, is totally another planet. A lot of it had to do with the space and the light. When I first went to L.A. in early ‘76, it just hit me like a brick, just walking out of the airport terminal. There’s a certain texture to the album that reminds me of space and sky and heat. It feels geographically specific. I’m glad that translates, because it was intentional. That’s why I wanted to work with Howe. I think "Hal" has done a really great job in refining that kind of sound. What does your late friend Michael Blake mean to the record? Michael and I met probably 30 years ago. He’s most famous for writing “Dances with Wolves.” He wrote the story and the screenplay and won an Oscar for that, but he also wrote several other historical fiction books that were really simple and all about telling a story. His favorite writer was Jack London, and he was in somewhat the same camp as him. Michael wasn’t quite the adventurer. Michael and I were like brothers. We talked about art, we talked about writing, we talked about everything, our relationships, character or narrator, in most of the songs. The songs are autobiographical too, it’s not just about him. The Native American presence in the Southwest is palpable. I would say that’s what he dedicated his life to. Some people don’t like that movie as much as others, and some people like to poke fun at it. But regardless of your opinion of the movie, it completely changed the modern perception of what Indian culture was like at the time. Before that, it was pretty simple. That was such a commercial success that people had to look at Native American culture in a different way, like, “Oh! Shit!” It’s come around. I really think that Michael is still helping me with this project. It sounds very “woo-woo,” and I don’t care, to be honest. [Laughs.] I saw this image that’s on the cover, and that is also helping Native American causes, because it was a collaboration between Aaron Huey and Shepard Fairey. The photograph was taken up at the Rosebud Reservation, and it’s helping that cause, called “Protect the Sacred” or “Honor the Treaties.” Does playing music allow you to open up more to those kinds of spiritual influences? Yeah, that’s really true. I think it’s something that you either develop as you get older or you choose to ignore. Even though I’m not religious, I’m more and more spiritual. I believe in spirits and I believe in things that you can’t see acting on the way things turn out. Anytime you’re being open, anytime your guard is down, anytime you’re using the right side of your brain I think you’re more open to different ways of explaining things or experiencing things. There are a lot of harmonic vocals on the record, almost reminiscent of what you and Exene [Cervenka, of X] would do. Was this intended to bring out a certain quality? Yeah. Exene and I taught each other great lessons. Exene was also a true friend to Michael, and he actually patterned the main female character in “Dances with Wolves” after Exene and dedicated the book to her. I like singing with somebody else, and I’ve done that a lot. Which song is Chan Marshall on? She's on that song “A Little Help.” And Debbie Harry is on “Go Baby Go.” In Blondie, she is usually a lead singer, but here she’s definitely a little bit more in the background, which was interesting. What was that like in the studio? Debbie is a great singer, but, like you say, she’s not used to singing harmonies that much. So she was asking me, “Is that OK?” And I’m saying, “Look, you can just read the phone book and it’d be fine." It took her a minute to understand and get the line, but then the crazy thing is, she said, “Ok, well, what if I just doubled that?” And I thought, “Sure, why not?” And she did it in one take. It was like she knew exactly what she’s done. And if you think of Debbie’s voice on a lot of Blondie stuff, a lot of it is doubled. So she knows that like the back of her hand. So it took her maybe 45 minutes to work out the part and to get the phrasing right and stuff like that, but then, once that was done, she doubled her own voice in, like, one take. It was insane. It was like totally uncanny. Like, “What did I just experience?” And that was pretty awesome. Have you known her for a long time? Well, yeah, we met a long, long time ago, and then X was lucky enough to do a tour with Blondie; I think it was 2012. She was coming over to our dressing room quite a bit because she really wanted to hang out with Exene, and we kind of hit it off, and I asked it if it would be OK if I called her when I was making a record. Then I found that song, and that song has kind of a '60s garage rock n’ roll vibe to it. There are some sparse songs and some rockers on the album. “Get on Board” really reminded me of The Doors. Really? I take that as a compliment. I’m thinking of the scene in the Oliver Stone film where they go to the desert to take peyote and commune with the spirit world. You have a connection with The Doors through Ray Manzarek, your old producer. Did you think of them at all when you were working on this? I was a big fan of Jim Morrison — his ability to channel that Dionysus thing that people have written about a lot. Someone just asked me about The Doors because I did a tribute to Ray. The question was, “Why did The Doors get a pass in the punk rock world?” And I said, “Because they just represented chaos and they didn’t give a fuck about anything and they were really dark.” Brendan Mullen once told me that it was because Iggy Pop was such a Doors fan. [Laughs] Yeah. But to answer your question, about whether I did think of The Doors: It’s just there. I don’t have to. On the other hand, in that song: a little bit, but more so in another song called “My Darling, Blue Skies.” I heard some of Ray Manzarek (Doors keyboardist and producer of classic era X albums) in the organ. I heard some of The Doors in, just, the beat of it. It sounded a little bit like “Break On Through.” So I thought, “Yes, let’s go for that more.” I’d give a nod to The Doors on that, “My Darling, Blue Skies.” Maybe if you listen to that again you’ll hear it. How did Ray Manzarek’s death affect you? It hit us pretty hard. I thought of Ray as kind of a father figure or, at least, a mentor. At the very beginning, we were completely dumbstruck that he wanted to work with us. It was a dream come true. I think the most difficult part, which would be for anybody with any close, or just a friend passing, it seemed really sudden. No one ever said, “Oh, by the way, Ray’s sick.” Somebody kind of mentioned it to me at a gig and said, “Oh, I heard about Ray.” And I said, “What did you hear about Ray?” And then three weeks later he was gone. The album’s been getting a lot of attention. You’ve seen the business change; is it easier to be heard now? I don’t know. I’m confident that I’m going to do as much as I can and I’m confident that I’ve made the right choice in working with Howe Gelb, and I give him a lot of credit, along with Dave Way, who mixed it. But the biggest challenge now is to rise above the static. There’s so, so much going on. I think it is harder, but I also don’t care ... there is no breakthrough, there. Some people thought that there were X songs that should have been big hits and they didn’t end up getting played on Top 40 radio. Because we were still too weird. You know? People like The Pretenders or Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello, they were a little bit more like ... people could wrap their heads around it, but we were just too weird, and that’s fine. Tell me about your upcoming book, “Under The Big, Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk.” Which is obviously the title of an X record. Is it a memoir or is it more poetic?
 It’s a memoir, but I didn’t do it on my own, mainly because the L.A scene was so collaborative. I used that same sense of collaboration. I wrote four chapters: the beginning, the middle and the end, and then a bunch of inner/additional pieces. Then I enlisted Exene, Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, Jane Wiedlin and El Vez and Dave Alvin, all different people that had been in the scene at the time, and asked them to write a chapter, so they had three to 5,000 words to tell their story. But I also gave them a topic, because I felt like they were expert in certain things . What’s the status of X now? Is Billy Zoom’s health OK? [Zoom was recovering from cancer.] Billy’s health is good. We’re playing a little less this year, just so I can work on the solo record. Because we played quite a bit last year, and then 2017 is our 40th anniversary, so we’re going to do a lot of stuff then. I don’t know if we’ll record, but we’re going to be touring live, and we’ve got a different kind of set going on now, where we call it “in concert,” so some of it is a little more sit-down oriented. But then we also play loud and fast, and so it’s a broader range of X. 40 years is really something... I know. I know! And you know what? Five years ago, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, “Oh my God, that’s so long.” And now it’s celebratory, so you have that to look forward to. I’m assuming you’re younger than I am. After you pass a certain milestone of either age or your perception, it’s like “Yeah! Fuck yeah!”For four decades, John Doe’s been the sturdy and surly voice of Los Angeles punk, as singer and songwriter in the genre’s finest band, X. His lengthy solo career has revealed him to be more of a wanderer, exploring various sounds and landscapes. He’s also been a hard-working character actor and poet and will release his new book, "Under the Big Black Sun," (also the title of X’s classic third album) a collaborative memoir, in May. For his new album, "Westerner," Doe ventured to Tuscon, Arizona, home of his late friend Michael Blake (screenwriter of the Oscar-winning epic "Dances with Wolves") and the studio of producer and performer Howe Gelb of Giant Sand, to achieve his unique rootsy, spacious quality. The result recalls the quieter Doors, various psychedelic Nuggets and a healthy amount of Americana folk. Here, Doe discusses the album, the book, the West and X’s upcoming fortieth anniversary (yes, fortieth anniversary). You’re originally from the East Coast, but you’ve been on the West Coast for about 40 years now. Do you identify as a “Westerner”? Compared to the East Coast, it’s like a different planet out there. [Laughs] Spoken like a true Easterner. I love Los Angeles, but I feel like I’m from space when I visit. Do you feel like a native? Is the title of the album autobiographical? Yes, it is. I identify as a male, first. [Laughs] I’m joking. What is it about the West that you identify with? Any place that has that kind of vista and horizon. That’s what first struck me about it. But I would agree with you: Los Angeles, especially the emotional state that it puts me in now, is totally another planet. A lot of it had to do with the space and the light. When I first went to L.A. in early ‘76, it just hit me like a brick, just walking out of the airport terminal. There’s a certain texture to the album that reminds me of space and sky and heat. It feels geographically specific. I’m glad that translates, because it was intentional. That’s why I wanted to work with Howe. I think "Hal" has done a really great job in refining that kind of sound. What does your late friend Michael Blake mean to the record? Michael and I met probably 30 years ago. He’s most famous for writing “Dances with Wolves.” He wrote the story and the screenplay and won an Oscar for that, but he also wrote several other historical fiction books that were really simple and all about telling a story. His favorite writer was Jack London, and he was in somewhat the same camp as him. Michael wasn’t quite the adventurer. Michael and I were like brothers. We talked about art, we talked about writing, we talked about everything, our relationships, character or narrator, in most of the songs. The songs are autobiographical too, it’s not just about him. The Native American presence in the Southwest is palpable. I would say that’s what he dedicated his life to. Some people don’t like that movie as much as others, and some people like to poke fun at it. But regardless of your opinion of the movie, it completely changed the modern perception of what Indian culture was like at the time. Before that, it was pretty simple. That was such a commercial success that people had to look at Native American culture in a different way, like, “Oh! Shit!” It’s come around. I really think that Michael is still helping me with this project. It sounds very “woo-woo,” and I don’t care, to be honest. [Laughs.] I saw this image that’s on the cover, and that is also helping Native American causes, because it was a collaboration between Aaron Huey and Shepard Fairey. The photograph was taken up at the Rosebud Reservation, and it’s helping that cause, called “Protect the Sacred” or “Honor the Treaties.” Does playing music allow you to open up more to those kinds of spiritual influences? Yeah, that’s really true. I think it’s something that you either develop as you get older or you choose to ignore. Even though I’m not religious, I’m more and more spiritual. I believe in spirits and I believe in things that you can’t see acting on the way things turn out. Anytime you’re being open, anytime your guard is down, anytime you’re using the right side of your brain I think you’re more open to different ways of explaining things or experiencing things. There are a lot of harmonic vocals on the record, almost reminiscent of what you and Exene [Cervenka, of X] would do. Was this intended to bring out a certain quality? Yeah. Exene and I taught each other great lessons. Exene was also a true friend to Michael, and he actually patterned the main female character in “Dances with Wolves” after Exene and dedicated the book to her. I like singing with somebody else, and I’ve done that a lot. Which song is Chan Marshall on? She's on that song “A Little Help.” And Debbie Harry is on “Go Baby Go.” In Blondie, she is usually a lead singer, but here she’s definitely a little bit more in the background, which was interesting. What was that like in the studio? Debbie is a great singer, but, like you say, she’s not used to singing harmonies that much. So she was asking me, “Is that OK?” And I’m saying, “Look, you can just read the phone book and it’d be fine." It took her a minute to understand and get the line, but then the crazy thing is, she said, “Ok, well, what if I just doubled that?” And I thought, “Sure, why not?” And she did it in one take. It was like she knew exactly what she’s done. And if you think of Debbie’s voice on a lot of Blondie stuff, a lot of it is doubled. So she knows that like the back of her hand. So it took her maybe 45 minutes to work out the part and to get the phrasing right and stuff like that, but then, once that was done, she doubled her own voice in, like, one take. It was insane. It was like totally uncanny. Like, “What did I just experience?” And that was pretty awesome. Have you known her for a long time? Well, yeah, we met a long, long time ago, and then X was lucky enough to do a tour with Blondie; I think it was 2012. She was coming over to our dressing room quite a bit because she really wanted to hang out with Exene, and we kind of hit it off, and I asked it if it would be OK if I called her when I was making a record. Then I found that song, and that song has kind of a '60s garage rock n’ roll vibe to it. There are some sparse songs and some rockers on the album. “Get on Board” really reminded me of The Doors. Really? I take that as a compliment. I’m thinking of the scene in the Oliver Stone film where they go to the desert to take peyote and commune with the spirit world. You have a connection with The Doors through Ray Manzarek, your old producer. Did you think of them at all when you were working on this? I was a big fan of Jim Morrison — his ability to channel that Dionysus thing that people have written about a lot. Someone just asked me about The Doors because I did a tribute to Ray. The question was, “Why did The Doors get a pass in the punk rock world?” And I said, “Because they just represented chaos and they didn’t give a fuck about anything and they were really dark.” Brendan Mullen once told me that it was because Iggy Pop was such a Doors fan. [Laughs] Yeah. But to answer your question, about whether I did think of The Doors: It’s just there. I don’t have to. On the other hand, in that song: a little bit, but more so in another song called “My Darling, Blue Skies.” I heard some of Ray Manzarek (Doors keyboardist and producer of classic era X albums) in the organ. I heard some of The Doors in, just, the beat of it. It sounded a little bit like “Break On Through.” So I thought, “Yes, let’s go for that more.” I’d give a nod to The Doors on that, “My Darling, Blue Skies.” Maybe if you listen to that again you’ll hear it. How did Ray Manzarek’s death affect you? It hit us pretty hard. I thought of Ray as kind of a father figure or, at least, a mentor. At the very beginning, we were completely dumbstruck that he wanted to work with us. It was a dream come true. I think the most difficult part, which would be for anybody with any close, or just a friend passing, it seemed really sudden. No one ever said, “Oh, by the way, Ray’s sick.” Somebody kind of mentioned it to me at a gig and said, “Oh, I heard about Ray.” And I said, “What did you hear about Ray?” And then three weeks later he was gone. The album’s been getting a lot of attention. You’ve seen the business change; is it easier to be heard now? I don’t know. I’m confident that I’m going to do as much as I can and I’m confident that I’ve made the right choice in working with Howe Gelb, and I give him a lot of credit, along with Dave Way, who mixed it. But the biggest challenge now is to rise above the static. There’s so, so much going on. I think it is harder, but I also don’t care ... there is no breakthrough, there. Some people thought that there were X songs that should have been big hits and they didn’t end up getting played on Top 40 radio. Because we were still too weird. You know? People like The Pretenders or Nick Lowe or Elvis Costello, they were a little bit more like ... people could wrap their heads around it, but we were just too weird, and that’s fine. Tell me about your upcoming book, “Under The Big, Black Sun: A Personal History of LA Punk.” Which is obviously the title of an X record. Is it a memoir or is it more poetic?
 It’s a memoir, but I didn’t do it on my own, mainly because the L.A scene was so collaborative. I used that same sense of collaboration. I wrote four chapters: the beginning, the middle and the end, and then a bunch of inner/additional pieces. Then I enlisted Exene, Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, Jane Wiedlin and El Vez and Dave Alvin, all different people that had been in the scene at the time, and asked them to write a chapter, so they had three to 5,000 words to tell their story. But I also gave them a topic, because I felt like they were expert in certain things . What’s the status of X now? Is Billy Zoom’s health OK? [Zoom was recovering from cancer.] Billy’s health is good. We’re playing a little less this year, just so I can work on the solo record. Because we played quite a bit last year, and then 2017 is our 40th anniversary, so we’re going to do a lot of stuff then. I don’t know if we’ll record, but we’re going to be touring live, and we’ve got a different kind of set going on now, where we call it “in concert,” so some of it is a little more sit-down oriented. But then we also play loud and fast, and so it’s a broader range of X. 40 years is really something... I know. I know! And you know what? Five years ago, 10 years ago, I would’ve said, “Oh my God, that’s so long.” And now it’s celebratory, so you have that to look forward to. I’m assuming you’re younger than I am. After you pass a certain milestone of either age or your perception, it’s like “Yeah! Fuck yeah!”

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Spreading hate has backfired on right-wing media: How Fox News unwittingly destroyed the Republican Party

The Republican Party is in a pickle. The Party itself despises its own two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This is a remarkable oddity just in itself. But there is good reason for it. Both of these candidates are so extreme and disastrous that they will almost certainly never be able to win a national election for the Republican Party. But much worse, if and when one of these candidates does become the Republican Party’s nominee, the GOP could very well be torn asunder into factions. This could devastate the party for years or even decades to come. The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight. The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television. Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few. And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging.  As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect.  The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth.  It is a remarkable phenomenon. From Nazi Germany in the 1930s to Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, history is replete with examples of propaganda's effectiveness as a tool for shaping public opinion. Propaganda is powerful stuff.  Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated. In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio.  This network is constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent messaging.  And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive. The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians. Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights.  Your freedom is about to disappear.  Your religious liberties will be stripped away.  You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions.  Free choice will be gone.  Your children will suffer.  Even though you are just an innocent person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized! Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us.  The particular targeted group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same. And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful.  If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, typically from Congress. Now, a political platform comprised of nothing more than hate and anger is not a very viable or sustainable political strategy, especially for a national party like the Republican Party. It may be a good strategy for a specific election or an isolated situation, but an entire political party cannot endure based upon only a message of outrage and opposition. So why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. In fact, it’s not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican master plan, but of market economics. The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party.  It is not supported by donations from people seeking political expression.  It was created for one central purpose: to make money. The founding motivation and the driving force behind all of this propaganda of hate and anger that is being disseminated throughout our society is nothing more than the almighty dollar.  It is a business, pure and simple. And, as it turns out, the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one. Rush Limbaugh raked in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue. If these frontmen are making this much money, well then you know that their corporate masters are making even more. Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire.  Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion.  And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion. This is Big Business. It is no joke.  We are not talking about some folks just yearning to express their opinions.  No.  This operation is not being driven by politics or by a desire to promulgate political viewpoints.  No.  This operation is being driven by money. Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies.  Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits.  And this, of course, is the Republican Party.  So it makes perfect sense that this extremist media network would use its megaphone to attempt to influence politics by urging support for the right-wing Republican Party. Today, the bottom line is money.  Politics is secondary.  While the media content is highly political, the purpose behind influencing politics is to serve the primary objective of protecting the big profits. Corporate profits are what led to the creation and expansion of this extremist right-wing media network.  And it is indeed a cozy little business model.  The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity and anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing political party that best protects the network’s own profits. It’s like a rigged game.  The content disseminated over the network masquerades as being objective and informative, but in reality the content has instead been carefully designed to promote the network’s own business interests. What is best for corporate profits, however, is not necessarily best for a democratic society. From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and hate within a nation’s own population.  And it is not very wise to inflame hostility and rage against a nation’s own government.  From a business perspective, sure, it is perfectly understandable because a corporation can exploit this and profit handsomely from it.  But from a political perspective of creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous. Responsible politicians certainly know better and would never endorse any enterprise seeking to inflame anger and hostility in the population.  A true political leader would not participate in any such conduct, but instead would speak out against it.  A true political leader would not condone the dissemination of false and misleading information, but instead would seek to correct it with accuracy.  A true political leader would not sacrifice unity in society in order to capture a few easy votes, but instead would uphold his or her principles and integrity even at the risk of losing votes. That is genuine political leadership.  Doing what is best for society, even in the face of adversity. But politicians in the Republican Party could not resist.  The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support.  Even though the extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to Republican politicians. An unholy alliance was formed.  The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party. The allure of easy votes was too great.  Exercising true leadership was too difficult. So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division.  And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon.  They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation. And guess what?  It worked. The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry.  Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater.  Their sense of victimization became ever more acute.  Their fury at the establishment boiled over. And then, predictably, it backfired. The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself.  It has become a monster of its own that is now roaming the countryside and terrorizing the very political party that created it. This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but the party has no idea how to slay these dragons. These candidates now pose the enormous threat of causing a split within the Party that could lead to the utter destruction of the entire Republican Party itself. It is a remarkable story. The Republican Party has enjoyed its dance with the devil.  Now it must pay the piper.The Republican Party is in a pickle. The Party itself despises its own two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This is a remarkable oddity just in itself. But there is good reason for it. Both of these candidates are so extreme and disastrous that they will almost certainly never be able to win a national election for the Republican Party. But much worse, if and when one of these candidates does become the Republican Party’s nominee, the GOP could very well be torn asunder into factions. This could devastate the party for years or even decades to come. The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight. The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television. Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few. And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging.  As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect.  The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth.  It is a remarkable phenomenon. From Nazi Germany in the 1930s to Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, history is replete with examples of propaganda's effectiveness as a tool for shaping public opinion. Propaganda is powerful stuff.  Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated. In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio.  This network is constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent messaging.  And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive. The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians. Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights.  Your freedom is about to disappear.  Your religious liberties will be stripped away.  You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions.  Free choice will be gone.  Your children will suffer.  Even though you are just an innocent person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized! Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us.  The particular targeted group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same. And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful.  If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, typically from Congress. Now, a political platform comprised of nothing more than hate and anger is not a very viable or sustainable political strategy, especially for a national party like the Republican Party. It may be a good strategy for a specific election or an isolated situation, but an entire political party cannot endure based upon only a message of outrage and opposition. So why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. In fact, it’s not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican master plan, but of market economics. The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party.  It is not supported by donations from people seeking political expression.  It was created for one central purpose: to make money. The founding motivation and the driving force behind all of this propaganda of hate and anger that is being disseminated throughout our society is nothing more than the almighty dollar.  It is a business, pure and simple. And, as it turns out, the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one. Rush Limbaugh raked in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue. If these frontmen are making this much money, well then you know that their corporate masters are making even more. Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire.  Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion.  And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion. This is Big Business. It is no joke.  We are not talking about some folks just yearning to express their opinions.  No.  This operation is not being driven by politics or by a desire to promulgate political viewpoints.  No.  This operation is being driven by money. Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies.  Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits.  And this, of course, is the Republican Party.  So it makes perfect sense that this extremist media network would use its megaphone to attempt to influence politics by urging support for the right-wing Republican Party. Today, the bottom line is money.  Politics is secondary.  While the media content is highly political, the purpose behind influencing politics is to serve the primary objective of protecting the big profits. Corporate profits are what led to the creation and expansion of this extremist right-wing media network.  And it is indeed a cozy little business model.  The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity and anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing political party that best protects the network’s own profits. It’s like a rigged game.  The content disseminated over the network masquerades as being objective and informative, but in reality the content has instead been carefully designed to promote the network’s own business interests. What is best for corporate profits, however, is not necessarily best for a democratic society. From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and hate within a nation’s own population.  And it is not very wise to inflame hostility and rage against a nation’s own government.  From a business perspective, sure, it is perfectly understandable because a corporation can exploit this and profit handsomely from it.  But from a political perspective of creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous. Responsible politicians certainly know better and would never endorse any enterprise seeking to inflame anger and hostility in the population.  A true political leader would not participate in any such conduct, but instead would speak out against it.  A true political leader would not condone the dissemination of false and misleading information, but instead would seek to correct it with accuracy.  A true political leader would not sacrifice unity in society in order to capture a few easy votes, but instead would uphold his or her principles and integrity even at the risk of losing votes. That is genuine political leadership.  Doing what is best for society, even in the face of adversity. But politicians in the Republican Party could not resist.  The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support.  Even though the extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to Republican politicians. An unholy alliance was formed.  The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party. The allure of easy votes was too great.  Exercising true leadership was too difficult. So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division.  And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon.  They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation. And guess what?  It worked. The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry.  Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater.  Their sense of victimization became ever more acute.  Their fury at the establishment boiled over. And then, predictably, it backfired. The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself.  It has become a monster of its own that is now roaming the countryside and terrorizing the very political party that created it. This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but the party has no idea how to slay these dragons. These candidates now pose the enormous threat of causing a split within the Party that could lead to the utter destruction of the entire Republican Party itself. It is a remarkable story. The Republican Party has enjoyed its dance with the devil.  Now it must pay the piper.The Republican Party is in a pickle. The Party itself despises its own two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This is a remarkable oddity just in itself. But there is good reason for it. Both of these candidates are so extreme and disastrous that they will almost certainly never be able to win a national election for the Republican Party. But much worse, if and when one of these candidates does become the Republican Party’s nominee, the GOP could very well be torn asunder into factions. This could devastate the party for years or even decades to come. The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight. The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base of its own party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed onto television. Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few. And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is barraged with a stream of consistent messaging.  As ordinary people go about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day in and day out, to the same messages in numerous forms and by numerous people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect.  The audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth.  It is a remarkable phenomenon. From Nazi Germany in the 1930s to Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s, history is replete with examples of propaganda's effectiveness as a tool for shaping public opinion. Propaganda is powerful stuff.  Many people are susceptible to it and can be swayed by it, especially the less educated. In America today, right-wing media is engaged in this very same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio.  This network is constantly barraging its audience with a stream of consistent messaging.  And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive. The messaging consists of common themes that recur in various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition to government, especially so-called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians. Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are about to take away your rights.  Your freedom is about to disappear.  Your religious liberties will be stripped away.  You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions.  Free choice will be gone.  Your children will suffer.  Even though you are just an innocent person minding your own business, you are about to be victimized! Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by those who are a little bit different from us.  The particular targeted group changes with the times, but the concept remains the same. And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful.  If a Democrat is in the White House, then the president becomes the favorite bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, typically from Congress. Now, a political platform comprised of nothing more than hate and anger is not a very viable or sustainable political strategy, especially for a national party like the Republican Party. It may be a good strategy for a specific election or an isolated situation, but an entire political party cannot endure based upon only a message of outrage and opposition. So why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. In fact, it’s not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican master plan, but of market economics. The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party.  It is not supported by donations from people seeking political expression.  It was created for one central purpose: to make money. The founding motivation and the driving force behind all of this propaganda of hate and anger that is being disseminated throughout our society is nothing more than the almighty dollar.  It is a business, pure and simple. And, as it turns out, the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one. Rush Limbaugh raked in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue. If these frontmen are making this much money, well then you know that their corporate masters are making even more. Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire.  Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion.  And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion. This is Big Business. It is no joke.  We are not talking about some folks just yearning to express their opinions.  No.  This operation is not being driven by politics or by a desire to promulgate political viewpoints.  No.  This operation is being driven by money. Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies.  Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits.  And this, of course, is the Republican Party.  So it makes perfect sense that this extremist media network would use its megaphone to attempt to influence politics by urging support for the right-wing Republican Party. Today, the bottom line is money.  Politics is secondary.  While the media content is highly political, the purpose behind influencing politics is to serve the primary objective of protecting the big profits. Corporate profits are what led to the creation and expansion of this extremist right-wing media network.  And it is indeed a cozy little business model.  The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity and anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing political party that best protects the network’s own profits. It’s like a rigged game.  The content disseminated over the network masquerades as being objective and informative, but in reality the content has instead been carefully designed to promote the network’s own business interests. What is best for corporate profits, however, is not necessarily best for a democratic society. From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and hate within a nation’s own population.  And it is not very wise to inflame hostility and rage against a nation’s own government.  From a business perspective, sure, it is perfectly understandable because a corporation can exploit this and profit handsomely from it.  But from a political perspective of creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous. Responsible politicians certainly know better and would never endorse any enterprise seeking to inflame anger and hostility in the population.  A true political leader would not participate in any such conduct, but instead would speak out against it.  A true political leader would not condone the dissemination of false and misleading information, but instead would seek to correct it with accuracy.  A true political leader would not sacrifice unity in society in order to capture a few easy votes, but instead would uphold his or her principles and integrity even at the risk of losing votes. That is genuine political leadership.  Doing what is best for society, even in the face of adversity. But politicians in the Republican Party could not resist.  The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that could easily be exploited for political support.  Even though the extremist media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to Republican politicians. An unholy alliance was formed.  The Republican Party would allow the extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican Party. The allure of easy votes was too great.  Exercising true leadership was too difficult. So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out content full of anger, hate, and division.  And Republican politicians jumped on the bandwagon.  They began preaching the same destructive messages and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation. And guess what?  It worked. The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry.  Their resentment against our very own government grew ever greater.  Their sense of victimization became ever more acute.  Their fury at the establishment boiled over. And then, predictably, it backfired. The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself.  It has become a monster of its own that is now roaming the countryside and terrorizing the very political party that created it. This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but the party has no idea how to slay these dragons. These candidates now pose the enormous threat of causing a split within the Party that could lead to the utter destruction of the entire Republican Party itself. It is a remarkable story. The Republican Party has enjoyed its dance with the devil.  Now it must pay the piper.

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