Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 820

“He has no idea what he’s doing”: Twitter tears into Trump for suggesting “some form of punishment” for women who get illegal abortions

In an MSNBC town hall interview with host Chris Matthews — to be aired Wednesday night at 8 p.m. — GOP frontrunner Donald Trump made a severely uninformed comment about his plan to punish women for getting illegal abortions. Asked if he'd criminalize abortion, Trump said, "There has to be some form of punishment." "For the woman?" Matthews clarified. "Yeah," Trump said. When asked if he thought a man should also be held accountable for an abortion, Trump doubled down: "I would say no." True to form, Trump didn't elaborate what that "punishment" would be. His new stance is so far right as to represent a perfect balance of ignorance and pandering. And opponents have taken to his medium of choice, Twitter, to air their grievances: https://twitter.com/elongreen/status/... https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/statu... https://twitter.com/behindyourback/st... https://twitter.com/theshrillest/stat... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/715... https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/... https://twitter.com/irin/status/71524... https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/statu... an MSNBC town hall interview with host Chris Matthews — to be aired Wednesday night at 8 p.m. — GOP frontrunner Donald Trump made a severely uninformed comment about his plan to punish women for getting illegal abortions. Asked if he'd criminalize abortion, Trump said, "There has to be some form of punishment." "For the woman?" Matthews clarified. "Yeah," Trump said. When asked if he thought a man should also be held accountable for an abortion, Trump doubled down: "I would say no." True to form, Trump didn't elaborate what that "punishment" would be. His new stance is so far right as to represent a perfect balance of ignorance and pandering. And opponents have taken to his medium of choice, Twitter, to air their grievances: https://twitter.com/elongreen/status/... https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/statu... https://twitter.com/behindyourback/st... https://twitter.com/theshrillest/stat... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/715... https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/... https://twitter.com/irin/status/71524... https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/statu... an MSNBC town hall interview with host Chris Matthews — to be aired Wednesday night at 8 p.m. — GOP frontrunner Donald Trump made a severely uninformed comment about his plan to punish women for getting illegal abortions. Asked if he'd criminalize abortion, Trump said, "There has to be some form of punishment." "For the woman?" Matthews clarified. "Yeah," Trump said. When asked if he thought a man should also be held accountable for an abortion, Trump doubled down: "I would say no." True to form, Trump didn't elaborate what that "punishment" would be. His new stance is so far right as to represent a perfect balance of ignorance and pandering. And opponents have taken to his medium of choice, Twitter, to air their grievances: https://twitter.com/elongreen/status/... https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/statu... https://twitter.com/behindyourback/st... https://twitter.com/theshrillest/stat... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/715... https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/... https://twitter.com/irin/status/71524... https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/statu... an MSNBC town hall interview with host Chris Matthews — to be aired Wednesday night at 8 p.m. — GOP frontrunner Donald Trump made a severely uninformed comment about his plan to punish women for getting illegal abortions. Asked if he'd criminalize abortion, Trump said, "There has to be some form of punishment." "For the woman?" Matthews clarified. "Yeah," Trump said. When asked if he thought a man should also be held accountable for an abortion, Trump doubled down: "I would say no." True to form, Trump didn't elaborate what that "punishment" would be. His new stance is so far right as to represent a perfect balance of ignorance and pandering. And opponents have taken to his medium of choice, Twitter, to air their grievances: https://twitter.com/elongreen/status/... https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/statu... https://twitter.com/behindyourback/st... https://twitter.com/theshrillest/stat... https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/statu... https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/715... https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/... https://twitter.com/irin/status/71524... https://twitter.com/danpfeiffer/statu...

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Thomas the Tank Engine, neocolonial fantasy: What his new international pals, and the backlash against them, signal

As a young child, I never much cared for Thomas the Tank Engine, who struck me as creepy and coercive (though I believe the word I used at the time was “yucky.”) The book I adored was “The Three Horses: Blackie, Brownie, and Whitey,” a “really bizarre” book that continues to inspire nostalgic devotion for its fascinating illustrations and unapologetic weirdness. It’s the story of three ponies who pass as princesses by wearing big-eyed, white-girl masks. By standing on their hind legs, they literally prance around in fancy dresses, their odd gaits waived away as an aristocratic affectation. Now that I am older, it’s obvious why that book fascinated me. It was an inquiry into race, performance, and whiteness as a normative social construct. The three horses were basically Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms in drag, these being a race of rational beings described in "Gulliver's Travels" that physically resemble horses but are superior to human “yahoos.” Our three horses attempt to humanize themselves as an exercise in reverse Utopianism, violently denying their true natures in exchange for…something. They didn’t actually know. They just knew they were supposed to want to be princesses. In the end, the dresses came off, so did the masks, and the naked horses returned to their free, frolicking, and ineffably colored selves. The book’s message was clear: it’s easy to fool others, but what really matters is how you feel about yourself. Naturally, hardly anyone has heard of “The Three Horses,” because its message is not only subversive, there’s a homoerotic subtext. Hence “weird.” By contrast, Thomas the Tank Engine isn’t just about a train engine with a moon face who gets in and out of trouble with a heavy helping of elbow grease and good cheer. As Stuart Heritage writes in a hilarious piece for The Guardian, everybody knows that Thomas the Tank Engine “is the story of several straight white men who solemnly obey the every passing whim of a white, straight, male dictator [Thomas] in a crude reinforcement of the belief that the working class should know its place.” Precisely because the talking train imparts Progressivist faith in technology achieved via willing obedience to its goals, Thomas the Tank Engine has become a cash cow: he's the keystone of a moneymaking empire that brings in a billion dollars in annual revenue composed of television shows, merchandise tie-ins, and now a straight-to-DVD film called “The Great Race.” Enter controversy. Over what? The fact that Thomas holds out systemic whiteness as a positive social good while reinforcing the message that mass industrialization is the key to prosperity? Or that the working classes should labor for free out of sheer delight to be contributing to society? No, these things are the bedrock of civilization and should forevermore remain jellied in cultural aspic. The trouble is that the film (and its subsequent tie-ins) will be giving Thomas fourteen new friends from other countries, four of which are also female, presenting cringing parents with the spectacle of boy trains rolling with girl trains with names like “Ashima.” Mattel made it plain that the girl trains “would not be a romantic love-interest for Thomas as a love-plot wouldn’t suit their demographic audience,” i.e. toddlers and young grade-schoolers. Whew! But that probably won’t stop anguished think pieces along the lines that Heritage dreamed up, including: “Why must I expose my children to all these sexy trains?” Lest Americans forget, Thomas the Tank Engine is British, wherefore the announcement of Thomas’s new foreign friends made readers of The Daily Mail lose their minds. “I think I’m going to be sick,” one commentator wrote. (Subtext: keep your bloody hands off my childhood!) I sympathize, but it’s adapt or die in the social-Darwinian struggle for survival in the vicious business of toys. Change is difficult, especially when the change forces a revision of misty memories, but the fascinating vitriol in response to the “diversification” of Thomas’ world reveals deeper issues are at stake. In Britain, at least, it poses an existential threat to Queen and Country, wherein the introduction of new trains such as Carlos from Mexico, Yong Bao from China, and Raul from Brazil, do not brightly reflect the realities of a globalized marketplace so much as suggest that yet another cultural battleground has been ceded to Daily Mail commenters' fear of “illegals,” who are poised to steal your jobs and corrupt the children with their foreign ways. Yet the crucial detail about Thomas’s new “foreign” friends is that these trains are all wearing masks, each face ghostly white despite being “Indian,” “Brazilian,” Mexican,” or “Chinese.” Under the bourgeois aegis of globalization, Thomas’ expanded universe is fostering the assimilation of the rest of the world into structural whiteness, and the new “friends” are facilitators of the neocolonialist marketplace. The century-old series’ original message of Civilization through Industrialization remains intact. So Thomas the Tank Engine will chug along, making fistfuls of money by adding more iron horses to the line, expanding a commercial empire that, two centuries ago, created modern time because railways had to be synchronized. I still prefer the story of the three horses, fast evaporating into oblivion because out of step, too slow, definitely strange because even black and brown bodies were worthwhile just as themselves. So weird.

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“World’s biggest bribe scandal”: Report on oil corruption exposes how corporations help destabilize Middle East

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Campbell Brown, charter propagandist: How the former anchorwoman became the face of education reform

Perhaps guided by the old adage that you have to spend money to make money, the champions of education "reform" have poured billions into the effort to privatize and profit from America’s schools. Those funds are used on multiple fronts: launching charter schools, underwriting the political campaigns of politicians, and of course, investing in media to propagate the free-market privatization vision. Among the most visible properties in this effort is the Seventy Four, the well-funded, power broker-backed education news website run by former journalist-turned-school privatization activist Campbell Brown. Launched last year, the site’s reported $4 million annual budget comes from a collective of school privatization’s big hitters: The Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Jonathan Sackler (of OxyContin producer Purdue Pharma) and the Walton Family Foundation. Philanthropy of this sort has an endgame—the privatization of America’s public schools—and media manipulation is an essential part of a winning strategy. Brown, leveraging her longstanding image as a truth-seeking newsperson in service of her new brand as an earnest education reformer, has been indispensable to this effort. As the head of the Seventy Four, under the guise of providing hard-hitting education news, she leads one of the key media efforts to push the anti-union, pro-privatization message of the charterization movement, all while keeping its billionaire backers out of the picture and off the front page. Among those betting on Brown’s brand, the Walton Foundation has been notoriously dogged in its efforts. Run by the family behind Walmart, the foundation has already spent $1 billion over the last 20 years on its education vision and recently committed an additional billion to bolster charter development. Thanks to their bottomless coffers, privatization pushers like Walton not only fund media entities that openly promote their agenda, but contribute to those that don’t seem to carry water for charter marketers at all. According to Walton’s most recent annual report, the foundation provides money to “shape public policy” to a list of grantees that includes the Atlantic Monthly Group, the New York Times and National Public Radio. The art of detecting if and how Walton money affects the editorial tone of these entities is at best imprecise. But for traditional public education defenders, it’s a relationship that merits interrogation. The billionaires and hedge fund millionaires heavily investing in the charter industry, from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Eli Broad and beyond, are engaged in a multi-pronged strategy to take over public schools while building an editorial army of proselytizers to spread the gospel of privatization. Like her partners in the site, Brown has spent years challenging tenure rules, attacking teachers unions and pushing for market-driven education. Unlike her partners, who quietly funnel money into corporate education reform from the shadows, Brown has been both vocal and visible in her advocacy. Though she’s not the only one, she has become the primary media mouthpiece for the school privatization agenda. How did Brown go from journalist to one of the loudest voices for education reform? Two years after leaving television news in 2010, Brown penned a controversial op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In it, she accused teachers unions of “resisting almost any change aimed at improving our public schools,” and suggested that the New York City teachers union helps sexual predators remain in the classroom. Brown wrote that union officials, whom she paints as almost cartoonishly nefarious, have created an arbitration process rigged to favor the guilty. Citing three cases over two school years in which wholly independent arbitrators made poor calls, Brown argued that “New York City's schools chancellor and districts statewide must have the power to fire sexual predators.” In the end, she seemed to suggest the arbitration process should be scrapped altogether. Brown left a lot out of the discussion to make her case stand. For starters, every teacher deserves due process, which unions, the clear target of much of Brown’s ire, fought hard for them to obtain. She ignores the fact that the union contract—an agreement made between the union and the schools chancellor—already includes a zero-tolerance policy for educators found guilty of sexual misconduct. As American Federation of Teachers head Randi Weingarten pointed out to Brown via Twitter, the union only defends teachers against allegations that are found to be false. Arbitrators, it cannot be stressed enough, are independent, and are selected jointly by the union and the New York City Department of Education, both of which can call for removal should they see fit. Andy Kroll, writing in Mother Jones, notes that while Brown makes it seem as if the union pulls the strings in these cases, there’s little about the process it controls. “New York state law...mandates that any teacher convicted of a sex crime be automatically fired. It is the law, not union contracts, that requires that an independent arbitrator hear and mete out punishment in cases of sexual misconduct that fall outside criminal law. The quickest route to changing that policy may be lobbying lawmakers in Albany, not hammering teachers and their unions.” There was one more item Brown neglected to mention in her piece, a bit of information that drew the most attention of all. Her husband, Dan Senor, was at the time an advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and a board member of StudentsFirst. The latter group, founded by former Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, has been on the frontlines of the school privatization fight against teachers unions and in favor of charterization. Media Matters pointed out that Brown’s failure to disclose that information seemed odd, not only because she is a seasoned journalist, but because she had pointed out her connection in a previous editorial she’d written that was critical of Barack Obama. Brown responded with a piece in Slate in which she suggested she was just learning the ropes about this whole journalism thing. “I never thought I was harboring a dark secret. But if you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in.” As Kroll notes, Brown directed a healthy dose of snark at the teachers union, writing, “Here I failed to disclose because I stupidly did not connect the teachers’ unions’ opposition to charter schools to their support for a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct. My sincerest apologies to the teachers unions for not fully appreciating how wrong they are on not one but two issues. As you may have guessed, I am not feeling very apologetic.” Pressing on in her mission, Brown founded and funded a “watchdog group” called the Parents Transparency Project, which in 2013 went so far as to create a $100,000 television ad challenging New York City mayoral candidates to “stand up to the teachers unions.” The commercial essentially accused the union of allowing 128 teachers accused of sexual misconduct to remain in the classroom without facing repercussions. But as the Washington Post noted, those allegations were misleading.

While some teachers accused of misconduct had remained on the job, the ad distorted several aspects of the emotional issue. One is that 33 of them had been fired. The balance were either fined, suspended or transferred for minor, non-criminal complaints. The other was the ad’s implication that the city’s main teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, had impeded the disciplinary process. As the union pointed out, however, under state law, non-criminal complaints against teachers are handled by independent arbitrators. Neither the union nor the mayor had a say in such cases.

The ad had little impact on the mayoral race, but Brown was undeterred. In late 2013, she established the Partnership for Educational Justice (PEJ), a nonprofit singularly dedicated to filing lawsuits to overturn New York’s tenure laws. This was a broader strike on teachers and teachers unions, one which relied on the erroneous idea that student failure could largely be chalked up to educators who remain in the system too long yet fail to do their jobs. Brown’s supporters in this campaign were precisely who you might expect. Though getting her to admit it would prove to be difficult. Who else is backing Brown's website and advocacy groups? Stay with me here, because this can get a little confusing. In 2014, Brown appeared on The Colbert Report to promote the Partnership for Educational Justice, which had just filed a lawsuit to strike down teacher tenure laws in New York State. The suit was modeled on a California case in which a court ruled teacher job protection laws in the state were unconstitutional. (The case is currently being appealed.) Brown cited a number of “facts” in opposition to teacher tenure that have already been refuted by research. Then, when asked by the Comedy Central host where her organization’s money comes from, Brown deflected the question twice, then flat out refused to answer. “I’m not going to reveal who the donors are,” Brown stated, because people opposed to her efforts “are also going to go after people who are funding this.” Despite heading up an organization that claims its mission is to “bring transparency” to education policy, Brown seemed to have decided that same transparency wasn’t required on her part. Oddly, the trusted newsperson-cum-determined privatization proponent steadfastly refused to live up to the principles that ostensibly define both. Mother Jones’ Andy Kroll had by then already reported that Brown’s group had worked with Tusk Strategies, the same consulting firm that previously worked with StudentsFirst, the Michelle Rhee organization where Brown’s husband is a boardmember. Brown’s organization also worked with a Republican consulting firm, Revolution Agency, whose partners, “include Mike Murphy, a well-known pundit and former Romney strategist; Mark Dion, former chief of staff to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.); and Evan Kozlow, former deputy director of the National Republican Congressional Committee.” ("The domain name for Parents Transparency Project's website was registered by two Revolution employees: Jeff Bechdel, Mitt Romney's former Florida spokesman, and Matt Leonardo, who describes himself as 'happily in self-imposed exile from advising Republican candidates.'") Based on IRS filings, Politico determined that between December 2013 and November 2014, Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice raised $3 million. A chunk of those funds, $300,000, was paid to the Incite Agency, a public relations firm founded by former Obama administration press secretary Robert Gibbs and campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. Perhaps this is what Brown means when she says her work is nonpartisan: her efforts are supported by numerous entities pushing to privatize our schools across party lines. It’s worth noting that Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice is also working with Mercury Public Affairs; Stefan Friedman, a partner in the company, sits on the Partnership for Educational Justice’s board. Mercury’s clients include Alliance Charter Schools in Los Angeles, which a court recentlyordered to cease its anti-union organizing efforts. Mercury also counts among its clients Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan* (who presumably hired it to handle spin as he attempts to retain political power despite allowing thousands to be poisoned by lead-tainted water). Another former client of Mercury? Walmart, which fired the agency after one of its staffers pretended to be a reporter to infiltrate a press conference by a pro-labor group. United Teachers Los Angeles union also notes that Mercury currently handles PR for Great Public Schools Now, an initiative backed by billionaire Eli Broad and the Waltons to privatize a significant portion of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Despite her initial refusal to name donor sources, the Walton Family Foundation’s 2014 Annual Report also lists Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice as a grantee, one given the task of “shap[ing] public policy.” (A 2015 New York Magazine interview with Brown also identifies the Broad family as a contributor.) That’s the same Walton Family Foundation that, as previously noted, has invested in Campbell Brown’s education news website the Seventy Four. An investigation by Edushyster also found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Mercury handles PR for the Seventy Four. There are myriad connections between Brown and the pro-charter, anti-union lobby. It’s just a matter of unraveling them. Beyond Brown: Who's funding your education media? It’s not just Brown, though. A look at the back end of education media reveals plenty of outlets that are funded by those seeking to displace public schools in favor of a market-driven system. Media Bullpen, published by Walton grantee Center for Education Reform, bills itself as an education “media watchdog,” and receives funds from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Walton family and the Gates Foundation. (The Columbia Journalism Review notes amanaging editor job ad explicitly sought a “passionate advocate for education reform.”)  Education Post, “a nonprofit, nonpartisan communications organization,” launched with promises to promote “an honest and civil [education] conversation,” as well as $12 million in startup funds provided in part by “the Broad Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies [and] the Walton Family Foundation.” (Per the Washington Post, the site’s three areas of focus are “K-12 academic standards, high-quality charter schools and how best to hold teachers and schools accountable for educating students,” the Holy Trinity of education reform.) Brown’s Seventy-Four, it turns out, is just another holding in the portfolio of the education reform lobby. Not every group is so nakedly apparent in its goals. Well-respected education blogs including Chalkbeat and Education Week both receive funds from the Walton Family Foundation (in the latter case, specifically for “coverage of school choice and parent-empowerment issues,” a long-winded way of saying pro-charter pieces.) The 3,000-strong Education Writers Association receives money from Gates and Walton, while the L.A. Times—which maintains that it retains editorial control—receives funds from Broad for its Education Matters Digital initiative. As mentioned above, the Walton foundation provides money to an unexpected list of progressive entities. As Inside Philanthropy puts it “[i]t's heartening to see philanthropy coming to the rescue of journalism. But the trend is also problematic...Nowhere is the influence of private money over public life more pronounced than in K-12 education and yet, as it turns out, the specialized media most likely to raise questions about the trend are themselves supported by foundations.” We haven’t even gotten to various other media campaigns guided by the invisible hand of school privatizers and built on a foundation of billionaire corporate reform stacks. Gates and Broad both underwrote the multi-year “Education Nation” broadcasting initiative, which brought education-focusedprogramming to NBC staples “such as ‘Nightly News’ and ‘Today’ and on the MSNBC, CNBC and Telemundo TV network.” The Walton Family Foundationreportedly provided the cash for Chicago Public Schools to purchase ad space for videos to spin the closures of 50 traditional public school even as charters increased in the city. Walton was also among the funders for ads pillorying New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio after he rejected three charter proposals from Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies charter chain. (Education blogger Diane Ravitch writes that the commercials “showed the faces of adorable children, all of them being kicked out of ‘their’ school by a vengeful mayor who hates charter schools.”) From union-bashing, teacher-blaming film Waiting For Superman (outreach and engagement funds by Walton; additional supporting monies from a host of school privatizers) to its brethren Won’t Back Down (Walton and other playersfactor in here, too), the level of media infiltration stunning. The Seventy Four and the takeover of America's schools “Our public education system is in crisis” warns the Seventy Four in its mission statement, echoing the refrain of billionaire school privatizers over the last decade plus. It’s evidence that Brown’s latest venture is dedicated to pushing what has become known as the “awfulizing narrative” that America’s schools are broken beyond repair; that teachers, unions and locally elected school boards are to blame; and that the only way to fix our education problem is by dumping one of America’s oldest democratic institutions—public schools—in favor of a market-driven system. After Brown announced the Seventy Four was coming and the site’s backers were named, numerous education watchers wondered aloud whether an education news website underwritten by a collective that has poured billions into school privatization would even attempt to offer impartial journalism. “It is always wise to know who is funding something,” John F. Jennings, founder of the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University, told the Washington Post. “If the ‘new reformers’ are funding [Brown’s] site, and there is no balance of funding from others, I believe the site will be suspect. Sorry, but as they used to say, ‘Money makes the world go 'round,’ and in this instance it may wobble in the direction that the new reformers like. I presume [the site has] integrity, but questions will always be asked about how the topics were picked [and] presented.” In response to the buzz of questions about potential bias in the Seventy Four’s reporting, Brown posted an open letter of sorts to the site. “I have learned that not every story has two sides,” the former reporter wrote. “[I]s The Seventy Four journalism or advocacy? For 74 million reasons, we are both.” This vague admission that the Seventy Four would be taking a side came as no surprise to those who have watched Brown’s trajectory over recent years. And while it hews as close to transparency as can realistically be expected from Brown, it still remains a good distance from full disclosure. The former anchor speaks openly and often in favor of charter schools. She once called herself a “soldier in Eva’s army,” a reference to Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of New York City’s Success Academy Charter Schools. (The chain has been criticized for putting so much pressure on children that they wet themselves during testing, and video recently surfaced of a teacher—whom Moskowitz has since defended—harshly berating a first-grader for a math mistake.) Last year, Brown loudly applauded UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s call “for an end to the country’s traditional public school system, endorsing instead a nationwide conversion to academies, which are essentially the British equivalent of charter schools.” The Seventy Four rarely covers charter missteps, but Brown dedicated an entire article to the demise of three New York City unionized charters, somehow surmising that the problem lies with teachers unions and not charters themselves. “Ms. Brown [has] transformed into the most recognizable face of the combustible school-reform fight,” a New York Times article declared in 2012, back when Brown was still rising to become the full-throated public voice of education reform. Since then, she has become a key media operative in the billionaire-backed effort to push the idea of school privatization. In many ways, thanks to two decades in television and an image as a truth-seeking reporter, it’s a role she was made for. The real cost to taxpayers, parents, students and traditional public schools It is not incidental that those who fund Brown’s groups and projects are the same figures who’ve been instrumental in charterizing school districts across the country. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, there are now 3 million children enrolled in charter schools across 42 states and the District of Columbia. Since 1992, by its own estimation, Brown backer the Walton Family Foundation has “supported a quarter of the 6,700 charter schools created in the United States.” A critical element of the charter campaign lies in convincing Americans that free-market "school choice" is the only route to good schools, and threading that narrative into the mainstream education conversation has helped contribute to the wildfire spread of charters in places like Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. But charter expansion has also had a downside for the school privatization movement, in the form of increased scrutiny on charter performance and delivery on promises made. In study after study, researchers have determined that, on average, charters don’t outperform traditional public schools, and not infrequently fare worse. They accept public funds, but in many cases give day-to-day oversight to private, for-profit organizations. They’re exempt from many regulations that govern traditional public schools, which, depending on the state, can include“‘minimum standards’ covering such things as training and qualifications of personnel; public disclosure of instructional materials, equipment, and facilities; organization, administration, and supervision of schools; and ‘reporting requirements.’” This ability to opt out of the very rules that make public education accessible to all helps further contribute to issues that already plague our schools, such asracial segregation and the achievement gap between white and minority students. A recent Mother Jones piece on the “no excuses” philosophy—the belief by some charter officials “that the smallest infraction...is to be met with an immediate consequence”—notes that punitive measures disproportionately target black children and students with disabilities. And perhaps unsurprisingly, widespread deregulation has led to charges of corruption at charter institutions around the country. “[The] model requires firing all the teachers, no matter their performance, allowing them to reapply for a job, and replacing many of them with inexperienced [Teach For America] recruits,” Ravitch told In These Times, speaking to the charterization of New Orleans schools. “That model requires wiping out public schools and replacing them with privately managed schools that set their own standards for admission, discipline, expulsion, and are financially opaque. These heavy-handed tactics require a suspension of democracy that would not be tolerated in a white suburb, but can be done to powerless urban districts where the children are black and Hispanic.” Despite the light now being cast on school privatization negatives, the Walton Family Foundation and other wealthy privatization advocates continue to promote and support charter schools instead of refocusing most of their giving on the nation’s perpetually underfunded public schools. It’s a strategy that has been questioned by numerous education experts. "What returns have we all seen as a society?" asks Kim Anderson of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union in the country, speaking to the Associated Press. "A billion dollars would provide a tremendous amount of services to a number of school districts around the country. Eyeglasses. Hearing exams. It is not as though we have things in the [traditional] public school systems that don't need to be improved." In fact, school privatizers have relentlessly promoted the idea that putting more money into traditional public schools is actually a bad idea. Yet if you doubt that the education fight is fundamentally about money, consider that Walton recently held a symposium to help hedge funders and other wealthy investors learn how best to get a crack at the $500 billion spent each year on K-12 public education. (Organizers expressly billed the event as a way for attendees to "[l]earn and understand the value of investing in charter schools and best practices for assessing their credit.") The Nation quotes a presenter at the conference, hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, saying it’s “not rocket science” that we shouldn’t put any more money into our public schools. The article goes on to note that New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, echoed this idea when discussing school spending in his State of the Union address last January. “Why do Cuomo and these hedge funders say money doesn’t matter?” Zakiyah Ansari, a parent who also works with the Alliance for Quality Education, asked the Nation. “I’m sure it matters in Scarsdale. I’m sure it matters where the Waltons send their kids. They don’t send their kids to schools with overcrowded classrooms, over-testing, no art, no music, no sports programs, etc. Does money only ‘not matter’ when it comes to black and brown kids?” Instead of more money for schools, school privatizers argue, “school choice” is the solution to underperforming schools. Vouchers and charters, they suggest, are the kids' best hope. Campbell Brown, who like so many in the top-down world of corporate education reform sends her own children to private school, suggests that choice for all is why she has enlisted in the school privatization battle. “Because my kids go to private school, I need to be in the fight," Brown said inan interview with local television station NY1 late last year. "Because I have a choice, I need to make sure everyone else gets a choice, too." But here’s the fallacy at the root of this argument: Many parents choose charters not because they want to, but because without fully funded, high-functioning local public schools, they feel they have to. If your community schools are riddled with problems, of course you’re likely to take a chance on a charter. But that’s a false choice. If we funded education the way we should, across the board, for every student, we wouldn’t need charters. It’s easier to talk about privatizing schools than it is to discuss poverty, racism and other socioeconomic factors that led to the problems in our most struggling schools. Problems which educators are somehow expected to overcome, often without basic provisions. (See: Detroit.) Growing awareness of evidence showing charters are not the miraculous cure-alls they’ve long been touted as has contributed to a slow but growing—and meaningful—resistance to school privatization. Billionaire backers of charters are aware of this mounting pushback and are also increasingly aware that they need messengers to counter it. Brown is the media face of that effort, and her backers are putting money on her ability to use her media skills and credentials to give their cause mainstream validity. The Seventy Four, under the guise of delivering news, is among the most recent developments in that campaign. The Seventy Four takeover of LA School Report In February, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Seventy Four had taken over LA School Report, which is focused on news related to the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest in the country behind New York City. The deal reportedly was a cash-free exchange, with Brown’s outlet absorbing the education site and its staffers. Defenders of traditional public education across the board were dismayed by the news, for multiple reasons. There was, of course, the matter of editorial integrity. Brown’s track record, along with those of her funders, and the pro-charter tone of the Seventy Four thus far, suggested that LA School Report would likely turn into yet another tool of the charter industry. But it was impossible to ignore the timing of the acquisition, which made the whole deal seem suspect and even cynical. In September 2015, the Los Angeles Times managed to get its hands on and make public a confidential 44-page document from the Broad Foundation outlining a plan to double the number of Los Angeles-based charter schools. A list of potential partners in funding the “Great Public Schools Now” initiative included, among many others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as the Walton family. With a proposed collective investment of half a billion dollars, the document makes the case (mostly by obfuscating results from existing charters so they outpace reality) for the privatization of one of the country’s largest school districts. After the leak, and the groundswell of criticism it received, Broad backed off its plan, softening its target goals and shying away from hard and fast numbers. But stakeholders remain suspicious of the plan—now referred to popularly as the Broad-Walmart scheme—and for good reason. The United Teachers Los Angeles blog makes clear why educators and others shouldn’t let down their guard down:

Although the Broad-Walmart public message has changed, their goal to defund, deregulate, and dismantle public schools has not. You only have to look at the team they hired to lead the disingenuously named Great Public Schools Now. If they were truly backing off their plan to push a massive expansion of unregulated charter schools across LAUSD, would they have put investment banker Bill Siart in charge? Siart is a founder of ExEd, a company that specializes in (and profits from) supporting new charters. Would they have hired Myrna Castrejon, a former lobbyist for California Charter Schools Association, as executive director? And if this effort was not truly about breaking the union, would they have hired Mercury Public Affairs?

UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl sees in the Seventy Four’s takeover of LA School Report a clear parallel to the ongoing effort to take over L.A.’s public schools. “Is there a connection between the Seventy Four’s takeover of LA School Report and the Broad-Walmart plan to privatize LAUSD schools? Of course there is,” Caputo-Pearl told the Los Angeles Times. “Campbell Brown is not about fair coverage. She is about ‘reform,’ which is often a code word for criticizing teachers and advocating that public schools get turned into charter corporations.” Steve Zimmer, president of the LA Unified School Board, spoke with LA School Report last year about the Broad-Walmart plan, describing it as terribly flawed. (“To submit a business plan that focuses on market share,” Zimmer told the publication, “is tantamount to commodifying our children.”) Upon learning of the site’s absorption by the Seventy Four, in an email to its outgoing editor, he lamented what the deal would mean for coverage of the school district. “Truth itself, as it relates to public education in Los Angeles, will be filtered through an orthodox reform lens at every turn,” Zimmer wrote, according to the Times. According to the California Charter Schools Association, the state already has “the most charter schools and charter school students in the country.” Charter school enrollment in California grew 7 percent during the 2015-2016 school year, an increase of 36,100 students. The Los Angeles area leads all others around the state for charter school expansion. If the free-market charter school advocates win the next round—and they are prepared to spend a lot of money to ensure they do—those numbers will likely grow exponentially in the coming years. The potential for this increases as the charter contingent builds steam, picking up properties along the way, including local education news sites. "LA School Report has been a legitimate and credible news organization,” Randi Weingarten told the Los Angeles Times. “The 74 million is not.” That’s sobering news for watchers of Los Angeles public schools, and schools nationwide, who know that a win for privatization is a loss for student, teachers, public schools and democracy. *An earlier version misstated Rick Snyder's title. He is governor of the state of Michigan.

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Anderson Cooper shuts down Donald Trump: “With all due respect, ‘He started it!’ is the argument of a five-year-old”

In tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986... tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986... tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986... tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986... tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986... tonight's CNN town-hall, Anderson Cooper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump about a photograph he re-tweeted which appeared to anyone with eyes to cast Texas Senator Ted Cruz's wife Heidi in an unflattering light. Trump replied that despite it being fairly obvious that he was attempting to do just that, that wasn't his intent. "I thought it was a nice picture of Heidi," he said. Cooper replied, "Come on, you're running for president of the United States." "Look," Trump replied, "I didn't start it." "Sir, with all due respect, that's the argument of a five-year-old," Cooper said. "It is not," Trump replied. "It is not!" "The argument of a five-year-old is, 'He started it'!" Cooper said. "You would say that. But he started it! The problem with our country -- that thinking, that's the problem with the country. He sent out a picture" -- Cruz did not, as Cooper noted, it was an anti-Trump group -- "it was Romney people, they were very embarrassed he did so poorly four years ago, he choked like a dog." If you have trouble following his logic there, don't worry, nobody else any could either. Watch the entire exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714986...

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Donald Trump insists he was assaulted by reporter who charged his campaign manager with assault: “She had a pen or something”

To describe the initial exchange between Donald Trump and Anderson Cooper about the assault charges filed against his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski by Michelle Fields as "testy" would be the height of -- "Let me finish, can I finish? Let me finish" -- understatement, as the likely GOP nominee will not allow the CNN host to finish a single question. In fact, as Cooper attempted to do so, Trump put his hand in the air and pulled from his pocket a printed version of Fields' statement, which he then spent the next ten minutes dissecting in great detail. As if his word-by-word dismissal of her claims was not bad enough, Trump later accused her of having assaulted him. "She had a pen," he said, "and the Secret Service doesn't like them. It could be a knife or a bomb or something." Trump also accused her of trying to ask a question, which she shouldn't have been doing since the press conference had already ended. Watch the frankly amazing exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714983... describe the initial exchange between Donald Trump and Anderson Cooper about the assault charges filed against his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski by Michelle Fields as "testy" would be the height of -- "Let me finish, can I finish? Let me finish" -- understatement, as the likely GOP nominee will not allow the CNN host to finish a single question. In fact, as Cooper attempted to do so, Trump put his hand in the air and pulled from his pocket a printed version of Fields' statement, which he then spent the next ten minutes dissecting in great detail. As if his word-by-word dismissal of her claims was not bad enough, Trump later accused her of having assaulted him. "She had a pen," he said, "and the Secret Service doesn't like them. It could be a knife or a bomb or something." Trump also accused her of trying to ask a question, which she shouldn't have been doing since the press conference had already ended. Watch the frankly amazing exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714983... describe the initial exchange between Donald Trump and Anderson Cooper about the assault charges filed against his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski by Michelle Fields as "testy" would be the height of -- "Let me finish, can I finish? Let me finish" -- understatement, as the likely GOP nominee will not allow the CNN host to finish a single question. In fact, as Cooper attempted to do so, Trump put his hand in the air and pulled from his pocket a printed version of Fields' statement, which he then spent the next ten minutes dissecting in great detail. As if his word-by-word dismissal of her claims was not bad enough, Trump later accused her of having assaulted him. "She had a pen," he said, "and the Secret Service doesn't like them. It could be a knife or a bomb or something." Trump also accused her of trying to ask a question, which she shouldn't have been doing since the press conference had already ended. Watch the frankly amazing exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714983... describe the initial exchange between Donald Trump and Anderson Cooper about the assault charges filed against his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski by Michelle Fields as "testy" would be the height of -- "Let me finish, can I finish? Let me finish" -- understatement, as the likely GOP nominee will not allow the CNN host to finish a single question. In fact, as Cooper attempted to do so, Trump put his hand in the air and pulled from his pocket a printed version of Fields' statement, which he then spent the next ten minutes dissecting in great detail. As if his word-by-word dismissal of her claims was not bad enough, Trump later accused her of having assaulted him. "She had a pen," he said, "and the Secret Service doesn't like them. It could be a knife or a bomb or something." Trump also accused her of trying to ask a question, which she shouldn't have been doing since the press conference had already ended. Watch the frankly amazing exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714983... describe the initial exchange between Donald Trump and Anderson Cooper about the assault charges filed against his campaign manager Corey Lewandowski by Michelle Fields as "testy" would be the height of -- "Let me finish, can I finish? Let me finish" -- understatement, as the likely GOP nominee will not allow the CNN host to finish a single question. In fact, as Cooper attempted to do so, Trump put his hand in the air and pulled from his pocket a printed version of Fields' statement, which he then spent the next ten minutes dissecting in great detail. As if his word-by-word dismissal of her claims was not bad enough, Trump later accused her of having assaulted him. "She had a pen," he said, "and the Secret Service doesn't like them. It could be a knife or a bomb or something." Trump also accused her of trying to ask a question, which she shouldn't have been doing since the press conference had already ended. Watch the frankly amazing exchange below via CNN. https://twitter.com/CNN/status/714983...

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Ted Cruz: “Of course” Donald Trump planted the story about his alleged affairs in the National Enquirer

In tonight's CNN town-hall discussion, host Anderson Cooper asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz whether he could sure that Donald Trump's organization was responsible for rumors that surfaced over the weekend in the National Enquirer. "You claim that the story was 'planted' by Donald Trump," Cooper asked, "do you have any proof of that?" Instead of being circumspect, Cruz said quite plainly that he is positive that Trump was responsible for the rumors. He noted that "the story on its face quoted one person on the record...Trump's chief political strategist and hatchet man, Roger Stone" and noted that Trump himself had proposed that the editor of "the head of the National Enquirer, a guy named David Pecker, is good friends with Donald Trump." "But you don't know for a fact that Donald Trump planted that story," Cooper replied. "Of course I do," Cruz said. "Do you know that in its history the National Enquirer has never endorsed a presidential candidate until Donald Trump? Trump suggested that David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, should take over Time magazine. Who in their right mind would suggest that?" Cruz later said that "the media is engaged in a love-fest with Donald Trump," and when Cooper noted that he's invited Cruz to be on Anderson Cooper 360 on numerous occasions, and that he's always refused to appear, Cruz could only say, "I'm here now!" In tonight's CNN town-hall discussion, host Anderson Cooper asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz whether he could sure that Donald Trump's organization was responsible for rumors that surfaced over the weekend in the National Enquirer. "You claim that the story was 'planted' by Donald Trump," Cooper asked, "do you have any proof of that?" Instead of being circumspect, Cruz said quite plainly that he is positive that Trump was responsible for the rumors. He noted that "the story on its face quoted one person on the record...Trump's chief political strategist and hatchet man, Roger Stone" and noted that Trump himself had proposed that the editor of "the head of the National Enquirer, a guy named David Pecker, is good friends with Donald Trump." "But you don't know for a fact that Donald Trump planted that story," Cooper replied. "Of course I do," Cruz said. "Do you know that in its history the National Enquirer has never endorsed a presidential candidate until Donald Trump? Trump suggested that David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, should take over Time magazine. Who in their right mind would suggest that?" Cruz later said that "the media is engaged in a love-fest with Donald Trump," and when Cooper noted that he's invited Cruz to be on Anderson Cooper 360 on numerous occasions, and that he's always refused to appear, Cruz could only say, "I'm here now!" In tonight's CNN town-hall discussion, host Anderson Cooper asked Texas Senator Ted Cruz whether he could sure that Donald Trump's organization was responsible for rumors that surfaced over the weekend in the National Enquirer. "You claim that the story was 'planted' by Donald Trump," Cooper asked, "do you have any proof of that?" Instead of being circumspect, Cruz said quite plainly that he is positive that Trump was responsible for the rumors. He noted that "the story on its face quoted one person on the record...Trump's chief political strategist and hatchet man, Roger Stone" and noted that Trump himself had proposed that the editor of "the head of the National Enquirer, a guy named David Pecker, is good friends with Donald Trump." "But you don't know for a fact that Donald Trump planted that story," Cooper replied. "Of course I do," Cruz said. "Do you know that in its history the National Enquirer has never endorsed a presidential candidate until Donald Trump? Trump suggested that David Pecker, the head of the National Enquirer, should take over Time magazine. Who in their right mind would suggest that?" Cruz later said that "the media is engaged in a love-fest with Donald Trump," and when Cooper noted that he's invited Cruz to be on Anderson Cooper 360 on numerous occasions, and that he's always refused to appear, Cruz could only say, "I'm here now!"

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“It’s not a cult!”: Scientology looms large over “The Path,” a sexy new drama about faith and doubt

The first episode of “The Path” is the hardest, which is ironic, because in all likelihood, the first step of the show’s proverbial path—the first step of the cult of Meyerism, “The Path”’s Scientology-like “religious” “movement”—is the easiest. The seductive qualities of Meyerism’s shining ladder—the members are all identified by which rung they’ve “attained,” be it 1R, 6R, or 10R—are the most communitarian and positive at the start, when they find ways to help you cope with the regular horrors of life. It’s midway that the trouble starts; politics, manipulation, shaken belief, and the systematic ostracization of those who don’t share Meyerism’s way of life. Which is why, to the viewer, just living in this world with these characters, no matter how well-drawn or beautifully crafted, is extraordinarily difficult. “The Path” puts its viewers through the paces of the daily life of cult living with such intimacy that it is hard to not feel the itchy restlessness of getting in too deep, or the feeling, on the back of your neck, that someone is about to corral you with an immovable yoke. The characters speak in institutional abbreviations and significant-sounding verbs; an “I.S.” is someone outside the cult, to “unburden” is to speak the truth or express full feelings, an “offset” is the good deeds a devotee does to make up for “bad” behavior. At the very least, the characters’ willingness to be wrapped up in what is clearly the self-interested ideology of a cult is bewildering and even angering. In one scene, family man (and 6R) Eddie (Aaron Paul, of "Breaking Bad" fame) reads a picture book to his daughter titled “The Ladder,” one that explains, via cheery illustrations, that the whole world is lies—except the path, of course. “The Path” is not just about the hypocrisies of its fake cult, though. The first episode opens on Mary (Emma Greenwell), a heroin addict who is rescued from a storm-ravaged landscape and taken to the cult’s compound in upstate New York. She is offered water, medical treatment, blankets, and—when she goes into withdrawal—counseling for her addiction. There are strings attached to the help she’s given, of course. But the renewed hope and self-possession Mary feels is very real, even if the path’s faraway promise of immortality (probably) isn’t. And this is one of “The Path”’s basic strengths. Throughout the show, as the origin stories of more and more characters come to light, it is difficult to find cynical fault with any of them—because yes, the world is pretty terrible, and anything you can find to cope with that, or otherwise help you survive it, is well within your rights. The believers of Meyerism include abuse survivors, abandoned kids, traumatized victims of gun violence, and recovering addicts, and if they find solace with something called the Ladder, well, whatever. What’s most off-putting about the world of “The Path” isn’t the newcomers; it’s the deeply indoctrinated, the higher-up rung-sitters who have more and more to lose. And this is where we find Eddie (Paul) and his wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan), the poster children for a happy and functional Meyerist family. Their two children are joined by Sarah’s substantial extended family, who are all also in the cult; their evening prayer, chanted in unison while holding hands, takes long, weird minutes to complete. They work for and live on the compound; they have almost no connection with the outside world. Their children are required to go to school, but at the start of the series, their 15-year-old Hawk (Kyle Allen, a dead ringer for a young Heath Ledger) is asking if he can drop out of high school to take his vows early. And in their world, the world of the somewhat seasoned Meyerist, the combination of performatively unshakable belief and devious, manipulative acts becomes all the more pronounced. No one in the cult bats an eye at the idea of a member spending 14 days in solitary confinement, being interrogated by a higher-up cult member. The “medicine” handed out to the devotees is ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drug that makes its users feel mystically connected to the universe. The members truly believe that their founder, the original Dr. Meyer, is immortal, and “transcribing the last three rungs of the ladder” at their outpost in Cuzco, Peru. It’s a bunch of New Age bullshit, but as the show demonstrates, it’s New Age bullshit with teeth. People’s lives are ruined when they run afoul of Meyerism’s teachings. A woman is pulled from her home and tossed into solitary confinement. The cult sends strapping, tall believers to rough up threats or drag wayward addicts back to the path. And when another woman tries to leave the cult, she is stalked, mercilessly, albeit with a devotional smile and a hand reached out in fraternity. The impending crisis for Meyerism—and it’s one that has affected many religious movements, including both Scientology and Christianity—is that its leader is about to die. The great Dr. Meyer is believed to be immortal by his congregants, but he is in fact dying slowly on a hospital bed in Cuzco. And even though it’s kind of insane that they really thought he wasn’t going to die, the unsettling news, as it trickles down to the believers, begins to wreak havoc on this community built entirely on faith. Above all, “The Path” is interested less in why people believe—that’s a question more for HBO’s “The Leftovers”—and more in how they process faith’s ever-present twin, doubt. So as Meyerism’s realities punch through its glittering myths, all of the characters who are old enough and advanced enough to understand the truth begin to embody different ways of coping. Eddie opts for doubt, serving Jesse-Pinkman-devastation with his usual bewitching vulnerability. Sarah opts for even more radical belief, clinging to the ideals of the cult she was born into with a devotion that begins to look like desperation. And Cal (Hugh Dancy)—Sarah’s former lover, and the highest-runged member on the East Coast—opts for the most terrifying path of all; a descent into self-denying and self-obsessed consolidation of power. Dancy, is, in short, playing a fictional version of what has been reported about David Miscavige, the current leader of the Church of Scientology. Miscavige has, to put it most mildly, has been dogged by controversy for his extreme practices, including the suggested forced imprisonment and/or exile of his wife, Shelley. The details are different enough that probably no one can be sued—indeed, “The Path” makes sure to reference Scientology, in order to distinguish Meyerism from it. But the parallel is easy to draw. As Dancy plays him, Cal is a pained, ruined, desperate man, capable of great violence and great humanity. When the series starts, he is an unassuming, loserish type, drifting on the margins of Sarah’s marriage with Eddie, sniffing around for an opening. By midseason, he’s a murderous wreck, doling out punishments and making them sound like gifts. He’s so high up in the organization that he knows all of its secrets, but that only seems to strengthen his belief in Meyerism; when it comes out that he came to the compound as a 5-year-old boy, tasked with handing out pamphlets from that young age, it becomes clear that Cal has to believe in Meyerism, whatever it ends up being, because that is literally all he has in his life. A nice character beat pops up when he’s driving around in his car; he listens to self-help tapes describing alpha male dominance in the animal kingdom as an analogue for success and power in the real world. His incredibly creepy liaison with addict and refugee Mary is one of feeding off of her childlike admiration for him, with every disturbing implication that raises. Eddie and Sarah, meanwhile, are at a crossroads at their marriage, without fully realizing it; Sarah is a singularly tiresome woman of faith, and Eddie is getting all of the tiresome parts of her now that he’s grappling with nagging doubts. “The Path” is not a particularly funny show, which can make it hard to watch, but it is—unexpectedly, perhaps—a surprisingly sexy show. Paul and Monaghan barely have chemistry while speaking, but in their frequent lovemaking, they are able to exhibit the almost teenage passion that first brought them together. Showrunner and creator Jessica Goldberg came up under “Parenthood” and “Friday Night Lights” showrunner Jason Katims (who is also an executive producer for “The Path”), and it shows: The family intimacy and sincere empathy for the trials of everyone under Eddie and Sarah’s roof smack of the community-oriented, regular-people dramas that have defined Katims’ career. One of the most affecting plots in the show is Hawk’s crush on a classmate, simply because it is treated with such breathless, innocent joy. And hearkening to that history of beloved network shows, “The Path” does not feel like a run-of-the-mill streaming-platform drama, which often have poor episode definition and result in saggy, overlong seasons. It could stand a touch more editing, probably. But if anything, “The Path”’s individual episodes of the five I watched have stronger beginnings and endings than HBO’s “Vinyl” or Fox’s “Empire.” Despite having a lot of creative freedom, the show is pointedly well-made—from the way certain religious experiences are filmed, which lend them that bewildering, otherworldly quality that is so seductive, to even the sound mixing in some scenes that creates a soundscape backing the characters that reminded me, incongruously, of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color.” I do tire of shows that are so gloomily serious that watching them feels like taking a shot of strychnine—remember how funny “The Sopranos” was? “The Wire”?—but with “The Path,” the lack of humor seems deliberate, instead of a way to grasp at the atmosphere of “prestige drama.” (The funniest thing that ever happens in the show is the repeated line, when an outsider calls Meyerism a cult, to reply, with pained indignation: "It's not a cult!") The characters have trouble laughing because they believe themselves to be a somewhat beleaguered minority of truth-tellers; what they express instead is a whole lot of sexual energy, which is, I guess, one way to do it. I’m interested to see where “The Path” goes with its musings, because although it took me a while to accept the premise of the show, I cannot deny that it is well-made and thoughtful, if mostly concerned with the thoughts and feelings of very frustrating people. I imagine that “The Path”’s lawyers are working very hard to separate the show from Scientology, staving off lawsuits however they see fit; to my mind, though, the show attains actual relevance because it does hit so close to reports about the actual institution. As long as we are living alongside and tolerating a powerful religion with any number of reported abuses to its name—indeed, in a world where we live alongside religious fanatics of every stripe, including the militant atheists—it is perennially involving to wonder why people believe the way that they do. Sometimes faith feels like the most explored facet of human nature, and sometimes it feels like the only facet that still is a complete mystery.

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Let’s all picture Stephen Tobolowsky in a beekeeper suit: “Lately, my wife and I have developed a fascination over honeybees”

Stephen Tobolowsky has been a character actor since, he claims, “the Pliocene era.” The tall, balding, Texas-born performer has played doctors, teachers, geniuses, plumbers, priests and Rabbis, among numerous other “professional” roles in nearly 250 film and television shows. He is most recognized as Ned Ryerson, the life insurance salesman in “Groundhog Day,” but has also had memorable parts in shows like “Californication.” In 2008, the actor started a podcast, “The Tobolowsky Files,” and in 2012, he published his fantastic memoir, “The Dangerous Animals Club,” which is both side-splittingly funny—he gets fired from a job in children’s theatre after saying the absolutely wrong thing to a young girl in Spanish—and also achingly poignant. Tobolowsky’s remarkable storytelling abilities are in evidence in the new DVD “The Primary Instinct,” a performance film where he recounts episodes from his life. He describes notable anecdotes from his career, such as one that involves swimming in a vat of Bavarian cream and discovering that the substance has the reverse gravitational effect of water (i.e., it never leaves your orifices and crevices). He recounts memories of his family, including an unexpected autograph session with the 1960 Green Bay Packers, and his mother’s frequent and misguided use of a salty Ben Franklin quote as a way of grappling with heartbreak. But mostly, Tobolowsky provides the elegance and beauty of storytelling; how the true tales he spins reflect the surprises of life and the meaning of life. “Tobo” as he is known, chatted via Skype with Salon about storytelling and his career. His interview was funny, surprising, and often quite profound. Let’s start with a question you try to answer in “The Primary Instinct,” which is: Why do people tell stores? What made you become a storyteller? The podcast dates back to my broken neck, which was 2008. [Tobo broke his neck in five places while horseback riding on the rim of an active volcano in Iceland.] The doctor told me I had a “fatal injury,” which isn’t something you should tell someone. So I thought: What if what he said was true? And with a broken neck, there’s not much you can do. So I thought: What if I started telling the stories for my children. They ended up in the podcast and in “Dangerous Animals Club.” I won the storytelling contest in sixth grade. I always enjoyed spinning a yarn. Only after the broken neck did I understand the power of telling true stories and not elaborating. Yes! You repeat the phrase, “Truth trumps clever” in “The Primary Instinct” How did you determine this? It gradually came upon me. I noticed the benefits of telling the truth: You don’t fill in the blanks of other people’s intentions. It can color the story, and make it bitter or overly optimistic. When you tell a true story, the story can continue after you tell it. Take for example, the story of my first job in summer stock. My college roommate and I drove to New York from Texas, and once we arrived, he realized he didn’t want to stay there. So he left me at the theater with my bags and went back to Texas. Why did he desert me like this? Why did he stick me in the mountains of New York with nothing? I was at his deathbed five years ago, and he was only conscious a few minutes at a time. And he told me, “Tobo, I wanted to tell you why I left you in the road in New York.” I asked, “Why, Jimmy, why?” He said, “My girlfriend was pregnant with someone else’s child and she was alone. I went back to take care of her, and I couldn’t tell anyone.” I didn’t color that story in, so the reader filled in the blanks. The truth knocked me in the solar plexus. You describe your process of researching a role as “more detective than interpreter?” For example, in “The Confirmation,” you play a priest and take the confession of a young boy. How do you approach a character who has just one or two scenes in a film? I start with simple questions: What is my greatest fear and what is my greatest hope? Answering those two questions will open the door to other questions. When in doubt, I start off with just facts. How long have I been a priest? Have I been a good priest? What is my congregation like? What are my expectations? I surround my world by what my expectations are. I can build the wrong expectations in so I can be surprised by the scene. Working on TV in “Californication” or “Silicon Valley,” which are very plot oriented arc-type stories, the writers are evolving the story. It’s not a beginning, middle, and end. They don’t know what’s next, and could pull something out of the hat that would make everything not true. If the secret to telling a good joke is to tell it fast, what is the secret to telling a good story? The problem I have when I see storytelling is that they tap dance with needless detail. As an audience, we are way ahead of that. I believe in Aristotelian concept of set up, rising action, and payoff. It’s nice if Act 1 and 3 connect. There are variations on that. But before I tell a story, I think what is that story about? As I write, I allow it to change. I start with the most important part of the story. I told stories about Beth [Henley, Tobo’s former girlfriend] and I coming to Los Angeles and our life together and our friends. But it’s important to know how Beth and I got together. I began in Act 2 went back to Act 1 and then wrote Act 3. So I knew what the payoffs are. And I don’t stick to an outline. I let the story inform me and then go back and cut and try to make it clearer. It’s important to know where you’re going. You may not know why.  I was surprised by how PG-rated your performance was. Are you secretly foul-mouthed and foul-minded? Yes, [laughs] though not completely foul-mouthed. Sarah Silverman puts me to shame. We worked together a few times. She’s surprisingly sweet, but she can shock me. It all began when I had to do one of my first [storytelling] shows, and there, sitting in the 400-people auditorium, were all these 5 year-olds. And then, in the heart of the audience was a section of white hair and beards—grandparents! —so I thought, OK, we’ll go clean with this. And the audience was so relieved. They didn’t feel assaulted by language. I had an accidental encounter with Harold Pinter once. I was directing “Miss Firecracker” and he had a play opening, and we were both at the bar, and had a couple of drinks. When he introduced himself, I went, “Holy Fuck!” He said he was a guy who said he never uses profanity in his plays because they are nuclear bombs. It affects the audience and the play. No one can hear anything beyond those words. I took him to heart. I am going to make sure in the podcasts and my books that if someone says it, I’ll quote them, but I won’t use it as a description. “Fuck” has more definitions than any word in English. It’s a noun, verb, adjective, etc. It has 135 meanings, which makes it meaningless, and using it makes you lazy. You recount your surprise about being cast as “buttcrack plumber,” your misadventures with a cocksock and blue goo on the set of “The Lone Gunman,” (and the crew’s shrugging at your nudity), and being face down in a Pamela Adlon’s maxipad for 5-hours shooting “Californication.” You also discuss hosting not “orgies” but “nudist parties” at your Hollywood Hills home. What makes you comfortable in your own skin? They were not nudist parties. It just happened that way. Guests would get naked and jump in the pool or have sex in the yard. I was a good host and brought them beer and wetnaps…. I did projects where I was naked, “Californication,” and I had heart surgery. What makes me comfortable now is telling the truth as much as I can, undo regrets I have had in the past, and avoid future regrets. Living with a regret is a waste of emotion, but the purpose of regret is instruction. And that’s the difference between regret and shame, which is condemnation. Regret, you feel bad, and don’t do anymore, but if you don’t listen to that… I regret that I didn’t catch a fly ball when I had the chance. You don’t have that many opportunities to catch a fly ball. You talk about hope vs. fear and discuss a sense of self-preservation. Is this what accounts for your work ethic? It was very much fear that drove me. I was afraid for my family; I have this mathematical equation in my head: A lot of us are happy—almost everyone I know sees our lives as a simple equation as a form of addition. Stephen + beer = great. Stephen + clean sheets = fantastic. It doesn’t work with world peace, or the cure for cancer. When you see subtraction, fear enters the picture. Things get smaller and smaller, and you lack the sensitivity to see the addition. There’s a beautiful line in George Eliot’s “Adam Bede.” His father has died and his mother is “sitting in the dreary sunshine.” That’s depression—the inability to see the sunshine. You get the contagion of seeing the subtraction in your life, which triggers the fear, and then you get more desperate. The other side of that is when you face the fear and get to the other side, and experience triumph. I think in a story, you want triumph. That doesn’t mean a happy ending but some kind of triumph. Pessimists view losing as one of the downsides of life, and they try to protect themselves from loss. They take a cynical view that keeps them from experiencing the positive, the win. I think losing can be incredible blow, an L on the scorecard, but you can have this enormous triumph. When my relationship with Beth crashed and burned, it made me better and stronger. You talk about your mother, who makes us laugh in her misquoting of Ben Franklin, or cry at the story about the pennies. How do you process what you have learned from her, and distill it into useful nuggets? My brother and I had a long discussion about your question. One of the things we realized was that mom was always an innocent. She never had an agenda. She had a good heart and saw the world very simply. Throughout our life we might laugh at mom—the Ben Franklin quote is something a 10-year old would do—she didn’t see what he was saying. It was the innocence that made the things she said and did so pure, and like poetry. It was heartfelt, it wasn’t clever, it was never coy, it was always wise. I’m not saying that she was intelligent school-wise, but she was wise. She didn’t let her education get in the way of her wisdom.  What might folks be surprised to learn about you? I keep being surprised by what I’m interested in. Lately, my wife and I have developed a fascination over honeybees. I don’t know why. We bought beekeeper suits. We’re going out in the desert in our bee suits and do a “honey-moon” and smoke the bees. I have no idea where it came from. Sometimes triggered by my wife, and sometimes by me. My broken neck said focus on finding the addition. You have to. You make a comment that we use a mirror to look at ourselves, and philosophy to look at ourselves. Which is really profound. How do you see yourself? The more I look at the cracks and crevices, I see a person who is fundamentally flawed. I have a limitless desire to succeed and be good and do the right thing. It makes me think I’m kind of like Adam. I’m flabbergasted at my weaknesses. I see them coming, and I’m like a car on an icy road—I can’t avoid it. I fall into trap after trap after trap. In the Talmud, they have a series of boundaries about when it’s too late to say the Shima [nightly blessing]. It’s a commentary on boundaries. We can call them manners, or art, or scientific method. We fill our lives with these boundaries that protect us. I know this, and yet I still break the boundaries, and still fall off the cliff. That perplexes me and tortures me and fascinates me. Is there a character you’ve always longed to play? [Closes his eyes, thinks]. There are so many roles I long for. I’ve play stud-hosses, geniuses, holy men, doctors, street people… [thinks some more]. I’m about to do Jon Robin Baitz’ “Other Desert Cities.” I’m looking forward to that because that’s a role I’ve wanted to do. It’s a political man, which I am not. And it’s someone who is lost in thought through most of the play. I’ve never had a chance to do that. I would find it a challenge to play someone who loses a lot. I have such antipathy for it. I’d have to see if I would do it honestly, or turn it into an underdog story. Stephen Tobolowsky has been a character actor since, he claims, “the Pliocene era.” The tall, balding, Texas-born performer has played doctors, teachers, geniuses, plumbers, priests and Rabbis, among numerous other “professional” roles in nearly 250 film and television shows. He is most recognized as Ned Ryerson, the life insurance salesman in “Groundhog Day,” but has also had memorable parts in shows like “Californication.” In 2008, the actor started a podcast, “The Tobolowsky Files,” and in 2012, he published his fantastic memoir, “The Dangerous Animals Club,” which is both side-splittingly funny—he gets fired from a job in children’s theatre after saying the absolutely wrong thing to a young girl in Spanish—and also achingly poignant. Tobolowsky’s remarkable storytelling abilities are in evidence in the new DVD “The Primary Instinct,” a performance film where he recounts episodes from his life. He describes notable anecdotes from his career, such as one that involves swimming in a vat of Bavarian cream and discovering that the substance has the reverse gravitational effect of water (i.e., it never leaves your orifices and crevices). He recounts memories of his family, including an unexpected autograph session with the 1960 Green Bay Packers, and his mother’s frequent and misguided use of a salty Ben Franklin quote as a way of grappling with heartbreak. But mostly, Tobolowsky provides the elegance and beauty of storytelling; how the true tales he spins reflect the surprises of life and the meaning of life. “Tobo” as he is known, chatted via Skype with Salon about storytelling and his career. His interview was funny, surprising, and often quite profound. Let’s start with a question you try to answer in “The Primary Instinct,” which is: Why do people tell stores? What made you become a storyteller? The podcast dates back to my broken neck, which was 2008. [Tobo broke his neck in five places while horseback riding on the rim of an active volcano in Iceland.] The doctor told me I had a “fatal injury,” which isn’t something you should tell someone. So I thought: What if what he said was true? And with a broken neck, there’s not much you can do. So I thought: What if I started telling the stories for my children. They ended up in the podcast and in “Dangerous Animals Club.” I won the storytelling contest in sixth grade. I always enjoyed spinning a yarn. Only after the broken neck did I understand the power of telling true stories and not elaborating. Yes! You repeat the phrase, “Truth trumps clever” in “The Primary Instinct” How did you determine this? It gradually came upon me. I noticed the benefits of telling the truth: You don’t fill in the blanks of other people’s intentions. It can color the story, and make it bitter or overly optimistic. When you tell a true story, the story can continue after you tell it. Take for example, the story of my first job in summer stock. My college roommate and I drove to New York from Texas, and once we arrived, he realized he didn’t want to stay there. So he left me at the theater with my bags and went back to Texas. Why did he desert me like this? Why did he stick me in the mountains of New York with nothing? I was at his deathbed five years ago, and he was only conscious a few minutes at a time. And he told me, “Tobo, I wanted to tell you why I left you in the road in New York.” I asked, “Why, Jimmy, why?” He said, “My girlfriend was pregnant with someone else’s child and she was alone. I went back to take care of her, and I couldn’t tell anyone.” I didn’t color that story in, so the reader filled in the blanks. The truth knocked me in the solar plexus. You describe your process of researching a role as “more detective than interpreter?” For example, in “The Confirmation,” you play a priest and take the confession of a young boy. How do you approach a character who has just one or two scenes in a film? I start with simple questions: What is my greatest fear and what is my greatest hope? Answering those two questions will open the door to other questions. When in doubt, I start off with just facts. How long have I been a priest? Have I been a good priest? What is my congregation like? What are my expectations? I surround my world by what my expectations are. I can build the wrong expectations in so I can be surprised by the scene. Working on TV in “Californication” or “Silicon Valley,” which are very plot oriented arc-type stories, the writers are evolving the story. It’s not a beginning, middle, and end. They don’t know what’s next, and could pull something out of the hat that would make everything not true. If the secret to telling a good joke is to tell it fast, what is the secret to telling a good story? The problem I have when I see storytelling is that they tap dance with needless detail. As an audience, we are way ahead of that. I believe in Aristotelian concept of set up, rising action, and payoff. It’s nice if Act 1 and 3 connect. There are variations on that. But before I tell a story, I think what is that story about? As I write, I allow it to change. I start with the most important part of the story. I told stories about Beth [Henley, Tobo’s former girlfriend] and I coming to Los Angeles and our life together and our friends. But it’s important to know how Beth and I got together. I began in Act 2 went back to Act 1 and then wrote Act 3. So I knew what the payoffs are. And I don’t stick to an outline. I let the story inform me and then go back and cut and try to make it clearer. It’s important to know where you’re going. You may not know why.  I was surprised by how PG-rated your performance was. Are you secretly foul-mouthed and foul-minded? Yes, [laughs] though not completely foul-mouthed. Sarah Silverman puts me to shame. We worked together a few times. She’s surprisingly sweet, but she can shock me. It all began when I had to do one of my first [storytelling] shows, and there, sitting in the 400-people auditorium, were all these 5 year-olds. And then, in the heart of the audience was a section of white hair and beards—grandparents! —so I thought, OK, we’ll go clean with this. And the audience was so relieved. They didn’t feel assaulted by language. I had an accidental encounter with Harold Pinter once. I was directing “Miss Firecracker” and he had a play opening, and we were both at the bar, and had a couple of drinks. When he introduced himself, I went, “Holy Fuck!” He said he was a guy who said he never uses profanity in his plays because they are nuclear bombs. It affects the audience and the play. No one can hear anything beyond those words. I took him to heart. I am going to make sure in the podcasts and my books that if someone says it, I’ll quote them, but I won’t use it as a description. “Fuck” has more definitions than any word in English. It’s a noun, verb, adjective, etc. It has 135 meanings, which makes it meaningless, and using it makes you lazy. You recount your surprise about being cast as “buttcrack plumber,” your misadventures with a cocksock and blue goo on the set of “The Lone Gunman,” (and the crew’s shrugging at your nudity), and being face down in a Pamela Adlon’s maxipad for 5-hours shooting “Californication.” You also discuss hosting not “orgies” but “nudist parties” at your Hollywood Hills home. What makes you comfortable in your own skin? They were not nudist parties. It just happened that way. Guests would get naked and jump in the pool or have sex in the yard. I was a good host and brought them beer and wetnaps…. I did projects where I was naked, “Californication,” and I had heart surgery. What makes me comfortable now is telling the truth as much as I can, undo regrets I have had in the past, and avoid future regrets. Living with a regret is a waste of emotion, but the purpose of regret is instruction. And that’s the difference between regret and shame, which is condemnation. Regret, you feel bad, and don’t do anymore, but if you don’t listen to that… I regret that I didn’t catch a fly ball when I had the chance. You don’t have that many opportunities to catch a fly ball. You talk about hope vs. fear and discuss a sense of self-preservation. Is this what accounts for your work ethic? It was very much fear that drove me. I was afraid for my family; I have this mathematical equation in my head: A lot of us are happy—almost everyone I know sees our lives as a simple equation as a form of addition. Stephen + beer = great. Stephen + clean sheets = fantastic. It doesn’t work with world peace, or the cure for cancer. When you see subtraction, fear enters the picture. Things get smaller and smaller, and you lack the sensitivity to see the addition. There’s a beautiful line in George Eliot’s “Adam Bede.” His father has died and his mother is “sitting in the dreary sunshine.” That’s depression—the inability to see the sunshine. You get the contagion of seeing the subtraction in your life, which triggers the fear, and then you get more desperate. The other side of that is when you face the fear and get to the other side, and experience triumph. I think in a story, you want triumph. That doesn’t mean a happy ending but some kind of triumph. Pessimists view losing as one of the downsides of life, and they try to protect themselves from loss. They take a cynical view that keeps them from experiencing the positive, the win. I think losing can be incredible blow, an L on the scorecard, but you can have this enormous triumph. When my relationship with Beth crashed and burned, it made me better and stronger. You talk about your mother, who makes us laugh in her misquoting of Ben Franklin, or cry at the story about the pennies. How do you process what you have learned from her, and distill it into useful nuggets? My brother and I had a long discussion about your question. One of the things we realized was that mom was always an innocent. She never had an agenda. She had a good heart and saw the world very simply. Throughout our life we might laugh at mom—the Ben Franklin quote is something a 10-year old would do—she didn’t see what he was saying. It was the innocence that made the things she said and did so pure, and like poetry. It was heartfelt, it wasn’t clever, it was never coy, it was always wise. I’m not saying that she was intelligent school-wise, but she was wise. She didn’t let her education get in the way of her wisdom.  What might folks be surprised to learn about you? I keep being surprised by what I’m interested in. Lately, my wife and I have developed a fascination over honeybees. I don’t know why. We bought beekeeper suits. We’re going out in the desert in our bee suits and do a “honey-moon” and smoke the bees. I have no idea where it came from. Sometimes triggered by my wife, and sometimes by me. My broken neck said focus on finding the addition. You have to. You make a comment that we use a mirror to look at ourselves, and philosophy to look at ourselves. Which is really profound. How do you see yourself? The more I look at the cracks and crevices, I see a person who is fundamentally flawed. I have a limitless desire to succeed and be good and do the right thing. It makes me think I’m kind of like Adam. I’m flabbergasted at my weaknesses. I see them coming, and I’m like a car on an icy road—I can’t avoid it. I fall into trap after trap after trap. In the Talmud, they have a series of boundaries about when it’s too late to say the Shima [nightly blessing]. It’s a commentary on boundaries. We can call them manners, or art, or scientific method. We fill our lives with these boundaries that protect us. I know this, and yet I still break the boundaries, and still fall off the cliff. That perplexes me and tortures me and fascinates me. Is there a character you’ve always longed to play? [Closes his eyes, thinks]. There are so many roles I long for. I’ve play stud-hosses, geniuses, holy men, doctors, street people… [thinks some more]. I’m about to do Jon Robin Baitz’ “Other Desert Cities.” I’m looking forward to that because that’s a role I’ve wanted to do. It’s a political man, which I am not. And it’s someone who is lost in thought through most of the play. I’ve never had a chance to do that. I would find it a challenge to play someone who loses a lot. I have such antipathy for it. I’d have to see if I would do it honestly, or turn it into an underdog story. Stephen Tobolowsky has been a character actor since, he claims, “the Pliocene era.” The tall, balding, Texas-born performer has played doctors, teachers, geniuses, plumbers, priests and Rabbis, among numerous other “professional” roles in nearly 250 film and television shows. He is most recognized as Ned Ryerson, the life insurance salesman in “Groundhog Day,” but has also had memorable parts in shows like “Californication.” In 2008, the actor started a podcast, “The Tobolowsky Files,” and in 2012, he published his fantastic memoir, “The Dangerous Animals Club,” which is both side-splittingly funny—he gets fired from a job in children’s theatre after saying the absolutely wrong thing to a young girl in Spanish—and also achingly poignant. Tobolowsky’s remarkable storytelling abilities are in evidence in the new DVD “The Primary Instinct,” a performance film where he recounts episodes from his life. He describes notable anecdotes from his career, such as one that involves swimming in a vat of Bavarian cream and discovering that the substance has the reverse gravitational effect of water (i.e., it never leaves your orifices and crevices). He recounts memories of his family, including an unexpected autograph session with the 1960 Green Bay Packers, and his mother’s frequent and misguided use of a salty Ben Franklin quote as a way of grappling with heartbreak. But mostly, Tobolowsky provides the elegance and beauty of storytelling; how the true tales he spins reflect the surprises of life and the meaning of life. “Tobo” as he is known, chatted via Skype with Salon about storytelling and his career. His interview was funny, surprising, and often quite profound. Let’s start with a question you try to answer in “The Primary Instinct,” which is: Why do people tell stores? What made you become a storyteller? The podcast dates back to my broken neck, which was 2008. [Tobo broke his neck in five places while horseback riding on the rim of an active volcano in Iceland.] The doctor told me I had a “fatal injury,” which isn’t something you should tell someone. So I thought: What if what he said was true? And with a broken neck, there’s not much you can do. So I thought: What if I started telling the stories for my children. They ended up in the podcast and in “Dangerous Animals Club.” I won the storytelling contest in sixth grade. I always enjoyed spinning a yarn. Only after the broken neck did I understand the power of telling true stories and not elaborating. Yes! You repeat the phrase, “Truth trumps clever” in “The Primary Instinct” How did you determine this? It gradually came upon me. I noticed the benefits of telling the truth: You don’t fill in the blanks of other people’s intentions. It can color the story, and make it bitter or overly optimistic. When you tell a true story, the story can continue after you tell it. Take for example, the story of my first job in summer stock. My college roommate and I drove to New York from Texas, and once we arrived, he realized he didn’t want to stay there. So he left me at the theater with my bags and went back to Texas. Why did he desert me like this? Why did he stick me in the mountains of New York with nothing? I was at his deathbed five years ago, and he was only conscious a few minutes at a time. And he told me, “Tobo, I wanted to tell you why I left you in the road in New York.” I asked, “Why, Jimmy, why?” He said, “My girlfriend was pregnant with someone else’s child and she was alone. I went back to take care of her, and I couldn’t tell anyone.” I didn’t color that story in, so the reader filled in the blanks. The truth knocked me in the solar plexus. You describe your process of researching a role as “more detective than interpreter?” For example, in “The Confirmation,” you play a priest and take the confession of a young boy. How do you approach a character who has just one or two scenes in a film? I start with simple questions: What is my greatest fear and what is my greatest hope? Answering those two questions will open the door to other questions. When in doubt, I start off with just facts. How long have I been a priest? Have I been a good priest? What is my congregation like? What are my expectations? I surround my world by what my expectations are. I can build the wrong expectations in so I can be surprised by the scene. Working on TV in “Californication” or “Silicon Valley,” which are very plot oriented arc-type stories, the writers are evolving the story. It’s not a beginning, middle, and end. They don’t know what’s next, and could pull something out of the hat that would make everything not true. If the secret to telling a good joke is to tell it fast, what is the secret to telling a good story? The problem I have when I see storytelling is that they tap dance with needless detail. As an audience, we are way ahead of that. I believe in Aristotelian concept of set up, rising action, and payoff. It’s nice if Act 1 and 3 connect. There are variations on that. But before I tell a story, I think what is that story about? As I write, I allow it to change. I start with the most important part of the story. I told stories about Beth [Henley, Tobo’s former girlfriend] and I coming to Los Angeles and our life together and our friends. But it’s important to know how Beth and I got together. I began in Act 2 went back to Act 1 and then wrote Act 3. So I knew what the payoffs are. And I don’t stick to an outline. I let the story inform me and then go back and cut and try to make it clearer. It’s important to know where you’re going. You may not know why.  I was surprised by how PG-rated your performance was. Are you secretly foul-mouthed and foul-minded? Yes, [laughs] though not completely foul-mouthed. Sarah Silverman puts me to shame. We worked together a few times. She’s surprisingly sweet, but she can shock me. It all began when I had to do one of my first [storytelling] shows, and there, sitting in the 400-people auditorium, were all these 5 year-olds. And then, in the heart of the audience was a section of white hair and beards—grandparents! —so I thought, OK, we’ll go clean with this. And the audience was so relieved. They didn’t feel assaulted by language. I had an accidental encounter with Harold Pinter once. I was directing “Miss Firecracker” and he had a play opening, and we were both at the bar, and had a couple of drinks. When he introduced himself, I went, “Holy Fuck!” He said he was a guy who said he never uses profanity in his plays because they are nuclear bombs. It affects the audience and the play. No one can hear anything beyond those words. I took him to heart. I am going to make sure in the podcasts and my books that if someone says it, I’ll quote them, but I won’t use it as a description. “Fuck” has more definitions than any word in English. It’s a noun, verb, adjective, etc. It has 135 meanings, which makes it meaningless, and using it makes you lazy. You recount your surprise about being cast as “buttcrack plumber,” your misadventures with a cocksock and blue goo on the set of “The Lone Gunman,” (and the crew’s shrugging at your nudity), and being face down in a Pamela Adlon’s maxipad for 5-hours shooting “Californication.” You also discuss hosting not “orgies” but “nudist parties” at your Hollywood Hills home. What makes you comfortable in your own skin? They were not nudist parties. It just happened that way. Guests would get naked and jump in the pool or have sex in the yard. I was a good host and brought them beer and wetnaps…. I did projects where I was naked, “Californication,” and I had heart surgery. What makes me comfortable now is telling the truth as much as I can, undo regrets I have had in the past, and avoid future regrets. Living with a regret is a waste of emotion, but the purpose of regret is instruction. And that’s the difference between regret and shame, which is condemnation. Regret, you feel bad, and don’t do anymore, but if you don’t listen to that… I regret that I didn’t catch a fly ball when I had the chance. You don’t have that many opportunities to catch a fly ball. You talk about hope vs. fear and discuss a sense of self-preservation. Is this what accounts for your work ethic? It was very much fear that drove me. I was afraid for my family; I have this mathematical equation in my head: A lot of us are happy—almost everyone I know sees our lives as a simple equation as a form of addition. Stephen + beer = great. Stephen + clean sheets = fantastic. It doesn’t work with world peace, or the cure for cancer. When you see subtraction, fear enters the picture. Things get smaller and smaller, and you lack the sensitivity to see the addition. There’s a beautiful line in George Eliot’s “Adam Bede.” His father has died and his mother is “sitting in the dreary sunshine.” That’s depression—the inability to see the sunshine. You get the contagion of seeing the subtraction in your life, which triggers the fear, and then you get more desperate. The other side of that is when you face the fear and get to the other side, and experience triumph. I think in a story, you want triumph. That doesn’t mean a happy ending but some kind of triumph. Pessimists view losing as one of the downsides of life, and they try to protect themselves from loss. They take a cynical view that keeps them from experiencing the positive, the win. I think losing can be incredible blow, an L on the scorecard, but you can have this enormous triumph. When my relationship with Beth crashed and burned, it made me better and stronger. You talk about your mother, who makes us laugh in her misquoting of Ben Franklin, or cry at the story about the pennies. How do you process what you have learned from her, and distill it into useful nuggets? My brother and I had a long discussion about your question. One of the things we realized was that mom was always an innocent. She never had an agenda. She had a good heart and saw the world very simply. Throughout our life we might laugh at mom—the Ben Franklin quote is something a 10-year old would do—she didn’t see what he was saying. It was the innocence that made the things she said and did so pure, and like poetry. It was heartfelt, it wasn’t clever, it was never coy, it was always wise. I’m not saying that she was intelligent school-wise, but she was wise. She didn’t let her education get in the way of her wisdom.  What might folks be surprised to learn about you? I keep being surprised by what I’m interested in. Lately, my wife and I have developed a fascination over honeybees. I don’t know why. We bought beekeeper suits. We’re going out in the desert in our bee suits and do a “honey-moon” and smoke the bees. I have no idea where it came from. Sometimes triggered by my wife, and sometimes by me. My broken neck said focus on finding the addition. You have to. You make a comment that we use a mirror to look at ourselves, and philosophy to look at ourselves. Which is really profound. How do you see yourself? The more I look at the cracks and crevices, I see a person who is fundamentally flawed. I have a limitless desire to succeed and be good and do the right thing. It makes me think I’m kind of like Adam. I’m flabbergasted at my weaknesses. I see them coming, and I’m like a car on an icy road—I can’t avoid it. I fall into trap after trap after trap. In the Talmud, they have a series of boundaries about when it’s too late to say the Shima [nightly blessing]. It’s a commentary on boundaries. We can call them manners, or art, or scientific method. We fill our lives with these boundaries that protect us. I know this, and yet I still break the boundaries, and still fall off the cliff. That perplexes me and tortures me and fascinates me. Is there a character you’ve always longed to play? [Closes his eyes, thinks]. There are so many roles I long for. I’ve play stud-hosses, geniuses, holy men, doctors, street people… [thinks some more]. I’m about to do Jon Robin Baitz’ “Other Desert Cities.” I’m looking forward to that because that’s a role I’ve wanted to do. It’s a political man, which I am not. And it’s someone who is lost in thought through most of the play. I’ve never had a chance to do that. I would find it a challenge to play someone who loses a lot. I have such antipathy for it. I’d have to see if I would do it honestly, or turn it into an underdog story. 

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Let’s face it: All our presidential candidates are hucksters

Here is Bill Clinton, the U.S. President who served Wall Street by removing all regulations on derivatives-trading and by ending FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act separation of investment-banking from consumer-banking, now telling an audience, that his successor George W. Bush had done this, and that Bush’s successor Barack Obama has unfortunately continued it. He said this on March 21st when explaining why everyone should vote for his wife to undo the ”awful” and “trickle-down” legacy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama: "If you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that when we were practicing trickle-down economics and no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her because she’s the only person who basically had good ideas, will tell you how she’s going to pay for them, can be commander in chief, and is a proven change maker with Republicans and Democrats and independents alike.” (Clarification: Where he said “seven years” he meant eight years, and where he said “eight years" he meant seven years, because Bush had 8 years and Obama has thus far had 7.) The truth is that just before Bill Clinton ended his Presidency he gave Wall Street exactly what it wanted: the ability to gamble with FDIC-insured money, so that Wall Street would be bailed out by taxpayers if their gamblers stopped gambling (‘investing’) and the financial system consequently froze up — which happened in 2008. George W. Bush didn’t make that change, Clinton did. Rotten as Bush was, Clinton was arguably even worse, but he’s now alleging that his wife will undo his own “trickle-down” legacy. Here is Donald Trump, pandering to the far-right, ethnocentric-Jewish, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), who hate Palestinians and Iran, telling these racist ethnocentric Jews why they should support Trump for President — and opening by telling his suckers that he’s not going to “pander to” them: "I didn't come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That's what politicians do: all talk, no action. … My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. … We have rewarded the world's leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion and we received absolutely nothing in return. … Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen, and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to their puppet states. … We will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetrated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the western hemisphere very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach. Third, at the very least, we must hold Iran accountable by restructuring the terms of the previous deal. … The United Nations is not a friend of democracy. It's not a friend to freedom. It's not a friend even to the United States of America, where as all know, it has its home. And it surely isn’t a friend to Israel. … When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the entire region.” On February 17th, Trump told the truth: "Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn't the Iraqis, it was Saudi.” Not Iran, but Israel’s ally the Saud family, who are the chief financial backers of the overthrow-Assad operation (which Israel’s government likewise supports) and of the entire war against Iran and all Shia everywhere — including even Shia in Saudi Arabia itself — and who were the chief funders of Al Qaeda at least until 9/11, and (according to Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary Clinton, in private) even as late as 2009, were still “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” As regards Shiite ‘terrorist’ groups, there’s only one, Hezbollah, and its exclusive focus is against Israel, not against the West. In fact, the title of that State Department cable from her was about ”Terrorist Finance: Action Request for Senior Level Engagement on Terrorism Finance,” not about “Sunni Terrorist Finance,” because, she knows, all  Islamic terrorism, except what’s directed against Israel, is Sunni, none of it is Shiite. So: that cable of hers was sent only to U.S. Embassies in Sunni-run countries, not to the U.S. Embassy in the only Shiite-run country where the U.S. has an Embassy, which is Syria. The U.S. government is quite aware that terrorism (except against Israel) is strictly  Sunni-fundamentalist-Islamic, and that Syria’s ideologically secular, non-sectarian, government, has (like Russia’s secular non-sectarian government) always tried to crush it, never  supported it. The U.S. is allied with the terrorist-financing countries, against Shiite-run countries, because Shiite-run countries (specifically Syria and Iran) are allied with Russia, which the U.S. government aims to isolate and ultimately conquer. So: even when the hucksters who make it to the top of American politics tell the truth, it’s by accident. Truthfulness isn’t ever their goal; winning and keeping power is. Americans are taught that things are like that in African countries, and in former Soviet-bloc countries, but not that this is the way America itself is; to say a thing like this here is verboten  in the ‘respectable’ ‘news’ media. It’s not publishable. It’s American samizdat. Any major news-medium that would publish it would be subject to severe sanctions; people would be fired. They might even be treated worse — like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange — isolated, smeared, and possibly imprisoned. It destroys careers of the few authentic journalists. They’re supposed to be propagandists, instead. Even to call oneself a ‘journalist’ here is supposed to be  a lie. There’s virtually no remaining market for real journalism in the United States. The major advertisers won’t patronize it, and the government-funded ‘news’ media also don’t allow it. So: certain types of truth are simply not publishable here. Huckster-politicians and their friends just thrive in such an environment. Like U.S. President Obama himself says, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” All other  nations are ‘dispensable.’ That’s something which Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, might equally say. But, of course, none of them would be “pandering.” They don’t do that — just ask them, and they’ll tell you they don’t (like Trump just did). Here is Bill Clinton, the U.S. President who served Wall Street by removing all regulations on derivatives-trading and by ending FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act separation of investment-banking from consumer-banking, now telling an audience, that his successor George W. Bush had done this, and that Bush’s successor Barack Obama has unfortunately continued it. He said this on March 21st when explaining why everyone should vote for his wife to undo the ”awful” and “trickle-down” legacy of George W. Bush and Barack Obama: "If you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that when we were practicing trickle-down economics and no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her because she’s the only person who basically had good ideas, will tell you how she’s going to pay for them, can be commander in chief, and is a proven change maker with Republicans and Democrats and independents alike.” (Clarification: Where he said “seven years” he meant eight years, and where he said “eight years" he meant seven years, because Bush had 8 years and Obama has thus far had 7.) The truth is that just before Bill Clinton ended his Presidency he gave Wall Street exactly what it wanted: the ability to gamble with FDIC-insured money, so that Wall Street would be bailed out by taxpayers if their gamblers stopped gambling (‘investing’) and the financial system consequently froze up — which happened in 2008. George W. Bush didn’t make that change, Clinton did. Rotten as Bush was, Clinton was arguably even worse, but he’s now alleging that his wife will undo his own “trickle-down” legacy. Here is Donald Trump, pandering to the far-right, ethnocentric-Jewish, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), who hate Palestinians and Iran, telling these racist ethnocentric Jews why they should support Trump for President — and opening by telling his suckers that he’s not going to “pander to” them: "I didn't come here tonight to pander to you about Israel. That's what politicians do: all talk, no action. … My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran. … We have rewarded the world's leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion and we received absolutely nothing in return. … Iran is a problem in Iraq, a problem in Syria, a problem in Lebanon, a problem in Yemen, and will be a very major problem for Saudi Arabia. Literally every day, Iran provides more and better weapons to their puppet states. … We will totally dismantle Iran’s global terror network. Iran has seeded terror groups all over the world. During the last five years, Iran has perpetrated terror attacks in 25 different countries on five continents. They’ve got terror cells everywhere, including in the western hemisphere very close to home. Iran is the biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world and we will work to dismantle that reach. Third, at the very least, we must hold Iran accountable by restructuring the terms of the previous deal. … The United Nations is not a friend of democracy. It's not a friend to freedom. It's not a friend even to the United States of America, where as all know, it has its home. And it surely isn’t a friend to Israel. … When I become President, the days of treating Israel like a second-class citizen will end on Day One. I will meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu immediately. I have known him for many years and we will be able to work closely together to help bring stability and peace to Israel and to the entire region.” On February 17th, Trump told the truth: "Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn't the Iraqis, it was Saudi.” Not Iran, but Israel’s ally the Saud family, who are the chief financial backers of the overthrow-Assad operation (which Israel’s government likewise supports) and of the entire war against Iran and all Shia everywhere — including even Shia in Saudi Arabia itself — and who were the chief funders of Al Qaeda at least until 9/11, and (according to Bill Clinton’s wife Hillary Clinton, in private) even as late as 2009, were still “the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.” As regards Shiite ‘terrorist’ groups, there’s only one, Hezbollah, and its exclusive focus is against Israel, not against the West. In fact, the title of that State Department cable from her was about ”Terrorist Finance: Action Request for Senior Level Engagement on Terrorism Finance,” not about “Sunni Terrorist Finance,” because, she knows, all  Islamic terrorism, except what’s directed against Israel, is Sunni, none of it is Shiite. So: that cable of hers was sent only to U.S. Embassies in Sunni-run countries, not to the U.S. Embassy in the only Shiite-run country where the U.S. has an Embassy, which is Syria. The U.S. government is quite aware that terrorism (except against Israel) is strictly  Sunni-fundamentalist-Islamic, and that Syria’s ideologically secular, non-sectarian, government, has (like Russia’s secular non-sectarian government) always tried to crush it, never  supported it. The U.S. is allied with the terrorist-financing countries, against Shiite-run countries, because Shiite-run countries (specifically Syria and Iran) are allied with Russia, which the U.S. government aims to isolate and ultimately conquer. So: even when the hucksters who make it to the top of American politics tell the truth, it’s by accident. Truthfulness isn’t ever their goal; winning and keeping power is. Americans are taught that things are like that in African countries, and in former Soviet-bloc countries, but not that this is the way America itself is; to say a thing like this here is verboten  in the ‘respectable’ ‘news’ media. It’s not publishable. It’s American samizdat. Any major news-medium that would publish it would be subject to severe sanctions; people would be fired. They might even be treated worse — like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange — isolated, smeared, and possibly imprisoned. It destroys careers of the few authentic journalists. They’re supposed to be propagandists, instead. Even to call oneself a ‘journalist’ here is supposed to be  a lie. There’s virtually no remaining market for real journalism in the United States. The major advertisers won’t patronize it, and the government-funded ‘news’ media also don’t allow it. So: certain types of truth are simply not publishable here. Huckster-politicians and their friends just thrive in such an environment. Like U.S. President Obama himself says, “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” All other  nations are ‘dispensable.’ That’s something which Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, might equally say. But, of course, none of them would be “pandering.” They don’t do that — just ask them, and they’ll tell you they don’t (like Trump just did).

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