Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 895
January 12, 2016
Regrets, veiled attacks, an olive branch and legacy: 4 things you should know about President Obama’s final State of the Union
In his final State of the Union address President Obama gave tough criticism of the Republican candidates, offered an olive branch to Speaker Paul Ryan, defended his legacy and named his one regret. Watch our recap here.
State of the Union: Obama rebukes GOP demagogues while making broad defense of his presidency
President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address before Congress tonight. The speech was an opportunity for the president to defend his record and to make the case that America is better off today than when he took office. It was also about the future, about life after his presidency. “I don’t want to talk just about the next year,” he said, “I want to focus on the next five years, 10 years, and beyond.” Obama began by highlighting his achievements in the face of difficult circumstances:
“Let me start with the economy, and a basic fact: the United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the 90s; an unemployment rate cut in half. Our auto industry just had its best year ever. Manufacturing has created nearly 900,000 new jobs in the past six years. And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.”This was a direct shot at the Republican demagogues who insist Obama has unilaterally destroyed America. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline,” Obama added, “is peddling a fiction. What is true – and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious – is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit.” The president also refuted the right-wing trope (popularized by gas bags like Donald Trump) that America has become timid and feckless:
“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic declines is political hot hair. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin.”This is true, of course, as is Obama’s broader defense of his presidency. It’s easy to forget – as the Republicans have – how bad things were when Obama entered office. The Great Recession was underway; we were mired in two unwinnable wars (one of which was completely unnecessary); we were hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had slumped to 7,949.09, an all-time low. Given those realities, Obama’s record is more than defensible. It’s true that the president failed to deliver on all of his promises. He didn’t transcend the petty partisanship; he didn’t end the wars as swiftly as many wanted; he didn’t close Guantanamo; he didn’t end the torture program; he didn’t win every battle with Congress; he didn’t fix the gun problem (which may be unfixable); and he didn’t rein in the reckless banks. But not all of that is his fault. There are limits on what the president can accomplish in our system. Obama faced the most obstructionist Congress in history, and no judgment of his presidency is complete without accounting for this. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in 2012 that the GOP’s “top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term,” and that’s how Congressional Republicans behaved. Against such recalcitrance, it’s remarkable that Obama achieved what he did. The president closed with a clarion call of sorts. We have to “fix our politics,” he said. He emphasized the need for bipartisanship:
“A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests…Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security. But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise.”In one of the more honest moments of the night, Obama added that “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Obama can’t say it, so I will (again): the rancor and division in Washington isn’t his fault. The GOP decided, as a matter of strategy, to oppose everything he does, and that’s what they’ve done. Obama concluded with a series of platitudes about America’s American-ness, as all presidents do in these speeches. The “State of our Union is strong,” of course, but there’s much to be done. There wasn’t a clear sense of the president’s agenda in 2016, but it’s pretty clear he plans to continue reaching across the aisle. I doubt the Republicans will respond in kind, but we’ll find out soon enough.President Barack Obama delivered his final State of the Union address before Congress tonight. The speech was an opportunity for the president to defend his record and to make the case that America is better off today than when he took office. It was also about the future, about life after his presidency. “I don’t want to talk just about the next year,” he said, “I want to focus on the next five years, 10 years, and beyond.” Obama began by highlighting his achievements in the face of difficult circumstances:
“Let me start with the economy, and a basic fact: the United States of America, right now, has the strongest, most durable economy in the world. We’re in the middle of the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. More than 14 million new jobs; the strongest two years of job growth since the 90s; an unemployment rate cut in half. Our auto industry just had its best year ever. Manufacturing has created nearly 900,000 new jobs in the past six years. And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by almost three-quarters.”This was a direct shot at the Republican demagogues who insist Obama has unilaterally destroyed America. “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline,” Obama added, “is peddling a fiction. What is true – and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious – is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit.” The president also refuted the right-wing trope (popularized by gas bags like Donald Trump) that America has become timid and feckless:
“I told you earlier all the talk of America’s economic declines is political hot hair. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that’s the path to ruin.”This is true, of course, as is Obama’s broader defense of his presidency. It’s easy to forget – as the Republicans have – how bad things were when Obama entered office. The Great Recession was underway; we were mired in two unwinnable wars (one of which was completely unnecessary); we were hemorrhaging 700,000 jobs a month; and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had slumped to 7,949.09, an all-time low. Given those realities, Obama’s record is more than defensible. It’s true that the president failed to deliver on all of his promises. He didn’t transcend the petty partisanship; he didn’t end the wars as swiftly as many wanted; he didn’t close Guantanamo; he didn’t end the torture program; he didn’t win every battle with Congress; he didn’t fix the gun problem (which may be unfixable); and he didn’t rein in the reckless banks. But not all of that is his fault. There are limits on what the president can accomplish in our system. Obama faced the most obstructionist Congress in history, and no judgment of his presidency is complete without accounting for this. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in 2012 that the GOP’s “top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term,” and that’s how Congressional Republicans behaved. Against such recalcitrance, it’s remarkable that Obama achieved what he did. The president closed with a clarion call of sorts. We have to “fix our politics,” he said. He emphasized the need for bipartisanship:
“A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything. This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests…Our Founders distributed power between states and branches of government, and expected us to argue, just as they did, over the size and shape of government, over commerce and foreign relations, over the meaning of liberty and the imperatives of security. But democracy does require basic bonds of trust between its citizens. It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise.”In one of the more honest moments of the night, Obama added that “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency – that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Obama can’t say it, so I will (again): the rancor and division in Washington isn’t his fault. The GOP decided, as a matter of strategy, to oppose everything he does, and that’s what they’ve done. Obama concluded with a series of platitudes about America’s American-ness, as all presidents do in these speeches. The “State of our Union is strong,” of course, but there’s much to be done. There wasn’t a clear sense of the president’s agenda in 2016, but it’s pretty clear he plans to continue reaching across the aisle. I doubt the Republicans will respond in kind, but we’ll find out soon enough.
Analysis: Obama in campaign form in final State of the Union
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama opened his State of the Union speech saying he'd keep it short, in what must have seemed music to the ears of some in the chamber antsy to get to Iowa to campaign for president.
At times, Obama looked like he was one of them, eager to challenge biting criticism from Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and other Republicans.
Obama was at turns boastful and biting, confident and sarcastic.
Anyone who says the economy is declining is "peddling fiction," he argued. Obama characterized skepticism about science and reluctance to adopt technology as absurd. "When the Russians beat us into space, we didn't deny Sputnik was up there," he said. Claims that U.S. stature in the world is shrinking, he virtually shouted, is "political hot air."
"The United States of America is the most powerful nation on earth. Period. It's not even close. It's not even close!" the president declared.
The president's final turn at the House podium was his most high-profile entry yet into the presidential race to succeed him. After largely begging off the day-to-day skirmishes in the raucous contest, Obama showed he was more than ready to defend his record and happy to use one of his last chances to seize America's attention to show Democrats how he thinks it should be done.
Obama has more than his party's interest at heart. His legacy will be shaped by whether Americans choose a Democrat to succeed him and cement his signature heath care law, environmental policies and immigration programs. Democrat Hillary Clinton has tried to put some distance between her campaign and the president — often saying she's not running for his third term. That has at times left Obama as his own best defender.
The White House had billed Obama's speech as a rethinking of the genre, and delivered.
Obama eschewed a lengthy to-do list for Congress and any rollout of new policies. (White House officials have promised to reveal some new plans in the coming weeks, rather than pack them into one night.)
Obama only breezed through his remaining priorities — raising the minimum wage, overhauling the immigration system, tightening gun laws — even as he acknowledged they were unlikely to get done. He highlighted a few possible proposals with better chances — criminal justice reform and fighting prescription drug abuse.
"Who knows? We might surprise the cynics again," Obama said.
The flip comment was a reminder that the speech, like the president's final year in office, wasn't focused on Congress as much as on defending his accomplishments.
Obama took some clear shots at the cast of Republicans who've used him as a target for months.
He defended his handling of the rise of Islamic extremism and tried to temper anxieties about the Islamic State.
"Over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands," Obama said. "We don't need to build them up to show that we're serious, and we sure don't need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is somehow representative of one of the world's largest religions."
With an expected audience of some 30 million viewers, the speech was Obama's first of two chances to take Americans squarely by the shoulders and make his case for a Democratic successor. Not until his speech at the Democratic convention this summer, will Obama likely have such undivided attention again.
The case he delivered was not new. The president and his aides have been marveling for months at what they described as Republicans' gloom-and-doom vision. White House officials have labeled it both inaccurate and bad politics. Some of his arguments echoed the case he makes to donors at fundraising events.
In trying to present an optimistic alternative, Obama's speechwriters were mindful of not taking a victory lap. Americans hardly share his confidence in America's upward trajectory, polls show. In touting the economic recovery, in particular, Obama risks seeming out of touch.
"The president's record has often fallen far short of his soaring words," South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said in the Republican rebuttal. "As he enters his final year in office, many Americans are still feeling the squeeze of an economy too weak to raise income levels. We're feeling a crushing national debt, a health care plan that has made insurance less affordable and doctors less available, and chaotic unrest in many of our cities."
But the president showed he was ready to rebut such comments — once Democrats pick a candidate and he's unleashed on the trail.
Until then, as he told his audience of lawmakers and candidates, he understands the hankering to get back to Iowa.
"I've been there," he said with a grin. "I'll be shaking hands afterwards if you want some tips."
___
EDITOR'S NOTE: Kathleen Hennessey covers the White House for The Associated Press
The NFL doomed itself: “Concussion” filmmaker Peter Landesman on brain injuries, football and the “ethically challenged” New York Times
Months before the movie “Concussion” was released – indeed, before anyone outside the film’s production team and a few Sony executives had seen it – the New York Times published an article suggesting that leaked Sony documents indicated that writer and director Peter Landesman had softened his depiction of the National Football League and its response to the brain-injury crisis in America’s biggest professional sport. This wasn’t the Gray Lady’s only embarrassing misstep of 2015, nor was it the only time the Times apparently got played by unnamed and unreliable sources who may have been pushing a hidden agenda. Maybe it’s not as dire to mischaracterize a Hollywood movie as to suggest that the San Bernardino shooters had pledged themselves to ISIS in social media post and law enforcement had missed it, but both failures are symptoms of the same disease. Ironically enough, Landesman had an extensive career in investigative journalism before turning to movies, and has written for the Times on several occasions. Was this experience strange or anomalous? Unfortunately not, he told me during a recent phone interview. “You know what? I was written about unfairly and inaccurately when I was a journalist,” he says. “It’s a real problem with journalism today, with the speed of the news cycle and the absence of quality control. Reporters often publish things based on a very limited understanding of the facts. You can’t blame that on the Internet, but it may have made the problem worse. Having said that, that Times article was ethically challenged in a big way. How do you take issue with a film you haven’t seen? I don’t understand how or why they decided to publish that.” There are legitimate criticisms to raise when it comes to “Concussion,” which I would describe in large part as a conventional inspirational biopic built around a well-loved star. Indeed, it’s a classic story of the Everyman who takes on the establishment, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with Mr. Smith as a squeaky-clean evangelical Christian doctor from Africa who holds conversations with corpses, and Washington as the NFL's massive sports marketing empire. (At the risk of being obvious, this film is definitely not Stacie Passon’s 2013 indie of the same title, which is about a married lesbian who becomes a prostitute.) One thing “Concussion” absolutely does not do is let the NFL or the sport of football off the hook. Will Smith plays Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born pathologist who may, as various people observe in the film, have been the only person in Pittsburgh who had never heard of Mike Webster, the Hall of Fame center for the Steelers who died in 2002, homeless and apparently psychotic. What most Steelers fans saw as an inexplicable tragedy, Omalu saw as a medical mystery: He could find no obvious explanation for Webster’s constellation of symptoms, nor any reason why an apparently healthy 50-year-old man should suffer severe dementia and drink himself to death in his pickup truck. Omalu’s autopsy of Webster’s brain tissue and his subsequent research ultimately led to a new diagnosis that has become familiar to even casual readers of the sports page: Chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, a devastating brain injury resulting from repeated blows to the head. As Landesman puts it, the NFL reacted “pretty much the way any large corporate entity would when an industry worth millions or billions is at stake.” As “Concussion” makes clear, the league repeatedly tried to suppress Omalu’s findings, depicting him as a foreign-educated quack with dubious scientific credentials and an anti-American agenda. He was harassed at home by football fans (“Are you trying to 'vaginize' our game?”) and derided by current and former NFL players, including legendary Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who would later commit suicide after suffering CTE-related dementia. Omalu may have come from a nation many Americans associate with scam emails and extremist groups, but he had multiple advanced degrees and an extensive background in both research and clinical practice. He knew he was right, and he wasn’t alone. Prominent neurologists and medical officials began to understand that he had confirmed something that hadn’t been more than a hunch: American-style football, the only major sport in which a player’s head is routinely used as a weapon, had catastrophic health consequences that went far beyond broken bones and arthritic joints. In the film, Alec Baldwin plays a longtime Steelers team doctor who comes to Omalu and spills the beans: Many NFL insiders already understood that concussions and head injuries posed a grave risk, but this was never discussed in public. “Concussion” may be told in conventional three-act fashion — characters, then crisis and then resolution — but it also reflects Landesman’s background in sticking very close to the facts of Omalu’s story and the unfolding issue of brain injury in the NFL. “I don’t actually see that much difference between telling stories in journalism and telling them on film,” he says. “The tools are very different, but the basic idea is the same. As a journalist, as a screenwriter and as a director, I’m trying to tell compelling and truthful stories. Sometimes in a fictional story you can be more honest and truthful, actually. As a journalist you’re a prisoner of the data, in effect. You have to tell the story with evidence you can verify. In a dramatic story you have much more flexibility to approach the truth with a whole range of different instruments.” In the screenplay for “Concussion,” for example, Landesman felt at liberty to invent conversations long after the fact that could not be documented, or to compress multiple events into a few illustrative examples. He did not, he says, pursue the tactic of Chris Terrio’s Oscar-winning screenplay for “Argo,” which took the true story of the Iranian hostage and fictionalized it extensively. “Those are very different cases,” Landesman says. “I happen to know that film has a very limited relationship to what really happened. I can assure you that is not the case here.” As for his interactions with the NFL while making the film, Landesman says there were virtually none. “We set up a meeting at the NFL’s offices, and I simply decided not to go. That was the journalist in me, looking to be fair and to hear statements from all sides. What I realized was that the only agenda I would be serving at that meeting was theirs, and I didn’t need to do that. I understood how [the league] had responded to Dr. Omalu and the whole question [of brain injury]. The record was clear. I didn’t need their permission to use clips [from NFL games] or to tell the story. I simply couldn’t see any reason to do it.” Does Landesman himself have some anti-American intellectual antipathy for football? Quite the opposite, he says. “I played football the whole time I was growing up, and through two years of college. I think it’s a beautiful game in many respects, one that allows you to follow a player from boyhood through manhood. Unfortunately, it has one very big problem. I mourn it, in many ways.” Wait: What does he mourn? NFL games continue to dominate the TV ratings, and are increasingly popular overseas, where almost no one plays the sport. Despite a wave of bad publicity around the CTE revelations and a $1 billion financial settlement with thousands of former players that has not quite put the issue to rest, the NFL remains an immensely profitable enterprise. But the true legacy of Bennet Omalu and the CTE discovery, Landesman says, still lies in the future. “It took a long time, but the NFL has now responded to this issue about as well as it can,” he says. “They are much more vigilant and cautious about head injuries. Players with likely concussions are not allowed back into games, and have to sit out until their symptoms have cleared. Those are big and important changes.” But most physicians and scientists would agree that the true scale of CTE-related injuries and illnesses among football players is not yet known. Does it encompass only linemen and star defensive players like Duerson and San Diego Chargers linebacker Junior Seau, another CTE suicide? Does it affect most former players? Is it nearly all of them? Those are the questions that haunt the future of football, Landesman says, and for all its audience-friendly storytelling and star charisma, “Concussion” makes that clear. “Enrollment in Pop Warner [youth] football is down something like 35 percent since Dr. Omalu’s research findings began to come out,” he says. “Which means that talented, athletic kids all over the country are playing something else, whether that’s soccer or basketball or tennis. So the first question for the NFL is what their talent pool will look like in 15 years. And the second question is whether, as we learn more about the extent of this issue, they can do anything to save the sport. I’m really not sure whether they can.” I ended the conversation by telling Landesman that I had already told my 11-year-old son he was never playing organized football. This was no big deal, in all honesty: I barely lasted half a season in Pop Warner at his age, and he’s much less interested in sports than I was. But for a genuine former jock, a guy who actually played NCAA football … Landesman interrupts me before I could ask the question. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I have a kid exactly that age, and my response is not just 'No' but 'No way in hell.' Not unless they change the sport in some way that’s nearly impossible to imagine. Magnify those individual decisions by the thousands, or the millions, and you have to say that football has a big problem.”
The dark side of David Bowie: As the mourning goes on, we can’t ignore his history with underaged groupies in ’70s
After David Bowie’s death took us all by surprise Monday, the tributes overwhelmed. Social media feeds were filled, almost unanimously, with videos and links and memes praising the influential artist who seems to possess near-universal appeal — he made enough hits to feel populist, and yet remained sufficiently influential to exist on a forever-cool plane with his scant handful of equals. But in between the “Labyrinth” GIFs, the retrospectives and moving tributes to his style and gender performance, a quiet pushback began online, too. Don’t forget this part of the story, the messages suggested, with links to this earlier interview shared: “I lost my virginity to David Bowie: Confessions of a ‘70s groupie,” in which Lori Mattix (her name has historically also been spelled "Maddox" in press accounts) recounts her teenage days in the Los Angeles rock scene. Mattix had, in her own words, consensual sex with not only Bowie — at age 15 — but with Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger as well.
THRILLIST: Still, a lot of people would have a hard time with an underage girl having sex with rock stars "But you need to understand that I didn’t think of myself as underage. I was a model. I was in love. That time of my life was so much fun. It was a period in which everything seemed possible. There was no AIDS and the potential consequences seemed to be light. Nobody was afraid of winding up on YouTube or TMZ. Now people are terrified. You can’t even walk out your door without being photographed. It has become a different world.”Mattix's narrative is troubling to read in the sober light of 2016. A girl loses her virginity to a man in a hotel room, and that same night has her first threesome with him and another teenage friend as well. There are drugs and alcohol everywhere. There is David Bowie’s wife, Angie, banging on the door the next morning. There is the girl’s mother, indifferent when she’s not overtly approving of the conquests; her father, deceased. There is David Bowie’s face Monday all over the Internet, fans moved to tears over his death. There is scant, if any, mention of that girl in those moving tributes. There is, even in 2016, the question of how appropriate it is to talk about her at all. I believe Mattix when she says that she felt special in the company of these glamorous, powerful men, happy to let them decide how and when she’d have sex and with whom. At 15, at 16, at 17. Not because I agree — most people grow out of the idea that sex with a rock star is a goal to pursue — but because when you’re young it’s easy to believe that experience is the one currency you’re allowed to hoard and never pay out. Because it’s alluring to believe a woman is made from her chosen experiences, and aren’t you already a woman at 14, at 15? Doesn’t the world, goddamn it, let you know that every day? Our culture, too, makes it easy to simply accept Mattix was a girl who decided she knew what she wanted, and to let it go at that. And wasn’t it, as she says, “a different world”? Oh, the ‘70s. Things were different then. But they were not, really, no matter how many times we all collectively wish that to be true. If you can say with a straight face “men don’t have sex with young girls anymore” — well, good luck to you with that. What changes is this, only — which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed. What is more appropriate than making sure we don’t forget this, ever, even at inconvenient times? Girls, of course, are convenient (until they aren’t). Boys, too. There are always more where they came from. So, it must be said, are rock stars. And filmmakers and actors and comedians. And choir directors and coaches and neighbors and dealers and family friends who take an interest. Mattix, for her part, kind of agrees:
“But, I should add, things haven’t really changed. Look at the Kylie and Kendall Jenners, the Gigi Hadids. They are the modern-day versions of teenage groupies. The only difference is that the Internet blows them up in a way that allows them to make a fortune. And then there’s Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and all those kids who were fucking partying at 15. It is just a different era. It has evolved into something else.”I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal for good reason. Age 15 is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way — or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t “Almost Famous” great? Does even talking about the story, now that he has died, taint Bowie’s legacy, as some fear? What is any true legacy but complicated? If we feel guilty for talking about it, maybe we should explore where that guilt really comes from. I can believe that David Bowie might not have believed he violated anyone by having sex with Lori Mattix and whoever else, though of course I don’t know his (or, for that matter, Jimmy Page’s or Mick Jagger’s) heart, or even whether these events transpired at all the way Mattix says they did, although the tales have been out there long enough to be read as a generally accepted narrative of the times. It is not hard to believe Bowie likely understood at the time — without even having to acknowledge it — that he was simply availing himself of the sensory perks of his station. How was a girl any different from good dope, the best table, a forgiven room service bill? They were an indulgence to finally grow out of, perhaps, like cocaine and cheeseburgers. This is a delusion, of course, and not one that we have to tacitly co-sign with silence, but a delusion that didn’t begin and end with him alone. And it would seem as though she believes the same — she was availing herself of the pleasures available to her at the time, and she made her own decisions willingly and enjoyed herself with no major regrets. Should we demand she represent her experience any other way? If what we do is believe women, should we believe her? It is possible to believe her and to know objectively that it was wrong anyway, and to say so. Not for her or for Bowie, necessarily, but for other girls now who are absorbing how we talk about these stories, and all the girls yet to come. Not only is it possible, it’s not even difficult to hold these two conflicting ideas in mind at the same time: A sensitive genius capable of soothing our misunderstood selves from afar can be incapable of summoning sufficient humanity in the moment to decide that a 15-year-old girl right in front of him is not a well-earned reward. Bowie was not a man who fell to earth — just another lousy human like the rest of us, and one we fashioned into a well-compensated man who consumed what he wanted and left the rest and maybe felt OK about that or maybe didn’t, and now it’s too late to say. What there is still time to say is it that yes, it was a wrong thing for him to do, a thing men shouldn’t do, not then and not ever, a thing we should speak up louder about even when it is personally or professionally uncomfortable to raise a voice against an artistic hero, or for that matter, anyone. Because what we're left with, in addition to his formidable and beloved body of work, is this story, and how we tell the story can shape how the next story plays out. Because there will always be more where he came from, and more girls raised to believe that it’s on her in the end, that her experience is both the bill he is always forgiven and the only currency that can settle it.After David Bowie’s death took us all by surprise Monday, the tributes overwhelmed. Social media feeds were filled, almost unanimously, with videos and links and memes praising the influential artist who seems to possess near-universal appeal — he made enough hits to feel populist, and yet remained sufficiently influential to exist on a forever-cool plane with his scant handful of equals. But in between the “Labyrinth” GIFs, the retrospectives and moving tributes to his style and gender performance, a quiet pushback began online, too. Don’t forget this part of the story, the messages suggested, with links to this earlier interview shared: “I lost my virginity to David Bowie: Confessions of a ‘70s groupie,” in which Lori Mattix (her name has historically also been spelled "Maddox" in press accounts) recounts her teenage days in the Los Angeles rock scene. Mattix had, in her own words, consensual sex with not only Bowie — at age 15 — but with Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger as well.
THRILLIST: Still, a lot of people would have a hard time with an underage girl having sex with rock stars "But you need to understand that I didn’t think of myself as underage. I was a model. I was in love. That time of my life was so much fun. It was a period in which everything seemed possible. There was no AIDS and the potential consequences seemed to be light. Nobody was afraid of winding up on YouTube or TMZ. Now people are terrified. You can’t even walk out your door without being photographed. It has become a different world.”Mattix's narrative is troubling to read in the sober light of 2016. A girl loses her virginity to a man in a hotel room, and that same night has her first threesome with him and another teenage friend as well. There are drugs and alcohol everywhere. There is David Bowie’s wife, Angie, banging on the door the next morning. There is the girl’s mother, indifferent when she’s not overtly approving of the conquests; her father, deceased. There is David Bowie’s face Monday all over the Internet, fans moved to tears over his death. There is scant, if any, mention of that girl in those moving tributes. There is, even in 2016, the question of how appropriate it is to talk about her at all. I believe Mattix when she says that she felt special in the company of these glamorous, powerful men, happy to let them decide how and when she’d have sex and with whom. At 15, at 16, at 17. Not because I agree — most people grow out of the idea that sex with a rock star is a goal to pursue — but because when you’re young it’s easy to believe that experience is the one currency you’re allowed to hoard and never pay out. Because it’s alluring to believe a woman is made from her chosen experiences, and aren’t you already a woman at 14, at 15? Doesn’t the world, goddamn it, let you know that every day? Our culture, too, makes it easy to simply accept Mattix was a girl who decided she knew what she wanted, and to let it go at that. And wasn’t it, as she says, “a different world”? Oh, the ‘70s. Things were different then. But they were not, really, no matter how many times we all collectively wish that to be true. If you can say with a straight face “men don’t have sex with young girls anymore” — well, good luck to you with that. What changes is this, only — which girls, which men, how and where it is allowed. What is more appropriate than making sure we don’t forget this, ever, even at inconvenient times? Girls, of course, are convenient (until they aren’t). Boys, too. There are always more where they came from. So, it must be said, are rock stars. And filmmakers and actors and comedians. And choir directors and coaches and neighbors and dealers and family friends who take an interest. Mattix, for her part, kind of agrees:
“But, I should add, things haven’t really changed. Look at the Kylie and Kendall Jenners, the Gigi Hadids. They are the modern-day versions of teenage groupies. The only difference is that the Internet blows them up in a way that allows them to make a fortune. And then there’s Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and all those kids who were fucking partying at 15. It is just a different era. It has evolved into something else.”I believe Mattix when she says the sex with her rock star partners was consensual on her behalf, and I also believe David Bowie and the others committed acts that are exploitative, and illegal for good reason. Age 15 is young, no matter what, and they were the adults with all the power in this dynamic, and that is not what healthy, normal sexual relationships for teenagers look like. I also believe it’s important to say this is different from the horrific decades worth of rape allegations brought forth against Bill Cosby, and different from Roman Polanski’s rape of a drugged girl. It is not the same as the lawsuits against R. Kelly over his alleged sexual abuse of young girls, though the conditions that made all of these stories possible stem from the same terrible old root: powerful men, young women, and a whole lot of people who looked the other way — or in the case of these teen groupies, even romanticized the tales. Say, wasn’t “Almost Famous” great? Does even talking about the story, now that he has died, taint Bowie’s legacy, as some fear? What is any true legacy but complicated? If we feel guilty for talking about it, maybe we should explore where that guilt really comes from. I can believe that David Bowie might not have believed he violated anyone by having sex with Lori Mattix and whoever else, though of course I don’t know his (or, for that matter, Jimmy Page’s or Mick Jagger’s) heart, or even whether these events transpired at all the way Mattix says they did, although the tales have been out there long enough to be read as a generally accepted narrative of the times. It is not hard to believe Bowie likely understood at the time — without even having to acknowledge it — that he was simply availing himself of the sensory perks of his station. How was a girl any different from good dope, the best table, a forgiven room service bill? They were an indulgence to finally grow out of, perhaps, like cocaine and cheeseburgers. This is a delusion, of course, and not one that we have to tacitly co-sign with silence, but a delusion that didn’t begin and end with him alone. And it would seem as though she believes the same — she was availing herself of the pleasures available to her at the time, and she made her own decisions willingly and enjoyed herself with no major regrets. Should we demand she represent her experience any other way? If what we do is believe women, should we believe her? It is possible to believe her and to know objectively that it was wrong anyway, and to say so. Not for her or for Bowie, necessarily, but for other girls now who are absorbing how we talk about these stories, and all the girls yet to come. Not only is it possible, it’s not even difficult to hold these two conflicting ideas in mind at the same time: A sensitive genius capable of soothing our misunderstood selves from afar can be incapable of summoning sufficient humanity in the moment to decide that a 15-year-old girl right in front of him is not a well-earned reward. Bowie was not a man who fell to earth — just another lousy human like the rest of us, and one we fashioned into a well-compensated man who consumed what he wanted and left the rest and maybe felt OK about that or maybe didn’t, and now it’s too late to say. What there is still time to say is it that yes, it was a wrong thing for him to do, a thing men shouldn’t do, not then and not ever, a thing we should speak up louder about even when it is personally or professionally uncomfortable to raise a voice against an artistic hero, or for that matter, anyone. Because what we're left with, in addition to his formidable and beloved body of work, is this story, and how we tell the story can shape how the next story plays out. Because there will always be more where he came from, and more girls raised to believe that it’s on her in the end, that her experience is both the bill he is always forgiven and the only currency that can settle it.
We need to talk about Ben: Kylo Ren, “Star Wars” and the media narrative of the mentally ill school shooter
Note: Serious spoilers for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" appear throughout this article. Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news. At a loss for how to raise their son, Leia and Han send Ben to Luke’s Jedi school. There, Ben betrays his teacher and murders his army of padawans. In the present day, Han and Leia are tortured over what their son has become. Contemplating where they went wrong, Leia tells Han they lost Ben long before they sent him away. The subtext is clear: There is nothing they could have done. It’s a troubling sense of inevitability all too often associated with the young men who commit acts of violence. The plot of this un-pictured story line features remarkable similarities to Lynne Ramsey’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (which happens to star Ezra Miller, who could easily be Adam Driver’s weird twin). In the 2011 film, Tilda Swinton (Eva) struggles to reconcile her son’s emerging sociopathy in the years before he commits a massacre at his high school. Eva finds it impossible to love the boy even as a small child, when he’s refusing to listen to her and deliberately shitting his pants. The slow march to Kevin’s mass murder is paced out between flash-forwards of Eva mired in the aftermath of her son’s crime. Again, there is a certain fated quality to the horror Kevin commits, as if there’s nothing his mother might have done to stop it. That sense of eerie certainty is implicit in the “mentally ill” label we so liberally slap on the white men behind mass shootings. When Jaylen Fryberg opened fire on his Marysville-Pilchuck High School classmates in October, the media quickly painted him as “anguished” and “full of angst.” Following the shooting in San Bernardino, Paul Ryan responded, saying, “People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings.” After Dylan Roof murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Fox published an Op-Ed claiming he “showed all the signs of severe and worsening mental illness.” In nearly every case, directing attention to mental health becomes a copout. It removes societal culpability, discussions of gun restrictions, domestic terrorism and toxic masculinity, in favor of the easier-to-stomach idea that suspects are damaged. According to a poll by the Washington Post, "By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws." As Mother Jones wrote of the study, these results “perpetuate a dangerous stigmatization,” especially considering that statistics show that most people who commit acts of violence do not suffer from mental illness. There’s relief in the idea that mental illness is to blame. Bringing up structural mental health deficiencies redirects the conversation each time it is conveniently paraded out in the wake of mass shootings. Never mind the fact that it’s an inaccurate claim. The stigma surrounding mental illness prevents us from engaging with a lack of treatment as the proposed cause, and allows us to paper over the forces behind these atrocities with reassuring inescapability. If perpetrators of violence are bad apples in an otherwise functional system, then there’s a total lack of efficacy; gun regulations (and a closer look at this country’s enduring white supremacist patriarchy) are off the hook. “Something is wrong with him” is a far easier way to cope than dealing with the things that might be wrong with us. The family units in the “The Force Awakens” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” become a myopic representation of this notion. They’re all nature and no nurture. In the latter, an imperfect yet stable home is irrelevant to Kevin’s inner rottenness. His maliciousness grinds to its aggressively foreshadowed apex regardless of Eva’s desperate attempts to find affection for her son. He is positioned as a curse cast upon her, a problem even the most idealized home life couldn’t have fixed. The infeasible struggle for Kylo Ren’s soul is further hyped up by his mythic setting. He is explicitly fighting off the internal conflict of the light and the dark side -- in case the good vs. evil analogy was yet unclear. But when his father extends himself, offering to do something, anything, to help, Kylo Ren responds by light-sabering him through the heart. If being born to and trained by the three most iconic heroes of the “Star Wars” canon couldn’t save him, what could? The irresistible pull of the dark side becomes a stand-in for the national excuse of mental health. Ben became Kylo Ren because he’s sick and, as “Star Wars” and public opinion would have it, there is no cure.Note: Serious spoilers for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" appear throughout this article. Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news. At a loss for how to raise their son, Leia and Han send Ben to Luke’s Jedi school. There, Ben betrays his teacher and murders his army of padawans. In the present day, Han and Leia are tortured over what their son has become. Contemplating where they went wrong, Leia tells Han they lost Ben long before they sent him away. The subtext is clear: There is nothing they could have done. It’s a troubling sense of inevitability all too often associated with the young men who commit acts of violence. The plot of this un-pictured story line features remarkable similarities to Lynne Ramsey’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (which happens to star Ezra Miller, who could easily be Adam Driver’s weird twin). In the 2011 film, Tilda Swinton (Eva) struggles to reconcile her son’s emerging sociopathy in the years before he commits a massacre at his high school. Eva finds it impossible to love the boy even as a small child, when he’s refusing to listen to her and deliberately shitting his pants. The slow march to Kevin’s mass murder is paced out between flash-forwards of Eva mired in the aftermath of her son’s crime. Again, there is a certain fated quality to the horror Kevin commits, as if there’s nothing his mother might have done to stop it. That sense of eerie certainty is implicit in the “mentally ill” label we so liberally slap on the white men behind mass shootings. When Jaylen Fryberg opened fire on his Marysville-Pilchuck High School classmates in October, the media quickly painted him as “anguished” and “full of angst.” Following the shooting in San Bernardino, Paul Ryan responded, saying, “People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings.” After Dylan Roof murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Fox published an Op-Ed claiming he “showed all the signs of severe and worsening mental illness.” In nearly every case, directing attention to mental health becomes a copout. It removes societal culpability, discussions of gun restrictions, domestic terrorism and toxic masculinity, in favor of the easier-to-stomach idea that suspects are damaged. According to a poll by the Washington Post, "By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws." As Mother Jones wrote of the study, these results “perpetuate a dangerous stigmatization,” especially considering that statistics show that most people who commit acts of violence do not suffer from mental illness. There’s relief in the idea that mental illness is to blame. Bringing up structural mental health deficiencies redirects the conversation each time it is conveniently paraded out in the wake of mass shootings. Never mind the fact that it’s an inaccurate claim. The stigma surrounding mental illness prevents us from engaging with a lack of treatment as the proposed cause, and allows us to paper over the forces behind these atrocities with reassuring inescapability. If perpetrators of violence are bad apples in an otherwise functional system, then there’s a total lack of efficacy; gun regulations (and a closer look at this country’s enduring white supremacist patriarchy) are off the hook. “Something is wrong with him” is a far easier way to cope than dealing with the things that might be wrong with us. The family units in the “The Force Awakens” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” become a myopic representation of this notion. They’re all nature and no nurture. In the latter, an imperfect yet stable home is irrelevant to Kevin’s inner rottenness. His maliciousness grinds to its aggressively foreshadowed apex regardless of Eva’s desperate attempts to find affection for her son. He is positioned as a curse cast upon her, a problem even the most idealized home life couldn’t have fixed. The infeasible struggle for Kylo Ren’s soul is further hyped up by his mythic setting. He is explicitly fighting off the internal conflict of the light and the dark side -- in case the good vs. evil analogy was yet unclear. But when his father extends himself, offering to do something, anything, to help, Kylo Ren responds by light-sabering him through the heart. If being born to and trained by the three most iconic heroes of the “Star Wars” canon couldn’t save him, what could? The irresistible pull of the dark side becomes a stand-in for the national excuse of mental health. Ben became Kylo Ren because he’s sick and, as “Star Wars” and public opinion would have it, there is no cure.Note: Serious spoilers for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" appear throughout this article. Before Kylo Ren was a modern iteration of Darth Vader, he was Ben: the problem child of Leia Organa and Han Solo, who murdered a group of his Jedi trainee peers. On-screen in “The Force Awakens,” he’s all theatrical evil and Pantene-commercial hair, but it’s the off-screen arc that is the most disturbing and fascinating facet of the character. Zooming in on his sinister back story, Kylo Ren presents a sci-fi version of the “mentally ill” school shooter with whom we’ve become all too well acquainted in the news. At a loss for how to raise their son, Leia and Han send Ben to Luke’s Jedi school. There, Ben betrays his teacher and murders his army of padawans. In the present day, Han and Leia are tortured over what their son has become. Contemplating where they went wrong, Leia tells Han they lost Ben long before they sent him away. The subtext is clear: There is nothing they could have done. It’s a troubling sense of inevitability all too often associated with the young men who commit acts of violence. The plot of this un-pictured story line features remarkable similarities to Lynne Ramsey’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (which happens to star Ezra Miller, who could easily be Adam Driver’s weird twin). In the 2011 film, Tilda Swinton (Eva) struggles to reconcile her son’s emerging sociopathy in the years before he commits a massacre at his high school. Eva finds it impossible to love the boy even as a small child, when he’s refusing to listen to her and deliberately shitting his pants. The slow march to Kevin’s mass murder is paced out between flash-forwards of Eva mired in the aftermath of her son’s crime. Again, there is a certain fated quality to the horror Kevin commits, as if there’s nothing his mother might have done to stop it. That sense of eerie certainty is implicit in the “mentally ill” label we so liberally slap on the white men behind mass shootings. When Jaylen Fryberg opened fire on his Marysville-Pilchuck High School classmates in October, the media quickly painted him as “anguished” and “full of angst.” Following the shooting in San Bernardino, Paul Ryan responded, saying, “People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings.” After Dylan Roof murdered nine people at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Fox published an Op-Ed claiming he “showed all the signs of severe and worsening mental illness.” In nearly every case, directing attention to mental health becomes a copout. It removes societal culpability, discussions of gun restrictions, domestic terrorism and toxic masculinity, in favor of the easier-to-stomach idea that suspects are damaged. According to a poll by the Washington Post, "By a more than 2-to-1 margin, more people say mass shootings reflect problems identifying and treating people with mental health problems rather than inadequate gun control laws." As Mother Jones wrote of the study, these results “perpetuate a dangerous stigmatization,” especially considering that statistics show that most people who commit acts of violence do not suffer from mental illness. There’s relief in the idea that mental illness is to blame. Bringing up structural mental health deficiencies redirects the conversation each time it is conveniently paraded out in the wake of mass shootings. Never mind the fact that it’s an inaccurate claim. The stigma surrounding mental illness prevents us from engaging with a lack of treatment as the proposed cause, and allows us to paper over the forces behind these atrocities with reassuring inescapability. If perpetrators of violence are bad apples in an otherwise functional system, then there’s a total lack of efficacy; gun regulations (and a closer look at this country’s enduring white supremacist patriarchy) are off the hook. “Something is wrong with him” is a far easier way to cope than dealing with the things that might be wrong with us. The family units in the “The Force Awakens” and “We Need to Talk About Kevin” become a myopic representation of this notion. They’re all nature and no nurture. In the latter, an imperfect yet stable home is irrelevant to Kevin’s inner rottenness. His maliciousness grinds to its aggressively foreshadowed apex regardless of Eva’s desperate attempts to find affection for her son. He is positioned as a curse cast upon her, a problem even the most idealized home life couldn’t have fixed. The infeasible struggle for Kylo Ren’s soul is further hyped up by his mythic setting. He is explicitly fighting off the internal conflict of the light and the dark side -- in case the good vs. evil analogy was yet unclear. But when his father extends himself, offering to do something, anything, to help, Kylo Ren responds by light-sabering him through the heart. If being born to and trained by the three most iconic heroes of the “Star Wars” canon couldn’t save him, what could? The irresistible pull of the dark side becomes a stand-in for the national excuse of mental health. Ben became Kylo Ren because he’s sick and, as “Star Wars” and public opinion would have it, there is no cure.
No one holds him accountable: The Donald sics his goons on protesters, and the media shrugs
Donald Trump's rallies may have reached a new apex of bigotry and intolerance last week when on two occasions protesters were set upon by agitated Trump supporters. In Lowell, Massachusetts, they tore up a "God Bless President Obama" sign, and then hurled insults at a Muslim woman wearing a "I Come In Peace" t-shirt who was escorted out of a Trump rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina. According to tweets from inside the South Carolina event, jacked-up Trump supporters were anxious to randomly kick out lots of other people from the rally, even if the targets of their wrath weren't protesting the event. The two ugly episodes last week join a long list of nasty and shocking physical skirmishes that have come to define Trump's political road show. In fact, here are some of the menacing utterances and taunts that have reportedly been yelled by Trump's supporters at rallies recently: "Go home n****r." "Sieg Heil." "Kick his ass." "Light the motherfucker on fire." "Scum!" And "get him the hell out of here." Actually that last taunt came directly from Trump, currently the Republican Party's frontrunner. I'm comfortable in suggesting this kind of habitual ugliness -- it's a Trump feature, not a bug -- is unprecedented in mainstream American politics. The idea that people are regularly being attacked, threatened and accosted at campaign rallies for a major party frontrunner is just off the charts in terms of modern American politics. Last month, Talking Points Memo published a helpful round-up of the violent outbursts, explicitly noting, "Racist and bigoted language has become commonplace at the rallies, both from Trump supporters and the candidate himself." Since then, the ugly phenomenon has only escalated, yet the press seems unsure of how to deal with it. Yes, journalists type up the here's-what-happened-dispatches. But where's the outrage? Where are the endless pundit panel discussions about the outrageous behavior Trump is purposefully fermenting? Where are the deep, front-page dives into what the cauldron of Trump campaign violence reveals about his possible presidency? Note that during an extended interview on Meet The Press on Sunday, Trump wasn't asked about the litany of altercations at his rallies, including two upsetting ones last week. But Trump was asked to discuss allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life from the 1990s. I can still hear people insisting the story about Trump rally violence is being covered. After all, I just linked to several news accounts that detail the mob rally actions, right? So that proves the press is adequately covering the campaign story, yes? No. First of all, too much of the coverage tiptoes around the looming threats of the Trump mobs. Following the incident in Lowell, where two men simply held held up signs that read "America Is Already Great" and "God Bless President Obama," only to have their signs torn up by a mini-mob of Trump supporters before being escorted out by cops -- the Washington Post suggested the incident was just another one of the "colorful ejections" that have come to define Trump rallies. The Post also suggested the sign-holding men had "disrupted the event," not the Trump thugs who turned on them. Meanwhile, Politico last week cheered the violent Trump events as being "fun." And as Media Matters noted last month, look at how CBS News reported on a Trump rally beat down: A "fight" broke out? All available evidence suggests a black protester who interrupted Trump's speech was quickly jumped and then beaten, kicked, and choked by a crowd of white Trump supporters. Secondly, I'm talking about what's routinely absent from the thuggery coverage; the crime of omission. For anyone who thinks the coverage has been pitch perfect, just imagine, for instance, if Hillary Clinton supporters were roughing up conservatives at her rallies, punching and choking them. Imagine if Bernie Sanders supporters were kicking and taunting attendees at Sanders rallies who were protesting the Democrat's agenda. Imagine if conservatives quietly protesting Clinton and Sanders were being hauled out of events by cops while mobs of Democrats hurled insults at them. Cardiac arrest barely begins to describe the type of communal meltdown that would occur within the Beltway press if any of those things had taken place under the auspices of the Democratic Party. Let alone if they took place over and over and over again. More script flips? What if: *Clinton or Sanders went on national television after violence at one of their rallies and said "maybe [protesters] should have been roughed up." *Clinton or Sanders stood at rally podium and called protesters "bloodsuckers." *Clinton or Sanders supporters were seen on video dragging a protester across the floor by the collar of his shirt. I'll answer the what-ifs: If any of that hallmark ugliness occurred on the Democratic side (let alone all of it), the Beltway press would essentially demand the offending Democratic candidate drop out of the race because they weren't qualified to be president. Period. So no, the press has clearly not given the Trump thugs and mobs the proper amount of attention or raised adequate concerns and objections. The press hasn't demanded that the Republican frontrunner fix the problem of hovering political violence that permeates his campaign. The press seems too nervous to call out the dangerous and disgusting behavior. People who cover politics know that what's unfolding at the Trump rallies is unheard of. They know it's extraordinary. They know it's potentially very dangerous. Yes, we keep getting updates about who was assaulted at which Trump rally. But there's little connectivity and not enough outrage. Instead, we're told Trump rallies where Democrats get physically assaulted are "fun." (They're not boring like "stodgy" Clinton events, am I right?) This is bonkers. And it might be the best, most depressing, example yet that too many in the campaign press have walked away from wanting to hold Trump accountable.Donald Trump's rallies may have reached a new apex of bigotry and intolerance last week when on two occasions protesters were set upon by agitated Trump supporters. In Lowell, Massachusetts, they tore up a "God Bless President Obama" sign, and then hurled insults at a Muslim woman wearing a "I Come In Peace" t-shirt who was escorted out of a Trump rally in Rock Hill, South Carolina. According to tweets from inside the South Carolina event, jacked-up Trump supporters were anxious to randomly kick out lots of other people from the rally, even if the targets of their wrath weren't protesting the event. The two ugly episodes last week join a long list of nasty and shocking physical skirmishes that have come to define Trump's political road show. In fact, here are some of the menacing utterances and taunts that have reportedly been yelled by Trump's supporters at rallies recently: "Go home n****r." "Sieg Heil." "Kick his ass." "Light the motherfucker on fire." "Scum!" And "get him the hell out of here." Actually that last taunt came directly from Trump, currently the Republican Party's frontrunner. I'm comfortable in suggesting this kind of habitual ugliness -- it's a Trump feature, not a bug -- is unprecedented in mainstream American politics. The idea that people are regularly being attacked, threatened and accosted at campaign rallies for a major party frontrunner is just off the charts in terms of modern American politics. Last month, Talking Points Memo published a helpful round-up of the violent outbursts, explicitly noting, "Racist and bigoted language has become commonplace at the rallies, both from Trump supporters and the candidate himself." Since then, the ugly phenomenon has only escalated, yet the press seems unsure of how to deal with it. Yes, journalists type up the here's-what-happened-dispatches. But where's the outrage? Where are the endless pundit panel discussions about the outrageous behavior Trump is purposefully fermenting? Where are the deep, front-page dives into what the cauldron of Trump campaign violence reveals about his possible presidency? Note that during an extended interview on Meet The Press on Sunday, Trump wasn't asked about the litany of altercations at his rallies, including two upsetting ones last week. But Trump was asked to discuss allegations about Bill Clinton's sex life from the 1990s. I can still hear people insisting the story about Trump rally violence is being covered. After all, I just linked to several news accounts that detail the mob rally actions, right? So that proves the press is adequately covering the campaign story, yes? No. First of all, too much of the coverage tiptoes around the looming threats of the Trump mobs. Following the incident in Lowell, where two men simply held held up signs that read "America Is Already Great" and "God Bless President Obama," only to have their signs torn up by a mini-mob of Trump supporters before being escorted out by cops -- the Washington Post suggested the incident was just another one of the "colorful ejections" that have come to define Trump rallies. The Post also suggested the sign-holding men had "disrupted the event," not the Trump thugs who turned on them. Meanwhile, Politico last week cheered the violent Trump events as being "fun." And as Media Matters noted last month, look at how CBS News reported on a Trump rally beat down: A "fight" broke out? All available evidence suggests a black protester who interrupted Trump's speech was quickly jumped and then beaten, kicked, and choked by a crowd of white Trump supporters. Secondly, I'm talking about what's routinely absent from the thuggery coverage; the crime of omission. For anyone who thinks the coverage has been pitch perfect, just imagine, for instance, if Hillary Clinton supporters were roughing up conservatives at her rallies, punching and choking them. Imagine if Bernie Sanders supporters were kicking and taunting attendees at Sanders rallies who were protesting the Democrat's agenda. Imagine if conservatives quietly protesting Clinton and Sanders were being hauled out of events by cops while mobs of Democrats hurled insults at them. Cardiac arrest barely begins to describe the type of communal meltdown that would occur within the Beltway press if any of those things had taken place under the auspices of the Democratic Party. Let alone if they took place over and over and over again. More script flips? What if: *Clinton or Sanders went on national television after violence at one of their rallies and said "maybe [protesters] should have been roughed up." *Clinton or Sanders stood at rally podium and called protesters "bloodsuckers." *Clinton or Sanders supporters were seen on video dragging a protester across the floor by the collar of his shirt. I'll answer the what-ifs: If any of that hallmark ugliness occurred on the Democratic side (let alone all of it), the Beltway press would essentially demand the offending Democratic candidate drop out of the race because they weren't qualified to be president. Period. So no, the press has clearly not given the Trump thugs and mobs the proper amount of attention or raised adequate concerns and objections. The press hasn't demanded that the Republican frontrunner fix the problem of hovering political violence that permeates his campaign. The press seems too nervous to call out the dangerous and disgusting behavior. People who cover politics know that what's unfolding at the Trump rallies is unheard of. They know it's extraordinary. They know it's potentially very dangerous. Yes, we keep getting updates about who was assaulted at which Trump rally. But there's little connectivity and not enough outrage. Instead, we're told Trump rallies where Democrats get physically assaulted are "fun." (They're not boring like "stodgy" Clinton events, am I right?) This is bonkers. And it might be the best, most depressing, example yet that too many in the campaign press have walked away from wanting to hold Trump accountable.
God as the original terrorist: 6 ways the Bible condones horrific acts of brutality
Last fall, Dutch pranksters put a cover from a Quran over a Bible and then asked passersby to read aloud homophobic, violent or sexist passages that violate modern moral sensibilities. The texts shocked people who had never immersed themselves in the Iron Age world of the Bible writers, a world in which daughters can be sold as sexual slaves and most of us deserve the death penalty: you included. By one count, the Quran has only 532 cruel or violent passages, while the Bible has 1,321. Christians respond that the Bible is longer, so the cruel, violent passages make up a smaller percent of the whole. ISIS terrorists claim that their scripts for jihad, executions, sexual slavery and theocracy come straight from the Quran, and they cite chapter and verse to back up their claim. But Christians who find ISIS horrifying might be even more horrified to learn that similar scripts can be found in their own Good Book, including endorsements of terrorism that rival the most vile atrocities committed in the name of Allah. Terrorism is notoriously difficult to define. Some limit terrorist acts to those committed illegally by groups seeking social power. Others argue that the state itself may systematically terrorize a civilian population. James Poland, author of
Understanding Terrorism
, defines terrorism as a means (intimidation) to an end (social control over someone other than the victim): Terrorism is the premeditated, deliberate, systematic murder, mayhem, and threatening of the innocent to create fear and intimidation in order to gain a political or tactical advantage, usually to influence an audience. Our Iron Age ancestors who wrote the Bible lacked explosive devices and the ability to spread gruesome images via mass media. They lacked jetliners and drones and napalm and nerve gas. But they definitely understood mass intimidation as a tool of social control, and they sanctified their own terrorist tendencies by projecting the same tendencies onto God himself. Here are some acts of terrorism from the Bible. 1. In the Bible God controls humans by raining down death, destruction and terror on those who defy or anger him. I kill ... I wound ... I will make mine arrows drunk with blood and my sword shall devour flesh. So says Yahweh in Deuteronomy 32:39-42, and this is no idle threat. You’ve heard the story of Noah’s flood, and about the fire God rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and about the 12 plagues of Egypt, but did you know that in the Bible God kills 158 times? The full list can be found in the Steve Wells book, Drunk With Blood. Like ISIS, God sometimes acts as an executioner with a laser focus, as when he kills a baby to punish King David’s sexual infidelity (2 Samuel 12), or strikes dead a couple who falsely claim to have given their money to the church (Acts 5: 1-10). But also, like ISIS, he often wreaks death and destruction on those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who were born into the wrong culture. For example, when the same King David conducts a forbidden census, God gives him a choice of punishments: Three years of famine, three months of attacks by neighboring tribes, or three days of plague. David chooses the plague, which kills 70,000 Israelites who had done nothing but let themselves be counted (1 Chronicles 21:1-17). 2. The Bible both opens and closes with graphic descriptions of torment and fear inflicted by God and designed to keep the faithful in line. In the Torah, God’s reign of terror is described in a series of graphic histories. In the book of Revelation, it is described in a series of graphic prophecies. In the books between, threats of torture and death hang over every interaction between God and humankind. God himself leans into his role as terrorist-in-chief. I will send my fear before thee, God promises the marauding Israelites (Exodus 23:27). This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee (Deuteronomy 2:25). The terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, reports a narrator in Genesis(35:5). The book of Proverbs advised Hebrew readers that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10 KJV). Centuries later, in New Testament times, the “fear of the LORD” is alive and well—and still useful. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men, says the writer of 2 Corinthians (5:11). 3. In addition to inflicting terror directly, God does so via human and nonhuman agents. He sends a bear to tear apart 40 boys who are teasing a prophet, presumably as a warning to others. In the story of Job, God gives Satan permission to destroy a house in which Job’s sons and daughters have come together for a celebration, killing them all—this time as part of a divine wager that will become a morality tale. He later gives superhuman strength to Samson (the Bible’s version of Hercules) so that Samson can complete an Iron Age suicide mission. He pulls down the pillars of a pagan temple so that it collapses, killing 3,000 civilians. Samson himself dies in a blaze of glory (Judges 16:27-30). When Moses as leader of the Israelites catches some of them worshiping a golden calf, he orders those who have remained loyal to Yahweh to take up swords and slaughter their family members and neighbors (Exodus 32:21-24). They do so by the thousands. In the Exodus story, an angel of death passes from house to house, killing the firstborn son in each Egyptian family whether the parents are poor slaves or royalty and whether their child is an infant or youth (Exodus 7-12). Of all the Bible writers who sought to terrify pagans and other sinners, none exceeds the writer of Revelation, who fantasized supernatural monsters, each with some special capacity for inflicting torture or death. In one passage, a cloud of giant insects with human faces and the teeth of lions descends on those who lack a special mark from God. “And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them” (Revelation 9:4-6). 4. During armed conflict, God and his messengers command the Israelites to slaughter civilians and destroy their homes and means of food production including livestock and orchards. During World War II, the American military engaged in “terror bombing” of civilian centers including Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, as the Nazis terror-bombed London. If the Old Testament stories are to be believed, the ancient Israelites similarly targeted and terrorized ordinary villagers during their military campaigns, only they did so at God’s command and with his blessing. Bible believers sometimes defend the slaughters depicted in the Old Testament by arguing that they serve a practical purpose. Ethnic cleansing is the only way to rid the Promised Land of evil idolaters, which is why God frequently orders the death of even children and slaves in conquered towns. But the stories themselves include graphic tortures and humiliations that would be of little value if the only goal were ethnic cleansing. A close reading suggests that many of the killings are simply God-sponsored terrorism: mass murder as a display of power and means of social control. In one account, God commands human assassins to wreak havoc on civilians literally hundreds of years after an offense. Just when you think He has forgiven or forgotten....Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (1 Samuel 15:2-3). 5. As in ISIS, sexual enslavement of conquered women is one means of humiliating enemy combatants. In the book of Numbers, God’s messenger commands the Chosen People to kill every Midianite man, woman or child, except for virgin girls who are to be turned into sex slaves according to very explicit instructions. Many Americans were horrified at the story of an ISIS fighter who bound and gagged a captive girl, praying and quoting the Quran to her before commencing rape. The Bible’s instructions for claiming a captive virgin suggest shaving her head rather than applying duct tape to her wrists and mouth (Numbers 31). Why might this be considered terrorism? In the Bible, as in the Quran, women and children are literally possessions of men, which is why a man can sell his daughter into slavery or a rapist can be forced to buy his victim. In the Iron Age honor cultures of the Ancient Near East, female consent mattered little, but a man’s honor could be destroyed by the sexual violation of a female. Enslaving and impregnating the women of a conquered tribe or religion sends a graphic message to other men about who is on top. 6. In the New Testament gospels, even Jesus threatens violence and torment against those who don’t fall in line. In one parable, he likens God to the Master of a great estate who says, “These enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence (Luke 19:26-27). In a sermon, he says that those who fail to repent in time will be cast into outer darkness where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Luke 13:22-30). Jesus even uses words that invoke the slaughter commanded by Moses at Mt. Sinai, "Do not think that I have come to send peace on earth. I did not come to send peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matthew 10:34-35). From Genesis to Revelation, God terrorizes those who fail to fall at his feet and worship in the way he demands. His followers inflict divinely sanctioned torture and death, knowing that if they don’t they may end up on the receiving end—or at least with less real estate and booty. The Chosen People see the horrors God rains down on evildoers, meaning anyone who worships another god, and despite having dedicated themselves to the cult of Yahweh, they walk on eggshells, following an intricate set of rules and rituals and offering up burnt offerings in order to avoid his wrath. In the New Testament narrative, even these burnt offerings and rituals fall short, and the only way God can be appeased is with the sacrifice of Jesus, “the lamb without blemish.” The Bible is filled with histories of God-blessed slaughter and threats of supernatural torture for a reason: To create fear and intimidation. To gain political or tactical advantage. To influence an audience.Specifically, to keep the faithful and to justify their recurrent bouts of conquest and mass murder. And that is exactly what Bible texts have done for as far back as we can trace the history of Abrahamic religion. Fortunately, most modern believers are both wiser and kinder than the writers of their sacred texts, who could not even imagine the varied, intricate world of landscapes and cultures. Many Christians claim what is spiritually nourishing from Bible (like passages opposing terrorism) and discard the rest. But the rot remains. Christian fundamentalists who see themselves on a crusade against godless infidels, and right-wing politicians who pander to those fundamentalists, find biblical sanction for bigotry and atrocity when they seek it. This fact is not lost on Islamists, who assert that they are fighting defensive jihad while simultaneously inflicting their own Quranic version of bigotry and atrocity on anyone within reach. As long as Christians continue to bind together the words of our Iron Age ancestors and call them Good and Holy and “God breathed,” they will have little argument against terrorists who cite other sacred texts to justify destruction and death in the name of God.
Last fall, Dutch pranksters put a cover from a Quran over a Bible and then asked passersby to read aloud homophobic, violent or sexist passages that violate modern moral sensibilities. The texts shocked people who had never immersed themselves in the Iron Age world of the Bible writers, a world in which daughters can be sold as sexual slaves and most of us deserve the death penalty: you included. By one count, the Quran has only 532 cruel or violent passages, while the Bible has 1,321. Christians respond that the Bible is longer, so the cruel, violent passages make up a smaller percent of the whole. ISIS terrorists claim that their scripts for jihad, executions, sexual slavery and theocracy come straight from the Quran, and they cite chapter and verse to back up their claim. But Christians who find ISIS horrifying might be even more horrified to learn that similar scripts can be found in their own Good Book, including endorsements of terrorism that rival the most vile atrocities committed in the name of Allah. Terrorism is notoriously difficult to define. Some limit terrorist acts to those committed illegally by groups seeking social power. Others argue that the state itself may systematically terrorize a civilian population. James Poland, author of
Understanding Terrorism
, defines terrorism as a means (intimidation) to an end (social control over someone other than the victim): Terrorism is the premeditated, deliberate, systematic murder, mayhem, and threatening of the innocent to create fear and intimidation in order to gain a political or tactical advantage, usually to influence an audience. Our Iron Age ancestors who wrote the Bible lacked explosive devices and the ability to spread gruesome images via mass media. They lacked jetliners and drones and napalm and nerve gas. But they definitely understood mass intimidation as a tool of social control, and they sanctified their own terrorist tendencies by projecting the same tendencies onto God himself. Here are some acts of terrorism from the Bible. 1. In the Bible God controls humans by raining down death, destruction and terror on those who defy or anger him. I kill ... I wound ... I will make mine arrows drunk with blood and my sword shall devour flesh. So says Yahweh in Deuteronomy 32:39-42, and this is no idle threat. You’ve heard the story of Noah’s flood, and about the fire God rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah, and about the 12 plagues of Egypt, but did you know that in the Bible God kills 158 times? The full list can be found in the Steve Wells book, Drunk With Blood. Like ISIS, God sometimes acts as an executioner with a laser focus, as when he kills a baby to punish King David’s sexual infidelity (2 Samuel 12), or strikes dead a couple who falsely claim to have given their money to the church (Acts 5: 1-10). But also, like ISIS, he often wreaks death and destruction on those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or who were born into the wrong culture. For example, when the same King David conducts a forbidden census, God gives him a choice of punishments: Three years of famine, three months of attacks by neighboring tribes, or three days of plague. David chooses the plague, which kills 70,000 Israelites who had done nothing but let themselves be counted (1 Chronicles 21:1-17). 2. The Bible both opens and closes with graphic descriptions of torment and fear inflicted by God and designed to keep the faithful in line. In the Torah, God’s reign of terror is described in a series of graphic histories. In the book of Revelation, it is described in a series of graphic prophecies. In the books between, threats of torture and death hang over every interaction between God and humankind. God himself leans into his role as terrorist-in-chief. I will send my fear before thee, God promises the marauding Israelites (Exodus 23:27). This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee (Deuteronomy 2:25). The terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, reports a narrator in Genesis(35:5). The book of Proverbs advised Hebrew readers that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10 KJV). Centuries later, in New Testament times, the “fear of the LORD” is alive and well—and still useful. Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men, says the writer of 2 Corinthians (5:11). 3. In addition to inflicting terror directly, God does so via human and nonhuman agents. He sends a bear to tear apart 40 boys who are teasing a prophet, presumably as a warning to others. In the story of Job, God gives Satan permission to destroy a house in which Job’s sons and daughters have come together for a celebration, killing them all—this time as part of a divine wager that will become a morality tale. He later gives superhuman strength to Samson (the Bible’s version of Hercules) so that Samson can complete an Iron Age suicide mission. He pulls down the pillars of a pagan temple so that it collapses, killing 3,000 civilians. Samson himself dies in a blaze of glory (Judges 16:27-30). When Moses as leader of the Israelites catches some of them worshiping a golden calf, he orders those who have remained loyal to Yahweh to take up swords and slaughter their family members and neighbors (Exodus 32:21-24). They do so by the thousands. In the Exodus story, an angel of death passes from house to house, killing the firstborn son in each Egyptian family whether the parents are poor slaves or royalty and whether their child is an infant or youth (Exodus 7-12). Of all the Bible writers who sought to terrify pagans and other sinners, none exceeds the writer of Revelation, who fantasized supernatural monsters, each with some special capacity for inflicting torture or death. In one passage, a cloud of giant insects with human faces and the teeth of lions descends on those who lack a special mark from God. “And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them” (Revelation 9:4-6). 4. During armed conflict, God and his messengers command the Israelites to slaughter civilians and destroy their homes and means of food production including livestock and orchards. During World War II, the American military engaged in “terror bombing” of civilian centers including Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo, as the Nazis terror-bombed London. If the Old Testament stories are to be believed, the ancient Israelites similarly targeted and terrorized ordinary villagers during their military campaigns, only they did so at God’s command and with his blessing. Bible believers sometimes defend the slaughters depicted in the Old Testament by arguing that they serve a practical purpose. Ethnic cleansing is the only way to rid the Promised Land of evil idolaters, which is why God frequently orders the death of even children and slaves in conquered towns. But the stories themselves include graphic tortures and humiliations that would be of little value if the only goal were ethnic cleansing. A close reading suggests that many of the killings are simply God-sponsored terrorism: mass murder as a display of power and means of social control. In one account, God commands human assassins to wreak havoc on civilians literally hundreds of years after an offense. Just when you think He has forgiven or forgotten....Thus saith the LORD of hosts, I remember that which Amalek did to Israel, how he laid wait for him in the way, when he came up from Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass (1 Samuel 15:2-3). 5. As in ISIS, sexual enslavement of conquered women is one means of humiliating enemy combatants. In the book of Numbers, God’s messenger commands the Chosen People to kill every Midianite man, woman or child, except for virgin girls who are to be turned into sex slaves according to very explicit instructions. Many Americans were horrified at the story of an ISIS fighter who bound and gagged a captive girl, praying and quoting the Quran to her before commencing rape. The Bible’s instructions for claiming a captive virgin suggest shaving her head rather than applying duct tape to her wrists and mouth (Numbers 31). Why might this be considered terrorism? In the Bible, as in the Quran, women and children are literally possessions of men, which is why a man can sell his daughter into slavery or a rapist can be forced to buy his victim. In the Iron Age honor cultures of the Ancient Near East, female consent mattered little, but a man’s honor could be destroyed by the sexual violation of a female. Enslaving and impregnating the women of a conquered tribe or religion sends a graphic message to other men about who is on top. 6. In the New Testament gospels, even Jesus threatens violence and torment against those who don’t fall in line. In one parable, he likens God to the Master of a great estate who says, “These enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slay them in my presence (Luke 19:26-27). In a sermon, he says that those who fail to repent in time will be cast into outer darkness where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Luke 13:22-30). Jesus even uses words that invoke the slaughter commanded by Moses at Mt. Sinai, "Do not think that I have come to send peace on earth. I did not come to send peace, but a sword. I am sent to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Matthew 10:34-35). From Genesis to Revelation, God terrorizes those who fail to fall at his feet and worship in the way he demands. His followers inflict divinely sanctioned torture and death, knowing that if they don’t they may end up on the receiving end—or at least with less real estate and booty. The Chosen People see the horrors God rains down on evildoers, meaning anyone who worships another god, and despite having dedicated themselves to the cult of Yahweh, they walk on eggshells, following an intricate set of rules and rituals and offering up burnt offerings in order to avoid his wrath. In the New Testament narrative, even these burnt offerings and rituals fall short, and the only way God can be appeased is with the sacrifice of Jesus, “the lamb without blemish.” The Bible is filled with histories of God-blessed slaughter and threats of supernatural torture for a reason: To create fear and intimidation. To gain political or tactical advantage. To influence an audience.Specifically, to keep the faithful and to justify their recurrent bouts of conquest and mass murder. And that is exactly what Bible texts have done for as far back as we can trace the history of Abrahamic religion. Fortunately, most modern believers are both wiser and kinder than the writers of their sacred texts, who could not even imagine the varied, intricate world of landscapes and cultures. Many Christians claim what is spiritually nourishing from Bible (like passages opposing terrorism) and discard the rest. But the rot remains. Christian fundamentalists who see themselves on a crusade against godless infidels, and right-wing politicians who pander to those fundamentalists, find biblical sanction for bigotry and atrocity when they seek it. This fact is not lost on Islamists, who assert that they are fighting defensive jihad while simultaneously inflicting their own Quranic version of bigotry and atrocity on anyone within reach. As long as Christians continue to bind together the words of our Iron Age ancestors and call them Good and Holy and “God breathed,” they will have little argument against terrorists who cite other sacred texts to justify destruction and death in the name of God.
8 signs Americans are slowly embracing a healthier diet
Last summer, the right mix of rain and sun over Minnesota gave corn farmers in the Gopher State a bumper crop. Garrison Keillor, the redoubtable host of the public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion,” was likely pleased. “Sex is good,” the proud Minnesotan once quipped, ”but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.” One of 2015’s food trends, in fact, was a craze for healthy maize. Organic, GMO-free corn products like Kiddylicious Sweetcorn Rice Rounds, Off the Cob Sweet Corn Tortilla Chips, Pipsnacks Popcorn and Pop Art Snacks Tandoori Yogurt Popcorn tantalized health-conscious taste buds at the 61st Annual Summer Fancy Food Show last summer in New York City. Darren Seifer, a food and beverage industry analyst at NPD Group, recently told Marketplace’s Annie Baxter that consumers are increasingly focused on clean and pure foods. And when it comes to corn, that means fresh, locally sourced organic sweet corn, not high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in a wide range of processed food that has been linked to obesity and diabetes. Consumers’ growing aversion to sugars in all forms will likely accelerate, said Seifer, as part of an overall trend of consumers becoming more aware of what they’re eating and how it affects not only their personal health, but also the environment, sustainability and animal welfare. Here are eight advancing food trends that are moving the food system to a better place, and that are poised to become even more popular in 2016. 1. Locavorism Coined in San Francisco in 2005 and rooted in the organic agriculture movement, locavorism is the practice of eating food that was produced locally; specifically, within a 100-mile radius of where you live. Eating this way is considered healthier, as the food will be fresher and won’t require preservatives. Locavorism is also better for the environment, since the food items don't have to travel very far to reach you, therefore using less energy for transportation and decreasing your carbon footprint and reducing emissions that contribute to climate change Last year, a small group of intrepid locavores in Bristol, England, began a research project called Going Local Going Green that has been tracking the progress of their exploration into the 100-mile diet. They will be releasing a short documentary about their research early this year. In the U.S. the locavore movement looks to increase its ranks in 2016. While Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon retained their Number 1 through 4 rankings, respectively, on the Strolling of the Heifers 2015 Locavore Index, several states moved up in the rankings from 2014 to 2015, including Massachusetts (11 to 5), Wisconsin (8 to 6), Montana (9 to 7) and Connecticut (20 to 10). The pushback on genetically modified foods may help spur an interest in locavorism. "The controversy around GMOs will prompt consumers to become even more interested in 'hyperlocal' organic food than ever before," predicts Aaron von Frank, CEO of GrowJourney, an organic, heirloom seeds-of-the-month club. In addition to eating locally, one of the main aspects of being a locavore is eating in season, which means giving up certain foods at certain times of year, and giving up some foods altogether. But eating as our ancestors did holds a certain appeal. “Eating in season is all about the pleasure of being in the moment and tasting something new,” says Sarah Elton, author of Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens, How Canadians Are Changing the Way We Eat. “When I haven't eaten asparagus for 10 months, that first taste of spring is heaven.” 2. Wholesome foods “The food industry has gotten incredibly good at manipulating the properties of food,” says Kelly Brownell, dean of Duke University’s School of Public Policy. “It has just the right texture, just the right color, just the right smell to make you consume as much as possible, miss it when you don’t have it, and crave it to the point where you want to keep coming back for more.” But even as Big Food attempts to lure us with processed foods, more consumers are seeking out the opposite: wholesome, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts and whole grains. This steadily increasing interest in wholesomeness correlates with an increasing aversion to sugar: A recent Gallup poll found that 44 percent of Americans now include organic foods in their diets, while a full half avoid sugar. Seventy percent of Americans seek out grains such as cereal, pasta and rice, while more than 60 percent avoid soda. And an impressive nine out of 10 Americans try to include fruits and vegetables in their diet. Not only are consumers increasingly seeking out wholesome foods, they are willing to pay a premium for them. According to Nielsen’s 2015 Global Health & Wellness Survey that polled over 30,000 people online, 88 percent of Americans are willing to pay more for healthier foods. Global sales of healthy food products are estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2017, according to Euromonitor. When it comes to what consumers will be seeking out more of over the coming year, it may amount to single word. “Just think of the word no," Seifer said. "No preservatives, no additives, no growth hormones." “While economic concerns remain in the forefront for consumers, health and wellness concerns continue to increase in importance,” said market researcher James Russo of Neilsen. “The reasons vary from societal, demographic, technological, governmental, and most importantly, a shift in consumer focus on the role diet plays in health." 3. More plant-eating Global Food Forums, which organizes conferences for the global food, beverage and nutritional products markets, says that 2016 will see a rise in herbivorism: “Plants are playing a meatier role in a surprising number of products, and not just for vegan and vegetarian alternatives.” This trend goes hand-in-hand with the recommendation issued last year by the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the nation’s top nutritional panel, that Americans should eat less meat. “High meat prices, fears over hormones, health concerns, and even processed-meat cancer scares have made vegetable-centric restaurants the new hot commodity in the food world,” says food writer Gillie Houston. In the new documentary In Defense of Food, based on his bestselling book, Michael Pollan offers a simple solution to the diet-driven health crisis in America that has resulted in nearly seven out of 10 adults being considered overweight or obese. His recommendation: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He means eat the kinds of things our ancestor ate for thousands of years, before the advent of the highly manufactured, processed foods that now litter the food landscape. Pollan notes that his advice “is about as universal as any advice you could offer. It’s very rare in our lives where the answer to a complicated question is so simple, but when it comes to eating, it is.” 4. Pushback on GMOs In 2013, a New York Times poll found that 75 percent of Americans “expressed concern about genetically modified organisms in their food, with most of them worried about the effects on people’s health.” So while the anti-GMO movement has been gathering steam over the past few years, consumer concern over this issue will be tested in 2016, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently ruled that the GMO salmon created by AquBounty Technologies is safe to eat. According to Nielsen, 43 percent of the global population, across all demographics, say they would pay more for foods that are GMO-free. “Whatever the science says, many consumers have made up their minds: no genetic tinkering with their food,” says Technomic, a food service research firm. In 2016, according to the food research firm, “Some diners will gravitate to restaurants touting GMO-free fare; others will demand GMO labeling on menus. That’s a big issue for the supply chain, since many crops (such as soy fed to livestock) have been modified to boost productivity.” "There is already a lot of controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms, but I think this debate is going to become seriously intense in 2016 due to the recent decision to pass GMO salmon for human consumption," says Abigail Keeso, a registered nurse and co-founder of That Clean Life, a platform for healthy eating. 5. Cage-free eggs 2015 marked a tipping point in the long campaign to free America’s egg-laying chickens from battery cages, as several of the biggest food brands announced they would stop sourcing eggs produced by hens subjected to an inhumane form of confinement so extreme the birds are unable to spread their wings even once in their entire lifetimes. These pledges indicate a sweeping corporate response to consumers who are increasingly demanding that their food be produced without cruelty. In 2016, conscious consumers will be seeking out cage-free eggs in greater numbers, a trend that will likely continue for years to come. “When you have everyone from McDonald’s to Taco Bell to Dunkin' Donuts to Nestlé all switching to cage-free, you know it is becoming the norm in society,” Josh Balk, senior director of food policy at the Humane Society of the United States, recently told AlterNet. The HSUS has been at the forefront of the nationwide cage-free campaign for the past decade. Terrence O'Keefe of WATT Global Media, an agribusiness information firm, says that “market demand for cage-free eggs is spurring a shift to cage-free housing, which may be the most significant development of 2016 for U.S. egg producers." “The cage-free future will happen,” said Balk. “I guarantee it. There’s no way a company will ever be able to convince its customers that it’s somehow okay to treat animals like machines and immobilize them to the point they can barely move.” 6. Hot sauces and spices There will likely be a steady rise in consumer interest in hot sauces, with chefs and condiment producers trying to keep up with Americans’ growing desire for spicy foods. “It's a contest to see who can blister your palate more,” Michael Whiteman of Baum & Whiteman, a food and restaurant consulting firm, told Marketplace. Technomic calls it the "Sriracha effect." The group says chefs have “learned that Sriracha sauce can add instant ethnic cachet to something as straightforward as a sandwich” and in 2016 will be seeking out new ingredients from around the world to keep the heat on, such as ghost pepper from India, sambal from Southeast Asia, gochujang from Korea, and harissa, sumac and dukka from North Africa. There’s also an increasing awareness of the health benefits associated with eating spicy foods. "There is accumulating evidence from mostly experimental research to show the benefit of spices or their active components on human health," said Lu Qi, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of a study published last year in the BMJ that eating spicy foods such as chili peppers may increase longevity. One reason could be the ability of capsaicin, the main compound in chili peppers, to reduce the harmful effects of LDL, or bad cholesterol, as well as its anti-inflammatory properties, which helps to reduce the risk of heart-related problems. Spicy foods also boost the production of so-called feel-good hormones like serotonin, which can help alleviate stress and counteract depression. 7. Ugly produce From the luscious images created by food companies to chefs focusing on the visual look of their dishes, we have been conditioned to believe that perfectly shaped fruits and vegetables are somehow better. This desire for perfect looking produce plays a significant role in food waste; twisted tubers and bent broccoli taste the same and provide the same nutrients as perfectly shaped versions, but end up in the trash. “Grocery stores refuse to stock ugly fruits and vegetables, so most of it never sees the light of day,” writes Ariel Schwartz, deputy editor for innovation at Tech Insider. “And billions of tons of perfectly tasty — but cosmetically challenged— produce goes to the landfill every year.” The National Resources Defense Council estimates that an astonishing six billion pounds of fruits and vegetables are wasted every year in the U.S. because they are considered ugly. Last year, Schwartz wrote about his experience trying a new startup called Imperfect, which aims to change the perception we have of so-called ugly produce by delivering it right to our homes. The company, which charges $12 for a box of mixed produce sourced from California farms that would normally cost $20 at a grocery store or $35 from a similar delivery service, has plans to expand to other parts of California and the rest of the U.S. “Maybe it's time to redefine what we think of as ‘attractive’ produce,” writes Schwartz. In Australia, a family firm called Eat Me Chutneys is also working to fight food waste by transforming ugly produce into 200-300 jars of chutney every week. They recently ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to help them reach their target goal of saving 10 tons of ugly produce in 2016. 8. Year of the Worker Many food and farm workers face labor abuses and a number of hazardous conditions, such as prolonged exposure of toxic pesticides. Thankfully in recent years, their stories have been surfacing and public awareness has been steadily growing. For example, in January of last year, following a two-decade fight against the slavery-like working conditions of American tomato farmers, Secretary of State John Kerry presented the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) with the 2014 Presidential Medal for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking. In the last decade or so, more than 1,200 farm workers have been liberated from agricultural slavery rings in Florida alone. That may sound like a lot, but, as Barry Estabrook, author of
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
, told NPR, "What you're seeing is the tip of a really ugly iceberg.” The problem, he said, is that "they're very, very hard cases to prosecute." In September, the EPA and the Department of Labor proposed updated worker protection standards that will raise the minimum age a farm worker can handle pesticides to 18, and also enlarge “exclusion zones” for all outdoor areas that have been treated with pesticides. These rules could soon increase protections for the nation’s 2 million farm workers. Considering the increased awareness of the farm worker, in addition to today’s tighter labor market, mandates to boost minimum wage and the advancement of technology and automation, it's no wonder that Technomic dubbed 2016 the “Year of the Worker,” saying that we can expect to see food companies devoting “more resources to training and retention.” Whatever specific food trends may arise over the coming year, it’s clear that consumers’ growing tendency toward healthier, more sustainable, more just and more humanely sourced foods will continue to drive positive changes aross the entire food system — not just in 2016, but for a long time to come.
Last summer, the right mix of rain and sun over Minnesota gave corn farmers in the Gopher State a bumper crop. Garrison Keillor, the redoubtable host of the public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion,” was likely pleased. “Sex is good,” the proud Minnesotan once quipped, ”but not as good as fresh, sweet corn.” One of 2015’s food trends, in fact, was a craze for healthy maize. Organic, GMO-free corn products like Kiddylicious Sweetcorn Rice Rounds, Off the Cob Sweet Corn Tortilla Chips, Pipsnacks Popcorn and Pop Art Snacks Tandoori Yogurt Popcorn tantalized health-conscious taste buds at the 61st Annual Summer Fancy Food Show last summer in New York City. Darren Seifer, a food and beverage industry analyst at NPD Group, recently told Marketplace’s Annie Baxter that consumers are increasingly focused on clean and pure foods. And when it comes to corn, that means fresh, locally sourced organic sweet corn, not high-fructose corn syrup, a sweetener found in a wide range of processed food that has been linked to obesity and diabetes. Consumers’ growing aversion to sugars in all forms will likely accelerate, said Seifer, as part of an overall trend of consumers becoming more aware of what they’re eating and how it affects not only their personal health, but also the environment, sustainability and animal welfare. Here are eight advancing food trends that are moving the food system to a better place, and that are poised to become even more popular in 2016. 1. Locavorism Coined in San Francisco in 2005 and rooted in the organic agriculture movement, locavorism is the practice of eating food that was produced locally; specifically, within a 100-mile radius of where you live. Eating this way is considered healthier, as the food will be fresher and won’t require preservatives. Locavorism is also better for the environment, since the food items don't have to travel very far to reach you, therefore using less energy for transportation and decreasing your carbon footprint and reducing emissions that contribute to climate change Last year, a small group of intrepid locavores in Bristol, England, began a research project called Going Local Going Green that has been tracking the progress of their exploration into the 100-mile diet. They will be releasing a short documentary about their research early this year. In the U.S. the locavore movement looks to increase its ranks in 2016. While Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon retained their Number 1 through 4 rankings, respectively, on the Strolling of the Heifers 2015 Locavore Index, several states moved up in the rankings from 2014 to 2015, including Massachusetts (11 to 5), Wisconsin (8 to 6), Montana (9 to 7) and Connecticut (20 to 10). The pushback on genetically modified foods may help spur an interest in locavorism. "The controversy around GMOs will prompt consumers to become even more interested in 'hyperlocal' organic food than ever before," predicts Aaron von Frank, CEO of GrowJourney, an organic, heirloom seeds-of-the-month club. In addition to eating locally, one of the main aspects of being a locavore is eating in season, which means giving up certain foods at certain times of year, and giving up some foods altogether. But eating as our ancestors did holds a certain appeal. “Eating in season is all about the pleasure of being in the moment and tasting something new,” says Sarah Elton, author of Locavore: From Farmers’ Fields to Rooftop Gardens, How Canadians Are Changing the Way We Eat. “When I haven't eaten asparagus for 10 months, that first taste of spring is heaven.” 2. Wholesome foods “The food industry has gotten incredibly good at manipulating the properties of food,” says Kelly Brownell, dean of Duke University’s School of Public Policy. “It has just the right texture, just the right color, just the right smell to make you consume as much as possible, miss it when you don’t have it, and crave it to the point where you want to keep coming back for more.” But even as Big Food attempts to lure us with processed foods, more consumers are seeking out the opposite: wholesome, unprocessed foods like fruits, vegetables, nuts and whole grains. This steadily increasing interest in wholesomeness correlates with an increasing aversion to sugar: A recent Gallup poll found that 44 percent of Americans now include organic foods in their diets, while a full half avoid sugar. Seventy percent of Americans seek out grains such as cereal, pasta and rice, while more than 60 percent avoid soda. And an impressive nine out of 10 Americans try to include fruits and vegetables in their diet. Not only are consumers increasingly seeking out wholesome foods, they are willing to pay a premium for them. According to Nielsen’s 2015 Global Health & Wellness Survey that polled over 30,000 people online, 88 percent of Americans are willing to pay more for healthier foods. Global sales of healthy food products are estimated to reach $1 trillion by 2017, according to Euromonitor. When it comes to what consumers will be seeking out more of over the coming year, it may amount to single word. “Just think of the word no," Seifer said. "No preservatives, no additives, no growth hormones." “While economic concerns remain in the forefront for consumers, health and wellness concerns continue to increase in importance,” said market researcher James Russo of Neilsen. “The reasons vary from societal, demographic, technological, governmental, and most importantly, a shift in consumer focus on the role diet plays in health." 3. More plant-eating Global Food Forums, which organizes conferences for the global food, beverage and nutritional products markets, says that 2016 will see a rise in herbivorism: “Plants are playing a meatier role in a surprising number of products, and not just for vegan and vegetarian alternatives.” This trend goes hand-in-hand with the recommendation issued last year by the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the nation’s top nutritional panel, that Americans should eat less meat. “High meat prices, fears over hormones, health concerns, and even processed-meat cancer scares have made vegetable-centric restaurants the new hot commodity in the food world,” says food writer Gillie Houston. In the new documentary In Defense of Food, based on his bestselling book, Michael Pollan offers a simple solution to the diet-driven health crisis in America that has resulted in nearly seven out of 10 adults being considered overweight or obese. His recommendation: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” He means eat the kinds of things our ancestor ate for thousands of years, before the advent of the highly manufactured, processed foods that now litter the food landscape. Pollan notes that his advice “is about as universal as any advice you could offer. It’s very rare in our lives where the answer to a complicated question is so simple, but when it comes to eating, it is.” 4. Pushback on GMOs In 2013, a New York Times poll found that 75 percent of Americans “expressed concern about genetically modified organisms in their food, with most of them worried about the effects on people’s health.” So while the anti-GMO movement has been gathering steam over the past few years, consumer concern over this issue will be tested in 2016, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently ruled that the GMO salmon created by AquBounty Technologies is safe to eat. According to Nielsen, 43 percent of the global population, across all demographics, say they would pay more for foods that are GMO-free. “Whatever the science says, many consumers have made up their minds: no genetic tinkering with their food,” says Technomic, a food service research firm. In 2016, according to the food research firm, “Some diners will gravitate to restaurants touting GMO-free fare; others will demand GMO labeling on menus. That’s a big issue for the supply chain, since many crops (such as soy fed to livestock) have been modified to boost productivity.” "There is already a lot of controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms, but I think this debate is going to become seriously intense in 2016 due to the recent decision to pass GMO salmon for human consumption," says Abigail Keeso, a registered nurse and co-founder of That Clean Life, a platform for healthy eating. 5. Cage-free eggs 2015 marked a tipping point in the long campaign to free America’s egg-laying chickens from battery cages, as several of the biggest food brands announced they would stop sourcing eggs produced by hens subjected to an inhumane form of confinement so extreme the birds are unable to spread their wings even once in their entire lifetimes. These pledges indicate a sweeping corporate response to consumers who are increasingly demanding that their food be produced without cruelty. In 2016, conscious consumers will be seeking out cage-free eggs in greater numbers, a trend that will likely continue for years to come. “When you have everyone from McDonald’s to Taco Bell to Dunkin' Donuts to Nestlé all switching to cage-free, you know it is becoming the norm in society,” Josh Balk, senior director of food policy at the Humane Society of the United States, recently told AlterNet. The HSUS has been at the forefront of the nationwide cage-free campaign for the past decade. Terrence O'Keefe of WATT Global Media, an agribusiness information firm, says that “market demand for cage-free eggs is spurring a shift to cage-free housing, which may be the most significant development of 2016 for U.S. egg producers." “The cage-free future will happen,” said Balk. “I guarantee it. There’s no way a company will ever be able to convince its customers that it’s somehow okay to treat animals like machines and immobilize them to the point they can barely move.” 6. Hot sauces and spices There will likely be a steady rise in consumer interest in hot sauces, with chefs and condiment producers trying to keep up with Americans’ growing desire for spicy foods. “It's a contest to see who can blister your palate more,” Michael Whiteman of Baum & Whiteman, a food and restaurant consulting firm, told Marketplace. Technomic calls it the "Sriracha effect." The group says chefs have “learned that Sriracha sauce can add instant ethnic cachet to something as straightforward as a sandwich” and in 2016 will be seeking out new ingredients from around the world to keep the heat on, such as ghost pepper from India, sambal from Southeast Asia, gochujang from Korea, and harissa, sumac and dukka from North Africa. There’s also an increasing awareness of the health benefits associated with eating spicy foods. "There is accumulating evidence from mostly experimental research to show the benefit of spices or their active components on human health," said Lu Qi, an associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of a study published last year in the BMJ that eating spicy foods such as chili peppers may increase longevity. One reason could be the ability of capsaicin, the main compound in chili peppers, to reduce the harmful effects of LDL, or bad cholesterol, as well as its anti-inflammatory properties, which helps to reduce the risk of heart-related problems. Spicy foods also boost the production of so-called feel-good hormones like serotonin, which can help alleviate stress and counteract depression. 7. Ugly produce From the luscious images created by food companies to chefs focusing on the visual look of their dishes, we have been conditioned to believe that perfectly shaped fruits and vegetables are somehow better. This desire for perfect looking produce plays a significant role in food waste; twisted tubers and bent broccoli taste the same and provide the same nutrients as perfectly shaped versions, but end up in the trash. “Grocery stores refuse to stock ugly fruits and vegetables, so most of it never sees the light of day,” writes Ariel Schwartz, deputy editor for innovation at Tech Insider. “And billions of tons of perfectly tasty — but cosmetically challenged— produce goes to the landfill every year.” The National Resources Defense Council estimates that an astonishing six billion pounds of fruits and vegetables are wasted every year in the U.S. because they are considered ugly. Last year, Schwartz wrote about his experience trying a new startup called Imperfect, which aims to change the perception we have of so-called ugly produce by delivering it right to our homes. The company, which charges $12 for a box of mixed produce sourced from California farms that would normally cost $20 at a grocery store or $35 from a similar delivery service, has plans to expand to other parts of California and the rest of the U.S. “Maybe it's time to redefine what we think of as ‘attractive’ produce,” writes Schwartz. In Australia, a family firm called Eat Me Chutneys is also working to fight food waste by transforming ugly produce into 200-300 jars of chutney every week. They recently ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to help them reach their target goal of saving 10 tons of ugly produce in 2016. 8. Year of the Worker Many food and farm workers face labor abuses and a number of hazardous conditions, such as prolonged exposure of toxic pesticides. Thankfully in recent years, their stories have been surfacing and public awareness has been steadily growing. For example, in January of last year, following a two-decade fight against the slavery-like working conditions of American tomato farmers, Secretary of State John Kerry presented the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) with the 2014 Presidential Medal for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Human Trafficking. In the last decade or so, more than 1,200 farm workers have been liberated from agricultural slavery rings in Florida alone. That may sound like a lot, but, as Barry Estabrook, author of
Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit
, told NPR, "What you're seeing is the tip of a really ugly iceberg.” The problem, he said, is that "they're very, very hard cases to prosecute." In September, the EPA and the Department of Labor proposed updated worker protection standards that will raise the minimum age a farm worker can handle pesticides to 18, and also enlarge “exclusion zones” for all outdoor areas that have been treated with pesticides. These rules could soon increase protections for the nation’s 2 million farm workers. Considering the increased awareness of the farm worker, in addition to today’s tighter labor market, mandates to boost minimum wage and the advancement of technology and automation, it's no wonder that Technomic dubbed 2016 the “Year of the Worker,” saying that we can expect to see food companies devoting “more resources to training and retention.” Whatever specific food trends may arise over the coming year, it’s clear that consumers’ growing tendency toward healthier, more sustainable, more just and more humanely sourced foods will continue to drive positive changes aross the entire food system — not just in 2016, but for a long time to come.
January 11, 2016
Watch livestream of the Democratic candidates talking social justice, immigration and more at the Iowa Brown & Black Forum
Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders take the stage live from Iowa to discuss where they stand on the issues that matter to young, diverse America. Including: social justice, immigration, education, health care, and the economy. The Forum is moderated by FUSION anchors Jorge Ramos and Alicia Menendez as well as FUSION contributor Akilah Hughes and New York Magazine Writer-at-Large Rembert Browne. Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders take the stage live from Iowa to discuss where they stand on the issues that matter to young, diverse America. Including: social justice, immigration, education, health care, and the economy. The Forum is moderated by FUSION anchors Jorge Ramos and Alicia Menendez as well as FUSION contributor Akilah Hughes and New York Magazine Writer-at-Large Rembert Browne.
