Yellowstone National Parkwas forced to close all entrances to visitors this week, after heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused massive flooding to sweep through the area, ripping through roads, bridges, and homes. More than 10,000 people were ordered to evacuate the nation’s oldest national park. As of yesterday, there have been no major injuries or deaths reported, officials said.
The damage, however, is extensive and could take years to repair. “Because initial damage assessments are ongoing, the [National Park Service] does not yet have an estimate on when Yellowstone will fully reopen nor are preliminary costs for repairs and recovery available,” NPS said in a statement. Yellowstone had just celebrated its 150th anniversary in March, the Associated Press notes, and was nearing its busiest season when the floods hit.
While an official reopening date has not been set, officials said three out of the five park entrances are “targeted for reopening as early as next week.”
Here are some of the most dramatic videos and photos from the disaster:
Current conditions of Yellowstone’s North Entrance Road through the Gardner Canyon between Gardiner, Montana, and Mammoth Hot Springs.
— Yellowstone National Park (@YellowstoneNPS) June 13, 2022
Flooding at the North Entrance Road
Jacob W. Frank/National Park Service via AP
Yellowstone National Park closed for the first time in 34 years after record floods washed out roads, bridges and nearby communities, prompting evacuations https://t.co/TF0Jl9Z15ypic.twitter.com/CXPqPfvfs0
Florida, a state famous for its oranges, is now in the orange. According to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most counties in the Sunshine State are seeing “high” Covid community levels, a metric based on hospital capacity, hospital admissions, and new case numbers. With an average of about 10,618 new cases reported per day in the state and climbing hospitalization rates this week, more than 90 percent of Floridians fall into the “high” risk category, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
Here’s the graphic of Covid community levels by county in Florida:
Covid Community Level by county in Florida, according to the CDC. Counties with “low” risk appear in green, “medium” risk in yellow, and “high” in orange.
The report comes at a particularly bad time for Florida. This week, the Florida Department of Health announced it would not be preordering vaccines for children under five years old, making it the only state in the country to do so. “States do not need to be involved in the convoluted vaccine distribution process, especially when the federal government has a track record of developing inconsistent and unsustainable COVID-19 policies,” the department said in a statement, according toPolitico. “It is also no surprise we chose not to participate in distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine when the Department does not recommend it for all children.” (It’s worth noting that Florida’s recommendations against vaccination for healthy children, including those older than five, have received harsh criticism from health experts and pediatricians.)
“There’s not going to be any state programs that are going to be trying to, you know, get Covid jabs to infants and toddlers and newborns,” said Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, at a news conference Thursday.“That’s not something that we think is appropriate, and so that’s not where we’re going to be utilizing our resources in that regard.” In response, Florida Democratic Party spokesperson Kobie Christian said DeSantis was “using children’s safety as a political prop,” CNN reported.
The CDC is expected to follow the Food and Drug Administration and recommend the vaccine for children under five years old (and older than six months) on Saturday.
On Friday, after reports of Florida’s decision circulated, Florida’s Department of Health issued another statement clarifying that vaccines can be ordered by health care providers and will be available “as early as next week” at pharmacies like CVS, Walgreens, and Publix, a Florida grocery store chain. “Florida’s decision to not participate in the cumbersome vaccine pre-ordering process never prohibited vaccine supply from being ordered or from being available in Florida,” it reads.
"Is It Cake?" contestant Andrew Fuller, alongside host Mikey DayNetflix
When it comes to reality television, my bar is pretty low. Love Island? Great. Dancing With the Stars? Fantastic. Antiques Roadshow? Mesmerizing. Too Hot to Handle? Gold. Almost nothing is too stupid for me to enjoy. So if I have time after a long day of doing journalist stuff to settle in for some television, chances are, it’s going to be trashy.
I understand, however, that these shows aren’t for everyone. And for the most part, I keep my love of reality TV to myself. It’s sort of like cheap wine: While I will happily dip into an opened, week-old bottle of Two Buck Chuck alone on a Tuesday night, I most certainly wouldn’t bring that to, say, a dinner party with friends. Other people have standards.
But there is one show that I’ve found myself talking about to anyone who will listen: The gripping—and surprisingly wholesome—Netflix baking competition Is It Cake? (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
Honestly, I didn’t expect much from this show. At its most basic level, Is It Cake?, which premiered in March, is a contest between nine bakers to make hyper-realistic cakes that look like things that are not cake: designer bags, bowling pins, shoes, luggage, steak, sea shells, etcetera. If a panel of celebrity judges can’t pick the cakes out of a lineup of real objects, the bakers win some cash—and increase their odds of winning the Grand Prize of $50,000.
If you’ve spent any time on social media during the pandemic, the show’s premise may sound familiar. As Slate‘s Cleo Levin wrote shortly after Is It Cake? aired, it’s basically a rip-off of an internet trend: “[T]he show’s source material is a meme, developed from the mega-viral series of realistic cake videos of the last couple years.” In short, someone saw one of those viral videos and thought, Let’s make it into a Netflix show. It’s absurd.
The writers of the show, to some extent, seem to be aware of this. Is It Cake? knows it’s a show about items made out of cake—and leans into the ridiculousness. This is best exemplified by the self-deprecating humor of the show’s host, comedian Mikey Day, “one of the white guys on SNL,” as he puts it, whose primary job responsibilities include making (at times, cringey) jokes and slicing open cakes with a really big knife. “That’s right,” he says in one of the episodes. “They gave an idiot a machete.”
But what makes Is It Cake? great isn’t the cake art or the cake jokes or even the tension of who is going to win. It’s the cast members themselves, who, even as they compete, root for each other. In the first episode, for instance, after fooling the judges with a taco cake, TikTok-er Jonny Manganello is given the opportunity to win $5,000 if he can distinguish between a sack of cash and a cake that looks a heck of a lot like a sack of cash. He guesses correctly, and his competitors burst into applause. “You guys are so nice!” he says. In episode five, Day holds a brief “graduation ceremony,” complete with a cap and tassel for 18-year-old Justin Ellen, who missed his high school graduation to appear on the show. And when finalist Hemu Basu is asked which of the eliminated bakers she would like to bring back into the competition to assist with a final cake, she chooses Dessiree Salaverria, because “[Salaverria] wanted one more chance to show her skill to her daughter.” Then, there’s Andrew Fuller aka “Sugar Freakshow” who becomes emotional after securing a spot in the finale: “I’m always, like, the weirdo and the oddball who people don’t take seriously,” he says, his eyes filled with tears. “And I’m just not used to being the one that people consider the best. And it’s crazy ’cause these are incredibly talented people and I just feel incredibly honored…I love you guys.” Is It Cake? may be the most wholesome reality television show I’ve seen since the Queer Eye reboot aired in 2018.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that a show like Is It Cake? would resonate with audiences—it ranked in Netflix’s top 10 most popular shows in English for four weeks—at a time of so much conflict and uncertainty (see: Covid, Ukraine, abortion rights, gun violence, the economy, [insert latest crisis here]). When normalcy has dissolved, a bizarre show about cake just…makes sense. Or maybe, after the last two bitter years, we all just needed something sweet. Either way, I’m pleased to report, Is It Cake? has been renewed for another season.
The political action committee that helped bring down Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) has released a series of salacious and likely false accusations against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)—and online liberals are eating it right up. But if the Cawthorn allegations, which centered around an explicit video, were fueled by homophobia, then the Boebert allegations are being fueled by a no less pernicious force: misogyny.
Several newssites in recent days have breathlessly amplified claims that Boebert had two abortions while working as a paid escort, a small news cycle that’s prompting loud accusations of hypocrisy from the blue-wave Twitter crowd. To be sure, these outlets have published unverified claims from a politically motivated organization as if they were facts, all in pretty clear violation of good journalistic practice. These claims come from a heavily redacted set of anonymous text messages sent to a member of the American Muckrakers PAC, without corroboration. And, as Will Sommer of the Daily Beast points out, one of the photos that the source characterized as being of Boebert is actually of another woman entirely—not exactly the mark of a trustworthy tipster.
Last month, I published a feature on Boebert, for which I interviewed many people who personally knew her. I had to sift through a lot of unverifiable information before deciding what to publish online. There was really no need for rumor-mongering about Boebert; the truth was dramatic enough. We know that Boebert was present on the night that a man exposed himself to two women at a bowling alley, one of them a teenager—then went Boebert went on to marry him. We know that she denied responsibility for selling tainted pork sliders that had sickened 80 people at a local rodeo. And we know, as I reported, that she consistently failed to pay employees at her restaurant, Shooters Grill.
A lot of the criticism of Boebert is warranted, but she doesn’t deserve to be the victim of sexist tropes. After my story on Boebert was published, many self-professed liberals used misogynistic language to describe her. One commenter called her a “batshit crazy woman.” A Twitter user replied to the article link with the word “Skank!!!” A recent Reddit thread related to a follow-up post contained some comments too obscene to post here.
In promoting the explicit video of Cawthorn and pushing unverified abortion allegations against Boebert, the American Muckrakers claim that they’re demonstrating political hypocrisy. Cawthorn, the PAC’s co-founder said, deserved to be outed as having dressed in drag and made homoerotic jokes with his friends because he “holds himself to be above everybody.” But the group’s attempt at exposing hypocrisy really came off as a cynical play on voters’ homophobia. Sure, one could call Boebert a hypocrite for allegedly having abortions despite publicly opposing them. But accusing Boebert of having done sex work and gotten abortions involves an obvious layer of contempt, of shaming a woman for things that she shouldn’t have to be ashamed of—especially when there’s no shortage of actually shameful things to talk about.
Keep in mind that Boebert once referred to her colleague Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) as the “jihad squad.” If the public outcry over her explicitly hateful comments wasn’t enough to get her to tone it down, I doubt the label of “hypocrite” will do the trick.
Correction, November 15: The age of the two women Jayson Boebert exposed himself to has been updated.
Asking questions about the ethics of something you’re already doing can be a useful evasion. Still, it’s a dodge. Just own it.
But let me ask for your feedback. I’m curious.
Is this an ad?
When I say this, I am asking: Is this post from erstwhile New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s Substack “asking for feedback on an ethics question” actually just an ad for his new cider? Is it a bizarre way to avoid admitting the normal fact he wants people to buy his alcohol? Is it a wild attempt to unnecessarily preempt blowback?
Thoughts?
Mostly I inflict my views on others; this time I'm asking for your views about an ethical question of my own. Is it OK for someone like me who has highlighted the toll of addiction and alcoholism to be raising wine grapes and cider apples? https://t.co/e9pdZVZXey Thoughts?
In case it helps inform your opinion, we got here because in 2021, Kristof attempted to run for governor of Oregon. He quit the Times, writing in his final column it was “fair to question my judgment.” From there, he launched his campaign as an encapsulation of the deaths of despair thesis. Kristof bemoaned that he’d fled to a better life while his friends were caught in the collapse of the working class. He harped on rising deaths caused by drugs and alcohol.
This made it surprising, and ironic, when he said he was going back to Oregon both as a political candidate and to make an alcoholic drink. As Olivia Nuzzi noted in a story for New York magazine, Kristof was starting a cider business. His explanation of this contradiction was that, basically, alcoholism doesn’t work like that. Can’t really be from cider.
Out at the Times and out of the race, Kristof’s been doing a bit of Substacking, where he has remained consistent when it comes to his fear that drug use these days is acute and particularly harmful.
But he needs feedback, you see, because he’s also stayed at the cider game. And he has a question: Am I being bad?
As he writes in explaining his question, he’s seen “how the wine industry had created good jobs, while spawning related jobs in tourism, retailing, restaurants and B&Bs.” He’s noted how “a glass of good cider and wine can promote social networks and reduce social isolation, which is another crisis I’ve written about often.”
In fact, Kristof has a potential comparison: “I wonder if alcohol isn’t something like motor vehicles: a powerful tool that causes death but also makes life more joyful for most.” (Hmm, do cars work like that?)
So I repeat: Why ask this now—months after the article and the dunk tweets about his hypocrisy? Well, as Kristof writes (with added bolding for emphasis from me):
All this has been on our mind because we just launched our new Kristof Farms cider a week ago, after it won a “best in class” among 151 ciders at Glintcap, the biggest international cider competition. We’re proud of this cider, and we think it adds sparkle to life.
That’s why I’m trying to think through these issues. My take is that a good cider or wine can, on balance, make life better and that they are worth producing and taking pride in, and have real economic development benefits. But I’m genuinely interested in how other people see this. What’s your take?
Oh, what’s my take? No, no. I’m just asking questions, too.
Specifically: Why did you try to shoehorn in an ad for your cider as some weird journalism ethics question? Why not just post “new cider (and career) just dropped” like any other journalist would?
The claim that Rudy Giuliani had been “inebriated” when he, as Donald Trump’s conspiratorial hype man, pushed the former president to prematurely declare victory over Joe Biden is indeed a distraction. But a day after the American public learned of Giuliani’s apparent condition on election night, the question arises: Is Giuliani wasted…right now?
I am disgusted and outraged at the out right lie by Jason Miller and Bill Steppien. I was upset that they were not prepared for the massive cheating (as well as other lawyers around the President) I REFUSED all alcohol that evening. My favorite drink..Diet Pepsi
Hints of an inebriated state abound. There’s the misspelling of “outright” and Bill Stepien, the former Trump campaign manager. The continued push of the false claim that Trump won. And perhaps most egregiously, the choice of Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke as one’s preferred diet soda. Taken together, it’s giving vintage Trump tweet with a fresh hint of melting Giuliani.
But his denial of being drunk only underscores this key takeaway from my colleague Dan Friedman. Giuliani may have taken the time to shoot down the headline-generating drunk claim—garnering yikes and laughs—but his statement conveniently forgets to address the January 6 committee’s most damning allegation. That he, as Trump’s personal lawyer, pushed the then-president into falsely declaring victory, ultimately helping to lay the foundation for the violence at the Capitol.
A detainee sits at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in California.Gregory Bull/AP
The Supreme Court on Monday issued two decisions on immigration-related cases that, while less high-profile than the pending “Remain in Mexico” case, could have far-reaching implications for detained immigrants.
In a blow to the rights of detained immigrants, the Supreme Court ruled in Johnson v. Arteaga-Martinez that federal law doesn’t require the government to grant bond hearings to them after six months of detention to prove that they are at risk of flight or pose a danger to the community. “On its face, the statute says nothing about bond hearings before immigration judges or burdens of proof, nor does it provide any other indication that such procedures are required,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the 8–1 opinion, in which Justice Stephen Breyer concurred in part and dissented in part.
In this case, Antonio Arteaga-Martinez, a citizen of Mexico who faced deportation proceedings and sought relief based on a fear of persecution or torture in his home country, was detained in the custody of the Department of Homeland Securityfor four months. After that period, he filed a petition for habeas corpus with a district court in Pennsylvania challenging his continued detention without a bond hearing. The district court had sided with Arteaga-Martinez, ordering the government to grant him a bond hearing before an immigration judge. The government appealed, but the appeals court affirmed the prior decision. At the bond hearing, an immigration judge authorized his release under supervision pending a decision on his deportation case. The Supreme Court reversed the rulings from the lower courts, finding that immigrants detained for longer than six months aren’t entitled to bond hearings.
Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court should overrule a precedent under another case known as Zadvydas v. Davis that prevents the government from detaining immigrants indefinitely. Mary Yanik, director of the Tulane Law School’s immigrant rights clinic, said on Twitter that such a reversal “would be a radical departure” from existing protections and result in no constitutional rights for people facing deportation.
The justices also ruled on a related case, Garland v. Gonzalez, which consolidated two class-action suits brought on behalf of immigrants in similar circumstances as Arteaga-Martinez. In a 6–3 vote, the Justices also decided that immigrants trying to challenge their detention can’t seek relief from lower courts on a classwide basis. Instead, they have to individually petition the courts, which effectively makes it harder for immigrants to challenge immigration policies. “Injunctive relief on behalf of an entire class of aliens is not allowed because it is not limited to remedying the unlawful ‘application’ of the relevant statutes to ‘an individual alien,” Justice Alito wrote for the majority.
The ruling, Justice Sotomayor wrote in a partial dissent, “risks depriving many vulnerable noncitizens of any meaningful opportunity to protect their rights.”
SCOTUS bars classwide injunctive relief in immigration cases. This means that if (when) DHS is violating the rights of noncitizens on a classwide basis, federal courts cannot enjoin it on a classwide basis. What justice is there in that? https://t.co/kwxnt22XdA
Herschel Walker talks a big game. As I’ve written before, the former college football star, who is now challenging Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) for a Georgia Senate seat, claims to have considered committing murder, repeatedly played Russian roulette, and suffered from dissociative identity disorder-related blackouts that allowed him to forget allegedly pointing a gun at his ex-wife.
Another one for the list: Walker has claimed to have a history in law enforcement. He doesn’t—even if his resume does sound like the making of a fine police officer. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported today, Walker said on at least three occasions that he had worked in law enforcement—and he once even claimed to be an FBI agent.
Pressed by AJC, Walker’s campaign said that he was an honorary deputy at Georgia’s Cobb County Police Department, which, a former DeKalb County district attorney said, is “like a junior ranger badge.”
As for being in the FBI, well, Walker spent a week at an FBI training school in Quantico, Virginia, in 1989. He never graduated college, a prerequisite for joining the FBI.
Honestly, I’m not sure which is worse: a cop running for Senate, or a non-cop pretending to be one.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) has come under investigation from several state agencies over her alleged misuse of campaign funds, the New York Times reported today.
Boebert allegedly used campaign funds to reimburse herself for $22,259 in mileage—a sum strikingly similar to the $20,000 she paid in tax liens for her previous failure to pay unemployment premiums on her restaurant, Shooters Grill. The allegations were brought to the Colorado attorney general’s office by the American Muckrakers PAC, which recently tanked Madison Cawthorn’s congressional run.
“Had Representative Boebert paid her restaurant staff properly and also paid the unemployment premiums to the State of Colorado, an investigation never would have been necessary,” David B. Wheeler, one of the PAC’s founders, told the Times.
As I reported last month, five former Shooters employees told me that Boebert did not pay them on time. Several said that they were paid in cash without taxes deducted.
In April, I spoke with Scott McInnis, who represented Boebert’s district from 1993 to 2005 and now serves as Mesa County Commissioner. At the time, McInnis shrugged off the allegations that Boebert had misused campaign funds. “I remember when they made a big wahoo out of the mileage she submitted for reimbursement or something. I just chuckled,” he told me, adding that the district is so big that a representative could easily rack up thousands of miles driving to campaign events.
But local news outlets suggest that the 38,712 miles Boebert purports to have traveled is an outrageous sum, even in Colorado’s huge 3rd District. As the Times reports, Boebert’s campaign later said that the mileage reimbursement included other expenses, like hotel rooms. It also claims that she paid off the tax liens before the reimbursements reacher her account.
As the congressional committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol prepares to kick off its primetime hearing, a curious report has emerged on the front pages of the New York Times. Taken at face value, it offers a behind-the-scenes look at how Jared and Ivanka dealt with Donald Trump’s increasingly delusional claim that he had defeated Joe Biden and secured a second term.
“We’re moving to Miami,” Kushner told his wife from their $18,000-a-month mansion, deciding that they’d hit eject even if Trump refused to accept defeat. The Times goes on:
No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen, according to people close to them. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency.
Their decision to move on opened a vacuum around the president that was filled by conspiracy theorists like Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who relayed to Mr. Trump farcically false stories of dead voters, stuffed ballot boxes, corrupted voting machines and foreign plots. Concluding that the president would not listen even to family members urging him to accept the results, Mr. Kushner told Mr. Trump that he would not be involved if Mr. Giuliani were in charge, according to people he confided in, effectively ceding the field to those who would try to overturn the election.
I’m no investigative journalist. Far from it! But to believe this account, at least entirely, is to ignore one of the most persistent storylines of the Trump era. We’ve seen this play out time and time again: flattering stories, somehow leaked to the press, depicting Jared and Ivanka as the least-awful members of MAGA-world. It’s hardly a coincidence that this latest one, which could help shield the couple from any accusation that they played a role in fomenting violence at the Capitol, is emerging just as the January 6 committee is presenting them as the hearings’ star attraction.
But alright, let’s assume that this account is true, that Jared and Ivanka, knowing that Dad was a loser before the race was officially called, decided to exit fast.It certainly wouldn’t be a leap to read that they spent the final days of the Trump White House checked out and overwhelmingly focused on their own reputations. But opening Trump’s orbit to clearly unhinged characters, and eventually, the January 6 insurrection, is incredibly damning on its own—and once again shreds the notion that Javanka quietly operated as some kind of moderating force against Donald Trump. That image was manufactured by Ivanka herself. But how on earth is the media still doing the couple’s dirty laundry?
I’ll leave you with the only good reason to actually click on the Times report today: That Kushner, whose parents reportedly bribed his way into Harvard, turned to a James Patterson-led MasterClass to write his forthcoming book on Trump’s legacy.
Miah Cerrillo, a fourth grader and survivor of the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, appears on a screen during a House hearing on gun violence.Jason Andrew/The New York Times/AP/Pool
Just two weeks after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school, Uvalde community members—including a doctor, a student survivor, and the parents of a child who died—have come together to plead for Congress to take action on gun control.
Dr. Roy Guerrero, an Uvalde pediatrician, tried to convey the horror of the day to the House Oversight Committee.
“What I did find was something no prayer would ever relieve: two children whose bodies had been pulverized by bullets fired at them, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart, that the only clue to their identities was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them,” he said.
Guerrero said that he became a pediatrician because he admired children’s resilience and willingness to accept change. “Adults are stubborn,” he said. “Why else would there have been such little progress made in Congress to stop gun violence? Innocent children all over the country today are dead because laws and policy allow people to buy weapons before they’re legally old enough to even buy a pack of beer.”
Guerrero criticized one other habit of adults: their affinity for nostalgia. “Once the blood is rinsed away from the bodies of our loved ones and scrubbed off the floors of the schools and supermarkets and churches,” he said, “the carnage from each scene is erased for our collective conscience, and we return again to nostalgia, to the rose-tinted view of our Second Amendment as a perfect instrument of American life, no matter how many lives are lost.”
Miah Cerrillo, a student who survived the massacre, was the next to testify at the hearing via video. Cerrillo made headlines when she described covering herself in her classmate’s blood and playing dead. In her video appearance today, she described the gunman shooting her teacher in the head. Asked if she felt safe at school, Miah shook her head and said, “Because I don’t want it to happen again.”
Miah Cerrillo, the #Uvalde student who smeared blood all over herself during the shooting, says she doesn’t feel safe at school because she doesn’t “want it to happen again”
Miah’s father, Miguel Cerrillo, appeared at the hearing and choked back tears as he described how the shooting affected his daughter. “She is not the same little girl that I used to play with, run with, and do everything, because she was Daddy’s little girl,” he said. “I wish something would change, not only for our kids, but every single kid in the world, because schools are not safe anymore.”
Kimberly and Felix Rubio, the parents of 10-year-old Lexi Rubio, who died in the attack, appeared to remember their daughter, who wanted to go to college on a softball scholarship, major in math, and attend law school.
“We understand that for some reason—to some people, to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns—that guns are more important than children,” Kimberly said. She proposed a list of demands: a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, red flag laws, stronger background checks, and an increase in the age to purchase assault rifles in Texas from 18 to 21.
As her husband wiped tears from his eyes, Kimberly concluded, “Somewhere out there, there is a mom listening to our testimony, thinking, ‘I can’t even imagine their pain,’ not knowing that our reality will one day be hers, unless we act now.”
Starting this week, the House’s January 6 Committee will hold a series of hearings, at least two of which will be in “primetime,” on the blitz of the Capitol by protesters egged on President Donald Trump on January 6. As my colleague David Corn has reported, the hope is to “convey the full significance of the insurrectionist assault on Congress.”
The seven Democrats and two Republicans on the panel face a massive undertaking to convince the American public, many of whom largely believe the news has exaggerated the affair, that something went dreadfully wrong on January 6, that American democracy was fundamentally harmed. It is an attempt to lay down for history what occurred.
Which is why it was odd this morning when the New York Times described the hearings as aimed at something else: winning the 2022 midterms.
NYT headline about violent coup to topple multi party electoral order of US republic apes talking point of party that orchestrated and covers up for sedition by casting attempt at national reckoning & accountability as a political horse race stunt pic.twitter.com/UtnN8VlgY5
Perhaps this is just a bad headline. The Washington Post reported Democrats are “not counting” on the January 6 hearings for influencing voters in the upcoming midterms; in the story, Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) noted that the presentation is solely “focused on presenting the American people with the truth about this violent attack.” The Times’ own report contains much of the same rhetoric.
But the headline is one set of a larger piece: New York magazine reported the plan is to “cast as stars” Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Democrats hired a former ABC News producer to assure it is, according to Axios, a “blockbuster investigative special.” At some point, the medium becomes the message.
Since January 6, and for much of the Trump era, Democrats have melded defenses of democracy with pleas to Vote Blue. (Donate, too, folks.) And so when Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.) tells the Times he wants the hearings to show “how irresponsibly complicit Republicans were in attempting to toss out their vote and just how far Republicans will go to gain power for themselves,” it’s easy to ask: Is he talking about the midterms or an investigation of a violent attack? The answer is Democrats want it to be both.
But putting on display weeks of what I’ve (perhaps crassly) started calling Democracy Porn can only do so much. People have to believe our electoral system, in some way, works for them. If not, an issue arises: What is this week’s massive spectacle TV show actually defending?
Institutions? Democracy? Rule of law? You mean the things that…don’t seem to be working at all for so many people?
Let’s remember: Over the past few years, a central thesis of the Democrats’ message has been to protect institutions of democracy. And that worked—they won. Yet, now with that power? Not much has changed. Democrats failed to enshrine reforms like eliminating the filibuster and passing voting protections, among many others. They have often fallen short in making the institutions strong enough to be cheered.
Partly as a result, everything else is broken, too. After a heartbreaking deluge of mass shootings, Congress can’t pass gun reform. The Supreme Court is about to overturn Roe as the federal government more or less sits on its hands. Police, transit, housing, and health care remain fundamentally broken. COVID relief could have heralded a larger social welfare state if enshrined, fulfilling all those heady pieces about Joe Biden’s New Deal; instead, Democrats couldn’t even keep around the expanded child care tax credit, which had lifted many out of poverty. For all the paying attention to court cases, scandals, reports, hearings, and impeachment(s) that would finally oust Trump, he’s been fine. Carbon filters into the sky.
Yelling about our chief Democratic obstructionists in Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema isn’t wrong as a response to this. But we’re living under a system designed to empower them.
So, sure, one can imagine how these hearings would be a good idea, a thorough presentation that outlines the core concepts of what some Democrats have been screaming for a long time: The other side cares more about winning (appeasing Trump, in our parlance) than democracy (the will of the people) and here’s the proof.
But that gambit doesn’t work as well if everything, the very system itself, is broken. The material benefits of democracy must flow to people from the institutions to earn all this defense. If not, we are in grave danger.
The right has made clear where it’s headed. Consider the ascendency of Senate hopefuls J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, who have shorn their economic populism pretty far from the economic. Ponder the New Right. Think about (shudder, I’m sorry) how the faux-Marxists cool kids have indulged in it. They are landing pretty close to fascism. The Republican Party has illustrated it’s okay with a tinge of illiberalism. Who could forget CPAC in Hungary?
January 6 was the more obvious of the antidemocratic moments of the past few years. But as Ari Berman has written for us, it is the slow-moving destruction of election law that could papercut our system to its knees. We’re living through a dirge of democracy; January 6 was a high note. If someone savvier takes up the reins, the next coup will likely be horrible, but also boring—and it might even be exceedingly popular.
The Democrats’ response to that cannot be only to message harder, even if it’s during primetime, that the other side is antidemocratic. Everyone saw it. The problem is that not enough people care that much about the sacred values of a Republic. They care about other things. For some, that’s bare allegiance to Donald Trump; for others, it’s tax cuts. No amount of framing will outweigh the galling lack of action by Democrats.
There is only one solution: Shit has to work. I get that’s not easy, but democracy has to function as a way to make the lives of people tangibly and materially better. If it does not, people won’t believe in it. Democrats need to not only defend democracy in hearings, they have to make it popular in real life. Or else it seems like all there is is the show.
This is something Eric Foner, the historian most famous for his book on Reconstruction, recently wrote about the history of the Democratic Party for the London Review of Books. In defeating Trump, Foner warns, many missed how easily a new Republican coalition is forming. He seems to agree with Michael Kazin, whose new book, What It Took To Win, allows him to give a tour of the history of the party, in noting that “the Democrats have succeeded…when they have enacted policies, such as Medicare in the 1960s, that demonstrably serve all segments of the working and middle class.”
Lately, in having these thoughts, I’ve come back to a piece from 1941 by Dorothy Thompson. In it, she famously wrote about the “macabre parlor game” of wondering “Who Goes Nazi?” There are “the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers,” she writes.
Often, we think of the born Nazis. These are easy enough to identify. But I want to pause for a moment on those “whom democracy itself has created.” Who is this man? Thompson describes him thus: “He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.”
Democrats must do everything in their power to stop that nihilism.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) loves accusing people of supporting pedophilia.
During Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Greene levied the accusation against the Democratic Party and a select group of moderate Republicans, all because of a bad-faith argument that Jackson was lenient when sentencing child-pornography defendants. Greene’s enthusiasm for smearing others as pedophiles isn’t surprising, given her affinity for QAnon and the pedophilia hysteria that goes along with it.
So I guess that makes it “funny,” in a backwards and depressing way, that Greene hired Milo Yiannopoulos as an unpaid intern. Yiannopoulos even posted a photo of his badge to Telegram.
For those blissfully unfamiliar with Yiannopoulos’ comments on sex between children and adults, all you really need to know is that they were bad enough for the editor-in-chief of Breitbart News to call them “indefensible” and “appalling.” Yiannopoulos had defended sex between adults and boys as young as 13 and bashed child sex abuse victims who came forward as adults. He has since said that his comments were an effort to cope with the sex abuse he experienced as a child. Yiannopoulos resigned from Breitbart in 2017.
Since then, Yiannopoulos has gone on to be a fundamental part of a new push from the far-right to fundamentally change the Catholic Church in the United States and across the world. As Kathryn Joyce reported for us earlier this year:
In 2018, [Yiannopoulos] published a book, Diabolical: How Pope Francis Has Betrayed Clerical Abuse Victims Like Me—and Why He Has to Go, that tied his defense of the remarks he’d made—that he’d been glibly processing his own childhood sexual abuse—to the broader crisis in the Catholic Church. Soon, he was welcomed by right-wing Catholic news outlets like Church Militant and LifeSiteNews, and a popular Catholic apologetics YouTube show hosted by firebrand and now anti-vaccine activist Patrick Coffin, which together represent some of the most vitriolic critics of the pope online. In early 2021, Yiannopoulos completed the journey, announcing to LifeSiteNews that returning to a traditionalist form of Catholicism had helped him become “ex-gay,” and he now planned to build a Catholic-based conversion therapy clinic in Florida, to be called the Milo Center.
As Yiannopoulos conducted a publicity tour around the alternative media universe of the Catholic right, he theatrically threw away an engagement ring he called his “sodomy stone” and quipped about the need to “make the Vatican straight again” and “make America homophobic again.” By July, he’d become a regular columnist at Church Militant, where he paired his trademark acidity with a laser fixation on the “cult of homosexualism,” which he described as “a reimagining of a very old, pagan form of worship.” He also claimed that women who miscarry after receiving Covid-19 vaccinations have effectively aborted their children, and declared that “sometimes one feels the only good bishop is a dead bishop.” By fall, he was appearing on Church Militant’s home-shopping network, flogging an $88 “Adoring Virgin” icon—a “good Mary,” Yiannopoulos promised, unlike some less physically attractive depictions—and a CD set of him reading Psalms and Proverbs for $75.
As usual, anything Yiannopouls says should be taken with a grain of salt, given his propensity to troll. That includes his internship. But, come on. There’s an entire section of his Wikipedia page subtitled “Remarks on paedophilia and child sexual abuse.”
What sort of a statement is Greene hoping to make by affiliating with someone whose rhetoric is harmful enough to have gotten him banned from both Twitter and Facebook? And to have gotten him to resign from, of all places, Breitbart?
“So I have an intern that was raped by a priest as a young teen, was gay, has offended everyone at some point, turned his life back to Jesus and Church, and changed his life,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told The Daily Beast. “Great story!” https://t.co/uVPkw3Zeeb
If Greene can accuse others of being “pro-pedophilia” for supporting Judge Jackson, does she think she’s immune from being the subject of those same jeers for supporting someone who has actually belittled the experiences of child sexual assault survivors?
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit a memorial outside Robb Elementary School to honor the victims killed in this week's school shooting, Sunday, May 29, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Aaron M. Sprecher via AP
The Uvalde, Texas mother of two young Robb Elementary School students who was handcuffed by law enforcement at the scene of last month’s school shooting that left 19 children and two adults dead, gave a detailed description on Thursday of her attempts to save her children. Speaking to CBS News, Angeli Gomez said that she has since received a phone call from law enforcement, warning her to stop telling her story of how she scuffled with police who had set up a perimeter around the school but refused to enter the building and attempt to stop the shooter.
Gomez, whose two sons are in second and third grade and survived the attack, told CBS that after being at the school earlier in the day for a graduation ceremony, she sped to Robb Elementary upon hearing a shooting was in progress. Upon arriving, she said she drove past a police line, and was handcuffed by federal agents after she confronted them over their inaction. She was eventually released by local police officers. Gomez recounted to CBS how she then hopped a fence and finally went into the school and found her children. Gomez was captured on video bringing her children out of the building herself. She also said she saw no police officers inside the building.
Gomez also said that since she began telling her story to the press, she received a call from “law enforcement” warning her that because she is on probation for a charge she says is close to a decade old, she could face legal trouble and be charged with “obstruction of justice” if she continues to speak to the media.
Ah, early June. The weather is warm, the water is fine, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is casually doing the most diabolical shit.
You name the progressive cause, and DeSantis has taken substantive steps to stymie it over the past few days, waging attacks on everything from gun control to vaccine mandates to trans rights.
Yesterday, DeSantis joined a growingcontingent of Republican governors who are trying to make it harder—or impossible—for trans kids to access gender-affirming medical care. His method is bureaucratic. Unlike in Texas and Alabama, DeSantis wants to circumvent the state legislature by placing the decision in the hands of the state Board of Medicine. The Florida Health Department, led by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, has made clear that it opposes these medical procedures. In a letter, the Board of Health requested an opportunity to “establish a standard of care” to curtail what Ladapo described as “complex and irreversible procedures.”
“The current standards set by numerous professional organizations appear to follow a preferred political ideology instead of the highest level of generally accepted medical science,” Ladapo wrote.
As my colleague Samantha Michaels has reported, treatments like puberty blockers and hormonal therapy can greatly reduce the risk of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among trans kids. “Typical gender-affirming treatments for kids are deemed safe and effective by major medical associations like the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics,” she writes.
The cherry on top? Hours before the Florida Board of Medicine issued its letter, the state Agency for Health Care Administration issued a controversial report that suggests that gender-affirming care is ineffective for people of all ages. The existence of the report threatens to ban Medicaid coverage of these treatments. As the Kaiser Family Foundation has reported, transgender adults tend to report lower household incomes and higher rates of unemployment than cisgender adults—which means they are likely to rely on Medicaid at higher rates than cis adults.
So, in multiple ways, DeSantis and his administration have tried to tamp down on gender-affirming care without even having to vote on it in the legislature.
As if that weren’t enough, DeSantis turned his crusade on, uh, the Special Olympics. The organization had a vaccine requirement for the games set to be held in Orlando this weekend. This makes sense, since, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people with disabilities might be more likely to get Covid, and those with underlying medical conditions have a higher risk of becoming severely ill.
But Florida has a law banning vaccine mandates, which allowed it to threaten the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million fine, according to ABC News reporter Jay O’Brien. Not wanting to stir the pot, the organization dropped its vaccine requirement.
SCOOP: The State or Florida threatened the Special Olympics with $27.5 MILLION in fines because the organization had a vaccine requirement at its games in Orlando this weekend.
Late yesterday, the Special Olympics pulled the requirement. 1/3
And, lastly, in DeSantis’ world, free speech is all well and good, except when it comes to a baseball team advocating for kids not getting shot in school. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, which has a pitcher from Uvalde, where 19 children and two adults were killed in a mass shooting last week, made several social media posts in support of gun control during its May 26 game. Among them was a pledge to donate $50,000 to Everytown for Gun Safety’s Support Fund, which promotes education, research, and litigation to reduce gun violence.
Days later, DeSantis vetoed state funds for a new practice facility for the team. I wonder why.
DeSantis’ actions could be cast as just more culture war, as if all these actions against gun control, vaccine mandates, and trans care were designed to gin up his base. But it’s not all talk: These decisions will have material consequences for the most vulnerable Floridians.
Peter Navarro, a former economic adviser to Donald Trump, was indicted Friday on two contempt charges for defying a subpoena from the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. He’s now the second former Trump aide to be charged with contempt related to the panel’s probe, after Steve Bannon.
According to the indictment, Navarro, who previously defied a House subpoena in Congress’ Covid probe, has failed to comply with January 6 committee’s requests for documents and an interview with congressional investigators. Each charge carries a minimum of 30 days and a maximum of one year in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.
Once branded “Trump’s looniest economic adviser” by the Wall Street Journal, Navarro is notably representing himself in a lawsuit challenging the House subpoena, which he’s called the “fruits of a poisonous tree.”
As for Bannon, who in April asked a federal judge to dismiss the contempt charges, his trial is set for next month.
It’s like clockwork. A harvesting of Star Wars IP is announced; a cast list is released; a horde of fans abuse an actor of color for daring to be in the franchise.
This time the racists crawled out of their hidey holes and took to social media to abuse actress Moses Ingram. Ingram faced the barrage after it was revealed she would play “Reva” in the new Obi Wan Kenobi mini-series. People called her a “diversity hire,” the N-word, and a slew of other race-based insults. Some even threatened her life.
Disney defended the actress. And, eventually, Ingram addressed the abuse herself, posting a response on her Instagram story.
Moses Ingram posted an instagram story about the racist comments she’s been receiving from Star Wars fans pic.twitter.com/NUe7aB0UQo
“Thank you to those who’ve stepped up to defend me,” she said. “And to the rest of y’all, y’all are weird.”
Ingram is only the latest person in a long string of actors who’ve been tormented by racist fans. We see this happen to actors of color in science-fiction and fantasy franchises over and over and over again. Just a few months ago, 12-year-old Leah Seva Jefferies had to contend with a similar bout of online harassment after being cast in the new Percy Jackson and the Olympians TV series. Jefferies, a Black girl, is slated to play Annabeth Chase, a character who was white in the novels the series is based on.
But the Star Wars fandom is especially notorious for bullying and harassing towards cast members they don’t like, especially if they’re an actor of color. In 1999, Ahmed Best secured a role in the Star Wars prequel film, The Phantom Menace, playing the infamous character Jar Jar Binks. While the character was rightfully criticized for being a hodge-podge of numerous racial stereotypes, a lot of that backlash unfairly fell on Best.
In a story for ABC News, Best describes how the toxicity almost pushed him to take his own life. At one point, the actor found himself on the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge.
“As a Black man from New York City, from the Bronx, there’s this façade that I can’t be hurt,” said Best. “In actuality, I was really just crumbling inside.”
In 2014, the teaser for the much anticipated Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens dropped. The first image that millions of fans saw was of the Black actor John Boyega, in the middle of a desert planet, decked out in the iconic, white Stormtrooper uniform. It outraged some fans. They called it “anti-white” propaganda. In response, the hashtag #BoycottStarWarsVII was created, with racists claiming that film promoted “white genocide.”
“I’m in the movie,” Boyega said in response. “What are you going to do about it?”
Four years later, actress Kelly Marie Tran endured a similar experience. Tran, who is Vietnamese-American, played the character Rose Tico in the movie The Last Jedi, the second installment in the sequel trilogy. After the films’ release, she also faced a hoard of sexist and racist insults online. In an essay for the New York Times, Tran detailed how those insults affected her mentally and emotionally.
“Their words reinforced a narrative I had heard my whole life,” she wrote. “That I was ‘other,’ that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, simply because I wasn’t like them.”
In the following movie, Tran’s role was scaled down significantly, with many speculating that this was in response to the backlash. However, the film’s co-screenwriter has said this was due to editing and bad CGI.
Unlike with Boyega and Tran, Disney stepped forward a bit more directly to support Ingram, saying that they’re proud to welcome her to the family and denounced anyone who made her feel “unwelcome.”
The series’ lead actor and executive producer, Ewan McGregor, took a more direct approach.
In a video that was posted on the official Star Wars Twitter account, McGregor stated that there’s no place for racism in this world and that he stands with Moses.
The New York Post isn’t exactly known for its tact. It has doxed a medic for her work on OnlyFans, published a photo of a man seconds away from being struck by a subway train, spread disinformation, and endorsed Trump—twice. But a comment from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) last week apparently went too far, even for the Post.
In an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show days after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, Boebert argued against “politicizing” the tragedy, but followed up with a bizarre remark. “When 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes,” she said. “We secured the cockpits.”
The Post branded this comment “tasteless” and “senseless.” Hard to argue with that. It’s also worth noting, as the Post does, it’s basically wrong. The 2001 terror attacks led to the construction of a massive security state, including the formation of the Transportation Security Administration, the passage of the PATRIOT Act, and changes in federal law to allow for the ongoing detention of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. “Securing the cockpits” entailed making sure that no weapons got on planes—not that that stopped Boebert’s colleague Rep. Madison Cawthorn from trying. In this light, Boebert’s comment could be read as an accidental endorsement of gun control.
It’s not surprising that Boebert would do anything in her power to avoid the topic of gun control. After all, she’s a fan of guns, big time. As I wrote in my recent profile of the Colorado congresswoman, Boebert owns a restaurant where staff are encouraged to open-carry firearms. (One former employee told me that Boebert jokingly pointed a loaded gun at him when he said he would have voted for Barack Obama for a third term.)
Compared to 9/11, the nation’s response to mass shootings has typically been, basically, nothing. Boebert’s comment begs the question: How would one secure classrooms? Would the congresswoman prefer that entering a school every day be as cumbersome and perplexing as going through airport security? (Many kids already walk through metal detectors upon entering school every day.) And what’s to prevent a shooter from doing as the Sandy Hook gunman did and entering a school not by entering an unlocked door, but by shooting through a window?
Or is the question of how to actually stop shootings not the actual point for her?
People embrace outside a memorial to honor the victims killed in this week's school shooting outside Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas.Aaron M. Sprecher/AP
On Sunday, the US Department of Justice announced it would formally investigate the police response to the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Questions have multiplied about the police response in the aftermath of the killing spree. The gunman spent 78 minutes inside the building, even as the members of the Uvalde Police Department and officers from other law-enforcement agencies gathered outside. Terrified parents gathered, too, and reported being handcuffed and even pepper-sprayed by those same cops. As the massacre dragged on, at least two kids on the inside repeatedly called 911, begging in vain for help.
“The goal of the review is to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events,” a DOJ spokesman said in a statement to CNN. “As with prior Justice Department after-action reviews of mass shootings and other critical incidents, this assessment will be fair, transparent, and independent. The Justice Department will publish a report with its findings at the conclusion of its review.”
Previously, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had tried to reassure the public by conducting a much different kind of investigation. In a May 25 press release, his office announced that the state’s assessment of the May 24 debacle is “being led by DPS Texas Rangers and the Uvalde Police Department.” In other words, after what looks like an epochal botching of an effort to save the lives of a mostly Latino group of fourth graders, Abbott had entrusted the Uvalde Police Department to investigate its own performance, aided by the Texas Rangers.
Venerated in pop culture and by politicians like Abbott, the Rangers are a state law-enforcement unit with a long history of atrocities against Native Americans, Mexican nationals, and Mexican Americans. As my colleague Tim Murphy pointed out in a great 2020 article, “unlike the Confederates or Columbus, the Rangers are still around and profiting from their past—they’re a ‘living monument,’ as [a] booster once said.” These days, he added, “the Rangers are the ones brought in to investigate when a local law enforcement officer kills a civilian, or when a Texan dies in custody (such as the 2015 death of Sandra Bland).” Tim quoted Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens: “The Texas Rangers come in and they whitewash the killing and always absolve the local police officer.”
Abbott tapped them to make sense of how the Uvalde Police Department handled last week’s rampage. The dead, the survivors, their families, and the public as a whole are owed a full accounting of what went wrong. The DOJ’s intervention is the least we can ask for.
Plenty of questions remain over the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre. But three days into the investigation, one thing is now for certain: law enforcement officials catastrophically mismanaged their response as 19 children and two teachers were killed inside a single classroom.
“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course it was the wrong decision—period,” Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety Steven McCraw told reporters at a tense press conference on Friday. McCraw was referring to the call by the on-scene commander at the time of Tuesday’s attack to not enter the classroom where an 18-year-old gunman had been located for more than an hour. The damning assessment comes a day after officials confirmed that “numerous” officers had been stationed just outside the classroom—only to retreat and wait for a special tactical team to arrive.
“There’s no excuse for that,” McCraw continued, before appearing to offer exactly that: “Again, I wasn’t there.”
"How many kids could have been saved had they breached the room?"
The press conference is sure to fuel public outrage as questions mount over the nearly 90-minute delay in police response—and what exactly transpired between the first 911 calls and when police eventually killed the 18-year-old gunman. In the wake of Tuesday’s massacre—the second deadliest school shooting in US history—law enforcement officials have repeatedly offered contradictory accounts of how they handled the shooting inside Robb Elementary School.
Texas DPS official refuses to say why officers didn't breach the door of the classroom for the hour that the Uvalde shooter was in there shooting children. pic.twitter.com/br2fdYruty
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