Six years ago, “Ted Lasso” reminded us that many winning TV shows are the result of the right sentiment landing at the right time — or, in this case, a terrible time. In 2020, the weight of pandemic lockdowns and an especially rancorous presidential election made life feel mean.

Enter Ted Lasso, Jason Sudeikis’ folksy Missourian loaded with cornpone wisdom, positivity and kindness. Against all good sense, Ted, an American football coach, moves to England to coach the AFC Richmond Greyhounds, a men’s soccer team, despite knowing nothing about the sport.

That suited Greyhounds owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) since she intended Ted, his assistant coach, Willis Beard (Brendan Hunt), and her team’s players to fail. Instead, Ted’s emphasis on personal growth and camaraderie rebuilds the Greyhounds from their league’s demoralized joke into its comeback kings, powered by their yearning to Believe.

In 2020, “Ted Lasso” made us feel like that motto, “Believe,” was all we needed.  In 2026, introducing a women’s football team changes that pitch. The fourth season sees Ted, Rebecca, AFC Richmond’s PR specialist Keeley Jones (Juno Temple) and the organization’s Director of Football Operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) attempting to transfer their proven winning methods over to the women’s team and are blocked by the sexism baked into professional sports at every step.

Data-backed analyses predict the Lady Greyhounds’ doom before they’ve even begun to race. Keeping the sponsors’ faith is challenging for Rebecca, who reminds one that a company that backs military actions shouldn’t hesitate to support a women’s football club.

“Wars are profitable,” her skeptic replies coldly. Women’s sports, not so much. So instead, Rebecca rewrites the call to “Believe” into a prayer for a chance.

“That’s what sport is. That’s what life is, isn’t it? A series of chances,” she says.  “We took a chance, creating this team. Yes, for little girls to see amazing, athletic women doing incredible things on the pitch. But equally important, so that little boys . . . can grow up in a world where they don’t know any different. And to do that, we need to be given a chance. By you.”

 

 

To me, speeches like this have a dual purpose: Rebecca is obviously speaking to a specific character, but Waddingham’s passionate delivery makes an effective case to viewers. Even in the wide world of sports movies and shows, men and women are treated differently. For the reasons Rebecca spells out, they shouldn’t be.

As a recent story on Togethxr.com delineates, the heyday of movies about women in sports ended by the close of the aughts – pretty much spanning the time between the first film in the “Bring It On” franchise in 2000 and the fifth in 2009.

On TV, actors Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds’ excursion into the wild world of British Premier football, “Welcome to Wrexham,” recently expanded to include a women’s team, the Red Dragons. In the 2023-24 season, with their star owners’ backing, the Dragons became the first Welsh women’s club to operate on a semi-professional basis.

And Netflix recently greenlighted “The 99’ers,” a biographical drama about the U.S. Women’s National Team’s victory over China at the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Meanwhile, there is no shortage of films and shows about male sports icons and legendary men’s team. Recently, a new season of “Hard Knocks” premiered, HBO’s behind-the-scenes journey through one American pro football team’s pre-season training camp. This run of episodes features the Seattle Seahawks—my home team—which I find less compelling than the prospect of seeing where the Lady Greyhounds end up.

I assure you this is less about sisterly solidarity or my lingering affection for “Ted Lasso” or even a love of soccer – er, football. Sports and I are largely incompatible, sorry to say. I am, however, the kind of curious and not judgmental person who wants to see what has and hasn’t changed about these stories since “Bend It Like Beckham” became a sensation in 2002. That movie’s heroines Jess (Parminder Nagra) and Jules (Keira Knightley) saw the opportunity to play at the university level in America as the ultimate dream. America, they thought, took women’s football seriously.

 

The diminishment of Title IX protections tells another story. Disparities in pay and resources are still a battle in both women’s professional sports and at the collegiate and Olympic levels, as publicized advocacy by athletes such as Megan Rapinoe has revealed.

More recently, the Trump administration’s snubbing of the gold-medal-winning women’s hockey squad at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan broadcast a shameful message about the common disregard for female athletes and their achievements.

And in Britain, Ted’s adopted stomping grounds, the BBC recently published a collection of anecdotes from women in football, whether they be professionals or fans, describing a strain of misogyny so brutish that one woman stopped taking her daughter to live men’s matches. “I wouldn’t feel safe and I certainly wouldn’t want to expose my daughter to sexism,” she told the BBC.

The fourth season of “Ted Lasso” doesn’t entirely frost those bad vibes with its happiness and hopium. The Lady Greyhounds confront doubts about their talent in pubs, from the stands and in the media.

This being “Ted Lasso,” every determined push downfield strides on a turf green with optimism. That starts in the fourth season’s kickoff, when Rebecca, Keeley and Higgins journey to Kansas City to re-recruit Ted.

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One of my favorite moments in their adventure shows Higgins finding his way to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum. He enters reluctantly, since he knows nothing about baseball, and leaves fired up by the heroism of men like Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson.

“You know, their story is quite similar to how women in England weren’t allowed to play football for years,” observed Higgins, netting a doubtful reaction from the museum’s forbearing docent. This sends the oh-so-polite Higgins into a stammering fit: “Not similar. Sorry. What happened here was much worse. Much, much worse. Much, much, much, much, much, I can’t stop saying much for some reason.”

But when Higgins explains that women weren’t allowed in England’s professional leagues until 1971, even the museum guide couldn’t help blurting, “Damn – that’s recent as hell.”

Yes. It’s still new enough for us to understand that getting the Lady Greyhounds to believe in themselves was always going to be the easy part. Getting a nation and a world to believe in the women of AFC Richmond and female athletes in general? That’s always been the whole game.

New episodes of “Ted Lasso” stream Wednesdays on Apple TV.

 

 

The post What the Ted Lasso Way doesn’t get about women in sports appeared first on Salon.com.

Those anticipating HBO’s series adaptation of “Watchmen,” the classic comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, may have divided opinions of the 2019 version conceived by Damon Lindelof, co-creator of “Lost” and “The Leftovers.”

The first episode, the only part of the nine-episode season HBO made available to critics,  introduces the story’s ostensible protagonists: Tulsa’s Police Force. And the enemy? It’s a white supremacist organization whose members wear masks inspired by the iconic “Watchmen” character Rorschach.

“What, in 2019, is the equivalent of the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the United States?” Lindelof posited Wednesday during a press conference, referring to one of the key political flashpoints examined in the original comic. He answered, “It just felt like it was undeniably race and policing in America.”

Until now HBO has kept the details of “Watchmen” cloaked in mystery, teasing audiences with disconnected snippets. Reporters assembled for HBO’s press conferences at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour screened a preview of the first episode on the condition that we refrain from posting reviews until the drama’s scheduled premiere in October.

You won’t find smartphones or references to social media in the story, either — a thoughtful detail from Lindelof, the man who quit Twitter after he’d weathered enough vitriol over the “Lost” finale.  Also absent, at least initially, are direct descendants of The Comedian, Nite Owl or other familiar heroes from the original’s 12-issue arc. Jeremy Irons has apparently taken on the mantle of Ozymandias, although HBO’s press notes only describe him as “the aging and imperious Lord of a British Manor.”

We can, however, describe Oscar winner Regina King’s role. She plays Angela Abar, a devoted wife, mother of three and bakery owner who ostensibly has retired from the Tulsa Police Force. But in this new world, cops hide their faces for their own protection (with the beat cops outfitted in colors associated with Silk Spectre) making Angela’s job as a lead detective a secret identity.

This aligns with the alternate history of Moore’s original “Watchmen” comics, released between 1986 and 1987, in which people with superhuman abilities emerged between World War II and the 1960s, changing the trajectory of history and granting the United States the upper hand during the Cold War.

Vigilantes and unaffiliated heroes are outlawed, and a few superheroes that haven’t retired go to work for the government. In Moore’s reality, America wins the Vietnam War, and Richard Nixon was never forced out of office. Term limits are abolished, in fact, allowing Nixon’s presidency to last well into the 1980s.

In presenting white supremacy as the main antagonist of these new chapters, Lindelof told the industry reporters assembled for HBO’s presentations at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour, currently underway in Los Angeles, that he’s selected a crisis to which there is no simple answer or grandiose solution.

“In a traditional superhero movie the bad guys are fighting aliens. And when they beat the aliens, the aliens go back to their planet and everybody wins,” Lindelof said. “There’s no defeating white supremacy. It’s not going anywhere. But it felt like it was pretty formidable foe.”

The Watchmen are an inversion of Golden and Silver Age archetypes, revised to fit a dystopian extreme of what Moore and Gibbons imagined America could become with but a few minor tweaks to the timeline. It’s an incisive vision of unchecked imperialism that questions our culture’s reverence of might.

Lindelof stressed that the new “Watchmen” will not alter the original series in any way: “We explore the past…but it’s canon,” he said. “Everything that happened in those 12 issues could not be messed with.”

Instead, he contemplated how the history kicked off in those comics might have progressed from where the story leaves off. Lindelof explained that he was inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ story in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” which lead him to read about Black Wall Street and the massacre of black families by white racist mobs in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.

As a result, he connected Moore and Gibbons’ “Watchmen” past to his version of that world’s present. He explained to critics  that Nixon remained president through the late ‘80s and died in office. Then Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, only to be defeated in ’92 by Robert Redford, who remains in office in alt-2019.

“One of the things that we’re interested in exploring is what would happen if a very well-intentioned white man, a liberal white man, was president for way too long?” Lindelof said, referring to the fictional Redford presidency.

As Lindelof explained to critics, racism isn’t presented as a simplistic evil in “’Watchmen” but rather as a strain of white supremacy born out of a white liberal version of good intentions. Later in a conversation with a small group of reporters, Lindelof put a finer point on it.

“Watchmen” isn’t merely interested in flaming racists, he said.  “This show is trolling the white savior.”

For these reasons and others, it probably goes without saying that a segment of viewers will be predisposed against embracing his vision.  Foremost among them would be Moore, but that’s to be expected. Moore has a reputation for being against any adaptations of his work, and not even Lindelof’s reverence for the source material enables him to win an exception.

“I have made personal overtures to connect with [Moore] and explain to him a little bit of what we were doing, and he made it clear that he didn’t want that to happen. And I want to respect that as well,” Lindelof said.  “… So, the wrestling match will continue.”

Lindelof added that he admires Moore’s “punk rock spirit,” saying that he imagines that “if you told Alan Moore in 1984 or ’85 or ’86, ‘You’re not allowed to do this because Superman’s creator or Swamp Thing’s creator doesn’t want you to do it,’ he would say, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”

He added in conclusion, “And so I’m channeling the spirit of Alan Moore to tell Alan Moore, ‘F**k you, I’m doing it anyway.’”

The post HBO’s “Watchmen” takes on white supremacy — Damon Lindelof promises to “troll the white savior” appeared first on Salon.com.

Donald Trump showed up at a Las Vegas rally on Wednesday night singing the same out-of-tune song he has belched out ever since he got his revenge over the Democrats in 2024 and clawed his way back into the White House. During that time, he has waged illegal wars, killed innocent people and committed war crimes against enemies real and imagined. 

Since his return Trump has consistently alienated and enraged U.S. allies while going out of his way to coddle and occasionally enrage nations more often viewed as enemies. Except for Iran, of course, which he alternately bombs, demonizes and flatters. He invaded Venezuela to serve  a warrant. He has ordered missile attacks on boats at sea without cause, evidence or due process. Hey, the crews have to stay sharp, right? 

Here at home, Trump has destroyed the East Wing, the South Lawn, the Kennedy Center and the Rose Garden, while crowding the city with young National Guard troops who have little or no desire to be there. Trump doesn’t care. Those men and women in uniform are just props used to exercise control so he can crow about how safe the city is. If he decides to call for martial law, he’ll conveniently already have boots on the ground in D.C. 

While preparing for the country’s planned celebration of its 250th birthday, Trump decided to do a little housecleaning and update the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, vowing  to make it better than ever. As usual with this guy, we got a lot less than he promised, though he continues to tell us how “big and beautiful” the pool is — or rather was, until “vandals” destroyed it. 

He issued a no-bid contract to a company that botched the renovation, according to staunch Trump loyalist Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. That revelation came out only after former Olympic canoeist Jeff Hearn got hit with a felony charge, apparently for picking up a piece of the pool’s peeling paint from the renovation. 

Immediately after his arrest, Pirro and Trump claimed they had definitive proof Hearn had caused more than $1,000 in damage. He was then indicted. Only after that did Pirro bother to review the evidence and conclude the renovation was at fault.

Wake up, kids: I’ve seen this behavior before.

When I was just a little boy, standing to my daddy’s knee, my pop took me to visit my Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly on their farm outside Bardstown, Kentucky.

Yes, Aunt Bill and Uncle Beverly. I thought they’d gotten named backward when I first met them. They were great people and it was a great place to live. Their farmhouse was already old when I first saw it in 1966, complete with a chicken coop out back.

It also featured what we’d now call a “vintage” kitchen, featuring antique appliances. The end of the Great Depression was just 25 years in our rearview mirror, but the stains were still easily seen throughout rural Kentucky. 

A few minutes after I met Aunt Bill for the first time, she said something that struck me funny. I may have heard this expression before, but to this day, I hear Aunt Bill’s voice in my head saying, “Honey, quit running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” I heard that as I fled a pursuing bumblebee, with an emphasis on “quit” that sounded like a meat cleaver going through a chicken’s neck. 

I laughed trying to visualize what she said. The only thing I could think of was a Bugs Bunny cartoon. My parents assured me that Aunt Bill’s description was every bit as accurate as she was colorful. I refused to believe them, and must have been strident enough that my aunt asked my mom if she’d allow me to witness her prepare the chicken casserole she planned to serve that night. I was a bit suspicious of the use of the word “witness” instead of the more familiar “watch.”

What was this all about? I soon found out. My aunt took me out to the chicken coop and demonstrated, with a large cleaver, not only the origination of the saying but how one “prepared” an appropriately sized hen for the family dinner.

What I felt in that moment is exactly how I feel about American politics in 2026.You could make the argument that most of what passes for culture on this planet resembles a headless chicken spewing blood everywhere as it stumbles around aimlessly for a few minutes before falling over dead and becoming food for something else.

On the surface, things seem deceptively quiet, even normal, if you ignore the mass shootings, the war, the cyclosporiasis, the Trump “sports curse” and the hole that used to be the East Wing. Congress still meets. The president does whatever the hell he does. The Supreme Court hears cases. Wall Street keeps moving upward. Large media companies produce endless amounts of entertainment and news.

But look below the surface and you see a Supreme Court bought and sold to a cause that isn’t the Constitution. You see unending greed. Congress is paralyzed, brain-dead and greedy, a political zombie. 

Just consider Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And his brain worm. 

The HHS secretary recently and proudly told a reporter he had no gag reflex. While that may explain his affiliation with Trump, Kennedy also said he could literally pick up anything dead along the side of the road and eat it. 

Once again, I have to circle around to the movie “Idiocracy.” I have previously compared Trump’s administration to the fictional world of that movie, while noting that it wasn’t supposed to be a documentary. In fact, I’ve made a huge error. The world “Idiocracy” is much less stupid than our reality. Remember that this president suggested treating COVID by injecting bleach. His two terms as president will likely serve as textbook examples of extreme government corruption. His name is destined to become a rude punchline or be completely forgotten. Either will do.

If there are still ratings to be gained from reporting on his nonsense, the corporate media will continuously keep doing that until a more profitable scandal comes along. 

Still, I must insist that the existential angst of the United States is much larger than Donald Trump, though we apparently love hearing about him. So does he, I assure you. Cheer him, mock him or despise him; he’ll be here all week, so try the veal. He thrives on the attention. 

Unless the Democrats win decisive control of both the House and the Senate this fall, or miraculously find a boatload of Trump supporters to vote for impeachment and convict him — and both seem unlikely — Trump will be president until he dies or his term ends. In  both cases, we can’t be sure he won’t stick around. If Mitch McConnell can disappear for weeks and still hold office, there’s nothing keeping Trump from doing the same. 

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Are we Rome after the empire has fallen? Would we even know it if we were? Many Romans didn’t know that at first. Will it take years to recognize our current situation for what it really is?

We have a president who does commercial breaks in his own public speeches for corporations that make him money. He loves insider trading, and engages in it based on decisions he makes as president. He should really be wearing a NASCAR jumpsuit with  his corporate sponsors displayed on his back and sleeves. Make it brilliant white, with gold piping and epaulets, and I guarantee he’d wear it.

There are no principles in this administration beyond the principle of making money. There are no values that can’t be counted in dollars. If you don’t like it, you get to meet the muscle. At least until we run out of bullets, or Pete Hegseth quits staring at himself longingly in his full-length mirror.

Just as the Reflecting Pool debacle exposes Trump, it also exposes the real existential threat to America. We have abandoned many of the ideals that founded the country. We exercise no caution. We don’t respect our institutions, even the good ones. Many ignore the Constitution. Some want to gut it. Some openly embrace bigotry, deny science, despise free enterprise and hate the contributions made by immigrants — one of the coolest aspects of our national narrative. 

We have literally and metaphorically tried to erase our actual history in favor of a mythical past that never existed — even in bad LSD trips.

What we’re left with is an intolerant society where might makes right, the ends justify the means and Anthony Fauci is thought to be guilty of corruption, greed and crimes against humanity, with no more evidence than was presented in the Reflecting Pool case. 

That case has a singular importance because it displays Trump’s heartless and vindictive nature over the smallest issues. Indict before you investigate. Threaten the world, including your own U.S. attorney when the corruption is exposed. Rinse and repeat. Keep lying about everything.

There’s no case against the canoeist. There’s no case against Fauci. We can’t trust Trump on anything. He runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to avoid questions about Jeffrey Epstein, his long list of no-bid contracts, and a wealth of other misdeeds. The press and the public also have that headless-chicken quality, running about reporting and consuming the latest outrages, while missing the larger point: Our government doesn’t work when we are at cross purposes. Of course being headless chickens we can’t think much. 

In other words, we cannot deal with the problems we face if we can’t face the fact that we have created most of our problems. Until we do that, all I see is my Aunt Bill “preparing” the chicken for dinner. And we’re the chicken.

The post Reflecting on Trump’s bottomless pool of corruption appeared first on Salon.com.

For Rep. Max Miller, shaking off allegations of domestic violence and child abuse should be an easy lift. The 43-year-old Ohio Republican benefits from a base that treats violence against women as a non-issue at best. In many cases, credible accusations against a GOP politician only bolsters his popularity with the MAGA base, who view men as the real victims of uppity women who should learn to keep their mouths shut. But as he aggressively attacks his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and her father, Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s behavior is as bizarre as it is unsettling. Even Republicans are starting to squirm. 

Miller faces an overwhelming number of accusations from Emily Moreno, including claims that he threw hot water at his ex-wife and held a gun to her head when they were married, and that he broke his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone. An in-depth investigation from Mother Jones revealed an apparent pattern of behavior that dates back to high school, when a fellow student said Miller threw her down a flight of stairs when she refused his sexual advances. He has also been accused of violence by a college classmate and his ex-girlfriend, former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who filed for a temporary restraining order against him on Monday. (In 2021, after Grisham published an op-ed in the Washington Post detailing abuse by her boyfriend, whom she did not name but described as a White House staffer, Miller sued her for defamation. He later dropped his suit, and the pair signed a nondisclosure agreement.)

In the past, Republicans — especially Donald Trump — have successfully weathered accusations of sexual or physical violence, regardless of how many or how well-evidenced the claims, by leaning on stereotypes that paint women as petty liars. As he once did with Grisham, Miller is following the same playbook against Moreno, but he is running into a serious problem: He is so off-putting that even the president seems a little annoyed about defending him.

But Miller is also confronting a party that seems increasingly weary of dealing with the alleged sex pests and predators that have flooded the Republican ranks, welcomed by a president with boundless sympathy for men who, like himself, face credible accusations of violence against women. 

Miller has been racking up a series of unsettling on-camera appearances in which his attempts at defending himself instead reveal a deep well of dishonesty. In his initial livestream denying the allegations, he not only exhibited an odd demeanor, but he also falsely insisted that every accusation could be “traced back to a single source, my former wife.” While the police opted not to file charges in the child abuse case, a specialist during the investigation said the bruising on the former couple’s daughter looked hand-shaped. Miller has also cited an October 2024 statement from Moreno that he had never harmed their daughter, which is especially dishonest, since the collarbone incident happened more than a year later, in February 2026. In an apparent effort to minimize throwing hot water on Moreno, he released an audio recording in which he blames her — “I told you before that not to come over to me and start screwing around,” he says — and accuses her of “weaponing this because of my previous allegation.”

It got worse when Miller was interviewed Tuesday by CNN’s Jake Tapper, an appearance deemed “strange” by Michael Grynbaum of the New York Times, and the equivalent of “tweeting through it.” One especially noteworthy moment in the 23-minute segment came when Tapper asked if Miller had held his daughter’s blue bunny — which she needs to sleep — hostage. After attempting to dodge the question several times, he said “no.” On Thursday, Mother Jones published a series of text messages allegedly showing both Emily and Bernie Moreno pleading, over the course of months, for Miller to return the stuffed animal, only to be rebuffed, even after a family friend and then a lawyer got involved. Eventually, a parenting coordinator texted Emily Moreno: “l’ve suggested you keep the bunny at your house . . . in a high conflict divorce these situations blow up.”

The situation is so bad that many in the Republican professional class have declined to defend Miller. “I mean what the absolute f**k was that,” an anonymous GOP strategist told a CNN reporter right after the interview. Scott Jennings, a Republican pundit under contract with the network, went even further: He begged Miller to resign, saying he can’t keep “litigating this on national TV day after day.” 

Bernie Moreno, albeit belatedly, reacted to Miller’s behavior by defending his daughter, telling reporters he sent her, his granddaughter and his wife to a “secure place” out of state for their own safety. Some of his GOP colleagues in the Senate are joining him in condemning his former son-in-law. Ohio Sen. Jon Husted called on Miller to resign on Thursday. Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy was even more forceful, tweeting that Miller is “a degenerate sociopath” and asking “What kind of person would treat their daughter this way?”

For the record: Adult women do not deserve abuse either. But hey, defending a toddler is a good start. 

For his part, Trump kept up his long history of robust public support for men accused of violence against women, saying Miller is “a good person” and portraying the allegations as a mere family dispute. But according to an Axios report, the president privately called Miller and said “things aren’t looking good.”

While most Republican leaders are trying to avoid the situation, many are starting to express doubts about Miller to reporters. Although the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Miller this week, they only did so after he publicly demanded it, which means there is good reason to believe Miller thinks very little effort will go into discovering the truth. House Speaker Mike Johnson has been dodging the issue with mealy-mouthed language about allowing “this process to play out.” 

The ambivalence sadly makes sense from a political perspective, even though the moral failure is damning. After all, this is the same party that unquestioningly supports Trump, who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse by at least 18 women, including the writer E. Jean Carroll, who sued Trump twice and won in both cases.

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Miller is clinging to Trump’s example, recalling how Trump “stayed in the fight” despite “dozens” of allegations of “nasty criminal misconduct,” and it may pay off. According to the Washington Post, many Republican voters are standing firm in their decision to back Miller. Most seemed to think he’s guilty, even as they used minimizing language. They told the Post they prefer a man they believe beats women to any Democrat.

Still, there are some intriguing signs that Republicans are growing weary of standing by gross and terrible men. Earlier this week, North Carolina Rep. Chuck Edwards agreed not to run for re-election, after the House Ethics Committee found “substantial reason to believe” he had “engaged in sexual harassment” of two young women on his staff. This follows the decision earlier this year by Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas to step down after a staffer he was having an affair with died by suicide.

Florida Rep. Cory Mills managed to hold onto his seat after police came to his house in 2025 to investigate an alleged assault, which was followed a few months later with a restraining order to protect his ex-girlfriend based on a series of alleged threatening text messages. More recently, things have been going poorly for Mills; in July, the Justice Department opened an investigation into his conduct. Two of his fellow Sunshine State Republicans jumped ship in August when they endorsed his opponent, Ryan Elijah, in the August 18 GOP primary.

The most prominent creep rejection, though, might be from outside Congress. In July, right-wing influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were detained in the U.S. last month and look likely to be extradited to the United Kingdom to stand trial for rape and sex trafficking. In 2025, the Tates thought they were going to escape justice by coming to the U.S., having cultivated friendships with Trump’s sons and various White House officials, one of whom, diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell, spoke with Romanian officials mere days before their government reversed course and let the brothers leave the country, despite pending sex abuse charges. But after their most recent arrest, it appears the Trump White House has decided to hang the Tates out to dry, even as they have pled for help in avoiding the British justice system.

After Andrew Tate’s most recent detention, the Guardian’s Moira Donegan wrote that his “style of masculinity is popular on the right,” before observing that that fact “does not mean that it is popular with the public.” With November’s midterms looming, that seems to be an increasing source of discomfort with Republicans. Loyal MAGA voters don’t mind gendered violence and, in many cases, hold men in higher esteem if they hate and abuse women.

But Republicans can’t win with base voters alone. They need to convince swing voters that the left’s accusations of misogyny are overblown and that accusations are false, rooted in political conspiracy and women’s alleged tendency towards hysteria. That’s getting a lot harder when the men claiming to be victims of lies make themselves impossible to take seriously. 

The post Max Miller tests GOP tolerance of terrible men appeared first on Salon.com.

Most of Donald Trump’s success in politics has stemmed from his reputation as a savvy dealmaker. But in his 11 years on the national political scene, that has been exposed as a fiction — a persona invented by Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter for the president’s bestselling book “The Art of The Deal,” who followed him around for 18 months and realized in the process that no one would want to read a book about the real Trump. 

After Trump announced his run for president in 2015, Schwartz told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer he felt deep remorse for creating this erroneous image of Trump, saying if he wrote the book today, he would call it “The Sociopath.” He said, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

His words were startling, to say the least, but Schwartz’s description of the president’s true personality was revelatory. The man who touted himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker was a pathologically dishonest hype artist with the attention span of a four-year-old, described by Schwartz as having “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” who seemed “driven entirely by a need for public attention.” His alleged negotiation prowess was actually nonexistent, as the multiple failures of his businesses should have made clear. 

In Trump’s first administration, it became obvious that his idea of dealmaking consisted of willingly succumbing to flattery by malevolent actors and ineffectually bellowing at allies. Professional diplomatic and national security advisers managed to steer him away from most disasters, although he commonly embarrassed the nation on the world stage by displaying his ignorance and fondness for sucking up to adversaries. 

Trump’s second term is a whole other story. 

The president has confused his “Art of the Deal” with the art of diplomacy, and they are most definitely not the same thing. Even if he were actually talented at the former, which he is not, it would have no bearing on the latter, and the consequences of that are turning out to be substantial and damaging. By this point, it’s a cliché that Trump is “transactional,” which many (if not most) people understand to mean he is negotiating on behalf of the American people, bringing riches and security to the nation. In reality, Trump’s often self-serving deals are gravely harming the national interest. 

Diplomacy isn’t just signing a particular agreement between two countries. That may be the culmination of negotiations or just the beginning, but it isn’t actually the goal, especially for a superpower. The aim is to manage relations between countries over the long term to maintain stability and predictability; it’s not a “winner take all” proposition. Credibility is everything for a country like the United States, and now, without it, we are unleashing powerful forces that will be very hard to control.

Trump is a pathological liar. Schwartz discovered that from the very beginning. He was attached to Trump at the hip for many months, listening in on every phone call, observing his conversations and racking his brain to figure out how to present the man as a lovable rogue rather than the damaged personality he really is. The whole world has seen this up close for the past decade. 

At first, allies depended upon the professional diplomatic and national security apparatus to continue to run things in spite of Trump’s erratic behavior and belligerence. They understood early on he loved pomp and circumstance, and that he was easily flattered by obsequious compliments, so they played along, giving him the pageantry of over-the-top state visits and paying homage to him at his properties and the White House. But for the most part, they were just trying to wait out the term, expecting that the American people would realize the error of their ways and revert to being a serious nation. 

This time around is different. A recent report in the Washington Post by Steve Hendrix and Anthony Faiola revealed that the world is no longer taking the U.S. seriously, leaving the government with no credibility. As a result, international relations are unstable and dangerous. 

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When Trump regained office the second time, the world quaked at his swagger, backed up by a bizarre tariff regime that seemed to be put together by Mad Libs. The markets dropped, recriminations flowed, and it looked as if Trump had finally been completely unleashed. To some extent, he had been. He and his close circle had decided to do whatever they wanted and see what they could get away with. But it soon became evident there wasn’t really any strategy or even any particular goals, despite the apparent participation of people like Elon Musk and the authors of Project 2025. In the end, it was all about Trump’s whims, which changed from minute to minute. 

The short attention span Schwartz described is now even more pronounced. The president’s obsession with building monuments to himself notwithstanding, he flits from subject to subject, bellowing threats to all who oppose him and rewarding his cronies with ever more obvious modes of corruption. 

The world has decided to stop paying attention. “[M]ost consequently,” Hendrix and Faiola wrote, “Iran refuses to bend under American bombs and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and Russian President Vladimir Putin persists in his war in Ukraine. Europe met Trump’s recently renewed demands for Greenland with a collective sigh, and trading partners have shrugged off the latest tariffs.” 

Over the years, world leaders have had varying reactions to American presidents of both parties. But the country’s leaders have never been disregarded. 

Jeremy Shapiro, director of the U.S. program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told the Post he was surprised at how long Trump’s bluffs and bellicosity had worked, crediting it to the “awesome power and deep, long-stored-up diplomatic capital of the United States” that Trump has “finally started to blow through.”

The president’s threats are now seen as empty, and his so-called deals aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. This was most recently on display in mid-July when he made a big, splashy announcement of a nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia. Within a day, Trump added a poison-pill requirement by way of a Truth Social post that left the Saudis reeling. His threats to annihilate Iran are now falling on deaf ears because he’s all over the place, usually lying about the progress of diplomatic talks, showing that he’s full of bluster and bombast but lacks a strategy to win and ideas about how to get out. 

America’s political dynamics have us all just trying to hold on until he’s out of office so we can try to rebuild from the rubble. But the loss of credibility, the exposure of the nation’s weaknesses and the people’s willingness to put such a man in charge will not be easily repaired. The long-term damage to our international reputation, coupled with the weakness we are demonstrating in any number of areas, will leave us vulnerable for a long time to come.

The post The world is finally calling Trump’s bluff appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Todd Blanche — whom Republicans hope to confirm as attorney general by the end of the week — has indicated he could steer the Justice Department to prioritize national abortion restrictions, a major shift from how the Trump administration has handled the issue thus far.

In a call last week, Blanche, who is serving as both acting attorney general and deputy attorney general and has previously served as Trump’s personal lawyer, suggested that under his leadership, the department would prioritize restrictions on medication abortion.

“If states have said we are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception, we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that,” Blanche said on a call organized by the White House Faith Office and posted online in full by Intercessors for America, a Christian organization. The call’s contents were first reported by Politico.

The remarks are only the latest to suggest that if confirmed, Blanche might take a more aggressive approach than his predecessor. In a July hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Blanche said that if confirmed, he would commit to reviewing how the federal government interprets the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law from the 1800s that abortion opponents believe could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of any drug used to terminate a pregnancy. 

Anti-abortion activists have been pressing the administration to revive the Comstock Act since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term; Trump has declined to do so.

When asked about the possibility of enforcing the law to ban mailing of abortion medications, the Department of Justice confirmed that its Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president and attorney general, “is undertaking a thorough review” of policies and procedures related to abortion.

Blanche requires one more vote to secure support from a majority of the Senate. Two Senate Republicans — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana — have not yet indicated whether they would vote to confirm him. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican up for re-election, said Tuesday she would not vote to confirm Blanche, citing his abortion-related remarks as a key factor.

The confirmation fight comes months before a midterm election in which Republicans — already facing an uphill battle to control both chambers of Congress — have largely avoided talking about abortion. Though reproductive rights dominated the 2024 election, polling suggests that the issue has taken a backseat, with voters primarily concerned about the cost of living. 

Still, national restrictions on abortion remain unpopular. 

Abortion pill restrictions have emerged as a top priority for the anti-abortion movement. Even as bans have proliferated across the country, medical professionals in protective states have continued to prescribe and mail them to people living under abortion bans. This telehealth practice is medically safe and has enabled thousands of people to circumvent their states’ laws and end their pregnancies. 

Anti-abortion activists have called on the federal government to intervene, arguing that the existence of this telehealth model has undercut states’ abilities to enforce bans. But so far, the Trump administration has taken no action to block telehealth abortion, despite pressure from top anti-abortion groups.

Blanche’s remarks suggest that could be changing, though it’s unclear when or how that shift might take place. 

In the White House Faith Office call, he did not reveal what approach the administration might take to limit the availability of abortion medication, or when any switch might take effect — only saying that “victory will be soon and victory will be permanent.” 

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Abortion opponents have pressed for the Food and Drug Administration to reverse its decision approving mifepristone, one of two drugs used in most abortions, to be dispensed without an in-person visit. The FDA is currently reviewing mifepristone’s approval, despite a vast body of medical research showing the drug’s safety and effectiveness, including by telehealth. 

They have also pressed for the Department of Justice to revive the Comstock Act to bar the mailing not only of mifepristone, but also misoprostol, an ulcer medication that is prescribed off-label as part of the abortion medication regimen. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department argued that the Comstock Act could not be enforced to enforce a blanket ban on the mailing of mifepristone or misoprostol. 

Democrats have argued that Blanche’s remarks are disqualifying. 

“He wants to strip Americans of their right to choose and strip states of their right to govern,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Tuesday during a meeting of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, posted on the social media platform X that “Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”

Abortion opponents are concurrently pursuing restrictions on mifepristone through the courts, notably in a case filed by Louisiana, in which the state has argued for the government to reverse its decision approving mifepristone for telehealth. That case is set to be heard by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in September.

The post Trump’s attorney general pick hints at making national abortion restrictions a priority appeared first on Salon.com.

Dr. Anthony Fauci is under congressional scrutiny following an appearance before a Senate committee last week, in which the former National Institutes of Health immunologist was grilled by elected officials over his response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, the Senate Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress over his repeated invocation of the Fifth Amendment. 

The committee’s chair, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has not been shy about his scorn toward Fauci, who led the pandemic response in the first Trump and Biden administrations. Paul floated conspiracy theories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID, was leaked from a Chinese lab and that Fauci covered up this info. There is no conclusive evidence that the virus leaked from anywhere but nature, but that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from promoting such theories.

Seemingly at the advice of his lawyers, Fauci declined to entertain this political side show. Nonetheless, he serves as a convenient scapegoat for the ongoing public health failures under President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

As unfortunate as this sounds, COVID did not go away. The virus that sparked a global pandemic still regularly infects, disables and kills hundreds of people per week. Although it’s not anything like previous waves, right now cases are rising slightly across the country, especially in Alaska and Missouri, but also in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Waning immunity, viral mutations and a refusal for some people to stay up on vaccines are part of the reason why COVID is returning.

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This isn’t a pandemic anymore, according to experts, but that’s because the virus is now endemic — it’s a part of our daily lives like flu, HIV and other infectious diseases. Even once-eradicated diseases like measles are now all too common. COVID is also now a preventable disease. Vaccines, masking, improved indoor air quality and acquired immunity have all kept the virus at bay so that morgue trucks no longer fill the streets. Still, even a “mild” infection these days can be devastating and lead to long-term health problems.

But a big part of the reason COVID is endemic in the first place is because it wasn’t controlled early, like MERS and SARS-1 were, related viruses that never became pandemics. The first Trump admin completely botched its response to containing COVID, but now they can deflect from their past and current failures — including letting things like the cyclospora outbreak slip or allowing Ebola to balloon into the second biggest outbreak in history — by attacking Fauci and plugging baseless conjecture about COVID’s origins. Unfortunately, for some people, this strategy seems to be convincing.

The post Fauci is an easy scapegoat for pandemic revisionists  appeared first on Salon.com.

White drugs. Underage drinking. Absentee parents. Nonstop parties. Oh, to be a rich teenager in the 1980s, says “The Shards” in so many words. Too many, I’d say, but slapping droning voiceovers atop expository visuals isn’t for me. Piling too much on too much is both Ryan Murphy and Bret Easton Ellis’ signature, however, as seen in this TV collaboration between auteur and author.

“The Shards,” an adaptation of Ellis’ 2023 autobiographical novel, rewinds to his pre-“Less Than Zero” adolescence, when he was just Bret (Igby Rigney), a high school senior in lockstep with his hedonistic friends. When they aren’t snorting narcotics, everyone but Bret ignores evidence that a serial killer is circling ever closer.

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Ellis’ eroded faith in the safety of adults is a recurring theme in his work, but “The Shards” cynically wraps that in horror, celebrity, luxury brands and needle drops like the Pretenders’ “Bad Boys Get Spanked.” Pop singer Hayes Warner portrays Bret’s girlfriend Debbie, whose father and mother (Wes Bentley and Evan Rachel Wood) share their loveless relationship with a psychosexual lich (Broadway producer Jordan Roth).

That two of Bret’s other pals are played by Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Kaia Gerber, and Richard Gere’s son, Homer Gere, is also a classic Murphy move: The offspring of previously married ‘80s icons starring in a story about the era their parents ruled? Fabulous! So what if Gerber looks like she’s repeating 12th grade for the tenth time? Realism is not the point.

Instead, think of “The Shards” as a View-Master reel designed to give Gen Z a glimpse at the lost age of excess they’re pining for. Cocaine and smoking are back, after all, along with outsize glamour. Bret may lament childhood’s demise, but if you had helicopter parents, these throes probably look less like trash than fire.

New episodes of “The Shards”  premiere Wednesdays on FX and Hulu.

 

The post “The Shards” is oozing with Bret Easton Ellis vibes appeared first on Salon.com.

Mitch McConnell announced that he was being discharged from the hospital on Thursday, saying that he would “continue his recovery at home.”

“On the advice of my doctors, I’ll maintain an intensive regimen of physical therapy from home during the state work period, and I’ll continue to engage with my staff and colleagues on important Senate business,” the Kentucky senator shared in a statement.

McConnell was hospitalized in mid-June after being found unconscious in his D.C. home. The lack of information about the senior Republican’s condition, and a dearth of evidence that the 84-year-old was responsive, led commentators in both conservative and progressive spheres to speculate that he was much worse off than was being reported. The statement on Thursday revived those theories, as many wondered why there were no photos of McConnell leaving the rehabilitation center.

“It’s strange. No photos of Mitch McConnell leaving the rehab center,” wrote activist Charlotte Clymer on X. “Just a statement and reporters giving a quick salute.”

MAGA commentator Eric Spracklen called Mitch’s statement “suspicious” and wondered why TMZ’s D.C. bureau wasn’t waiting for McConnell outside of the hospital.

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Author and prolific poster Joyce Carol-Oates questioned whether McConnell was involved in the statement at all. 

“Did McConnell literally SAY these words publicly or is this a press release written by someone else?” she wrote. “No wonder rumors & disinformation spread here like black mold.”

McConnell plans to retire at the end of the year. Since his health scare, he has been facing pressure from Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear to resign early if he can not prove that he’s fit to serve out the remainder of his term.  

The post “Suspicious”: McConnell hospital discharge revives conspiracy theories appeared first on Salon.com.

“This is not a story about a woman who made the best of traditional skills . . . This is the ‘woman’s pluck’ story, the dust-bowl story, the burying-your-child-on-the-trail story, the I-will-never-go-hungry-again story, the Mildred Pierce story, the story about how the sheer nerve of even professionally unskilled women can prevail, show the men; the story that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men.”

That prose could describe Lorraine Lyon, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s indomitable Queen of Debt and the true showstopper of “Fargo.” She seems the type, descending her spiral staircase into our lives (which she’d describe as “sad,” “little” or both) with an imperious purr of “I’m here,” before demanding a do-over when her lawyer on call ruins her entrance.

Lorraine makes the men around her nervous because she has little use for them. For what use are men to a woman with billions in the bank, six governors on speed dial and a personal liaison at the Federal Trade Commission? Her son and husband might as well be pets. She wears her power like a second skin and speaks a mid-Atlantic accent similar to the one Leigh used in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” only mellowed by casks of rare scotch and impatience with unrefined dullards.

Lorraine is not a hero, nor a pure villain, but one of the rarest forces in nature – a woman billionaire who can afford to buy respect or purchase punishments for those who don’t show her a healthy fear when she fires a warning shot.

One also gets the sense that Lorraine had to earn a good share of that influence, though. Maybe she was born rich, but not with the type of money she has. Her multibillion-dollar debt consolidation company is cruelly named Redemption Services. Redemption implies salvation or forgiveness, two graces Lorraine lacks for strangers and barely bestows on loved ones. Looming behind her office desk is a behemoth of a painting bellowing what we presume to be her motto: “No.”

By now you may have deduced that the passage quoted above is not about Lorraine. Joan Didion wrote that for The New Yorker about Martha Stewart, although the line that comes next in that paragraph could have easily been written about Lorraine’s Bisquick-mixing daughter-in-law Dorothy (Juno Temple). “The dreams and the fears into which Martha Stewart taps are not of ‘feminine’ domesticity but of female power,” Didion writes, “of the woman who sits down at the table with the men and, still in her apron, walks away with the chips.”

Assuming Lorraine is around the same age as the actor playing her, she would have learned plenty from the example set by Stewart’s public rise and fall, and her precarious choice to make her identity and image her brand. Didion’s essay was published four years before Stewart’s pristine if prickly image was undone by her implication in an insider trading scandal, in which she was found guilty of obstructing justice and lying to investigators.

Stewart’s empire was built on elevating the art of homemaking, winning the gratitude and millions of dollars of support from of underappreciated women everywhere. As many have written since, Stewart’s main sin was being a successful older woman. She was around 63 when she was sentenced to five months in prison.

Lorraine would have vowed to never go out like Stewart did, making her money by becoming the person who takes the good life for granted instead of toiling to create it.

She barely tolerates Dorothy until trouble comes knocking, threatening her son and her granddaughter, an intentional friction constructed by series creator Noah Hawley. Their rivalry continues the “Fargo” tradition of burdening women with having to constantly fight for every inch of the life they’ve won and the slightest esteem of the men surrounding them.

Lorraine’s battle readiness is the type one learns by competing against men – and it is mostly men in the billionaires’ club – and not only winning but routing them every single time. It’s the arrogance of a woman who never received respect or sympathy and therefore appears to have none to give.

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)One of the most satisfying subplots of the season involved a sexist pair of bank executives with whom Lorraine sits down, only for them to initially refuse to deal with her until she sets them straight by informing the two that she intends to buy their bank.

Even then, the bank’s top executive fears Jon Hamm’s sheriff Roy Tillman more than Lorraine, because what’s the worst a woman can do? Roy threatens the man to stop him from making the sale to Lorraine, simply because he doesn’t want “that woman” to profit on his territory.

And that makes Scandia police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) braver and more stalwart than she realizes.

When Lorraine first meets Indira, several episodes before she sits down with those good old boys, all she can see is a civil servant in debt up to her eyeballs.

“What is your function?” Lorraine asks Indira when they first meet in her office. “The police. I mean, why do we need you? . . . You’re gatekeepers standing outside the walls, keeping the rabble from getting in. But in here, inside these walls, you have no function. You should remember that.”

Women like Lorraine pride themselves on rarely being surprised, which works in Indira’s favor. She’s also constantly underestimated, leaving her with nothing to push back with except for her anger. So when Lorraine tries to shut her up by saying, “I don’t like your tone,” Indira replies, “Tough s**t. Some of us work for a living and go home to empty houses. Or houses that should be empty bedrooms filled with the dirty underpants of our man-child spouses. Your problem is you think that you’re rich because you’re better than me.”

Then Indira lists all the ways the two women are alike – more to the point, how alike Lorraine and Dorothy are, despite Lorraine’s dismissive refusal to look at her daughter-in-law’s police file showing the harrowing abuse she survived. In a single conversation Indira moves Lorraine from the conservative “People claiming to be victims are the downfall of this country” to offering Indira the job of heading her security team.

Moments after Indira walks out of Lorraine’s office, Dot’s mother-in-law gets on the phone with that banker who thought denying her was the safer choice. She opens that conversation with, “Are your balls in your belly looking for a safe place to hide? Good.” Mrs. Lyon then opens her devouring maw, listing all the ways she’s arranged to destroy the man’s life. These are not empty words but actions that have already been set in motion. “You want to know what your mistake was? It was thinking death is the worst thing that could happen to you.”

Lorraine’s epic chilliness contributes mightily to the delectability of this season of “Fargo,” offsetting its grim themes of spousal abuse and marriage as a chain of indebtedness. But her relative warming to Indira and Dorothy in the season’s second half makes her more compelling, moving what starts as a pair of adversarial relationships toward a team of women who understand each other, with one offering others a chance to succeed where bureaucracy and lazy men have failed them.

Helpfully we can see some version of this in reality. As Taraji P. Henson spills the details of how poorly treated the cast of “The Color Purple” were, she’s returned to mentioning that Oprah Winfrey’s intervention helped her get better pay and other benefits casts of primarily white productions receive, like drivers to the set.

“They [Warner Bros.] gave us rental cars, and I was like, ‘I can’t drive myself to set in Atlanta,’” the Oscar-and Emmy nominee told The New York Times.  “This is insurance liability, it’s dangerous. Now they robbing people. What do I look like, taking myself to work by myself in a rental car? So I was like, “Can I get a driver or security to take me?” I’m not asking for the moon. They’re like, ‘Well, if we do it for you, we got to do it for everybody.’ Well, do it for everybody!”

Since Henson first went public with her career-long struggles to get paid what she’s worth and treated with the same respect as her white peers, people have reverted to blaming Winfrey for failing her, playing into the classic tendency to pit high-profile women against each other. 

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But of Winfrey, one of the movie’s main executive producers, Henson posted on her Instagram, “She told me personally to reach out to her for ANYTHING I needed, and I did! It took ONE CALL . . . ONE CONVERSATION . . . and ONE DECISION-MAKING BLACK WOMAN to make me feel heard.”

Richa Moorjani in “Fargo” (FX)Who doesn’t love an aspirational power figure and fairy godmother who can make a few calls to reduce your problems if not make them entirely vanish? Hence the satisfaction of witnessing Lorraine’s steady shift from Mommy Dearest to vindictive she-dragon protecting what’s hers, including the two women she views as equals in gladiatorial terms if not financially.

Even so, Lorraine is a dangerous type of savior, playing into our culture’s poisonous trust of oligarchs and corporate titans hailed for their innovations and insufficiently questioned for their wrongdoing. And that may be intentional on the writers’ part, since presenting society as it is and not necessarily as we wish it were is the “Fargo” way.

Indira accepts Lorraine’s offer because it’s better pay than what the Scandia police can offer and a job with actual power and resources to save Dorothy – another woman who, like her, never asked for a handout and fought for the meager life she wants.

Indira achieves that by hitching her career to someone who benefits from the common person’s suffering, and that should not be lost on us. Neither should the new power she may wield as Lorraine’s new right hand, functioning as the single commodity the Queen of Debt needs but lacks: a conscience.

 

The post Power, respect and conscience: How the women of “Fargo” manage (up) in a man’s world appeared first on Salon.com.

The moon has a brand new crater as of Wednesday, thanks to a rogue SpaceX rocket that crashed into Earth’s nearest neighbor at 5,400 miles an hour. Originally part of a 2025 mission to launch a pair of lunar landers for U.S. and Japanese companies, the rocket was supposed to fall back to Earth. Instead, it strayed off course and eventually reached its final resting place on the moon’s surface.

According to the Guardian, astronomers were unable to confirm the impact, “possibly because the impact site was close to the visible edges of the moon.” A day later, a Korean lunar orbiter captured images of the impact, but it will still take time to confirm the size of the crater, which is expected to be about 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, for the record. In March 2022, a rocket slammed into the moon, creating a double crater about 95 feet wide. That object was later identified as part of China’s Long March 3C rocket, which propelled the Chang’e 5-T1 mission around the moon in 2014. In fact, there’s been trash on the moon ever since humans first landed there, which some scientists cite as evidence of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by how badly humans have messed up the planet and its nearby neighbors.

NEWS 🚨: A Korean lunar orbiter has photographed the crash site of a SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage on the Moon pic.twitter.com/chI8hpWdsv

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) August 6, 2026

Indeed, it’s difficult to estimate how space junk is currently orbiting our planet. By one count, there are more than 17,000 metric tons of objects in Earth orbit, including nearly 19,000 satellites. Every time we shoot more stuff up into space, we risk it hitting something else, as in a giant game of billiards. That threatens to create a cataclysmic chain reaction, in which every collision creates more space debris and also risks damaging satellites and space stations we’d like to keep operational. This might make future space launches unsafe (such as the planned Artemis IV moon landing mission) and could render GPS devices completely useless. If you think Google Maps is glitchy now, just wait.

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This hypothetical scenario is called Kessler Syndrome, but I propose renaming it Tesla Syndrome, given that Elon Musk’s Starlink has nearly 11,000 satellites in orbit, with eventual plans to launch as many as 42,000. Musk’s car is still floating out there somewhere, too. The statistical probability of a company owned by the world’s richest man making our space trash problem even worse is high, so we’d better keep crossing our fingers for more near misses — and, just maybe, a future in which humans behave less like slobs.

The post SpaceX’s rocket trashes the moon appeared first on Salon.com.

On May 31, 1921, an armed white mob poured into Tulsa, Oklahoma’s majority African-American Greenwood district and began setting it ablaze. Families were driven out of their homes at gunpoint as their neighbors looted their belongings and burned their property to the ground. The lucky ones escaped the city with their lives, the less fortunate were rounded up and detained by law enforcement, and scores of men, women, and children were simply gunned down in the street.

Within the space of 48 hours Greenwood, a beacon of prosperity previously nicknamed the Black Wall Street, was wiped from the face of the earth. More than 10,000 black families were left homeless, and the death toll, tallied at 36 in 1921, is now estimated to be upwards of 300.

In all likelihood, most people who tune in to Sunday’s highly anticipated premiere of “Watchmen” (9 p.m. ET, HBO) will have never heard of this bloody, racist massacre that occurred almost a century ago on American soil.

The thought that such a crime could happen at all beggars belief to those of us who cling to the version of the American story that draws the place as heroic and just, where our greatest wrongs are made right. But nearly two weeks ago came the headlines that scientists and forensic anthropologists have begun the process of searching for the mass graves where untold numbers of murdered Tulsans may be buried.

And this is why series creator Damon Lindelof opens his part of the story with a re-enactment of that massacre that includes historically accurate eyewitness details from the thick of the nightmare. The vision of planes swooping down and dropping bombs on the screaming, unarmed citizens below, and the Klan openly hunting them, might appear to be heightened elements tossed in for dramatic effect, just part of the story that differentiates reality from fictionalized alternate history.

Except, according to records, that is actually what occurred. By air and on the ground, American citizens waged war on other American citizens, and made sure the survivors were frightened enough to stop talking about it, thereby keeping this account out of the history books.

The Tulsa massacre is the origin story of Lindelof’s “Watchmen,” an inspired, riveting continuation of the seminal comic book series co-created by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons first published between 1986 and 1987.

In the original series Moore and Gibbons presented an interrogation of our relationship with superheroes and the popular notion of heroism itself with its story of people with purported superhuman abilities emerging between World War II and the 1960s and changing the trajectory of history itself.

In Moore’s and Gibbons’ history, these heroes gave the United States political and military advantage, allowing America to win the war in Vietnam, making it a state in the process, and gain the upper hand during the Cold War.

Within that history, too, are the effects of things that never came to be. Richard Nixon was never forced out of office, and term limits were abolished, allowing him to remain president well into the 1980s. After that, he was replaced by our first celebrity president, Robert Redford. It is against the law for freelance masked vigilantes to operate, and those that remain either work for the government or have gone into retirement.

The looming threat of World War III serves as the backdrop to the A-plot, a story comprised of many smaller tales and plots told from various points of view. But this overarching anxiety pitting the United States against the Soviet Union is annihilated when a gigantic squid reported to be from another dimension drops on Manhattan, immediately killing millions.

Lindelof’s continuation is intimately informed by that game-changing climax, only not in any way that the fly-by comic book consumer might immediately connect. The threat in the “Watchmen” comics mirrors the overriding fear hanging over the Reagan era, which is that of nuclear annihilation. Twenty-seven years later, in the alternate and actual histories of 2019, the all-destructive threat assumes the form of violence driven by white supremacy.

Only in this new “Watchmen,” the cops in Tulsa are the ones wearing masks, yellow face coverings for the uniformed beat cops, and more elaborate, fully immersed get-ups for its detectives.  Nominally this protocol allowing the police to remain anonymous was enacted to keep officers safe; only Tulsa’s Chief of Police Judd Crawford (Don Johnson) allows his face to be seen while he is on duty.

In practice, as is quickly evidenced, this inability to be identified allows the cops to operate with near-impunity and intimidate any population it deems a threat – mainly poor whites suspected of making up the ranks of the racist Seventh Kavalry, branded a terrorist organization.

Second in the chain of command is the fearsome cloaked Sister Night, the alter ego of Angela Abar (Regina King), a devoted wife, mother of three, and bakery owner. Angela claims to be retired; a hideaway under her bakery proves otherwise.

And her costume is the sleekest and most intimidating of her band of law-enforcement besides that of her colleague Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson), a severe by-the-book soldier whose engulfing reflective mask renders him featureless, and hints at a streak that is equally skeptical and paranoiac.

I suspect each will inspire a few Halloween costumes, maybe and hopefully replacing the popularity of Rorschach’s mask following Zack Snyder’s 2009 theatrical adaptation. In alt-2019, the Rorschach mask is the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry, making it the equivalent of a Klansman’s hood. He’s not around to critique this appropriation of his mantle, but other original characters are, including Doctor Manhattan (referenced but not seen),  the former Silk Spectre, who now just goes Laurie Blake (Jean Smart), and Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), now the lord of a manor and still very much an arrogant tinkerer.

What Lindelof has achieved in the six episodes of “Watchmen” provided for review is extraordinary for its execution alone. It is dark, but it’s also exciting; grim, but also invigorating. The action sequences are stunning, as are the performances. King is a mesmerizing presence, as is Louis Gossett, Jr. as the mysterious Will Reeves, a figure who seems designed to irritate Angela at first but, owing to his age, is obviously there to give her clues as to how modern-day Tulsa connects to its past.

For all of its fantastical details, elements of “Watchmen” resemble the real 2019 too closely to be thought of as comfortable escapism. But the viewers that it hooks will be as fascinated, inquisitive, and passionate as its haters are rabid. If that isn’t a hallmark of inventive, provocative television, I’m not sure what is.

As I stated earlier, Lindelof’s “Watchmen” is not a divergence from the original story but an extrapolation – and a brutally intelligent one – of the original comic’s theories about our blind trust in authority, our misplaced reliance and trust in power, and even our concept of identity, shared and individual.

And yes, part of this has to do with the title itself, and Lindelof’s signature creative approach. The audience that knows him via “Lost” may have been flummoxed by “The Leftovers” and its insistent, unsettling interpretation of the mystery surrounding grief and loss.

What’s funny is that “Watchmen” is more straightforward than “The Leftovers” but will nevertheless confuse anyone who tunes in expecting a straightforward superhero tale, or even an obvious sequel to the comic.

“Watchmen” is very true to the original mythology – so much, in fact, that at the very least I’d advise reading a few summaries about the comic’s plot before diving into the show. This is because Lindelof intentionally steeps “Watchmen” in history: its own, and ours, and the version that answers the various “what if” questions that hold the potential to tweak the trajectory of an entire culture.

On the page, “Watchmen” liberally toys with the meaning of story and the power of perspective, but it also forces the question of whether the systems and structures we presume to be good or working for us actually are. The HBO series also does this in obvious ways, but makes answering that question more complicated and foggier as the series progresses.

But where Lindelof’s take finds the strongest and more fertile common ground with Moore’s is in the examination of history, and the difference between what actually happened and the so-called official record.

What “Watchmen” posits throughout its story is that history is only as accurate as the honesty in the edit and of the editor. In large part, history is a means of asking a culture to adopt an identity by remembering the past in a prescribed way. At its most aggressive, it demands we accept a particular point of view to the erasure of others that may blemish that perspective – essentially asking an entire nation of people to live in the heads of a select few.

That the series begins with an actual historic account that’s been intentionally kept out of the books is part of the trick, one that dares the viewer to simultaneously believe and distrust everything we see afterward. That’s very much in keeping with 2019, both the version in “Watchmen” and the one we’re living through. After all, if hate can wipe an entire town off the face of the earth in two days, an event that tens of millions never knew about, then why couldn’t squid rain down from the sky?

“Watchmen” premieres on HBO at 9 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20. 

The post “Watchmen” is a brutally provocative reckoning of alternate history appeared first on Salon.com.

Writing something is a bit like polishing rocks. You start with an ugly hunk of something, a phrase or an idea you’ve tripped over. It rattles against the hard edges of your brain until it gets polished and smooth. Moving the rock through finer and finer grits is time-consuming, strenuous and not always rewarding. Sometimes, the lump becomes a slightly smaller and shinier lump, marginally less ugly than it was on the ground. But like exercise and tough conversations, the process is the point. You feel better for having gone through the ritual yourself.

Boy George didn’t get the memo. 

The former Culture Club frontman, whose voice adorned New Wave pop hits like “Karma Chameleon” and “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” in the 1980s, had artificial intelligence spew out an unfortunate reggae song last week that turned out to be a statement of support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza. “You say genocide, I say war,” the song, titled “We Will Dance Again,” starts, and the lyrics seem to revel in the ugliness of the ongoing violence in Gaza. The tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the song claims, are “what the military’s for.” 

Obvious AI tells throughout this track make clear that Boy George hasn’t just gotten lazy, he’s also lost the quality of discernment. The song’s meter is odd, and its lines are overstuffed. There are no interesting choices, no glimpses of an artist’s vision. It’s a hollow provocation over a royalty-free riddim. 

Since Hamas militants attacked Israeli military installations and civilians on October 7, 2023, the ensuing war in Gaza has left more than 73,000 Palestinians dead. The United Nations has called Israel’s campaign a genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing the Israeli prime minister of crimes against humanity. Attacks on Gaza continue despite a ceasefire deal. Against that backdrop, a song defending and celebrating the Israeli military is nasty work, no matter who made it. The fact that no one made it, that it’s the creation of a machine that hallucinates in exchange for electricity, only intensifies the sick, empty feeling the track leaves behind. 

The track’s release has been a disaster for George. He split acrimoniously from Tony Pontius, the long-time manager of his record label BGP, because of Pontius’ refusal to release the song. A planned role as King Herod in a production of “Jesus Christ Superstar” was put on ice. Spotify pulled the track down for violating its restrictions around AI-generated music. Bandcamp followed soon thereafter. Boy George has dug in his heels in recent days, calling the platforms a “bunch of c**ts” as part of a steady stream of Instagram posts. His doggedness would be almost admirable, if “We Will Dance Again” wasn’t so lazy. 

In releasing the track, Boy George presumably wanted to turn heads, to make a statement. But he didn’t want to do any work. He didn’t want to record multiple vocal takes of lines he supposedly wrote and believes in. He didn’t want to arrange actual instruments to better emphasize his lyrics and pro-war stance. He didn’t want to mix the track carefully to refine his statement. He could have made something that shimmers, a piece of true pop that expresses repellent ideals. It wouldn’t have been the first. 

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Merle Haggard’s iconoclastic “Okie From Muskogee” is considered a country classic, even though the sentiment is about as far from mainstream American thought in 2026 as can be imagined. When even right-wing commentators are pushing microdosing as a path to self-betterment, his disparaging remarks about longhairs taking LSD come off as impossibly square. But you can hear the heart in Haggard’s leathery vocals, buoyed by the sweet harmonies of his backing band. Haggard waffled over the years on whether the anti-hippie hardliner anthem was a satire  of the crew cut set or a genuine tribute to his conservative father. Either way, Haggard sounds like he believes what he’s saying, regardless of whether that’s true, because of the time and effort he spent working out the song.

With 2013’s “Blurred Lines,” Robin Thicke and Pharrell set out to make a groovy single in the vein of Marvin Gaye. Though the song has been relegated to the dustbin following a widespread critical backlash and later allegations of sexual assault against Thicke by model and actress Emily Ratajowksi, who appeared in the song’s video, they were extremely successful. The song itself, creepiness aside, is a Swiss watch of a partystarter. Pharrell’s ad-libs and inserts interrupting the groove at perfect intervals to wake up the dancefloor. They arguably did too good a job recreating the shuffling, glass-clinking percussion of 1970s cocktail party classics, as they lost almost everything they’d made from the song in a subsequent — and successful — lawsuit from Gaye’s estate.  

“We Will Dance Again” does none of that. It warrants no qualifiers, no deeper thought, because Boy George clearly didn’t think too hard about it himself before spitting it out into the world. He asked a machine to build him a song to support what many consider to be an ongoing genocide. When it offered him half a song, he said, “Good enough” — without even bothering to run it through a few rounds of polishing. I regret to inform you that, in 2026, Boy George won’t even tumble for us.  

The post Sorry, Boy George. AI can’t even make bad art appeared first on Salon.com.

When Netflix announced the first-ever Chef’s Table Food Festival, bringing 70 internationally acclaimed chefs to Park City for four days of dinners, demonstrations and excursions, I felt something between excitement and apprehension.

The series changed the way I understood food. I wasn’t yet sure whether a festival built around it could preserve the reason why.

If you asked me to name the greatest piece of modern food media, I would hesitate. Without missing a beat, I would say Season 1 Episode 1 of “Chef’s Table.” 

And that answer has been the same for a decade. 

It’s not because I think Massimo Bottura is the greatest chef alive. It wasn’t only the breathtaking cinematography or the immediate fantasy of booking a flight to Modena and a table at Osteria Francescana. 

I’ve returned to it so many times because it permanently changed the way I think about food.

Yes, food media should make you hungry. But the very best examples also make you care about something greater than what’s on the plate. 

I was initially drawn in by Italy. Like so many Italian Americans, I grew up seeing pieces of my family’s history reflected in its food and had an insatiable desire to learn as much as I could about the country my grandparents grew up in. Watching Bottura reinterpret the flavors of Emilia-Romagna felt familiar, even comforting, but that’s not why the episode stayed with me. 

I still think about it and watch it over and over again because it beautifully articulates something I’ve always believed but struggle to find the words to explain.

“Chef’s Table” showed me that food could be a lens through which to understand culture, grief, resilience, identity, and community. It showed me that restaurants weren’t simply places to eat. They were living institutions capable of preserving history, supporting entire local communities, and bringing people together in moments of crisis.

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Looking back now, I can trace so much of my own career back to that realization.

For years, I’ve found myself gravitating towards stories about neighborhood restaurants, family businesses, local farmers, and food traditions — not because they’re quaint or nostalgic, but because they’re windows into something larger. These people have tangible passion and intoxicating energy for what they do. “Chef’s Table” helped open my eyes to the fact that that’s the story. Not the rare ingredients or celebrity guests, the pure, genuine joy for cooking and sharing that with others. 

One moment from Bottura’s episode has lingered most. 

After earthquakes struck Emilia-Romagna in 2012, warehouses collapsed around hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano, threatening the livelihoods of the cheesemakers who depended on them. Bottura responded by creating a recipe for riso cacio e pepe and inviting people around the world to cook it with him. Nearly 40,000 participated, and all 360,000 damaged wheels were sold.

In Bottura’s hands, Parmigiano was never merely an ingredient. It represented years of labor, centuries of knowledge and an entire community’s economic survival.

One of Bottura’s most famous dishes from his three-star Michelin restaurant is the Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano, featuring the PDO product at five distinct aging points (24, 30, 36, 40, and 50 months). He manipulates the physical form of the ingredient to showcase different temperatures and textures: souffle, cream, biscuit, foam, and air. 

The dish isn’t about the cheese. It’s about tradition and craftsmanship and protecting your community. 

As Bottura says in the episode, “Cooking is an act of love.” 

It’s not a love expressed through expensive ingredients or elaborate techniques just for the sake of it. It’s expressed through responsibility — to your producers, neighbors, and the place you call home. 

Years after I first watched Bottura’s episode, I read Ruth Reichl’s “Why Food Writing Matters” and felt the shock of recognition. Food writing has been dismissed as frivolous or shallow — as if writing about restaurants somehow exists outside the realm of “real” journalism. Reichl had found the language for something I had understood only emotionally: food journalism belonged in the larger conversation about labor, politics, culture and power. Every person needs to eat, which means every person has a relationship with food that extends beyond the plate.

“Food touches everything we do. And that it is definitely a political issue,” she says, “Every election analyst has pointed to rising food costs as a major concern for voters. Yet despite the evolution of food writing over the last thirty years, consumers still have very little understanding of the forces that drive those costs.”

For the first time, I felt as though I had discovered the tradition I wanted to join.

A cohort of people who pursued and brought light to all genres of food stories. That feeling has become harder to find these days. 

In today’s media, there is simply so much food content competing for our attention. Social media has democratized food storytelling in remarkable ways, but it has also created an endless stream of restaurant rankings, viral menu hacks and “must-try” lists that reward speed over substance. 

Thankfully, there are still creators proving that audiences are hungry for something deeper. Nicholas Nuvan reminds me that thoughtful food storytelling hasn’t disappeared—it has simply adapted. His videos don’t stop at recommending where to eat. They introduce viewers to the people, histories and communities behind a dish, proving what the best food journalists have always known: people don’t just fall in love with dishes, they fall in love with stories.

When Reichl first took over the food section at the LA Times, she got a lot of pushback for covering international restaurants and including recipes for things like goat soup, sea slugs, and eel. She received dozens of letters lamenting the “good old days” of “American” recipes like cola-soaked pork chops, but she didn’t listen.

And isn’t that really what it’s all about? Reichl had the courage to dig deeper and show people a different side of food writing in a time when most people only read the food section for the ads. Not only were readers interested in what she had to say, she helped show people and restaurants of all cultures and styles that their food and their story matters just as much as any Michelin restaurant.  

That’s why I felt a genuine sense of cautious optimism when Netflix announced the Chef’s Table Food Festival. On paper, it’s easy to dismiss it as another celebrity chef event, many of which have become exercises in exclusivity — expensive tickets, buzzy names and Instagrammable bites. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but it isn’t what made “Chef’s Table” resonate in the first place.

The series never asked us to admire chefs simply because they were famous. It asked us to understand them. To understand why they cooked, where they came from and what they were trying to preserve. Fame was a byproduct of that curiosity, not the goal.

“I see [the festival] as a celebration of why we come together to eat, why we go to restaurants,” “Chef’s Table” creator David Gelb told Bon Appetit, “That’s paramount and one of the most important things that makes us human. We come together around a hearth, we tell stories, and we eat.”

It wasn’t Bottura’s technical brilliance that changed me. It was his belief that food could be an act of service. That a restaurant could strengthen a community. That a wheel of Parmigiano could represent thousands of livelihoods. And that writing about those things wasn’t frivolous at all.

“Chef’s Table” didn’t convince me to become a food writer, but it convinced me that food could be the vehicle through which I wrote about everything else. 

If the festival can capture even a fraction of that spirit — if it asks us to understand not only famous chefs, but the farmers, artisans, workers and communities behind them — it will be more than another stop on the culinary calendar. It will be a reminder of what food media can offer when it chooses to nourish more than our appetites.

 

 

The post Why “Chef’s Table” still matters appeared first on Salon.com.

Perez Hilton always wanted to be famous. This is a statement of fact and not meant to make light of his self-harming incident broadcast via TikTok livestream on Tuesday—quite the opposite. Videos and images of Hilton, 48, covered in blood and cutting himself with a knife should be interpreted as a cry for help, not attention. A person can understand that much without seeing the footage.

But many who watched didn’t have a choice. Although Perez’s livestream proceeded for around 15 minutes before it was shut down, screenshots and clips rocketed across the internet, invading countless social media feeds. Some saw those disturbing images simply by picking up their mobile devices.

Fortunately, Hilton was transported from his Miami home to a hospital to receive medical attention, according to the local sheriff’s office. But such incidents have become increasingly commonplace to the point of numbing us.

While Wednesday morning Google search trends data showed that people were hunting for images of Hilton, I went to YouTube to see what he was up to in 2002. That year, he starred in a short film called “Dating Up,” which is not listed under his IMDb or Wikipedia filmographies.

He describes it in the video summary as “A short film about gay dating. In a world before Grindr!” It’s also a glimpse of the time before YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and before the man born Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr. launched PerezHilton.com in 2004 and quickly became one of the world’s most popular, controversial and despised gossip bloggers. 

I chose 2002 because that year’s most famous video captured the Feb. 1 execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Footage of his beheading circulated in the bowels of the internet for months, until the now-defunct Boston Phoenix published a link to it on its website, igniting furious debates about the morality and journalistic ethics of that decision.

Such discussions seem quaint in an age in which the video of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was posted to social media moments after it happened, and a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, livestreamed his killing of 51 worshippers at two mosques on Facebook.

An age, it bears adding, when X and Meta—Facebook and Instagram’s corporate owner—no longer emphasize stalwart moderation guardrails in the name of reducing “censorship” on their platforms.

The circumstances leading to Hilton’s distressing livestream and Pearl’s filmed execution are entirely dissimilar. But what brought the 2002 video to mind was that it marked the first time in modern history, at least that I can remember, that the public questioned what purpose watching something too horrible to fathom ultimately serves. Such discussions helped establish the difference between witnessing as a matter of civic responsibility and leering voyeurism.

Images of Sept. 11, 2001, were still fresh and traumatizing for millions who watched the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapse on live TV when Pearl was murdered.

But his death was an intimate injury to his loved ones first and foremost. Making it public, therefore, was viewed as a ghoulish act by many, including Salon’s former national correspondent Bruce Shapiro. “The idea that tossing the desires of Pearl’s family into the ashcan is ‘just what journalists do’ is only a cover for indiscriminate National Enquirer logic,” he said in a June 2002 column.

Months after that, the Phoenix’s media critic Dan Kennedy contended that it is our obligation to watch such difficult accounts in an essay for Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. “We turn away from such evil at our own peril,” Kennedy maintained.

Somewhere in the middle, the rest of us wondered how absorbing such horror would change us, whether as individuals or as a society.

Twenty-four years ago, it was very easy to turn away from something you had to go digging for in the first place. YouTube would not exist until 2005. Instagram’s founding happened five years after that. TikTok turns 10 this year.

In the years between those companies’ founding and now, social media has given us plenty of opportunities to take up those debates again. But when such content is widely available, and we have so little choice as to whether we can avoid it, conversations about the ethics of it all seem like a luxury.

In exceptional cases, disseminating footage that’s hard to stomach serves a noble objective. Graphically violent video pouring out of 2011’s Arab Spring uprisings opened the world’s eyes to the deadly state violence people suffered under the repressive regimes of Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Arab nations.

In the United States, bystander videography has been bringing incidents of police brutality into American living rooms since at least 1991, when Los Angeles resident George Holliday captured cops viciously beating Rodney King on videotape. But the first cellphone equivalents to go viral were the 2009 videos of a police officer fatally shooting 22-year-old Oscar Grant III in the back at Fruitvale Station in Oakland.

And the list of people whose last living, breathing moments were captured on cellphone videos and shared with the world has only gotten longer. In 2014, the nation watched Eric Garner suffocate to death as a New York City police officer subdued him using a prohibited chokehold. In 2016, Diamond Reynolds filmed the moment that a police officer shot her boyfriend Philando Castile to death during a traffic stop in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and posted it to Facebook Live.

In 2020, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier recorded Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. And earlier this year, multiple bystanders recorded the shootings of Minneapolis residents Renee Good and Alex Pretti, footage that contradicted Trump administration officials’ claims that Good was a “domestic terrorist” and Pretti was an “assassin.”

In all those incidents, bearing witness galvanized the public. The international furor over Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests and briefly mainstreamed the Movement for Black Lives. Videos of Good and Pretti’s killings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents turned all eyes to Minnesota, leading to the ouster of Kristi Noem from the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, our social media algorithms were not as loosely regulated a decade ago as they are now. Teams of human moderators once employed by all the major platforms have been gutted. Nobody should be shocked to know that the easiest place to find Hilton’s self-harm videos is X.  As for TikTok, a spokesperson told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, the platform relies on automated moderation systems. They flagged Hilton’s alarming livestream within minutes, closed other live streams within 90 seconds and banned the account, the spokesperson said, but its removal was delayed by what was characterized as “a moderator error.” (TikTok previously banned Hilton in 2020 for violating its community guidelines. At the time, his account had 1.6 million followers and averaged 10 million views per week.)

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The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.

Knowing this, the fact that the top search terms on Wednesday morning indicated that people were looking for images of Hilton’s self-harm instead of contextualizing reporting is telling but, sadly, not surprising.

Lurid real-world footage of people harming others or themselves is being served directly to us whether we want to see it or not. What we might debate, as we did 24 years ago, is what that’s doing to us.

The post The end of looking away from violence on social media appeared first on Salon.com.

When Graham Platner ran for Senate, he came with an irresistible, dream candidate profile: a plainspoken veteran and man of the people who was ready to change careers from oyster farmer to politician. Platner, who turned 40 during the campaign, found immense support from other male Democrats close to his age who saw his campaign as the breath of fresh air the party needed to stay relevant. Even when his many skeletons came tumbling out of the closet — the Nazi tattoo, the Reddit posts, retweeting far-right podcaster Stew Peters and others — they only doubled down in their support. Each scandal was followed by another high-profile endorsement from a senator or influencer. Only when women accused him of rape and sexual assault did they finally drop their support, leading to his exit from the race in July.

The Platner fiasco revealed how a subset of male Democrats show symptoms of a midlife crisis. Typically, a man’s mid-life crisis occurs between his 40s and 50s when, having achieved a stable economic and sociopolitical status, a new generation emerges that threatens to replace him. He becomes depressed, irritable and restless. The cultural stereotype is that rather than accept this as a natural consequence of aging, he seeks to recapture his youth with rash impulsivity by purchasing an expensive red sports car, or having an affair with a younger woman, or changing careers on a dime without any idea of the scrutiny that comes with those who make such a shift — i.e., from oyster farmer to senator.

Politically, the midlife crisis expresses itself as an attraction to ideological extremes, represented by the trope of men growing more conservative with age. Sen. John Fetterman, once a darling of the progressive elite who embraced him as the leftier-than-thou alternative to center-left Rep. Conor Lamb in the 2022 Pennsylvania Senate primary, has become every Democrats’ face on the dartboard for embodying this exact stereotype. Fetterman’s conservative shift could have stemmed from how his staunch support of Israel amid rising sentiment toward Palestine within portions of the Democratic base pushed him further away from the party, leaving him susceptible to Republican overtures. But given that he had already displayed signs of an erratic and hostile personality before arriving in the Senate, his change feels of a piece with his past behavior. 

However, in today’s political climate, Fetterman’s rightward drift makes him something of an outlier, as the Democratic midlife crisis now expresses itself as a shift toward the far-left, even if it means compromising one’s previous positions and alienating the audience that brought them to prominence. 

The most public examples of this are the “Pod Save America” hosts Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Tommy Vietor and Dan Pfeiffer — a.k.a. the “Pod Bros” — who first jumped on this bandwagon in November 2024 when they interviewed far-left streamer Hasan Piker on their podcast. Bringing on Piker — who, by coincidence, is the same age the Pod Bros were when they founded their parent company, Crooked Media — got people talking about them again, even if the talk was that the podcast had jumped the ideological shark by hosting someone who has been accused of caping for communists and terrorists. 

Since his first “Pod Save America” appearance, Piker has traveled to China and Cuba to defend their regimes, and he recently deployed Vladimir Putin-like language when he called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a catastrophe” at a Yale political union meeting in April. But the Pod Bros have interviewed him multiple times, even inviting him to Crooked Con, their Washington, D.C., convention, in November 2025, where he appeared on a panel alongside MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend and Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov. 

Given their embrace of Piker, it’s no surprise the Pod Bros were also among the most ardent backers of Platner, defending him like an expensive red sports car. When the news broke about his Nazi tattoo, they invited him on the show to explain himself. Ben Rhodes, the former Obama aide and host of the Crooked Media podcast “Pod Save the World,” even penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed on Platner’s rise, lauding him as a voice of the anti-war movement. In the wake of the rape allegations, Favreau issued an apology for his defense of Platner; Rhodes, as of this writing, has not. (Rhodes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Other elected officials within this age bracket have dunked their big toes in populist waters despite being elected as moderates in red states, such as Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, or as so-called center-left “Normie Democrats” in blue states, such as Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy. Both men have been mentioned as contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, but absent a campaign announcement, their leftward shifts are the equivalent of focus group testing on a national scale. Granted, neither Gallego nor Murphy have alienated their constituencies with these ideas, but it’s a far cry from their personas when they were first elected.  

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Since arriving in the Senate in 2025, Gallego has gone on the lash against big corporations and monopolies. In a speech for the American Economic Liberties Project, a left-wing think tank, in September 2025, Gallego said “anything that empowers the consumer, the everyday person, is going to be a very popular message . . . It can win in any cycle, in almost any state, or environment.” He has continued this crusade, recently endorsing a $20 minimum wage and speaking out against the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

Murphy, who entered the Senate only a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, made a name for himself as one of the body’s most outspoken gun control advocates. But in a May 2025 interview with “The Atlantic,” he seemed a bit sheepish over this, arguing that by emphasizing social issues over economic ones, Democrats risk losing voters who might be more receptive to economic messaging. “I own part of that responsibility,” he said. 

In addition to being spoken of as a potential 2028 contender, speculation is rampant that Murphy is positioning himself to lead the Democratic caucus after the midterms. Once known as a bipartisan negotiator, he has pivoted to a harder line, telling the Connecticut Mirror in November 2025, “I just don’t think that’s the job right now . . . I think I would be committing sort of political malpractice if I was operating this year like I’ve operated in the past.”

The psychological phenomenon of the midlife crisis masquerading as populism does not occur in a vacuum. Social media has exacerbated it, with algorithms making it easier to gain popularity by taking extreme viewpoints, as Piker has, than to represent the center-left, as the “Pod Save America” crew did for years. Moving toward extremes also has the potential to produce rewards. For pundits and influencers, that could mean boosting their voices and incomes. For politicians, it means the chance to swell their campaign coffers — even though he isn’t up for reelection until 2030, Murphy’s campaign PAC, Friends of Chris Murphy, had $11.5 million cash on hand as of June 30 — and, better yet, position themselves for future elections, regardless of whether the shift is sincere.

However, the less sincere that shift is, the greater the fallout when it turns out to be for naught. Watching Graham Platner’s campaign implode was like watching that expensive red sports car get totaled. You felt bad for anyone who got harmed. But if you’re honest, you also loved watching the guy dumb enough to buy it fume over the futility of his impulses. But the harder you laugh, the more you have a responsibility to not do what he did. Otherwise you could wind up behind the wheel.

The post The Democratic male’s midlife crisis appeared first on Salon.com.

On Wednesday morning, shortly after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the hotly contested Michigan Democratic Senate primary in a slender victory, the Republican Party let slip the dogs of war. Barely 15 minutes after the Associated Press called the race for the unabashed progressive and first-time candidate for federal office over the centrist Rep. Haley Stevens, Donald Trump was crowing on Truth Social that the 41-year-old El-Sayed’s win was “great news for the Republican Party.” The newly minted Democratic nominee, he wrote, is “a Communist loser who hates Jews and Israel.”

As he has for 10 years, the president set the tone for the rest of the GOP. 

By the noon hour, the National Republican Senatorial Committee had fired off an attack ad that led with Islamophobia and recalled the attempts from some quarters to define a certain Illinois senator who carried the name Barack Hussein Obama. “Abdulrohman Mohamed El-Sayed,” the ad began, making a point to use the candidate’s full name, an obvious move to launch the process of otherizing him to voters in Michigan and across the country, “[is] the most radical Senate candidate in America.”

But the day’s vilest moment came three hours later when Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who has always demonstrated a willingness to go there, invoked the T-word in a brief interview as he boarded an elevator after voting to confirm Dr. Erica Schwartz, Trump’s controversial nominee to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

“The guy was basically a cheerleader for 9/11,” Tuberville told me, linking El-Sayed to a comment made by the popular far-left streamer Hasan Piker, with whom the candidate campaigned, that “America deserved 9/11.” (When asked in April by POLITICO about Piker’s remarks, El-Sayed characterized the question as a “gotcha game” and said “I’m not here to disavow people’s views”; Piker later apologized for the comments, calling them “inappropriate,” “messed up” and a failed attempt at satire.) “I mean, come on,” Tuberville continued, “the country’s changed, but it hasn’t changed this much to put people in [office] that are basically terrorists.”

When I asked if he was calling El-Sayed a terrorist, the senator replied, “I say he’s got the ability to become one.”

Tuberville has the political incentive to make such inflammatory remarks; they will play well to Republicans in Alabama, where he is running for governor, and he has no grand designs on national office. But they and the GOP’s larger response to El-Sayed’s win reflect another emotion that is running throughout the party. Although Republicans got the Democratic opponent they professed to want for former Rep. Mike Rogers, who lost a Senate race to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 only by the thinnest of margins, they are also scared — and with good reason.

El-Sayed has got game. When I approached his campaign for comment on Tuberville’s remarks, I was directed to an exchange he had on Wednesday night with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, in which he addressed the Republican onslaught. 

“There are people like J.D. Vance or Donald Trump or Mike Rogers, who want to define America as being too small to include some kinds of people, and they point to my name, they point to my faith, they try to insinuate that somehow I’m less American because of those things,” El-Sayed said. “They want America to be small. I believe that America is big. It’s open-minded. It’s big-hearted. It can include any of us, regardless of how we pray, regardless of where our families come from, regardless of who we love or how we identify. That’s the America we’re building. And I think America, in Michigan in particular, has an opportunity to remind us just how big we are.”

Although El-Sayed has never run for federal office, these are not the words of a political novice. He is a gifted communicator, able both to make open-hearted, aspirational appeals and channel anger at billionaires and elites, a needle Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for all of his influence on the Democratic Party, has never quite been able to thread. 

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But unlike eloquent politicians known to be showhorses, enjoying the social media clips from their media hits, El-Sayed is a workhorse, and this combination makes him formidable. One reason for his primary win is that he simply outworked Stevens, visiting over 110 cities, according to his campaign, holding over 500 public events and, in the process, building a genuine movement. This tenacity, along with rallying cries of “Medicare for All” and getting money out of politics, helped him overcome the opposition of the Democratic establishment and over $60 million in spending by super PACs supporting Stevens. 

Nevertheless, after the race was called for El-Sayed, the Democratic Party quickly coalesced behind him and he was reportedly fielding calls from former Vice President Kamala Harris, former Transportation Secretary — and Michigan voter — Pete Buttigieg and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

The stakes are high. Polls taken before the primary showed El-Sayed trailing Rogers by a larger margin than Stevens. Democratic control of the Senate runs through Michigan, and as many have pointed out, El-Sayed’s win has teed up a first-of-its-kind test: whether a progressive can win in a swing state that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, went for Biden four years later and returned to Trump in 2024. El-Sayed will need to be even more nimble than he already is and avoid giving the GOP talking points.

Despite generous overtures to Stevens and assurances to the Jewish community El-Sayed made in remarks on Wednesday morning after the race was called, there are intraparty divisions left to heal. He must set to work convincing centrist and moderate Democrats, Black voters in urban areas and suburban voters, all of which Stevens carried, as well as disaffected independents, that he is worthy of their vote. The race will be tough, but it is winnable, even as he continues to face GOP efforts to define him on their terms.

Responding to a reporter who asked about how Republicans are deploying his name in their attacks, El-Sayed said, “That’s the only play they got.”

Whether that’s true or not, between now and November, we’ll see if it works.

The post Abdul El-Sayed’s win in Michigan causes a GOP meltdown appeared first on Salon.com.

Additional deaths involving Delaney Hall, a private immigration jail run by The GEO Group in Newark, New Jersey, has sparked renewed calls for the closure of the notorious 1,000 bed facility even as the Trump administration dramatically increases arrests and detentions across the nation.

On Saturday Aug. 1st, 41 year-old Edwin Lopez-Cornejo died while in custody. Multiple press reports and Lopez-Cornejo’s mother maintain that Lopez-Cornejo, a father of a 12-year-old girl, who suffered from chronic illness, died from medical neglect after he was refused treatment. He had been in the United States for 20 years and was taken into custody on his way to work.

In a statement shared with CNN, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that Lopez-Cornejo “experienced a medical emergency while in ICE custody,” and GEO Group staff “responded immediately and called 911 for emergency medical services.”

After the confirmation of Lopez-Cornejo’s death, Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) disclosed he had learned of a third death in late July in which the detainee experienced a seizure not long after arriving at Delaney Hall. According to Menendez’s account, GEO Group and ICE officials told him they called for EMS and the unidentified man was taken to University Hospital where he died. His name and additional details have yet to be disclosed. 

Back in December 2025, 41 year-old Jean Wilson Brutus died while in custody in Delaney Hall. At that time, 30 people had died in ICE custody across the country that year.

Unlike the high profile violent confrontations witnessed in Minneapolis that sparked massive street protests and culminated in the murders of Renee Good and Alex Peretti, ICE is now utilizing non-law enforcement databases for programs like Medicare to target and apprehend thousands of people who are actually in this country legally. In fact, scores of American citizens have been abducted off the street and detained.

Since Delaney Hall re-opened as a private immigration prison at the start of the second Trump admin, grassroots groups like NJ Pax Christi and Eyes on Ice NJ have had a humanitarian witness at the site located next to the Essex County Correctional Facility in the Ironbound section of Newark.

Back on May 9, 2025 masked federal agents abducted Newark Mayor Ras Baraka off of a public street outside the private jail, only to release him later that day after a mass non-violent protest. While charges were dropped against Baraka, President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice continues to prosecute Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) on charges related to that day that could result in a 17 year jail term. McIver, along with Rep. Robert Menendez Jr. (D-N.J.) and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), who were also on site at Delaney Hall that day, insist they were there only fulfilling their constitutionally-protected oversight duties.

The city of Newark has been pressing for The GEO Group to permit a fire inspection and obtain a certificate of occupancy for the sprawling private jail. Back in 2021, activists had successfully lobbied the state of New Jersey to prohibit municipal and county governments as well as private facilities from entering into new contracts with ICE to house immigration detainees.

Private jailers like The GEO Group successfully challenged the legislation in court. At the time, the Biden administration was holding more than 26,000 detainees nationwide at more than 120 sites. Multiple press reports indicate the Trump administration is now holding almost three times that number at over 450 facilities in all 50 states, Washington D.C. and in U.S. territories. In July, ICE reported it had arrested 51,000 people, the largest number in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, according to ABC News.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump pledged to target millions of U.S. residents and “deport them so rapidly” he would “rescue every town that had been invaded and conquered.” In that same campaign, Vice President JD Vance advanced an admittedly completely fabricated story about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ domestic pets. The claim was so outrageous that local municipal officials and Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine spoke out on behalf of Springfield’s Haitian residents, who they said had filled jobs in the rust belt town that had actually helped revive the local economy.

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At least 22 people have died in ICE custody in 2026, with close to four months still to go in this year. That does not include the multiple fatal shootings just since Trump was sworn in for the second time. According to the Guardian, last month’s fatal shooting of 52 year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was the 10th such fatal ICE shooting since Trump regained office.

In an interview with WBAI Pacifica Radio, Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), who has been in Congress for less than three months, recounted that in her multiple visits to Delaney Hall “what was clear was that there were individuals being detained with chronic health conditions that were not receiving the kind of care that is necessary and mandated by their doctors.”

Lack of access to timely medical care has been a long standing and well-documented complaint throughout the ICE system and private contract immigration prisons across the nation.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, 300 detainees launched a hunger and labor strike at Delaney Hall. Under the GEO Group business model, detainees maintain the private jail for a dollar a day. Earlier this summer, large crowds of protestors converged on Delaney Hall in support of the hunger strikers.

While New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill has been a vocal opponent of the private jail and was turned away when she initially came for a visit, she did call out the New Jersey State Police at the height of street protests outside Delaney in solidarity with the hunger strikers.

The move marked a significant escalation and came after the Trump administration threatened to suspend the processing of international flights at Newark Liberty International on the eve of the World Cup, in which New Jersey had invested heavily.

Henry Craver, writing for the American Friends Service Committee, described GEO and ICE’s repressive and violent response to the show of solidarity for the hunger strike.

“In one incident guards tried to remove a strike leader soon after the strike began,” Carver wrote. “When other detained people formed a human shield around him, armed officers returned in force. They swept through multiple units, physically assaulted people, and deployed tear gas. People in those units told AFSC that they struggled to breathe for hours after.”

Carver continued: “The retaliation escalated in the following weeks. Hundreds of detained people have been transferred out of Delaney Hall to facilities in Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — far away from their families and communities.”

With a Republican Congress very much under the control of Trump, efforts at oversight of ICE and the private prison system that has expanded significantly has been left to the Democrats, who are in the minority. Grassroots efforts at the municipal level have been far more effective in galvanizing resistance to the creation of new immigration prisons.

State lawmakers also have a mixed record when it comes to reigning in ICE’s mass deportation strategy. A federal judge recently struck down New York State’s legislation to prohibit federal agents from wearing masks while letting stand a provision that prohibits town and county governments from entering into so-called 287(g) partnership that deputizes local police to enforce immigration laws.

“I need to say that every single American should be paying attention to what’s happening here — our government is treating a set of people with such impunity, with such inhumanity it is costing them their lives,” Mejia said. “Now we can debate our positions on immigration and immigration reform but I think it is fair to say that essentially sentencing people to death is not what the American people are calling for or want.”

Mejia continued: “It is imperative that at least the state of New Jersey is pushing hard to make sure that our state officials have full and unrestricted access to these detention centers to ensure the well being of these individuals. These are human beings.”

Trump has repeatedly described undocumented immigrants as “animals,” “illegal monsters” and “gang members” staging “the largest invasion in the history of our country.”

These claims, which have been the way the Fox media complex frames the immigration, are easily debunked by study after study that found immigration into the U.S. is actually associated with lower crime rates.

A previous version of this article originally appeared on WBAI. Read the original here.

The post Two more deaths at Delaney Hall detention center as ICE arrests surge appeared first on Salon.com.

Abdul El-Sayed isn’t worried about Islamophobic attacks on the campaign trail. 

The progressive Democrat who just won a hotly contested primary in Michigan told reporters on Wednesday that he’s willing to take smears on the chin, saying that name-calling and bigotry is “the only play” in his opponents’ playbook.

“That’s the only play they got,” he said. “They’re going to point at me. They’re going to point at my name like, ‘Well, he’s different.’ That’s the best you got?”

The former public health director has stuck to a platform centered on affordability at home and an end to foreign entanglements. He said that Islamophobia is a cop-out because his opponents don’t want to debate substantive issues. 

“You can’t actually talk about what you want to do?” he said. “My name is not raising your gas prices. My name is not taking us to war. My name is not the reason you can’t afford groceries.”

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El-Sayed will face Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in the upcoming midterms. He encouraged Rogers to come up with a better line of attack than his identity, because he doesn’t think his Michigan voters will bite.

“I’ve been an Abdul in Michigan my whole life. This is the best place in the world to be Abdul,” he said. “Michiganders are big-hearted, they’re open-minded… [They’re] sick and tired of BS politics coming in to divide us.”

The post “That’s the best you got?”: El-Sayed brushes off right-wing Islamophobia after Michigan primary win appeared first on Salon.com.

While Jeffrey Epstein’s island or his various mansions get a lot of attention, the late sex offender and financier’s New Mexico Zorro Ranch was also allegedly the site of extensive abuse and criminal activity. Now, in a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Department of Justice and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, are accused of “stonewalling” New Mexico’s criminal investigation of Epstein’s activities at the ranch outside of Santa Fe.

New Mexico’s Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who is behind the lawsuit, argues that the DOJ unlawfully withheld records, therefore delaying justice for victims. The lawsuit accuses Blanche and the DOJ of perpetuating “that disgrace” of failing to investigate or hold Epstein accountable before his death. The suit requests the court to order the DOJ to provide the requested unredacted records.

“USDOJ and Acting Attorney General Blanche are refusing to facilitate the investigation of state law crimes by hiding information about Epstein and his co-conspirators from Attorney General Torrez and state law enforcement, when New Mexico is one of few jurisdictions that still may have an opportunity to hold Epstein’s associates accountable or otherwise provide some sense of justice to survivors,” the lawsuit reads.

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Meanwhile, New Mexico’s legislative “truth commission” released its first report on Zorro Ranch Wednesday, but the 119-page document offers little in the way of new revelations or recommendations. It draws heavily on news reports and what has so far been released from the Epstein files, but does underscore numerous hurdles the investigation has faced. 

“Those in law enforcement most responsible for protecting New Mexicans from Epstein played a passive role in investigating him, letting others in Miami and in New York do it. As a result, the conduct of Epstein and his co-conspirators in New Mexico went unexamined and unpunished,” the authors conclude. “Going forward, this commission endeavors to uncover the truth so many for too long were blind to.”

The post New Mexico sues DOJ over Epstein files and releases “truth commission” report appeared first on Salon.com.