Director Matt Johnson’s latest feature, “Tony” — a biopic following a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) through his first kitchen experience, slinging cheap fish in a Provincetown greasy spoon — exists inside a quote. The film opens with a pull from Bourdain’s beloved pseudo-memoir, “Kitchen Confidential,” in which Bourdain reminisces about his 19-year-old self, trolling around Cape Cod trying to impress a girl and become a writer, with zero experience doing either. “I was — to be frank — a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, and badly in need of a good ass-kicking,” Bourdain writes early in the book. 

From the jump, it’s hard to shake the feeling that “Tony” is mistakenly aligning itself with the public’s idea of Bourdain rather than the man’s reality. When I think of Anthony Bourdain, I think of two people. The first is the enigmatic yet ultimately unknowable chef, whose charm and good nature sometimes dulled a cloud of unmistakable darkness to the eyes of the public; the second is the idealistic version of Bourdain, who exists in half-remembered citations and GIFs of his many travel shows removed from their context — rosy, nostalgic tributes to an image, rather than a person. 

Regrettably, “Tony” operates in the latter state: all sentiment and little practical truth, different from the ways Bourdain’s effusive, colorful work and writing make people feel when they really dive into it. It’s part biopic, part coming-of-age story and all gung-ho idealism, battered and fried until golden and palatable, before being spritzed with a fresh splash of lemon, providing the film a brief, compelling tartness that fades all too quickly. Like a lobster roll made with imitation crab meat — or a guy who lists Bourdain as his biggest inspiration in a prompt on his Hinge profile — “Tony” is economical and satiating, but far less satisfying than the real thing. 

What’s more, the film is bizarrely undercooked when it comes to Bourdain’s experiences in the kitchen. To be fair, Johnson has his work cut out for him. “Tony” is adapted from only the first 50 pages or so of “Kitchen Confidential,” meaning Johnson and his co-writer Matthew Miller (working from a screenplay originally written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe) essentially had to flesh out a pitch draft’s worth of detail into a feature-length film. And for those who like their biopic by-the-numbers, the finished product is a perfectly serviceable entry into the canon. 

But I get the sense that, in comparing Bourdain’s writing to the film, true die-hards will long for his quippy, evocative storytelling that’s absent from “Tony.” Bourdain gave fellow outsiders an insider’s view of the kitchen. He made people fall in love with food, its rituals and its culture. And though “Tony” doesn’t entirely lack that heady romanticization, its choice to amplify its introductory quote — making Bourdain an even more insufferable lout for dramatic effect — feels antithetical to Bourdain’s raw candor.

Now, I’m not exactly a stickler for precise detail. All book adaptations, whether from novels or memoirs, could stand to embellish the facts here and there, or go ahead and reinvent the wheel when possible. This irks literature purists. But cinema is a different medium, and as such, changes must be made. It did strike me as odd, however, that “Tony” is forged on a factual alteration that diverts Tony from the kitchen far too often — the movie’s cardinal sin. 

After pitching a bogus novel to the Vassar English department in hopes of scoring a writing fellowship that will provide his summer with a sizeable goofing-off stipend, Tony’s sure he’s got the prize in the bag. At a college bar, he drunkenly peacocks for his high school crush and fellow Vassar student, Nancy (Emilia Jones). Tony tells her that he’s going to be a famous writer, before challenging her comprehension of a few five-dollar words. Repelled, Nancy replies that she will be happily spending her summer slinging pizzas in Provincetown.

Surprise, surprise: Tony doesn’t get the fellowship, and instead, flees his childhood home early in the morning to catch a bus and a ferry to Provincetown. With no money but plenty of blind devotion to Nancy — whose character, it’s worth mentioning, has subzero charm and nuance, making Tony’s staunch affection feel like a ruse to the viewer — Tony arrives hapless and hopeless. It turns out Nancy’s got a pizza-slinging beau, so Tony drowns his sorrows in fried fish and cheap beers at the ramshackle clam shack The Flagship. When he can’t pay for his meal, Tony’s tossed out by the head Chef (Antonio Banderas) and his flighty kitchen cohort, Sal (Leo Woodall). Long story short: Tony wants to stay and pursue Nancy, Chef lets Tony sleep on his hammock in exchange for washing dishes at the restaurant, and the film can never decide which narrative to give more time to.

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In “Kitchen Confidential,” Bourdain describes his decision to head to Provincetown as an impulse motivated less by romantic desire than by general apathy. “I went in with some friends on a summer share in Cape Cod. It was what my friends were doing, and that was enough for me,” he writes. A brief mention of a pizza-spinning girlfriend is tossed off immediately after, replaced by vivid stories about his first summer working at the real-life Flagship, given the pseudonym The Dreadnaught. Each member of the kitchen crew in Johnson’s film is as scraggly and unpredictable as Bourdain describes them in the book, teaching him as much about sex and drugs as they did broiling lobsters and frying up clams.

Here, “Tony” is in its element as Johnson crafts the intimidating yet irresistible camaraderie of a kitchen, and all of the misfits who work inside it. But when Tony leaves for the day and is left to his own devices in Provincetown, the movie falls hard into all of the trite trappings of your average biopic. Tony and Sal get into all kinds of trouble, snorting coke and banging broads, but these things often happen in freewheeling montages with little consequence. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how Tony himself is actually feeling. Watching this version of him is akin to seeing Sessa bang his hands against the confines of that Bourdain quote, desperately trying to make something substantial out of this thin rendering of a very significant persona.

All of the men who idolize Bourdain for their imagined notions of who he was — who model themselves after the image of him sitting in a leather jacket and tiny sunglasses, with a pack of cigarettes on the table of a Parisian cafe — will love it. Under a clip of Bourdain sitting at this cafe, one person commented (before Bourdain’s death), “When I grow up I am going to be just like Anthony Bourdain.” That’s the perfect summation of the toothless film Johnson has crafted.

“Tony” tries to distance itself from the public’s quixotic version of Bourdain by making the younger depiction casually unbearable, the kind of person you wouldn’t enjoy working with — and especially not mentoring — in a kitchen. But these attempts largely come off as cloying, even silly. There’s one moment where Tony witnesses Sal score drugs before watching him shoot up on the boardwalk, as if to say, “We may not show it here, but Anthony Bourdain will later struggle with heroin use!” The dope is dopey, and it’s unfortunately only a foray into mushier territory. Banderas provides his mentor figure with a delightful vigor, but Johnson can’t quite figure out what to do with him, or how to make Chef feel like a real person. (How fitting we never learn his real name.) Even a few flowery sentences in “Kitchen Confidential” about lessons learned working at The Dreadnaught dwarf “Tony” in comparison. For a film about the origins of a foul-mouthed culinary renegade, beloved for his thoughtful musings on food and life, there’s bafflingly little interiority.

One could argue that’s Johnson’s point: Tony hadn’t yet become Anthony. Bourdain’s singular reflections could only come from a life well-lived and filled with mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that this version of Bourdain has to lack depth. Johnson is so concerned with conforming to the auspicious, nostalgic idea of who Bourdain was that he makes his biopic far too safe. He reduces Bourdain to a zygote who simply needed enough nurturing to become his older, cooler self, when he could, instead, read between the lines to find what makes young Tony special. Bourdain’s writing is far more tender and interested in other people than “Tony” ever is. And as intent on vivifying culture as Bourdain was, I think he’d watch this movie and feel that there’s an authenticity that is deeply missed. But we’ll never know that for sure. If “Tony” must open with a quote and confine Bourdain to his words, as he so often is posthumously, I’ll close with one that appears just a few sentences before it: “The less said about that part of my life, the better.”

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Perhaps it is because I’ve been nursing a slight and recent obsession with zany detective movies of the 1960s — prompted by “The Pink Panther,” then by following the Peter Sellers trail to “A Shot in the Dark” and “After the Fox” — but when I first heard that President Donald Trump had reportedly escaped Turkey in an “airport catering cart,” the scene arrived in my mind already blocked and costumed: a white-tableclothed trolley, steered by a nervous waiter in a bow tie, perhaps topped with a silver cloche. Beneath the linens, taking care that his shoes did not give him away, Trump crouched while he was wheeled past a succession of unfriendly eyes, their owners somehow oblivious to the president concealed at knee height.

The reality was, of course, considerably less cinematic.

The cart was not really a cart at all, but a truck: a large white box fitted with a hydraulic lift, the sort of airport machinery designed to rise neatly to the door of an aircraft. No tablecloth. No cloche. No perspiring waiter trying to look casual. Trump could, essentially, simply walk inside.

And, according to reports, that is more or less what happened. The BBC described footage from July 8 showing Trump boarding the presidential jet at Ankara airport; according to the Washington Post, he was then secretly transferred, by way of an elevated catering truck positioned on the aircraft’s far side, to a smaller C-32A military plane — a modified Boeing 757 more commonly used by the vice president. The operation was reportedly prompted by an Iranian assassination threat. 

The internet, however, wasn’t particularly interested in this version. 

Within hours of the original Washington Post report, social media had begun supplying its own: AI-generated images of Trump hunched in a cramped compartment over a small mountain of McDonald’s hamburgers; jokes that the operation was going to require “a bigger catering cart”; and, in perhaps the fullest realization of the bit, a mock announcement that, for the president’s “food truck extraction operation,” a team of top operatives had been assembled, all uniquely suited to the task. The operatives were Chef Boyardee, Ronald McDonald, the Burger King and Colonel Sanders.

It is worth considering why this particular image struck such a chord. In another context, a president being quietly transferred between aircraft in a service vehicle might register as little more than a piece of security choreography — unusual, perhaps, but hardly ready-made for farce. Trump in a catering truck was different. For years, he has made food part of his political stagecraft: something to display, serve, pose beside and use as shorthand for abundance, familiarity and a particular vision of American life. 

The exquisite comic reversal of the Turkey episode was that, this time, he was no longer directing the tableau. He had been swallowed by the scenery.

Consider the hamburgers. 

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One image from Trump’s first presidency still looms especially large for me. In the middle of the 2019 government shutdown, he filled the White House State Dining Room with McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King to celebrate Clemson’s national-championship football team, telling the players that he had ordered roughly a thousand hamburgers — “everything that I like, that you like.” The photographs were almost absurdly theatrical: silver serving pieces and candelabras, the gilt-and-cream grandeur of the White House, and, arrayed beneath it all, mountains of branded fast-food packaging. The incongruity was the point. Trump stood behind the spread as host and Quarter Pounder impresario. 

Five years later, he took his relationship with McDonald’s a step further. During the 2024 campaign, Trump appeared at a franchise in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania, where the restaurant had been closed to regular customers for the occasion. Instead of bringing McDonald’s into his political theater, as he had at the White House, Trump stepped into McDonald’s theater: apron on, fries in hand, leaning through the drive-thru window. The staging was unusually literal. The restaurant had become a set, the counter a stage, and Trump had given himself a part.

Even the strange little culture war over Cracker Barrel’s logo found Trump acting as something like both dramaturg and producer. When the chain’s 2025 redesign set off a backlash, Trump urged the company to restore its old logo and immediately translated the controversy into the language of show business: Cracker Barrel, he wrote, had received “a Billion Dollars worth of free publicity” if it knew how to use it. “Make Cracker Barrel a WINNER again,” he advised. Restore the old set. Bring back the familiar character. Capitalize on the attention. Trump wasn’t merely offering an opinion about restaurant branding; he was giving notes.

The White House soon made the conceit almost embarrassingly literal. Its official X account posted a doctored version of the familiar Cracker Barrel logo in which Trump had replaced the old man beside the barrel. The barrel itself now read “America First”; beneath it: “America is back.” Trump had not simply inserted himself into a debate over the restaurant’s iconography. He had been cast inside it.

There is, of course, nothing inherently funny about a catering truck, much less about the security concerns that reportedly put Trump inside one. But political imagery is not entirely under the politician’s control. Spend enough years standing behind pyramids of hamburgers, posing at fry stations and inserting yourself into the iconography of American restaurant chains, and eventually the props begin to accrue meanings of their own. McDonald’s becomes not merely something Trump eats or campaigns beside, but part of the visual vocabulary through which people understand him.

Which may explain why, when news broke that Trump had been spirited between planes in a catering truck, the internet required almost no time to dress the scene. The hamburgers were already there. So were Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and the Burger King. Trump has spent years directing the food theater. The catering truck was funny because, for once, he disappeared backstage.

The only thing missing, really, was my nervous waiter in the bow tie.

The post Trump’s catering-truck farce appeared first on Salon.com.

Poor Helaena Targaryen never stood a chance. George R.R. Martin’s fantasy world of Westeros in “House of the Dragon” is a particularly cruel place to be sensitive, whether to the declining fortunes of a kingdom or the machinations of the spirit world. Notably hard and remarkably sexist, the people in power treat women who happen to be a little weird with twice-over disdain.

A seer whose talent only seemed to arise when she needed to share bad news, Helaena was an unwelcome presence in her feuding family. Having seen her worst predictions come to pass, she grabbed hold of the only future she was able to change: her own. In the season three finale that aired Sunday night, the pregnant Helaena leapt from her window, checking out of the war and leaving behind one final, unwelcome prophecy: an embroidered image of her half-sister and captor, Rhaenyra Targaryen, on the Iron Throne, surrounded by flame and crowned in blood. 

Even in death, though, no one was listening to Helaena. Her only sin was being right too early and too often — and the world never stopped hounding her for it. 

Though they’re remarkably different in terms of age, style and dragon-riding ability, Helaena reminded me of Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose uncouth objections to the Democratic Party’s neoliberalism and various Middle Eastern wars have earned him the lifelong label of Capitol Hill Crank.

The Vermont Independent’s vehement opposition to the Gulf wars made him an odd man out in Congress more than a full decade before it became fashionable — and politically expedient — to turn on expensive Middle East boondoggles. Now 84, Sanders has advocated for universal healthcare since the 1970s while watching Americans fall deeper into medical debt. In the late 1990s, he was a loud voice against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act’s financial guardrails, and after banking adventurism nearly destroyed the global economy in the financial crisis of 2008, he managed to keep his told-you-sos muted. 

In boom and bust times alike, Sanders has been unshakeable on the idea that the U.S. is uniquely rigged against the lower classes, spoiling the party thrown by the winners of the go-go ‘90s and the Great Recession’s recovery. His Brooklyn honk has been a constant in the halls of Congress, sharing portents of doom and Bureau of Labor Statistics data. 

On Monday Sanders issued another unwelcome proclamation in a career full of them, sending a letter to the CEOs of the three largest artificial intelligence companies that called on them to pause the technology’s development. The letter follows news of several AI prototypes breaking the confines of their testing sandbox and accessing the internet. In the most shocking example, an agent made by OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face, a platform that AI programmers use to share datasets and models. The news prompted the company Anthropic to review its own tests; it discovered that models had found a way around their parameters to access the internet in three cases. Meta also shared that one of its own prototypes had done the same.

A breach of an AI-equivalent of GitHub was never going to bring about doomsday, but an AI agent that can ignore the bounds set by its creators and users has massive potential to cause widespread harm. Sanders certainly thinks so, in any case. He called on Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, the big three of the industry, to stop work until they can get a better handle on the machines they’re creating. 

“Almost every day, there is a new story about how your companies are losing control of the AI technology you are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” he wrote. “Last month, the world found out OpenAI lost control of an AI model. The result? The model hacked into another company’s computers—a clear violation of federal law.”

AI models have been rolled out quickly and haphazardly across the wider internet. Though the major players haven’t yet found a way for this technology to make money and ensure its long-term survival, a cycle of hype, government contracts, and integration into software and search have made the models an inescapable part of digital life. AI has been spun up into all the surfaces the average internet user touches, and along the way it has warped academia and embedded itself with the U.S. military with reportedly disastrous results. 

The Maven Smart System, an AI-powered platform built for the Pentagon by the analytics firm Palantir, generated over 1,000 airstrike targets in the early hours of the Iran war. When the U.S. carried out a deadly strike on an all-girls school, legislators were quick to ask if the AI model was to blame. Fears of a bombing-run-capable Skynet striking children halfway around the globe spread, but the truth was a little more nuanced. Some of the U.S. intelligence fed to the system was outdated, not accounting for the presence of the school. Whipped up and given a sheen of analytic legitimacy by the Maven, military officials did not do their due diligence in the midst of hundreds of similar, simultaneous strikes. As The Guardian put it, “people failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.”

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Even if AI models never got one iota more powerful than they are today, Sanders is still right to call for a pause. The damage companies like OpenAI can do to working Americans is very real. Layoffs will come from CEOs who buy AI’s spiel: that large-language models can replace humans in  the service sector, which accounts for nearly 70% of U.S. jobs. The data centers and infrastructure built to support these technological advances will strain our utilities. The tax breaks and incentives to attract these companies are a drain on state and local coffers. Weigh those cons against the things AI has reliably proven it can do – cheat on homework and write janky code – and it’s easy to understand Sanders’ urge to stand and yell “stop!”

It’s not only AI itself that concerns Sanders. In March, he and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced legislation calling for a moratorium on new data centers until critical safeguards are put into place. These massive sites, which are proliferating across the country, produce loud noise and pollution, rely on enormous amounts of water and electricity, tax power grids and inflate utility bills. Data centers are also proving massively unpopular, even among conservative voters in rural areas. The CEOs of companies that run these large-language models have often done end-runs around democratic controls, ingratiating themselves with Donald Trump and circumventing traditional pathways for their planned construction projects via backroom deals. They’ve managed all this even as their AI products have not proven they can reliably do any of the things OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg claim they can do. Merely mentioning the potential power of their models is enough to boost investment.

A nationwide movement opposing the continued construction of data centers offers some hope, with both Republicans and Democrats noticing the popular sentiment is largely anti-AI. But given the speed at which these data centers have been built, and the secretive lengths companies will go to avoid rowdy town halls full of angry crowds, even that groundswell of opposition is unlikely to put AI development on ice. 

The result is that Sanders’ warnings are likely to go just as unheeded as Helaena Targaryen’s. His threat of legislation will die, written off by other members of Congress as more grumping from a lifelong stick-in-the-mud. 

Don’t expect a similar dramatic exit from Sanders, though. He’s lived long enough to get used to the feeling of being unfortunately, awfully correct. 

The post Bernie Sanders’ AI warnings are being ignored in the Senate appeared first on Salon.com.

In MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.”

Even Donald Trump has gotten in on the act. At a Women’s History Month event in March 2025, he bizarrely referred to himself as the “fertilization president.” 

So when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram recently to announce she is freezing her eggs, surely MAGA was resoundingly grateful to her for carrying forward this pro-baby message, right? Not quite. As the 36-year-old New York Democrat was no doubt aware would happen, MAGA commentators lashed out at her for preserving her ability to have kids in the future. Christian right commentator Allie Beth Stuckey said she was “selfish.” Podcast host Matt Walsh called Ocasio-Cortez’s choice “backwards and ridiculous.” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway argued that the congresswoman’s video was a “sad public performance/display of unnecessarily unwise decision making.”

In the MAGAsphere, it’s not enough for a woman to want motherhood. If she doesn’t give up her career and even her personal happiness in the process of making babies, it doesn’t count. Being pregnant isn’t enough. Conservatives also seem to require the “barefoot” and “in the kitchen” parts of the traditional job description.

In the case of Ocasio-Cortez — and many women like here — the problem is that she has ambitions for higher political office, hinting repeatedly that she’s considering a run for the Senate or even the presidency. For the right, babies aren’t an end in themselves; they are also a weapon to use in MAGA’s ongoing war on women’s equality. 

“She’s glamorizing the lie that women can have it all,” Stuckey said. “You can’t.” 

Hemingway agreed. “Ladies, get married to a good man as young as you’re able and have your babies,” she said. 

Blinded by their own sexism, none of these pundits considered the possibility that Ocasio-Cortez, a savvy politician who is skilled at social media, knew how MAGA would react to posts where she injected the medications on camera or answered people’s detailed questions about the process. She even hinted at this in her video. “Don’t be weird about this,” she said as she gave herself an injection. “Even though I know you all will be.”

The right’s reaction revealed what the White House has been trying to hide from swing voters all along: Their chatter about fertility rates was never about happy families or a prosperous nation. To the contrary, as evidenced by the draconian bans in red states, Republicans will gladly sacrifice happiness and prosperity for the goal of subjugating women. One White House official even told Axios that it’s “not helpful” and “isn’t really a winner” for conservative influencers to say the quiet part out loud.

Notably, none of these MAGA pundits have called Elon Musk “selfish” for having kids in his 50s. Or Vance, who is 42 with an infant at home. Or Trump, who was 59 when his youngest child, Barron, was born. The mandate to have kids young, even if it ruins your career or railroads you into an unhappy marriage, applies only to women.

Ocasio-Cortez flagged this in an Instagram story discussing why women might freeze eggs. “So much of this discussion around parenthood and fertility is focused on women, but it takes two to tango,” she said, going on to explain that often women want to get married and have kids, but “they haven’t found their person.” According to Puck News’ Leigh Ann Caldwell, who cited “a reputable Democratic source,” the congresswoman and her fiancé Riley Roberts called off their engagement “about 18 months ago.”

Regardless of her own relationship status, Ocasio-Cortez spoke a simple truth that is typically ignored by right-wing pundits: Women aren’t “delaying” marriage. The verb itself implies young women are turning down viable offers, but no evidence exists for such a claim. In fact, an increasing number of conservative women are starting to publicly complain about all this pressure to get married and have babies young, since they can’t magically conjure suitable men out of thin air. Last week, annoyance over this burbled up in far-right women’s circles on X. Despite being openly anti-feminist, these women were nonetheless complaining. “Many of us would have happily gotten married young . . . if we had the choice,” one wrote. Another said, “You can’t snap your fingers and get a spouse on demand, sadly.” 

Alex Clark, a popular podcast host in the Turning Point USA network, has also been struggling to tamp down her anger over this. In May, the 33-year-old published an ill-advised newsletter complaining that “[w]hores get married first” because, she felt, liberal women had an easier time attracting eligible men. The following month, at the TPUSA women’s conference, Clark was less overtly angry, but she still expressed frustration at her deceased mentor, Charlie Kirk, for telling young women to get married: “Right-wing men act like we’re supposed to just, I guess, live under an overpass and wait for our husband to fall from the sky.” 

Considering that young conservative men outnumber young conservative women, one would think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a Mr. Right who is also Mr. Right Wing. Recent high-profile stories about younger Republican politicians, though, offer a reminder of why the pickings can seem so slim.

In Texas, a 30-year-old Republican congressional candidate, Brandon Herrera, was recently exposed for posting a video in which he scolded mothers because “you let somebody [vulgar term for ejaculation] you” and calling a child a “c*m trophy.” When asked for comment by the Austin-American Statesman, his campaign replied with a picture of a whipped cream-covered pie, a reference to a term shaming women who have had sexual intercourse. 

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Even more high profile has been the divorce of Rep. Max Miller from Emily Moreno, the daughter of another prominent Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno. Miller has been accused of breaking his two-year-old daughter’s collarbone, pointing a gun at his then-wife’s head and scalding her with hot water. The accusations are inextricable from his over-the-top public posturing as an alpha male, including an admission that despite being just 37, he has taken testosterone injections. 

In Florida, GOP Rep. Cory Mills, 46, is facing a tough primary due to allegations of violence and harassment against an ex-girlfriend.

Not every Republican man is as repulsive as these three. Democrats aren’t immune from bad men either, as recent scandals involving former California Rep. Eric Swalwell and former Maine Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner have shown. The difference, though, is that Democrats made clear to both men they needed to step down once the evidence against them stacked up. Republican politicians, on the other hand, are rewarded for demonstrating abusive and misogynistic behavior, as evidenced by the robust support and fundraising given to Herrera, Miller and Mills by GOP leadership.

It’s incredibly hard to square the pious claims that young women should marry a “good” Christian man young and start having babies with a Republican culture that is so welcoming, even encouraging, of such vile men. Women aren’t respected in MAGA. Despite the Christian right’s false claims, mothers aren’t venerated either. Instead, ugly, sexually demeaning language about mothers and children is normalized. Abuse is also tacitly accepted, and women are shamed if they speak out. As with the attacks on Ocasio-Cortez, all this talk about family and motherhood is a paper-thin disguise for hate, and for putting women under the boot. 

The timing of Ocasio-Cortez’s egg-freezing announcement dangles a once-unimaginable prospect: that we could have a pregnant president of the United States. If she, as many assume, is putting off pregnancy until after a presidential run, then such a scenario is at least a possibility.

Republicans can complain, but most Americans understand that a pregnant woman is more capable of doing a high-level job than a man in his 80s, especially one in such seemingly poor health as Donald Trump. A pregnant President Ocasio-Cortez would also further reveal their hypocrisy. After all, these are the people who, not so long ago, were holding up a pregnant press secretary, second lady and whatever it is that Katie Miller does as role models. Surely, a pregnant president would send that pro-baby message they say they crave even more loudly. 

The post AOC exposes MAGA’s motherhood hypocrisy appeared first on Salon.com.

As the western United States is gripped by record-shattering wildfires, some unscrupulous people aren’t just contemplating what it will be like for future generations living in our new normal of erratic weather patterns, or wondering whether climate change is making this situation worse. They’re thinking about how much money they can make. 

Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket allow people to bet on pretty much anything, whether it’s some boring sports thing, election results or perhaps even war crimes. You can even bet on the outcome of clinical drug trials and whether cancer drugs will be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which experts criticize as undermining the integrity of medication research. The father of a seventh-grader living with cancer recently raised the issue of “whether researchers in a trial could be motivated by prediction market profits,” something so heinous it is difficult to contemplate.

While the makers of these apps insist they are “future exchanges,” not digital gambling parlors, regulators in places like Singapore, France, Belgium and elsewhere aren’t convinced and have banned the platforms altogether. There are several mechanisms inherent to prediction market apps that make them a little different than putting it all on red. They involve binary contracts that resolve based on whether certain events happen or not, using some complex math to factor in a probability of an outcome. Critics are increasingly looking into the consequences of making almost everything wagerable.

On Aug. 3, Democratic senators from six states sent a letter to the chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the independent government arm that regulates Polymarket and Kalshi, warning that the apps are allowing bets to be placed on wildfires, which could incentivize arson. They highlight previous examples of bets placed on the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires, which razed large areas of Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying more than 16,000 structures. 

“Offering bets on destructive wildfires threatens to minimize communities’ suffering all so the rich and powerful can profit,” the letter’s authors, who include Sens. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., wrote. “There’s also the heightened risk — according to state and local fire officials — that individuals could be tempted to commit arson in order to make sure their bets are successful.”

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For example, someone might bet on how big a fire might get or how many buildings it might destroy. I wanted to know what unexpected stuff I could find on the apps, so I downloaded Polymarket and Kalshi, seemingly the two most popular platforms or at least the ones I’m tired of seeing ads of the most. Both were littered with sports events, which I scrolled past, but also had sections for elections, politics, tech and a lot more. Polymarket seemed to have fewer and more bland options for betting, with the most shocking queries I could find being things like who will get kicked out of Trump admin next or if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be arrested by year’s end.

After giving over way too much private data to Kalshi, I was able to browse entire categories dedicated to natural disasters and climate change, such as if 2026 will be the hottest year ever or if the U.S. will ever meet its climate goals. I also found weird things like how many Atlantic hurricanes this year or if California will be hit by a magnitude 8 earthquake, which goes without saying but would be extremely bad. For context, the recent Colombia and Venezuela earthquakes were both magnitude 7.4 and 7.5 respectively. All of these things are likely to kill countless people if they happen, but climate change is already widely treated like an abstract future problem, rather than our disastrous present, so maybe this shouldn’t be surprising.

Both apps allowed wagers on the number of “explosive diarrhea” cyclosporiasis and measles cases this year, with both outbreaks shattering records. I could not find anything related to fires, presumably such content being recently removed, as there have been plenty of cited examples of bets on fires in the past, such as how many acres or locations the Palisades fires would reach.

So many of the scenarios on these apps present classic examples of a perverse incentive, in which the structure of a system encourages undesirable results. The classic example is of dubious historical accuracy, but originates from the British occupation of India. Weary of venomous snake bites, British authorities put a bounty on dead cobras — but this only incentivized locals to breed more of the snakes, in order to collect even more reward money. If you allow people to earn cash from dead snakes, you risk getting a lot more living snakes in the process.

Are we already seeing this with wildfires? It’s hard to say, but it’s true that arson is, strangely, a common catalyst for wildfires. One man was arrested outside of Spokane a few days ago, admitting to starting the Old Trails Fire, which burned entire neighborhoods to a crisp. Police say that Aaron Farinacci admitted to having set two dozen other blazes since 2025.

The conditions that make these blazes so out-of-control are thanks to climate change, which is causing hotter and drier conditions. According to a 2021 study supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the increase in fire weather in the western U.S. is primarily due to climate change. (Still, trying to explain that level of nuance to a climate denier is like teaching rocks to play Risk.)

What these apps do best is lay bare the ways in which our entire economy is structured like a betting app strung together by incentive perverts. It’s why the market rewards the most amoral and destructive behavior, from hedge funds that short the market and destroy company value to vulture capitalists who gut businesses like Toys “R” Us or Radio Shack, and then escape on their golden corporate parachutes. Even when such behavior results in a recession, the government is likely to bail big corporations out, while any form of assistance for the working class is branded as “socialism.” In fact, the entire stock market could be best described as a casino that incentivizes absurd growth like the historic tech bubble provoked by the spread of artificial intelligence.

Mainstream economists may want you to believe all this is driven by Darwinian forces that follow some natural law, simplified as “the cost of doing business,” or even by Adam Smith’s invisible hand. But that’s pretty unscientific.

Money itself is just a construct, one with rules dreamt up by humans. We don’t have to live in a world where people profit from tragedy, be it wildfires or a child with cancer, housing foreclosures or weapons manufacturing. I’m willing to bet we can actually achieve such a utopian outcome, even if it takes another century. The alternative is to continue draining everything of value as it goes up in smoke. 

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What Happened: More than 60 House Democrats are pressing Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins for answers about how the agency’s mental healthcare has been increasingly strained under President Donald Trump’s second administration. The lawmakers sent the secretary a letter last week asking questions about the state of VA care, citing a ProPublica investigation from this spring that revealed the agency’s mental health workforce has been plummeting and veterans have been left in the lurch.

What They Said: The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Judy Chu, who is a psychologist and represents a district in Southern California. “Caring for our nation’s Veterans is a fundamental responsibility,” the letter says. “That includes ensuring access to high-quality mental health care.”

The lawmakers demanded that the VA disclose details about its shortage of mental health providers and the impact on veterans. It also pushed the agency to lay out how long veterans have to wait for care.

As ProPublica has detailed, while the VA has long had a shortfall of mental health providers, the situation has gotten far worse under the current Trump administration. Hundreds of mental health staffers have left the VA and not been replaced.

Background: ProPublica’s investigation recounted the troubling experiences of both mental health providers and of veterans seeking care.

With so many staffers leaving and not being replaced, the remaining providers have often been stretched remarkably thin.

A psychologist who worked for a VA in Arizona recounted how some of her one-on-one sessions were replaced with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said their remaining individual sessions were sometimes limited to as little as 16 minutes.

“It was always bad,” said the psychologist. “And now it’s at a breaking point.”

In VA exit surveys that ProPublica obtained, mental health staffers who quit often wrote that they were no longer able to provide high-quality care.

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“Mental Health is understaffed, burned out,” wrote one New York-based staffer who was leaving. “There is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services.”

Veterans, meanwhile, have started to fall through the cracks.

Jason Beaman, a Navy and Army vet, was shuffled among therapists who later left until he finally had enough. “I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman told us this spring.

Why It Matters: After Trump returned to office last year, his administration promised to deliver veterans “the highest quality care.”

The VA is the country’s largest healthcare system, serving 9 million veterans. Those men and women face many mental health issues at a higher rate than the general population. They die by suicide at roughly twice the rate.

VA mental health staff have developed deep expertise in addressing the particular needs of vets. Indeed, studies have shown that vets get better care at the VA than through private providers.

“VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and now a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price.”

ProPublica reported that in January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year. Recent VA data shows those head counts continue to decline.

Response: In response to questions from ProPublica, VA spokesperson Quinn Slaven defended the agency. “The Trump Administration is solely focused on measuring VA’s success by how well it serves Veterans,” Slaven wrote in an email. “This commonsense approach has led to dramatic improvements for Veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors across the country.”

Slaven said that the VA completed a record number of mental healthcare appointments in the past fiscal year while also lowering veterans’ wait times.

The VA previously declined our request for an interview. Instead, spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.”

After ProPublica shared the findings of its investigation and the names of veterans who would appear in it, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help.

The congressional letter gives the VA until Aug. 14 to respond.

The post House Democrats demand answers from Trump’s VA on vets struggling to access mental healthcare appeared first on Salon.com.

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

BLUE ASH, OHIO — The first Haitian immigrant reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office at 7:42 a.m. on Sunday. From the corner, the Catholic sisters watched, their positions on immigration stamped on banners and signs.

Sister Alice Gerdeman’s sign noted that her order, the Sisters of Divine Providence, supports “challenging systems that exclude.”  Sister Sandy Howe’s sign read, “Love Your Neighbor, no exceptions.” Sister Patricia Wittberg’s took a more direct approach: “It’s so bad even the NUNS are mad!”

“Where has our conscience gone as a society?” Sister Carren Herring asked as the Haitian man walked toward the field office, where he would reemerge from hours later with a GPS tracker clamped around an ankle.

There would be a dozen or so more like him that day, mostly Springfield-area Haitian residents summoned to report to ICE after the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for the country. The program has allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians to live and work legally in the United States due to violence and political instability back home. 

The man paused before entering the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations office. At the door, Springfield pastors were offering communion and prayer. He waved to the crowd of nearly 700 lining the street in support.

“ICE does not speak for the people! No neighbor of ours is illegal!” they chanted in early-morning humidity that portended an oppressively hot August day. 

The group of sisters positioned on the corner in front of the office were from different orders: Sisters of Mercy, Sisters of the Precious Blood, Sisters of Charity and Sisters of Divine Providence. They are united by their faith and shared ministry, the Ohio Sisters Justice Network, whose banner described the network’s use of “gospel justice” to protect democracy, end human trafficking and support immigrants. 

         

That included advocating that the Trump administration extend TPS for Haitians. Now, it means showing up to support them as immigration enforcement tightens its grip.

“I’ve had people say to me, ‘Sister, they need to come here legally.’ Well, they came here legally,” said Sister Sally Duffy, a Sister of Charity and active participant in the network. She held a handwritten orange sign that read: “Our Immigrant Brothers and Sisters have God given DIGNITY.”  

“We are changing the rules,” she continued. “If it was a Bengals football game, and it was the last second on the clock, and the field goal kicker was going to make a 30-yard field goal, and all of a sudden, no, we moved him back, so now it became a 70-yard field goal, there’d be an uproar, an outrage over changing the rules.”

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Late last month, ICE started sending letters to Haitians in Springfield, informing them that the Trump administration would begin to enforce the end of TPS for Haiti, a plan greenlit by the Supreme Court. Haitian immigrants have been reporting to the ICE office in this Cincinnati suburb since.  

In Springfield, a city of 60,000 about an hour’s drive north of the ICE office, roughly one in four residents are Haitian — and many of them were on TPS. For months, faith-based and secular groups there have marshalled thousands of volunteers to prepare for a potential mass deportation event they fear could result in a humanitarian crisis. Many have wondered what will happen when families are separated: Who will care for the U.S.-born, citizen children who may be left behind?  

Now, these volunteers have expanded their efforts to Blue Ash, which has one of the closest ICE offices.

President Donald Trump pledged during his 2024 campaign to undertake the “largest deportation of criminals in the history of America.” He and Vice President JD Vance, who was then a U.S. senator representing Ohio, specifically targeted Haitians living in Springfield, spreading the lie that the legal immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets. White nationalist groups descended on the city; bomb threats closed area public schools. 

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The Springfield community watched with trepidation as Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge” wrought havoc on much-larger Minneapolis earlier this year, leading to the deaths of two U.S. citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. Organizations working with Haitians in Springfield started stockpiling supplies and forming ICE patrols to prepare for a similar enforcement surge as in Minneapolis — but the surge never arrived.

Gregory Bovino, the commander-at-large of Trump’s Customs and Border Protection, was removed from his position in January after the deaths. Two months later, Markwayne Mullin replaced Kristi Noem as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Federal immigration agents dialed down their street presence in Minneapolis amid intense public backlash against the administration’s tactics, prompting a shift in enforcement strategy. 

The sisters paid attention.

“They don’t want another Minneapolis … but they’d love for all the Haitians to be deported in secret,” Sister Wittberg said. “I don’t know that we can do anything but witness that this is not a Christian thing to do.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson reiterated in an email that TPS was supposed to be temporary, writing: “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations.”

         

Catholic sisters are playing a key role among clergy and other religious leaders who have been organizing demonstrations and vigils at ICE field offices and processing centers in places like Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. Religious leaders present in Blue Ash on Sunday also included women serving as a Jewish rabbi, a Baptist minister and a Muslim chaplain.

When Cincinnati-based Ignite Peace, a group founded by Catholic sisters that has since become an interfaith organization, planned the “ICE: We See You” response for Sunday, they encouraged participants to wear “religious garments.” After all, the action would happen on a day and time when many would otherwise be attending religious services. 

Sisters Anita Marie and Maria Francine, biological twins with the Sisters of Notre Dame, stood at the door to the ICE office wearing their traditional habits. Pastor Carl Ruby of Springfield’s Central Christian Church and Viles Dorsainvil, a Moravian pastor and founder of Springfield’s Haitian Support Center, offered Haitian immigrants the sacrament before their appointments.

The sisters both said they would typically be praying quietly in their rooms early on a Sunday, ahead of attending Mass.

“And this,” Sister Anita Marie said, “is a type of prayer.” 

The post “Even the nuns are mad”: Catholic sisters are standing for Haitians outside ICE offices appeared first on Salon.com.

Last month, Paramount Skydance CEO and Trump ally David Ellison threatened to relocate the company out of California in response to his ongoing legal battle with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is suing, along with 12 other states, aiming to block the $110 billion Warner Bros. Discovery takeover. The threat was first reported by Semafor. Now, Bonta has responded.

“Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through,” Bonta wrote on X. “Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose in court. It didn’t work the first time … and it won’t work this time.”

If Paramount were to move its HQ, it would likely happen before Oct. 1, when “Paramount will start accruing a $7-million-per-day ‘ticking fee’ payable to WBD shareholders until the deal closes,” according to Variety. Which state will it be? That’s not clear yet, but presumably it wouldn’t be any of the dozen states suing the company, which include Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and Washington. Ellison’s shortlist reportedly includes Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.

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The Warner Bros. Discovery takeover has been steeped in controversy since the beginning. Recently, a pair of government watchdog groups demanded investigations into whether Paramount gifted luxury gala tickets to Federal Communications Commission members, thus violating ethics requirements, while the company sought approval for its acquisition. 

In a span of weeks, Paramount agreed to halt the merger until a court decision or until June 2027, asked for a November trial, and is now back with another attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.

Paramount has lost the plot as it continues to lose…

— Rob Bonta (@AGRobBonta) August 11, 2026

Ellison has been a major Trump acolyte in the president’s second term. After the Trump administration approved Skydance’s takeover of Paramount in 2025, Ellison hand-picked political commentator Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News, sparking months of controversy as viewership has cratered and stories related to the Epstein files and immigration were spiked.

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Just personally speaking, if it were alleged in court documents that I abused my family in an alcohol-fueled tirade that culminated in my children seeing me pour a drink all over their mother’s head, I would not be so cavalier about parting with my very public sobriety. But I’m not Brad Pitt, and no one is doing sycophantic cover stories on me in Esquire.

In the recently published profile, Pitt admitted to getting “back off the wagon,” but “in a more restrained manner,” admitting he can have a few glasses of wine. If he overindulges, he risks losing a morning to a hangover, and thus, the beautiful morning views outside his luxurious Los Angeles home. The piece continues to fawn over Pitt and his generous hospitality, with some observations on his legacy and a quote from Pitt calling AI “an interesting experiment” — which he interrupts to admire the hawks outside his window, a fluffy moment of color kept in the profile.

In a sane world, Pitt would be challenged more, asked about his ongoing legal battles with Angelina Jolie, his children dropping the last name “Pitt,” the substance abuse — even a question about Pitt not having a good film role since before the pandemic would do. 

But we live in a world where sanity is swapped for starry-eyed adulation, where celebrity culture often mirrors the blind devotion for MAGA politicians. Fame absolves stars like Pitt in the way popular politics protects men like Max Miller, who also faces a slew of credible abuse allegations. As long as they stay the course, maintain manhood and weaponize nostalgia, the public will forget and the challenges will stop coming. When a brooding Pitt admits he’s had trouble with “family stuff,” the writer lets the sentiment disintegrate. “We’ll leave it at that,” Pitt concludes.

The post Brad Pitt’s sobriety story deserves more scrutiny appeared first on Salon.com.

In an Oscars season rife with controversies, shutouts and disappointments, the one seemingly surefire, feel-good figure this year has been Brad Pitt. Nearly 30 years into his Hollywood career, the hardworking leading man has created some of our most iconic movie moments and developed an uncanny instinct for creative, audience-pleasing parts. Now, he seems a lock to take home his first acting Academy Award (he has one under his belt as a producer on “12 Years a Slave”) for his supporting role as good-natured, possibly wife-killing, history-changing stunt double and righthand man Cliff Booth. But if ever there were a classic case of someone being the odds-on favorite based on overall industry goodwill than a singular performance, Pitt would be our greatest recent example. If merit alone earned awards, would Pitt really take it this year? Or to put it another way, can Brad Pitt act?

At 56, the Oklahoma native has entered a career stage where he seems at last to be forgiven for being so really, really, really, ridiculously good looking. Yet perhaps his best trick all along has been making his critics feel they shouldn’t dismiss him as a so-so performer just because he’s handsome, when in fact he might actually be just a so-so performer.

From the beginning, Pitt’s always been clever about how he leverages his physical appeal, using it as an instrument to create his characters rather than a diversion from his efforts. Even in his breakout role, as a smooth talking grifter in 1991’s “Thelma & Louise,” Pitt seemed in on the joke that as long as he kept his shirt off, he could tell a woman point blank that he was a robber — and then effortlessly rob her.

His rise was instantaneous after that. It was as if the factory that had created ruggedly beautiful stars like Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck had suddenly spit out one special new edition just for the ’90s. Campy starring roles followed in forgettable films like “Johnny Suede” and “Cool World,” parts that played off Pitt’s throwback appeal. Yet he also played the long game shrewdly, refusing to settle as simply agreeable beefcake. He sought out darker work in movies like “Kalifornia” (a film I still have to remind myself is not “Natural Born Killers”), “A River Runs Through It” and “Interview with a Vampire.” He appeared in his first Tarantino-penned film, “True Romance,” where he played a blissfully clueless stoner. And he had a knack for picking instant cult classics  like “Se7en” and “Fight Club,” a movie that should have inspired a special Oscar category for Best Performance By a Pelvis just so Pitt could have won.

Yet when I think of the Brad Pitt of that era — the actor, not the celebrity he was in the World’s Sexiest Man, Mr. Jennifer Anniston, name-checked in a Shania Twain song years — I remember his performance in the lesser known “The Devil’s Own,” in which he plays an IRA member and says things like, “Oi need dat mooney, Tum.” He may not yet have an acting Oscar, but for this role, Pitt is widely regarded as delivering one of the worst Northern Irish accents ever committed in cinema. A few years later, in Guy Ritchie’s “Snatch,” Pitt played an Irish Traveller, and while he memorably delivered a comically unintelligible performance, it was not exactly a method actor’s one. Ritchie reportedly made the character a Traveller because Pitt couldn’t pull off a London accent, and Pitt recently revealed he based his character’s dialect on a minor character on “Father Ted.” Then there’s his unfortunate “Everyting gwarn be iree” moment in “Meet Joe Black,” an attempt that I assure you was cringeworthy two decades ago, and has since aged like milk. Even as he’s filled up his IMDb page, his technical abilities have remained limited. 

Admirably, Pitt could have spent his career doing the big superhero parts, instead of skewering that image in “Megamind” and “Deadpool 2.” He could have done some lucrative spy series and be 20 years into the role by now. That’s what movie stars do, right? He’s consistently gravitated toward odder, more challenging work like “Burn After Reading.” His previous acting nominations have all been for more idiosyncratic films — “Twelve Monkeys,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Moneyball.” Yet the impression he gives is not that of some weird, English arteeeste who disappears into his characters. He’s just a hard-working regular guy who gets the job done. This is not without appeal. 

And then there are those Tarantino movies. In “Inglorious Basterds” he carves up Nazis and helps rewrite a history where Hitler doesn’t weasel out in a bunker suicide. (Surely there’s a Tarantino-Pitt collaboration on the Jeffrey Epstein story somewhere in our collective future.) He also delivers another accent that gets a little shaky. Now, in his Oscar-nominated performance in “Once Upon a Time . . .  in Hollywood,” Pitt plays a man who is seasoned, heroic, a little sinister, and still looks insanely good shirtless. In other words, he’s a Hollywood executive’s wet dream of himself.

Is “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” any good? I side with my colleague Matt Rozsa and say, it decidedly is not. It’s a meandering mess, from a filmmaker whose works increasingly play into the classic “If I was there, things would have gone a lot differently, let me tell you” fantasy. (Take that, hippies.)

Though there is not much to see in Pitt’s performance that he hasn’t already delivered in at least a dozen other eccentric-and-manly-but-the-ladies-like-him-too performances, critics loved it. The New York Times praised Pitt’s “down-to-the-bone minimalism” and the star has already picked up a shelf of prizes, earning goodwill at each stop on the road to Oscar for his charming acceptance speeches.

Though the Oscar is only supposed to be for one performance, Pitt’s awards trajectory this year has no doubt been boosted by “Ad Astra,” another acclaimed movie with an appeal that entirely eluded me. As astronaut Roy McBride, Pitt is a middle-aged man searching the solar system for his daddy. It’s desperately tedious and doesn’t make sense, and I would like a refund for those hours of my life. Pitt’s stoic performance doesn’t help matters, but he does get to well up with emotion at times, which does technically constitute acting.

Writing in the New York Times recently, critic Manohla Dargis observed that earlier in Pitt’s career, “It became a favorite cliché to write that he was a character actor trapped in the body of a star . . .  Some of this, I think, stems from a suspicion of beauty, that it can’t be trusted.” Yet the “character actor in a movie star’s body” designation seems more fitting for Pitt’s costar and fellow Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, who from his earliest roles in “This Boy’s Life” and “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” has always displayed serious native talent. Or look at another of his “Once Upon a Time . . . ” costars, Oscar nominee (for “Bombshell”) Margot Robbie, who in the last six months skillfully has played Sharon Tate, Harley Quinn, and an ambitious Fox News employee, and among other laudable elements, delivered a different (and believable) accent for each.

In contrast, Pitt seems to dazzle by sticking to similar characters in very different movies, a neat bit of acting sleight-of-hand. If he is indeed a character actor, he sure likes to stick to the same character — unselfconsciously virile, easy to imagine chewing on a toothpick.   

I happen to enjoy plenty of Pitt’s movies and even his performances. I could watch him eat his way through “Ocean’s 11” all day, and I can’t imagine any other actor delivering the immortal line, “What’s in the box?” But his seemingly locked-down Oscars juggernaut is not a reward for a meticulous performance in a stellar movie. That is absolutely not what is happening here. It’s a prize for consistency, charm and charisma over several decades.

This shining moment also happens to come at one when the industry is still clearly not ready to fully reckon with itself. It’s been only two years since the real Sharon Tate’s famed widower, Roman Polanski, was removed from the Academy. And this year’s crop of Oscar nominees once again conspicuously fell short on honoring more diverse and deserving contenders. That’s not Brad Pitt’s fault. But it’s easy to see how his role represents a certain nostalgia for a certain era, when being a movie star didn’t mean you had to be an actor too.

The post Should Brad Pitt really win an Oscar for acting? appeared first on Salon.com.

Since the first season of HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” we’ve watched Helaena Targaryen (Phia Saban) grow from an eccentric child preoccupied with insects and murmurings of dreams — shrugged off as nothing more than oddities by the adults who occupy the Red Keep in King’s Landing — to becoming an adult with a tremendous power that she was wise to mainly keep to herself.

The only daughter of Viserys (Paddy Considine) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), Helaena was a dreamer in more than just the flibbertigibbet sense, receiving flashes of things to come — her brother Aemond (Ewan Mitchell) losing an eye, Rhaenys’ (Eve Best) dragon Meleys crashing her brother/husband Aegon’s (Tom Glynn-Carney) coronation, hired assassins posing as rat-catchers breaking in to kill her baby son — and though these premonitions could have been a considerable help to those around her, they mainly fell on deaf ears until she herself fell to her death in the Season 3 finale, at which point it was too late. But the joke’s on everyone but Helaena because in taking her undervalued gifts and goodness with her, she’s removed herself from the fray as the only one with the knowledge that power is an ugly thing to die for, but an even uglier thing to live for.

In the fight for the Iron Throne, the Targaryens and anyone from the Hightower line with a drop of lineage blood in the game are neck and neck in a battle to out-dragon and out-incest the other. Helaena, having a Hightower mother but a Targaryen last name, has empathy for both sides, as she does for any of the other tools and pawns of war; the dragons killed in battle, the horses destroyed by enemies, the caterpillars outside the castle that feed on toxic plants but are not toxic themselves.

“They eat the leaves of the nightshade, but that would be death for you or me . . . It’s a puzzle,” she warns her daughter Jaehaera in a Season 3 episode. And Jaehaera, who actually listened to Helaena’s warnings when few others did, has at least this to remember her mother by: feasting on poison may fortify you, for a while, but it will only bring harm to everyone around you. Dark-mode Rhaenyra would have been wise to heed this warning when it was delivered the second time.

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In the Season 3 finale, held prisoner by Rhaenyra and refusing to eat, despite being pregnant with what’s presumed to be her brother/husband’s child, Helaena talks of a rare beetle which can only be seen in the summer, which she’ll never see again.

“There’s a beetle that emerges on the cusp of summer. It has lots of colors. Blue, gold, purple. It looks like a turtle,” she tells a befuddled Rhaenyra. “You can only find it in King’s Landing. It sustains itself on the waste of other creatures. It’s beautiful.”

Hearing this, Rhaenyra is, once again, just sitting there thinking this lady is nuts and very much not picking up on the “you’re trash” goodbye speech that her half-sister is delivering, so Helaena makes it clearer.

“All the things you care about are ugly. This place is ugly. You, yourself . . . ugly.”

Having already made up her “F this” mind that she’d rather throw herself out of a window than live one more day as Rhaenyra’s pawn, Helaena drives the sentiment home with: “You think life is nothing more than not being dead?”

Removing herself from the game board, Helaena is free. No more subsisting on poison. No more having her warnings be ignored. The Targaryens F’d around, but now they’re gonna find out. Sometimes dreams do come true.

Like the fragile butterflies that flitter around Alicent after Helaena’s death, she was too good for all of this nonsense. Too pure for endless battles over a damn chair. 

Amid struggles for dominion, making the choice to pack it up and take her power with her — a truly useful power, at that, even more so than dragonfire, I’d argue — Helaena’s “no thanks” refusal to participate exhibits a level of nobleness and bravery the others will never live to even come close to. Refusing to fight is, often, the biggest fight.

During a press conference for “House of the Dragon” reported on by Variety, Emma D’Arcy spoke of the character Helaena, saying, “She’s maybe the only character who has a proximity to power, but remains kind of uncontaminated . . . I think her death condemns Rhaenyra to the path she’s chosen. There’s no way back after that.”

Loyal, love to be steered. Allegiance to suffer, only to serve. Helaena saw through all of it, and what she saw but had yet to say, well, she took that to her grave.

The post Helaena was too good for “House of the Dragon” appeared first on Salon.com.

Our table at Cuatrolatas never stood a chance.

My glass of vermút sweats down to the turquoise tabletop. Standing room only among wine glasses, water glasses, sunglasses, juice glasses. A platter of summer tomatoes, tuna-belly conserva, shaved onion, and punchy olives arrives where it cannot possibly fit.

We lift glasses. Shift glasses. Angle plates. Borrow a few inches from the precarious ledge beside the table. Then Lola sends more food. We shift the impossible again.

Pericana lands dark and red and glistening with oil, a spread for bread made with sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, and cured fish. Two creamy ensaladillas come next. One riff includes krab stick. The other follows the familiar Russian formula. A meat board carries half a butcher shop in sausage form. Pork cheeks nestle into a steamed bao. Barbecue flatbread arrives piled with chicken, cheese, and sauce, as though California Pizza Kitchen had taken up Spanish.

Nobody objects. There is no space to clear. Plates lean on plates. Glasses get relinquished. Appetite takes over. Snug becomes a footnote. Outside, Alicante performs the same trick on a larger scale.

Cars vanish from streets. Neighborhood party tents, barracas, occupy half-blocks. Restaurants lucky enough to face freed asphalt push their patios past the curb. Roadways become dining rooms, dance floors, bars, and parties. Alicante finds space, fills it. Then finds more.

This is Hogueras de San Juan, Alicante’s annual festival of fire. Across Spain, San Juan welcomes summer with infernos and midnight rituals. Alicante makes it monumental. Enormous sculptures rise in intersections and plazas. Some intricate. Some cartoonish, satirical, wonderfully strange. People stop to photograph details destined to disappear in the cremà, when the monuments go up in flame.

Alicante does not ease into celebration. It engineers it. Neighborhoods commission the monuments, build the barracas, prepare the food, and turn valuable public space into temporary headquarters. Then they welcome everyone in.

More glasses. More tapas. More elbows. More appetites.

From Cuatrolatas, I hear a saxophone. A tuba. A brass band works down the block and stops at the park outside. Percussion underneath, horns above, their rendition of  “Tequila!” with a ska spirit. I leave my plate and pop into the street.

There is no room to dance. People still try with whatever parts still fit. Feet first. Shoulders when possible. At the end, the entire block shouts the only lyric required. “Tequila!” The band moves on. Another block has another band. Brass woos one crowd. Percussion shakes the next.

Women in lace mantillas and gold jewelry pass on their way to somewhere ornate. Men dressed as pirates follow along in their own finery. Another band carries the flower procession, ceremonial now but no less insistent. Alicante has music for lunch, music for dancing, music for parades. Silence is not part of the program. The city is precise about its chaos. It is also hungry.

Alicante is a city of paella. Yes, Valencia, I said it. This afternoon, rice asks too much. It wants a chair and thirty quiet minutes. Hogueras wants another beer and somewhere louder to be. So the city eats on the move. Tapas. Charcuterie. Salty things. Sandwiches. Paella gets a rain check.

We leave Cuatrolatas, catch up, and follow the music. The genre or at least the loudest instrument shifts every couple hundred feet until we reach the fireworks. The streets are shoulder to shoulder. We slip into a packed barraca beside the traffic circle. As close to the pyrotechnics as we can get. Then we look up. 

The sky detonates. The loudest noise I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. “Keep your jaw open,” someone yells, “it helps.” I may disagree.

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Smoke swallows civilization while sparks fall around the baroque column of the Fuente de los Luceros. The tower somehow survives the booming chaos. Stacked balconies on surrounding apartment buildings are packed with celebrants, drinks, fireworks scorecards. Mostly 10s. A few 9s to keep the ignition crew humble.

The open-jaw guy Jaime helps keep this barraca organized. He calls Hogueras the most important celebration of the year. Tourism, commerce, and visibility matter, he suggests. Then he finds the word beneath all of that. “It’s pride,” he says. “We’ve been burning our bonfires and our traditions for like forever.”

The fireworks end. The crowd does not. It wriggles back into the streets aiming for friends, tunes, food. Preferably all three. Inside another barraca, there is no room for another person. So I go in.

Long tables run beneath temporary walls, temporary roof. White plastic chairs press together. Red shirts, straw hats, beer bottles. Bodies fill nearly every gap. Another somehow appears when someone needs it. Another band plays next to the entrance. Feet answer beneath the tables. 

Then a smiling man walks in carrying another tray. The tables are full. More food fits. Somehow.

Cold beer. Catalan sausages. Olives. Black figs. Soft, jammy in the heat. Then coca de tonyina, icon of Hogueras. The golden slab loses a few crumbs over the tablecloth when cut and grabbed. Inside, tuna and onion cooked slowly until savory hits sweet, almost caramelized. A little anise. It travels well, and leaves one hand free for beer.

A cartoonish monument depicting a certain oafish world leader dominates the intersection outside. In here, the art seem almost secondary. Though funny. 

Artists spend months crafting these monuments that will burn to ash two nights from now. The temporary walls and roofs, the tables and chairs, the music. They all disappear or duck behind a curtain for another year. The people begin again.  

I head for another feast, another set of fires. The route carries me north toward Valencia. We pause in Benidorm. 

We sit high above the city at La Terrasse in the Port Benidorm Hotel just before sunset. Skyscrapers line up against the Mediterranean. A DJ checks the sound and bartenders shake their elevated work while Benidorm turns to gold below. Sea, sand, spiked skyline, and mountains meet in one widescreen. 

Rarefied air with room to breathe it. And the hospitality and the menu have changed clothes.

A foie gras “emerald” comes first. A squat little gem painted gold, filled with vermouth jelly, surrounded by blueberry toast. Crimson beet and avocado tartare, mango vinaigrette. Aged picanha peeks beneath tonnata, goat cheese. Croquettes draped in jamón. A plump shrimp concoction that reminds me of a lobster roll. Wrong coast. 

The plates are polished, precise, a bit of theater. Proper wine stems. Soft seats. Enough empty space to recognize as luxury. Glasses fill. Plates multiply. Music drifts through the warm air. 

Down the coast in Alicante, the monuments wait for their flame. From this height and with the southern horizon glowing orange it feels like a preview. Or someone lit the fuse a day early. 

A friend joins for dinner. Adriana distills the season’s arrival into one sentence: “Summer here is experienced collectively.” Across the Comunitat Valenciana, that communal arrival changes shape. Alicante gives it ill-fated monuments and exuberant crowds. Benidorm gives it height and panache. Valencia goes to the beach. 

At L’Alegria de l’Horta on the Malvarrosa Beach promenade, I sit in pressed clothes and drink fine Valencian wine. White, cold, a touch tart. My free hand dangles close enough to touch the sand. I resist. 

Bread comes with alioli and grated tomato. Anchovies shine like silver blades over toast and spiced aioli. Hearty slices of calamari singed on the plancha gleam in the fading sunlight.  Baseball-sized salt cod fritters arrive golden and hot. Garlic oil erupts from the middle. 

Then my lubina arrives. A whole fish split open direct from the grill. Smoky. Simply dressed with oil. A lemon wedge. Crispy fries. No sauce. None needed. I work from the tail toward the head until my plate holds just a frame, some skin, one or two fries I’m saving for no good reason.

From my perch I see thousands of revelers pour from the tram, cars that magically found a parking spot, bikes, and buses. They carry blankets, coolers, and totes with dinner. Each group branches off as they meet the sand with enough equipment to establish a civilization for one night. Small fires start within each pod. Smoke begins to rise.

My fish is a buttery memory. My glass is dry. I step off the restaurant’s orderly little terrace and make a slow serpentine path past makeshift dinner parties. The night grows darker. The beach grows brighter as fires multiply from Malvarrosa down toward the port. I stop counting at 175. 

A sausage spits over open flame. Meat skewers hiss when fat reaches flame. Corn cobs char and pop. Shellfish, bread, beer circulate around firepits dug into sand. A blanket becomes seating. A cooler becomes a table. And a fridge. A plastic crate holds more wood in waiting.

My friend Felipe had explained the ritual back in Alicante. Make a big fire, jump it several times, then jump several waves. “That will welcome summer,” he told me, “and will give you strength and good luck for the whole of the year.” 

On this beach, interpretations vary. Some make deliberate, careful hops. Some leap over flame as friends raise phones and cheer. Some perform feats of strength, flips, aerial dance moves, head-first dives. Possibly singed and mostly sandy, they storm the Mediterranean and return to their grills wet, steaming, and triumphant. 

Children thin out before midnight. The club crowd grows afterward. Elbow room becomes a luxury. Groups become amorphous. Firepit boundaries dissolve. Shoes, bottles, hats, towels, coolers migrate. Blankets become rumpled communal flooring. Jumpers still jump. With increasing altitude and inventiveness and shrinking landing space.

Someone asks me to send a photograph I’ve just taken. We trade Instagram handles. Someone has me hold their phone while they dive through shorebreak. Trust abounds. Someone begs me to jump the fire. I jump. Gingerly. For several minutes, I belong to the beach and to no particular party. It seems a common feeling. 

Alicante builds upward. Monuments, balconies, barracas, fireworks, towers of smoke. Valencia spreads outward. Blanket beside blanket, grill beside grill, body beside body, fire beside fire. The beach becomes one long temporary table. 

By night’s end, campfire settles into my clothes. My dinner had servers, collars, and wineglasses. Beach dinners have coolers, flame, and daredevils. The smoke makes no distinction.

At Cuatrolatas, there was no room for another plate. Another plate arrived. In the barraca, there was no room for another chair. Someone sat down. On Malvarrosa, there was no room for another blanket, another fire, another wet body running back from the sea. They made room.

The monuments burn. The embers go cold. The tents get broken down. The beach empties. What remains is the promise beneath all that food and flame.

Bring everyone back. We will squeeze in.

The post In Spain, summer begins with thrills and feasts appeared first on Salon.com.

There have been many changes in America’s political system in the last decade or so, but some things are perennial. If you would have told me in August 2015 that we would be in the middle of Donald Trump’s second term, in which he’s slapping his name on buildings all over Washington, building monuments to himself and declaring that the country is under attack by communists, I would have laughed out loud. But if you had told me instead that the media would be framing the upcoming midterm elections as a referendum on the Democrats going too far left and alienating the rock-ribbed Americans who matter, I would have shrugged and said, “What else is new?” 

If there is one thing we have been able to count on for the last 30 years, if not longer, it is that it doesn’t matter how extreme the right wing might become or how far down the conspiratorial rabbit hole they go. The media interprets all political events in this polarized environment as validation of the belief that conservatives are always more in touch with Real America, and therefore more deserving of positions of leadership. According to this thesis, if Democrats want to win power, they will have to radically change their positions. 

That’s the conventional wisdom when it comes to the Michigan Senate race. After Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s win on August 4 in the Democratic primary, an avalanche of articles, editorials and op-eds — not to mention analysis by television pundits and social media influencers — have appeared claiming that he is too far left for Michigan’s general election voters. Practically no one is doing the same for his GOP opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, who has tacked so far right that he has become a Midwestern hologram of the president.

This pattern is fascinating, especially considering the fact that in the last 35 years, Democrats have won the presidency five times to the Republicans’ four, a number that includes the two times (George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016) the party lost the popular vote but won the anachronistic Electoral College. Coupled with the fact that control of Congress has been evenly split, it’s not as though the GOP has had their fingers on the American pulse this whole time. Instead, they have built a massive partisan media infrastructure and stolen Supreme Court seats to further put their thumbs on the scale of the electoral system with big money and voter suppression. 

With the deep unfairness of the Senate giving far more power to small, rural (and conservative) states, the institutional advantage held by Republicans is profound. And yet, according to conventional wisdom and the predictable knee-jerk reactions by too many establishment Democrats, when Republicans win it’s because conservative ideas have won over the people, and when the Democrats win it’s also because conservative ideas have won over the people. 

This dynamic was on full display Sunday when CNN’s Fareed Zakaria analyzed the Michigan Senate race by saying that working class voters have abandoned Democrats as the party has moved left — even as they have tried to appeal to people on economic grounds and offer ideas that will help them materially. “The lesson is not that economics don’t matter,” he said, “but the Democratic Party’s problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare, and even now, the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues — crime, immigration, the border and the so-called woke agenda.” In other words, Democrats must move right on cultural issues to win elections. 

When Republicans lose — which, as we’ve seen, happens at least half the time — they aren’t harangued to take up diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, open the borders or clamp down on excess policing, even though their excesses on those issues could just as easily be seen as dispositive. The press will blame Trump or individual candidates for a lack of character, but they rarely apply the kind of analysis that Zakaria does, which essentially demands that Republicans abandon elements of their base to pander to Democrats. 

The result is that only Democrats have agency to break the impasse. 

When Bill Clinton won the presidency 34 years ago, Democrats had been in the presidential wilderness for 12 years. Their last two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Lyndon Johnson, had left office under the clouds of the Iran hostage crisis, in the case of the former, and Vietnam with the latter. The party decided to do just as Zakaria suggested, and Clinton won a plurality of voters in the 1992 general election on a platform of fiscal and personal responsibility, challenging the Democratic base on, you guessed it, culture war issues. Two years later, the GOP won the House majority for the first time in 42 years. So, that worked out well. 

According to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center, over the past 35 years, the public has actually moved left on culture war issues, following a progressive shift among Democrats, while the right has clung to its prejudices. (Republicans’ cult worship of Trump and conspiratorial thinking is hard to measure in these terms, but there is no doubt they have changed dramatically in this regard.) 

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It should come as no surprise then that Democrats, feeling their strength in opposition to the extremely unpopular Trump, would see an opportunity to more explicitly push their message. Generally speaking, midterm elections are seen as a referendum on the party in power, and with the economy in an ongoing slump and Trump more polarizing than ever, you cannot blame them. As the New York Times reported, the party’s left wing has been energetically organizing all over the country, and it’s paid dividends in primaries in blue and purple states alike in the upper Midwest. And, once again, the media is falling back on the same old fear-mongering about the left alienating the Real Americans. 

We have article after article hand-wringing over El-Sayed’s primary win because he supports issues they consider beyond the pale, such as Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and ending unlimited support for Israel, even though each of these issues have majority support. His primary opponents are now holding unity rallies to bring the various factions of the party together after the bruising campaign, and the national party has mobilized in support of his candidacy, including former President Barack Obama and former Transportation Secretary — and current Michigan resident — Pete Buttigieg, both of whom carry serious clout among more conservative members of the Democratic base and independent voters. In other words, Democrats are doing everything they can to reach out to the broad middle of the state.

Rogers, meanwhile, is doing the opposite, tacking hard to the right and even going so far as to join the most noxious, destructive conspiracy theory of all: election denialism. 

As a member of Congress between 2001 and 2015, Rogers was a standard conservative in the George W. Bush mold, voting for tax cuts and deregulation, and later chairing the powerful House intelligence committee in the last four years of his term. When he retired from the House, Rogers worked as a talk radio host and commentator for CNN. Although he supported Trump after he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, he refused to go down the road of the Big Lie following Joe Biden’s win in 2020. In an op-ed for the Washington Post — published the day before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol — Rogers called Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he urged the secretary to find him additional votes, “more gangster than presidential.” Rogers wrote, “This trend of refusing to accept free and fair elections, without any proof of fraud, must end for the sake of our democratic republic.” A year later, he said Trump’s political career was over.

But times have changed. 

In 2024, when Rogers ran for the Senate against Elissa Slotkin, who would go on to win the race, he needed Trump’s endorsement. He gave his in return. Rogers has also adopted the president’s Big Lie, which should be disqualifying among thinking people everywhere.

I’m not seeing a lot of hand-wringing among the pundits about how Rogers is losing Real Americans with his extreme views; that criticism is being reserved for El-Sayed. Likewise, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is locked in a close Senate race against Democrat state Rep. James Talarico, isn’t being browbeaten to moderate his views. 

The Democrats may very well lose those races. But in this closely divided electorate, they might have lost them anyway with more moderate candidates. After all, Republicans have been running on racism and left-wing hippies for decades, no matter what their views were. The very centrist Clinton was vilified 35 years ago because he played the saxophone with sunglasses on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” Barack Obama’s middle name — Hussein — remains an Islamophobic meme all these years later. So, it’s not as if Republicans wouldn’t deploy the same insults to other candidates, no matter their positions.

This year, Democrats are talking straight and taking it right to the people, and both El-Sayed and Talarico, with their populist messages, are powerful communicators. Maybe it won’t work. But it’s long past time for the Democratic Party to stop allowing candidates to be harassed by the conventional wisdom that says the only way to win is to run to the right.

The post Mike Rogers is the real radical in the Michigan Senate race appeared first on Salon.com.

The spectacle of Laura Loomer touching down in a Kyiv bomb shelter to announce her sudden conversion to supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia has been covered by much of the media as a sort of a political awakening. In a series of recent interviews with America’s most prominent news outlets, the MAGA influencer and conspiracy theorist took a victory lap for discovering — nearly four-and-a-half years after Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine — that Vladimir Putin is a liar. But what looks to be a surprising shift away from Russia is not a moral reckoning. It is a petty turf war amongst MAGA media — and Ukraine stands to benefit. 

Our unfortunate reality is that the shallow personal ambitions and petty feuds of MAGA influencers can dictate foreign policy. Loomer holds no elected office and possesses no genuine policy expertise, yet because she knows how to flatter the vulnerabilities of Donald Trump, she wields terrifying influence on the administration and its agenda. After years of parroting Kremlin talking points and even calling on Putin to swallow Ukraine whole, Loomer recently took a tour of Ukraine, arranged and paid for by unnamed handlers, and had an epiphany. She has suddenly rebranded herself as Kyiv’s most unlikely defender, telling the New York Times that Ukrainian officials now “view me as an extension of the Trump administration.” She recorded a glowing, highly produced interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the gardens of the presidential palace, dined with the chief rabbi of Ukraine and declared that she had been “bamboozled” by Russian propaganda. 

“You don’t need to listen to a podcaster and let them influence your opinion about a country. You can look at those facts yourself,” she told the Associated Press, blaming American social media platforms for banning her in the aftermath of Trump’s 2020 election loss, which led her to try Telegram, where Russian media is widely shared. “The Russians are very good at capitalizing on people’s rage. And I was very angry.” 

She elaborated six days later in an interview with NewsNation’s Batya Ungar-Sargon: “I really have come to understand that everything that I was led to believe while living in this echo chamber, a very toxic echo chamber, that is supported by foreign governments.

The whiplash is breathtaking, but it requires profound gullibility to take her transformation at face value. There is no ideological conversion here. Loomer’s evolution comes at precisely the moment when the Republican coalition is undergoing a bitter fight over what “America First” is supposed to mean. The old MAGA formula — distrust Ukraine, NATO and GOP hawks, and view Putin as a potentially useful counterweight to American liberalism — is colliding with a newer reality related to Trump’s ongoing and unpopular war of choice against Iran. Russia is increasingly difficult to portray as a friendly or even neutral power while it cooperates with the Islamic Republic. Ukraine’s resilience and effective drone campaigns, meanwhile, have made it impossible for even the most hardened cynics to paint Moscow as the inevitable victor. 

Loomer’s reversal is also inseparable from her rivalry with fellow podcasters Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly and other right-wing media figures who have become increasingly hostile to Trump over Israel, Iran and the use of American military power. Loomer herself has said the right-wing split over Iran prompted her to reconsider Ukraine, and she claimed to have noticed that people she regarded as opponents of Trump were simultaneously advancing Russia-friendly arguments. Now she worries those pro-Russian voices inside the MAGA coalition have become “the biggest detriment to social cohesion” heading into what, by all credible predictions, will be a brutal midterm cycle for Republicans.

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Owens’ decision to travel to Putin’s marquee conference in St. Petersburg and Carlson’s ongoing pushing of lines amplified directly by Russian state media have provided Loomer with a tactical opening. She realized that her online nemeses had cornered the market on reflexive Kremlin apologetics. By pivoting to a pro-Ukraine posture wrapped in the language of America First security investments, she’s weaponizing patriotism against her rivals while positioning herself as the true guardian of the movement’s ideological purity. This evolving narrative frames support for Ukraine not as an act of charity or foreign aid, but as a hard-headed business transaction, one Trump appears to have welcomed. He publicly endorsed her meeting with Zelenskyy, and Loomer has said she spoke twice with Trump while in Ukraine.

None of this happens in a vacuum. In September 2024, the Justice Department indicted two Russian state media employees for funneling nearly $10 million into Tenet Media, a Tennessee outfit whose talent roster included right-wing podcasters Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin, all of whom produced content the indictment says was crafted to inflame American divisions and tilt coverage toward candidates the Kremlin found useful. Pool was allegedly pulling in a $100,000 an episode while insisting he had no idea where the cash originated, a claim that got considerably shakier once reporters noted he’d made major real estate purchases the same month Tenet launched. After Loomer arrived in Kyiv last month, Pool experienced his own conversion and posted that Ukraine had been “fighting for their very existence against an evil dictator” and hoped Trump would “lend their support.”

Republican voters have also been moving in this direction. In January 2026, Pew Research Center found that 47% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents described Russia as an enemy of the U.S, up from 40% the year before. Republican confidence in Zelenskyy also rose four points to 34%.

While Loomer works to convert MAGA to the Ukrainian cause, the press should stop treating her reversal as a heroic story about one brave influencer seeing the light. They should instead frame it for what it actually is: a split in MAGA media over Ukraine and Russia that is ultimately a domestic turf war disguised as statecraft.

The post The petty loyalty beef behind the MAGA Ukraine revolt appeared first on Salon.com.

There’s some good news for American lifespans: In July, preliminary CDC data suggested that life expectancy in the U.S. is on track to reach a record high while death rates hit a historic low. 

According to the report, there were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in 2025 — the lowest rate recorded since mortality rate tracking began. The news comes at a time when the buzzword “longevity” has become synonymous with wellness, and as the U.S. centenarian population is expected to explode over the next few decades. At first glance, this news might sound encouraging after years of headlines highlighting the reverse trend, that life expectancy was falling. But public health experts who have been studying mortality rates over the last couple of decades aren’t exactly optimistic this trend reflects any positive health advancements in American public health — or that these numbers can be sustained.

“This is welcome news, but should be taken with a grain of salt,” Steven Woolf, a physician and a professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, told Salon. One reason, Woolf pointed out, is that the current estimates are only “slightly better” than in 2019, when there were an estimated 715.2 deaths per 100,000 people. “Although this signals that the U.S. has rebounded from the devastating losses that occurred during the pandemic, returning to 2019 conditions hardly puts us out of the woods.” 

Death rates, particularly among young Americans, remain high. According to research published earlier this year, “excess deaths” have surged among people between the ages of 25 and 44 when compared to mortality trends of young people from the early 2000s. The overall death rate of children has increased, too. “This means that children in the U.S. today are less likely to survive to adulthood and young adults are less likely to reach middle age than in prior years,” Woolf said.

A third reason for tempering our enthusiasm about the data is that U.S. life expectancy remains far below that of other high-income countries. 

“Yes, we have rebounded from the pandemic, but other countries rebounded earlier and have since achieved greater gains in life expectancy,” Woolf said. “Even before the pandemic, more than 60 countries had achieved higher life expectancy than the United States.”

A recently published study in JAMA Health Forum found that 46 percent of all U.S. deaths among people under the age of 65 would not have occurred if the U.S. had the age-specific death rates of its peer countries. That means that one out of every two U.S. deaths under 65 is likely avoidable. One of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Jacob Bor, called the lack of willingness to address this issue “a national scandal.”

Life expectancy is an estimate of the average number of years a person might live based on a country’s mortality rates. As it stands, the 2025 life expectancy calculation wasn’t included in the report since it’s still technically provisional data. But in 2024, life expectancy at birth in the U.S. was 79.0 years — a historic high, compared to 78.4 years in 2023. But compared to other Western democracies, as researchers have emphasized, there’s room to catch up. For example, in Italy, life expectancy at birth has increased from 79.6 in 2000 to 83.4 years in 2019. In Switzerland, life expectancy has increased from the late ‘70s in the mid-2000s to an average of 84.3 years today.

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“It does not surprise me that we’re starting to see some improvements,” Marc Cohen, co-director of the LeadingAge LTSS Center at UMass Boston, told Salon. “But we’re surely still falling short of other Western democracies.”

Cohen said one notable difference between the U.S. and how Western European countries approach health and wellness is how governments spend their money. The United States spends much more on actual medical care, Cohen said, in terms of curing illnesses — but much less on preventative care. 

“The Europeans end up spending more on social care and less on medical care,” he said. Many social determinants of health influence longevity, he added, such as access to food, housing, and transportation. In Western European countries, those services are frequently part of the social safety net. “So they don’t need to spend as much on curing illness; they spend a lot more on getting services in place to prevent illness,” he said. The United States, he said, is the exact opposite. 

Another reason, Cohen said, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy is because of access to health insurance. “When people have access to medical care through insurance, they tend to undertake activities that can help longevity, like better preventive care, better management of chronic and disabling conditions,” Cohen said. He added that due to recent Medicaid cuts, which is the primary health insurance program for low-income Americans, he’s concerned life expectancy rates will decline again in the future. “Once all of these cuts kick in, you’ll see a turnaround going in the wrong direction again, even if everything else stays the same, and that is the only major change; you will see declines.” 

That’s in part because there is a strong correlation between wealth and longevity in America. 

“It has always been the case that the poor, on average, live shorter lives than the rich, but the gap has widened over time,” Woolf said. “Income inequality and the wealth divide in America have widened dramatically, and so has the gap in longevity and health between rich and poor.”

One of the most stark examples is longevity entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, a tech millionaire who has reportedly spent $2 million per year trying to reverse aging. Johnson recently made headlines announcing he was diagnosed with autoimmune gastritis. While the disease itself isn’t fatal, as STAT News reported, it is linked to an increased risk of stomach cancer.

“For proof that better health is possible, look to the 60 countries that are outperforming the United States; they have shown that a better way exists to protect the health of their populations,” Woolf said. “The problem in the United States is not a lack of solutions but a lack of political will.”

One recent report estimated that working-class Americans can expect to die seven years earlier than wealthy ones. In an era of pay-to-access wellness, it checks out. A 2022 report by the Global Wellness Institute found that greater consumer spending on wellness is associated with a slight increase in life expectancy. Still, wealth doesn’t always guarantee a longer life.

“Rich Americans die earlier than rich people in other countries, because systemic problems affecting the health of Americans affect us all,” Woolf said. “Your bank account can’t protect you if you are breathing polluted air or rely on a dysfunctional health care system.” 

The post Rising US life expectancy isn’t what it seems appeared first on Salon.com.

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

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second election, voting for legislation to boost immigration enforcement could have seemed like a safe choice to some Democrats, who tied Donald Trump’s second presidential victory to a rejection of their party’s handling of immigration. 

Forty-six Democrats broke with their party to support legislation named after the murdered Georgia college student Laken Riley. Now, for some, that vote is a potential liability, as primary opponents say the votes cosigned Trump’s mass deportation agenda. 

In Minnesota’s Democratic primary for an open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan has made Rep. Angie Craig’s vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act a key focus of the campaign, calling it “disqualifying,” even after Craig walked back support of the law. Democrats in primary races in Maryland and Arizona have also faced attacks based on their support of the law this cycle, while others have expressed regret over their votes. 

“Voting three days into the second Trump administration for Donald Trump’s immigration bill that allowed him to terrorize our communities, the loss of life, the economic impact, the trauma — it’s horrific,” Flanagan said Monday night during the final debate ahead of the August 11 primary.

Trump and fellow Republicans held up Riley’s February 2024 murder by an immigrant without permanent legal status in the lead-up to the fall elections that year, using the case to cast unauthorized immigrants as dangerous and violent, and argue that the influx of immigrants during President Joe Biden’s term had made the country less safe. The law named after Riley requires federal law enforcement to detain and deport immigrants charged with nonviolent crimes, including shoplifting, even if those charges never result in a conviction. Riley’s convicted murderer had been arrested and released in New York before the murder in Georgia. Forty-six Democrats joined Republicans to pass the law in early 2025, despite criticism that the law denied immigrants due process. 

Only a few of those lawmakers have walked back their support for the law, but the backlash facing some Democrats in competitive primaries suggests an evolution on the politics of the issue since Trump took office and dramatically ramped up raids, arrests, detentions and deportations. 

Polling consistently shows the majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration. While Republicans remain overwhelmingly supportive, 92 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of independent voters said they strongly or somewhat disapprove, according to a July survey by Winthrop University and YouGov.

“The support for something like the Laken Riley Act was speaking to what I think some voters had expressed — wanting a government that can manage the the border and the chaos — but those same voters have shown us in the last year that they also reject indiscriminate arrests, the killings of people, masked agents,” said Lorella Praeli, co-president of Community Change, a Democratic super PAC and nonprofit focused on turning out infrequent voters of color.

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In the Minnesota Senate race, the issue is particularly salient following the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” which involved the sudden deployment of federal agents to the state and saw ICE ramp up aggressive tactics to detain immigrants, including pursuing them outside of schools. The enforcement campaign led to clashes between agents and protestors, and the killing of two U.S. citizens — Renée Good and Alex Pretti — by federal agents. 

“As I stood at the Whipple detention center, as I met with constituents who were being literally rounded up by ICE in Minnesota under Operation Metro Surge, I couldn’t help but regret giving this administration any additional authority,” Craig said in an interview earlier this month, reiterating her comments from a March op-ed in which she first expressed regret over the vote.

“I wanted to be honest with the people of Minnesota. I will tell you when I get it wrong, and I got that one wrong.” 

In a statement to The 19th, Craig said that Flanagan’s attacks over her vote on the Laken Riley Act don’t take into account her work fighting the administration on the issue. Craig said that from her seat in Congress, she took on the administration by conducting oversight, helping get constituents released from custody and fighting against the opening of new detention centers in Minnesota. 

“The attacks from my opponent fall flat when this moment calls for leaders who can take accountability and take on tough fights – not watch from the sidelines,” Craig said. 

In Maryland, Rep. April McClain Delaney overcame a primary challenge from former Rep. David Trone, but not before she walked back her support for the Laken Riley Act. Trone made McClain Delaney’s support for the law one his main lines of attack — arguing she sided with Trump and stripped immigrants of due process — and played up criticism from Maryland lawmakers and immigrant rights groups.

In interviews, McClain Delaney said she regretted the vote and that at the time, she didn’t envision the Trump administration carrying out its mass deportation promises.

“I don’t think I totally focused as much as I should have on the ‘accused of a crime’ [part],” she said in a December interview with the Baltimore Banner. “But I will say that this was in the beginning of my term. And I never thought that ICE immigration and the horror of what has happened would happen.” 

McClain Delaney said that her decision to disavow the vote came after receiving thousands of messages from constituents raising concerns about the administration’s immigration policies and also asking for help from their local representative. More than 50 percent of her constituent services casework at the end of last year was related to immigration, she told the Banner. 

McClain Delaney defeated Trone by six points. 

In Arizona, Rep. Greg Stanton, the former mayor of Phoenix, easily fended off a challenge from progressive activist Kai Newkirk, but Newkirk’s criticisms of Stanton, including over support for the Laken Riley Act, attracted attention to the race. 

Separately, two other Democrats have publicly walked back their support of the law. Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, said he regretted his vote during a campaign appearance last summer, before his reelection in November. Last April, Democratic Rep. Jahana Hayes of Connecticut said during a CNN town hall that she wishes she had voted differently. 

“As I’ve thought about it over the past couple of months, I probably would have voted differently. It’s a vote that I regret,” Hayes said.

Not all Democrats are expressing regret. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia has been criticized by Republicans for voting against an earlier version of the law in 2024 but has stood by his vote for the Laken Riley Act ahead of his high-stakes reelection campaign this November. 

Immigration – including how Democrats respond to Trump’s policies and communicate a different vision on the issue to voters — is one of the key issues of the 2026 campaign cycle, already a historic one for Democrats as their leaders and base voters grapple with the direction of the party ahead of the 2028 election. 

Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from California widely seen as a 2028 presidential contender, said in May that support for the law should be disqualifying.

“Nine swing-state Democrats gave permission for mass deportation,” Khanna told the Bulwark in May.“No one who voted for the Laken Riley Act should have any role in the future leadership of the Democratic Party in this country. … It’s disqualifying, just like the Iraq War vote.”

Heading into November and beyond, Lorella said, Democrats have an opportunity to shift the dynamic of the immigration debate. At the time of the Laken Riley Act vote, she said, Republicans created a “boogeyman” out of immigration, and there was nothing competing against that vision. 

“Now we’re a year and some change into what it means to execute a mass deportation agenda. People understand these are neighbors, childcare providers, people who take care of us,” she said. “If all they hear is Democrats say we need to abolish ICE, I think what falls short. They can lead with a governing vision, an affirmative vision for immigration.”

The post 46 Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act. For some, it’s a liability appeared first on Salon.com.

Last month, President Donald Trump visited Turkey for a fairly banal reason: a routine NATO summit. But when the president left the country on July 8, he took a secret route home. As he left, the White House reported he was on Air Force One. Trump even made a big show of boarding the plane in front of cameras before later sneaking out the back. But he was really on a different plane, unbeknownst to the public and many in his entourage.

To get people off the trail, Trump even posted on his social media site Truth Social, “For old time’s sake, we’ll be taking the former Air Force One, from Turkey to Mildenhall, a short trip that is totally worth doing in order to give our Great Military Heroes a chance to appreciate our beautiful new addition to the Air Force Fleet!”

Trump was referring to the “flying palace” — the Boeing 747-8 gifted last year to the Trump admin by Qatar, in what has widely been characterized as a bribe — which he took to get there. Instead of leaving on either that jet or “former” Air Force One, the president secretly hopped into an airport catering truck and shuttled to an Air Force C-32A, a smaller military plane.

The clandestine mission was first reported by the Washington Post, citing anonymous sources who say the move fooled some journalists and some White House staff members “who believed they were on the same plane as the president.”

The breakdown in negotiations to end the war with Iran at the time is cited as the reason for Trump’s hide and seek charade, fearing some sort of attack. Such behavior is rare for U.S. presidents.

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“In the first hours after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush administration officials did not immediately disclose the president’s whereabouts, saying only that he had been taken to an ‘undisclosed location,” the Post reported. “But they did not say he was somewhere he was not, and within hours officials revealed that he had been flown to a military facility in Nebraska.”

The same week that Trump switched planes, the New York Times, citing anonymous officials, reported that the Qatari-gifted Air Force One lacks the defensive countermeasures of the previous model. The White House later subpoenaed the Times journalists over the report, demanding to know who disclosed the information, and even brought FBI Director Kash Patel into the investigation. The subpoenas were later withdrawn.

The post Trump performs disappearing act to avoid Iranian threat appeared first on Salon.com.

50 years ago, the Ramones released their self-titled debut LP. Adorned with a black-and-white photo of the faux brotherhood against a brick wall at the back of CBGB (taken by photographer and CB’s door person, Roberta Bayley), Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee stood somewhat awkwardly wearing jeans in various stages of destruction, T-shirts (shoutout to drummer Tommy for going with the belly shirt), leather jackets and sneakers. 

It’s important to remember that it was 1976, so this particular fashion choice was not yet au courant, because they had just codified it. The outfits that they’d wear walking around were the same outfits they’d wear onstage. They standardized on this particular uniform because everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to wear onstage and they didn’t want audiences to think they were a glam band or, worse. “I mean, these guys were not hippies,” said Legs McNeil, co-creator of “PUNK” magazine. No, they weren’t.

“Ramones” features 14 songs in total, seven songs on each side, because Ramones songs come in around two minutes and change. The album opens with one of the best opening tracks of any debut album: “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That wall of sound barrage of guitars and then: “Hey, ho, let’s go!” It never fails to sound like a call to arms. As an introduction to this band, they couldn’t have chosen a better song; it precisely conveyed exactly who the band was and what they were about. 

Fifty years later, “Blitzkrieg Bop” feels ubiquitous. The intro gets blasted at sporting events to raise energy or when something good happens, and it never fails to rally a crowd. That opening track has been featured in at least one video game and a wide selection of TV commercials for a long line of different product offerings: airlines, car brands, fast food, exercise equipment, financial products, mobile phone networks, vaccinations, a cartoon movie, and perhaps most memorably, diet soda, featuring animated pogoing soda cans. 

But in 1976, and in fact the entire duration of the band’s existence (they officially ceased operations in 1996), the Ramones did not achieve chart positions of any note. “Ramones” went to #111 on the Billboard 200, and their highest charting album was 1980’s Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century,” which reached #44 in the U.S. and got as high as #11 in the U.K. “It’s crazy when Phil Spector produces your record and you still don’t have a top ten record,” Eddie Vedder mentioned when he inducted the Ramones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Their singles didn’t do much better. Only three Ramones songs ever made it to the Billboard Hot 100 — “Rockaway Beach,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” and “Do You Wanna Dance,” all absolute bangers that should be enshrined in the culture. “Rockaway Beach” did the best out of the three, and by “best” we’re still talking #66 (and it took a year to get there); the other two only got as high as the 80s. The numerous post-breakup compilations and live albums didn’t fare any better, and not even an appearance on “The Simpsons” in 1993 or numerous other mainstream cinema placements (like the title track for a Stephen King movie, “Pet Sematary”) moved the needle in any meaningful direction from a sales or chart or airplay perspective.

With that information in hand, it won’t be surprising to learn that none of the singles released from the 14 albums put out during the band’s existence (or again, afterwards) garnered any radio airplay on commercial radio (college radio is of course another story), and outside of places like Brazil (and towards the end of their career), the Ramones could not get arrested, much less sell out arenas or anything much larger than a theater. (In Brazil, however, they sold out stadiums and their tour bus was mobbed with crowds that made Beatlemania look like nursery school.) 

“Ramones” also featured such hits as “Beat on the Brat,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” Of course that statement is inaccurate, because the Ramones didn’t have any hits, not in 1976 and not ever. That wasn’t the plan — no one in the Ramones, their management or their record company was pretending that commercial success wasn’t important to them. It just eluded them.

To quote Legs McNeil in “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”: “Those songs are classic American pop songs. Why weren’t they played on the radio?” 

Two words: punk rock. 

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The Ramones were the second band from downtown NYC’s Class of 1975 to be signed to a major label (Patti Smith was first). They had the full support of Sire Records and a great manager in Danny Fields (who would become the subject of the band’s song “Danny Says” later). The band toured the U.S., playing anywhere that would have them; there was no touring circuit for original bands starting out back then. Danny Fields later explained, “Every place we went to, there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there, and when they came back, they did.” (They’re not the only band that can make that claim, but that doesn’t make it untrue or irrelevant.)

A show the band played in London on July 4th, 1976 is considered by the people involved to be a major impetus to the formation of U.K. punk rock, with members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned (and more) in the audience that night. No less than Joe Strummer would later say, “If that Ramones record hadn’t existed, I don’t know that we could have built a scene here. Because it filled a vital gap between the death of the old pub rocking scene and the advent of punk.”

But it would be precisely that historical moment that would be the band’s downfall. When the Sex Pistols’ record came out, initially the Stateside reaction was positive, at least from people in the Ramones’ camp. “Not only did Malcolm [McLaren, Sex Pistols’ manager] steal the scene and repackage it, but the music was good,” Legs McNeil was quoted as saying. “We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become almost like The Beatles and the Stones; we were the new revolution,” Joey said. 

And that might have happened, if the Sex Pistols had booked their first U.S. tour through the kinds of major, music-friendly cities that most bands visit. Instead, Malcolm McLaren wanted the tour routing to go through more authentic, working-class cities, so it opened in Atlanta and traipsed through the Southwest, visiting places like Memphis, San Antonio and Tulsa before finishing up (and breaking up) in San Francisco. 

The Sex Pistols headlining the Palladium in New York City or the Agora in Cleveland wouldn’t have made splashy headlines. But when you play smaller cities that don’t usually get international touring acts, and when everything you hear about the band and the movement they represent is exaggerated and sensationalized, and the band are absolutely willing to play into all of that for the sake of headlines, it’s not going to end up well for anybody. The Sex Pistols arriving in Memphis was the kind of news story that would show up on your local news station at 6 p.m., and once one station ran with it, the rest followed. 

“It was getting such a negative feeling of . . . it was going to destroy the whole thing, which is what happened; it scared everyone else off, scared off the music industry, scared off the radio,” Joey remembered. And then there was the episode of NBC’s “Weekend” news magazine, which would run in place of “Saturday Night Live” one weekend a month. In June of 1977, “Weekend” ran an episode about U.K. punk. Years later, Joey Ramone offered, “One day on 60 Minutes was a thing about the Sex Pistols and the safety pins and everybody gouging each other’s eyeballs out and strangulation, and everybody flipped out, and things changed radically. It really kind of screwed things up for ourselves.”

Danny Fields explained how the view of the Sex Pistols as 100% representative of “punk rock” ended up impacting the Ramones: “. . .when their records went around to radio stations, they intuitively say, ‘What do I know about them? They’re trouble. They throw up, and if we play it, we’ll have to have them here, and they’ll throw up on the console in the recording studio, and we don’t want them. Don’t play their records; it’s easier.’ It’s always easier not to do something than to do it.”

It wasn’t just the Ramones. Blondie’s Debbie Harry complained that the radio stations would tell her, “We like you. Give us something to play,” when they’d just released their version of “Denis,” a surefire pop hit if there was one. Blondie would eventually break through into actual pop stardom, but also had to fight back against the “punk” label.

This explanation is going to feel thoroughly anodyne in 2026, when you can walk into places like Hot Topic or Target and buy merchandise from bands that at least once upon a time were considered “punk.” If you could even find a Ramones T-shirt in the ’70s or ’80s, you weren’t going to wear it anywhere besides a Ramones concert unless you wanted to find yourself in an argument, or worse. Musician Jesse Malin lived in Queens, a subway ride away from CBGB, and yet he tells endless stories about getting hassled by random passersby or having stuff thrown at him from car windows just for dressing differently. 

The Ramones eventually retired because of interpersonal issues: Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend. And it would probably be a lot easier to deal with all of that if your band had achieved the kind of commercial success you deserved and weren’t still touring in an Econoline van. (When they were inducted into the Rock Hall, Eddie Vedder commended them for still touring in a van, but a tour bus might have kept them around a while longer.) The Ramones wrote songs and played music because it was the only thing they wanted to do, the only thing they could do, the only thing that made sense to them. 

Countless bands have given them their props — Pearl Jam took them out on tour, they were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1996, U2 wrote a song about them, among many others  — and the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, their second year of eligibility, but not early enough for Joey to have seen it happen; he died in 2001, and would be followed by Dee Dee (2002), Johnny (2004) and Tommy in 2014. (Later, Ramones CJ and Marky are still carrying the torch.) 

The records are still there and still sound great, even if they didn’t earn their creators the kind of money and lifestyle that they deserved. And the Ramones are still inspiring kids all over the world to write a song, pick up a guitar, and go out and play, no matter how bad they might think they are, because that’s exactly what the Ramones did. 

The post 50 years later, the Ramones’ debut still defines punk appeared first on Salon.com.

The road to Democratic control of the Senate remains steep, but Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity, the misbegotten war in Iran and a wobbly economy have opened a slender path.

The thinking goes that if Democrats can hold every blue seat, prevail in North Carolina and defeat Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, then they must take any two from a list of red states that could well be in some semblance of play: Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska.

Imagine that almost everything goes right. Democrats hold Georgia and New Hampshire. They claim North Carolina, vanquish Collins, and spring upsets in Texas and Alaska. But the chamber remains in GOP hands because Michigan Democrats could not reunify after a bruising primary. Kick away a winnable race in Michigan and, in this scenario, Ohio, Iowa or Nebraska also becomes a must. 

So don’t lose Michigan. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed defeated Rep. Haley Stevens to claim the Democratic nomination. All the instant analysis is true: This was a political earthquake and one of the biggest wins progressives have scored. Stevens was better funded and the candidate of the Democratic establishment. El-Sayed’s win is a sign of the importance of Gaza inside the Democratic coalition, and of shrinking support for Israel. Now, his ability to close the deal this fall will be a crucial test of progressive electability ahead of the 2028 presidential election. 

The race was also closer than expected. With a small number of votes outstanding, El-Sayed’s lead is just under 16,000. He fell short of a clear majority, winning with 48.5%. And while both candidates continue to say all the right things about coming together for what will be a very close battle against an old-school conservative in former GOP Rep. Mike Rogers this fall, the tight margin, El-Sayed’s failure to secure a true majority and the nastiness of the race could make that difficult.

After all, El-Sayed recently had to plead with his backers not to take personal shots at Stevens and her accent online. The airwaves were filled with millions of dollars in negative ads, many of them determined to paint El-Sayed as unelectable in the general. He called Stevens “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account.” She retorted that “Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans.” A unity breakfast might not be enough to paper all that over in a matter of weeks, especially if the super PACs that backed Stevens continue to spend millions to fan the flames against El-Sayed in the general election. 

This race could have been run in a far different and more positive manner. If it had, both progressives and Democrats as a party would be in a much stronger position heading into what will likely be a very competitive general election that decides control of the chamber. The stakes are high and will determine, among other things, whether Trump can confirm Supreme Court justices over the next two years.

Imagine the difference that ranked choice voting would have had in the primary. A third Democrat, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, won over 4% of the vote despite dropping out of the race several weeks ago. She won 61,000-plus votes, almost four times the difference between El-Sayed and Stevens. If Michigan used RCV in its primaries — like Maine, New York City and dozens of cities nationwide — the winner would have been able to claim a majority, and an easier path to unifying the party.

Some $60 million of negative ads flooded Michigan’s airwaves over this primary. Ranked choice voting wouldn’t have stopped that entirely; important, contentious issues were at stake. Outside dollars were a given. Yet RCV has been proven to lower the temperature in races like this and encourage conversation, coalition-building and respect. 

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It’s entirely likely that an RCV race would have looked quite different. McMorrow and other challengers — forced out to provide voters with a binary, two candidate contest without spoilers — would have been able to stay in the race. Then, El-Sayed, Stevens and the others would have had every incentive to build a coalition through second choices to reach 50%. That comes from finding common ground, not from scare ads and nasty attacks. The winner of a race like that would be in far stronger shape, and ready to focus on the Republicans. Instead, El-Sayed is stuck trying to rebuild an intra-party coalition after the primary.

Instead, as McMorrow faded, party leaders and donors leaned on the state senator, a promising, charismatic politician, to exit and reduce the field to two. But this strategy didn’t produce a majority winner. It just limited choices before voters, and the winner still fell short of a majority. Democrats look less unified in a must-win race as a result.

Ranked-choice voting doesn’t fix everything that’s wrong with our politics. It’s not a silver bullet that cures polarization, settles complicated policy debates or ensures that everyone gets along. But it’s such an obviously useful tool in races like this that it makes zero sense not to use it. 

Win or lose, progressives and centrists will debate the meaning of this race for some time to come. That’s fine. In some form, the party is endlessly re-fighting 2016 over and over again. The more immediate issue is that primaries like this are going to continue to be contentious. Democrats would be in a better position to win races they absolutely must win if they adopted ranked choice voting in primaries like Michigan’s this. (Republican primaries would benefit from this nonpartisan tool too). 

This is a lesson that Democrats absolutely must learn ahead of the 2028 presidential primaries. Then, it won’t simply be a schism between centrists and the left, but between multiple candidates within each lane and others representing different perspectives, backgrounds and parts of the country.

It will be painful for Democrats if they fail to take the Senate because they lost Michigan. But if that happens, it might not be because El-Sayed was too progressive for a swing state — but because Democrats chose their nominee through a process that bloodied and embittered everyone with no hope of consensus, and no easy path to reconciliation. In Michigan, and in other bitter primaries to come, they are going to need one.

The post Ranked choice voting could have saved Michigan appeared first on Salon.com.

For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago.

The good doctor exercised his Fifth Amendment rights in response to most questions, correctly pointing out that Paul has an “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution.” Furious that Fauci wouldn’t give him even minor discrepancies as an excuse to launch go-nowhere perjury charges, Paul and other Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted several days later to hold the 85-year-old in contempt. 

Most voters don’t even want to think about the pandemic anymore. But the social media response to the Fauci hearing showed that one group of people wishes it could be 2020 all over again: MAGA diehards. Right-wing accounts went buck wild with posts reviving all their favorite lies from the pandemic, from claiming vaccines don’t work to insisting that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon. The What’s Resonating newsletter laid out the astonishing levels of media coordination on the day of the committee hearing: 

Right-leaning accounts posted 2,300 times about Fauci yesterday—for comparison, that’s more post volume than the Super Bowl (1,900 posts for right-leaning accounts, same for left-leaning accounts). The coordination is notable—Fauci was mentioned in an astonishing 20% of all right-leaning posts yesterday, with three entities mentioning him more than 75 times in a day.

For normal people, yearning for a time when we were socially isolated and afraid of dying from a highly contagious virus is downright bizarre. MAGA, though, has a reason to feel nostalgia for a pandemic that killed millions. It was an era when the GOP got to do what they love more than anything: play the victim as loudly as possible before huge audiences that were especially vulnerable to disinformation.

The pandemic was a painful, scary time that many of us have tried to block out. But at the height of the pandemic, the right found both unity and energy by denying the seriousness of a virus that was, at its height, killing thousands of people a day. Echoing Trump’s “hoax” language about the pandemic, MAGA decided the whole thing was being exaggerated — or even made up altogether — by Democrats for hazy but nefarious purposes. This created endless opportunities for conservative white people to insist that they are the most oppressed, put-upon people on the planet.

This was the era of angry white people going into grocery stores unmasked, so they could film themselves throwing tantrums when the underpaid, scared clerks asked them to follow the rules.  It was a moment when evangelical preachers, always hungry for proof that Christians are facing persecution, claimed it was a violation of religious freedom when they were asked to obey the same bans and restrictions on large indoor gatherings as everyone else. When a vaccine was finally released that offered protection against the deadliest version of the disease, MAGA was unwilling to give up a pandemic that was clearly serving their political purposes. Mass numbers of conservatives refused the vaccine, which cost many Republican lives and drew out the pandemic — and their opportunity to play the victim — for months longer than necessary.

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Fascist movements have historically thrived in times of great social stress that leave people vulnerable to misinformation and eager for scapegoats to blame, and the pandemic era was no different. With people isolated and bored at home during the lockdown, many were more willing to engage in conspiracy theory content that runs rampant online. The pandemic was the peak of QAnon, sucking in millions with elaborate fantasies that Trump was a savior out to defeat a worldwide Satanic child cannibalism cabal. Many people, some of whom had even identified as liberal in the past, were radicalized to the right. Fauci became a favorite scapegoat for people who wanted to believe there was an evil mastermind behind the virus, instead of viral replication and transmission. It’s easy to forget it now, but Jan. 6 was fueled by Covid-19 and the sense of disconnection that drove a lot of once-ordinary people to lose their intellect and rationale. 

Five years later, MAGA isn’t doing so hot. Between the Iran war and a faltering economy, Trump’s presidency is failing, and his approval ratings are in the toilet. In this environment, it has become increasingly hard for conservatives to play the victim when Trump has unleashed a secret police in the form of Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is rounding up people and sending them to detainment camps. People aren’t as isolated; they are reconnecting with the real world. MAGA media is fracturing, and their audiences are a small fraction of what they had during the pandemic. Republican in-fighting has grown to the point where podcaster Tucker Carlson, once a loyal Trump ally, is fueling speculation that he’s going to start a third-party. 

Right-wing politics has always been about escaping from contemporary problems by hiding in nostalgia. After all, “Make America Great Again” is a painfully literal version of that mentality. So it’s no surprise that the movement is responding to their current stress with fantasies about bringing back the glory days. By reviving the harassment campaign against Fauci, the GOP has inadvertently revealed the time they long to return to, an era that is remembered by most people as miserable and deadly. 

There’s no more compelling indictment of MAGA than this: The moment they felt most ascendent was when everyone else was in hell.

The post MAGA has pandemic nostalgia appeared first on Salon.com.