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    Seth Meyers on Musk and his agency’s corruption: ‘It’s so transparent’

    Late-night hosts talked Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s bizarre Oval Office press conference and their dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.Seth MeyersThough Trump promised throughout his campaign to lower grocery prices as president, to date, “we still don’t have a plan for lowering eggs prices,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday night. “But we do have a plan for building hotels in Gaza.”The Late Night host had a theory for why Trump remained so fixated on his “plan”, announced seemingly on a whim at a press conference, to expel Palestinians and build hotels: “It’s called the Gaza Strip, and the only other strip he knows is the Vegas Strip, so he thinks that can work there,” Meyers explained. “And if you think the people around him are going to say, ‘Actually, sir, it’s a different kind of strip,’ just remember that the people around him also suggest Red, White and Blueland” as an alternative name for Greenland.“This is what Trump does,” Meyers continued. “We’ve seen it for years. It’s nothing new. He’s hoping voters will pay attention to his plans for Gaza and Greenland, and ignore what he’s doing to the rest of the government.”Such as disbanding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). After firing its employees, Musk tweeted “CFBP RIP” with a tombstone emoji. “First of all, don’t announce policy via emoji,” Meyers said. “Second, think about how corrupt this is: they’re eliminating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the agency that stops companies from ripping you off. It’s so transparent.” Meyers noted that Musk is in the process of turning X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter that he owns, into a peer-to-peer payment and financial services app, while also dismantling the agency that oversees payments and financial services.At a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Musk defended his conflicts of interest, claiming transparency via posts to the Doge handle on X. Meyers didn’t buy it – “so to find out what our government is up to, we just have to wade through a sea of Nazis, trolls, ads for Cheech & Chong weed gummies and bots with women in bikinis offering to send us 1m units of something called Sex Coin as long as we send our social security and bank routing numbers.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host ripped into Trump’s proposal on Gaza. “Blob the Builder is still going all in on his ridiculous and potentially disastrous plan to force nearly 2 million Palestinians who live in Gaza to go live somewhere else,” he explained. “There seems to be no thought put into this plan outside of just what he says at the press conference.”Asked if the Palestinians didn’t want to leave, Trump answered: “They’re going someplace beautiful, they’re going to be in love with it.”“This is not what you say to people you’re evicting from the place where they live!” Kimmel exclaimed. “This is what you say to your parents when you’re about to put them in a retirement home.”In other Trump chaos, the White House banned reporters from the Associated Press because the outlet refused to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump’s self-proclaimed new title, the Gulf of America. “They’re going to keep kicking journalists out until all they have left are Fox, Newsmax, OAN, OnlyFans and Golf Digest,” Kimmel joked.Google and Apple Maps both fell in line, relabeling the body of water for just American users. “It’s basically the equivalent of giving Trump a binky and hoping he shuts up,” said Kimmel.The Daily ShowAnd on the Daily Show, Jordan Klepper recapped an Oval Office presser hosted by Trump and Musk. “It’s good that we have Elon Musk here,” said Klepper, “because we’ve been watching him slashing programs and shuttering agencies for a month now, and we can finally ask Elon, ‘Why are you doing this?’”Musk defended his unofficial “department of government efficiency” (also known as Doge) because: “It’s incredibly important that the president, the House and the Senate decide what happens, as opposed to a large, unelected bureaucracy.”Though Musk disparaged unelected bureaucrats, Klepper had to ask: “Isn’t that you …? Am I going crazy? Because it feels like I’m watching Drake sing Not Like Us at karaoke. Like, does he not know?“Is having this one unaccountable bureaucrat in charge better than having those other unaccountable bureaucrats in charge?” he continued. “Because at least the others have to follow transparency laws. The only thing transparent about Doge is Elon’s skin.”As Klepper noted, Musk’s financial disclosures are being kept secret, the ‘efficiency’ agency is exempt from open records laws, and when someone on X posted the names of Doge employees, the account was suspended and Musk tweeted “you have committed a crime” – “which, we tried to factcheck with career officials at the FBI, but they’re all working at a Panera now”, Klepper quipped.Musk also defended himself against obvious conflicts of interest, saying: “I fully expect to be scrutinized and get a daily proctology exam.”“Well, I did the exam, and what an asshole,” Klepper retorted.Send us a tip
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    ‘Stand up for what’s right’: Melville House co-founder on publishing Jack Smith and Tulsa reports

    A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media.The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel’s summation of his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: “It is just a report, and we’re just reprinting it. We’re not doing anything to it. We’re not adding anything in the front or back. We’re not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.”But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump’s push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights.Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.Melville House has always been “mission-driven”, Johnson said, describing a company “founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush”.Nonetheless, after Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves “just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.”Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated “whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election”, as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving power.Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November.After Trump’s election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith’s report, covering his work on Trump’s election subversion. Part two, on Trump’s retention of classified information, remains under wraps.Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such “crash publishing” required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would “launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid.“We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they’re one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list.“We knew that wasn’t going to happen this time, because the big houses, we’re guessing, are intimidated – don’t want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he’s going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump’s nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn’t going to put [the Smith report] out. So we’d have the field to ourselves, which is good.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I think there’s a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what’s right.”It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob.No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division.Calling the new Tulsa report “nauseating and gripping”, Johnson said: “We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They’re just aerial shots of devastation. It’s like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.”Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in “libraries and classrooms” as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew “had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.”

    The Jack Smith Report is published in the US on Tuesday More

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    Trump says he will appoint himself chair of Kennedy Center

    Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is appointing himself as chairman of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, adding that he is immediately terminating multiple people from the board of trustees and the current chairman.“At my direction, we are going to make the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., GREAT AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.The Kennedy Center is the country’s national cultural center and is run through a public-private partnership. The idea for such a center began with Eleanor Roosevelt in the 1930s and was authorized by Congress in 1958 . It’s doors officially opened in 1971. The center is known for hosting music, theater, dance, artwork and performance art, and has hosted acts ranging from Tina Turner to Led Zeppelin.A spokesperson for the Kennedy Center said in a statement it was aware of Trump’s Truth Social post, but that it had “received no official communications from the White House regarding changes to our board of trustees”.Some members of the board have received termination notices from the administration, the spokesperson said.The Kennedy Center’s current chairman is David Rubenstein, a billionaire philanthropist and the co-founder of the private equity firm the Carlyle Group. Rubenstein has held the position since 2010 and was set to retire this year. After Trump was elected, the Kennedy Center said it had failed to find a new chair to replace Rubenstein and that he would stay on until September 2026.Rubenstein served as a policy adviser to Jimmy Carter and is reportedly close to Joe Biden. He was first appointed by George W Bush.Members of the board of trustees are typically appointed by the president. Currently, the attorney general Pam Bondi, lobbyist Brian Ballard and singer Lee Greenwood – all Trump supporters – are on the board, according to the Hill. Several Biden appointees are still on the board too, including press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. First ladies are honorary members and Congress can also designate ex-officio members.“We have had a collaborative relationship with every presidential administration,” the Kennedy Center spokesperson said, adding that it has long had “a bipartisan board of trustees that has supported the arts in a non-partisan fashion”.Rubenstein’s position, which Trump says he is now seizing, has always been appointed by the center’s board members, according to the act authorized by Congress in 1958.“There is nothing in the center’s statute that would prevent a new administration from replacing board members,” the center’s spokesperson said. “However, this would be the first time such action has been taken with the Kennedy Center’s board.”Trump said the reason for terminating Rubenstein and some members of the board of trustees is that they don’t “share our Vision for a Golden Age in Arts and Culture”. In his Truth Social post, he also brought up the topic of queer people, something he has raised repeatedly since being sworn into office, saying that the Kennedy Center “featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth – THIS WILL STOP”.The Atlantic first reported Trump’s decision to appoint himself as chairman of the Kennedy Center. During his first term, he didn’t attend a single annual gala event at center – a tradition US presidents have long partaken in. Trump had a prickly relationship with the center after artists protested against his administration and threatened to boycott events at the White House.Now, it seems, Trump wants back in. Capping off his Truth Social post, he wrote: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” More

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    Seth Meyers on Elon Musk’s US takeover: ‘A billionaire coup’

    Late-night hosts spoke about the damage being caused by Donald Trump’s new right-hand man as well as the president’s unconvincing attempts to show off his Christian side.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers started by saying that despite the recent election, “the real president is Elon Musk”, who has shown he is in control despite being “very unpopular” with voters.He said the billionaire has been launching a “de facto takeover of the federal government” with his “team of unaccountable hatchet men”.Recent polls have shown that Americans are unhappy with Musk’s increased control but Trump has been defending him during typically hard-to-understand rambles, resembling “a real-time version of Mad Libs”.Musk has been frantically figuring out what to keep and what to cut within the government, with Meyers showing that he ultimately wants a “wholesale removal of regulations”.Meyers called it “a billionaire coup”.Musk has been busy dismantling USAid, with elected senators recently being blocked from entering the agency’s headquarters. “I’d be so embarrassed if I was a senator and I couldn’t enter the building based on something called Doge,” he said.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also criticised Musk and his “crew of teenage mutant incels” who are busy trying to “tear apart 250 years of democracy like seagulls fighting over a bag of french fries”.They are trying to fire many people within the federal government and part of that has seen the White House ordering the CIA to send an unclassified email with the names of all employees hired over the last two years.Colbert calmed viewers by saying that according to an official, the people would be protected as the list only included the first names and first initial of the last name. “Well then we’re fine,” he said. “That is an uncrackable code.”He then joked that no one would be able to figure out who he was targeting if he said that it would be funny and good for the US if “obvious fascist Elon M got his junk stuck in a four slice toaster”.Colbert then said “Trump’s goons are also doing increasingly useless things just to scour the government clean of any trace of DEI” including taking down any reference to diversity or inclusion on walls or desks. “No federal agency is safe from the anti-compassion cyberdorks,” he said.They have also been ensuring that bathroom signs comply with Trump’s ruling. “What a waste of time,” he said. “The only bathroom signs that should be taken down are the confusing ones in theme restaurants.”He then continued by saying that “it’s not all bad news, some of it is also scary” as he spoke about a second bird flu strain that has now infected cattle. “This can mean only one thing: the birds are having sex with the cows,” he said. “Please no one tell the bees, they’re going to feel so betrayed.”Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host spoke about this weekend’s Super Bowl, “also known as ‘get drunk at a friend of a friend’s weird living room’ evening”.Kendrick Lamar is the half-time performer, which means that it will lead to the “largest group of people ever to see anyone call Drake a bitch ever”.Trump will be in attendance and Kimmel joked that “he said he’s gonna let Elon pick the winner this year”.This week also saw the president attend the National Prayer Breakfast because he “doesn’t like it when people worship anyone but him”.He added that “of all the unbelievable things about Donald Trump, religious people believing he is also a religious person might be the toughest one to understand”.Kimmel said that if Trump met Jesus, “he’d call him a loser, he’d tell him to get a haircut and put a shirt on”.He also said the only reason he is going to the Super Bowl is because “he can’t stand to have even one day when he’s on TV less than Taylor Swift”. More

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    Sad but true – Donald Trump really did wrestle his way into the White House | David Moon

    Do you remember World Wrestling Entertainment? For many people, the show, in which muscle-bound wrestlers in tight tights throw one another around in staged fights, is a nostalgic throwback to the early 2000s, when it played briefly on Channel 4. Today, its mix of soap opera, theatre and athletic spectacle still draws millions of viewers each week. To some, it’s a guilty pleasure; to others, timeless entertainment. Still, few would associate it with the serious world of politics.For Donald Trump, though, professional wrestling is a lifelong passion. His announcement in November that the former CEO of WWE, Linda McMahon, would take up the role of education secretary in his cabinet of curiosities elicited shock and disbelief. It is impossible to fully understand US politics today without understanding the significance of pro wrestling.Long before McMahon’s nomination, Trump was the first occupant of the Oval Office to be a WWE Hall of Fame inductee, an honour that marked his decades-long business relationship with the company. Trump has hosted two WrestleManias, the WWE’s flagship annual event, appeared more than a dozen times on WWE programmes, played a leading role in two storylines, and gotten physical (albeit to a very limited, awkward degree) around the ring itself. It’s now widely acknowledged that pro wrestling is key to Trump as a political phenomenon. Yet its influence is bigger than Trump. Wrestling has become a key element to understand the reshaping of US politics itself – particularly the Republican right.Just look at the 2024 presidential campaign. Jesse “the Body” Ventura was named by the Robert F Kennedy Jr campaign as a potential vice-presidential running mate. Hulk Hogan tore his shirt off at the Republican national convention, rallied “Trumpaholics” at Madison Square Garden, and hinted at a possible role in a future Trump administration on Fox News. For his part, Donald Trump participated in a Fox News segment with former WWE superstar Tyrus, who dubbed him “the people’s champion” and gave him a replica title belt. He joined the podcasts of pro wrestling icon Mark “the Undertaker” Calloway and current WWE superstar Logan Paul, as well as receiving the endorsement of Calloway and Glenn Jacobs – better known as WWE’s Kane, the Undertaker’s storyline brother – in a TikTok video.One explanation for such behaviour is simply that it’s strategic. A former boxing promoter, Trump has become a fixture at combat sports in general, especially Ultimate Fighting Championship (which merged with WWE to form the media conglomerate TKO in 2023), whose CEO, Dana White, was one of the first people brought on stage at his victory speech. By attaching himself to entertainment forms widely dismissed in polite society, Trump burnishes his anti-establishment vibes while reaching out to a younger, often politically apathetic, male electorate that populates these fandoms. It is pro wrestling, however, that is his natural home. The idea that Trump’s pro wrestling background is used strategically is also linked to his infamous campaign rallies. From the fireworks and thumping entrance music, to the carefully choreographed conflict and spectacle on the stage, the atmosphere of these rallies has often been compared with pro wrestling shows.View image in fullscreenTrump frequently resorts to call-and-response chants and indulges in “smack talk” against the “losers and haters” – assigning them diminishing nicknames such as “lyin’ Ted”, “crooked Hillary” and “sleepy Joe”. Being part of a pro wrestling audience – much like attending a Trump rally – allows spectators to experience emotions that are usually forbidden. They can scream, shout and display rage in a rare public context where it’s socially permitted. Trump rallies are safe spaces where it’s acceptable to emote: to shout and cheer for your country and candidate, while vocalising hatred for political opponents. In 2016, it was possible to think these similarities were coincidental. Today, the influence of pro wrestling is unavoidable. Watch the post-election footage of Donald Trump emerging to the strains of Kid Rock’s American Badass – the Undertaker’s previous entrance music – through the roaring crowd of a recent UFC event and it’s impossible not to make the connection.As the US political sphere becomes one gigantic pro wrestling arena, traditional theories and frameworks are inadequate for making sense of events. We need, therefore, to turn to pro wrestling for answers, particularly the industry-specific concept of “kayfabe”. Initially a label for the illusion that pro wrestling’s predetermined performances were “real”, today, kayfabe describes the peculiar way fans engage with pro wrestling as an acknowledged performance form. In her own insightful writings on pro wrestling and politics, the writer and author Abraham Josephine Riesman proposes “neokayfabe” as a label for Trump-inspired Republican strategies that deliberately blur truth and fiction so that producers and consumers lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.The idea of politics as kayfabe can be taken further. In my view, the relationship between pro wrestling fans and performances are analogous to how electorates engage with contemporary politics more generally. Trump and his supporters are an extreme case of a wider phenomenon. Enjoying pro wrestling involves a deliberate suspension of disbelief, whereby fans acknowledge the theatricality of the performance while investing in it emotionally. Spectators collaborate with the performers by playing along as “believing fans”, cheering and booing as conventions dictate, embracing the spectacle even while recognising its pretence. In pro wrestling terms this is called “keeping kayfabe”.This mirrors people’s engagement with the artifice surrounding contemporary, professionalised politics. We all know, for example, that politicians’ words are written by speechwriters, based on focus group findings, targeted at specific voter demographics, identified by pollsters and strategists. Yet supporters suspend disbelief, cheer conference speeches and emotionally invest in sentiments they express, all while knowing and accepting and even discussing in detail the calculations behind their construction. In other words, they keep kayfabe. Politics increasingly amounts to this: electorates acting out their role as “believing supporters” while maintaining a knowing cynicism about the whole performance.What makes Trump special is thus not that he personifies “pro wrestlingified” politics, but that his supporters are willing to suspend their disbelief and support his campaign when its fakery is so blatant. If the best our political systems offer their understandably jaded electorates is the option to “suspend disbelief” and “keep kayfabe” with a political campaign they view as essentially simulated, we shouldn’t be shocked many choose the one with an anti-establishment pose and chaotic performance style (each products of a pro wrestling pedigree). It may be a performance, sure, but at least it’s entertaining.

    Dr David Moon is head of division for politics at Bath University More

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    Seth Meyers: ‘Trump’s fake populism was a con and it couldn’t be any clearer’

    Late-night hosts talk Joe Biden’s act of clemency and Donald Trump becoming Time’s Person of the Year.Seth MeyersSeth Meyers could only laugh on Thursday evening at the image of Trump, just named Time magazine’s Person of the Year, ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.The incoming president looked delighted – or, as the Late Night host put it, “like a Make-A-Wish kid who faked being sick until he got what he wanted”.“Before he was elected he toured the country telling grandpas in folding chairs he was just like them,” he added, “and as soon as he wins he’s on a fucking marble balcony on Wall Street rocking a bell like he just ate a 72-ounce steak in under an hour.”As for the cover, Meyers had concerns. “My only issue is this glamour shot of Trump in a pose I’ve literally never seen him take before,” he said. “I’ve only ever seen him screaming or hunched over, so apologies if I’m not buying Donnie Contemplation over here.”Moreover, “this guy has pretended for over a decade to be a populist champion of the working class and now he’s on literal Wall Street, getting pats on the back from the richest people in the country,” he said. “The only way that Trump’s hypocrisy could be any more on the nose is if he started doing campaign events with actual fat cats.”Case in point: though Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign to lower grocery prices, he told Time that “it’s hard to bring things down once they’re up … You know, it’s very hard.”“Fuck me, I can’t believe we really have to spend the next four years watching this idiot relearn how hard it is to be president,” said Meyers. “Yeah man, we know it’s hard. Everyone knows.”“Trump’s fake populism was a con and it couldn’t be any clearer,” he added. “The second that he won he started rubbing elbows with his rich Wall Street buddies and admitting that his promises were all BS.”Jimmy KimmelIn Los Angeles, Jimmy Kimmel also lamented Trump’s Time magazine cover. “Sadly there’s no one left to roll it up and spank him with it,” he quipped. “Maybe Elon will do it for him? I don’t know.”According to Time, the Person of the Year distinction is bestowed on the person, group or concept that had the biggest impact for good or for ill. “Well, that’s him all right,” said Kimmel. “It was a no-brainer in every sense of the word.”As for Trump’s appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, “he jammed his little finger on that bell like it was the Diet Coke button in the Oval Office,” Kimmel joked.Kimmel also touched on Joe Biden’s last-minute act of clemency, commuting more than 1,500 criminal sentences. “Before this, the biggest act of clemency was on election night on November 5,” said Kimmel.“Joe Biden is handing out pardons like they’re Werther’s Originals,” he added. “He has no more malarkey to give right now.”Stephen ColbertAnd on The Late Show, Stephen Colbert also noted Biden’s clemency, in which he also pardoned 39 people. “Wow, I did not know he had 39 sons,” the host joked.The mass commutation is a tradition for all outgoing presidents, but Biden committed the largest single-day act of clemency in modern history. “I believe that is an empathetic and generous act of forgiveness and hope – that will be knocked out of the headlines as soon as Trump threatens to bomb Manila because he cut himself on one of their envelopes,” said Colbert. “That’s coming. You know that’s coming.”Colbert also laughed at Pornhub’s year in review, which revealed generational trends, such as the fact that 18-to-24-year-olds spend, on average, 76 fewer seconds than any other age group on videos. “I guess young folks today don’t have the attention span,” Colbert quipped. “Back in the 90s, if you wanted to see boobs on your computer, you had to listen to this,” he added before a dial-up tone.The site also provided a map highlighting the most distinct searches in each state, such as Tennessee’s “chubby milf”, Delaware’s “mature” (“I assume in honor of Joe Biden,” Colbert joked), Maryland’s “girlfriend” (“dorks!”) and Pennsylvania’s “naked women”. “That’s clearly Amish teens on rumspringa getting their first crack at a computer,” Colbert noted. More

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    ‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years’: actor Brian Cox on overrated co-stars, charmless politicians and the joy of smoking weed

    As I leave the office, my editor wishes me luck. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!” she says. A moment later, the deputy editor asks where I’m off to. To see Brian Cox, the actor, I say. “Oh!” she says, with a rather-you-than-me look. “Hope he’s not too grumpy!”Cox has played grumpy for going on 60 years. All sorts of grumpiness – idiot grumpy (independent candidate Bob Servant in the TV comedy of the same name), world-weary grumpy (school principal Dr Nelson Guggenheim in Wes Anderson’s film Rushmore), psychopathic grumpy (the first movie incarnation of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter), egomaniacal grumpy (Robert McKee in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation) and, of course, brutal grumpy as media mogul Logan Roy in the TV series Succession. In recent years, he has often appeared on chatshows being grumpy about the state of the world. In 2022, he published his hugely entertaining memoirs, in which he was grumpy about method acting, useless directors, vain thesps, useless politicians, the church, capitalism, cancel culture, you name it. He was also fabulously indiscreet – Steven Seagal, whom he worked with on The Glimmer Man, is “as ludicrous in real life as he appears on screen”, Johnny Depp is “so overblown, so overrated”, Tarantino’s work is “meretricious”, Edward Norton is “a nice lad, but a bit of a pain in the arse because he fancies himself as a writer-director”, while Michael Caton-Jones, who directed him in Rob Roy, is a “complete arsehole”.‘I feel I’ve upset a few people over the years,” Cox says with an angelic smile. “The problem is, I can be quite a loudmouth. Sometimes I have been fairly volatile, and I think, ‘Why the fuck did you say that?’” He’s looking back over his epic career. “There’s a lot of stuff I’ve done which I look at and think, ‘That was crap.’” But today’s not the time for negativity. “No, I’m not going to go down that road.”Blimey, I say, we’re going to have to out you as a diplomat? He laughs – a lovely youthful chuckle. “Yes! You can out me as a diplomat!” he says enthusiastically. The thing is, he adds, certain people are overrated. We’re talking about his memoirs, and the unflinching references to the likes of Depp and Seagal. “But then they probably think they’re overrated as well. So I’m not saying anything they don’t think anyway.”View image in fullscreenWe meet at a hotel in London’s West End, close to the Haymarket theatre where he’s rehearsing The Score, about the ageing Bach, directed by Trevor Nunn. Cox stars in the play opposite his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, who is playing his stage wife. Cox looks so dapper in 50 shades of brown – brogues, socks, checked trousers and jacket, all offset with a purple tie. As a young man, he looked older than his years – a squat, Sherman tank of a man made for middle age. Now, at 78, with snow-white hair and a goatee, he looks surprisingly youthful.I ask him why he so often gets cast as grumps. He holds his hands up, nonplussed. Is it because he is one? “No, I’m not like that at all. It’s the antithesis of who I am, actually.” He stops to think about it. “No, that’s not entirely true. Of course, I get grumpy. Particularly about politics, I get very grumpy. A lot of that makes me angry. The failure of the Labour party in particular.” Pause. “But I don’t want to get into that.” Another pause. “Listen, I could go on for ages.” And another.One, two, three. And he’s off. “I don’t know why the Labour party is called the Labour party. It’s not labour orientated. I just think … ”He exhales with loud disappointment. “Keir Hardie, the guy who started it all, was an extraordinary man. And it was a very inclusive thing he was after – social justice. And this lot coming in now, they’re not exercising social justice. It’s true that the last lot left us in deep shit, so there’s a lot of stuff they’ve got to do, but they’ve got to be a bit canny about it in order not to alienate the folk. And Starmer is not exactly the most charming of individuals. He’s not Mr Charm. He’s not got the thing Tony Blair had, which served him brilliantly till hubris got the better of him. Starmer is minus one on that score.” Nor does he rate Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, on the charm front. “She’s had a charm bypass. There’s no question.” He laughs again. But he’s worried – for Scotland, for Britain, for Europe, for the world.Cox has been campaigning with the group Independent Age against the scrapping of the winter fuel payments for pensioners who aren’t on certain benefits, urging older people to check whether they are eligible for pension credit. “I just think it’s not on. It’s unjust. And means testing?” He hisses the word with contempt. “Means testing is something they did in the 30s. And I find that … I don’t know.” He stops, lost for words. “I can’t get with it at all.”View image in fullscreenHe loves his politics. For many years, he was a Labour loyalist. “I was a big Labour man. I was the voice of Labour for the 1997 campaign.” Eventually, he fell out with Blair over Iraq. As for Corbyn, he says, he was not cut out to be a leader. “Jeremy Corbyn is a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a professional backbencher. He’s a naysayer. And you can’t just be a naysayer, you’ve got to come up with something else in its place. That’s what progress is about.”And just to show he’s no naysayer, he’ll name the person most suited to the job. “I was all for Andy Burnham.” Unfortunately, he says, Burnham is mayor of Greater Manchester rather than a Labour MP. “But what he’s done in Manchester is phenomenal. And he’s keen on the idea that I’m keen on, which is a federal Britain. I believe the way we will survive and come out of the fucking shite that we’ve been in, and keep regurgitating again and again, is by being a federal society where each country has its own say. You can’t separate these islands off, but we’ve got to come together on a federal basis. Not as subjects.”Cox had a fascinating childhood, and is still exploring how it shaped him. He was born in Dundee, to observant Catholic parents. He was the youngest of five siblings – his oldest sister was 17 years his senior. His father, Charles, known as Chic, ran a grocer’s in a deprived part of Dundee; his mother was a spinner in the jute mills. Chic was a kind, sociable man who sold stuff on tick to the needy. “We lived in a tenement, and my dad had the grocer’s shop for 25 years, so he was lower middle class. Not working class.” The flat had two bedrooms – the three girls slept in one room in a single bed, his parents slept in the other, while Cox and his older brother bedded down in the living room.There were three landmarks within a street of where they lived – the church, the library and the cinema. He went to the church because he had to, the library because he wanted to, and the cinema because he was smitten. “My first love was cinema. There were 21 cinemas in my hometown, and I visited every single one of them.” From the age of six, he went by himself. First, he fell for Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin’s slapstick, then, by the age of nine, he was watching serious films about corruption and thwarted ambition such as On the Waterfront. There was no question, he says, that he would become an actor. “I knew this was my trade.”View image in fullscreenWere there any actors he knew, in the family or among friends? “No, but there were performers.” He looks at the biscuit next to his coffee. “D’you want it? I’m diabetic so I can’t eat it. Every Hogmanay the flat was packed with 70 people and I’d be summoned at 1am to perform.” How old was he? “I was three.” Was he the only one summoned? “No, everybody was. My second eldest sister, May, had a great voice. I’d do Al Jolson impersonations. It was weird for a wee boy to sing “Climb up on my knee. Sonny Boy, though you’re only three”! I always remember the effect on the room. There’s something about the room when it’s focused on something. The dynamic changes. Human beings get into a harmony with one another. It’s a wonderful feeling, and I thought, I want to be a part of that.”When he was eight, his father died and his life was uprooted. They discovered that Chic had given so much away on tick, he had left the family in debt. His mother never recovered from his death and their new poverty, and she had severe mental health problems from then on. Cox was farmed out to his three sisters. He left school at 15 and went to work at Dundee Repertory, and at the age of 17 went to England to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.“The 60s were amazing. It was the time of social mobility, when you were welcomed. When I came to drama school, people made it obvious they were happy that I was there. I felt so liberated. London to me has always represented freedom. I loved the sense that I was allowed to be who I was and celebrated for coming from my class.” Does he think he would have a chance of making it nowadays, coming from his background? “No, I wouldn’t. The conditions are so different now.”He really hoped to be an American movie actor, but of course that was impossible. So he settled for being a British theatre actor. And this is where his identity started to fragment. He wanted to be the best he possibly could be in theatre, and that meant excelling in Shakespeare, and Shakespeare was unambiguously English. So Cox started to think of himself as British at best, possibly even a little bit English, and he became more and more divorced from his Scottishness. He moved away from his homeland physically and mentally.Ever since he fell out with Blairism, he has been reconnecting with his Scottishness – or more accurately his Celticness. He recently had a DNA test and discovered he is 88% Irish and 12% Scottish. And it makes sense to him now.View image in fullscreenCox campaigned for Scottish independence and became active in the Scottish National party. Did he ever consider going into politics? “Yes. Alex [Salmond] wanted me to stand as an SNP candidate. I just don’t believe in the word national. It’s got too many connotations. It should be called the Scottish Independence party. SIP.” Cox became close to Salmond, the SNP’s former leader who died in October. Salmond was a controversial figure, who was cleared of 12 charges of sexual assault in 2020, with one charge of sexual assault with intent to rape found not proven. “Alex wasn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, but his political thinking was quite brilliant. Probably the most brilliant we’ve had. He was a visionary. I saw a lot of Alex. He was great fun, a bon viveur.”Did he ever warn him about his behaviour? “I never got to that stage. I wish I had. Someone had asked me about his questionable relationship to women. I won’t go into the details. And I think that was problematic.” Was Salmond aware it was problematic? “He wasn’t a fool so he had to be aware of what was going on, but he got let off. He was never salacious in my company. I just liked his brilliance; his sense of the world.”One reason Cox wasn’t tempted by politics is that he has always loved his profession. Acting has been a calling; a vocation. Cox gave up on his Catholicism long ago because it made no sense to him. “If you want a real church, go to the theatre; that tells the truth. Or the cinema. Go and see the performing arts.” He talks about the great directors with awe, paying a special tribute to two who have passed on – Michael Elliott who directed him in a stage production of Moby Dick in 1984, and Lindsay Anderson, who cast him in In Celebration, his second film, in 1975, set in the Derbyshire mining town of Langwith, and also starring the great Alan Bates. “Michael Elliott and Lindsay Anderson were the two people who gave me standards – both were of Scottish extraction, it has to be said. It’s a sort of purity of vision. I loved working with both of them. I’ve still got Lindsay’s notes.”Cox, famously, can’t stand method acting. He believes it’s pointless, selfish, an enemy of the imagination and destroys the atmosphere for others on set. He has described the technique used by his Succession co-star Jeremy Strong, who plays one of his three children, as “fucking annoying”. But, today, the newly circumspect Cox would like to accentuate the positive. “He was wonderful to act with. I had no argument with Jeremy’s acting.” But? “He would be an even better actor if he just got rid of that so there would be much more inclusiveness in what he did.”Isn’t it a pain when you can’t have real conversations with a cast member because they are permanently in character? “Well, it’s not good for the ensemble. It creates hostility. That’s the problem.” Did he talk to Strong about it? “No, not in the way I would like to have talked to him, but it’s a very emotive subject for people who follow the Strasberg line.”View image in fullscreenCox is talking about Lee Strasberg, regarded as the father of method acting in America. Last year, Cox suggested that if Strong had been more relaxed about his technique it would have been helpful for the Succession cast: “Go back to your trailer and have a hit of marijuana, you know?” Does he hit the marijuana? “Oh yes,” he says. What does it do for him? “It relaxes me.” He says it was only in middle age that he discovered the joy of a spliff. He was introduced to it by the uncle of a former girlfriend. He does a Cockney wide boy impersonation of him. “He was staying with me, and I’d come home and say it’s difficult for me to switch off, and he said, ‘Have you ever tried the weed?’ I’d always been very against that because when I was young I thought drugs just obfuscated the career path. And probably it would have at that time. So he said, ‘Why don’t you try some weed?’ So I did, and I just thought, ‘Oh GOD! It’s just the best way to get rid of the day.’”Succession has made Cox more famous than he ever had been. A mixed blessing, he says. Beforehand, he would get stopped by people who recognised him, but didn’t know why. Now there’s no doubt. Strangers not only ask for selfies, they also beg him to tell them to fuck off Logan Roy style, which often he’s happy to do, with feeling.Looking back at earlier profiles, it’s an astonishing career progression. In the 1980s, when he won the Laurence Olivier award for best actor in a new play for Rat in the Skull, and Critics Circle award for Titus Andronicus and The Taming of the Shrew, we were told he was a latecomer to success. In his 70s, he has won a Golden Globe and been Emmy nominated three years on the trot for playing Succession’s dyspeptic media mogul, who some have compared to Rupert Murdoch. “There’s a lot of, ‘Oh Brian Cox, isn’t he doing well now?’” he says. “But I’ve done well my whole career. I’ve had a great career.”Succession has, however, given him opportunities that he might not otherwise have had. He has just finished directing his first movie. Glenrothan is a family saga about a whisky distillery, which he calls his love letter to Scotland. What he has learned most from the experience, he says, is that directing is the wrong word for the job. “I realised I’m not a director, but a curator.” What’s the difference? “Film is a communicative art, where you’re curating brilliant costume designs with brilliant set designs with a brilliant DP. It’s not you. You’re just gathering that together and organising it, rather than saying we must go there and do this and do that. Not me, me, me. I mean the film may be shite, but at least it’s shite on my terms.”He has worked alongside his wife, Nicole Ansari-Cox, before; he directed her in 2020 in Sinners, a play about a woman stoned for adultery. “I love directing her. Or even curating her! She’s great – so good, so open.” Before marrying Ansari-Cox, he had two children with the actor Caroline Burt, to whom he was married for 19 years. His oldest is the actor Alan Cox, now in his mid-50s, who played the young John Mortimer in the TV drama A Voyage Round My Father.Cox has straddled the classes over the years, and known both poverty and considerable wealth. Burt came from an upper middle class family, and they sent their children to prestigious public schools. He has often said he was lacking as a father first time round – impatient, absent. But now he’s not so sure. “I think that’s just to do with the fact that I got married so young first time. I was 21 and had my first kid at 24. It was all alien to me.”View image in fullscreenHe has experienced being both a young father and an old one. His two sons with Nicole, Orson and Torin (aged 22 and 20, respectively), have grown up in New York, where the family live. He becomes gooey when talking about them. “I still look at their baby pictures. I miss them from when they were small. They’re now grown adults. They’re ridiculously tall, which is embarrassing because I’m only 5ft 8in and Nicole’s 5ft 2in.” How tall are they? “6ft 4in and 6ft 3in. It’s something about America. I used to think, ‘If I go to America, I’ll grow tall. Well, I’ll be taller.’ And of course I never lived in America when I was young, so I never got tall!”As a US citizen, how does he feel about the return of Donald Trump as president? “The penny doesn’t seem to drop about him. I can’t understand it. That’s why it’s so shocking. A man known to be sexist, racist, a suspected rapist … ” He turns puce, and struggles to get the words out. “And he’s got a big Catholic vote behind him … and I kept thinking, ‘How does that tie in with Catholic consciousness?’” No wonder, he says, that he gave up on religion. “It’s all bollocks. BOLLOCKS,” he roars. I’ve never met anybody who says bollocks with such ferocity. Then he rows back. “I don’t want to be disrespectful of people who believe, so bollocks is a bit harsh.”The older he gets, the more he wants to know why we’re on Earth – what our purpose is, if there is any. And the re-election of Trump makes him even more baffled. “We don’t understand who the fuck we are. We really don’t. We have no fucking clue who we are. How did we get to a stage where 80 million Americans will elect this fucking, you know, to become president.” He says “fucking” every bit as ferociously as he does “bollocks”.Does the US election make him lose faith in people?” “No, it doesn’t make me lose faith in people. It just makes me realise people are stupid. We’re in for a pretty rough old four years coming up.” Does he think he’ll stay in the US with Trump in power? “I don’t know. I’ve got to because my sons are there. But I’ll try to spend as much time here as I can.”We change the subject to something more positive. He tells me how he got together with Nicole. He’d previously met her one evening in 1990, when he was playing Lear in Hamburg. They talked, they danced, and then eight years elapsed before they saw each other again. By now he was single, recently out of a long-term relationship, and working on Broadway. “I got this message from the stage doorman, Jerry, and he said, ‘This broad came here last night. Really good-looking broad, she left this note, and I had one of those weird thoughts, ‘If I open this note, it’s going to change my life.’ I literally had this premonition. I’ve never experienced anything like this in my life.” And it did. He had just heard there was a no-show, so he rang Nicole and offered her the ticket. “We got together over that weekend – 1998, 26 years ago.”View image in fullscreenHe has previously said the secret to a happy relationship is separate bedrooms. Did he mean it? “That helps.” Why? “Because it means we’re independent. We’re not dependent on each other. I mean it’s very hard at the moment because we’re having to share a room, as I’ve got such a small flat in London. It’s weird. The place is such a fucking mess.” Normally, back home in America, they have a totally different set-up. “We visit each other.” Does he stay overnight if he visits? “Yeayeayea. The secret of a happy marriage is to allow the person to be the person and not make them into what you want to make them.”I ask if he thinks about death. “Yes, all the time. I have a fantasy every night about how I’m going to die. I don’t think about it in a depressing way. I just think of all the possible scenarios.” What’s his favourite? “Going without fuss, wrapped up in bed with a cup of tea, maybe with the telly on.” I think you may have a long wait ahead of you, I say. “Maybe. Maybe.” I hope so.It’s time to leave. We head off together. He talks about where I grew up in Manchester, the years he spent there working in the theatre, and the people and places he loves that I may know. Grumpy? No way. Sure, he’s passionate about a better world and pointing out all that’s bad in the present one. Yes, he’s a loudmouth with a penchant for roaring “Bollocks” at the world’s shysters and hypocrites. But, whisper it, Brian Cox may just be one of life’s great enthusiasts. The Score is at Theatre Royal Haymarket in London from 20 February to 26 April 2025, trh.co.uk More

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    ‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

    He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”Separated is based on the NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (“one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had”, says the Oscar-winning Morris) and premieres on the MSNBC network on 7 December. It is an excruciatingly timely reminder of how Trump ripped 5,500 children from their parents (up to 1,400 of whom are not yet confirmed as reunited).The 93-minute documentary forensically details how the first Trump administration’s policy of family separations was deliberate, systematic and intentionally inhumane, leaving children in wire-mesh cages with feelings of fear and abandonment. Trump said with casual cruelty: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. I know it sounds harsh but we have to save our country.”Wearing white shirt and spectacles, sipping from a white coffee mug and speaking slowly in honeyed tones, Morris reflects: “The separations was an abomination. It was racist, was cruel, was unnecessary. As one of the interviewees in my film says, there were other levers that we could pull. This seemed to be something we did not need to do.”Trump had come into office promising a crackdown on illegal immigration including the construction of a border wall. The pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) was ditched in favour of something more draconian.Family separations under his administration began as early as March 2017 under a pilot programme in El Paso, Texas. The fact it is was happening covertly undermines the notion that it could act as a deterrent.A “zero tolerance” policy, officially announced in spring 2018, marked a significant escalation. It mandated the prosecution of all adults crossing the border illegally. Anyone who did not arrive at a designated port of entry and claimed asylum would be arrested.While the policy never specifically called for children to be taken from parents, separation became inevitable because the adult was detained and charged. Since children were not allowed to be held in a federal jail, they were taken from their parents and placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Jonathan White, a civil servant who worked at the ORR and fought against the policy, says in the film: “Harm to children was part of the point. They believed it would terrify families into not coming.”Images of children held in cages in a McAllen, Texas, facility triggered outrage in June 2018. But Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that there was a policy of separating families at the border and sought to shift blame to Congress, even though the enforcement of laws happens at the president’s discretion. The Bush and Obama administrations had largely allowed families to stay together.Morris comments: “There was a totally fatuous claim that is made by Kirstjen Nielsen in the film: we’re just following the law – if you arrest a criminal and they have a child with him or her, you separate them.“There have been miserable policies towards immigrants from probably every administration, the first Bush on through to Donald Trump. But none of those administrations felt the need to do what he did. It was considered to be a step too far, a no-no, and yet they embraced it anyway.”He continues: “There are a lot of things that get to me but what really appalls me is that they would separate nursing infants from their mothers. This is clearly not right. What’s the word I’m searching for? This is wrong.”For Morris, the child separation saga pointed to a wider issue. “It’s an issue about racism and what I see as the racist rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his acolytes. I find it repulsive. I often like to remind people that racism is disgusting and it’s also bad manners. Haven’t we been taught not to act like that? Isn’t that part of the repertoire of being a civilised, cultured human being?“I hate analogies, but like everyone else, I can’t avoid using them. I like to tell people, as an American Jew, I always wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, more specifically to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s. Now I know a lot more about what it must have been like.”Morris’s works include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, American Dharma and My Psychedelic Love Story. Separated came with some distinct challenges. Much of the separation process happened away from TV cameras; the director compensations with dramatisations to portray a Guatemalan mother and son experiencing the border crossing, separation and reunification.View image in fullscreenIt was also hard to get interviews with those involved. Morris explains: “There are all kinds of impediments to getting people to talk; I’ve never seen anything this severe. If you’re working for the government, for example, like Jonathan White was working for the government, you’re constrained. You’re not allowed to talk without getting the permission of your superiors.“Most people who are still working in some capacity for the government simply would not talk and it didn’t matter how much begging and how much cajoling I might do. Jonathan would and that represents an extraordinary act of courage on his part.“He felt that the issues were so important that he had to talk. Call him a whistleblower. Call him whatever you want to call him. He did something that was incorrect and greatly appreciated by me. He took risks in order to tell a story which I believe needed to be told. A hero.”In his interview White describes Scott Lloyd, the head of the ORR, as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history”, given White’s disturbing lack of awareness of the trauma inflicted on children under his care.Morris reflects: “Why is he doing the job? He’s a political appointee. He was known for his anti-abortion activism and that was his chief concern: preventing any of the women in ORR custody from ever getting abortions, even though at that time Roe was the law of the land.“Was Scott Lloyd interested very much in the care of people in his charge? I don’t know. It seems to me – I hate to make these inferences but I don’t hate them so much that I’m unwilling to make them – that he was currying favour with the administration. He was interested in self-advancement. He was ambitious and perfectly willing to do the bidding of the hardliners in the Trump administration.”Separated is also a study in the bureaucratic machinations behind how the sausage is made. “There is a very strong theme running through this about bureaucrats and bureaucracy, good bureaucrats and bad bureaucrats. Most interesting to me in the story is how pliable our morality is.“If we need to find a way to justify the most appalling behaviour, we somehow find a way to do it. You can listen to Kirstjen Nielsen braying like a donkey that she is just following the law – you wouldn’t want me to break the law, would you?“Well, I don’t look at it that way and, when it’s suggested that she might be separating families as a deterrent to immigration, she gets outraged. I can’t even believe you would suggest such a thing. This is all Looney Tunes. It’s people living in some strange nimbus of self-deception.”The film highlights the role of civil servants who challenged the policy and fought to reunite families – courageous individuals such as White and Jallyn Sualog who worked within the system to mitigate its harmful effects. And it offers a reminder of the mass street protests – plus worldwide condemnation from the pope and others – that ultimately compelled Trump to back down: the one significant policy reversal of his first term.Yet a scandal that has been called “torture”, and by Morris himself as leading to “state-created orphans”, gained relatively little attention during this year’s presidential election campaign. Democrats were on the defensive on the border issue and tried to avoid the subject.Morris says: “People were scared to talk about immigration. The Democrats were and the Republicans weren’t scared to talk about it as long as they could frame it in the most draconian, repulsive terms: we’ll deport everybody.”View image in fullscreenHe was denied a chance to help put the issue on the agenda when Separated was not scheduled for TV broadcast until after election day. Morris complained on the X social media platform: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”Trump claimed that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and asserted, without evidence, that Haitians were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He pledged the biggest mass deportation in US history and has already announced a team including the immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, both of whom were instrumental in family separations during the first term.Will there be another public revolt this time or, given Trump’s victory in the national popular vote, are people demoralised and desensitised? Morris asks: “Did people in Germany all know that there was antisemitism? Well, yes. Did they know that they were involved in genocide? Probably not everybody.“On the part of the public, there’s a concept I’m very fond of: anti-curiosity. I sometimes say to myself, how much will it cost me to know less? There’s denial, there’s self-deception, there’s willful disbelief and on and on and on and on and on. I often say Homo sapiens: very bad and most certainly a compromised species.”But a mass deportation operation will be costly, logistically difficult and likely to produce harrowing images on TV that could reignite the anti-Trump resistance. At a recent screening of Separated in Washington, an audience member interrupted Soboroff and others on a panel discussion by shouting: “We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US! We’re not going to let him make our National Guard people the Gestapo of the United States! We are not going to let that happen!”The sequel is always worse. Mass deportations would mean a return to child separations by another name. Some 4.4 million US citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. The return of Trump has left Morris thinking about questions of justice.“What happens when you have crime without punishment?” he asks. “We all have this kind of quasi-religious model that moral transgressions have to be punished. There has to be some kind of societal reply. But what if there isn’t? What if crime goes unpunished?“I was just in Ukraine and I kept wondering – they’ve recorded over 100,000 war crimes by Russian soldiers – will these go unpunished? Will there ever be any kind of accountability? My answer to that is: ask America about crime without punishment and what ultimately that does to a society.”

    Separated will air on MSNBC in the US on 7 December More