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      America’s Parallel Realities: Are We All in the Wrong Movie?

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      In the early 1960s, one of the most popular series on American television was “The Twilight Zone.” This was a time when television, even in the United States, was still in black and white. Most of the show’s episodes were riveting, poignant and, in a number of cases, scary as hell — starting with the haunting tune at the beginning of each episode.

      “The Twilight Zone” reflected the anxieties and fears of a generation faced with the horrifying potential of technology capable of obliterating humanity. At the same time, it was informed by the equally terrifying capability of humans, if given the chance, to commit the most horrendous atrocities against other humans as long as there was a political regime that both sanctioned and encouraged them in the name of some kind of narrative, based on religion, race, class or superior insight.

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      It might not come as a surprise that in recent years, there has been an upsurge in references to “The Twilight Zone.” As the author of a 2018 article put it, the “anti-fascist, anti-racist themes of ‘The Twilight Zone’ are more relevant today than ever.” So are the themes referring to environmental catastrophes which also featured prominently in the series.

      For me, however, the reason “The Twilight Zone” has increasingly popped up in my mind lies elsewhere, in the way many of the episodes were constructed. A person wakes up in the morning in his or her familiar setting. A few hours later, he or she enters a fundamentally different reality, finds him or herself “in the wrong movie.” This is how I feel when I read American newspapers today and expose myself to the latest news. What is most striking in today’s America is the fundamental disjointedness, for lack of a better word, between realities.

      Episode 1: The Case of the Racist USC Professor

      A couple of days ago, the idyllic world of American academia was rudely awoken by an egregious case of blatant racism in the classroom or, rather, in the virtual space of Zoom-enhanced higher learning. A widely-known and celebrated business communications professor at the University of Southern California, which is generally better known for its prowess in college football than its academic achievements, repeatedly used the N-word — or at least what appeared to be the N-word — during a lecture.

      Commenting on the importance of filler words in communications, he used as an example the expression “nei ge.” The use of the expression caused much distress among African American students, resulting in the demand that the professor be immediately sanctioned. The university complied, putting him on administrative leave.

      As it happens, my wife is Chinese. When she speaks to her relatives and friends, every other sentence is interrupted by “nei ge.” It appears to be one of the most common expressions in Chinese, much like an English “um” or “uh,” allowing the speaker to take a pause to find the appropriate words to finish the sentence. In today’s victim culture, however, an innocent expression is turned into a signifier of racism, given the phonetic similarity between it and the N-word, much to the bewilderment of those like my wife who come from the culture that has used the expression for centuries (apparently a similar expression exists in Korean).

      In the end, there is no easy way to resolve the issue. It would be easy to demand that Chinese speakers in the United States show a modicum of sensitivity when using words that might cause offense. At the same time, however, Chinese speakers have a just cause to demand that others show a modicum of sensitivity to them, give them the benefit of the doubt and abstain from assuming evil intentions.

      The controversy reminds of the brouhaha over the word “niggardly,” which is the synonym of “stingy,” and has nothing to do with the N-word. Yet on several occasions, it has provoked accusations of racism, grounded more in the accuser’s unfamiliarity with the intricacies of the English language than the evil intentions of the person who dared to use it. To be sure, there are good reasons to avoid using the word. It is largely outdated, and “stingy” is a perfectly appropriate equivalent. At the same time, it is preposterous to sanction a person for the single reason that he or she uses a word that might evoke phonetic associations but which has absolutely nothing to do with the offensive term.

      Episode 2: The Case of the Racist Romance Novelist

      Romance novels are big sellers. In fact, they outsell most other literary genres. Its readers number in the millions, not only in the United States but worldwide. Most of the authors are women — as are the readers — and most of the women authors happen to be white. As a result, most of the stories revolve around white women getting involved with white men of either the affluent or the dangerous variety. Romance novels are replete with millionaires and billionaires just waiting to fall in love with single moms and members of motorcycle gangs with a soft core falling for the “sassy girl” next door.

      There are relatively few women of color who have made it in and into the genre. One of them is Alexandria House. Her novels center around some of the strongest women the genre has produced. In fact, Alexandria House’s stories are every feminist’s dream, and for good reason. Her heroines refuse to take shit from anyone, and particularly from good-looking, cocky African American men. Her heroines are strong, ballsy women who know what they want, and they have no problem asking for it and pursuing their goals with determination and verve.

      And then there is this: One of House’s best novels is “Let Me Love You,” with a Goodreads score of 4.6 out of 5. The setting is the hip-hop scene, and the main protagonists are top performers making millions with their songs. The novel has all the drama and heartache one would expect from an outstanding romance, and it delivers in a big way. This, however, is not the point. What is particularly striking to a reader sensitized to the intricacies of racist language is the fact that the novel’s author has absolutely no qualms using the N-word throughout the story. In fact, thanks to Kindle, the precise number of the N-words is easy to ascertain — 39 times, to be exact.

      To be sure, things are never as clear-cut as today’s hypersensitized purists would like us to believe. The debate about the N-word, in its two versions, has been going on for decades, and it has hardly been conducted in as straightforward a fashion as one might expect. To be sure, it does make a difference who uses the N-word. In fact, as has been pointed out, used on the part of an African American author, the word has a different connotation — including expressing a sense of endearment, which, I presume, is House’s intention — than used by a white author. 

      Embed from Getty Images

      In a recent essay in The Atlantic, John McWhorter from Columbia University has discussed the question at great depth. One of his conclusions: “Even when discussing rather than wielding the word, people —including black ones — might avoid barking out the word any more than necessary. (Or avoid writing it more than necessary, as in this very essay.) Surely, its history means that it provokes negative associations; it doesn’t sound good.”

      McWhorter starts his essay with controversy at Columbia following a white professor’s evoking the N-word in reference to James Baldwin’s 1963 public statement that he was “not a nigger.” One of her (white) students objected to her uttering the word, the administration agreed and put her under investigation. Ultimately, she was cleared of suspicion that she had violated the university’s anti-discrimination rules.

      For McWhorter, the very fact that a professor would be sanctioned for exploring the question of why James Baldwin would have chosen to say what he did is a clear indication of what he calls mission creep, “under which whites are not only not supposed to level the word as a slur, but are also not supposed to even refer to it. That idea has been entrenched for long enough now that it is coming to feel normal, but then normal is not always normal. It borders … on taboo.”

      This brings me back to the main topic of Episode 1. Here is a case that goes even further than the “mission creep” McWhorter alludes to. It surely is a case of that “hypersensitive to injury so abstract,” so inane, it should never have become an issue of controversy. To make the point quite clear: This is not about the use of Alexandra House’s use of the word. It is about the controversy generated by the use of “nei ga.” As said before, Alexandria House is one of the very best authors of romance novels. Her rather frequent evocation of the word is largely owed, I presume, to her attempt to reflect the realities of the setting of the novel, the hip-hop scene. 

      At the same time, however, in light of the controversy over the use of “nei ga,” it opens up legitimate questions that are not easy to resolve. In any case, it is probably a blessing that most college students don’t read romance novels. They might find themselves in the wrong movie.

      Episode 3: The Case of the Conspiracy Theory to End All Conspiracy Theories

      On August 31, during a mass protest against the German government’s draconian measures (i.e. wearing a mask) to combat the spread of COVID-19, dozens of Germany’s new freedom fighters managed to break through police lines to storm the Reichstagsbebäude in Berlin, the seat of the German parliament. For many of the demonstrators, having to wear a mask, according to one sign, was “inhuman,” almost a crime against humanity.

      As it turns out, many of the freedom stormtroopers were inspired by QAnon, which has taken the white global biosphere, from the US to Germany, from Australia to France, by storm. QAnon is the new all-encompassing master narrative for all those eager minds who want to know, but for whom Marxism is far too sophisticated, Nostradamus too obscure, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion too parochial (a Jewish cabal? So 19th century!), and Scientology far too expensive. To be a QAnonista, all you need is a sign with a big “Q” and you too can sow terror and fear among the elite.

      From what I understand, QAnon is a “theory,” albeit a conspiratorial one, postulating that whatever happens today is the result of the evil designs of obscure forces, from the World Economic Forum to powerful individuals such as George Soros, Bill Gates and, why not, Elon Musk. As Mike Wendling describes it for the BBC, “At its heart, QAnon is a wide-ranging, unfounded conspiracy theory that says that President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.”

      In the world some of us inhabit, theory is a bunch of ideas that only gain value if subjected to an empirical test. A famous example is the Ptolemaic system, which postulated that the Earth was the center of the universe. It sounded good at the time but turned out to be completely false. The theory was debunked to be replaced by a new theory that made sense. Today, apparently, the word “theory” has a different connotation — at least among the growing number of those who believe there are dark forces at work seeking to manipulate and, ultimately, control humanity. Today we know because we know, because it makes common sense or because we’ve read it somewhere.

      Embed from Getty Images

      This is why creationism — the notion that the Earth was created some 10,000 years ago — is a viable theory, on a par with Darwin’s theory of evolution. (Creationism is absolutely true. I saw pictures of Jesus riding and petting dinosaurs. Or the theory that the world is flat, and if you are not careful, you’ll fall off the edges. Absolutely true, too. I read it in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, the ultimate source of scientific knowledge for sophisticated endeavoring teenage minds.)

      In today’s populist world, where science is scorned (it’s just so last century) and scientists loathed, something is true if enough people believe it is true. QAnon is the perfect example. According to a recent poll — unfortunately based on scientific method and therefore prone to fake news-ism — one in three Republicans believes that the “theory” is mostly true. A further quarter thinks that some parts of it are true. That leaves only a bit more than a tenth who think that it is not true at all. Against that, among Democrats, a three-quarter majority hold it not true at all — the definitive proof of the pernicious influence of living in the real world.

      The “success” of QAnon “theory” is symptomatic of the utter bizarreness of the schizophrenic state of reality in today’s world. For many of us, the fact that Donald Trump was elected president already evoked a strong sense that we had somehow passed into the twilight zone. Over the years of his presidency, this sense has gotten stronger and stronger. Like COVID-19, the Trump virus — that mixture of fear-mongering, appealing to raw emotions and a dose of paranoia — has slowly been infecting growing parts of our world, as recently demonstrated during the siege on the German parliament, inspired by claims that Russian and American troops were on their way to deliver the German people from its tyrannical government which forced them to wear masks.

      At the same time, the fact that a professor’s reference to one of the most common expressions in the Chinese language would provoke charges of racism suggests that bizarreness is hardly confined to the right. Add COVID-19 to the mix, which has created a new dimension of parallel realities, and the scenario for a brand new “Twilight Zone” series practically writes itself.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Tekashi 6ix9ine and the American Way

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      A New York Times interview with controversial rapper and ex-convict Tekashi 6ix9ine offers a rich catalog of the curious values that characterize contemporary US culture. What emerges from the feature is a series of reflections by both the interviewer and the interviewee on some of the driving forces in today’s society, including ambition, fame, money, commercial media, tools of influence, law and social rules, and freedom of expression.

      Some may wonder why the Gray Lady — aka The New York Times — should take such a serious interest in a scandal-ridden rapper. The answer to that question tells us quite a lot about the values that now dominate, even in what are deemed the most serious media. Scandal, crime and celebrity have moved up several notches in the priority list of “all the news that’s fit to print.”

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      What appears to make the interview worthy of coverage by The Times is a spectacular scoop. The interviewer, Joe Coscarelli, gets 6ix9ine to admit that, if allowed to vote, he would go for US President Donald Trump. This meets an essential criterion for New York Times stories in this election cycle. An article that associates the extreme, manifestly irrational personalities of marginal celebrities with a taste for Trump’s politics is a strong argument for voting Joe Biden in November. It has the twofold advantage of confirming that Trump’s fans are marginal freaks and suggesting that the president himself implicitly shares the criminal instincts of those freaks.

      This approach to the news could be called “divisive,” though not in the sense that the word is used by The Times itself and the intelligence community to characterize Russian interference in US elections. It implicitly divides Americans into those who think and make serious decisions — a category that would include all readers of the New York Times — and those whose sole interest is to express their irrational impulses.

      To Coscarelli’s question, “You feel like the art you’re making is adding to the world?” the rapper answers, “Of course.” The interviewer then offers this critique of 6ix9ine’s music: “Maybe it’s fun, it’s turn-up music, but it’s not introspective.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Introspective:

      An attitude attributable to people who deserve to be taken seriously not just because of their success, but because they sometimes stop to think things through and weight their own responsibilities

      Contextual Note

      US social and political debate has become so divisive in recent years that society can now be separated into two groups: those who, like Barack Obama, pronounce the second syllable of “divisive” with a short “i” sound (as in “it”) and those who pronounce it as a full diphthong (as in “eye”). Alas, this distinction cuts across all boundaries of political and cultural orientation.

      The question of introspection highlights a more telling distinction in US culture. Over the past two centuries, self-reliance and atomistic individualism have risen to the level of a philosophical ideal. This became a central message of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s influential philosophy. This ideology initiated a tug of war between assertive action and introspection.

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      P.T. Barnum, the 19th-century founder of the Barnum and Bailey circus and the man who said, “Never give a sucker an even break,” set the tone for Emerson when he proclaimed, “Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.” Initiating the great American tradition of giving to those who need it least — as exemplified in recent government bailouts as a response to the economic crisis — Barnum added this thought: “The best kind of charity is to help those who are willing to help themselves.”

      Ever since Barnum established the principle that success belongs to the assertive, the very idea of assertiveness flipped from being seen as a moral weakness — or moral traditionally, as the capital sin of pride — to becoming the supreme personal virtue that separates the rich from the poor.

      In the hierarchy of values that regulates US culture, being assertive does not necessarily exclude introspection. For Emerson it even required it. Introspection allows the ambitious individual to assess and correct any of the weaknesses that may undermine a veneer of assertiveness. But for at least half of the population, if introspection exists, it should be hidden because the average person (the suckers) will perceive it as a weakness. For the other half of the population, it still stands as a moral virtue.

      Effective assertiveness thus implies the skill of hiding the reality of introspection to create the appearance of certitude based on the person’s unwavering convictions and self-confidence. It is only when the assertive person is caught out for being too assertive and must apologize after a glaring mistake that it becomes necessary to invoke the virtue of introspection. This typically translates as the standard cliché of confused denial: “That is not who I am.”

      The half of the population that dismisses or hides introspection from view correlates roughly with the Republican Party. Trump stands at one extreme, thanks to his apparent total absence of introspection. As president between 2001 and 2009, George W. Bush may have been capable of introspection, but he carefully hid it from view. He projected an image of resoluteness and unwavering conviction even when faced with facts that contradicted his stated beliefs. He won the 2004 election by accusing his Democratic opponent, John Kerry, of flip-flopping.

      Democrats prefer to maintain their faith in introspection as an intellectual and moral virtue, setting themselves apart from the rabble. Their defense of introspection enabled Republicans in the 1950s to term them “eggheads,” people who prefer thinking to acting. When Hillary Clinton called Trump voters a “basket of deplorables” in 2016, she was implicitly accusing them of being incapable of introspection.

      Historical Note

      After two centuries that have seen the growing dominance of the idea of assertiveness in the US, what is the status of introspection in today’s culture? The interview with Tekashi 6ix9ine confirms the division highlighted above between the Democrat-aligned Times and its belief in the virtue of introspection vs. the rapper who identifies with the Republicans and Donald Trump and dismisses introspection as irrelevant.

      In the interview, Coscarelli affirms his belief in the value of introspection. He appreciates that the late rapper Tupac Shakur “grappled with his demons” and said, “I’ve done good, I’ve done bad, I want to be better.” Coscarelli implicitly condemns 6ix9ine for not including self-criticism to his repertoire of artistic sentiments.

      But rap thrives on extreme, borderline criminal assertiveness, unlike traditional forms of black American music: blues, jazz, soul, and rhythm and blues. Traditional black music focused on sophisticated musical form and ironic expression in a complex cultural context. It contained at its core a pair of emotions: humility and love. The player was always less important than the music, even in the case of dominant figures admired for the power they built into their performances, such as John Coltrane or James Brown.

      In the 1980s, the rise of rap and hip-hop as the dominant if not unique form of black music consecrated the triumph of assertiveness over introspection. The music industry — run essentially by white executives — saw this revolution as a godsend. Rock and roll — which took root in the 1950s — had already lowered the bar of musical complexity and introspection for the white community, making it easier to produce highly profitable hits. But it maintained the link to humility and love.

      Rap provided another advantage for white record producers, who defined it as the culture of the ‘hood. Music took a back seat to extremely individualistic aggressive intent. In the Ronald Reagan era, this helped to consolidate the white community’s perception of black culture as essentially criminal and antagonistic to traditional white values, even though white youths enthusiastically purchased the records. Rap made money for its star performers, producing a new generation of rags-to-riches heroes. For the first time, they were black males who embodied, in their way, the Reaganian ideal of the self-made man recognizable by his financial success.

      6ix9ine is right when he contradicts Coscarelli’s apparent belief that simply because he wants “to do better,” Tupac Shakur was introspective. Coscarelli’s take reflects the political orientation of The New York Times and its minimally introspective Democratic Party ethos. The neoliberals have done bad but want to do better. Which means doing the same thing but fixing it on the edges. “Vote Biden” is the message.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Disloyal review: Michael Cohen's mob hit on Trump entertains – but will it shift votes?

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      Michael Cohen is no saint. Aside from the obvious, Donald Trump’s former fixer has never entered into a formal cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors, a fact duly noted by the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York in its sentencing memorandum. Because of that, the “inability to fully vet his criminal history and reliability impact his utility as a witness”.On top of that, Cohen boasts in his memoir of his exposure to the mob as a teenager, and even compares his reception in federal prison to that accorded to Al Capone and El Chapo.Yes, it’s easy to distrust Cohen. On that score, Disloyal should be taken with more than a grain of salt. Its author is no hero.But that doesn’t make the book any less interesting. For all its black-hearted opportunism and self-aggrandizement, it delivers a readable and bile-filled take on Trump and his minions.What the book lacks in genuine contrition is made up for with score-settling and name-calling. Like Omarosa Manigault Newman before him, Cohen entertains, albeit at the expense of others: Don Jr, Jared Kushner, Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, for starters.Right off the bat, Cohen shares that the president lacks respect for his namesake. According to Cohen, Trump Sr would repeatedly tell him Donnie possessed the “worst fucking judgment” of anyone he had ever met. That’s saying something.Organized crime pervades the book, and Cohen does not sound at all disapprovingLikewise, asked by his oldest son if he is nervous about appearing in a televised wrestling match with the WWE impresario Vince McMahon, Trump Sr banishes him and comments: “What kind of stupid fucking question is that?”Humiliation is central to Trump and Cohen’s MOs – and it doesn’t end there.Shown a photo of his sons’ hunting escapades, Trump is angered, and again tears into his hapless offspring: “You think you’re a fucking big man? Get the fuck out of my office.” He sounds a lot like Tony Soprano. More important, he shared Melania’s displeasure over junior’s penchant for big-game hunting.As it happens, an earlier book by Ivana Trump recorded that it was she who wanted to call their son Donald Jr, to which Donald Sr replied: “You can’t do that!”His explanation: “What if he’s a loser?”Ivanka Trump is immune from the president’s derision. After all, Donald once told Howard Stern that if he weren’t her father, he’d have dated her. Cohen is not her dad, though, so is less hesitant in tattling on the favorite child.After writing about how Ivanka once joined him and his wife for lasagne dinners, Cohen recalls a brush with the law in connection with Trump Soho, an ill-fated condominium hotel in Manhattan, and Ivanka’s elaborate plans for Trump Moscow. Once again, the Trumps are caught in the headlights of the Manhattan district attorney.In Cohen’s telling, after first adopting a “hands-off policy” to the Russia project, Ivanka became enthusiastic when she learned the building would contain a health and wellness center named for her. She was prepared to hire the architect Zaha Hadid, discarding drawings supplied by Cohen.William Barr’s efforts to be Roy Cohn 2.0 – Trump’s consigliere in corridors of power Cohen could never reach – are realIn the end, Cohen laments, “all three kids were starved for their father’s love”.Jared Kushner also emerges worse for wear. Words like “inexperienced” and “unqualified” tumble on to the page. Cohen observes that “Kushner was supremely arrogant, a real snob” with an “exaggerated sense of his importance and intelligence”.Elsewhere, however, Cohen expresses admiration for macho swagger and strut. So confusing.Speaking of which, Disloyal offers a window into the president’s views of Vladimir Putin. Cohen records that on numerous occasions Trump told him the Russian president was “the richest man in the world by a multiple”.Trump is quoted explaining: “If you think about it, Putin controls 25% of the Russian economy … imagine controlling 25% of the wealth of a country. Wouldn’t that be fucking amazing.”Consistent with that take, Trump muses that a Russian oligarch who bought property from him was actually doing Putin’s bidding.“The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,” Trump purportedly said. “That’s all they are doing – investing Putin’s money.” More

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      Speaking for Myself review: Sarah Sanders writes one for the Trump team

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      Toward the end of Speaking for Myself, Sarah Huckabee Sanders recalls a conversation with Donald Trump in which she advises him her book will be aimed at defending his reputation.“I think you will like it,” says the president’s second press secretary. “You have been falsely attacked and misrepresented for too long and it’s time for America to know the real story.”An approving president replies: “Can’t wait. I’m sure it will be great.”Whether Sanders has succeeded is open to debate. Speaking for Myself does a better job in burnishing her brand in advance of a possible run for the Arkansas governorship in 2022. It is very much a would-be candidate’s autobiography, even as it devotes countless pages to its author’s time in the White House.Sanders shares her experiences of being the daughter of Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas and two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. She also describes her time as a student, how she met her husband and life as a working mother. Personal normalcy and faith are the dominant themes, the narrative a mixture of whitewashing and score-settling but with the emphasis on the former.Sanders describes her father’s 2008 presidential run, including his win in the Iowa caucus. She heaps praise on a campaign ad featuring the martial-arts eminence Chuck Norris, and goes out of her way to knock Mitt Romney, a rival to her father who would win the nomination in 2012, for his “flip-flops” on “nearly every major issue”.The tension between Romney and the Huckabees predates his vote this year, as a senator from Utah, to convict Trump on impeachment charges. Rather, it is tribal.Unmentioned by Sanders is her father having attacked Romney’s faith. In the run-up to Iowa, Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister, declared the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a “religion”, not a “cult”. But in the next breath, he pondered whether Mormons believe “Jesus and the devil are brothers”. Evangelicals comprised three-fifths of Iowa’s Republican caucus-goers. Among them, Huckabee trounced Romney by more than 25 points.Not surprisingly, when Sanders describes her time in the Trump White House she goes full-bore at Robert Mueller, doing her best to play the victim. As is to be expected, she regurgitates the “no-collusion” party line and offers full-throated endorsements of Bill Barr, Trump’s second attorney general, and Pat Cipollone, his second White House counsel, for their defense of the president.This too is personal. In the aftermath of James Comey’s dismissal as FBI director in May 2017, Sanders did her best to trash his reputation, including falsely stating “the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director”. Questioned by a reporter on her version of reality, Sanders remained unyielding: “Look, we’ve heard from countless members of the FBI.”Pressed by the special counsel, Sanders characterized those remarks as a “slip of the tongue”, made “in the heat of the moment” and “not founded on anything”.Now, time has passed, an election looms and Sanders isn’t having any of it. She accuses Mueller’s staff of “totally” misrepresenting her statements, for no purpose other than to “vilify” and “falsely” attack her. Likewise, she draws no line between her baseless accusations and prosecutors’ concerns about obstruction of justice.Sanders remains silent about the fact Mueller issued a correction of Barr’s characterization of his report. Likewise, though she denies collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the Senate intelligence committee recently cast a different light on the operative facts.In its report, the committee confirmed Trump lied to the special counsel and that Paul Manafort – the campaign manager whose departure paved the way for Steve Bannon – worked hand in glove with a Russian intelligence officer in an effort to help his candidate.Whether any of it altered the election result is a different story. From the looks of things, Comey probably had a greater impact.In an act of grace, Sanders goes easy on Cliff Sims, a former White House staffer who lashed into her in Team of Vipers, his tell-all from 2019. As press secretary, Sims wrote, Sanders “didn’t press as hard as she could have for the rock-bottom truth”. He also said her “gymnastics with the truth would tax even the nimblest of prevaricators, and Sanders was not that”.Sanders turns the other cheek, acknowledging Sims as the author of the “script” she delivered at each daily briefing and crediting him as “an excellent writer and fellow southerner”. Sims was banished from the administration and sued the president, but recently worked as a speechwriter at the Republican convention.To Sanders, Jim Acosta of CNN and the former national security adviser John Bolton are different. Extracts attacking Bolton were leaked to coincide with the release of his book, The Room Where It Happened, this summer. Acosta is accused of “grandstanding to build his media profile”, Sanders questioning his commitment to getting the “story right”.Unfortunately, Sanders can go overboard with ethnic reductionism. Or, at least, she could have used some editing.Sanders does a cultural compare-and-contrast with Josh Raffel, a former staffer who handled public relations for Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. Raffel, Sanders observes, was a “liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City”. Substitute, “non-church-going Presbyterian” for “Jew” and you would have a description of the 45th president.Sanders also lets the reader know she had “grown to love Josh” and heaps praise on his sense of humor.One of few Trump aides to leave the West Wing smiling and of her free will, Sanders’ spouse and children have not spoken out. This is as candid as we are going to get. It is not an audition for another Trump-tied gig. She has her eyes on a different executive mansion – in Little Rock, Arkansas. More

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      Anohni on her new track R.N.C. 2020: 'It's me, screaming in the past, for the present'

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      I watched the Republican National Convention last week. It’s becoming harder to put into words the dread that many of us feel.What’s really happening? Toxic levels of corruption and collusion are devouring the US. Christian extremists want to turn the country into a religious state straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale.After bombarding us with media campaigns pressuring us not to wear masks in March and April, the US now accounts for 22% of all Covid-19 deaths worldwide. I personally know three New Yorkers who died in April, I believe as a result of this official guidance.Trump has stoked racist police violence in the US to even more atrocious heights. Scaring voters with fake tales of impending anarchy and “dark shadows”, he then promises that if re-elected he will crush BLM protesters and “restore law and order”. Is he getting this stuff from Steve Bannon or Mein Kampf? Probably both.Trump is hosting federal executions in the countdown to the election as another prong of his racist, fake “law and order” platform. Last Thursday, the US government defied Navajo tribal sovereignty and executed Lezmond Mitchell, injecting him with a massive quantity of pentobarbital in a death chamber in Indiana.Behind this curtain of carefully orchestrated chaos, the network of corporate lobbyists that form the core of the GOP pillage the US Treasury and dismantle scores of environmental regulations, driving the country and the world even more hopelessly into global boiling and mass extinction.Australian-born Rupert Murdoch blares his obscene propaganda into American homes, hypnotising viewers with lies, rage and fear-mongering. Meanwhile, 40,000 square miles of Australian wilderness burned last summer, killing over a billion animals. More than half of the Great Barrier Reef has collapsed in the last five years due to rapidly increasing ocean temperatures. The same kinds of awful, permanent losses are engulfing nature on every continent.For many people, economic suffering looms while Amazon, Facebook, Google, Tesla, Apple and others expand their global footprints, sucking dry local economies. Some of the CEOs pour the wealth of the world into colonial space programs. They fantasise that they might finally shed their dependence upon Mother Earth and become the heroic creators and patent-holders of life on Mars.Unlike the Koch brothers, who paid for the malevolent spread of climate change denial, today’s tech billionaires scent themselves with a pheromone of liberal philanthropy while monetising the dismantling of checks and balances that once helped to protect us. They take meetings with Trump, provide him with the viral platforms he needs to retain the presidency, advertise themselves as having done the opposite, and then hedge their bets in private. Huge swaths of California’s ancient redwood forests continue to burn around the perimeter of Silicon Valley.Incessant, nihilistic assaults on truth, empathy and the biosphere ensure that life on earth will become much, much worse.On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump’s team described him as the first presidential candidate since Harry Truman with “the guts” to “drop the bomb”. Trump stood there, grinning with pride, and a wave of nausea spread through me. I had the same feeling a few months ago, when I heard Trump utter the words “the Chinese virus”.What waits for us on the other side of this is a world undone by endless cataclysm and aching with senseless loss.The sound of this track, RNC 2020, is pretty rough. The loop is from a concert I did at a club in New York City in my early 20s. So that’s me screaming in the past … for the present.Can you visualize a different path forward? We all have to focus on this now, with everything we’ve got. More

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      Trump told Sarah Sanders to 'take one for the team' after Kim Jong-un wink

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      Donald Trump told Sarah Sanders she would have to “go to North Korea and take one for the team”, after Kim Jong-un winked at the then White House press secretary during a summit in Singapore in June 2018.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” a delighted Trump joked, according to Sanders’ new memoir. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Speaking for Myself will be released next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.Rather than a tell-all by a former staffer or a burn-all by a hostile family member, the book is a paean to the president by a loyal follower with the subtitle Faith, Freedom and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House.Sanders is from a notable Republican family – her father is Mike Huckabee, a candidate for the presidential nomination in 2008 and 2016 – and reportedly has her eye on a run for governor in Arkansas.However, somewhat in the manner of leaked sections that took aim at the former national security adviser John Bolton after he turned on Trump, Sanders does describe boorish or misogynistic behavior by the president and senior aides that may make campaign aides wince, particularly as Trump trails Joe Biden among women.Of the incident with Kim, whom Trump courted assiduously in the first two years of his presidency, Sanders describes a session at the Singapore talks in which the dictator “reluctantly” accepted a Tic Tac from Trump, who “dramatically blew into the air to reassure Kim it was just a breath mint” and not a capsule of poison.The two men also talked about sports, including women’s soccer. Then, Sanders writes, she looked up “to notice Kim staring at me. We made direct eye contact and Kim nodded and appeared to wink at me. I was stunned. I quickly looked down and continued taking notes.“… All I could think was, ‘What just happened? Surely Kim Jong-un did not just mark me!?’”Later, in the presidential “Beast” limousine on the way to the airport, Sanders relayed the incident to Trump and his then chief of staff, John Kelly.“Kim Jong-un hit on you!” Trump said. “He did! He fucking hit on you!”Sanders, a devout Christian who discusses her faith throughout her book, does not spell out the presidential expletive. But she does write that she told Trump that was not what she meant, and said: “Sir, please stop.”Kelly backed up the president and Trump joked: “Well, Sarah, that settles it. You’re going to North Korea and taking one for the team! Your husband and kids will miss you, but you’ll be a hero to your country!”Trump and Kelly, Sanders writes, “howled with laughter” as the car drove on.Trump has met Kim three times – in Singapore, in Hanoi and in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. He has not convinced Kim to give up his nuclear weapons, which Sanders says would take a “miracle”.In fact, observers say, Pyongyang has increased its arsenal significantly. Trump’s critics also say his mercurial approaches to Kim have damaged relations with key allies, including Seoul.In his own memoir of the Trump administration, Bolton does not mention the Singapore incident Sanders describes, though he does say Trump talked sports with Kim and “handed out mints”. Bolton also says aides did not want to leave Trump alone with Kim, lest he make damaging concessions.Sanders describes other aspects of Trump’s North Korea policy, including interactions with Dennis Rodman, the former NBA star who has established a unique relationship with Kim, and the release in May 2018 of three Americans formerly held by Pyongyang.She does not mention Otto Warmbier, a student from Ohio held in the North before being returned to the US in June 2017, in a coma and showing evidence of torture. The 22-year-old died soon after.Warmbier’s parents have said they hold “Kim and his evil regime … responsible for unimaginable cruelty and inhumanity. No excuses or lavish praise can change that.”Though Trump admitted in Hanoi that “some really bad things happened to Otto”, he also said: “Kim tells me that he didn’t know about it and I will take him at his word.” More