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    Can ‘The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ Change a Conservative Religious Culture?

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    In the seventh episode of the new reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” a character makes this observation of a fellow married mom struggling with a controlling husband: “It’s kind of a theme with our church, though, and kind of what the problem is. Everyone is getting married before their brains even develop.”The show, which is on Hulu, follows eight influencers in Utah who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is being marketed as a docudrama with a religious gloss; a caption for the trailer on TikTok promises “Secrets, scandals and viral handles.” This group of conventionally attractive mostly 20-somethings was cast because, as part of a loose network of friends who call themselves “#momtok,” they already had millions of social media followers. Following their rise to fame over the past few years, they made headlines for a cascade of salacious and embarrassing public moments.“Mormon Wives” is being sold as regular reality TV dreck — I say this with love. I love garbage. So I was surprised to find that beneath the usual petty squabbles and plastic surgery recovery scenes, there is a much deeper theme of religious conflict.These women are engaged in an ongoing discussion about, among other subjects, the social conservatism of Mormonism — where chastity is a virtue, homosexuality is a sin and the father is the “is the presiding authority in his family” — and whether they can change the culture of the church and also the broader world, including their own families.(A similar conversation has also been happening on “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” but it tended to be overshadowed by the criminal behavior of one of the cast members, which played out over multiple seasons. I told you, I love garbage).The “Mormon Wives” very public grappling with rigid gender roles and working outside the home is also part of a larger trend I wrote about earlier this year — while every demographic group is moving away from organized religion in the United States, young women are leaving “in unprecedented numbers.” They are pushing back against their churches and disaffiliating in part because they feel like second-class citizens in their houses of worship.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      2 Brothers Sentenced to More Than 17 Years in Prison in Sextortion Scheme

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      Two brothers from Nigeria helped run an online sextortion operation that prosecutors said resulted in the death of a high school student.A federal judge in Michigan on Thursday sentenced two brothers from Nigeria to 17 and a half years in prison for their roles in a social media sextortion scheme that claimed more than 100 victims across the United States and resulted in the death of a high school student.The brothers, Samuel Ogoshi, 24, and Samson Ogoshi, 21, who each pleaded guilty in April to one count of conspiracy to exploit minors, will be on supervised release for five years after completing their prison terms, prosecutors said in a news release.The brothers, who are from Lagos, Nigeria, were extradited to the United States from Nigeria in August 2023 after they were indicted in November 2022.The extradition marked a new chapter in cooperation with Nigerian authorities in extraditing perpetrators of this kind of scam. Last month, the Justice Department announced the extradition of two other Nigerian nationals on similar charges in Pennsylvania.A third defendant in the case, Ezekiel Robert, is pending extradition from Nigeria, prosecutors said.The brothers were sentenced in a case involving a popular relatively new scam the authorities call financial sextortion, in which scammers pose as young women on social media and send flirty messages to young men and teenage boys before soliciting nude photographs that they then hold as ransom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Defends App in First Comments Since Arrest

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      Pavel Durov, held in France since last month, blamed “growing pains” for the company’s problems and pledged to make improvements.Pavel Durov, the founder of the online communications tool Telegram, said on Thursday that it was a “misguided approach” to hold him personally responsible for the spread of illicit content on the platform.Mr. Durov’s comments, made on his Telegram account, were his first public remarks since he was arrested at an airport outside Paris and charged last month by the French authorities for failing to prevent illegal activity on the app. The crimes on Telegram included the spread of child sexual abuse material, fraud and drug sales, French prosecutors have said.“No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools,” Mr. Durov wrote. He said “growing pains” on Telegram, which has 950 million users, had made it easy for criminals to abuse the platform.“That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard,” he said.Mr. Durov’s case has become a point of contention in the politically charged debate over the limits of free speech on the internet. Telegram is committed to light supervision of what people say or do on the platform. The app has helped people living under authoritarian governments communicate and organize. But it has also become a hothouse for disinformation, extremism and other harmful content.Telegram has long been in the cross hairs of global law enforcement agencies because it has refused to cooperate with the authorities. French prosecutors said Mr. Durov had been arrested in part because of Telegram’s “almost total lack of response” to requests related to criminal investigations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Nebraska, Tim Walz’s Family Is Split Over the Election

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      An intriguing photo has been circulating online. It appears to be a smiling family huddled around a matriarch, all in matching T-shirts that say “Nebraska Walz’s for Trump.”The photo is attached to a post on the social media site X from Charles W. Herbster, a Nebraska cattleman, businessman and former Republican candidate for governor. “Tim Walz’s family back in Nebraska wants you to know something…” he wrote.Tim Walz’s family back in Nebraska wants you to know something…@realDonaldTrump @JDVance #SaveAmerica🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zp08nuKAun— Charles W. Herbster (@CWHerbster) September 4, 2024

      Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, grew up in Nebraska and still has family there. The photo looks authentically Nebraskan. It turns out the family is related to Mr. Walz. But they are distant relatives. They are descendants of Francis Walz, the brother of Mr. Walz’s grandfather.Sandy Dietrich, Tim Walz’s sister, made it clear the two branches of the family were not close.“That is not us,” Ms. Dietrich, who lives in Alliance, Neb, said in an interview. “We don’t even know them. We just have never known that side” of the family.The members of Francis Walz’s family told The Associated Press in a written statement that shortly after Mr. Walz was nominated, family members had a get-together.“We had T-shirts made to show support for President Trump and JD Vance and took a group picture,” the written statement said. “That photo was shared with friends, and when we were asked for permission to post the picture, we agreed.”“The picture is real. The shirts are real,” the message continued. “The message on the shirts speaks for itself.”For her part, when asked if she was voting for her brother, Ms. Dietrich said, “I’m a Democrat, so yes, most definitely.”But even among Mr. Walz’s siblings, there’s a political rift. Mr. Walz’s other sibling, Jeff Walz, has donated to Mr. Trump and comments on Facebook indicate he will not vote for his own brother’s ticket. “I’m 100% opposed to all his ideology,” read a message from his Facebook account.When a commenter suggested he get onstage with President Trump, the response from Jeff Walz’s account read, “I’ve thought hard about doing something like that. I’m torn between that and just keeping my family out of it.” More

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      TikTok Expands its Election Resources Ahead of November

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      The company is an increasingly popular source of political news. It’s adding more content about how elections work and media literacy.TikTok is pushing to improve information about the upcoming U.S. presidential election on the app, it said Wednesday.The company will expand a landing page on how elections work and why they can be trusted and run new in-feed videos about media literacy. It will also increase security requirements for verified accounts from politicians and governments in the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump and their vice-presidential nominees each have TikTok accounts as of two weeks ago, a sharp pivot from last year, when the vast majority of American politicians were avoiding the app.TikTokTikTokThe efforts come as TikTok warily acknowledges that it has become a much bigger news source for millions of Americans ahead of the presidential election than it was in 2020. It joins other major tech companies like Meta, Google and X that must regularly grapple with how their platforms handle election-related content. But TikTok has an added layer of scrutiny, since it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a looming possibility that its app could be banned as soon as January, based on national security concerns.“Young people are going to TikTok and other vertical video platforms for news more than ever,” said Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, which worked with TikTok to create a series of videos on media literacy that will soon begin airing to users. “As of late, TikTok has been investing a lot in media literacy and fact-checking.”The U.S. government has expressed some concern that TikTok could imperil future elections. The Justice Department said in July that China could direct ByteDance and TikTok to manipulate videos served to Americans to “undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions.” President Biden signed a landmark law in April that will ban TikTok in the U.S. in January unless ByteDance sells the app to a non-Chinese company.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Here’s Why We Shouldn’t Demean Trump Voters

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      Some of the best advice Democrats have received recently came from Bill Clinton in his speech at the Democratic National Convention.First, he warned against hubris: “We’ve seen more than one election slip away from us when we thought it couldn’t happen, when people got distracted by phony issues or overconfident.” That’s something that any Clinton understands in his — or her — gut.Second, related and even more important, he cautioned against demeaning voters who don’t share liberal values.“I urge you to meet people where they are,” said Clinton, who knows something about winning votes outside of solid blue states. “I urge you not to demean them, but not to pretend you don’t disagree with them if you do. Treat them with respect — just the way you’d like them to treat you.”That’s critical counsel because too often since 2016, the liberal impulse has been to demonize anyone at all sympathetic to Donald Trump as a racist and bigot. This has been politically foolish, for it’s difficult to win votes from people you’re disparaging.It has also seemed to me morally offensive, particularly when well-educated and successful elites are scorning disadvantaged, working-class Americans who have been left behind economically and socially and in many cases are dying young. They deserve empathy, not insults.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares112 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump takes sexist Harris attacks to ‘whole other level’ on Truth Social

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      Donald Trump has reposted a crudely misogynistic comment about Kamala Harris on Truth Social in a move that reprised his past record of sexist behaviour and brazenly flouted pleas from members of his own party to emphasize issues over personal attacks.With fresh polls showing Harris further improving her standing – and widening the gap with her opponent among women voters – Trump drew online opprobrium by sharing a vulgar post on his social media site implying that the Democratic nominee owed her political rise to sexual favours.The post – originally posted by another user – featured photos of Harris and Hillary Clinton alongside the comment: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…”The comment was an oblique reference to innuendo surrounding Harris’s former relationship with Willie Brown, the San Francisco mayor. The mention of Clinton – Trump’s defeated opponent in the 2016 presidential election – alluded to the affair between Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, and her husband Bill Clinton in the 1990s, which came close to ending his presidency.It was not the first time Trump had made lewd references to Harris. On 18 August, he shared a video by the Dilley Meme Team, a group of rightwing content creators, to the soundtrack of a parody of the Alanis Morrisette song Ironic that contained the lines, “She spent her whole damn life down on her knees”, as an image of Brown appeared behind a picture of the US vice-president and her husband, Doug Emhoff.But the latest post appeared among a flurry of other extreme posts on Wednesday that also included tributes to the QAnon conspiracy theory that holds that Trump is waging war against an elite network of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government, business and the media.He reposted: “WWG1WGA! RETRUTH IF YOU AGREE.” The acronym is short for the QAnon slogan: “where we go one, we go all.” He similarly reposted another QAnon phrase: “nothing can stop what is coming.”The FBI has previously identified fringe theories like QAnon – which Trump has stopped short of endorsing while praising its supporters – as likely to fuel domestic terrorism.In yet another incendiary communication, Trump posted manipulated images of some of his favourite targets – including the entrepreneur Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, who spearheaded the US vaccine effort against Covid-19, Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi – imprisoned and wearing orange jumpsuits.The Harris campaign made no immediate response to Trump’s latest burst of social media activity, which followed disclosures of an altercation between his campaign team and staff at Arlington national cemetery, the resting place of fallen US military heroes, during a visit on Monday.However, the CNN host Anderson Cooper – in a lengthy segment – said the posts took Trump’s previous campaigning to a “whole other level”.“This is the Republican candidate for president and the 45th president of the United States, talking about two women who, no matter what you think of their politics, are two of the most accomplished women in American political history,” Cooper said.Wednesday’s online outbursts came as a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed Harris with a four-point nationwide lead, 45% to 41%, over Trump. Among women, the survey showed the vice-president increasing her lead to 13%, compared with an average of 9% in polls for July.A separate Fox News survey showed Harris leading or increasing her support in four southern Sun belt states, all considered vital battlegrounds in November.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a two-way race, Harris was up by one point in Arizona and by two points in Georgia and Nevada, while Trump is ahead by one point in North Carolina, according to the poll.Beyond the polls, there was irritation among Republicans strategists who had previously urged Trump to desist from attacking Harris personally and focus on issues of concern to voters, such as the economy, inflation and immigration.“I think people are incredibly frustrated,” Jason Roe, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican party, told the Washington Post.He said Harris’s campaign and policy stances gave “opportunities for the Trump campaign to talk about issues that actually will matter to swing voters. And rather than doing that, he’s delving into this nonsense.”Stuart Stevens, a member of the anti-Trump Republican group, the Lincoln Project, and a strategist for Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential bid, challenged widespread predictions of a close election by suggesting that Trump’s approach would eventually alienate voters and enable Harris to win convincingly.“There’s been a lot of talk – it’s sort of a universal truth – that this election is going to be close,” he told CNN. “I have a different opinion. I think it’ll be close till about October 20th, and then I think it’s going to be like Carter versus Reagan [in 1980, when Reagan won in a landslide], that the bottom is going to start to drop out [of Trump’s campaign].“I think this is going to be a race that Democrats are going to win by more than Biden did,” he added. More

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      Brazil Threatens to Ban Elon Musk’s X

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      The country’s Supreme Court gave the service 24 hours to name a legal representative in Brazil or face suspension.Brazil’s Supreme Court on Wednesday gave Elon Musk 24 hours to name a legal representative for X in Brazil or face a ban of his social network across the nation of 200 million.Mr. Musk closed X’s office in Brazil last week in protest of orders from a Brazilian Supreme Court justice to suspend certain accounts. If X refuses to comply, it could lose access to one of its largest markets outside the United States — a blow as the company struggles to regain revenue after Mr. Musk battled with advertisers and told them not to spend on the platform.The court posted its order on X on Wednesday night, suggesting that Mr. Musk had until about 8 p.m. local time Thursday to respond.The moment is one of the biggest tests yet for Mr. Musk’s efforts to mold X to his personal ideology, and how he responds will shed light on how far he is willing to take his stated commitment to protecting his social network from what he calls censorship.X and Mr. Musk did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the possible ban.Mr. Musk has been enmeshed in a monthslong feud with Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice whom he has accused of censoring conservative voices online. Justice Moraes has ordered the suspension of more than 100 X accounts in what he says is a battle against misinformation, hate speech and attacks on democracy.Most of the accounts that Justice Moraes has targeted belong to right-wing supporters of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president. Some of them questioned Mr. Bolsonaro’s 2022 election loss and sympathized with protesters who raided Brazil’s halls of power, hoping to invoke a military takeover.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More