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      ‘I keep hope alive’: Tamara Tunie on playing Kamala Harris in political dystopia The 47th

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      Interview‘I keep hope alive’: Tamara Tunie on playing Kamala Harris in political dystopia The 47thArifa Akbar The Law & Order: SVU star is returning to the stage in a White House satire set in 2024. She talks about the ‘black-lash’ after Obama’s election, brokering a new deal for Broadway diversity – and her role as Whitney Houston’s mumTamara Tunie is limbering up to play the vice-president of America in Mike Bartlett’s new political satire, The 47th. “I have great admiration for what she’s achieved,” says Tunie, in a back office at the Old Vic in London, emanating a big, easygoing exuberance that seems Californian in spirit, although she is a New Yorker. So how is she preparing for the role of Kamala Harris: observing her public persona to mimic her convincingly?“No, I don’t try to impersonate – I find that could get in the way,” says Tunie, who appears utterly at ease with the part. Perhaps that’s because she is no stranger to playing true-life characters – including Whitney Houston’s mother, Cissy, in the upcoming biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. “I go to good old YouTube to see what interviews I can find,” she says of her research. “But what I look for more is the essence of the person: there might be one or two things that are significantly them – a quirk, something that they do. What I try to do is land on that but then allow myself the freedom to go: ‘What if they were in this situation?’”Bartlett’s drama finds Harris in 2024 in a world still dominated by the Trump family. It is a funny, horrifying political dystopia, much of it written in iambic pentameter with sly Shakespearean references tucked in. The reality of living through the Trump administration was sobering for Tunie. “This undercurrent of racism and misogyny was always there. What Trump allowed was the Pandora’s Box to be flung open … We must remain vigilant, and we must constantly fight, and we can never just relax and think ‘OK, everything is taken care of.’”Does she think America began relaxing during the Obama years? “Absolutely. The point when President Obama was elected was when the term ‘post-racial’ was coined. That was, unfortunately, a fantasy that everything was all fixed, because now we had a black president. What we are seeing – and one of the reasons I believe that Trump was elected – was that there was a backlash. In my circle we called it ‘black-lash’.”Tunie was born and raised in Pittsburgh, one of six siblings whose parents ran a funeral home. Her mother was also the first black female security guard at United States Steel and had a strong activist streak: “She believed that if there was something that needs to be addressed, you don’t wait for somebody else to do it.” Her father had a second job as an airport porter. Tunie was an all-rounder at school who loved singing and dancing but was fiercely academic, with ambitions to become a medic (she has played a medical examiner for more than 20 years in the TV drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit).What made her swerve into the performing arts was a single, thrilling moment, in the choir of a spring concert at high school. “I had a solo number and I got a standing ovation. It occurred to me that ‘This makes people really happy, it is something I love to do, and I can touch people with it.’”She won admission to the prestigious drama school at Carnegie Mellon University and made her Broadway debut in 1981. Feeling potentially pigeonholed as a musical performer, she stopped singing and dancing for a while. “I was classically trained. I wanted to do Shakespeare, I wanted to do straight plays, film and television. So for a good eight years or so I didn’t sing at all.”What was it like to return to singing for her part as Cissy Houston, one among a family of women with phenomenal voices, filmed last year? “Utterly intimidating. A lot of people don’t know that I sing, but the music that inspires me is in the jazz vein. Cissy Houston is more an amazing singer of gospel and R&B.” Tunie re-trained her vocals to “find” the character with the help of a musical team which included Rickey Minor, Whitney’s musical director.The 47th is the first live show Tunie has done since the beginning of the pandemic but she used the shutdown to build a campaign for better inclusivity within the theatre community. As part of Black Theatre United, the organisation which Tunie co-founded with fellow black professionals, a “New Deal for Broadway” was secured last year, which established industry-wide standards for equality, diversity, inclusion and accessibility. “This was a product of six months of meetings with the leaders in the industry: theatre owners, producers, creatives, casting directors. It is not a legal document but an agreement that is saying we as a community are going to address the exclusions of black people and make the industry much more inclusive.”Has she seen change more generally across screen and stage in recent years? Yes, but it has come very slowly and with a lot of pain. And even then it could flip back, she says, returning to her point about remaining vigilant. “But what I see in Hollywood are black individuals who have their own production companies, and black people making their own content, with Hollywood calling on them. There is Shonda Rhimes and the incredible dynasty she has built … I see that here, too [in the UK] – I worked with Michaela Coel in Black Earth Rising and she is very much the example of what I’m talking about.”On the subject of trailblazing women, has she ever met Harris? “I was on a Zoom with some other black women [during the presidential campaign] and she chatted with us, sharing some of her thoughts and policies for the future of the country. I found her utterly engaging.” So Harris for president? “As Jesse Jackson would say, ‘I keep hope alive.’ [To be vice-president] is a monumental accomplishment and I feel like it’s another rung in the ladder towards equality and space for not just a woman but a woman of colour to be the president of the United States. That would be the best thing for the country.”
      The 47th is at the Old Vic, London, from 29 March to 28 May.
      TopicsTheatreMike BartlettOld Vic TheatreKamala HarrisUS politicsTelevisionWhitney HoustoninterviewsReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative anger

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      Star Trek makes Stacey Abrams president of United Earth – and stokes conservative angerNational Review says candidate for governor in Georgia and self-confessed superfan does not deserve fictional title The Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting rights campaigner Stacey Abrams has been made president – of United Earth.‘Champion for Alaska’: Don Young, longest-serving House Republican, dies at 88 Read moreThe honour, which a leading conservative website said Abrams did not deserve, was bestowed by the Paramount+ TV series Star Trek: Discovery, in its season four finale.Abrams is a self-confessed Star Trek superfan. In 2019, she told the New York Times she binged on episodes during her last run for governor.“I love Voyager and I love Discovery and of course I respect the original,” she said, “but I revere The Next Generation.”Michelle Paradise, executive producer of Star Trek: Discovery, told Variety the show decided it needed a figure of suitable gravitas.“When the time came to start talking about the president of Earth,” she said, “it seemed like, ‘Well, who better to represent that than her?”Abrams is a former Democratic member of the Georgia state house as well as a prolific romance novelist. She has said she will be US president by 2040.In 2018, she ran the Republican Brian Kemp close for governor of Georgia. She is seeking a rematch this year and in part thanks to her work on voting rights has risen to prominence in the national party, having been considered for vice-president to Joe Biden.Abrams’s work helped secure both Biden’s win in Georgia in 2020 and Democratic control of the US Senate, via two Georgia run-offs.Such work has made her a target of the right. On Friday, the National Review, a conservative site, published a column about her Star Trek cameo: Stacey Abrams Does Not Deserve to Be President of Earth.Abrams, the Review said, “is, at this time, most famous for losing the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election and then proceeding to deny she had lost it”.Abrams refused to concede to Kemp, who as Georgia secretary of state oversaw the purging of voter rolls before the election he contested.Brad Raffensperger, the current Georgia secretary of state, has argued that Abrams’ refusal to concede was “morally indistinguishable from – and helped set the stage for – former president Donald Trump’s behavior after the 2020 presidential election”.Raffensperger famously stood up to Trump, whose request that Raffensperger “find” sufficient votes to flip the state is at the heart of a grand jury investigation.In 2019, Abrams told the New York Times that while she “legally acknowledge[d] that Brian Kemp secured a sufficient number of votes under our existing system to become the governor of Georgia. I do not concede that the process was proper, nor do I condone that process.”She also said: “I have no empirical evidence that I would have achieved a higher number of votes. However, I have sufficient and I think legally sufficient doubt about the process to say that it was not a fair election.”The Review complained that Star Trek would never make Trump president of Earth, not even “in the way that the evil genetic superman Khan Noonien Singh once despotically ruled one-quarter of earth’s population”.It added: “In classic Trek fashion, Abrams [was] shown as the logical and inevitable result of the kind of technocratic progressivism that the show has long advanced, a fruition of our highest ideals. Her behavior in the political sphere does not seem to bear this out.”Elie Mystal, a writer for the Nation, responded: “Look at how conservative white people react to a FICTIONAL black woman president.”Mystal also tied the Review’s criticism to events in Washington, where Ketanji Brown Jackson will next week begin confirmation hearings to be the first Black woman on the supreme court.“Next week,” Mystal wrote, “this same publication that can’t handle a black women president ON A TELEVISION SHOW is going to claim to have reasonable and *totally not racist* thoughts about a real life black woman on the supreme court.” The makers of Star Trek: Discovery seemed happy just to have had Abrams on set. They also explained how they fulfilled her request not to be told of the plot of her episode, so she could enjoy it later.As the Washington Post reported, the episode, which was filmed in Toronto last August, ended with Abrams “telling the show’s protagonist … ‘There’s a lot of work to do. Are you ready for that?’“‘I am,’ [Captain Michael Burnham] responds. ‘Let’s get to it.’”Sonequa Martin-Green, who plays Burnham, told Variety she was “taken aback … and really moved” by Abrams’ performance.“It really signaled the culmination of the season having her there,” she said, “because she’s such this symbol of hope and strength and connection and sacrifice and building something bigger than yourself that will last generations, and that’s exactly what we’re talking about doing in the story.”In a “cherished moment”, Martin-Green said, Abrams was presented with a trophy, a captain’s badge and a poem.TopicsStacey AbramsStar TrekUS politicsDemocratsUS midterm elections 2022GeorgiaUS televisionnewsReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      How Billionaires Are Shaping France’s Presidential Campaign

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      In a nation with strict political finance laws, control over the news media has provided an avenue for the very rich to influence elections, this one more than ever.PARIS — The face of President Emmanuel Macron’s possibly fiercest rival in France’s coming election is not on any campaign poster. He has not given a single speech. His name will not be on the ballot.He is not a candidate at all, but the man often described as France’s Rupert Murdoch: Vincent Bolloré, the billionaire whose conservative media empire has complicated Mr. Macron’s carefully plotted path to re-election by propelling the far-right candidacy of Éric Zemmour, the biggest star of Mr. Bolloré’s Fox-style news network, CNews.With the first round of France’s presidential election just a month away, polls show Mr. Macron as the favorite. But it is Mr. Zemmour who has set the themes of the race with the openly anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim views he had put forth each evening on television for the past couple of years.“Bolloré’s channels have largely created Zemmour,” François Hollande, France’s former president, said in an interview. But Mr. Zemmour’s emergence is just the latest example of the power of France’s media tycoons, Mr. Bolloré most prominent among them, to shape political fortunes. In a nation with very strict campaign finance laws, control over the news media has long provided an avenue for the very rich to influence elections.“If you’re a billionaire, you can’t entirely finance a campaign,” said Julia Cagé, an economist specializing in the media at Sciences Po, “but you can buy a newspaper and put it at the disposal of a campaign.”The political reach of media tycoons like Vincent Bolloré, center, has become enough of a concern that the French Senate opened an inquiry.Isa Harsin/Sipa, via Associated PressIn the long run-up to the current campaign, the competition for influence has been especially frenzied, with some of France’s richest men locked in a fight over some of the nation’s top television networks, radio stations and publications.The emergence of Mr. Bolloré, in particular, has intensified the jockeying in this election season as he buys up media properties and turns them into news outlets pushing a hard right-wing agenda.The phenomenon is new in the French media landscape, and it has prompted fierce jostling among other billionaires for media holdings. It has been the hidden drama behind the 2022 elections, with some of the media billionaires angling strongly against Mr. Macron, and others in support of him.On one side are Mr. Bolloré and his media group, Vivendi; on the other are billionaires regarded as Mr. Macron’s allies, including Bernard Arnault, the head of the LVMH luxury empire.The political reach of media tycoons has become enough of a concern that the French Senate has opened an inquiry. In hearings broadcast live in January and February, they all denied any political motive. Mr. Bolloré said his interests were “purely economic.” Mr. Arnault said his investments in the news media were akin to “patronage.”But there is little doubt that their media holdings give them leverage that France’s campaign finance laws would otherwise deny them. In France, political TV ads are not allowed in the six months before an election. Corporate donations to candidates are banned.Personal gifts to a campaign are limited to 4,600 euros, or about $5,000. In this election cycle, presidential candidates cannot spend more than €16.9 million each, or about $18.5 million, on their campaigns for the first round; the two finalists are then limited to a total of €22.5 million each, or about $24.7 million. By comparison, when he was a presidential candidate, Joseph R. Biden Jr. raised more than $1 billion for his 2020 campaign.Bernard Arnault, the head of the LVMH luxury empire, with President Emmanuel Macron of France in Paris last year. He is regarded as an ally of Mr. Macron.Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Why do you think that these French capitalists whose names you know buy Le Monde, Les Echos, Le Parisien?” Jean-Michel Baylet, whose family has owned a powerful group of newspapers in southwest France for generations, said in an interview, mentioning some of the country’s biggest newspapers.“They’re buying influence,” said Mr. Baylet, a former minister of territorial cohesion, who himself has been accused of using his media outlets to advance a parallel career in politics — a charge he denies.The control of media by industrialists, whose core businesses depend on government contracts in construction or defense, amounts to “a conflict of interests,” said Aurélie Filippetti, who oversaw the media sector as a minister of culture.Armed with media properties, businessmen enjoy leverage over politicians.“Politicians are always afraid that newspapers will fall into unfriendly hands,” said Claude Perdriel, the main shareholder of Challenges, a weekly magazine, who said that he made sure to sell his previous outlets, including the magazine L’Obs, to other businessmen who shared his left-leaning politics.For Mr. Macron, that is what happened when early this year Jérôme Béglé, who is a frequent guest on CNews, took over the Journal du Dimanche, a Sunday newspaper once so pro-Macron that it was called the “Pravda” of the government. After Mr. Bolloré gained control over the newspaper’s parent company last fall, it began publishing critical articles and unflattering photos of Mr. Macron.It recently zeroed in on what right-wing competitors consider the most vulnerable aspect of Mr. Macron’s record: his crime policy, which the publication referred to as a failure and his “Achilles’ heel.”Though not widely read, the newspaper enjoys a following among the French political and economic elite and an agenda-setting role. “It’s one of the two or three most influential newspapers,” said Gaspard Gantzer, a presidential spokesman under Mr. Hollande.A newsstand in Paris. “If you’re a billionaire, you can’t entirely finance a campaign,” said Julia Cagé, an economist at Sciences Po, “but you can buy a newspaper and put it at the disposal of a campaign.”Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via ShutterstockOne of Mr. Bolloré’s television channels, the youth-oriented C8, has served as a powerful echo chamber for promoting far-right ideas. A recent study by the CNRS, France’s national research organization, showed that from September to December last year, C8’s most popular show devoted 53 percent of its time to the far right and to one figure in particular: Mr. Zemmour.But it is through CNews, created in 2017 after his takeover of the Canal Plus network, that Mr. Bolloré continues to extend his influence in the final stretches of the campaign. With its ability to shape the national debate around issues like immigration, Islam and crime, CNews quickly grew into a new, and feared, political force in France. It made Mr. Zemmour, a newspaper reporter and best-selling author, a star.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionCard 1 of 6The campaign begins. More

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      in Elections

      Much of Smartmatic Case Against Fox News Can Proceed, Judge Rules

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      The $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News by the election technology company Smartmatic can move forward, a New York judge ruled on Tuesday. But the judge tossed out Smartmatic’s defamation claims against the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and a network guest, Sidney Powell.Smartmatic sued Rupert Murdoch’s cable news networks last year, along with several Fox hosts and guests. The lawsuit accused them of damaging the company by promoting a false narrative about the 2020 election: that Smartmatic and other voting systems companies tried to rig the race against President Donald J. Trump. Smartmatic later expanded its legal battle against disinformation to the right-wing media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network.On Tuesday, Justice David B. Cohen of State Supreme Court in Manhattan said in a 61-page ruling that, “at a minimum, Fox News turned a blind eye to a litany of outrageous claims about plaintiffs, unprecedented in the history of American elections, so inherently improbable that it evinced a reckless disregard for the truth.”He added, “At this nascent stage of the litigation, this court finds that plaintiffs have pleaded facts sufficient to allow a jury to infer that Fox News acted with actual malice.”He also declined to dismiss Smartmatic claims against Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business star, and Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was a frequent clearinghouse for baseless theories of electoral fraud in the weeks after Mr. Trump’s defeat. Fox canceled Mr. Dobbs’s program last year, one day after Smartmatic sued.Citing a legal technicality, Justice Cohen dismissed most of Smartmatic’s defamation claims against Rudolph W. Giuliani, who, appearing on Fox News as a legal representative for Mr. Trump, said the technology company had “tried-and-true methods for fixing elections,” among other false assertions. Even so, Justice Cohen said there was “substantial” evidence that Mr. Giuliani “acted with actual malice insofar as he evinced a reckless disregard for the truth” and ruled that Smartmatic could try again. The judge allowed another part of Smartmatic’s defamation case against Mr. Giuliani to go forward.Fox News vowed a swift appeal.“While we are gratified that Judge Cohen dismissed Smartmatic’s claims against Jeanine Pirro at this early stage, we still plan to appeal the ruling immediately,” the network said in a statement. The network added that it would “continue to litigate these baseless claims by filing a counterclaim for fees and costs” under New York’s anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) statute, which is meant to quickly set aside lawsuits that may be intended to chill free speech.Fox News said it would do so “to prevent the full-blown assault on the First Amendment which stands in stark contrast to the highest tradition of American journalism.”In dismissing the claim against Ms. Pirro, Justice Cohen said that while she had asserted on her show that Democrats “stole votes,” she had not specifically blamed Smartmatic’s software.A spokesman for Smartmatic did not reply to a request for comment.Fox News is also battling a related $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems, which has accused the channel of advancing lies that devastated its reputation and business. A Delaware judge rejected an attempt by Fox News to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit in December. More

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      in Elections

      Bob Beckel, Liberal Operative Who Became a Fixture on Fox, Dies at 73

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      He ran Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign, and later became a curmudgeonly pundit on conservative TV.Bob Beckel, who parlayed a lengthy career as a Democratic political operative into an even longer one as a TV pundit, mostly for Fox News, where he assumed the role of avuncular in-house liberal with a penchant for saying whatever was on his mind, died on Sunday at his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 73.His daughter, McKenzie Beckel, confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.As a pundit, Mr. Beckel often traded punches with the likes of Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld. But some of his positions — though he defended Barack Obama, he called for a freeze on visas for Muslim and Chinese students — meant that he often had more friends on the right than the left.“He and I got along great. He had a key to my house,” Mr. Hannity said on his show on Monday. Appearing alongside Mr. Hannity, Laura Ingraham, another Fox host, called him “an old-time liberal you could fight with.”But Mr. Beckel frequently crossed the line into cultural insensitivity. On the Fox News show “The Five,” where he was a host, he used racial slurs for Chinese people and repeatedly questioned the loyalty of Muslim-Americans. “I am an Islamophobe. That’s right — you can call me that all you want,” he said in 2015, after the attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.Fox News fired him in 2015, ostensibly over a dispute about an extended medical leave, which began with back surgery but, after he became addicted to pain killers, turned into a stay in rehab. The network rehired him in early 2017 to great fanfare — only to fire him again a few months later, after a Black employee accused him of making a racist remark.Mr. Beckel denied the charge, saying he had been set up because of his constant criticism of President Donald Trump.Mr. Beckel rose to national prominence as the outspoken campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign. By all accounts he ran a savvy race, helping his candidate overcome an embarrassing loss in the New Hampshire primary to Senator Gary Hart of Colorado — in part by persuading Mr. Mondale to question the substance of Mr. Hart’s agenda during a debate by uttering the popular catchphrase, “Where’s the beef?”Mr. Mondale clinched the nomination, but Ronald Reagan trounced him that November in one of the most lopsided elections in recent history.Soon after, Mr. Beckel announced he was done with campaigns, but not politics. The next year he established a consulting firm, advising politicians and corporate clients, and he hung out his hat as a pundit on cable, network and local news coverage through the 1990s.He signed on as a commentator with Fox News in 2000, and in 2011 he joined four other of the network’s personalities to launch “The Five,” an afternoon gab fest loosely modeled on “The View.”Mr. Beckel, second from left, in 2013 with his co-hosts on “The Five,” from left, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Eric Bolling, Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld and Andrea Tantaros.Carlo Allegri/Invision, via Associated PressThe show took off, dominating its 5 p.m. time slot and ranking behind only Mr. Hannity in Fox viewers. Many of the show’s fans, including a surprising number of liberals, said they tuned in mostly to see what the always unpredictable Mr. Beckel would do next.Broad-shouldered and slightly stooped, decked in bright suspenders and shirt sleeves, Mr. Beckel was as likely to defend liberal pieties as he was to puncture them. He might make a crude gesture at one of his conservative sparring partners, or show up just before Christmas dressed as Santa Claus.“It’s like seeing a family at Thanksgiving come home and argue about politics, but you know that everybody loves each other,” he told The New York Times in 2011.Robert Gilliland Beckel was born on Nov. 15, 1948, in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. His father, Cambridge Graham Beckel, taught at Queens College and later at a high school in Lyme, Conn., where the family moved when Robert was in middle school. His mother, Ellen (Gilliland) Beckel, was a homemaker.His parents were both alcoholics, a fact that brought Mr. Beckel great shame but one he discussed freely, especially in light of his own later struggles with substance abuse.But his father, who worked on the side as a labor organizer and a civil rights activist, also passed on a fierce commitment to progressive ideas, a complicated legacy that Mr. Beckel examined in his memoir “I Should Be Dead: My Life Surviving Politics, TV, and Addiction” (2015).He graduated in 1970 with a degree in political science from Wagner College, in Staten Island, where he also played football. He served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines between 1971 and 1972, and joined the State Department in 1977.There, as a deputy assistant secretary, he worked on the Panama Canal Treaty, the SALT II arms control negotiations, and U.S. policy in the Middle East. He left to run the Texas ground operations for Jimmy Carter’s re-election campaign, a losing effort that would nonetheless set him up to run Mr. Mondale’s campaign.Mr. Beckel was hard working as a pundit. He did whatever producers asked of him, whether substituting for vacationing hosts or jumping into election night coverage. “It’s a way for me to keep my finger in the socket,” he told The Washington Post in 1991. “I can still get juiced up for the campaigns, but I don’t have to do them. I can go to Iowa and New Hampshire, do my stand-ups and then go to bed.”He married Leland Ingham, a professional golfer, in 1991; they divorced in 2002. Along with his daughter, he is survived by his son, Alex; his brother, Graham; and his sister, Peggy Proto.In November 2000 Mr. Beckel undertook an effort to see whether electors in Florida could be persuaded to switch their votes from George W. Bush to Al Gore. When The Wall Street Journal reported on his project, Mr. Gore distanced himself from it, and when Mr. Beckel persisted, two partners at his firm left, forcing him to dissolve it.Mr. Becker in 1997 with Senator John McCain. He advised both politicians and corporate clients through his consulting firm.Rebecca Roth/CQ Roll Call via Getty ImagesMr. Beckel’s demons occasionally brought him controversy. In early 2001 he got drunk at a bar in Maryland and made a pass at a married woman. Her husband, sitting nearby, pulled out a gun and aimed it at Mr. Beckel’s head; he pulled the trigger and it misfired.A year later he hired a prostitute who then tried to extort money from him; after he refused and she went public, he was fired from the campaign of Alan Blinken, a Democrat (and uncle of Antony Blinken, the secretary of state) who was running for Senate in Idaho.Mr. Beckel kept on rolling. With the conservative writer Cal Thomas, he wrote a regular point-counterpoint column for USA Today, debating issues like immigration, the Iraq war and holiday shopping; they later co-wrote “Common Ground: How to Stop the Partisan War That Is Destroying America” (2008).But his real love was television.“I can write a good solid column about a presidential campaign in the L.A. Times and nobody will pay a hell of a lot of attention,” he told The Washington Post. “I get on ‘Crossfire’ and people seem to think that’s more important.” More

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      in US Politics

      Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children | Sam Wolfson

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      Rudy Giuliani doesn’t need a monster costume to scare childrenSam WolfsonTrump’s lawyer was revealed to be a contestant on The Masked Singer – and when Robin Thicke storms off in protest, you know you’ve got problems It’s like something from a Guillermo del Toro film: a grotesque fantasy creature disrobes, only to reveal an even more horrifying monster underneath. But that’s what viewers will see when the US version of The Masked Singer, Fox’s incognito singing competition, returns at the end of this month.Rudy Giuliani’s surprise reveal on Masked Singer led to judges walking offRead moreThe show, in which a panel of judges and the audience try to guess the identity of celebrity vocalists dressed in furry theme-park costumes, is taped in advance of airing. But Deadline reports that at the first episode’s climax, when the eliminated singer reveals their true identity, it was Rudy Giuliani whose head popped out of the costume. Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the set in protest. Quite a good reflection of how bad a guy you have to be when rape-culture chanteur Thicke, the singer of Blurred Lines, decides you’re beyond the pale.The disbarred attorney and former mayor of New York, who played one of the largest roles in trying to end 250 years of American democracy, is now under investigation for bribing foreign powers to investigate his political opponent, lying about election fraud, and trying to actively overturn votes, in some cases by seizing voting machines or ignoring electoral counts. It would be fair to say that the only reason the results of a democratic presidential election were not overturned is because Giuliani’s attempts were thwarted.So what better place for this cuddly henchman to hide from law enforcement than on a cosplay singing show. No footage has yet been released of what outfit Giuliani was wearing, although he doesn’t need a monster costume to scare children. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine how the producers came up with something more grotesque than his own smirking face, seen recently on the Borat sequel making creepy sex eyes at an actor he believed was a young journalist as he thrust his hand down his trousers.The Masked Singer began in Korea, but has been exported round the world and become one of the most successful non-scripted series in the US of the last decade. Stars from every era, including Gladys Knight, T-Pain, Jojo and Jewel, have found career rejuvenation after appearing on the show as furrier versions of themselves.But the masks have also been a way on sneaking controversial figures who may not normally be accepted on primetime TV. Logan Paul, who uploaded footage of a suicide victim to his YouTube channel, was eliminated in season five, and in season three a cuddly pink bear that rapped Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back was revealed to be former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Palin later commented that her appearance was “a walking middle finger to the haters out there”.Reality TV provides a fantastic and powerful form of reputation-washing, in which all participants are celebrated “for being able to laugh at themselves”, as if that was a greater attribute than not being a fascist.There is a reason Giuliani, Palin, Sean Spicer (Dancing with the Stars), Anthony Scaramucci and Omarosa Manigault Newman (Celebrity Big Brother) have attempted to use entertainment, rather than politics, to revive their reputations, and it’s not just because they enjoying turning network television into a moral-less Hunger Games universe where propagandists with blood on their hands shimmy in sparkles in between adverts for pharmaceuticals and Tostitos. Shows like The Masked Singer encourage viewers to think of politicians’ personalities as somehow separate from their political positions.We’ll have to wait until next month to find out what Giuliani wore. Until then, we’re left to imagine what stench uncontrolled flatulence might create in a costume that producers have previously warmed can get dangerously hot.TopicsRudy GiulianiTelevisionUS politicsTrump administrationUS televisioncommentReuse this content More

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      in Elections

      Why Dr. Oz Is So Popular: American's Dysfunctional Attitude to Health

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      It’s perhaps an understatement to say that Americans have a difficult and contradictory relationship with our bodies.Every decade or so there is a new optimal way to feed ourselves, along with increasingly outlandish weight-loss regimens and whole categories of foods to champion or fear. We revel in the sophistication of medical science while widely distrusting it, and our politicians refuse to support a health care system in which everyone has access to basic, compassionate care. We are overly sedentary, but when we exercise we value strenuous over relaxing movement, strain over ease, striving over acceptance.No one embodies these obsessions better than Mehmet Oz, known as Dr. Oz to American daytime television viewers. Dr. Oz, who has styled himself as a kind of high priest in the church of American wellness, recently announced his candidacy in the Republican primary for an open Senate seat in Pennsylvania — a race that could decide control of the chamber.As Dr. Oz pursues this pivotal position, he should be seen as more than a celebrity turned politician. He’s rightly understood as a kind of quasi-religious leader, one who has set up his revival tent between a yoga studio and an urgent-care clinic, with the television cameras rolling. And many Americans are primed and ready to commit to his doctrine, which promises boundless possibility so long as we invest in individual responsibility — for our health and for everything else.This is worrying. As we collectively face yet another surge of coronavirus infections, leaders who extol individualism aren’t simply ineffective — they’re dangerous. If there’s anything we should be taking away from the past two years, it’s that autonomy and self-reliance are inadequate for 21st-century problems such as climate change, structural racism and the pandemic.The son of Turkish immigrants, born in Cleveland, and by all accounts a gifted surgeon, Dr. Oz gained notice as a frequent guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” appearances that earned him the tag “America’s doctor” and led to introduction of “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2009. Over 13 seasons, the frequent topics of the show, which at its height regularly drew over a million viewers per week, could also be a list of Americans’ biggest bodily anxieties: weight loss, cancer, weight loss, aging, weight loss, sleep problems, poop problems and oh, weight loss.Dr. Oz often describes his path from cardiothoracic surgeon to TV health expert with missionary zeal: “As I performed thousands of surgeries on patients whose hearts had been ravaged by obesity, I realized we needed to better educate people on how to take part in their own care,” he explained in testimony before a Senate committee in 2014. “And for that reason I went into the public life, in an effort to teach.”And his announcement that he is now making the leap from daytime television to national politics took on a downright rapturous tone: “I’m running for the Senate to empower you to control your destiny,” he wrote in an essay in The Washington Examiner, “to reinvigorate our great nation, and to reignite the divine spark that we should always be seeing in each other.”The thousands of on-air hours Dr. Oz has spent ministering to Americans’ health concerns have made him a multimillionaire, and also a controversial figure. He has praised unproven supplements such as sage leaf tea, green coffee bean extract and raspberry ketones as “miracles” for weight loss and was chastised by senators for doing so. He was part of a team at Columbia University that patented a device to strengthen damaged heart valves, and also was the target of a letter of protest by physicians who asked why the university kept him on the faculty since he had shown “an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments and cures in the interest of personal financial gain.”On Covid-19, Dr. Oz has been particularly contradictory. He has promoted the safety and efficacy of vaccines and masks, but also initially recommended the use of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid, based on a small and soon-discredited study. And his bid to represent Pennsylvania in the Senate is based on his promise to free Americans from some of the mask and vaccine mandates that his medical colleagues widely support.“We are Americans, and we can do anything we want,” he tweeted recently, alongside a Fox News clip of himself criticizing the Biden administration’s Covid-19 policies. “It’s time we get back to normal.”If there’s one consistent strain in Dr. Oz’s trajectory, it’s his belief in the power and responsibility of individuals to take control of their health and well being. Strikingly, in his essay announcing his candidacy, Dr. Oz doesn’t speak of unity or community, as many politicians do. Instead he identifies himself as a doctor who is “trained to tell it like it is because you deserve to hear our best advice and make your own decisions.”Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that this messianic diet guru would offer to cure us of all that ails us, physically and spiritually. The bigger question is why so many are ready to believe that organic, cold-pressed snake oil could stop us from aging, cure cancer, make us lose weight and end a pandemic?There’s something deeply American in Dr. Oz’s quest to reach a higher state via the improvement of the body. Its roots can be found, arguably, in the spiritual strivings of the Transcendentalists, the group of 19th-century nature-obsessed New England philosophers.Ralph Waldo Emerson’s notion of an “original relationship to the universe,” and his belief that there is a divine spirit in nature and in the human soul that does not require the doctrines and laws of organized Christianity, was radical in its time, but became foundational to the American concepts of individualism and self-reliance. These threads have been woven into everything from the prosperity gospel to my yoga teacher’s instructions to lift our arms over our heads and send our intentions “from Earth to sky through you.”The same ideas, filtered through the 21st-century preoccupation with wellness, quickly arrives at the idea that we shortchange ourselves by accepting what we are told by society — by doctors, scientists or government health officials — if it contradicts our individual instincts or opinions.It’s this American idea that health is a personal responsibility that gives rise to figures like Dr. Oz. In his individualist doctrine, when we get sick it’s generally at least partly our fault — there was probably a supplement we should have taken, a superfood we could have eaten more of or a junk food we should have eaten less of, a specialist we should have consulted.This American predilection for individualism is itself a public health risk in a pandemic, Ed Yong has argued in The Atlantic — one that has led to bad policy that puts everyone, especially the most vulnerable people, at risk. When reducing the spread of an infectious disease requires collective and individual action, “no one’s health is fully in their own hands,” Mr. Yong explains.And yet the idea that your health is in your own hands is key to Dr. Oz’s worldview. Despite what appears to be an earnest desire to help people, “The Dr. Oz Show” is not a public health effort. It’s a business. And by recommending products and services, Dr. Oz offers us opportunities to buy things — a very American way to feel empowered. He helps us find the perfect alchemy of diet, exercise and açaí berries to keep us spry, thin, and disease-free forever, as long as we can pay for it all out of pocket. In our individualist, consumerist society, wealth is health.This perhaps is the deeper, more primal appeal of what Dr. Oz is selling — the idea that if we can find the right guru, buy the right products and strive hard enough to manifest our best selves, we might just cheat death.Which of course we can’t. In this moment, when so much hangs in the balance, it’s a dangerous delusion.Annaliese Griffin is a journalist who covers culture, lifestyle and health.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More