#apparently i wrote it in feb 2018 and never posted it

[pseudocitrus]

[furuta&rize] hc where, when he came to visit her at the usual time, she didn’t turn to greet him: instead, she kept staring at the mirror, intently.

((content warnings))

her gaze was fixed. when she finally does turn, he almost jumps back in surprise.

“what? what’s — that?”

rize smiles at him. some teeth show, and they are all the brighter now for how red her lips are, as vivid as blood. she clips a tube of lipstick shut, with a sound like a crisp bite.

“what do you think?” she asks. she purses her lips, pushes them out again, smiles again, glances at herself in the mirror again. furuta remains near the door. he isn’t sure what to say. in the end, it just tumbles out.

“you…you were already beautiful without it.” he frowns, and then says, “where…did you get it, anyway? did you go out? or did — did someone give it to you?”

“it’s a secret,” rize tells him. her voice is airy. she looks back into the mirror, sits up, gazes at herself from the side. she still doesn’t invite him in, and finally furuta enters himself, at first hesitant, and then with a march. he steels his voice.

“tell me how you got it,” he says, firmly, and she laughs.

Read more

[kyluxtrashpit]

2019 Fic Recap

So I’ve done this for the past few years and I started doing it at the end of 2019 but never managed to finish it. I think between TROS and IRL and then I got really, really sick, I just haven’t had the chance to do so. But fuck it, I decided to finish it anyway even though it’s now 3 months late lmao. So anyway, a recap of my 2019 fics

Total wordcount: 96 419 words. Which is less than last year, but still not too shabby. I wish I could’ve banged something out to get it over 100k but eh, it just didn’t happen. I definitely have enough wip words and whatnot to get me over that bump, though

Tough Love, 6572 words, posted Jan 17

So this was an experimental one. As you all know, I’m pretty hard on the sub!Kylo/dom!Hux train. But I had a conversation with a friend and it turned into one of those ‘okay, I don’t like x dynamic because of a, b, and c. But is it possible to write x without those and make it into something I like?’ and as it turns out, yes, yes it was. Thus this fic happened and here we are. I still really like it and I have a lot of Feelings on this dynamic vs the one I usually write, but that’s an essay in and of itself lmao. It got some great feedback too, which was cool

Take My Breath Away, 1230 words, posted Feb 7

Ah yes, this one, which was based off a throwaway KOTOR ability but was an excuse for me to write Kylo getting stuffed from both ends with some asphyxiation thrown in. And also extremely rough sex + softer aftercare is a weakness of mine haha, so I just had to do it

Fix You, 1994 words, posted Feb 10

So this was my first piece for Bad Things Happen Bingo, which is an event I’m still planning to finish at some point lmao, and that I’ve had a lot of fun with so far. This fic was another that I tried for a more ‘classic’ feel with, though it’s a lot softer. The uncomfortable intimacy. The ‘feelings are happening but we won’t talk about them’. The shaky trust. All of that good stuff. I had fun with it

Keep Your Enemies Closer, 1657 words, posted Feb 24

Another for BTHB! I just love when Hux wins, okay. And I think this was one of those time periods where Kylo was doing all the winning in fics and I just. Needed something different lmao. Emperor Hux remains one my all time fave ideas and it’s still a shame canon never gave it to us. But I have the power to make it happen, so I did. Plus Kylo in a shock collar is always fun >:)

Indulgence, 17 357 works, completed Apr 19, first posted Mar 28

So! This was a continuation to my experiment from above and really it was just an excuse for lots of smut and pampering lmao. Much as I had thought I had said everything I wanted to say with Tough Love, apparently I had not, and this monstrosity formed. There may be a third, more serious piece to finish off the series this year, but I haven’t decided yet. Although, I have to admit, I’m still surprised how poorly this fic did feedback-wise, especially compared to its predecessor and considering it’s the more popular dynamic these days. Tbh some of my best smut is in this fic imo, but ah well, sometimes people just don’t like things and I suppose I have to accept that, even if I’m really, really proud of that thing

(Okay and the rest are behind a cut for length)

Best Served Bloody, 2666 words, posted Apr 29

Another BTHB and, again, not much deeper to it. Beating up Brendol is always fun though lmao. And when I was writing this, I really wanted Hux to be the one to strike at his father. A lot of pieces have Kylo doing it, which is great, but I wanted to do something a little different. I wanted Hux to have the power to save himself. It was fun to write in that way, as a powerful revenge fantasy

The Best, 6450 words, posted May 12

Ah, now this was a fun one lmao. It was born of a horny crack idea but I can’t do real crack, so it ended up as crack treated seriously. And really, I just wanted an excuse to have Kylo sucking dick. A lot of dick. All the dicks he can find lmao. Slutty Kylo fic remains my favourite pwp, so I gotta contribute to the cause, you know. It was a delight to write, though challenging cause it kept turning me on LMAO. Totally worth it though. It was one of the most fun this year for sure

Be My Outlet, 1003 words, posted May 23

There’s not really much of a story behind this one haha. I was horny and I wanted some classic, Not Nice Hux and hatefucking, thus this exists. Plus I miss Kylo getting choked and it’s rare these days to see stuff quite this rough. I also have a bit of a somnophilia thing, which this sort of fits in to. And I’m always a fan of messy, masochist Kylo. So yeah. Idk it’s smut lmao what else could we want? It’s just a short little pwp, but I had a lot of fun with it and it was nice to revisit the classic kylux days

Safe Harbour, 1616 words, posted Jun 13

This one was for kyluxomegaverse week and it was very fun. A/b/o is one of those tropes where I really, really like a lot of it, but there’s also some stuff that’s much less my cup of tea. So I don’t write a lot of it, even though there are aspects of it that I adore. Which this one includes a lot of lmao. I think the nesting is fucking adorable and I wanted to write something soft, so here we are. Plus omega!Kylo is just delightful. Also looking back on it now, this one did really well? Holy shit, I had no idea it was that popular!

With Dignity, 4475 words, posted Jul 1

This was the last for BTHB that I managed last year (and I still intend to finish my card eventually, it’s just been a rough go so far this year lmao). I’m actually very proud of this one because this is the exact sort of angst I love to write. I didn’t intend for it to be as heavy as it ended up being, but when I started looking up the mechanics of force-feeding and reading about the experience of it, the plan changed drastically because holy fuck. I had never thought of it as that much of a torture before. I also enjoy with Hux like, making the reader feel bad for him while also actively reminding them he’s awful and getting that perfect cognitive dissonance. So this was a great excuse to do exactly that. And I love how tough he is even in such circumstances. Despite the heavy subject matter, I had a blast with this one

Greener Grass, 3389 words, posted Jul 14

This one was originally a twitter thread that really got away from me lmao, so I edited it and put it on ao3 because I really liked it. I’ve always liked self-cest as a concept and I thought it’d be interesting for Kylo to interact with a version of himself that made some different choices. One that was happier. And then we see Kylo through Ben’s eyes, see what the dark side has wrought for him. And then, of course, some smut to pull it all together lmao. It was a really fun character study and I had a grand time with it

Subliminal, 5719 words, posted Aug 23

This one! Okay so I’m pretty sure I sent in a couple of khk prompts over the years that were basically this, but no one ever wrote them so I finally did it. I’m honestly surprised hypno kink isn’t actually used more in kylux, considering Hux is canonically in charge of the brainwashing program. So much potential. So I had to write it. I also went down quite a few rabbit holes in researching this (with mixed success lmao) and learned a whole lot about hypno kink in the process. I may have even acquired it as a fetish lmao. But anyway, this one’s a bit darker and it’s fun to write those every once in a while. I think I pulled it off well too

Ashes Among the Stars, 36634 words, posted Dec 1

Ah and my big bang this year! I had a blast with this one although it was quite the challenge. My first fandom was gundam so when I saw this prompt I was very intrigued and ended up getting it. This fic had a lot more world-building than I usually do, which was the primary challenge as I basically had to take aspects from both franchises and sew them together into a new world of its own. I think I did that rather successfully tbh. The plot gave me trouble too but also gave me some of my best eureka moments haha. My partner was also wonderful and made the experience that much better. I know crossovers don’t tend to perform as well, so I was expecting that, though I do wish some more people had given it a chance since I wrote it specifically so that no prior knowledge was needed. But alas, I’m still incredibly proud of it. It’s also my second longest fic ever!

Filthy, 5657 words, posted Dec 9

And here it is, the gangbang fic I’ve always wanted to exist lmao. I had wanted to write this one for a long time, but I could never figure out how to end it, what circumstances would lead to the gangbang. Then a convo with friends gave me the idea and boom, I could finally write it. This fic is just straight up smut and I fucking love it lmao. There needs to be more Kylo gangbang fics tbh

What have I learned?

Last year wasn’t as successful for writing as I’d hoped, given that I wrote less in 2019 than I did in 2018. But also a lot of things happened to me last year. I got a new role at work. My dad had a heart attack (he’s okay though). I had a pretty rough time with my mental health. And then there was the lead up to TROS and the frankly unnecessary amount of stress that caused me. So there was a lot going on and working against me, which is a large part of why I didn’t manage to write as much as I’d hoped I would, and there’s a lot in my folder that I started but just wasn’t able to finish before the end of the year. I worried for a while I was losing interest, but looking back, no, it was definitely the IRL shit lmao. That said, I’m also extremely happy with all of the pieces I did finish, regardless of how well they did. I’m proud of them and I loved writing them, even when it was difficult

One of my goals from last year was to write more, which I didn’t manage, and to get better at answering comments, which I think I did well on for the most part up until post-TROS lmao. I also wanted to do the big bang again (and I was hoping for a reverse, which it was!) and I did. And I also wanted to have fun and keep my confidence with my writing, which I think I was the most successful at. I feel really good about everything I made and I really enjoyed writing them, even if I didn’t manage to finish everything

Goals for 2020?

I think part of the reason I didn’t finish this post in 2019 is because of my TROS breakdown and subsequent stresses associated with it. Because I wasn’t sure what I wanted or what I was going to do. Sometimes I wanted to give up and find a new fandom/ship, other times I was sure I was over it and going to just do whatever the fuck I wanted, and then there was every emotion in between

Now, though, I’m sure I’m going to keep writing here. I haven’t managed much this year yet, but I can feel it coming back to me. I have a post-TROS fic I managed to solve a major problem with the other day. I also have renben as a new ship to excite me. And I still have a lot of wips and BTHB and various others I desperately want to do. Right now, I feel good about my writing and my interest in it is back to normal, which is great. So this year? I’m not going to set a hard goal. I’d love to write more than last year and maybe I will, but it’s okay if I don’t. I’d love to do another big bang this year, but I’m not going to kick myself if I can’t handle it when that time comes. I’d love to finish BTHB, but if it stretches into another year, who cares? My only goal is to just keep writing and keep enjoying it. I want to have fun with it. I want to be happy with whatever pieces I do manage to put out. I want to set aside time to read more fics from others, if I can. And I think all of those will really help with my mental health, which is starting to recover right now, and that’s what’s most important of all

Also thank you all for your patience with me. I know I’ve not been responsive, here or on twitter or to comments, but I am trying my best. It’s been a rough go and I don’t like to whine too much in my fandom spaces. I don’t know when or even if I’ll get back to normal, but I’m trying, and that’s what matters. I love every one of you on here <3

[chiefbuttons]

Happy New Year! Books are the Best!

In 2018 I went to Japan, filled some bookshelves, and read more than the usual amount of literary biographies. In Japan, we navigated the bookstore in which Haruki Murakimi apparently bought his first fountain pen. While there, I bought copies of two of my favourite Japanese books: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, and Book 1 (of 6) of 1Q84.

Japanese books are very beautiful, and all very uniform. There were hundreds of book protectors on sale in every bookshop and stationery shop (we went to a lot of those – the Iroshizuku ink was soooo cheap!), I had to remind myself that books in the UK don’t fit into them to stop myself from bringing them all home. Now that I have at least one  Banana Yoshimoto book in Japanese, there’s more incentive than ever to try and learn the language. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how much is lost or gained in translation and what that does to a book depending on the language you read. This Little Art by Kate Briggs is a novel-length essay on exactly this topic, and I read it not long after The Idiot in which the protagonist has a crisis about language and how words can lose their meaning. They fit together very well in my head – both asked and tried to provide answers to questions about translation, like why even do it at all if meaning is going to be lost? Having read Murakami’s most recent book, Killing Commendatore, I’m still not sure if the absence of Jay Rubin as translator is responsible for my disappointment with it, or if it was just a bad book, or if Haruki Murakami has never been that great and it was all Jay Rubin all along.

This Little Art, The Idiot, Shirley and Romantic Outlaws are probably my favourites from this year. Also Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Breakthrough, from Don’t Look Now. Sinister, terrifying, haunting, all words that fall short of describing the atmosphere of that one short story.

I read Shirley after reading Outsiders by Lyndall Gordon. I had tried to read it before and had never been able to get past the first chapter, but something about Outsiders made me want to try again. Reading Outsiders made me realise in a way that I hadn’t before that books written in the last couple of centuries aren’t as far removed from us as I had thought. Previously, when reading books from different time periods, I had become as detached as if I was reading fantasy; I forgot that the stories being told were often very firmly set in social, political and cultural climates that had once existed. It helped me to find ways to empathise with the narrators and the characters, and make them much more human and relatable. While reading Shirley, instead of feeling like the characters and situations were a million miles away, I forced myself to remember that Charlotte Brontë was writing about events that were important to the people in the time she was writing about. Her father witnessed Luddite uprisings. The setting of Shirley with its discussions of workers’ rights and its attacks on mills was as real for Charlotte and her father as Brexit and Trump are for us now.

Turtles All The Way Down – John Green

My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs – Kazuo Ishiguro

Manderley Forever: Daphne du Maurier, A Life – Tatiana de Rosnay

Don’t Look Now & other short stories – Daphne du Maurier

Outsiders: Five Women Writers who Changed the World – Lyndall Gordon

Shirley – Charlotte Brontë

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The first time I tried to read Shirley, I struggled to get past the first three chapters. "This is not as good as Jane Eyre or Villette," I thought. And, of course, I was wrong. How did I come to change my mind and try again? It was because I read Outsiders by Lyndall Gordon. It was sometimes difficult to read; lots of what felt like fact-listing, and the events of the five lives studied are not always in chronological order, which would not be a problem if it was made clearer. This made it difficult to get through but did not affect my ability to be grateful for all the new information and the future reading list (I have a charity shop copy of Middlemarch now sitting on top of a book pile, and am searching for some Olive Schreiner). It also provided me with new reasons to persevere with Shirley. Though the Brontë sister included in this book is Emily, not Charlotte, it is impossible to talk about one without mentioning the other. Especially when Charlotte included a characters based on Emily in a novel: Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. To read someone's fictionalised perception of her sisters' characters, I thought, would be a very strange experience. And it is, it sometimes feels weirdly voyeuristic. In the future we are all in on the secret. A huge theme throughout Outsiders is the rights of women and how their role has changed over time; Shirley is referred to as an incredibly feminist book. And it is. Jane Eyre has nothing on it. Still feminist, but this is in-your-face "what are we supposed to do all day, cook and sew??" "…yes. I hate womenites." So I decided to read it again but placing it as contemporary, rather than viewing it as a relic of the past which I should accept that I can't always understand or relate to. Putting these new perspectives on it has really helped me to get into the book. This is a huge post. Shirley is great. (Also the first time Shirley was used as a female name!) #bookstagram #Shirley #charlottebrontë #outsiders #lyndallgordon #brontë #nowreading

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In Search of Anne Brontë – Nick Holland

Moshi Moshi – Banana Yoshimoto

Asleep – Banana Yoshimoto

Valley of the Dolls – Jacqueline Susan

Eleanor and Park – Rainbow Rowell

Winter – Ali Smith

Banshee, Volumes 2 & 5

My Uncle Oswald – Roald Dahl

Young Hearts Crying – Richard Yates

The White Book – Han Kang

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

The Idiot – Elif Batuman

Emily Brontë Reappraised: A View from the 21st Century – Claire O’Callaghan

A Cup Of Sake Beneath The Cherry Trees – Yoshida Kenko

This Little Art – Kate Briggs

The Lonely City – Olivia Laing

The Diary of a Bookseller – Shaun Bythell

Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami

A Cat, A Man and Two Women – Junichiro Tanazaki

N. P. – Banana Yoshimoto

Romantic Outlaws – Charlotte Gordon

The Pilgrims – Mary Shelley

Bartleby The Scrivener – Herman Melville

Behind A Wardrobe In Atlantis – Emma J. Lannie

The Hatred of Poetry – Ben Lerner

Convenience Store Woman – Sayuka Murata

Demian – Herman Hesse

Revolutionary Girl Utena 20th Anniversary companion book

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories – Edited by Jay Rubin, Introduction by Haruki Murakami

The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night – Jen Campbell

The Tales of Beedle the Bard – J.K. Rowling, Illustrated by Chris Riddell

We went to a talk given by Chris Riddell at Nottingham Trent University. He was answering questions about his work on the newly illustrated Beedle the Bard while drawing for us live. He signed my copy of The Edge Chronicles Maps, and was generally very lovely.

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Tonight we went to see Chris Riddell speaking with Dr Sarah McConnell at Nottingham Trent University. There were live illustrations, and Shauna Shim did dramatic readings from The Tales of Beedle The Bard. I've been reading The Edge Chronicles since I picked up a copy of Beyond The Deepwoods AT THE LIBRARY (libraries, man!), aged 11, and thought it had the best front cover I had ever seen. Now that I'm older, if Chris Riddell has illustrated something I assume it's good and read it. Thank-you @chris_riddell for staying super late after your talk to speak to everyone and sign everything! @ntucreated #nottinghamtrent #illustration #theedgechronicles #beyondthedeepwoods

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Oct 3, 2018 at 2:26pm PDT

Ariel – Sylvia Plath

Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the 21st Century – Sophie Franklin

Killing Commendatore – Haruki Murakami

By The Light of My Father’s Smile – Alice Walker

Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë

Rough Magic – Paul Alexander

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HAPPY FRIDAY GUYS

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 21, 2018 at 1:55pm PST

How To Be Invisible – Kate Bush

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Merry Kate-mas =D

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 25, 2018 at 9:34am PST

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom – Sylvia Plath

This year I would like to write more about the books I am reading – this blog has been very neglected for the past couple of years! I’ve been occasionally taking part in the Are You Book Enough bookbinding challenge on instagram again. This time last year I was working on the January 2018 theme Darkness. I wrote and illustrated a story called The Black Ribbon. It was inspired by the Tatiana de Rosnay biography of Daphne du Maurier, in which de Rosnay refers to Daphne du Maurier’s depressive episodes as her “black ribbon.” It’s also a tribute to Edward Gorey. I thought his style of illustration would be best suited to the story I was telling, so I had a go at reproducing his style.

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Part 2 of my #AreYouBookEnough January book. Here are all the illustrations and the story I wrote inspired by Edward Gorey, Daphne du Maurier and Tatiana de Rosnay. Please see my previous post for the explanation! #bookart #bookstagram #handmadebooks #illustration #edwardgorey

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Jan 30, 2018 at 1:43pm PST

Another of the books I made this year was a book in a box for the theme Listen. I chose to bind a book of Kate Bush’s Fifty Words For Snow from her song and album of the same name.

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This is my contribution to the August #AreYouBookEnough bookbinding challenge, #listen . I love to listen to music, and Kate Bush is one of my favourites. Why choose Fifty Words For Snow when I could choose any of her songs? Why does it fit the theme best? The song is a list. It's Stephen Fry reciting fifty words for snow – some made up by Kate Bush, some real. She wanted him to be the narrator because people believe the words he says, he is intelligent and speaks with a quiet authority.  Hearing him speak her fictional words for snow makes them sound real. Snow itself deadens sound but has sounds of its own; one of the words is "creaky-creaky." I hope whoever looks at my book can hear the snow behind the words. This is the first time I've made this kind of box, and my measurements are a bit off (the lid is loose!) but overall I'm pleased and know what to do better next time! The paper is very fibrous, I wanted something that looked and felt like snow. Both the front cover of the book and the lid of the box are padded. The ink I used to write the fifty words is a mixture of two different inks – white calligraphy ink and a Grey Plum Kwiz ink. I'm going to have to find a way to photograph it properly because it is almost pearlescent! If you hold the paper a certain way it disappears. Hold it to the light and it looks like it is glowing. I'll try and get some video footage of it. #AreYouBookEnough #bookart #handmade #katebush #fiftywordsforsnow #50wordsforsnow #listen #books #snow #music

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Aug 30, 2018 at 12:36am PDT

I will leave you with a picture of the new bookcase. I hope you have an excellent 2019!

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Got a new phone. The cats ran away so I took a picture of one of the bookcases. It's so shiny

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 6, 2018 at 1:28pm PST

  Books I read in 2018 Happy New Year! Books are the Best! In 2018 I went to Japan, filled some bookshelves, and read more than the usual amount of literary biographies.

[scull-dog]

Female Representation in Mainstream Science Fiction: Muted Group Theory in The-X Files

Megan McGrew University of North Carolina Wilmington

Hey, so this is the short essay I wrote on the difference between how men and women write female characters in The X-Files. Give it a read if you’d like, I’m pretty happy with the result!

I’m re-writing this into a deeper ~20 page paper in a few months, so maybe I’ll post that too if there’s interest. 

Enjoy!

The science fiction genre is a unique form of entertainment, as its’ changes tend to reflect real-world innovations and discoveries. These stories create a speculative perspective that explores how developing ideas might impact a population. Early contributors such as Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and George Orwell have been regarded as the pioneers and fathers of science fiction. (Cates.) However, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is frequently overlooked, despite being the first example of science fiction as we know it today. (History.com) This imbalance in representation can be explained just as the genre is; that is to say, that authors pulled from their experiences and peers. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, female scientists rarely saw recognition for their work. These women would either be dismissed despite equal contributions while their male counterparts received the praise, or would be dismissed entirely. (Bordelon) Television shows such as Doctor Who and Star Trek: The Original Series are guilty of perpetuating this practice. When men write these female characters, they are ignorant of realistic expectations that a woman would have. They are depicted as strong, intelligent women, but are somehow satisfied with little recognition in order to benefit their male leaders. 

Chris Carter’s The X-Files demonstrates this power struggle in a number of ways throughout its’ eleven seasons and two movies. The two main characters, Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, are partners in the FBI. Scully was assigned to the X-Files unit to provide a rational, scientific point of view to counter Mulder’s belief in the supernatural. She’s educated, having graduated medical school and the FBI academy; emotionally and physically strong, and is generally respected by Mulder. However, an analysis and comparison of the season six episode “Milagro” and the season seven episode “all things” reveal that Carter’s Scully is a woman as a man would want to see her.

“Milagro,” which originally aired in April 1999, was written by Carter himself. The episode focuses on a man named Phillip Padgett, a novelist who becomes obsessed with Scully and spends all of his time writing his detailed personal fantasies.

Padgett perfectly fits the “nice guy” stereotype; he thinks that he deserves Scully and that she will reciprocate his feelings for no reason other than his interest in her. His attempts at flattery are extremely invasive, eventually crossing the line into criminal activity when he reveals that he moved to be closer to her. When Scully expresses her discomfort and explicitly denies his advances, his anger is with Scully, concluding that she doesn’t understand her own feelings. As it becomes more obvious that Scully doesn’t match Padgett’s exaggerated perception of her, his hostility escalates, ultimately resulting in a murder attempt when he learns of Scully’s feelings towards Mulder.

One year later, Gillian Anderson (who plays Scully on the show) wrote and directed “all things.” A string of unlikely events results in an uncomfortable encounter between Scully and Daniel Waterston, a man she had an affair with over ten years prior. Like Phillip Padgett in “Milagro,” Waterston is dismissive of and tries to correct Scully when she expresses her feelings, makes assumptions about Scully, (based on his perception of her from their past relationship as opposed to Padgett’s glorified representation) and believes he is entitled to Scully simply because he wants her. 

Carter writes Scully as she relates to the men in the episode. Every action she makes in “Milagro” is a direct effect of something a man does. She is never seen alone, only being described by Padgett in his novel or being told off by her partner. The end of the episode doesn’t provide any relief for Scully, and the last lines still paint Padgett as the victim. Anderson takes a character with similar motives and turns his relationship with Scully into an opportunity for her to asses her own reservations. The end of “all things” leaves Scully with a renewed confidence in herself.

Outsiders observing only these two episodes might determine that Anderson’s episode was an attempt at assimilation. She was held to the same expectations as male writers and directors, conforming to Kramarae’s suggestion that assimilators aim to “change the rules so that they incorporate the life experiences” (p. 456). However, examining statements made by Chris Carter, Gillian Anderson, and others involved in the production of The X-Files, it becomes apparent that women are being separated. In an “ask me anything” Reddit thread from January, Carter responded to concerns of ignorant sexism and objectification of women by stating, “I resent the calling of it misogyny, unintentional or not” and later arguing that “...the message we need to be sending to young women would be more likely, "don't take a job on the X-Files. You'll be abducted like eight times, have chips implanted in you and who knows what else."” (Carter). Despite creating The X-Files, Dana Scully, and the obstacles presented to her, his solution to ending misogyny on his own show is to not include any women in the first place. 

Anderson proved that her gender is not an impairment and she is just as capable as her male counterparts, while Carter reinforced the decisiveness of separation. Assimilation can only improve upon The X-Files and other science fiction.

Works Cited

Carter, C. (2018). Believe it or not, I’m Chris Carter, creator and executive producer of The X-Files. Season 11 starts tomorrow at 8/7c on FOX! AMA [Online Forum]. Retrieved from https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/7no3en/believe_it_or_not_im_chris_carter_creator_and/.

Bordelon, Suzanne. “Reflecting on Feminist Rhetorical Studies and the Covert Rhetoric of Anita Loos.” Vol. 33, no. 3/4, 2013, pp. 712–722., www.jstor.org.liblink.uncw.edu/stable/43854574. Accessed 16 Feb. 2018.

History.com Staff. (2009). Frankenstein published. Retrieved February 16, 2018, from http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/frankenstein-published

Kramarae, Cheris. A First Look at Communication Theory (Conversations with Communication Theorists) (Chapter 6, Muted Group Theory). McGraw-Hill Higher Education. Kindle Edition.

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry

[bountyofbeads]

What Would Happen if Trump Refused to Leave Office?

A peaceful transfer of power is necessary for American democracy to survive.

By Barbara McQuade | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted Feb 22, 2020

If Donald Trump is defeated in November 2020, his presidency will end on January 20, 2021. If he is reelected, then, barring other circumstances such as removal from office, his administration will terminate on the same day in 2025. In either of these scenarios, Trump would cease to be president immediately upon the expiration of his term. But what if he won’t leave the White House?

The American Constitution spells out how the transfer of power is supposed to work. Article II provides that the president “shall hold his office for the term of four years.” The 20th Amendment says that the president’s and vice president’s terms “shall end at noon on the 20th day of January … and the terms of their successors shall then begin.” Of course, a president may be reelected to a second four-year term, but under the 22nd Amendment, “no person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice.”

[ READ BELOW Read: Trump’s second Term]

For nearly 250 years, presidents have respected the law. Even when electoral defeat has been unexpected and ignominious, presidents have passed the baton without acrimony. In a sense, perhaps this is the central achievement of the American system: to have transferred power peacefully from one leader to the next, without heredity to guide the way.

That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about. As the former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee tweeted, President Trump “will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.” A good troll though it may have been, Huckabee is not the first person to suggest that Trump might not leave when his presidency ends.

In May, the faith leader Jerry Falwell Jr. tweeted an apparent reference to the completed investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian election interference. “I now support reparations,” he wrote. “Trump should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup.” Trump retweeted Falwell’s post.

One of Trump’s former confidants, Michael Cohen, has suggested that Trump won’t leave. In his congressional testimony before heading to prison, Trump’s former attorney said, “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump, I fear that if he loses the election in 2020, there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”

Trump himself has joked about staying in office beyond his term, and even for life. In December, Trump told a crowd at a Pennsylvania rally that he will leave office in “five years, nine years, 13 years, 17 years, 21 years, 25 years, 29 years …” He added that he was joking to drive the media “totally crazy.” Just a few days earlier, Trump had alluded to his critics in a speech, “A lot of them say, ‘You know he’s not leaving’ … So now we have to start thinking about that because it’s not a bad idea.” This is how propaganda works. Say something outrageous often enough and soon it no longer sounds shocking.

Refusal to leave office is rare, but not unheard of. In the past decade, presidents in democracies such as Moldova, Sri Lanka, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gambia have refused to leave office, sometimes leading to bloodshed. In 2016, Joseph Kabila decided not to step down after three five-year terms as the president of Congo, announcing that he would delay the election for two years so that a census could be conducted. His decision was met with mass protests in which 50 people were killed by government security forces. Still, he followed through and an election took place in 2018. He left office thereafter.

Elected officials in the U.S. have also refused to step down, albeit from lower offices than the presidency. In 1874, a Texas governor locked himself in the basement of the state capitol building after losing his reelection bid. The saga began when Republican Governor Edmund J. Davis lost the 1873 election by a resounding 2-to-1 ratio to his Democratic challenger, Richard Coke, and claimed that the election had been tainted with fraud and intimidation. A court case made its way to the state’s supreme court. All three justices, each of whom had been appointed by the incumbent Davis, ruled that the election was unconstitutional and invalid. Democrats called upon the public to disregard the court’s decision, and proceeded with plans for Coke’s inauguration. On January 15, 1874, Coke arrived at the state capitol with a sheriff’s posse, and was sworn in to office while Davis barricaded himself downstairs with state troopers. The next day, Davis requested federal troops from President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant refused, and Davis finally stepped down three days later.

In 1946, Georgia endured the “Three Governors Crisis,” when the governor-elect died before taking office. Three men—the outgoing governor, the son of the governor-elect and the lieutenant governor-elect—each claimed a right to the office. The state assembly voted for the governor-elect’s son to take charge, but the outgoing governor refused to leave, so both men physically occupied the governor’s office. The outgoing governor yielded when the governor-elect’s son had the locks changed. The state supreme court finally decided in favor of the lieutenant governor-elect three months later.

The closest thing to a refusal to leave office that the U.S. presidency has experienced was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s break with tradition by seeking a third term. Roosevelt rejected the norm set by George Washington, and followed by successive presidents, to step down after two terms. FDR was elected to a third and even a fourth term, but concern about a permanent executive led to the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951, limiting presidents to two terms.

If Trump were inclined to overstay his term, the levers of power work in favor of removal. Because the president immediately and automatically loses his constitutional authority upon expiration of his term or after removal through impeachment, he would lack the power to direct the U.S. Secret Service or other federal agents to protect him. He would likewise lose his power, as the commander in chief of the armed forces, to order a military response to defend him. In fact, the newly minted president would possess those presidential powers. If necessary, the successor could direct federal agents to forcibly remove Trump from the White House. Now a private citizen, Trump would no longer be immune from criminal prosecution, and could be arrested and charged with trespassing in the White House. While even former presidents enjoy Secret Service protection, agents presumably would not follow an illegal order to protect one from removal from office.

Although Trump’s remaining in office seems unlikely, a more frightening—and plausible—scenario would be if his defeat inspired extremist supporters to engage in violence. One could imagine a world in which Trump is defeated in the 2020 election, and he immediately begins tweeting that the election was rigged. Or consider the possibility, albeit remote, that a second-term Trump is removed from office through impeachment, and rails about his ouster as a coup. His message would be amplified by right-wing media. If his grievances hit home with even a few people inclined toward violence, deadly acts of violence, or even terrorist attacks against the new administration, could result.

Ultimately, the key to the peaceful transfer of power is the conduct of the outgoing leader himself. America has thus far been lucky in that regard. After voluntarily relinquishing the presidency after his second term, Washington took measures to demonstrate the peaceful transfer of power. He attended the inauguration of his successor, John Adams, and insisted on walking behind Adams after the ceremony to display his subservience to the new president. Through this example, the citizenry was able to accept that the power of the presidency now resided in its new occupant.

More recently, upon leaving office after a heated campaign, George H. W. Bush left behind a letter to welcome Bill Clinton into the White House on January 20, 1993. It concluded, “You will be our president when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success now is our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good luck.” Imagining such a gracious note from the current occupant of the White House to his successor is difficult.

But if Trump should fail in his final duty as president to transfer power peacefully, the nation’s laws, norms, and institutions will be responsible for carrying out the will of the electorate. Should those fail too, then the American experiment’s greatest achievement will come to a grinding halt, and with it the hope that a republic can ever be kept.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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BARBARA MCQUADE is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School. She was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan and co-chair of the Attorney General’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and National Security in the Obama administration.

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NOW WE KNOW WHAT KIND OF AUTHORITARIAN TRUMP ASPIRES TO BE.... Over the past week, Trump has showed his commitment to creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

By Franklin Foer | Published February 14, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Donald Trump’s obsession with Ukrainian corruption turned out to be genuine: He wanted it thoroughly investigated—for the sake of its emulation. The diplomats who testified in front in Adam Schiff’s committee explained and exposed the Ukrainian justice system. Their descriptions may have been intended as an indictment of kleptocracy, but the president apparently regarded them as an instructional video on selective prosecution, the subversion of a neutral judiciary, and the punishment of whistle-blowers who expose corruption.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, his critics have speculated about the model of illiberal democracy that he would adopt as his own. After the past week—which saw the firing of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the revocation of the Justice Department’s sentencing memo for Roger Stone, and Attorney General Bill Barr’s increasingly heavy-handed control of the investigations into his boss—there’s less doubt about the contours of the state Trump hopes to build. He’s creating Kyiv-on-the-Potomac.

The House Intelligence Committee narrative featured a villainous bureau in Kyiv called the Office of the Prosecutor General. On paper, this department is akin to America’s own Department of Justice, but in practice, it acted more like an auction house where top government lawyers would entertain bids from oligarchs. These prosecutors have been integral to the maintenance and perversion of the system. Oligarchs would abuse the office to bring cases against old enemies; they also used the office to punish critics of their corrupt practices. And, in the most extreme example, one Ukrainian president weaponized the office against his primary political opponent: He actually locked her up. (It was Paul Manafort’s job, as a consultant to that president, to justify the arrest to the rest of the world.)

The United States has tried to push Ukraine away from this corrupt system. When Joe Biden bragged about how he conditioned U.S. financial assistance on the firing of the prosecutor Viktor Shokin, he was boasting about a legitimate accomplishment. Thanks in part to his efforts, Ukraine’s judiciary moved toward a system more like our own—at least more like the system that existed before William Barr entered the Justice Department—where the state shows no favor to its friends and no punitive malice towards its enemies.

There’s an irony to this tale. Just as the United States was succeeding in pushing the Ukrainian judiciary in a more democratic direction, it began plundering Ukraine’s recent past, borrowing its worst practices. The corrupt prosecutors who were displaced in the course of reform have reemerged as the conspiratorial figures whispering in Rudy Giuliani’s ear, stoking unfounded theories about Burisma and Biden. They urged Trump to exact revenge against his enemies, with the same malevolent prosecutorial intent and flimsy evidence that they might themselves have deployed.

At the core of liberal democracy, especially as it evolved in the 20th century, is the notion that a swath of the state should be preserved as a neutral territory. One of the constraints on political power is a governmental structure that removes politics from important tasks. This commitment extended well beyond insulating the judicial system. The government installed a layer of experts and civil servants, who sat below political appointees. These are people like Alexander Vindman, who supply facts and dispassionate analysis. They are the technocrats, so maligned around the Western world these days. They tabulate the data about economic growth so that an administration can’t concoct self-serving statistics about employment and production. They process foreign intelligence so that sycophantic aides don’t simply manipulate briefings to confirm the policy biases of the commander in chief. And they exist as checks on the machinations of political appointees, sensitive to any attempts to corruptly distort the government for personal benefit.

Conservatives have long waged war on this neutral state. George W. Bush’s administration bulldozed the CIA when its bureaucracy objected to his Iraq policy; it trashed the EPA when officials there sought to provide assessments of the environmental impact of proposals. The problem with Trump is that he is even less sensitive to the idea of neutrality than were his predecessors. He’s incapable of self-control and incapable of distinguishing his self-interest from the common good. So with the ejection of Vindman and other events of this past week, it’s possible to see Trump finally making his move against the neutral state. By punishing whistle-blowers so ostentatiously, he’s disciplining the bureaucracy to accept his corruption. He’s instigating the Ukrainification of American government.

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Our Founders Didn’t Intend for Pardons to Work Like This

The Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

By Jeffrey Crouch, Assistant professor of American politics at American University | Published FEBRUARY 21, 2020 | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump commuted the sentence of Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor and Celebrity Apprentice contestant who was imprisoned for trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat. The president also pardoned the former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward DeBartolo Jr., the “junk-bond king” Michael Milken, and former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik, among others. Each person had some connection to the president, a fact that the White House press announcement  on the decisions made clear. Trump seems to view clemency as a way to reward celebrities and please his supporters.

The country’s Founders did not intend for the clemency power to be used as a prize. Article II of the Constitution allows the president to forgive any federal crime, but just because he can does not mean he should.

[ Quinta Jurecic: Trump’s unpardonable challenge to the Constitution]

The Founding Fathers had their own ideas about how the process should work; Alexander Hamilton provided the most famous rationales for the clemency power. In “Federalist No. 74,” he noted how the president must be able to make exceptions for “unfortunate guilt”; otherwise, the justice system would be “too sanguinary and cruel.” Additionally, Hamilton pointed out that presidents may need to use clemency to quell unrest or rebellion and thereby “restore the tranquillity of the commonwealth.”

President George Washington pardoned two men charged with treason after the Whiskey Rebellion. On December 8, 1795, in his annual address to Congress, he said he was motivated to both show mercy and serve the public good. Washington’s use of these dual rationales set the clemency standard for his successors. Going forward, one or both ideas have implicitly undergirded most of the roughly 30,000 individual clemency decisions that have been granted by presidents one through 44. Each rationale has also been featured in a Supreme Court case: United States v. Wilson described a pardon as an “act of grace,” and Biddle v. Perovich described the pardon power as “part of the Constitutional scheme” and characterized clemency as a decision to be guided by “public welfare.”

Using clemency to address a larger societal concern, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson offered forgiveness to entice the Confederates to rejoin the Union. Harry Truman named a panel to recommend amnesty for Selective Service Act offenders after World War II. Both Jimmy Carter and his predecessor, Gerald Ford, offered amnesty to Vietnam War–draft offenders.

Presidents have also granted pardons and commutations as “acts of mercy” to individuals—many anonymous—for a variety of federal offenses. Most recipients applied to the pardon attorney’s office within the Department of Justice and, months or years later, successfully received a pardon or sentence commutation. Recent examples include Olgen Williams, whom George W. Bush pardoned in 2002 for stealing money from the mail, and Charles Russell Cooper, a bootlegger pardoned by Bush in 2005. In 2017, Barack Obama pardoned Fred Elleston Hicks for illegal use of food stamps.

Not all presidents have followed these rationales, though. History also shows that presidents—particularly recent ones—have abused clemency for their own personal or political benefit. In 1992, George H. W. Bush pardoned several Iran-Contra figures, including former Reagan Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, effectively relieving Weinberger of the need to stand trial, a boon to Bush, who may have been called to testify. Bill Clinton offered clemency to members of the violent Puerto Rican nationalist organization FALN, a controversial decision that  some said he made to gain Latino support for the political races of his wife and Vice President Al Gore. Right before he left office, Clinton pardoned  Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice  whose ex-wife was a large Clinton donor. George W. Bush commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sparing Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff a prison term. (Trump later pardoned Libby.) The presidents issued each of these clemency decisions after they were free from electoral consequences.

President Trump began by pardoning former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for criminal contempt of court, after Arpaio refused to stop police practices that amounted to racial profiling. Trump mentioned his intentions at a political rally before granting the pardon three days later. Since then, Trump hasn’t looked back. Along the way, he has favored a host of well-connected, famous, wealthy, or partisan figures for presidential mercy. To his credit, Trump has not hidden from the press, Congress, or other institutions when exercising clemency. He makes a decision and then takes the heat, often noting that his clemency grants counteract an “unfair” criminal-justice system.

Almost a year after Arpaio, Trump teased on Twitter a pardon for the conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, who had violated campaign-finance laws. He pardoned D’Souza that same day, and then made comments that shifted clemency speculation to the TV personality Martha Stewart and to Blagojevich.

Trump has also been swayed by celebrities. He commuted Alice Marie Johnson’s prison sentence after Kim Kardashian West visited the White House to advocate for her. He also pardoned the late African American boxer Jack Johnson in a grant pushed by the Rocky actor Sylvester Stallone.

The usual procedure for petitioning for a pardon or sentence commutation is far less showy than Trump’s current process. Typically, after waiting a minimum of five years, applicants go to the website of the pardon attorney; download, complete, and submit the appropriate form; and wait. After a lengthy review—sometimes years—the result is usually the same for everyone: a denial. George W. Bush granted only about 2 percent of petitions for a pardon or sentence commutation; Barack Obama granted 5.3 percent; and—as of February 7, 2020—Trump had granted less than 0.5 percent of clemency requests.

The former pardon attorney Margaret Love explains in her article “The Twilight of the Pardon Power” that one crucial reason so few clemency cases receive a positive recommendation is that “all but a handful of the individuals officially responsible for approving Justice Department clemency recommendations since 1983 have been former federal prosecutors.” In other words, because prosecutors in the pardon attorney’s office are reluctant to undo the work of their fellow prosecutors, presidents are rarely given a thumbs-up to pardon.

[ Garrett Epps: The self-pardoning president]

The traditional role of the pardon attorney has been basically abandoned by the Trump administration, after the office assisted presidents for more than a century. As The Washington Post  reported earlier this month, “Former White House officials describe a freewheeling atmosphere in which staff members have fielded suggestions from Trump friends while sometimes throwing in their own recommendations.” Moreover, “all but five of the 24 people who have received clemency from Trump had a line into the White House or currency with his political base.”

Whether Trump is reaping significant personal benefits from his clemency decisions is unclear, but he does seem to enjoy the public’s reaction, even inviting two military clemency recipients onstage at a fundraiser late last year. With so many clemency grants to controversial figures like Arpaio, D’Souza, and now Blagojevich, he may be launching trial balloons to test public reaction to more serious pardons for his former associates, including Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

Along similar lines, Trump has twice tweeted about his understanding of the scope of the clemency power. In July 2017, he noted that he held “the complete power to pardon.” Roughly a year later, Trump tweeted that he had “the absolute right to PARDON myself.” Robert Mueller’s investigation and the impeachment trial are now both behind him. Still, it’s become apparent at this point in his presidency that Trump has used clemency to both gauge public opinion and stake out ground for a self-pardon, should he ever need one.

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This story is part of the project “The Battle for the Constitution,” in partnership with the National Constitution Center.

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JEFFREY CROUCH is an assistant professor of American politics at American University. He is the author of The Presidential Pardon Power and the editor of the journal Congress & the Presidency.

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WHAT DEMOCRATS AREN’T ADMITTING ABOUT TRUMP’S RECORD

The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

By Uri Friedman | Published February 22, 2020 7:00 AM ET | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

It’s 2020, and America is embroiled in not one but two catastrophic wars: one with Iran that has sucked in the entire Middle East, and another halfway across the world in North Korea sparked by Kim Jong Un test-firing nuclear-capable missiles that could hit the United States. It’s all the worse since the U.S. is waging both wars without allies, all of which have abandoned Donald Trump because of his incessant bullying.

Fortunately, this isn’t where we find ourselves today, but it’s what the president’s critics have been warning could occur if he carries on with policies that have shattered decades of conventional U.S. policy making. It’s not as if their concerns have no factual basis. The Trump administration really did come to the brink of war with Iran and North Korea. In neither case are the underlying tensions that got them there anywhere near resolved. America’s alliances are indeed in flux. But the fact that this is not our reality in 2020 is just as instructive as the fact that it could have been.

This pattern has recurred on several occasions during the Trump era: The president’s detractors foretell doom caused by one of his decisions, only to be proved wrong, and then nobody acknowledges that they got it wrong or admits that Trump’s policies have had some advantages.

Of course, just because some of these doomsday scenarios haven’t yet  materialized doesn’t mean that they won’t eventually. A number of Trump’s actions have already inflicted serious damage and could have corrosive consequences that will only become evident over time. In some cases, Trump seems to have simply been lucky. A number of warnings, moreover, have proved right.

Nevertheless, as American foreign policy comes under greater scrutiny as part of this year’s presidential campaign, the Democratic candidates risk losing credibility with voters and undermining their policy prescriptions if they don’t reckon with the moments when they said the sky was falling and it wasn’t. Why should a voter be convinced that returning to aspects of the pre-Trump status quo is necessarily a good thing when the people advocating for that inaccurately diagnosed the results of Trump’s defiance of convention? The episodes in which critics’ predictions weren't borne out offer valuable lessons for Trump’s challengers, even if they still vigorously disagree with the moves the president has made.

[ Read: The Sanders doctrine]

As Charles Dunlap Jr., the head of Duke University’s Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security, wrote for Just Security early in the Trump administration, Americans “need balance in our national security and foreign policy discussions before we don sackcloth and ashes and hoist our ‘The End is Near’ signs. True, we are in an era of change, which is what happens in democracies when a candidate runs on a platform of change and wins, and change can be disquieting to those who prefer the status quo. But how good was the status quo?”

Consider three emblematic episodes:

The War With Iran That Wasn’t

In the wee hours of January 2, shortly after news broke that Trump had killed the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani in a drone strike, Twitter pulsed with anxiety about #WWIII.

Enter the Democratic candidates: Bernie Sanders warned that Trump had just placed the United States “on the path to another” endless war, one that could again “cost countless lives and trillions more dollars.” Joe Biden  declared that Trump had “just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox,” potentially bringing America to “the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” The U.S. was perched precariously on that brink, Elizabeth Warren argued, “because a reckless president, his allies, and his administration have spent years pushing us here.”

The calamitous war they envisioned, however, has not come to pass. They were right, though, that there would be devastating consequences. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq, leaving at least 109 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. The Iranians mistakenly downed a civilian airliner, killing its 176 passengers, and hostilities between Iran and the U.S. remain dangerously high. Tehran has cast off restrictions under the 2015 deal brokered by the Obama administration to constrain Iran’s nuclear program, though it hasn’t yet raced to build a bomb, as many of Trump’s critics predicted would happen when the president withdrew from the agreement in 2018. Had Trump stuck with the accord in the first place, Iran and the U.S. might never have found themselves on the precipice of war over Soleimani’s demise.

Nevertheless, Iran’s missile barrage was a relatively restrained response when measured against the blow of losing its most powerful military leader and the predictions made by Sanders, Biden, and Warren. Iranian officials thought “that after a series of escalatory [Iranian] military operations—the tanker attacks, the shooting down of an American drone, the Saudi oil strikes, rocket attacks on bases in Iraq by Iranian-backed militias—Mr. Trump would refrain from responding consequentially,” only to be shocked by Trump taking out Soleimani, The New York Times reported last week in a postmortem of the crisis. Trump’s decision, the paper noted, “might ultimately deter future Iranian aggression.” A former British diplomat similarly told my London colleague Tom McTague that the Soleimani strike opened up “the space for de-escalation” by scrambling the Iranian government’s “understanding of how the Americans might react in [the] future.”

Setting aside the vital question of whether Trump’s killing of Soleimani was legally justified or strategically wise (for candidates such as Sanders and Warren, the answer is unequivocally no), it’s worthwhile to investigate why Iran didn’t react the way so many assumed it would and what insights that yields for how the United States deals with adversaries. Trump, “accidentally or otherwise, has identified real problems, including Iran’s ability to act with relative impunity,” McTague concluded. The Soleimani incident also suggests that viewing every U.S. military action in the Middle East through the trauma of the Iraq War can distort our understanding of those events.

The War With North Korea That Wasn’t

Trump’s critics argued that war would break out as a result of the president’s  assorted threats (unleashing “fire and fury,” totally destroying “Rocket Man”) to attack North Korea during his first year in office. After Trump engaged in a nuclear-button measuring contest  with North Korea’s leader on Twitter, Biden argued that the United States was closer to a nuclear war with North Korea than it had ever been. Sanders and Warren helped  introduce legislation to restrain Trump from going to war with North Korea. These critiques weren’t confined to the left. Republican Senator Bob Corker  cautioned that Trump doesn’t realize that “we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making.”

North Korean officials probably didn’t interpret Trump’s remarks as a signal that war was imminent. But the bellicosity of the president and his advisers put the U.S. military on high alert, alarmed America’s ally South Korea, and increased the risk that the parties could stumble into conflict, just as the president’s critics had warned.

That bellicosity, though, was also productive in ways that Trump’s detractors rarely acknowledge. Nikki Haley, Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, told me that she leveraged her boss’s rhetoric and volatility to persuade China and Russia to support UN Security Council sanctions against North Korea, which helped pressure Kim into (thus far mostly fruitless) nuclear negotiations with the United States. Vincent Brooks, who commanded U.S. forces in South Korea from 2016 to 2018, told me that the president’s unpredictability, paired with new military maneuvers on the Korean peninsula, helped Brooks reestablish deterrence against North Korean provocations and create space for diplomacy. "Trying to bait a dictator who has nuclear weapons is not a way to advance diplomacy," Warren argued  in 2017. According to two former Trump administration officials who were at the forefront of its North Korea policy during this period, however, it was one way to do so.

The lesson here isn’t exactly that future American presidents should bait nuclear-armed dictators, but rather that, in certain situations, unconventional behavior can unlock opportunities to achieve breakthroughs with enemies. Thae Yong Ho, one of the highest-ranking officials ever to defect from North Korea, told me that he thought Trump’s sharp break with the “very gentle” posture of past American presidents helped dissuade North Korea from escalating the nuclear crisis with the United States in late 2017.

The Very Anxious Allies That Remain Allies

Trump’s critics have likewise divined doom each time the president has raised questions about his commitment to defending U.S. allies and demanded huge hikes in their financial contributions to collective security. Biden, for example, has warned that if Trump is reelected, “NATO will fall apart.” Similar predictions have been made as Trump pushes for new arrangements in which Japan and South Korea would cover most of the costs of stationing U.S. troops in each country.

These alliances are indeed being tested more than they have been in decades, and all these partners are now engaged in more contingency planning for a world in which they can no longer depend on U.S. protection. But the fact that the alliances haven’t yet shattered—and by some measures, certain alliances have actually grown  stronger during the Trump era—reveals two realities of America’s network of alliances that the next commander in chief will confront.

First, Trump’s tenure has underscored that the United States never really figured out its role in the world and national-security interests once the Cold War ended and its clout began to decline relative to that of rising powers. That debate is now under way in earnest, and U.S. allies are gradually grasping this and processing what it means for them.

Second, for all the upheaval of the Trump years, these partners have come to recognize that they ultimately don’t have attractive alternatives—teaming up with authoritarian powers such as China and Russia? Staking their security on a weak European Union?—to their alliance with the United States. Some allied leaders may not be especially enthused about collaborating with the U.S. these days, and their publics may be with them, but their national interests still dictate that they do. That means there’s more room to tackle sensitive issues such as burden-sharing and more resilience in the relationships than previous American presidents suspected. Kersti Kaljulaid, the president of Estonia, a NATO member bordering Russia and thus on the front line of fears about America’s wavering fidelity to the bloc, told me and my colleague Yara Bayoumy that it took Trump’s crass transactionalism (rather than Barack Obama and his predecessors asking “nicely”) to impress upon NATO members that they had to get serious about ramping up their own defense spending.

As Robert Blackwill of the Council on Foreign Relations noted in a 2019 assessment of Trump’s foreign policy—in which he memorably likened the president’s policies to “a large bowl of spaghetti bolognese dumped and spread on a white canvas”—many criticisms of the president’s conduct in the world are related to the manner in which he makes, announces, and explains decisions and to the policy incoherence within his administration. Rarely, however, is it acknowledged that “the president has disrupted a whole series of conventions in the international system, some of them undoubtedly needed.”

“Not a single U.S. politician,” Blackwill observed, “has a coherent and convincing set of policies to cope with this eroding world order, but Trump receives nearly all the slings and arrows.”

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TRUMP’S SECOND TERM.... It’s more likely than most people think—and compared with his first term, its effects would be far more durable.

By Paul Starr | MAY 2019 ISSUE | The Atlantic | Posted February 22, 2020 |

Of all the questions that will be answered by the 2020 election, one matters above the others: Is Trumpism a temporary aberration or a long-term phenomenon? Put another way: Will the changes brought about by Donald Trump and today’s Republican Party fade away, or will they become entrenched?

Trump’s reelection seems implausible to many people, as implausible as his election did before November 2016. But despite the scandals and chaos of his presidency, and despite his party’s midterm losses, he approaches 2020 with two factors in his favor. One is incumbency: Since 1980, voters have only once denied an incumbent a second term. The other is a relatively strong economy (at least as of now). Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University who weights both of those factors heavily in his election-forecasting model, gives Trump close to an even chance of reelection, based on a projected 2 percent GDP growth rate for the first half of 2020.

So far, much of the concern about the long-term effects of Trump’s presidency has centered on his antidemocratic tendencies. But even if we take those off the table—even if we assume that Trump continues to be hemmed in by other parts of the government and by outside institutions, and that he governs no more effectively than he has until now—the impact of a second term would be more lasting than that of the first.

In normal politics, the policies adopted by a president and Congress may zig one way, and those of the next president and Congress may zag the other. The contending parties take our system’s rules as a given, and fight over what they understand to be reversible policies and power arrangements. But some situations are not like that; a zig one way makes it hard to zag back.

This is one of those moments. After four years as president, Trump will have made at least two Supreme Court appointments, signed into law tax cuts, and rolled back federal regulation of the environment and the economy. Whatever you think of these actions, many of them can probably be offset or entirely undone in the future. The effects of a full eight years of Trump will be much more difficult, if not impossible, to undo.

Three areas—climate change, the risk of a renewed global arms race, and control of the Supreme Court—illustrate the historic significance of the 2020 election. The first two problems will become much harder to address as time goes on. The third one stands to remake our constitutional democracy and undermine the capacity for future change.

In short, the biggest difference between electing Trump in 2016 and reelecting Trump in 2020 would be irreversibility. Climate policy is now the most obvious example. For a long time, even many of the people who acknowledged the reality of climate change thought of it as a slow process that did not demand immediate action. But today, amid extreme weather events and worsening scientific forecasts, the costs of our delay are clearly mounting, as are the associated dangers. To have a chance at keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius—the objective of the Paris climate agreement—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2030, CO2 emissions must drop some 45 percent from 2010 levels. Instead of declining, however, they are rising.

In his first term, Trump has announced plans to cancel existing climate reforms, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards and limits on emissions from new coal-fired power plants, and he has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. His reelection would put off a national commitment to decarbonization until at least the second half of the 2020s, while encouraging other countries to do nothing as well. And change that is delayed becomes more economically and politically difficult. According to the Global Carbon Project, if decarbonization had begun globally in 2000, an emissions reduction of about 2 percent a year would have been sufficient to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. Now it will need to be approximately 5 percent a year. If we wait another decade, it will be about 9 percent. In the United States, the economic disruption and popular resistance sure to arise from such an abrupt transition may be more than our political system can bear. No one knows, moreover, when the world might hit irreversible tipping points such as the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which would likely doom us to a catastrophic sea-level rise.

The 2020 election will also determine whether the U.S. continues on a course that all but guarantees another kind of runaway global change—a stepped-up arms race, and with it a heightened risk of nuclear accidents and nuclear war. Trump’s “America first” doctrine, attacks on America’s alliances, and unilateral withdrawal from arms-control treaties have made the world far more dangerous. After pulling the United States out of the Iran nuclear agreement (in so doing, badly damaging America’s reputation as both an ally and a negotiating partner), Trump failed to secure from North Korea anything approaching the Iran deal’s terms, leaving Kim Jong Un not only unchecked but with increased international standing. Many world leaders are hoping that Trump’s presidency is a blip—that he will lose in 2020, and that his successor will renew America’s commitments to its allies and to the principles of multilateralism and nonproliferation. If he is reelected, however, several countries may opt to pursue nuclear weapons, especially those in regions that have relied on American security guarantees, such as the Middle East and Northeast Asia.

At stake is the global nonproliferation regime that the United States and other countries have maintained over the past several decades to persuade nonnuclear powers to stay that way. That this regime has largely succeeded is a tribute to a combination of tactics, including U.S. bilateral and alliance-based defense commitments to nonnuclear countries, punishments and incentives, and pledges by the U.S. and Russia—as the world’s leading nuclear powers—to make dramatic cuts to their own arsenals.

In his first term, Trump has begun to undermine the nonproliferation regime and dismantle the remaining arms-control treaties between Washington and Moscow. In October, he announced that the U.S. would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. While the Russian violations of the treaty that Trump cited are inexcusable, he has made no effort to hold Russia to its obligations—to the contrary, by destroying the treaty, he has let Russia off the hook. What’s more, he has displayed no interest in extending New START, which since 2011 has limited the strategic nuclear arsenals of Russia and the United States. If the treaty is allowed to expire, 2021 will mark the first year since 1972 without a legally binding agreement in place to control and reduce the deadliest arsenals ever created.

The prospect of a new nuclear arms race is suddenly very real. With the end of verifiable limits on American and Russian nuclear weapons, both countries will lose the right to inspect each other’s arsenal, and will face greater uncertainty about each other’s capabilities and intentions. Already, rhetoric has taken an ominous turn: After Trump suspended U.S. participation in the INF Treaty on February 2, Vladimir Putin quickly followed suit and promised a “symmetrical response” to new American weapons. Trump replied a few days later in his State of the Union address, threatening to “outspend and out-innovate all others by far” in weapons development.

The treaties signed by the United States and Russia beginning in the 1980s have resulted in the elimination of nearly 90 percent of their nuclear weapons; the end of the Cold War seemed to confirm that those weapons had limited military utility. Now—as the U.S. and Russia abandon their commitment to arms control, and Trump’s “America first” approach causes countries such as Japan and Saudi Arabia to question the durability of U.S. security guarantees—the stage is being set for more states to go nuclear and for the U.S. and Russia to ramp up weapons development. This breathtaking historical reversal would, like global warming, likely feed on itself, becoming more and more difficult to undo.

Finally, a second term for Trump would entrench changes at home, perhaps the most durable of which involves the Supreme Court. With a full eight years, he would probably have the opportunity to replace two more justices: Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be 87 at the beginning of the next presidential term, and Stephen Breyer will be 82. Whether you regard the prospect of four Trump-appointed justices as a good or a bad thing will depend on your politics and preferences—but there is no denying that the impact on the nation’s highest court would be momentous.

Not since Richard Nixon has a president named four new Supreme Court justices, and not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has one had the opportunity to alter the Court’s ideological balance so decisively. In Nixon’s time, conservatives did not approach court vacancies with a clear conception of their judicial objectives or with carefully vetted candidates; both Nixon and Gerald Ford appointed justices who ended up on the Court’s liberal wing. Since then, however, the conservative movement has built a formidable legal network designed to ensure that future judicial vacancies would not be squandered.

The justices nominated by recent Republican presidents reflect this shift. But because the Court’s conservative majorities have remained slim, a series of Republican appointees—Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and most recently John Roberts—have, by occasionally breaking ranks, held the Court back from a full-scale reversal of liberal principles and precedents. With a 7–2 rather than a 5–4 majority, however, the Court’s conservatives could no longer be checked by a lone swing vote.

Much of the public discussion about the Court’s future focuses on Roe v. Wade and other decisions expanding rights, protecting free speech, or mandating separation of Church and state. Much less public attention has been paid to conservative activists’ interest in reversing precedents that since the New Deal era have enabled the federal government to regulate labor and the economy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conservative justices regularly struck down laws and regulations such as limits on work hours. Only in 1937, after ruling major New Deal programs unconstitutional, did the Court uphold a state minimum-wage law. In the decades that followed, the Court invoked the Constitution’s commerce clause, which authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, as the basis for upholding laws regulating virtually any activity affecting the economy. A great deal of federal law, from labor standards to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to health and environmental regulation, rests on that foundation.

But the Court’s conservative majority has recently been chipping away at the expansive interpretation of the commerce clause, and some jurists on the right want to return to the pre-1937 era, thereby sharply limiting the government’s regulatory powers. In 2012, the Court’s five conservative justices held that the Affordable Care Act’s penalty for failing to obtain insurance—the so-called individual mandate—was not justified by the commerce clause. In a sweeping dissent from the majority’s opinion, four of those justices voted to strike down the entire ACA for that reason. The law survived only because the fifth conservative, Chief Justice Roberts, held that the mandate was a constitutional exercise of the government’s taxing power.

If the Court had included seven conservative justices in 2012, it would almost certainly have declared the ACA null and void. This is the fate awaiting much existing social and economic legislation and regulation if Trump is reelected. And that’s to say nothing of future legislation such as measures to limit climate change, which might well be struck down by a Court adhering to an originalist interpretation of our 18th-century Constitution.

Democracy is always a gamble, but ordinarily the stakes involve short-term wins and losses. Much more hangs in the balance next year.

With a second term, Trump’s presidency would go from an aberration to a turning point in American history. But it would not usher in an era marked by stability. The effects of climate change and the risks associated with another nuclear arms race are bound to be convulsive. And Trump’s reelection would leave the country contending with both dangers under the worst possible conditions, deeply alienated from friends abroad and deeply divided at home. The Supreme Court, furthermore, would be far out of line with public opinion and at the center of political conflict, much as the Court was in the 1930s before it relented on the key policies of the New Deal.

The choice Americans face in 2020 is one we will not get to make again. What remains to be seen is whether voters will grasp the stakes before them. In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s emails absorbed more media and public attention than any other issue. In 2018, Trump tried to focus attention on a ragtag caravan of a few thousand Central Americans approaching the southern border. That effort failed, but the master of distraction will be back at it next year. If we cannot focus on what matters, we may sleepwalk into a truly perilous future.

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PAUL STARR is a professor of sociology & public affairs at Princeton & winner of Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He is the author of Entrenchment: Wealth, Power & the Constitution of Democratic

Societies.

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Here’s A List of Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’ in The Trump EraFebruary 19th, 2019  Actor Jussie Smollett, who is accused of staging a hate crime. Liberal actor Jussie Smollett is accused of staging a racist and anti-gay attack on himself, which Smollett blamed on supporters of President Donald Trump. Smollett’s alleged fake “hate crime” appears to be the latest instance of liberals manufacturing hate crimes for attention in the Trump era. The Daily Caller News Foundation compiled below some of the most outrageous fake hate crimes since Trump was elected, in rough chronological order: 1. Anti-Muslim Hate Crime in Michigan Turns Out to Be A Hoax (Nov. 2016) A Muslim woman at the University of Michigan received national attention from national outlets like The Washington Post in November 2016 after she claimed a drunk 20-something man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The university condemned the “hateful attack,” which turned out to be a hoax. 2. Bisexual Student Fakes Trump-Inspired Hate Crime (Nov. 2016)Taylor Volk, an openly bisexual senior at North Park University claimed to be the target of hateful notes and emails following Trump’s election in November 2016. Volk told NBC News that “I just want them to stop.” But the “them” referenced by Volk turned out to be herself, as the whole thing was fabricated. 3. Gas Station Racism Goes Viral — Then Police Debunk It (Nov. 2016) Philadelphia woman Ashley Boyer claimed in November 2016 that she was harassed at a gas station by white, Trump-supporting males, one of whom pulled a weapon on her. Boyer claimed that the men “proceeded to talk about the election and how they’re glad they won’t have to deal with n—–s much longer.” Boyer deleted her post after it went viral and claimed the men had been caught and were facing criminal charges. Local police debunked her account. 4. White Men Rob Muslim Woman of Her Hijab and Wallet — Except It Never Happened (Nov. 2016) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana claimed in November 2016 that two white men, one of whom was wearing a Trump hat, attacked and robbed her, taking her wallet and hijab while yelling racial slurs. She later admitted to the Lafayette Police Department that she made the whole thing up. 5. Church Organist Vandalizes Own Church (Nov. 2016) A church organist was arrested in May 2017 after he was found responsible for spray-painting a swastika, an anti-gay slur and the words “Heil Trump” on his own church in November 2016. When the story first broke, media outlets tied the hoax to Trump’s election. “The offensive graffiti at St. David’s is among numerous incidents that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s Election Day win,” The Washington Post reported at the time. 6. “Drunk White Men” Attack Muslim Woman in Story That Also Never Happened (Dec. 2016) Another 18-year-old Muslim woman, this time in New York, was the subject of breathless headlines in December 2016 after she claimed to have been attacked by a group of Donald Trump supporters on a New York subway while onlookers did nothing. The woman, Yasmin Seweid, would go on to confess that she made the whole thing up. 7. White Guy Sets His Own Car on Fire, Paints Racial Slur on His Own Garage (Dec. 2016)Denton, Texas, resident David Williams set his own car on fire and painted “n***** lovers” on his home’s garage, in an apparent attempt to stage a hate crime. Local police investigated the arson as a hate crime. Williams and his wife, Jenny, collected more than $5,000 from Good Samaritans via a GoFundMe page before the hoax was exposed. 8. Prankster Tricks Liberal Journalist into Spreading Anti-Trump Hoax (Dec. 2016) As tales of Trump-inspired “hate crimes” were spread far and wide by liberal journalists after Trump’s election, one online prankster decided to test just easy it was to fool journalists. The prankster sent Mic.com writer Sarah Harvard a fictitious story in which a Native American claimed to have been harassed by an alleged Trump supporter who thought she was Mexican. Despite no evidence backing up the claim, Harvard spread the fake story, emails the prankster shared with The Daily Caller showed. 9. Student Writes Anti-Muslim Graffiti on His Own Door (Feb. 2017) A Muslim student at Beloit College wrote anti-Muslim graffiti on his own dorm room door. The student was reportedly motivated by a desire to seek attention after a Jewish student was targeted with an anti-Semitic note. 10. Israeli Man Behind Anti-Semitic Bomb Threats in the U.S. (April 2017) Media outlets didn’t wait to find out who was behind a string of bomb threats targeting synagogues and Jewish schools before linking the threats to Trump. A U.S.-Israeli man was charged in April 2017 and indicted in February 2018 for the threats. A former reporter for The Intercept was also charged in March 2017 with making several copycat threats. 11. Hoax at St. Olaf (May 2017) Students at St. Olaf college in Minnesota staged protests and boycotted classes in May 2017 after racist notes targeting black students were found around campus, earning coverage in national media outlets like The Washington Post. It later came out that a black student was responsible for the racist notes. The student carried out the hoax in order to “draw attention to concerns about the campus climate,” the university announced. 12. Fake Hate at Air Force Academy Goes Viral (Sept. 2017)The Air Force Academy was thrown into turmoil in September 2017 when horrific racist notes were found at the academy’s preparatory school. “Go home n***er,” read one of the notes. The superintendent, Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria, went viral with an impassioned speech addressing the racist notes. Two months later, authorities determined that one of the students targeted by the notes was also the person responsible for writing them. 13. K-State Fake Hate Crime (Nov. 2017) A student at Kansas State University filed a police report in November 2017 over racist graffiti left on his car. “Go Home N***** Boy” and “Whites Only,” read the racist graffiti, which the student later admitted to writing himself. 14. Racist Graffiti Carried Out by Non-White Student (Nov. 2017) Another instance of racist graffiti that same month also turned out to be a hoax. A Missouri high school investigated after racial slurs were left on a bathroom mirror in November 2017, only to find that the student responsible was “non-white.” 15. Waiter Fakes Note Calling Himself A Terrorist (July 2018) Texas waiter Khalil Cavil went viral after posting a Facebook picture of a racist note that he claimed a customer had left on the receipt, in lieu of a tip. The note described Cavil as a “terrorist.” Saltgrass Steak House, where Cavil worked, initially banned the customers for life, before their investigation revealed that the waiter had faked the racist note. “I did write it,” Cavil later admitted. “I don’t have an explanation. I made a mistake. There is no excuse for what I did.” 16. Waitress Fakes Racist Note, Blames Law Enforcement (July 2018) A Texas waitress apologized in July 2018 after blaming local law enforcement for an offensive note targeting Mexicans. She later admitted to writing the note herself. 17. New York Woman’s Hate Crime That Wasn’t (Sept. 2018) A New York woman was charged in September 2018 after police determined she fabricated a story about white teens yelling racial slurs at her and leaving a racist note on her car. 18. Student Faked Racist Notes (Dec. 2018) Several racist notes at Drake University were actually the work of one of the students who had been targeted by them. “The fact that the actions of the student who has admitted guilt were propelled by motives other than hate does not minimize the worry and emotional harm they caused, but should temper fears,” university president Marty Martin said afterwards. 19. The Covington Catastrophe (Jan. 2019)National media outlets pounced on a selectively edited video from the March for Life that showed Native American activist Nathan Phillips beating a drum in front of a boisterous group of boys from Covington Catholic High School. The exterior of Covington Catholic High School Dennis Griffin stadium is pictured in Park Hills, Kentucky, U.S., January 23, 2019. REUTERS/Madalyn McGarvey Phillips originally told The Washington Post the students swarmed him while he was preparing to leave the Indigenous People’s March scheduled for the same day. Phillips originally said one student, who later identified himself as high school junior Nick Sandmann, blocked his path from leaving as he tried to do so. The extended video shows that wasn’t the case: Phillips approached the high school boys during their cheers, not the other way around. Some of the people with Phillips were directing racially charged language at the students, not the other way around. Phillips told a second variation of his story to the Detroit Free Press. Phillips claimed he was playing the role of peacemaker by getting between the students and four “old black individuals,” whom he claimed the students were attacking. “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillip told the Michigan paper. “I was there, and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something, or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong, and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong.” “These young men were beastly, and these old black individuals was their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that,” he added. Extended video shows that account also isn’t accurate. The four individuals Phillips referenced were members of the Black Hebrew Israelites and they launched racist and anti-gay slurs at the high school students, not the other way around. (RELATED: Nathan Phillips Keeps Changing His Story, Keeps Getting It Wrong) WATCH:   20. Bonus: Anti-Semitic Vandal Exposed as Democratic Activist (Nov. 2018) Anti-Semitic vandalism in New York City turned out to be the work of a Democratic activist, according to police. It wasn’t a hoax — the anti-Semitic vandalism was real — but the suspect wasn’t the right-winger some had assumed him to be. The man police arrested, based on surveillance footage, was 26-year-old James Polite, who had actually interned for City Hall on anti-hate issues. 21. Bonus II: Trump-Inspired Racist Blaze at Black Church Was Carried Out by Black Church-goer (Nov. 2016) This hoax occurred one week before Trump was elected, but TheDCNF is including it as a bonus because it was so egregious. Leftist media outlets ran headlines like “A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump” after a black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump.” The Washington Post’s original coverage of the incident read in part,” Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons called the fire a ‘hateful and cowardly act,’ sparked by the incendiary rhetoric of GOP nominee Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.” But the church was set on fire by one of the church’s own congregants, who is black. Did we miss any hoaxes? Shoot me an email. Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHassonContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. https://www.facebook.com/whiskeyandrebellion/videos/2499668473592291/?t=20

[sentrava]

A Tale of Public Art, Private Property and Government Bullying

It all started innocently enough. SVV and I, long-time mural chasers, wanted to bring public art to our former  town of Manchester, Tennessee, many buildings of which have been neglected for decades and which had a downtown that had long fallen into a virtually-deserted square. SVV was a commercial painter for well over a decade and knows better than anyone what a fresh coat of paint can do to beautify and protect the structural integrity of a building. Plus, it’s a well-proven fact that murals stimulate economic development, drive tourism, and instill both pride and a sense of public safety in a place. It’s called “creative placemaking,” and it’s a concept we are 1,000 percent behind.

Why wouldn’t a community want a public art initiative, particularly one that a couple of journalists and tourism pros with more than a wee bit of marketing experience, were spearheading?

We put together the framework for such a program, including developing an RFP for artist commissions, and presented it to our town’s tourism body at their annual workshop in February two years ago. The tourism commission in Manchester, however, is a volunteer body, and communication is severely lacking; after multiple encouraging meetings and submitting all the components to the commission secretary on Feb. 22, 2017, we heard … nothing. That is, until another commissioner texted me months later in May and asked: “whatever happened to that mural program?” I explained to him that we had sent it all to the secretary in February, who in turn was supposed to share it with the commission, and it turns out she never bothered to pass it along.

And so goes the tale of trying to move the needle in Manchester, Tennessee.

Even once all the tourism and community development commissioners had a copy of the scope, which we ensured by following up individually with each one of them, another year went by with zero movement—in fact, it was almost as if that conversation never happened—so we took matters in our own hands: We’d commission the city’s first community mural at our own expense.

We find an artist

If you know SVV and me, you know we aren’t types to dilly-dally. Once we set our minds to things, they happen. And from there, it happened fast. Real fast. I had followed Tara Aversa’s gorgeous floral mural as it went up at Walden bar in Nashville and reached out over Instagram on March 7 of last year. “I saw your work on a friend’s profile, and I really love it,” I wrote. “Would you be interested in working with us on a project in Manchester?” Not only did she write back immediately, but she and her fiancé drove down to Manchester the following week to meet with SVV and me in person. The four of us had lunch at Jiffy Burger to discuss ideas, and it was an instant connection. I could tell Tara was the artist we needed to launch a movement of love and positivity via ribbons of paint on a wall.

Tara told us she could carve out a block of time in May to come down and paint. She’s a celebrated hair stylist in Nashville and makeup artist to the stars, so we had to get on her busy calendar, and while we didn’t know how we were going to fund it, we knew that she was our girl. She understood and embraced our mission, she was new to large-scale painting and—most importantly—eager and excited about the concept. So we signed a contract with her and moved forward.

But first, we needed a building. There was an old, faded flag that was turning purple at the entrance to the historic Manchester square that just made the half-occupied downtown look even more tired. SVV walked into the business one afternoon and, nearly three hours later, walked out newly-minted friends with the business owners, Jim and Sylvia Wheeler. They’d bought the building three years prior for their booming construction business and had wanted to replace the old flag but weren’t sure how to go about it. It was like SVV was the patron saint of mural arts they’d been waiting for, and it was a divine appointment. On top of that, Jim offered to cover the cost of materials, and SVV offered to paint his entire building for free. It was already the perfect marriage.

A picture of the old American flag mural that was on the building when Wheeler Construction bought it four years ago. Taken on May 7, 2018.

Jim and Sylvia offered us the side of their building and said they trusted SVV to put up something we liked but wanted to see drawings first. Tara gave us two different sketches: one was an awesome pop art rendering I’m still dying to have her paint somewhere and the other was an American flag overlaid atop a Southern magnolia. SVV took the sketches to Jim, who loved the American flag and had wanted something to go up similar on his building where the old one was. So just like that, we had an artist, we had a building and we had a design.

While this was all happening, SVV kept both the Historic Zoning Commission, of which he is a commissioner, and the downtown groups apprised of what we were doing, still trying to keep everyone motivated and emotionally-invested in the public art project. We even showed them the artist sketches, and one of the downtown committees committed to help us fund it, which was a godsend because murals, while not overly costly, still cost money, and we didn’t even have a public art company at this point—we were going at it all on faith and a dream.

Before Tara started painting, we went down to the election commission office to have a sit-down with HZC chairman Ray Amos. Like SVV, he is a veteran, and part of our reason for wanting to get the American flag up so quick was because we thought it would be a great way to honor our fallen service men and women. We wanted to have a flag dedication ceremony on Memorial Day weekend, but Ray told us you can’t dedicate a flag that is a painting and not actually a flag. Other than that, he seemed to have no issue with the mural, and we told him we were moving forward with it as soon as we could get all the pieces in place.

Worth noting: The HZC comprises a handful of older folks born in the first half of the 1900s who don’t understand how good murals, social media and the impact of the two combined can have on a town. One later tried to ban the use of a hashtag, calling it “advertising,” and got mad about Tara’s prominent florals, a motif throughout her entire body of work, mockingly calling it her “logo,” to give you a sense of what we were dealing with. Still, we kept them in the loop, as this was always meant to be a community project, the genesis of a greater overhaul of a tired town that needed a gentle facelift.

So, SVV and our buddy John Mancini manned up at 5am and painted the Wheeler building on May 8 of last year, and we scheduled Tara to start the mural the following Sunday, eager to get it finished by Memorial Day.

What follows is rather nutty, so buckle up for the ride.

The artist starts; the cops show up

On the first morning of painting, Mother’s Day 2018, SVV and our John were out there bright and early with Tara and Michael setting up. She hadn’t been painting for three hours when the vice-chairman of the HZC, who is facing controversy of his own these days, showed up, conveniently while SVV was away for 15 minutes getting Tara a water refill, and demanded she stop.

Not missing a beat and only briefly pausing to address this man that lounged on her scaffolding as if it was his property, she said firmly, “You’re going to have to talk to Scott about that. Because he hired me and I’m not stopping.” According to her, he apparently lost it and threatened to call the police before storming off in a tizzy. We have it all on video, too, since we recorded the entire painting process from start to end.

When SVV returned and sat down to observe the creative process again, Tara related this encounter to him. Rolling his eyes and glad that he’d done all the preplanning work of ensuring that we were totally in the right to paint a piece of private property with artwork, even in a “historic zone,” he slathered on more sunscreen and kicked back.

Then, three police cars rolled up.

The media frenzy begins

On Wednesday of that week, we had an early morning flight to Minneapolis for a three-day break. The moment I touched down in Kansas City for our connection, my phone started blowing up. Channel 4. Channel 2. Fox 17. The Manchester Times story on “someone” calling the cops on us had gone live that morning, and they all wanted to interview SVV and me about the “controversy.” Who could have ever known that painting an American flag to honor all the service men and women who have given their lives to defend our country could veer into “controversial” territory? The things small towns get up in arms about, I swear.

My Facebook immediately started dinging. People posted misinformation saying we broke the law. Others launched a #SaveTheMural hashtag, alleging they heard the old folks were going to paint over our beautiful flag, and so they posted a photo of the half-painted mural as their Facebook cover image in a show of solidarity. Memes started circulating (the one below being my favorite). Meanwhile, we were on vacation trying to actually relax and catch up with friends, but instead spent the whole time fielding inquiries as our phones didn’t stop ringing. It was simultaneously hilarious and mind-boggling.

Since SVV and I weren’t around to do interviews, the news crews talked to our buddy John, some local residents who just happened to be photographing the mural at the time of filming … and the HZC commissioners who called the cops on us. You can see and read those news segments here, here and here. Nashville’s CBS affiliate Channel 5 did come down seven weeks later, on July 4 (ironically, SVV’s birthday), to do an updated segment and caught us coming home from the pool, so SVV logged a couple minutes on camera then.

“I’m philosophically against regulated art … it ceases to become art if you have a committee deciding what goes where.” —Scott van Velsor

From then on out, we made sure if Tara was painting, one of us was on duty as her guard. It wasn’t fair to us that she could potentially be threatened by these rogue old folks who think they have more power than they do, and even though everyone that drove by gave her the thumbs up or shouted encouragement, we feared what some crazy-eyed, righteously-ignorant commissioner would do.

Despite all odds, Tara completed her masterpiece on May 23. How anyone could possibly find this piece of beauty offensive is beyond me. I’m forever grateful to her for powering through, taking all the “controversy” in stride (though in actuality it was just four unhappy people) and giving Manchester the gift of her art. It was only her second ever mural to complete—can you imagine being new to the street art world and being treated like this by a Historic Zoning Commission?

It also took her less than six days to paint with a one-inch brush—a true artistic genius who no doubt will be telling the story of her time in Manchester for years to come.



In the 10 months that followed, we have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of posts in front of the Southern Magnolia mural, which just warmed our insides and provided fuel for our passion. This is the point: for people to be a part of the art, for them to feel pride in their community, and for others to get off the interstate and come see what this tiny town is all about, spending money locally and contributing to the Manchester economy.

The HZC chairman calls for SVV and John’s dismissal

But even after the mural was done, the drama did not end.

Right before Bonnaroo, we caught wind that the HZC commissioners opposing the mural were attempting to seek legal recourse, so we rallied our troops and more than 50 people supporting our program packed the house at the next Board of Mayor and Aldermen meeting, a monthly session with typically low to no public attendance. It was there that the HZC chairman and secretary continued dragging SVV’s name through the mud in front of the public. The HZC chairman called for SVV and John’s removal from the commission. Rather than chastising the commissioners for abusing the police department with this civic complaint—which pulled four police officers off the streets for a couple hours, I might add—the mayor just said he wanted everyone to get along and told the commission to work it out amongst themselves. OK….

I filmed this all for posterity since meetings in Manchester are not broadcast for the wider public, and often minutes have a way of being light on substance by the time they’re sent out for approval, not accurately reflecting everything that went on in such a meeting. In the months that followed, the chairman and three other members continued to try to bully SVV, right out in the open. And no one said a word, including the alderman overseeing the commission, who not only sided with the older folks, but requested SVV’s resignation. He declined that request and asked for an apology from the commission members instead. They lost their minds; it was if someone had pulled a pin from a grenade.

Eventually, they realized that we weren’t going to give up and were actually in the right, so instead, they took another approach: trying to add in a mural ordinance to the historic zoning codes. After a subsequent HZC meeting in which the city attorney asked SVV to send over rough guidelines for a mural program, he did as asked and submitted the American Bar Association’s recommended guidelines to the whole commission by email. The chairman replied all, copying the city attorney, all commissioners, an alderman and the director of codes, on July 17:

“Scott, I don’t understand your concerns over the first amendment. Until you started bring it up most of us on the HZC did not have any problem with the first amendment. It appears you are planning something that you need the protection of the first amendment. We ask you once before to wait until we could get guidelines for a mural you refused and even lied about it. You even told us you would be getting paid to help paint. But you know all that don’t you? Why not be honest and up front with us for a change, What kind of murals do you plan now, and where, and when? You say you put Manchester first but your actions say otherwise, Why don’t you cooperate with us instead  of calling us rogues when you can’t get your way. We have a [sic] excellent city attorney that we use to approve our guidelines and we don’t need a sea lawyer trying to tell us what to do.  We need a HZC that can work together to improve our city not one that has a member or two who insist on doing things their way.  I propose that we use good common sense in what we do and do it for the good of Manchester and not for the good of one person. Can you do that? 

If we all strive for that we will not need to even worry about the first amendment.

Ray.”

Note: Not only have we not profited off the murals, we’ve actually spent our own money (and so much time) to accomplish them. And the “you even told us you would be getting paid to help paint” is straight-up fake news, given that SVV donated his time and expertise to paint Wheeler’s building as a gift to the downtown.

You can see why everything about this line of thinking is a problem. Last time we checked, the United States of America needed the First Amendment when it passed in 1791, and still needs it today along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, which addressed deficiencies in the Constitution regarding protection of individual freedoms and government overreach against its citizens.

SVV continued working with the HZC throughout the process of their attempts at regulatory overreach, eventually forcing them to accept a very basic set of guidelines that closely mirrors the ABA recommendations (no hate speech, no profanity, no porn, no regulation of content or size). It’s very common sense stuff, and passed the Board of Mayor and Alderman unanimously a few months ago.

Our second mural goes up

Mural number two went up very quickly and with little controversy. We’d been communicating with Nashville muralist Eric “Mobe” Bass all summer, and he and his pal Folek had a break in their schedule in August and were able to come down on a Monday night, prep the wall, then paint the entire thing in less than a day. We’re grateful to the Hershman family for giving Mobe and Folek the space on which to paint.

The only negativity came following my Facebook announcement of the completion of the Manchester Postcard mural, when the HZA secretary at the time—who is not my Facebook friend, please note—chimed in on my personal page, calling us copycats by drawing inspiration from Victor Ving and Lisa Beggs’ Greetings Tour that we’ve photographed all over the US.

The whole thing is pretty embarrassing for these senior members of the community, watching them act like children in a public forum, but we’ve since learned that it’s just a pity, and have mostly moved on. But with a lack of oversight of some of the volunteer-based committees that Manchester has, it’s still a concern that some folks feel empowered to act like this without fear of removal for unethical behavior. Manchester’s a town with five interstate exits on one of the most heavily-trafficked corridors in the South, and living through years like the past one, we now know why there hasn’t been meaningful growth in the last few decades.

The classic power struggle

Sadly, this type of power struggle isn’t isolated to Manchester; we’ve seen evidence of similar issues in other small towns from upstate New York all the way down to Mount Dora, Florida, where the mayor was made to publicly apologize to a couple who the city attempted to fine for a mural on their private property. Still, we dotted our “i’s” and crossed our “t’s,” because we’re journalists after all. After talking to enough lawyers in the private property and public art sectors who further confirmed that we were in the right—the HZC had no grounds on which regulate or to ask us to remove art from private property—we slowly extricated ourselves from our involvement with them and the downtown groups that didn’t support us when it counted and have been installing murals on our own.

I’ll go into the legality of trying to challenge freedom of speech in a future post, but as the Pacific Legal Foundation stated: “Government must have a powerful, clearly articulated justification to regulate the exercise of First Amendment rights rather than the personal taste or whims of individual bureaucrats.” In other words, if a government body decides to enforce such things as a historic overlay or a codes rule, the enforcement must be content neutral; they can’t simply decide they don’t like the art as justification for opposing it, as a few of the Historic Zoning Commissioners did. In fact, HZC acting secretary at the time, Pat Berges even admitted it was the art she didn’t like and claimed to support the concept of murals; she was quoted in the local newspaper as saying: “It doesn’t represent anything. It has nothing to do with Manchester history.”

To many of us that believe in individual freedom and property rights, the right to express yourself without regulation is a no-brainer, but we’re happy that the federal courts have established this precedent, regardless.

Soft-bullying and small-town government

Through this process, we met just about every building and business owner along the square in this designated “historic overlay.” Many of them gave us tours of their buildings, the majority of which are slowly rotting into oblivion—not because the owners don’t want to do anything to fix that but because for so long, but because the Historic Zoning Commission has thrown regulatory shade into any plans they tried to make. One shop owner told us days after he bought his building that it started pouring water into the office. He wanted to replace the roof, went to the HZC for a COA, and was told any replacement must be a flat roof in keeping with the “historical significance” of the area—for a building that was constructed in the 1980s. He’s still livid, and I’m sure told others about it, thereby deterring potential investment in the square. This is just one of many similar stories we heard from downtown property owners, who are being blocked from improving their investment by a power-hungry commission who wants to keep the square in a decaying time capsule.

The greatest thing that has revealed itself in the past year is that Tennesseans love art and appreciate community improvement, especially in Manchester and greater Coffee County. But sadly, in this particular town, so many of them have been shamed into keeping quiet by soft-bullying. We’ve had hundreds—whose messages we have kept screenshots of in a folder anytime we need a morale boost—come forward by text, Facebook or email saying they so appreciate what we’re doing and support us but don’t want to publicly proclaim as much so as to not get involved in the “controversy.” And look, I get it: It’s a small town of barely 12,000 residents; you don’t want to supposedly alienate those in positions of power. The threat of retaliation is real in a community of this size.

It remains sad to me that posting a beautiful photo of original art on social media could be misconstrued as controversial (and an American flag, a show of patriotism, no less). But this, this is what soft-bullying does; it scares those who do want change into submission. And, as a result, the “good ol’ boy” system (whatever that means!) is allowed to continue as it always does. The town remains rundown, and muddles along, even at the crossroads of major tourism destinations and a superhighway running the length of the United States, north to south. Zoning changes that benefit a select few mysteriously pass, and residents are none the wiser until the roads are clogged up, the schools are at capacity or sewer systems need millions of dollars in upgrades. Apathetic or busy citizens don’t show up to city meetings because they don’t know when they are or, even worse, think that they can’t make a difference through the democratic process because their voices won’t be considered. And heaven forbid the various commissions under the City of Manchester actually broadcast public meetings—or release detailed minutes in a timely manner. Is that asking too much of our elected officials?

The HZC had a historic preservationist from the state come to Manchester last July in an attempt to “educate people about the historic zone” (i.e. scold us for our mural program), only for her to say exactly what we’d been reiterating about the basic constitutional protections of private property and individual freedom enshrined in our country’s founding document. Once again, I filmed it, because people need to hold these folks accountable.

Moving forward: can’t stop, won’t stop

So far, we’ve commissioned the magnolia, the Manchester Postcard, the American Eel triptych, a three-wall Dragonfly block and a #lovescript series of inspirational writings. Next up, we’re tackling the skate park and several spaces along the greenway in conjunction with Manchester Parks & Recreation, a great group of visionaries who understand the merit of artistic freedom, are dedicated to moving the area forward and who embrace the idea that well curated artwork brings a community together, makes it think of a better place and celebrates this land we’re so blessed to have beneath our feet.

Here’s where the power-abusers went wrong: They underestimated us. They can attempt to slander us. They can call my veteran husband “unpatriotic.” They can make themselves look childish in a dozen different ways, continuing to lose moral authority in the community. But you know what? We won’t be bullied. We won’t be made to stop doing something that is visibly improving the area, has so much magical community support and that we’re passionate about personally. And we won’t give in. Is it tough being spoken to the way we have, being treated by a handful of folks like we’re vigilantes out to wreck this town? Absolutely. But we also know that Rome was not built in a day.



Thanks to our Minneapolis friends, Wailing Loons, for this beautiful sentiment.

And so we persist. Or, as SVV says: “We stand on the shoulders of giants.”

I’ve had many tourism professionals ask for more help with starting their own mural programs. I have a step-by-step guide on how to go about this in your community drafted to publish this spring, but first, you need to know the abbreviated backstory to get an idea of what you might potentially face. I skipped over quite a few bits of the story, but am happy to answer any lingering questions in the comments—fire away!

  PIN IT HERE

A Tale of Public Art, Private Property and Government Bullying published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS

[junker-town]

Why in the world do Odell Beckham Jr. trade rumors keep popping up?

Every NFL team would love to have a receiver as talented as Beckham. So would the Giants want to trade him away?

In August 2018, Odell Beckham Jr. signed a five-year, $90 million contract with the New York Giants that appeared to put trade rumors to rest for good.

“We feel good about having him on our team for the next five years,” Giants owner John Mara told reporters.

Beckham responded with a bounce-back season with 1,052 receiving yards, despite missing four games. He even threw two touchdowns for an offense that struggled to be anything more than average with Eli Manning at the helm.

But it didn’t even take a year for trade rumors to bubble back up.

It’s not surprising that Beckham is a player many teams would want to acquire. The 26-year-old receiver already has 5,476 career receiving yards and 44 touchdowns in just 59 career games. His 92.8 yards per game is the second best average all-time behind only Julio Jones.

That’s also exactly why it’s so puzzling that trade rumors follow the receiver so persistently. Why would the Giants want to get rid of one of the league’s most elite, young talents?

What are the latest Beckham trade rumors?

Feb. 20, 2019: Glazer said he wasn’t backing down on his earlier prediction, even though “a lot has to materialize for it to take place.”

Feb. 18, 2019: Bleacher Report’s Chris Simms said the Patriots pushed hard for a trade for Beckham in 2018. NBC’s Mike Florio responded to that by saying the 49ers have been — and continue to be — interested in trading for the receiver.

Feb. 13, 2019: Jay Glazer wrote on The Athletic that his bold prediction of the offseason is that Beckham will be traded.

Oct. 28, 2018: Jay Glazer said on Fox that several teams called the Giants ahead of the trade deadline with “some decent offers,” but were rebuffed.

Oct. 7, 2018: The receiver sat down with rapper Lil Wayne and ESPN’s Josina Anderson for an interview and gave some surprisingly honest and candid answers. That reignited a rift between the player and team, and just like that trade rumors were back.

Why won’t the Beckham trade rumors go away?

Shortly after the end of the 2018 season, Giants general manager Dave Gettleman tried to dump some water on the trade rumor embers before they turned into a fire.

Gettleman on @obj: “We didn’t sign him to trade him.” #NYG

— Kimberly Jones (@KimJonesSports) January 2, 2019

Apparently that didn’t work.

With the possibility of a Beckham trade continuing to make headlines in February, the receiver has posted a few tweets that appear to show his frustration with the rumblings.

They don’t even kno what they did. The shift/ transformation, Is comin... thank u for motivating me yet again.

— Odell Beckham Jr (@obj) February 20, 2019

ONE DAY. Everything will all make sense in the end. I promise u. Story’s unfolding, it’s all a part of the journey. #JustWait

— Odell Beckham Jr (@obj) February 20, 2019

A comment on Instagram was even more pointed:

FRRR giants media putting their best player in trade scenarios cause they refuse to let go of their worst player @obj pic.twitter.com/i9ExE5Ko4A

— Carly (@carlymersky) February 20, 2019

But the trade rumors are — at least to some degree — a self-inflicted wound for Beckham. A year ago, they popped up right around the time a video made the internet rounds that showed the receiver with an aspiring French model, a pizza, and a couple of things that resembled illegal substances.

“I guess my response to that is I’m tired of answering questions about Odell’s behavior,” Mara told reporters in March 2018. “He knows what’s expected of him, and now it’s up to him.”

Beckham has never been arrested and his only suspension was a one-game ban following a knock-down, drag-out battle with Josh Norman in 2015. While his colorful and larger-than-life persona has been a pain in the ass for the Giants at times, it hasn’t kept him out of action.

But the Giants wanted to see personal growth before they committed long-term to the receiver.

“The only question was, was it going to be this year, or were we going to give him another year to prove himself,” Mara said in August after Beckham was extended. “But as I said, he came in with the right attitude. His energy level has been off the roof. He’s done everything we’ve asked him to do.

“I think he’s matured quite a bit. … I think he’s ready to go on and be the type of player and citizen that we expect him to be, and I think he will be.”

Then came the interview with Lil Wayne. Beckham questioned Manning’s abilities, and suggested the Giants were holding the receiver back.

“I don’t feel like I’m being given the opportunity to be the very best that I can, to bring that every single day — and that’s really all I want to do, to bring that every single day,” Beckham said. “Since I’ve been here I’ve put up numbers, records have been broken and all those good things, not to say mean nothing to me, but I know they could have been double, or triple whatever they are now. That’s the part that bothers me.”

The reaction was swift.

Pat Shurmur was "livid" with Odell Beckham after the first part of his interview came out on Friday, according to Fox's @JayGlazer , and made Beckham apologize to the team. ... Shurmur's public reaction did not indicate any anger at all. Wonder if that'll change post-game today.

— Ralph Vacchiano (@RVacchianoSNY) October 7, 2018

On top of the ill-advised interview, 2018 was another injury-shortened season for Beckham. A fractured ankle cost him 12 games in 2017, and a quad injury kept him out for the last four games of the year in 2018.

Five seasons into his career, he’s missed 20 games due to injury and one because of a suspension.

That combination of drama and unavailability makes the idea of cashing in a talented headache for draft capital and cap space intriguing.

You still shouldn’t expect a Beckham trade to happen

A day after Glazer predicted a trade will happen this offseason, odds were released that showed the Giants are still the likeliest team to have Beckham on the roster in 2019 — although it wasn’t very lopsided:

Odds for what team @obj will be on for Week 1 of the 2019 NFL regular season (BetOnline): Giants -110 49ers +400 Raiders +700 Dolphins +800 Steelers +900 Cardinals +1000 Jets +1200 Patriots +2500 Bills +2500 Cowboys +2500 Browns +2500 Bears +2500 https://t.co/0HwGeSfJv8

— OddsShark (@OddsShark) February 14, 2019

Then at the NFL Combine, Gettleman reiterated his same talking point from earlier in the offseason:

Gentleman: “we didn’t sign Odell to trade him. That’s all I need to say about that.”

— Judy Battista (@judybattista) February 27, 2019

The biggest obstacles for a trade getting done are:

Beckham’s contract

Trade compensation

The receiver is due to count $21 million against the Giants’ salary cap in 2019, but they would only save $5 million of that space by trading him this spring. If the Giants wait until after June 1 to trade Beckham, the team could recoup $17 million of that cap space and carry only $4 million in dead money. But that’d mean missing out on trading Beckham for 2019 draft picks and the big savings wouldn’t be that useful months after free agency.

Bottom line: If the Giants decide to trade Beckham for a pick (or picks) in the 2019 NFL Draft, the team is going to carry $16 million in dead money in 2019 and $12 million in 2020. That’s a whole lot of money going to a player who isn’t even on the roster.

Can the Giants even get enough for Beckham to make that much dead money worthwhile? A year ago, Brandin Cooks was traded for a first-round pick, presumably setting the price tag for Beckham — an even more productive receiver — higher than that.

Antonio Brown is currently on the trading block and a player at Beckham’s level, but it’d be surprising if the Steelers got anything more than a second-round pick for the 30-year-old, pricy receiver.

A team would probably need to come with a significant trade package to pry Beckham from the Giants. Given his contract, his injury history, and a persona that may scare away a team or two — you probably shouldn’t count on a trade getting done.

[2whatcom-blog]

Who's Jordyn Woods, Kylie Jenner's mannequin greatest pal? three issues to know

Kylie Jenner's bestie Jordyn Woods is in scorching water with the Kardashian clan. The 21-year-old mannequin was allegedly caught dishonest with Khloe Kardashian's boyfriend, Tristan Thompson, at a celebration at his Los Angeles dwelling shortly after Valentine's Day. Hollywood Unlocked, an leisure information web site, posted an Instagram video in regards to the alleged affair between Thompson and Woods on Tuesday, prompting a response from Kardashian and her associates. “#PressPlay One of our contributors was at #TristanThompson’s house party and saw what went down! @kyliejenner we need you to address some thangs with @jordynwoods,” the post read. “Anyhow, #JordynWoods stayed at his house until approximately 7am. Who needs to go?! Comment below!” Kardashian replied to the video with a collection of speaking head emojis. A number of leisure websites confirmed this week that the pair, who had been courting publicly since 2016 and share a 10-month-old daughter, True, break up due to Tristan's infidelity. The NBA star was booed at video games after information first broke that he cheated on a pregnant Kardashian final spring. Photographs of Thompson kissing a lady at PH-D Lounge in New York Metropolis have been posted by The Day by day Mail days earlier than Kardashian gave start. TMZ additionally shared video from October 2017 that seems to indicate the basketball star kissing a lady at a DC hookah lounge. The identical video additionally seemingly confirmed Thompson touching and fascinating with two different girls. Kardashian was three months pregnant on the time. But it surely appears like making a transfer on Woods was the final straw for Kardashian. Here is what that you must learn about Jenner's longtime shut pal who's apparently inflicting the drama. She's Jenner's proper hand Woods and Jenner have been shut since center college and have lived collectively as not too long ago as final 12 months. In a 2018 YouTube video, the buddies defined that they met by means of "mutual pal" Jaden Smith once they have been youngsters, based on Stylecaster. Since then, they've been hooked up on the hip — launching enterprise collaborations, modeling and spending particular events along with family and friends. In July 2018, Jenner revealed she lived with Woods they usually have been nonetheless extraordinarily shut. https://www.instagram.com/p/BDJLdTuHGgj/?utm_source=ig_embed "I test out most of my stuff on Jordyn because we live together. So I’m like, 'Jordyn, I need you,'" Jenner told Vogue at the time.

She's a plus-sized mannequin

Woods is a plus-sized mannequin who not too long ago launched her personal clothes line SECNDNTURE, which sells athletic put on. "With SECNDNTURE, I wanted to create something for everyone—clothes available in a wide range of styles and sizes, that can not only be worn in the gym but on any occasion. 'Second nature' means something that comes naturally to you, and your activewear should always feel that way," she told Women's Health in September 2018. The 21-year-old is represented by Wilhelmina Worldwide’s Curve, a New York Metropolis-based modeling company. https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt161R-Aq4t/?utm_source=ig_embed “There’s so many people out there just like me, and right now the curve industry is just blowing up because people are realizing curve models are cool, and most people are not that skinny,” she told Teen Vogue in 2015. “I just want to make a change in the curve industry because I want other curve girls to realize that you don’t have to dress a certain way because you are curvy.” In response to Individuals, Woods was found on Instagram when she was 18.

She's referred to as Stormi's "aunt"

Jenner and Woods are so shut, they think about one another household. So, when Jenner gave start to Stormi on Feb. 1, Woods rapidly stepped in to be one other "auntie." “Her mom is her mom, but I can be the aunt that spoils her and gives her whatever she wants,” Woods previously told People. https://www.instagram.com/p/BsyTj8kHKDu/?utm_source=ig_embed On Stormi's first birthday, Woods wrote a candy message on Instagram marking the big day. "STORM!! You never fail to make me happy. You are the sunshine on any day and there is never a dull moment with you. I can’t wait to continue to see the smartest little girl I know blossom and grow. Your Aunty Jordy loves you baby. HAPPY 1st BIRTHDAY ROCKSTAR. and when I say rockstar.. I mean it. This girl has rhythm already," she wrote. https://www.instagram.com/p/BtWEPCSHyPf/?utm_source=ig_embed Read the full article

[mysteriouslyzealouspandalov-blog]

Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez's relationship timeline, from secret romance to 'power couple'

New Post has been published on https://relationshipguideto.com/must-see/jennifer-lopez-alex-rodriguezs-relationship-timeline-from-secret-romance-to-power-couple/

Jennifer Lopez, Alex Rodriguez's relationship timeline, from secret romance to 'power couple'

Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez have been together now for more than a year. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images for Caesars Entertainment)

Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez were a match made in New York City — literally.

The beloved New Yorkers found love with one another nearly a decade after first meeting at a baseball game in Queens, though A-Rod has hinted in the past the pair may have met even earlier than that. At first, the pair kept it quiet but their silence was short-lived. After just two months of dating, they went public, and they never looked back.

From gracing magazine covers to attending events on behalf of their significant other, the pair have quickly grown to be known as one of Hollywood’s biggest “power couples.”

ALEX RODRIGUEZ SHARES SIGNED JENNIFER LOPEZ PHOTO FROM ‘ALMOST 20 YEARS AGO’

Here’s a look back at the couple’s flourishing romance.

2nd-anniversary, February 2019

Arod and JLo marked two years together in February.

On Feb. 4, the day after they officially became a couple, Rodriguez posted a romantic tribute to his love.

“I can’t believe it’s been two years. Only 730 days, which have flown by, but it feels like we have been together forever. We are meant to be, and how much you mean to me cannot be put into words,” he wrote, in part. “From baseball games, to traveling across the world to shows in Vegas. We have done it all together and every moment with you is cherished. Where this road will take us next is unknown but there is no one else I would rather have by my side. The journey is just beginning and I am excited for what’s ahead.”

Rodriguez gushed that there’s “no one like you” while posting a slideshow of some of his favorite moments over the past two years.

Likewise, Lopez also humble-bragged about her number one fan in a sweet post.

“Two years of laughter. Two years of fun. Two years of adventures.Of excitement of growing and learning. Of true friendship. And so much love!! You make my world a more beautiful safe and stable place… in the midst of our ever-changing, ever-moving life… you make me feel like a teenager starting out all over again… Every time I think I have you pegged, you surprise me in the most wonderful ways reminding me how blessed I am to have found you now in this moment at this time… our time… Te Amo Macho,” the singer wrote on Instagram.

Wedding bells ringing? November 2018

Lopez shut down engagement rumors on Ellen DeGeneres’ show in November. The television host joked about Rodriguez texting her prior to airing that they were planning on getting hitched.

“He did not say that. He did not say that! Let me see the text,” Lopez joked.

When asked whether she believes they will ever get married, Lopez, who has been dating A-Rod for “a couple years,” said she wasn’t sure.

AMAs, October 2018

The couple attended the American Music Awards together in October 2018.

“There’s nothing this woman can’t do,” Rodriguez wrote on Instagram, tagging Lopez’s upcoming film “Second Act.”

Birthday girl, July 2017

Rodriguez celebrated his girl’s 49th birthday with a series of never-before-seen snapshots of Lopez.

“When we were kids, birthdays were exciting because it was all about the gifts we would be getting,” Rodriguez captioned an Instagram gallery in July 2017. “A new bat, dance shoes, maybe a new CD (yes I’m old!).”

The 42-year-old continued, “I see firsthand how that’s changed for Jennifer, and how she’s found joy in sharing with others. For someone who has been about giving everything she has 365 days a year—to our children, our families, the world—I hope today, we can give you all the happiness you deserve. I love you mucho Macha 13.”

Cover girl, March 2018

Described as being “on top of the world personally and professionally,” Lopez was named one of Harpers Bazaar’s spring cover stars.

“He sports-metaphors me to death, and now I do it to everyone else,” Lopez joked.

A-ROD’S GIRLFRIEND JENNIFER LOPEZ FLAUNTS HUGE DIAMOND WHILE ON DATE NIGHT

“Baseball is just like life,” she added. “All you want to do is hit a home run.”

Happy 1-year, February 2018

Before performing at a pre-Super Bowl LII show, Lopez took a moment to give her boyfriend some praise.

“We’ve been together for one year today. I don’t want to get all mushy or anything, but baby, this song’s for you. I love you,” she said, according to E! News.

She later explained to E! why she felt compelled to give her beau some love.

“It was our little anniversary, so it was a special night. I kept thinking ‘Oh, God—February 3! That’s our day. Oh, my God! It’s been a year.’ It was more spontaneous than anything else. It wasn’t too planned. I thought about it, and I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll do it; maybe I won’t,'” Lopez said. “But it was a great show, in general, and…I don’t know. We felt really good.”

Workout king and queen, August 2017

J-Lo and A-Rod both work hard to stay in shape. The singer-actress posted a candid of the pair after a yoga session in August 2017.

“You push me I push you…” she wrote.

Cover models, December 2017

It’s true. “J-Rod” made their magazine cover debut in December 2017, landing the front page of Vanity Fair.

The couple opened up about their relationship and spilled the tea about how they first got together. Lopez recalled spotting Rodriguez while eating lunch in Beverly Hills. Though nervous, Lopez got the courage to walk over to Rodriguez and say hello.

“I had just come from a promo for my show, ‘Shades of Blue,’ so I’m dressed like my character, like a boy—Timberlands, jeans, curly short hair. He looks at me. I say, ‘It’s Jennifer.’ He says, ‘You look so beautiful,'” Lopez revealed to Vanity Fair.

JENNIFER LOPEZ POSES HALF-NUDE IN A SEQUINED CAPE

The pair later discussed their first date: dinner at Hotel Bel Air. At first, the couple had mixed signals — unsure whether it was a real date or not. But eventually, it was crystal clear. And the rest is, well, history.

“I understand him in a way that I don’t think anyone else could, and he understands me in a way that no one else could ever,” Lopez gushed.

Red carpet debut, May 2017

The couple made their first official red carpet debut together at the 2017 Met Gala in New York City. At that time, J-Lo blasted out a series of photos showing the couple enjoying themselves at the event — from snapping selfies in the car en route to the event to blowing kisses at the dinner table.

“You’re never fully dressed without a smile,” Lopez captioned one of the Instagram posts.

Secret romance, March 2017

Rumors began to swirl around March — about a month after the pair reportedly started dating. At first, they attempted to keep their relationship a secret. Lopez and Drake split around that time after just two months of dating, Us Magazine reports.

“She is his dream girl.”

— Source to People

The news wasn’t completely shocking. Apparently, Rodriguez has always been attracted to Lopez.

JENNIFER LOPEZ FALLS DURING LAS VEGAS ‘ALL I HAVE’ CONCERT, GRACEFULLY RECOVERS

“A-Rod has always been taken with the beauty and personality of Jennifer Lopez,” a source told People in March 2017. “She is his dream girl.”

First sight, May, 2005

The pair first met at Shea Stadium in Queens back in 2005. Lopez stopped to shake Rodriguez’s hand before the first pitch, People reports.

At the time, Lopez was still with her ex-husband Marc Anthony. They even all posed for a picture together.

Jennifer Earl is an SEO editor for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter @jenearlyspeakin.

On Our Radar

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/

[chestnutpost]

Terry Crews Apologizes For Claiming Kids Of Same-Sex Parents ‘Malnourished’

This post was originally published on this site

Actor Terry Crews apologized Sunday after tweeting a day earlier that children raised by same-sex parents are “severely malnourished” when it comes to love.

“It was the wrong choice of words in response to another tweet. I apologize,” Crews tweeted, referring to his since-deleted tweet from Saturday that suggested children need both paternal and maternal love to fully thrive.

It all started on Feb. 24 when Crews criticized a New York Times opinion piece by human rights lawyer Derecka PurnelI titled “Why Does Obama Scold Black Boys?” In her piece, Purnell argues that the former president spends too much time “finger-wagging” at black boys instead of encouraging them to dismantle the systems that oppress them.

The “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” actor questioned whether Purnell as a woman was equipped to comment on how to raise “successful young men.”

“How would she know?” Crews tweeted. “You can speak with us ― just not FOR US. There is a big difference.” 

If a successful black man can’t advise the black male youth of the next generation, who will?

THE STREET. That’s who.

Why Does Obama Scold Black Boys? https://t.co/p7RIFzS2sO

— terry crews (@terrycrews) February 24, 2019

Another thing that bothers me is that this OP-ED was written by a WOMAN about how how boys should be taught to grow into successful young men.

How would she know?

MEN NEED TO HOLD OTHER MEN ACCOUNTABLE.

— terry crews (@terrycrews) February 24, 2019

You can speak with us— just not FOR US. There is a big difference.

— terry crews (@terrycrews) February 24, 2019

Crews, who has become a leading male activist in the Me Too movement after speaking out about his own sexual assault, faced immediate backlash on Twitter for doubting Purnell’s credentials.

“You’re a good dude, but you might leave this one to experts,” tweeted Andray Domise, a contributing editor for Canadian news magazine Maclean’s. “I disagree with propagating myths about the Black family, and delegitimizing a credentialed Black woman. That’s not OK.”

Purnell defended her piece on Wednesday, pointing out that she has two sons while Obama “met his dad once” and has two daughters.

“I am genuinely confused,” she tweeted, adding that she never said Obama couldn’t give black boys advice. “I said he had power to make changes that don’t match his advice.”

Crews stood by his criticism of Purnell’s op-ed in the days to follow, though the discussion on Twitter began to focus more on the roles that mothers and fathers play in their children’s lives.

“Same sex couples and single parents can successfully raise a child,” Crews tweeted Saturday. “But I believe paternal AND maternal love are like vitamins and minerals to humanity. No matter where you get that paternal and maternal love. MY purpose is to give paternal love.” 

Wonder if any of the #BrooklynNineNine cast are going to address the disgusting things terry crews is tweeting pic.twitter.com/8znPusepOQ

— auguste (@astdelagrange) March 2, 2019

His tweets on parenthood drew outrage from some LGBTQ community members and their allies who viewed them as disparaging and homophobic.

“Love is not gendered,” one Twitter user wrote in response. “A child will not starve with only one gender loving them.”

Crews responded, “But they will be severely malnourished,” sparking even more backlash and prompting the actor to apologize for his word choice the next day.

Crews has come under fire over his remarks about the LGBTQ community in the past. In July 2018, he tweeted that he was still “learning and reflecting” after backlash over comments some called “transphobic.”

“Why is it considered perfectly fine to be transgender, but deemed totally unacceptable to be TRANSRACIAL?” Crews had posted on Instagram, an apparent reference to Rachel Dolezal, the white woman from Washington state who posed as a black woman for years until she was outed by local media in 2015. She had said she identifies as “transracial.”

“Terry… no,” tweeted writer Clarkisha Kent. “These two are not remotely the same. And what’s worse, proponents of the latter have purposely attempted to Columbus this term from transracial families/adoptees. I am very disappointed.”

The post Terry Crews Apologizes For Claiming Kids Of Same-Sex Parents ‘Malnourished’ appeared first on The Chestnut Post.

from The Chestnut Post https://thechestnutpost.com/news/terry-crews-apologizes-for-claiming-kids-of-same-sex-parents-malnourished/

[newstechreviews]

August 2020 saw no soca floats sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble.

All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right on the Carnival route, and see some manifestation of Trinidad going by, or a reggae crew, wrapped in amazing sculptures of bikini and shiny hosiery. Edward, one of six siblings, would stay out late and take it in, all that sound and spectacle, which for decades has been the triumphant annual pinnacle of London’s cultural and racial multiplicity.

It was this world that nurtured his creativity and helped shape the vision he has brought to the pages of British Vogue since being appointed editor in chief in 2017. “I was always othered,” Enninful says on a nostalgic walk through the streets of Ladbroke Grove, a much gentrified, still bohemian part of London, where he moved with his family from Ghana at the age of 13, “you know, gay, working-class, Black. So for me it was very important with Vogue to normalize the marginalized, because if you don’t see it, you don’t think it’s normal.”

Today, Enninful is the most powerful Black man in his industry, sitting at the intersection of fashion and media, two fields that are undergoing long-overdue change and scrambling to make up for years of negligence and malpractice. Since becoming the only Black editor in history to head any of the 26 Vogue magazines—the most influential publications in the multibillion-dollar global fashion trade—he has been tipped as the successor to Anna Wintour, the iconic editor of American Vogue and artistic director for Condé Nast. The privately held company is navigating, on top of an advertising market battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, public controversies around representation both in its offices and on its pages.

Wayne Tippetts—ShutterstockEnninful at London Fashion Week on Feb. 16, 2019.

Enninful’s vision for British Vogue comes at a critical moment for the international publisher. “I wanted to reflect what I saw here growing up, to show the world as this incredibly rich, cultured place. I wanted every woman to be able to find themselves in the magazine.” He chose the British model Adwoa Aboah to front his first issue, in 2017: “When others took steps, Edward took massive strides, showing the importance of our visibility and stories,” she says. Covers since have featured the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna, Judi Dench (at 85, British Vogue’s oldest cover star), Madonna and soccer player Marcus Rashford, photographed for this year’s September issue by Misan Harriman, the first Black male photographer to shoot a British Vogue cover in its 104-year history. While other publications, including American Vogue, have reduced frequency during the pandemic, British Vogue has remained financially stable and is still producing 12 thick issues in 2020.

Under Enninful, British Vogue has morphed from a white-run glossy of the bourgeois oblivious into a diverse and inclusive on-point fashion platform, shaking up the imagery, tracking the contemporary pain. Its shelf presence is different—more substance, more political—and perhaps in part because of it, the shelf as a whole looks different. No more do Black women search mainstream newsstands in vain for visions of themselves. Now we are ubiquitous in my newsagent, in my corner shop, and it really wasn’t that hard; all it took was to give a Black man some power, to give someone with a gift, a voice and a view from the margin a seat at the table.

“My Blackness has never been a hindrance to me,” Enninful says. Yet he is no stranger to the passing abuses of systemic racism. On a Wednesday in mid-July, while entering British Vogue’s London headquarters, he was racially profiled by a security guard who told him to enter via the loading bay instead. “Just because our timelines and weekends are returning to normal, we cannot let the world return to how it was,” he wrote on Twitter. This summer, in the wake of worldwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd, we are seeing a seismic reckoning across industries, scrutinizing who is doing what and who is not doing enough to bring about real change in equality and representation. “My problem is that there’s a lot of virtue-signaling going on,” he says. “But everyone’s listening now, and we need to take advantage of that. This is not the time for tiptoeing.”

We meet at Ladbroke Grove tube station in a late-summer noon. When anticipating an interview with the leader of a historic luxury fashion bible, it’s tempting to have inferior thoughts about your Nissan or your Clarks boot collection or your latest unlatest something, but Enninful, 48, is unassuming, arriving in a loose navy suit, pale blue shirt and shades, the only giveaway to his sartorial imperium the no socks with his brogues. He is warm and relaxed, bearing the close-shouldered tilt of the lifelong hard worker; he rises at 5 a.m. most days to meditate before work.

I-D: Nick Towers; Vogue Italia: Steven Meisel From left: a Fashion Week report by Enninful in I-D’s January 1995 issue; Naomi Campbell on Vogue Italia in July 2008.

These days he resides toward Lancaster Gate, on the posher side of Ladbroke Grove, with his long-term partner the filmmaker Alec Maxwell and their Boston terrier, Ru Enninful, who has his own Instagram account and whose daily walking was a saving grace during lockdown. But the London Underground is where Enninful’s journey into fashion began, one day on the train in a pair of ripped blue jeans, when he was spotted by stylist Simon Foxton as a potential model for i-D, the avant-garde British fashion magazine. Being only 16, a shy, sheltered kid who grew up in a Ghanaian army barracks and who was less than four years in the U.K., of course he had to ask his mother. Albeit a clothes fanatic herself, a professional seamstress and regular rifler (with Edward) through the markets of Porto-bello and Brixton for fabrics, Grace was wary of the hedonistic London style vortex, the enormity of the new land, and reluctant to release her son into its mouth. He begged. He wore her down: “I knew I couldn’t just walk away from this, that something special was going to come out of it.”

He never had the knack for modeling, he says with characteristic humility. “I was terrible at it. I hated the castings, all that objectifying. But I loved the process and the craft of creating an image.” He soon moved to the other side of the lens, assisting on shoots and assembling image concepts and narratives, a particular approach to styling that impressed i-D enough to hire him as their youngest ever fashion director at only 18, a post he held for the next 20 years. Without the courtesy designer clothes later at his fingertips, he would customize, shred, dye and bargain for the right look, using the skills he’d developed at home in the sewing room. “I realized that I could say a lot with fashion,” he says, “that it wasn’t just about clothes, but could tell a story of the times we’re in, about people’s experiences in life. And that freedom to portray the world as you saw it.”

What was innate to Enninful—this blend of skilled creativity with the perception of difference as normal, as both subject and audience—was relatively unique in an industry dominated by white, colonial notions of beauty and mainstream. Legendary Somali supermodel Iman remembers a 2014 W magazine shoot in which she, Naomi Campbell and Rihanna were cast by Enninful, the publication’s then style director, wearing Balmain, designed by Olivier Rousteing. “Until Edward appeared, no one at the mainstream fashion magazines would have cared to commission a portrait exclusively featuring three women of color, and furthermore who were all wearing clothes designed by a person of color,” she says. “He’s an editor in vocation and a reformer at heart, compelled to spur woefully needed social change.”

Courtesy Jamie Hawkesworth and Condé Nast Britain Train driver Narguis Horsford, on British Vogue’s July 2020 issue.

He shows me his various old haunts and abodes, the top-floor bedsit where he used to haul bags of styling gear up the stairs, the Lisboa and O’Porto cafés of Golborne Road—or “Little Morocco”—where he’d sit for hours chewing the fat with people like makeup artist Pat McGrath, Kate Moss, Nick Kamen and photographer David Sims. Name-drops fall from his lips like insignificant diamonds—stylists, photographers, celebrities—but he navigates his domain in a manner apparently uncommon among fashion’s gatekeepers. Winfrey says of him, “I have never experienced in all my dealings with people in that world anyone who was more kind and generous of spirit. I mean, it just doesn’t happen.”

Her shoot for the August 2018 cover of British Vogue left Winfrey feeling “empress-like,” and she ascribes his understanding of Black female beauty to his being raised by a Black mother. “Edward understands that images are political, that they say who and what matters,” she adds. Enninful’s father Crosby, a major in the Ghanaian army who was part of U.N. operations in Egypt and Lebanon, had thought that his bright, studious son would eventually grow out of his fascination with clothes and become a lawyer. But three months into an English literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying Hardy, Austen and the usual classics, thinking maybe he’d be a writer, or indeed a lawyer, Enninful quit to take up the position at i-D. His father did not speak to him for around 15 years, into the next century, until Grace suffered a stroke and entered a long illness. “Now that I’m older, I realize he just wanted to protect us. He’s come to understand that I had to follow my heart and forge my own path.”

He credits his parents for his strong work ethic—“drummed into you from a very early age by Black parents, that you have to work twice as hard”—and his Ghanaian heritage for his eye for color. His approach to fashion as narrative comes from the “childish games I would play with my mother,” creating characters around the clothes, sketching them out. “I can’t just shoot clothes off the runway,” he says. “There always has to be a character, and that character has to have an inner life.” Since Grace’s death three years ago, his father has lived alone by the Grand Union Canal and is very proud of his son, particularly of the Order of the British Empire awarded to him by Queen Elizabeth II in 2016 for his services to diversity in fashion. The Queen, incidentally, is high on Enninful’s list of Vogue cover dreams.

The British Vogue Enninful inherited from former editor in chief Alexandra Shulman three years ago was starkly different from today’s rendition. During her 25 years in charge, only 12 covers out of 306 featured Black women, and she left behind an almost entirely white workforce. Now the editorial team is 25% people of color—“I needed certain lieutenants in place,” he says—and similar shufflings are being called for over at Condé Nast in New York. Enninful is reluctant to tarnish names any further, maintaining that Shulman “represented her time, I represent mine,” and declining to comment on the U.S. headquarters.

Courtesy Edward Enninful A Polaroid of Enninful in the 1990s from his personal collection.

Enninful’s rise is particularly meaningful to people like André Leon Talley, former editor at large of American Vogue, where Enninful also worked as a contributing editor. Talley describes the new British Vogue as “extraordinary,” and was joyous at Enninful’s appointment. “He speaks for the unsung heroes, particularly those outside the privileged white world that Vogue originally stood for. He has changed what a fashion magazine should be.”

“I’m a custodian,” Enninful says of his role, sitting in a sumptuous alcove of the club bar at Electric House. “Vogue existed before I came, and it will still exist when I leave, but I knew that I had to go in there and do what I really believed in. It’s our responsibility as storytellers or image makers to try to disrupt the status quo.” Ironically, though, he does not see himself as an activist, rather as someone who is unafraid to tackle political issues and educate others, while remaining firmly within the Vogue lens. “They said Black girls on the cover don’t sell,” he says. “People thought diversity equals down-market, but we’ve shown that it’s just good for business.” British Vogue’s digital traffic is up 51% since Enninful took over. He previously edited the 2008 Black issue of Vogue Italia, which featured only Black models and Black women and sold out in the U.S. and the U.K. in just 72 hours.

Since the incident with the security guard in July—which Enninful reveals was not isolated and had happened before (the culprit, a third-party employee, was dismissed from headquarters)—building staff have been added to the company’s diversity-and-inclusion trainings. Enninful would also like to see financial aid put in place for middle management, “because we forget sometimes that the culture of a place does not allow you to go from being a student to the top.” In 2013, he tweeted about another incident, where he was seated in the second row at a Paris couture show while his white counterparts were placed in front. “I get racially profiled all the time,” he says, going right back to his first experience of being stopped and searched as a teenager, which “petrified” him. “When I was younger, I would’ve been hurt and withdrawn, but now I will let you know that this is not O.K. People tend to think that if you’re successful it eliminates you, but it can happen any day. The difference now is that I have the platform to speak about it and point it out. The only way we can smash systemic racism is by doing it together.”

Campbell Addy for TIMEBritish Vogue editor in chief Enninful in Ladbroke Grove, London, on Aug. 31.

Activism, then, is intrinsic. Fashion is altruism, as much as story and craft, as much as the will to capture beauty. For Enninful, there is no limitation to the radicalism possible through his line of work. Rather than the seemingly unattainable elements of style (the £350 zirconia ring, the £2,275 coat) obscuring the moral fiber of the message, the invitation to think and see more openly, the style instead leads you to it, perhaps even inviting you to assemble something similar within the boundaries of your real, more brutal, less elevated existence. “Relatable luxury,” he calls it, and though it’s difficult to imagine exactly how one might evoke a £2,275 coat without his customizing skills and magical thinking, I am inclined to accept the notion, partly because I saw soul singer Celeste in a £1,450 dress in the September issue and think I might give it a try. Anything is possible. “I still feel like I’m at the beginning,” he says with palpable optimism. “I feel the fire of something new.”

—With reporting by Cady Lang/New York and Madeline Roache/London

Evans is the author of Ordinary People, The Wonder and 26a

Cover photo: Styling: Susan Bender; Suit, sweater, shoes: Burberry

[bountyofbeads]

Justice officials were briefed months ago on allegations against operative at the center of N.C. election fraud scandal

https://wapo.st/2FpUVhE

Justice officials were briefed months ago on allegations against operative at the center of N.C. election fraud scandal

By Beth Reinhard | January 11 at 9:51 PM EST | Washington Post | Posted January 12, 2019 |

Nine months before allegations of absentee ballot fraud tainted a congressional race in North Carolina, the state elections board gave officials from the Justice Department’s main office evidence that the political operative at the center of the scandal had used similar tactics in 2016.

On Jan. 31, 2018, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which oversees prosecutions of election crimes, met in Raleigh with state officials and U.S. attorney Robert Higdon, according to an elections board spokesman.

The following day, the state officials sent a public integrity lawyer an eight-page memo describing interviews with two campaign workers who said they were paid during the 2016 election to hand-deliver mail-in ballots to political operative Leslie McCrae Dowless. Under North Carolina law, only voters or their close relatives or guardians may deliver or mail in ballots. The memo also summarized interviews with three Bladen County voters who filed complaints saying those campaign workers had sought their ballots.

The meeting and follow-up email, obtained by The Washington Post under a public records request, are the first public indications that officials with the Justice Department in Washington were made aware of the allegations against Dowless. Dowless has emerged in recent weeks as a key figure in the absentee ballot scandal in Republican Mark Harris’s 2018 congressional bid. State elections officials and some voters have expressed frustration that federal prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in North Carolina did not act more aggressively to pursue earlier complaints against Dowless and potentially stop him from working on campaigns.

Dowless worked for one of Harris’s campaign vendors, and the state elections board has declined to certify his narrow win in the 9th Congressional District amid allegations that ballot tampering may have affected the results. Dowless did not respond to messages seeking comment and has previously declined interview requests.

“I really expected something would be done about this,” said Linda Johnson-Baldwin, a retired principal and one of the three voters who filed complaints about absentee ballot collection in 2016. Told her complaint was shared with the Justice Department, she added, “I didn’t even know it went that far. So was anything done about it?”

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. An FBI spokeswoman in Raleigh did not return phone calls. A spokesman for Higdon also declined to comment. 

The other two voters who filed complaints, Brenda Register and Heather Register, who are not related, also said they never heard from federal law enforcement after giving interviews to state elections investigators.

Josh Lawson, general counsel for the state elections board, said he saw little indication that federal prosecutors pursued the Dowless matter. “Meetings did not result in prosecutions or substantial work in the district before the election,” he said.

Other emails obtained by The Post shed additional light on state elections officials’ entreaties to federal prosecutors and the FBI.

After the primary in May of last year, elections officials provided the FBI with records that they said suggested “new efforts by ‘MD,’ ” an apparent reference to Dowless. That communication was referenced in a reminder email Joan Fleming, a state elections investigator, sent to an FBI agent on Oct. 3, a month before the midterm election.

“For this election, Bladen County’s ABS requests are off the charts,” Fleming wrote to FBI agent Julia Hanish, using shorthand for absentee ballots.

The email address misspelled Hanish’s name, using two N’s, and it was unclear whether the email was received. An email sent to that address seeking comment bounced back.

After the November election, reports that unusually high numbers of mail-in ballots were requested in the county but not returned fueled questions about the integrity of the congressional election. State elections investigators have spoken with witnesses who link Dowless to the irregularities, people familiar with the probe have said.

Harris has denied knowledge of any wrongdoing by Dowless during the campaign.

The Jan. 31 meeting in Raleigh included a broad discussion of campaign practices in North Carolina, including the 2016 allegations in Bladen County, state elections board spokesman Pat Gannon said. The elections board had initially referred those allegations to the U.S. attorney’s office a year earlier, warning that those activities “if not addressed will likely continue for future elections.”

The email sent the following day included a transcript of Dowless’s testimony at an elections board hearing in December 2016. Dowless acknowledged that his campaign workers collected absentee ballots in violation of state law but said that he had not told them to do so and that he later ordered them to return the ballots.

On Feb. 28, 2018, state elections officials met again with federal law enforcement authorities to discuss suspicious campaign activities in Bladen County, Gannon confirmed. Hanish and two prosecutors from Higdon’s office attended the meeting.

Marshall Tutor, a state elections board investigator who worked with Fleming on probing election irregularities, said he thought the case referred to prosecutors was strong.

“You dig and dig and dig, and then nothing comes of it, which is quite frustrating,” Tutor said in an interview. He retired in March.

[strike-back-now-info]

Here’s A List of Hoax ‘Hate Crimes’ In The Trump EraFebruary 19th, 2019  1. Left: Actor Jussie Smollett, who is accused of staging a hate crime. Right: President Donald Trump (Left photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images; Right photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Liberal actor Jussie Smollett is accused of staging a racist and anti-gay attack on himself, which Smollett blamed on supporters of President Donald Trump.Smollett’s alleged fake “hate crime” appears to be the latest instance of liberals manufacturing hate crimes for attention in the Trump era.The Daily Caller News Foundation compiled below some of the most outrageous fake hate crimes since Trump was elected, in roughly chronological order: 2. Anti-Muslim Hate Crime In Michigan Turns Out To Be A Hoax (Nov. 2016) A Muslim woman at the University of Michigan received national attention from national outlets like The Washington Post in November 2016 after she claimed a drunk 20-something man threatened to light her on fire if she didn’t remove her hijab. The university condemned the “hateful attack,” which turned out to be a hoax. 3. Bisexual Student Fakes Trump-Inspired Hate Crime (Nov. 2016) Taylor Volk, an openly bisexual senior at North Park University claimed to be the target of hateful notes and emails following Trump’s election in November 2016. Volk told NBC News that “I just want them to stop.” But the “them” referenced by Volk turned out to be herself, as the whole thing was fabricated. 4. Gas Station Racism Goes Viral — Then Police Debunk It (Nov. 2016) Philadelphia woman Ashley Boyer claimed in November 2016 that she was harassed at a gas station by white, Trump-supporting males, one of whom pulled a weapon on her. Boyer claimed that the men “proceeded to talk about the election and how they’re glad they won’t have to deal with n—–s much longer.” Boyer deleted her post after it went viral and claimed the men had been caught and were facing criminal charges. Local police debunked her account. 5. White Men Rob Muslim Woman Of Her Hijab And Wallet — Except It Never Happened (Nov. 2016) An 18-year-old Muslim woman in Louisiana claimed in November 2016 that two white men, one of whom was wearing a Trump hat, attacked and robbed her, taking her wallet and hijab while yelling racial slurs. She later admitted to the Lafayette Police Department that she made the whole thing up. 6. Church Organist Vandalizes Own Church (Nov. 2016) A church organist was arrested in May 2017 after he was found responsible for spray-painting a swastika, an anti-gay slur and the words “Heil Trump” on his own church in November 2016. When the story first broke, media outlets tied the hoax to Trump’s election. “The offensive graffiti at St. David’s is among numerous incidents that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s Election Day win,” The Washington Post reported at the time. 7. “Drunk White Men” Attack Muslim Woman In Story That Also Never Happened (Dec. 2016) Another 18-year-old Muslim woman, this time in New York, was the subject of breathless headlines in December 2016 after she claimed to have been attacked by a group of Donald Trump supporters on a New York subway while onlookers did nothing. The woman, Yasmin Seweid, would go on to confess that she made the whole thing up. 8. White Guy Sets His Own Car On Fire, Paints Racial Slur On His Own Garage (Dec. 2016) Denton, Texas, resident David Williams set his own car on fire and painted “n***** lovers” on his home’s garage, in an apparent attempt to stage a hate crime. Local police investigated the arson as a hate crime. Williams and his wife, Jenny, collected more than $5,000 from Good Samaritans via a GoFundMe page before the hoax was exposed. 9. Prankster Tricks Liberal Journalist Into Spreading Anti-Trump Hoax (Dec. 2016) As tales of Trump-inspired “hate crimes” were spread far and wide by liberal journalists after Trump’s election, one online prankster decided to test just easy it was to fool journalists. The prankster sent Mic.com writer Sarah Harvard a fictitious story in which a Native American claimed to have been harassed by an alleged Trump supporter who thought she was Mexican. Despite no evidence backing up the claim, Harvard spread the fake story, emails the prankster shared with The Daily Caller showed. 10. Student Writes Anti-Muslim Graffiti On His Own Door (Feb. 2017) A Muslim student at Beloit College wrote anti-Muslim graffiti on his own dorm room door. The student was reportedly motivated by a desire to seek attention after a Jewish student was targeted with an anti-Semitic note. 11. Israeli Man Behind Anti-Semitic Bomb Threats in the U.S. (April 2017) Media outlets didn’t wait to find out who was behind a string of bomb threats targeting synagogues and Jewish schools before linking the threats to Trump. A U.S.-Israeli man was charged in April 2017 and indicted in February 2018 for the threats. A former reporter for The Intercept was also charged in March 2017 with making several copycat threats. 12. Hoax at St. Olaf (May 2017) Students at St. Olaf College in Minnesota staged protests and boycotted classes in May 2017 after racist notes targeting black students were found around campus, earning coverage in national media outlets like The Washington Post. It later came out that a black student was responsible for the racist notes. The student carried out the hoax in order to “draw attention to concerns about the campus climate,” the university announced. 13. Fake Hate At Air Force Academy Goes Viral (Sept. 2017) The Air Force Academy was thrown into turmoil in September 2017 when horrific racist notes were found at the academy’s preparatory school. “Go home n***er,” read one of the notes. The superintendent, Lt. Gen. Jay B. Silveria, went viral with an impassioned speech addressing the racist notes.Two months later, authorities determined that one of the students targeted by the notes was also the person responsible for writing them. 14. K-State Fake Hate Crime (Nov. 2017) A student at Kansas State University filed a police report in November 2017 over racist graffiti left on his car. “Go Home N***** Boy” and “Whites Only,” read the racist graffiti, which the student later admitted to writing himself. 15. Racist Graffiti Carried Out By Non-White Student (Nov. 2017) Another instance of racist graffiti that same month also turned out to be a hoax. A Missouri high school investigated after racial slurs were left on a bathroom mirror in November 2017, only to find that the student responsible was “non-white.” 16. Waiter Fakes Note Calling Himself A Terrorist (July 2018) Texas waiter Khalil Cavil went viral after posting a Facebook picture of a racist note that he claimed a customer had left on the receipt, in lieu of a tip. The note described Cavil as a “terrorist.” Saltgrass Steak House, where Cavil worked, initially banned the customers for life, before their investigation revealed that the waiter had faked the racist note. “I did write it,” Cavil later admitted. “I don’t have an explanation. I made a mistake. There is no excuse for what I did.” 17. Waitress Fakes Racist Note, Blames Law Enforcement (July 2018) A Texas waitress apologized in July 2018 after blaming local law enforcement for an offensive note targeting Mexicans. She later admitted to writing the note herself. 18. New York Woman’s Hate Crime That Wasn’t (Sept. 2018)A New York woman was charged in September 2018 after police determined she fabricated a story about white teens yelling racial slurs at her and leaving a racist note on her car. 19. Student Faked Racist Notes (Dec. 2018) Several racist notes at Drake University were actually the work of one of the students who had been targeted by them. “The fact that the actions of the student who has admitted guilt were propelled by motives other than hate does not minimize the worry and emotional harm they caused, but should temper fears,” university president Marty Martin said afterward. 20. The Covington Catastrophe (Jan. 2019) National media outlets pounced on a selectively edited video from the March for Life that showed Native American activist Nathan Phillips beating a drum in front of a boisterous group of boys from Covington Catholic High School. 21 The exterior of Covington Catholic High School Dennis Griffin stadium is pictured in Park Hills, Kentucky, U.S., January 23, 2019. REUTERS/Madalyn McGarvey Phillips originally told The Washington Post the students swarmed him while he was preparing to leave the Indigenous People’s March scheduled for the same day. Phillips originally said one student, who later identified himself as high school junior Nick Sandmann, blocked his path from leaving as he tried to do so. The extended video shows that wasn’t the case: Phillips approached the high school boys during their cheers, not the other way around. Some of the people with Phillips were directing racially charged language at the students, not the other way around.Phillips told the second variation of his story to the Detroit Free Press. Phillips claimed he was playing the role of peacemaker by getting between the students and four “old black individuals,” whom he claimed the students were attacking. “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals,” Phillip told the Michigan paper. “I was there and I was witnessing all of this … As this kept on going on and escalating, it just got to a point where you do something or you walk away, you know? You see something that is wrong and you’re faced with that choice of right or wrong.”“These young men were beastly and these old black individuals were their prey, and I stood in between them and so they needed their pounds of flesh and they were looking at me for that,” he added. An extended video shows that account also isn’t accurate. The four individuals Phillips referenced were members of the Black Hebrew Israelites and they launched racist and anti-gay slurs at the high school students, not the other way around. (RELATED: Nathan Phillips Keeps Changing His Story, Keeps Getting It Wrong)WATCH:   22. Bonus: Anti-Semitic Vandal Exposed As Democratic Activist (Nov. 2018) Anti-Semitic vandalism in New York City turned out to be the work of a Democratic activist, according to police. It wasn’t a hoax — the anti-Semitic vandalism was real — but the suspect wasn’t the right-winger some had assumed him to be. The man policearrested, based on surveillance footage, was 26-year-old James Polite, who had actually interned for City Hall on anti-hate issues. 23. Bonus II: Trump-Inspired Racist Blaze At Black Church Was Carried Out By Black Church-goer (Nov. 2016) This hoax occurred one week before Trump was elected, but TheDCNF is including it as a bonus because it was so egregious. Leftist media outlets ran headlines like “A Black Church Burned in the Name of Trump” after a black church in Greenville, Mississippi, was set on fire and spray painted with the words “Vote Trump.” The Washington Post’s original coverage of the incident read in part,” Greenville Mayor Errick Simmons called the fire a ‘hateful and cowardly act,’ sparked by the incendiary rhetoric of GOP nominee Donald Trump during his presidential campaign.” But the church was set on fire by one of the church’s own congregants, who is black. Did we miss any hoaxes? Shoot me an email. Follow Hasson on Twitter @PeterJHassonContent created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.https://amp.dailycaller.com/2019/02/18/hoax-hate-crimes-list

[sentrava]

January 2018 Highlights: The Highs + Lows

As compared to last year, January started off in a sprint with two week-long work trips almost back-to-back. This month, I spent 12 nights in hotel rooms, and we took a few additional day trips to nearby cities like Chattanooga and Huntsville.

And the third work trip of the year happens soon in February, which you’re invited to join me on! Remember how I went to St. George, Utah last spring to participate in an InstaMeet at Zion National Park? And I explored Snow Canyon, hiked Observation Point and visited all the other state parks around St. George? Welllll, there’s another InstaMeet slated for Feb. 16-18 also in Zion—and you can come! Here are the details, and feel free to ask me any questions in the comments.

But back to what happened this month:

HIGHS

We went to Canada! And had so much fun! Have you read my posts on winter travel to Alberta with Canada by Design? If not, you can catch up on them here.

We also went to Texas. Actually, we’re here now! I love me any excuse to visit the Lone Star State and this content project with the tourism board had us visiting corners I’d never been before. And we’ve had an absolute blast—one of the best trips we’ve taken in ages. I’ll be doing one big trip recap after I’m home, but in the meantime, you can follow our day-to-day coverage via Texas Tourism’s Facebook page and, of course, my Instagram Stories.

I wrote three pieces on my alma mater, Knoxville, for Marriott Traveler. I also have one HUGE content project due for another client next week, so hopefully February’s recap will include that.

We got snow in Tennessee! The last thing I expected the morning I flew home from Canada was a) temps 30 degrees cooler than when I left Banff and b) that I’d still be needing my ski clothes for the duration of the week! The schools in our town were out an entire week, and we pretty much holed up at our house and tackled a pile of work.

We signed another couple of big projects for the spring. The way the year is shaping out, it looks as if we’re going to be on the road at least every other week from now till fall. Whew!

We also re-signed our contract with the Opry. Meaning another  year of really cool content collaborations and some unbelievable shows. Working with such an iconic Nashville institution this past year and change has been an absolute dream, and I’m thrilled they want to bring us back for another year of content marketing goodness.

LOWS

I got a stomach flu, yuck. I haven’t gotten a stomach bug since I was in Switzerland in 2009, so go figure that would happen on day three of our Canadian adventure. The upside? My mom was there to take care of me. And this might be the one trip I didn’t come home having gained weight!

And I also got frostbite. I know, right—who gets that? Apparently, a girl standing outside for an hour in -26 degree temps while weathering the flu. Three weeks later, I almost have full feeling back in both big toes.

No sleep for the weary. Our next door neighbors installed a spotlight that shines directly into our home from 6pm to 6am and lights up the entire thing like a Christmas tree. Annoying? Definitely. So SVV and I have not been having very restful nights—I guess it’s a good thing we’re on the road so often? Anyone ever dealt with light pollution and inconsiderate neighbors before?

And with that, it’s February.

What was the highlight of January for you? What are you most looking forward to next month?

January 2018 Highlights: The Highs + Lows published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS