#gives you an answer like an American politician who was asked about a scandal

[jeevasphere]

Hey there 🤗 just wanted to chime in with my own question after seeing your answer to the prev ask. What’s your personal take on Matt?

thanks for the ask!

matt’s always changing in my head. when I was younger I tended to write him as super pitiful, self-loathing, and flirtatious, which is so cringey looking back now lol. these days he’s fairly reserved and very nonchalant. like any matt, he has a boyish charm and funnels nervous energy into making dirty jokes.

it’s easy enough to assign matt to a depressed, burnt out character whose time at the orphanage killed his spark and left him as wasted potential. undoubtedly he would be a more productive and well-adjusted adult had he lived a normal childhood, but i’ve put to rest the resentful matt i used to write. I think matt’s one of those guys who doesn’t seem to care a ton about anything besides what he wants to do in the moment. very few things are a big deal in his eyes. at the house, everything was stressful all the time, everything was a life-or-death exam. matt never had a desire to be an L, so he got tired of this really quickly. as a result, his adult self is extremely easygoing, lazy, and perfectly fine with spending his life in boxer shorts in front of a console. he’s earned that much.

in terms of how he feels about mello: something something, feelings so dark and shameful they are softened by raw sexual desire. they’re symbiotic parts of each other—a forced proximity trauma bonding trope really does a lot for your favorite pair of BFFs. there’s a lot to unpack there, but something else is keeping matt chained to mello like a lost puppy and it’s a word that does not yet exist in the english language. in a world where almost nothing can motivate matt to get off his ass, mello is one creature who can get away with it. matt unconsciously, somehow, always seems to make mello more important than anything else in his life. they make each other crazy in the same way an old couple with undiagnosed psychological issues do.

stopping myself here so I don’t bore you too much. i will hopefully have more answers for you when i start writing more regularly!

[slytherflynn]

Old and New | Pt I

Blaise Zabini x muggle!reader

word count: 1971

summary: y/n is new to France on a study abroad trip. Blaise is visiting France post-Hogwarts. rags to riches story of an unfortunate muggle falling for a complicated, ridiculously wealthy person who just so happens to also be a powerful Wizard.

a/n: this started with an idea, became a moodboard, then became an entire fleshed out fic! I thought it would be short but my brain had other ideas. enjoy! note: I did write this from my personal perspective in life. as a result it is not very inclusive. I plan to change that with my next fics, I’ve just been having a really hard time lately and have been writing a lot of comfort fics and/or self-inserts to escape from irl bc irl is rly shitty for me rn

It’s a brand-new start, in a brand-new apartment, in a brand-new city, in a brand-new country... an ocean away from home. I can bring Tacoma to France, right? At least, that’s what I’m trying to tell myself. Study abroad is fucking... scary. I kinda regret it. It’s a good opportunity and for someone who doesn’t travel, it should be a fun experience. But I’m currently having an anxiety attack over taking out the garbage, so I’m not sure my positive self-talk is working.

I look out the window of my top floor apartment, wait until someone finally finishes walking down the stairs, and run out my door - I nearly trip about five times going down the spiral of death, my arms feel like jelly thanks to perpetually pushing my garbage deeper in to avoid this trip, and I swing with all my might to hurl my garbage bag into the trash compacting dumpster - only it hits the bottom lip and falls to the ground, splitting open.

“Great!” I say, sarcastically, “First they send my luggage to the wrong location, then they try to say my passport isn’t valid because my apartment was a temporary address, then I’m greeted with a fridge full of rotting food and no power, then I’m bitten up by fleas and now - I just- fuck. Why can’t I just- do anything- right-“ I cut myself off when I hear a screen door slide and blink a couple times to erase the threat of tears that had been creeping up on me while I ranted.

When I look up, I see a tall, dark-skinned guy about my age - handsome. He’s wearing a suit, and expensive jewelry. Combine that with the fact he’s living in the apartment building next to me, which is worth more than my life just for one month of rent, and I put together that he’s probably rich beyond belief. I quickly look away, not wanting to stare. I silently pick up my garbage, piece by piece. As I work, I feel eyes drilling holes in the back of my head. I ignore it. It continues, and I still ignore it as I finally shove my ripped garbage bag in the compactor and slam the door shut. I hear a slight jump up above, and chuckle to myself.

I zoom back up the stairs and almost make it to the top, but I trip 5 stairs away from my door - and fall, hard. Body laid out flat hard. Cheek scraped and stinging from the metal grating on the stairs, hard. Lost the goddamned slide that caught on the stair, and can see it gradually falling, bouncing and rolling down the stairs, hard. I lift my head and see blood on the stair. I feel it running down my face. All I can think is that this really fucking hurts. The tears come, a combination of pain and frustration, and I pick myself up and stumble my way into my apartment, completely forgetting about the attractive rich boy who just watched me be a danger and inconvenience to myself.

I rush to the kitchen and grab a roll of paper towels, and run to the bathroom, I see the markings in the mirror and can tell it will leave a sizeable scar. Do I need stitches? I don’t know. Anyway, I start dabbing at everything and blood is still oozing out of every nook and cranny, to my displeasure. I’m about to start bandaging my face when I hear a knock on my door. “Fucking Christ!” I mutter to myself as I slap a wad of paper towels on my face and sulkily go to fling open my door.

I’m not sure who I’m expecting, but to see the same rich guy on my doorstep, slide in hand, probably wasn’t it. “Hey, um, I saw what happened, and I thought you might want your shoe back.” His accent sounds very British - I was expecting it to sound more like a snooty Frenchman’s.

“Oh. Um. Thanks.” I say flatly.

As my muscles twitch to begin closing the door, he says, “Would you like some help cleaning that up? I have certifications to give medical aid... and stitches. My name’s Blaise, by the way.”

Doctor, maybe? Probably. “Sure,” I say, opening the door wider and standing back so the blood doesn’t drip on his suit. “I’m y/n.”

A few minutes later we’re in my bathroom, me sitting on the toilet, him sitting on the bathtub as he helps me fix my face. “So, Mademoiselle y/n,” He asks, “Do you find yourself in these predicaments very often?”

“Which one? Poverty, flea bitten, or bloody?” I say.

“I suppose whichever you’d like to think I was referring to.”

“Well, in *that* case - I’m usually caught unawares in all kinds of predicaments - though I’d say self-injury due to clumsiness is an uncommon one. And do you usually find yourself in predicaments requiring you to treat someone’s wounds?”

“I used to, though now it’s only on the occasion.”

“Sounds like an improvement,” I note. “I won’t guarantee it, but I think I’ll get the hang of walking up the stairs soon enough, so you don’t have to worry about me.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily mind it if I did worry about you once or twice more. Why were you running? It seemed like you wanted to get away from something. Does your garbage compactor smell that disturbing?”

“It doesn’t smell great,” I admit, “But truth be told, I’m not a fan of human interaction. It’s scary. Especially when everything is new to me.”

“How long have you been In France?”

“A few days, just enough to get myself physically settled.”

“I see. And you are from America?”

“Mhm. Let me guess, my accent gave it away.”

“And the slang, I’ve yet to hear someone from France use certain terms that you seem to favor.”

“Oh, most of my slang is specific to my city, not just my country.”

“Your city?”

“Yea, Tacoma. It’s near Seattle, if you know where that is. Tacoma’s better, though.”

“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been there. My mother is a fashion designer, but she only travels where there’s inspiration or a business deal.” So that’s how he gets the expensive clothes. The rest of the money too, probably.

“Must be nice, having a handmade closet.” I muse. “Not that I care for having any more clothes than I brought. They’re pretty reliable, if I do say so myself.”

He laughs. “Yes, well, if the blood stains don’t come out of your jumpsuit you might need a new one. They shouldn’t be too difficult to remove, though.”

“Yea, I’ll just dump a bucket of Oxi-Clean on it and call it a day. That is, if any stores nearby have it.” I frown, realizing I have no clue if France carries any of the products I usually get. This is gonna suck. Hopefully the internet has some answers so I don’t have to ask anyone for help.

“Why don’t I take your jumpsuit back with me? Save you the trip. Believe it or not, I used to have chronic nosebleeds, so I know a thing or two about stain removal.” Blaise offers.

I smile, only just. “Well, if you insist. But I love this jumpsuit practically more than myself, so I expect it back right away!”

He returns the smile. “A fan of fashion? You ought to meet my mother.”

I chuckle. “I’m sure your mom would despise me - I only own seven jumpsuits and some athleisure for going on runs.” I pause, then tack on: “Oh, and some fuzzy pajamas for when I’m sick.”

Blaise cocks a brow at me. “And when you’re not sick?”

“Don’t worry about it.” I grin mischievously.

A wave of recognition graces his eyes, and he very quickly looks away, I assume for being flustered.

“You Americans, always so scandalous.” He tsks in mock scorn.

“That’s what we’re known for, is it not?” I say cheekily, “Beer, boobs and gun barrels. And all the other problems that come with that, but that’s a can of worms I am not looking to open today.”

He ties off his handiwork, and says, “It looks like my job is finished, other than stealing your jumpsuit off your back to fix it. I can wait in the other room, if you’d like?”

“Um, yea, that works. Lemme just, grab my next jumpsuit. Gonna have to do laundry early, I suppose-“

“I can wash your jumpsuit for you. I’m pretty good at reading labels, if I do say so myself.” He jokes.

“Oh?” I say, “Then you must be a real genius! Who taught you, Einstein?”

“No, but it was another white-haired, eccentric man, so you’re not that far off.”

“When all teachers are like that it’s kind of impossible not to hit relatively close to the mark.” I remark, then change clothes as quickly as I can, tossing the dirty outfit into a trusty plastic bag and tying it shut.

When I walk out to the living room, Blaise is toying with one of my sculptures. He’s definitely been meandering and lurking around. “Enjoying yourself?” I ask, at which he jumps. “You’re rather skittish, Blaise.”

“And you’re rather quiet on your feet, y/n.” He observes. “But yes, I quite like your eclectic style. If only you had an apartment that let your customization shine. Something more minimalist.”

“Yes, well, it’s something I’ll forever dream of and likely never accomplish. I don’t suspect I’m going to be someone leaving the income level I was born into.” I say, just a little bit cynical.

“And why is that?” He asks.

“Because most people don’t, and the ones who do are the ones who make money. My career isn’t going to make me money.” I reply.

“So why did you pick it?”

I sigh. “Because somebody has to care about the people like me. The politicians don’t, the middle class don’t, and the rich are hell bent on keeping us there so they can have factory workers and have people going straight to prison after they graduate because we’re all desperate and miserable.”

He frowns. “That’s terrible.”

“It’s reality. And I don’t want to be like the people who get rich and stop caring because all they see is the wage difference and pretend it’s justified so they don’t have to feel complicit in the system.” I look him in the eye, my face grim. “Not all luck is by chance. Most of it is by design.”

He nods. “I understand, in a way.”

“Everyone does.” I say. “But understanding in a way and caring enough to do something about it are two different things.” I look away from him when I see his posture change. “I’m not trying to be rude, but it’s impossible not to notice the wealth gap between us when you’re wearing designer clothes and living in what looks like a mansion and I’m living in a building made in like 1900 with no elevator. It’s just the way things are, though.”

“I know.” He says quietly, thoughtfully. “I’d better get going. Your clothes?” He reaches out tentatively for the bag I’m still holding.

“Oh. Right.” I say, handing it to him. Our fingers brush against each other slightly, and it sends chills down my spine. He heads to the door while I’m rooted to the spot, collecting myself.

“I look forward to seeing you again, y/n.” He nods, meeting my eyes with a rather changed expression.

“I’ll see you soon, then?” I ask, not quite sure which answer I’m expecting.

He smiles, only just. “As soon as I am able.” Seconds later, he’s out the door, and I’m alone in my dingy ass apartment. How in the fuck did any of that just happen?

[pawprintsmoon]

Henry has no clue; The Aftermath

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31306808/chapters/77401784

Once Alex leans into the kiss, the prince is royally screwed. An immense energy encompasses them, and he loses his breath along with all his remaining sensibilities. He pulls Alex’s hair, eliciting the sweetest, smallest sound. If he doesn’t stop right now, he won’t be able to stop at all.

“Fuck,” Henry swears, pulling back. Apparently, he still has an ounce of sense after all, or at least an ounce of self-preservation. “I’m just, shit. I’m sorry.”

Snow crunches beneath his stumbling feet as he practically runs away from the freshly snogged boy. The boy who must be having a total identity crisis. Even drunk, he could taste Alex’s confused wanting and a yearning that might even match his own. Impossible. The type of impossible that makes you question your interpretation of reality.

The humid heat and festive noises of the Gala overwhelm him as he re-enters the White House. He is sweating under his wool coat and his collar is too tight around his throat. The champagne in his system is tilting the floor, and it’s too much. Where the fuck is Pez?

Eventually, he finds his best friend between June and Nora, all dancing scandalously close to each other. It’s a testament to Pez’s loyalty that as soon as he looks at Henry, he exits the dancefloor, bowing to the ladies.

“What did you do?” Pez asks, leaning close to talk over the music.

“The most foolish thing possible.” He grabs Pez’s arm. “We have to go.”

After a beat, Pez nods. “Okay, let’s go.”

They walk through the party together, Pez’s presence keeping him from unravelling completely. It’s unlikely that Henry is effectively hiding his emotions, what with the drinking and kissing and panicking. Hopefully everyone around them is too intoxicated to notice.

“So, are we just getting some air or are we calling it a night?” Pez asks as they meet their PPOs at the front door. “Should I call a car to take us to the hotel?”

“No.” He imagines Alex showing up at their hotel the next morning, hungover and demanding answers. “No, we’re going home.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.” Henry’s throat is dry and his eyes are unforgivably wet. “Please.”

Pez stares at him, presumably assessing the severity of the situation, before nodding again.

“Okay, I’ll call a car to take us to the airport,” Pez says, pulling out his phone. “And as soon as we board the plane you are telling me everything.”

Within ten minutes, Shaun arrives with their luggage, a shiny black car, and three burly PPOs. Within two hours they are flying over the Atlantic Ocean, Henry pacing up and down the aisle of their private jet while Pez sips champagne.

"What the hell, Hen?" Pez says at last. Henry had been monologuing his panic spirals since they’d boarded the plane and is finally taking a breath.

"It just kind of happened?" Henry replies. He had fucked up, real bad this time.

"Well, to be completely honest with you, that was too fucking awesome!".

"You mean I did the right thing?" Henry asks, disbelief coloring his face. He isn’t sure if he’s asking approval of his choice to kiss Alex or his choice to run away afterwards.

"I don't know, Hen,” Pez says in an apologetic tone. “All I know about Alexander Claremont-Diaz is that you’re obsessed with him. This was bound to happen eventually, right?"

Henry has no clue how to answer, so he sighs and starts his pacing again. He knows he isn't going to sleep tonight, maybe not ever if he has a say in it. Alex might murder him in his sleep, even if he is protected by PPOs all the bloody time. He makes a mental note to ask Shaan to keep an eye out for Alex and his transatlantic flights.

…

"So yeah that happened." Henry finishes telling last night's events to his therapist who sports an impassive expression.

"Henry, why are you so afraid of Alex's reaction? For all you know he might feel the same way," Shannon says. The sincerity and calm in her voice almost soothes his racing heart.

"Because I do know he feels the same way, but he wasn't ready to know that. His obliviousness was the only thing saving us from falling together; the only thing stopping me from losing control. But then I lost control anyways because he’s just so bloody dense! It’s torture. Hell, both Nora and June have caught on. He’s going to be the last person to figure out he is queer! And I don’t, well, I shouldn’t have pushed it. Rash and careless.” Henry is rambling, but isn’t that the point of therapy? “Sometimes I think I reread Jane Austin too much, because I can’t help pining. Fantasizing. I thought, sure, he’ll see our mutual attraction eventually, and I can wait, and generally, or I can resist making idiotic choices I like to think I’m patient, but-"

He stops speaking abruptly and looks away from her sharp gaze. Even after so many years of therapy, it's still hard for him to talk about his feelings.

"But what Henry?" Shannon gently prods him.

"But I was...I got jealous when I saw them kissing and I just couldn't wait any longer for him to be ready. I know it was not fair, but I’ve known for years now.” He sighs. “I was actually just waiting for Pez to have his fun so we could leave. But...but Alex- he came outside looking for me and he was infuriating and couldn’t take a hint. I just couldn't stop myself. God, I'm such an idiot."

"Henry, we have talked about this before. Not everything is your fault. You need to understand that.” She pauses as if to give him an opportunity to agree with her. When he doesn’t, she continues, “And you told me Alex kissed you back so how can you be sure that he doesn't know that he’s queer?"

"Because I know Alex. I’m his best friend, we’ve talked for hours on end and he’s an obliviously stupid prat and I'm in love with him!" Henry snaps, but Shannon already has an answer ready for that.

"Yes Henry, but it doesn't mean that it was a mistake. You may be in love, but that doesn’t mean you know everything about him and his relationship with his sexuality. You aren’t a mind reader. Maybe he’s just playing dumb, and it’s a farce just like yours. The difference is you appear heterosexual while he appears to be oblivious. You can't know for sure."

That gives Henry something to think about, and he goes quiet for several moments.

Could it be that Alex acting so oblivious was just for the public? But that couldn't be. He knows Alex, knows him, knows him. Not only from the months of constant texting and late-night phone calls but also from countless tabloids and magazines. It didn’t feel like Alex was hiding anything from him. But who knows? Maybe he did it so that he could be himself but still not be himself. Maybe, he could enjoy the queerness but pretend not to know in order to save his political career?

No, that is not the Alexander Gabriel Claremont Diaz, he has come to know. He would be out and proud if he knew. Henry suddenly registers the fact that he is overthinking again when Shannon calls his name.

"Yes, Shannon?" Henry asks politely. Apparently she’d been speaking, but he has no idea what she was saying.

“You can tell me what you’re thinking, you know. That’s literally my job.” She smiles wryly and he grants her a weak laugh. “I was just saying that you can’t possibly try to know what he’s thinking about the kiss, or where he is with his sexuality.”

“Exactly! That’s the other thing.” Henry shakes his head. “Maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. I thought I knew what he wanted, and that I knew what I wanted, but now I don’t know anything. Maybe Alex is just a very flirty guy. Maybe it’s just an American thing. I haven’t been friends with an American before-”

“Henry”

“- and he was drunk and I kissed him and he probably thinks I took advantage. At the very least, I ran away like a scared twelve-year-old.”

“Let’s try to take a non-judgemental stance here,” suggests Shannon gently. “And for now, let’s just imagine a hypothetical. What if you were right all along, and he really does like you? That’s very much possible, so let’s explore what that would mean, yeah?

Henry shrugs noncommittally.

“You mentioned a couple of weeks ago that you think that if you two get too close you’ll be doomed,” she continues. “Do you still think that?”

“Well, yeah,” replies Henry, looking at his hands. “If he likes me -which I’m not sure he does anymore- then inevitably he’ll get sick of me. I like him so, so much, you know? He might be attracted to me, but he can’t possibly like me the way I like him. And even if by some horrible miracle he does like me back, then what? I’m a bloody prince and he’s an aspiring politician, and there’s no way it wouldn’t end in disaster. The whole world would be looking at us. I’m just… I’m…”

“You’re afraid of getting hurt.”

“I… I guess. Yeah. I feel like I’m about to fall off a cliff, holding onto the unstable rocks, and I have no idea where I’ll land.” Henry chuckled a little at his cliche metaphor. “He must think I’m a complete tosser.”

“Henry,” she gives him that Therapist Look. “You can’t read minds. Journal on that topic this week?”

Henry sighs and nods, letting that sink in. She has said it before, numerous times, and Henry never quite believes her.

They sit in silence before Shannon redirects the conversation.

"When are you meeting Alex again?"

That's an easy question, Henry has known the answer ever since he left D.C. He answers immediately, "Oh never."

"Henry," Shannon reprimands.

"No, you don't get it. I'm going to be murdered if I so much as go within 10 feet near Alex."

"No.” She’s holding back a laugh as she tries to look stern. “The answer is that you're going to the state dinner and you're going to talk to Alex like a mature adult and listen to what he says instead of guessing what he’s thinking. Meanwhile, I want you to think about what we discussed today and tell me next week what you might want to say to him."

"Hour's up then?" Henry asks, because he suddenly can't wait to get out of Shannon’s office. He needs time to think about everything. Or maybe he needs time to avoid thinking about anything.

"We have five more minutes, but if you don't have anything to add today, we can end early." Shannon smiles warmly at him and he knows that if he wishes to continue she wouldn’t mind, but right now he can't. Enough talking of emotions for one eternity, thank you.

So he leaves and as he hurries to the car he texts Shaan: SOS I need about a million boxes of Jaffa Cakes from the nearest corner shop.

Then, sliding into the back seat: Please.

…

The weeks pass by quickly with Henry trying his best to ignore Alex's texts and trying to convince everyone that he oughtn’t to go to the state dinner in D.C. No one listens to him, not Shannon or even Pez. Not even his own sister, rather Bea tries to make him see reason as to why he should go.

It's all 'you never know,’ 'just trust me, Hen' and other bits of vague encouragement. Predictably, Bea decides to drop Henry off at the airport herself so he can't escape at the last minute. When he accuses her of this, however, she’s all 'Can’t a girl escort her dear younger brother to the airport, or what?’

As they leave Kensington palace she explicitly instructs his PPOs that Henry should at all costs stay in America for the allotted time and should not be allowed back even a minute too soon. Shaan, for some reason, seems extremely happy to hear those instructions and can't stop smiling. Henry scowls at him whenever he sees him, thinking that he is Henry's personal equerry. It’s a lot.

"Do I really have to, Bea?" he asks her as they near the airport.

"Henry, you know this is important and by that, I do not mean the state dinner. That can go fuck itself for all I care, but you need to talk to Alex. Hiding from him like this is doing no one any good. Talk to him, see what he says and do not overthink this, Hen please." Bea squeezes his hand lightly as the car stops.

They walk silently side by side to the plane where Bea hugs him and sees him off.

As the plane starts to take off, the panic that had been sedated by her hug starts to grow again, fiercer than ever. Henry keeps repeating the same phrase throughout the flight.

Don't overthink this. It's going to be okay.

[script-a-world]

(sorry this is long) I'm creating a fantasy matriarchal society that's a combination of like America post WW2 and like the amazons/valkyries crossed with magical girls. I could use some help figuring out the gender dynamics, since part of my goal is to use the swap to highlight some inequalities that still exist in our gender expectations today by flipping them. I'm trying to figure out if it's better to have the men be primary caregivers (1/?)

since there’s no reason to assume that the gender that gives birth has to be the caregivers) or if I should go the “matriarchal society would value childrearing above other jobs” route. Some thoughts I had: Women are the main magic-users in society (magical girl/amazons blessed directly by the god who rules the city with power)and that perhaps all young women are expected to go through military service of some sort before becoming matrons, politicians and doctors. (2/?)

Maybe women are associated with Life and Death and “important duties” that revolve around them, including duties regarding both killing and saving lives. So healing, leading armies, fighting, hunting, childbirth (possibly care?) and politics are feminine jobs, while “lesser duties” that revolve more around menial labor are relegated to men (manual labor, maintenance, ‘uneducated’ jobs, support jobs like scribe and secretary, cooking, cleaning, perhaps some jobs like fashion design or art). (3/?)

Do you think this is a good balance? What are some other ways I could divide gender roles? The world situation is a magical land with about early 20th century level tech (trains and private schools and like phones/radios).Also, what is the best way to objectify men in this society? I was thinking of making it so men are seen as useless/only for the purpose of providing sexual pleasure and siring children to women. (4/?)

They don’t’ actually create children or take the ‘important jobs’ (the poor dears just don’t have the brains for it, they’re too simple and direct, men don’t have the emotional maturity to handle serious issues, they lack empathy, they only want sex anyway so it’s not like you need to worry about their emotional needs, etc). I’d love some suggestions on how a society like this might work or if there are other ways to divide the gender roles, (5/?)

as well as some ways men might experience objectification in society. How would fashion be different, and how would this society put pressure on men to look or act in certain ways (and women as well). Any suggestions? Thanks, and sorry for the long question(6/?)

Mod Miri Note: If you have a question that requires multiple asks, please use the google form! That way there’s no risk of parts of the question being lost.

Tex: “Do you think this is a good balance?” No, I do not. I disagree with the notion that a group of people ought to be objectified, neglected, abused, pigeon-holed, or otherwise mistreated under the guise of inversion as a way to tout a certain prescription of thought. I think this methodology perpetuates stereotypes, and with stereotypes come all the -isms that are used as excuses to treat people poorly just because they’re different from the originating group.

I’m going to be radical and say “none of the above”. There’s a few reasons for my answer, but aside from the brief overview in the previous paragraph, let me go through and try responding to all of your points in a more precise manner.

Let’s start with American culture post WWII - and I’m going to assume that, because of this choice, you’re working from an American perspective. This is important! But I’ll handle that detail in a bit.

Post-WWII culture is heavily influenced by WWII culture. For women, this meant enlistment in the military, as well as filling the gaps in the domestic labor force left by men being shipped off (History.com, The Atlantic). Their service in the military - quite often voluntary - was as critical and crucial as their domestic work (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2, Wikipedia 3). They usually received lower pay than men, true (though interestingly the women in the UK were often treated better; Striking Women), though governments of the time admitted that without women the war effort would have crumpled.

Rosie the Riveter is a popular piece of propaganda (where it was also considered patriotic for women to join the workforce and military service; National Women’s History Museum), but don’t let that dissuade you from thinking that women were not recognized for other types of work during the war. Many women in the US were recognized for their military service (USO), and other women’s histories endure today - Lyudmila Pavlichenko (Wikipedia), Vitka Kempner (Wikipedia), and Virginia Hall (Wikipedia). I’m going to toss in the official synopsis of Queen Elizabeth II’s involvement in her own military to round things out (The Royal Family), complete with a picture of her in uniform (Wikipedia).

Many women after the war went back to strictly domestic duties, and I think that parallels their wartime efforts - both situations are of the “all hands on deck” type, but the play of gender roles here means that the duties of a functioning society are divvied up by different functional spheres - and make no mistake, men and women relied on each other equally as much to cover the gaps, despite the sexism inherent in modern Western society. The difference between war and non-war time cultures was that the latter wasn’t necessarily cultivated by patriotism that could unite the different “factions”. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History gives a thorough examination of this topic.

The following era - typified by the birth of the Baby Boomer generation - saw a marked increase in economic prosperity (Wikipedia). With that came increased social mobility for women (Citation 1), usually catalyzed by the actions of their fathers (Citation 2). This may typically be achieved by consistent, conscientious public policy formation (Citation 3). In short, many cultures - if they haven’t already - are realizing that it’s good for business to let women control how they participate in society and the flow of money.

In the US, this was precipitated by the boom of social development (American History; archived version). Aside from the Truman administration negotiating price fixing to prevent inflation, a significant factor was the passing of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (AKA the G.I. Bill). This primarily benefited the Greatest Generation, though other pertinent legislation by the 79th Congress benefited the Silent Generation onwards: the Fair Deal, Revenue Act of 1948, Taft-Hartley Act, Employment Act of 1946, National School Lunch Act, and Hobbs Act.

It’s debatable how well this impacted long-term economic development, considering the almost immediate rise of McCarthyism in the US in 1947, which was heavily intertwined with the Truman Doctrine that precipitated the Cold War. The results of the war, at least economically, were… mixed (Wikipedia 1, Wikipedia 2). I have no doubt that this impacted the social mobility of women in all affected countries - which is all of them, but I’m sure hairs could be split on this if you wish.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s tackle the Amazons.

The modern, popular interpretation (that is slow to be shaken by archaeological evidence) is mostly mythological (Wikipedia). While some ideas are thrown in the way of a Minoan Crete ancestry to the myth, there are more similarities drawn to the Scythian and Samartian cultures on the Eurasian Steppe (CNET). It’s possible that instead of the equally-extreme pole end of the gender dichotomy that is patriarchy-matriarchy, the Scythians just scandalized the Athenians with a comparatively more fluid society (Smithsonian Magazine).

As for Valkyries… there’s been a revival of them in pop culture, probably as a net-casting to see what’s out there aside from Amazons. TVTropes covers the many, many ways media utilizes them as a trope, to varying degrees of mythological and cultural accuracy. As they state, valkyries are a form of psychopomp, as they decide who among the battlefield’s dead will go to Valhalla (ruled by Odin) or Fólkvangr (ruled by Freya). Freya seems to have assumed the “type” (as opposed to characteristics salient to a particular individual) of a valkyrie, as the female counterpart the warrior archetype. To wit, Freya herself may be a type (Wikipedia).

Here’s where the issue gets thorny - modern popular understanding of valkyries, and by extension Scandinavian women, is skewed through the modern lens.

@fjorn-the-skald has a lovely series called Viking History: Post-by-Post, or An Informal Crash Course & A Historical Guide to the Vikings, that typically focuses on medieval Iceland. In his post “Lesson 13.c - Women in the Viking Age, Part III: Were Women “Vikings”?”, discusses the particular penchant of modern times to romanticize and/or skew history to their own biases - in this instance, how medieval Icelandic women functioned in their culture, as well as how valkyrie myths play into this.

The TL;DR of that is: “viking” women were a societal anomaly, the battlefield was a male domain (and they were expected to die on it), a woman’s prowess of the domestic sphere was highly respected to a level often equivalent to men, and the domestic sphere was the sphere of commerce. Scandinavian culture prized strong women, just as they prized strong men, and their culture rested upon the concept of different genders having their own distinct, complementary, and equal domains.

Fjörn builds upon this history in an ask about gender roles outside the usual dichotomy of male-female. Valkyries, and shield-maidens, may be classed as a third gender in medieval Scandinavian culture, because women were temporarily occupying the male role in their society. While valkyries are of divine origin, shield-maidens are not, though they seem to have taken on a supernatural bent by performing feminine qualities while living in the male sphere (something that they can literally wear, by the donning of their armor).

That probably comes across as distasteful to, especially, a modern American perspective, but many ancient cultures are like that. There’s a footnote on that ask about links to a contemporary perspective of same-sex relationships, as well, to round out that talking point.

With those historical and mythological details discussed, let’s move on to magical girls.

Interestingly, the genre and trope derive from the American TV show Bewitched (Nippon.com). Its evolution reflected Japan’s changing tone about female sexuality, focusing on girls.  Magical Girl doesn’t seem to be intended to attract the male gaze in a sexual light - and in fact was generated as a form of female empowerment by by way of growing up (TVTropes), but it seems to happen anyways (TVTropes).

Magical girls, as a genre, originated in the 1960s - the archetypical Sailor Moon encompasses not only magical girls, but also the kawaii aesthetic. Kawaii, incidentally, followed after the magical girl trope, and plays upon women performing as girls in society.

As magical girls are intended for young girls, a demographic known as shōjo, it is considered a subgenre of the target audience. Please note that shōnen'ai (Fanlore) and yaoi (Fanlore) are also subgenres of shōjo.

For some context, the adult female target audience is known as josei, the young adult men is known as shōnen, and adult male audience is known as seinen. Many manga and anime are often misattributed to the wrong category, so it helps to know which is which, and why.

Kumiko Saito argues (through an unfortunately paywalled article that I’m more than willing to disseminate to those without JSTOR access) that magical girls reinforce gender stereotypes as well as fetishize young female bodies. She argues this point more eloquently than I can, so I’ll be quoting a few sections below.

Page 148 (7 of 23 on the PDF):

The 1960s “witch” housewife theme waned quickly in the United States, but various cultural symbolisms of magic smoothly translated into the Japanese climate, leading to Japans four-decade-long obsession with the magical girl. Bewitched incorporated the concept of magic as female power to be renounced after marriage, thereby providing “a discursive site in which feminism (as female power) and femininity has been negotiated” (Moseley 2002, 403) in the dawning of Americas feminist era. Japans magical girls represented a similar impasse of fitting into female domesticity, continued to fascinate Japanese society, and came to define the magical girl genre. In direct contrast to the American heroines Samantha and Jeannie, however, whose strife arose from the antagonism between magic (as power) and the traditional gender role as wife or fiancée, the magical girls dilemma usually lies between female adulthood and the juvenile female stage prior to marriage, called shõjo. In other words, the magical girl narratives often revolve around the magical freedom of adolescence prior to the gendered stage of marriage and motherhood, suggesting the difficulty of imagining elements of power and defiance beyond the point of marriage. In fact, these programs were broadcast exactly when the rate of love-based marriage started to surpass that of miai (arranged marriage),4 which implies that the magical girl anime, founded on the strict ideological division between shõjo and wife/mother, may have been an anxious reaction to the emergent phase of romance.

Page 150 (9 of 23 on the PDF):

The combination of magical empowerment and shõjo-ness framed by the doomed nature of transient girlhood naturally created ambivalent, messages in Akko-chan as well. In the societal milieu in which Japan was undergoing the politically turbulent era of Marxist student movements at the largest scale in the postwar era, Akko-chan’s super- human ability to transform into anyone (or anything) is quite revolutionary, implying a sense of women’s liberation. Despite this potential, her metamorphic ability never threatens gender models, as she typically dreams of becoming a princess, a bride, or a female teacher she respects. The use of magic is also largely limited to humanitarian community services in town. Akko-chan’s symbolic task throughout the series focuses on how to steer her power to serve her friends and family, leading to the final episode in which she relinquishes magic to save her father. Akko-chan embraces the cross-generic mismatch between the radical idea of empowering a girl with superhuman ability and the hahamono [mother genre] sentimentalism idealizing women’s self-sacrifice. All in all, the new setting adopted in this series, that a mediocre girl accidentally gains magic, became a useful mechanism for the underlying theme that the heroine is foredoomed to say farewell to magic in the end. This rhetorical device transforms latent power of the amorphous girl into the reappreciation of traditional gender norms by equating magic with shõjo-hood to be given up at a certain stage.

Saito discusses the thematic shifts in the magical girl subgenre in the 1980s to a more sexualized view, and the according rise of both an older audience and otaku fans, the latter of whom, she clarifies, make a habit of recontextualizing canon to categorize characters into stereotypes that are stripped of the majority of their original context.

On pages 153-154 (12-13 of 23 on the PDF):

The conventions of the magical girl genre transformed significantly against this paradigm shift. Both Minky Momo and Creamy Mami originally targeted children, recording a decent outcome in business and eventually leading to the revival of the genre. Because the plots are directly built on the genre clichés, however, the jokes and sarcasm of many episodes appear comprehensible only to adult viewers equipped with the knowledge of the Töei magical girls. The intrigue of these programs largely lies in the way they parody and mock the established genre conventions, especially the restrictive function of magic and the meaning of transformation. The genre is now founded on the expectation that the adult viewer has acquired a diachronic fan perspective to fetishize both the characters and the text’s meanings.

Creamy Mami presents the story of fourth-grader Yū, who gains magical power that enables her to turn into a sixteen-year-old girl. Yū’s magical power is more restrictive than Momo’s, for her superhuman capacity simply means metamorphosis into her adult form, who happens to become an idol singer called Mami. Given that the magic’s ability is self-oriented cosmetic effect and bodily maturation, the heroine’s ultimate goal by means of magic is to grow old enough to attract her male friend Toshio, who neglects Yū’s latent charm but falls in love with the idol Mami. The series concludes when Yū loses her magic, which correlates to Toshio’s realization that Yū is his real love. Mami’s thematic messages teach the idea that magic does not bring much advantage or power after all, or rather, magic serves as an obstacle for the appreciation of the truly magical period called shõjo. The heroine gains magic to prove, although retroactively, the importance of adolescence preceding the possession of “magic” that enables (and forces) female maturation.

It’s noted in the article that the 1990s-2000s period received criticism for showing a physical maturation of girls, so codified euphemisms via garment changes such as additional frills and curled hair were used instead. This “third-wave” magical girl challenged standing norms of its predecessors by doing things such as likening adult responsibilities (“childrearing and job training”) as a sort of game, as well as the transformation implying that the character’s power is in being herself, something that juxtaposes previous norms.

Due to shifting power dynamics and other changes in Japan’s culture, it became more common for boys to become magical girls as well, further separating the magical girl concept from a strict reflection of gender roles. As such, Japanese culture - insofar as my English-based research can guide me - no longer immediately implies a direct and distinct correlation between magical girls and the female gender.

An analysis of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (PMMM) by Tate James (2017; PDF) discusses an additional dimension of the magical girl genre. Two pertinent points of the piece is that 1.) PMMM dismantles archetypes pitting women against girls, and 2.) PMMM reinforces the gender stereotype that the best type of girl is a passive girl.

Now for the issue you’ve raised about who ought to be the primary caregiver of children.

Consistent, immediate, and continuous interaction between a mother and her child benefits both of them (Citation 4, Scientific American 1, Live Science, Citation 5, Scientific American 2, UNICEF, WHO). Mothers have a distinct neurobiological makeup that predisposes them toward caring for infants (Citation 6), and likewise infants have a predisposed preference to their mother’s voice and heartbeat (Citation 7). I would like to think that is sufficient evidence as to why nearly all cultures encourage mothers as the primary caregivers.

This said, cultivation of a father-child dyad is immensely beneficial to the child (Citation 8, Citation 9), and can alleviate the effect of maternal depression on the child (ScienceDaily). Partnered men residing with children have lower levels of testosterone but a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and adiposity (Citation 10). It’s interesting to note that higher prolactin levels in the mother’s breastmilk has a correspondingly higher level of sociosexual activity with their partner in cotton-top tamarins, which stimulates pair bonding (Citation 11), as well as in other species (Citation 12).

Paternal postpartum depression is recently recognized in fathers, to severe and reverberating deleterious effects on themselves and their family (Citation 13). Screening tools for detecting depression in Swedish fathers is not sufficiently developed, and many men may be passed over despite reaching cut-off suggestions in other criteria for depression (Citation 14).

It has been observed that while human mother and fathers have the similar oxytocin pathways, the exhibit different parenting behaviours when exposed to elevated levels of oxytocin - primarily that fathers will react with high stimulatory behaviour and exploratory play (Wikipedia).

Men being socialized in a culture of stoicism and an encouraged reaction pattern to violence have poor mental health that can culminate into death and other long-term effects (Citation 15). Suicide in the US is currently the leading cause of death at time of posting this response, that the total suicide rate increased 31% from 2001-2017, and in 2017 male rates were nearly four times higher than females (NIMH).

On the topic of magical culture: it’s incredibly difficult to research because it’s a component of overall culture, and one that’s not typically available to strangers/foreigners/the uninitiated. As such, a lot of authors default to what they already know. It’s not a bad thing, but if someone wants to reach outside their comfort zone, they’re going to have some trouble.

I’m going to go off the three, four-ish, cultures you’ve already come to us with: American, Scandinavian, Scythian/Samartian, and Japanese just to round things out.

For a very, very rough overview of America, we have:

Native Americans of the contiguous US

Hawai’i

Alaska

Whatever the colonizing peoples brought over (including, but not limited to, English, Scottish, Irish, Norwegian, German, and Italian)

Whatever the myriad cultures of Africa brought over as slaves

Hispanic

NB: I’ve put Hawai’i and Alaska as separate items because they’re not part of the contiguous US.

European settlers were of a few groups:

The merchants working on charters

Indentured servants from the merchants’ homelands

Slavs

Immigrants in post-colonial eras

This is an important distinction because 1.) contemporary culture matters a lot politically, 2.) how people came to the US determined how they and their family were treated, and 3.) the contemporary job culture determined their social class.

(Slavs, as a note, are the origin of the English word “slave”, something that Western Europeans historically liked to propagate.)

I’m not going to go into the details of everything the US has to offer in terms of cultural diversity aside from a nudge in the direction of Santería. What you pick up to research is up to you.

Scandinavian folk magic is known as “trolldom” (Swedish-language Wikipedia), and the region was known for their cunningfolk. Please note that klok/-a, klog/-e, and related words relates to the English word cloak, and these people are so named because wearing one was an integral part of how they interacted with the supernatural.

The InternetArchive has a book (albeit in Swedish) about the history of magic in Sweden, which is available in multiple formats. If you’d prefer to have something in English, you can either buy this book, or inform your library you’d like to them to buy it for you.

I’m a little surprised you hadn’t mentioned either the völva (Swedish Wikipedia, English Wikipedia) or seiðr (Wikipedia), as they’re quite a well-known part of Scandinavian folk culture. Fjörn, as always, is my first stop for this area of research, with the post “Lesson 7 - Viking Spirituality”, the Víkingabók Database, the tag of Old Norse words, and the post “Norðurbók: A List of the Tales and Sagas of Icelanders” as incredibly good starting points. I encourage you to peruse them, especially because the words you learn will help you be more precise during research.

The Scythian culture is quite far reaching, as they had occupied most of the Eurasian Steppe during the Iron Age, and much of this area can be found in modern-day countries such as Russia, Iran, and China, among others. Because of how far their peoples spread out, the Scythians intermixed with their neighbors, and as such there are sub-groups to the culture.

The Sarmatians were more Russian, as that’s where a large amount of their territory laid, and were absorbed into early Slavic culture. Both their and the overall Scythian language group is eastern Iranian.

In order to help you orient yourself, here’s a map from Wikipedia:

Description: Historical spread of Iranian peoples/languages: Scythia, Sarmatia, Bactria and the Parthian Empire in about 170 BC (evidently before the Yuezhi invaded Bactria). Modern political boundaries are shown to facilitate orientation.

Japanese magical culture is intrinsically tied to their religion, and as such it would be beneficial to read about Shintoism and Japanese Buddhism. The wiki for Japanese mythology is a thorough primer, though if you get stuck, then I’m sure @scriptmyth would be glad to help you on not only this culture, but others.

As for the jobs you’ve proposed - I’m going to jump right into scribes because the irony of that is it’s historically a male-dominated job, and is the progenitor of jobs such as “public servants, journalists, accountants, bookkeepers, typists, and lawyers”. It is, with even greater irony, European women that are noted in Wikipedia, and that medieval women are increasingly thought to have played an integral part in manuscript writing (New Scientist, Science Advances).

I’m not the best person to ask for medieval culture, unfortunately, so you’ll need someone more knowledgeable than me on the subject to direct you to the finer points.

The wiki for women in war links to a lot of lists, so I would suggest poking around for historical references by era (that will likely lead to by culture) to orient yourself on how women have participated in war in the past. There’s quite a bit of mythology to be found there, as well, so if you pick up some specific goddesses you get stuck on, then pop over to @scriptmyth.

Likewise, the wiki for women in government is an interesting read, as is women in positions of power. Since both are primarily modern-times oriented, I would suggest looking at the list of queens regnant for a more historical perspective. I would have difficulty giving you more than that, as you would need to pinpoint your reference cultures first.

As history often neglects women’s contributions to society if they weren’t a ruler or similarly powerful ruler - and, frankly, that frequently applied to men as well the further back you go - I’m going to toss a couple of starting points at you for the area of medicine:

Women in medicine § Ancient medicine - Wikipedia

Women in medicine - Science Museum: History of Medicine

One thing to keep in mind is that as goalposts changed for medicine - the standardization of knowledge and the need to attend a medical school to be legally allowed to perform medicine - the availability of women to participate went down.

Another is that medicine, historically, relied upon herbal medicine, and Wikipedia itself notes that there’s a heavy overlap with food history - something that’s traditionally a domain of women. This abstract by Marcia Ramos‐e‐Silva MD, PhD, talks about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, and the first page available tells you that medieval women were in charge of quite a lot despite not being allowed to participate in the male-dominated sphere of war. The Herbal Academy dips briefly into not only the saint, but other historical aspects of herbalism that might interest you.

The wiki of women in the Middle Ages, along with that of Hildegard of Bingen, nicely rounds out this particular topic.

I need to bring out the fact that Ancient Egypt was and is well-known for the equality and respect afforded to their women - in the interest of staying on subject, particularly in the field of medicine (Ancient History Encyclopedia). Isis was well-known as a goddess of healing (Wikipedia), an aspect she has in common with goddesses in many other cultures (Wikipedia). As an added side-note, Merit Ptah in her popularly-known context has been concluded to be an inflated misunderstanding - and misconstrued interpretation - of a historical figure with significant fabrication (LiveScience, Oxford).

The presence of women in medicine fluctuated in every culture, an in ancient times often shared some correlation with the use of magic (Citation 16). Healing, historically, has a high correlation with the supernatural - and if you care to look, women are usually responsible for the domain of the supernatural. (Or at least the feminine part, which was complementary and complemented by the masculine part.)

I’m going to hop back to politics real quick to bring up abbesses, particularly the social power they exercised as women heading religious orders. An article by Alixe Bovey for the British Library gives the TL;DR of medieval women and abbeys, though if you’d like something with a bit more detail, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 by Eileen Edna Power is also available.

Abbeys, with their rise and fall, are important to modern American culture. Midwives, to be even more particular, have the most direct impact. In Western Europe, a midwife may under certain circumstances perform baptisms. This was a debated topic of its time, as baptisms were rituals of the Church, and the Church had strict regulations allowing only men to perform their rituals.

During the 1500s - and up to the 1800s, in some cases - midwives were defamed to be witches. You’ll notice that this corresponds to a standardization of medical knowledge, with its corresponding legal restrictions on who may practice medicine. For the Church, the politics playing behind the scenes of midwifery and female physicians fluctuated with their observations about women’s power relative to their own (Citation 16).

Malta is an excellent case study of this phenomenon (Citation 17), and encapsulates the movement of witchcraft accusations that took place throughout this period - something historians noted as corresponding to the rise of Protestantism (ThoughtCo). There’s some debate that the increasing orientation to wages in contemporary economy facilitated this adverse behaviour against women, as well as various other social pressures as politically mitigated by the Catholic Church (Wikipedia).

As the practice of medicine was segregated according to sex - male patients to male physicians, female patients to female physicians - there were proportionally fewer men in trades such as midwifery than women despite the medieval shift toward male encroachment of territory (Wikipedia). This corresponding money- and thus male-oriented intrusion into the female sphere of medicine can be seen with the invention of the obstetric forceps (JSTOR). The rising culture of appropriation constituted the witchcraft trials that, incidentally, influenced American culture during their colonization years.

A pertinent name to remember for American history of the witchcraft trials is Margaret Jones, a Puritan midwife and the first person to be accused of witchcraft in the trails taking place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Wikipedia).

The Salem Witch Trials, as an offhand note, could well be an anomaly due to ergotism (Citation 18).

One thing I’m willing to bend on - a little bit - is manual labor, but mostly because you’re describing something very similar to what’s already been invented: corvée labor. There’s plenty of other forms depending on what culture you’re going for, though unlike what you’re proposing, does not necessarily imply the direct and permanent subjugation of people.

I will absolutely quibble with the idea of “uneducated” labor equating to “less valuable” labor - universities offer non-vocational degrees, typically in the areas of research and/or religion, and guilds were created as a means of quality control (that unfortunately got out of hand and committed crimes such as rent-seeking). Women in guilds were a thing, vulnerable to the same fluctuations as their other occupations outside the house.

If we are defining “uneducated” labour as “menial” labour, then this set of occupations inherently varies by culture, as does its relative weight of importance. One example of this would be writing; it may be menial but important, whereas holding negotiations could be a “major” role but wouldn’t exist without the support of workers “less than” them.

Correspondingly, gender divisions may not necessarily mean an assignation of “lesser” or “greater” when compared against each other. In medieval Europe, at least, the creation of textiles was split along the general lines of spinning and weaving. Women held the former (hence “spinster”), and men held the latter. Spinning was often not formalized into guilds then, but it was an important cornerstone of the economy that could support entire families. A guest post on The Freelance History Writer’s blog seems to indicate that this gender division was due to influence by the Bible, which seems to corroborate with the history of both professions as detailed on Wikipedia - the further back we go, and also the less connected to Christianity, the more textile work women presided over. This granted them greater control over their presence in society, since the selling of textiles was useful leverage to support themselves and others.

A similar discrepancy can be found with agriculture. Hamer women in Ethiopia are traditionally the one to cultivate sorghum, a cornerstone crop to their diet, and they exhibit preferences in which varieties they grow according to criteria such as which is easiest to grind and long-term storage feasibility (Citation 19). Accordingly, there’s been an increasing orientation around the growing of crops rather than the pastoralist habits of their men, with trading standards occuring at one goat for one Dore (“pile of maize or sorghum”) (Citation 19).

A study examining the male sphere of hunting within a society discusses the various cultural implications of defendable vs non-defendable meat sharing, with respect to how the meat is distributed and its corresponding social range (e.g. immediate social circle vs entire community), something I find interesting given that the kilocalories obtained from meat is roughly equal to that of the female sphere-acquired agriculture/gathering (Citation 20). The division of labour along gender lines when it comes to food flow in a community seems, historically, to be both comparable and compatible to each other - a recurring theme with many of the topics I’ve already covered.

Gender roles in their historical perspective - especially the further back you go - are often complimentary to each other, and are an economical way to divide up the burden of maintaining a society to a functional level. There are plenty of exceptions to this (see: third genders), as well, and many cultures exhibit the idea that a productive person is good for society; their roles may look a little different from the person next to them, and not only is the work considered equal in terms of importance, but also with a bit of poking around, you’ll find that few cultures have harsh punishments for anyone “stepping outside” their predicted roles.

Men are already objectified plenty. That their treatment by society looks different than women’s, or other genders, is by no means an excuse to sweep things under the room and pretend that they have it best - or worse, purposefully ostracize them in a fictional work to further mock, ridicule, and isolate them. This contributes to the societal issues in your culture that you wish to address, and stems from a uniquely pervasive perspective from modern American culture that differs from many other cultures in the world.

TL;DR - The way you wish to objectify men is already being done, especially in American culture. It is harmful, and will have an impact that will reach further than you might anticipate. This approach is counterproductive to your goals, and the cultures/media you cite either directly contradict your beliefs of said sources or otherwise undermine your beliefs. It is vastly more productive to take a deeper look at the origins of the issues you wish to address in your writing, as well as the reference material that you wish to use. Learning perspectives outside your native culture will benefit you immensely, and the results could surprise you.

Citations

Citation 1 -  PDF - Doepke, M., Tertilt, M., Voena, A.. (2012). “The Economics and Politics of Women’s Rights,” Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 4(1), pages 339-372, 07.

Citation 2 - PDF - Fernández, R.. (2014). “Women’s rights and development,” Journal of Economic Growth, vol 19(1), pages 37-80.

Citation 3 - PDF -  Duflo, E. (2012). “Women’s Empowerment and Economic Development”, Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 50, No. 4: 1051-79.

Citation 4 - PDF - Crenshaw J. T. (2014). “Healthy Birth Practice #6: Keep Mother and Baby Together- It’s Best for Mother, Baby, and Breastfeeding.” The Journal of perinatal education, 23(4), 211–217. doi:10.1891/1058-1243.23.4.211

Citation 5 - Faisal-Cury, A., Bertazzi Levy, R., Kontos, A., Tabb, K., & Matijasevich, A. (2019). “Postpartum bonding at the beginning of the second year of child’s life: the role of postpartum depression and early bonding impairment.” Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics & Gynecology, 1-7.

Citation 6 - PDF - Bornstein, M. H., Putnick, D. L., Rigo, P., Esposito, G., Swain, J. E., Suwalsky, J. T., … & De Pisapia, N. (2017). “Neurobiology of culturally common maternal responses to infant cry.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(45), E9465-E9473.

Citation 7 - PDF - Webb, A. R., Heller, H. T., Benson, C. B., & Lahav, A. (2015). “Mother’s voice and heartbeat sounds elicit auditory plasticity in the human brain before full gestation.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(10), 3152-3157.

Citation 8 - PDF - Pan, Y., Zhang, D., Liu, Y., Ran, G., & Teng, Z. (2016). “Different effects of paternal and maternal attachment on psychological health among Chinese secondary school students.” Journal of Child and Family Studies, 25(10), 2998-3008.

Citation 9 - PDF - Brown, G. L., Mangelsdorf, S. C., & Neff, C. (2012). “Father involvement, paternal sensitivity, and father-child attachment security in the first 3 years.” Journal of family psychology : JFP : journal of the Division of Family Psychology of the American Psychological Association (Division 43), 26(3), 421–430. doi:10.1037/a0027836

Citation 10 - PDF - Lee T Gettler, Mallika S Sarma, Rieti G Gengo, Rahul C Oka, James J McKenna, Adiposity, CVD risk factors and testosterone: Variation by partnering status and residence with children in US men, Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Volume 2017, Issue 1, January 2017, Pages 67–80, https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eox005

Citation 11 - PDF - Snowdon, C. T., & Ziegler, T. E. (2015). “Variation in prolactin is related to variation in sexual behavior and contact affiliation.” PloS one, 10(3), e0120650.

Citation 12 - Hashemian, F., Shafigh, F., & Roohi, E. (2016). “Regulatory role of prolactin in paternal behavior in male parents: A narrative review.” Journal of postgraduate medicine, 62(3), 182–187. doi:10.4103/0022-3859.186389

Citation 13 - PDF - Eddy, B., Poll, V., Whiting, J., & Clevesy, M. (2019). “Forgotten Fathers: Postpartum Depression in Men.” Journal of Family Issues, 40(8), 1001-1017.

Citation 14 - PDF - Psouni, E., Agebjörn, J., & Linder, H. (2017). “Symptoms of depression in Swedish fathers in the postnatal period and development of a screening tool.” Scandinavian journal of psychology, 58(6), 485-496.

Citation 15 - Pappas, S. (2018, January). “APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys.” Monitor on Psychology, 50(1).

Citation 16 - PDF - Kontoyannis, M., & Katsetos, C. (2011). “Midwives in early modern Europe (1400-1800).” Health Science Journal, 5(1), 31.

Citation 17 - PDF - Savona-Ventura, C. (1995). “The influence of the Roman Catholic Church on midwifery practice in Malta.” Medical history, 39(1), 18-34.

Citation 18 - PDF - Woolf, Alan. (2000). “Witchcraft or Mycotoxin? The Salem Witch Trials. Journal of toxicology.” Clinical toxicology. 38. 457-60. 10.1081/CLT-100100958.

Citation 19 - PDF - Samuel, T. (2013). “From cattle herding to sedentary agriculture: the role of hamer women in the transition.” African Study Monographs, Suppl. 46: 121–133. [Alternate PDF link]

Citation 20 - PDF - Gurven, Michael & Hill, Kim. (2009). “Why Do Men Hunt?.” Current Anthropology. 50. 51-74. 10.1086/595620.

Further Reading

Harry S Truman § Domestic Affairs - Wikipedia

Marshall Plan - Wikipedia

Interstate Highway System - Wikipedia

Medieval Icelandic Law (The Grágás) – Women’s Rights: On Reclaiming Property during Separation. By @fjorn-the-skald

Fjörn’s Library

“Notes on Valkyries and the like?” by @fjorn-the-skald

Fjörn’s chronological tag on women

Epigenetic correlates of neonatal contact in humans - Development and Psychopathology

Feral: So, obviously, everything Tex just said- round of effing applause!

I do want to hone in on one specific part of your ask, “since part of my goal is to use the swap to highlight some inequalities that still exist in our gender expectations today by flipping them” and direct you to this blog post on Mythcreants specifically addressing the Persecution Flip Story and why it’s not a great idea from a social justice perspective.

Happy reading!

[lovelyirony]

for @tsatskes, one of the best 

Maria Hill went to the library every day after school. Her dad couldn’t pick her up until five-thirty, when he got off work. This was fine with her, seeing as how she liked to read. 

Maria liked biographies. It was odd for a small child, but she liked them. She learned about politicians, musicians, criminals, and actresses. 

In a biography, most everything is laid bare if the person is dead. Sure the family, if living, has some say and control. But for the most part, you are learning everything about this person’s life. 

Including rumors that maybe weren’t just rumors. 

This is how Maria finds out that people can like girls. 

So it doesn’t feel odd when she stares at Lisa Odenning for a bit too long. She knows that she likes girls. 

But she also knows that it’s...frowned upon. Frowned upon in the way her father scoffs at rainbows, tells Maria to wear a dress to a dance instead of the suit she had wanted to wear. 

“I like pants. Dresses aren’t my thing.” 

“You wanna be a lesbian or something?” 

Maria knows it’s not bad. She knows it, like she knows that sunshine feels good on her shoulders. But her dad makes it seem like that. Like it’s wrong to love someone. 

“So? What if I was?” 

Her dad laughs. He fucking laughs. 

“No daughter of mine is gonna be gay. That’s ridiculous.” 

“I need to go to the bathroom.” 

Tile is hard as she drops to her knees, biting her hand to keep from crying too loudly. But what’s harder is learning the fact that it doesn’t matter if your parents are your parents: 

They’re still allowed to dislike you for who you are. 

She stares at her plate at dinner time when her mother chatters on about her workday, how difficult it was handling a group of fifth graders at a field trip. 

“Maria, how was your day?” 

“Fine.” 

“Just fine? Nothing else?” 

“Nothing that matters.” To you. 

Her mother says she’ll wash the dishes instead of her brother, and her brother gives her a knock to the shoulder and says a thank you, running out to get his bike and play basketball with friends. 

Maria doesn’t tell her mom what’s wrong when she asks. She doesn’t want to talk to her dad either, who tries to talk to her in a softer voice. 

“Mar, did something happen today that we should know about? You know we love you.” 

You know we love you. you know we love you. Do they? Do they love her? 

Or do they love that they think she is who they want her to be? 

Maria has to know. 

So she says it. 

“I’m gay,” she says plainly. “And I like girls and I always will. That’s what happened today.” 

Her dad’s face grows stony. Her mother doesn’t say anything for a moment. 

“You don’t mean that.” 

“Oh what, I don’t?” Maria asks, incredulous. 

“No, you’re confused. You don’t know what you want so you’re acting out.” 

Maria drops the plate she’s drying. It shatters to pieces and a shard cuts her leg. 

Her mom sweeps it up. Her dad doesn’t say anything. Maria walks outside and sits. 

Blood runs down her leg. It dries. She can’t be bothered to clean it up, even when it stains and dries on her pants. 

Her dad comes outside. 

“Are you okay?” he asks. 

“No. I’m really, really not.” 

“You know, we could...ask someone. About those camps that they have.” 

Maria’s face tightens. They want to send her away. 

“What, because I’m not enough?” Maria asks. “Because I’m not your perfect little daughter?” 

“You know, I never said that--” 

“You didn’t have to, I know,” Maria hisses. “You don’t love me. Not really. You can’t bear the fact that you have a fucking daughter who likes girls. Because for some reason that’s the worst thing that could happen to me.” 

He doesn’t say anything. He stands there and looks at her. 

They won’t send her to college. They’re not ending up letting her borrow the car for anything. They think she’ll sneak out to kiss a girl or something. 

That doesn’t bother Maria. 

She’s used to the cold looks and never-there-hugs over time. Her brother doesn’t say anything. She jokes to him that she’ll be cut out of the will. 

“You think they’d do that?” He asks. 

“Of course they will. The only reason mom didn’t make me leave the family is because it would cause a scandal at the next goddamn homes association meeting she has.” 

Maria bikes everywhere. And runs. She gets to be pretty fast. She figures it’s practice for when she’s run out of the house at the end of the year. 

But she ends up stopping a robbery. 

There’s a man who asks if she wants to “try out” in a sense, for a job. 

SHIELD. That’s what they call it. She thinks it’s ridiculous. 

She doesn’t tell her parents when she leaves. 

She takes everything she owns, stuffs it into a duffel bag, and bikes to where her new life begins. 

Her brothers calls her and says that her parents are upset. They’re thinking about calling the police. 

“Tell them I’m okay,” Maria says. “I’ll write them soon.” 

It’s petty, she knows. 

But she writes them back with no letter, just two things. 

The pocket knife her dad gave her. And the necklace that has been passed down for generations from her mother. 

A rejection of family, a severance of ties. She will not talk to them again. Her brother may pass updates on her. 

But judging by her experience in SHIELD, she won’t be returning home. 

They think she shows promise. She’s good in the field, deals with professional heckling in the most professional manner possible, and has a stare that takes most agents at least ten years to earn, and got Agent Barton to do paperwork in less than twenty-four hours. 

She doesn’t say anything about her personal life. They know she has parents that she doesn’t talk to, but that’s it. There’s nothing else to learn. 

At least, until Natasha Romanov enters. She’s a Black Widow. Or rather, Black Widow. She’s the lone survivor, doesn’t suffer fools easily, and likes to know everything. 

She and Clint are friends and joking around within two weeks. She knows where Coulson’s secret stash of coffee is within a week. And most importantly, she finds out Fury’s home address. 

(He lives in a nice house in a cul-de-sac and wears t-shirts and sunglasses on his days off. His neighbor on the right calls him Nick and they sometimes grill burgers.) 

Maria Hill is an enigma. Natasha doesn’t like not knowing. 

Or she does like to not know. She likes the thrill of getting information that you’re not supposed to know. 

There is no possibility of that with Maria Hill, because this job is her everything to her. People know that she doesn’t go home for any holiday, only takes off for health concerns, and doesn’t have any friends that she goes out with. 

Maria is alone. 

But there has to be more. Has to be. 

Natasha follows her home. Or, attempts to. 

She loses her on a subway stop. She’s not even sure how she lost her. 

She gets a typed note stuck to her door in the morning. 

Quit following me. I mean it. 

Natasha is suitably impressed. 

And undeterred. 

“Thanks for the note sweetheart,” Natasha says. “But I’m not gonna stop until I get something good.” She sashays away, looking back. “I like the hair, Maria.” 

Maria Hill is nervous. She hasn’t been nervous in three years. And this woman, this insufferable redhead who has the eyes of danger and a smile that could rival Aphrodite, is driving her insane. 

She is nervous. And that? That is throwing off her whole day. She can’t even drink her coffee because her fingers are so jittery. 

Maria hasn’t had a crush in years. She’s quashed them all down, ignored them. They were on people who were in and out, and she’s...well. Her marriage is to SHIELD. 

Natasha Romanoff is...similar. She’s exactly Maria’s type. Which is dangerous to know. 

She tries not to think about it. Tries to not smile as Natasha asks teasing questions. 

“Well, what’s your favorite condiment?” 

“What does that say about anything?” 

“Gives me some specifics about your past life, Maria darling.” 

“Ketchup,” Maria answers. 

Ketchup does not narrow anything down. Natasha just likes learning about her. 

Natasha learns that Maria has poor circulation, enjoys waking up with no alarm (which is insane), and absolutely adores the color blue. Everything, nearly, is blue. 

There are other, more serious things. Maria doesn’t like talking about her parents. Ever. She has a brother who occasionally emails. He got married a year ago and Maria visited at the wedding reception just as everyone was emptying. She has some drama with her parents. 

And nothing else is revealed about her life. Who her past crushes were. She visits the library when she has a free weekend. 

This is how Natasha finds her in a chair at the local library, reading a biography about Norman Rockwell. Something had seemed off about her all week, her face strange. (Natasha tended to look at Maria’s face. A lot. More than necessary. Clint made fun of her.) 

“He painted the idealized American life,” Maria says. “I like his work. He’s interesting because I probably wouldn’t like him.” 

“Better to see your idols than know them,” Natasha remarks. “Everything okay?” 

Maria is quiet. 

“My brother told my parents where I work.” 

Natasha sits, looks at a biography of some TV host. 

“You know if this one is any good?” 

“Talks too much about family history. Sucks.” 

Natasha picks out another one about Mary Pickford and starts reading. 

They read in silence like that for the better part of an hour. Natasha uses Maria’s legs as her own sort of chair, pressing her back against them. Maria doesn’t say anything but loses her page. 

Natasha gets up, looking at Maria. 

“What’s going on?” 

“It’s nothing. I’ll be fine.” 

“Doesn’t matter if it’s nothing. It’s affecting you enough so that you’re reading about someone else. Sounds like you want to focus on anyone but yourself.” 

“Didn’t know you talked to SHIELD psychologists,” Maria says, mouth quirking up in a smile. 

“They talk at me. I occasionally listen to fit my needs.” Maria laughs some more, getting up from her chair. The white, plastic library card is between two fingers. 

“Let me check some of these out. Then I’ll sit down at coffee with you.” 

It is awkward. Silent. At first. Maria has the books to the side, pressed against a window. She almost never has her back to the window. This is new. 

“What I tell you cannot be flaunted around the office like the cat just got the cream,” Maria says tightly. “It cannot be bragging like you know of Clint’s circus career or Phil’s quite frankly weird obsession with Cap and Howling Commandoes memorabilia.” 

“Airtight,” Natasha says. “You’re my friend.” 

Maria talks. 

“I don’t talk to my parents. Ever. I’m...I like girls. More than a friend way.” 

“You sound like the biggest dork on the planet,” Natasha teases, smiling. “But continue.” 

Maria shoots her an annoyed glance, but she looks down at her coffee, not annoyed really. 

“I don’t talk to them. They thought it was a phase. They tried to get me to go to church or some weird Christian summer camp. I never did. I mailed back anything of family value. I don’t ever mention them. 

Because I...I never could think of myself as part of that family. And my mom found where I live and now she’s calling me to get dinner. And I kind of want to. But I also don’t want to. I don’t know what to do.” 

Natasha sits back. 

“You know, this makes having dead parents desirable right now.” 

Maria laughs. It’s a horrible joke, in the worst taste, but Natasha makes her laugh. 

“I don’t know everything about this, but I suggest maybe talking with them,” Natasha says. “Only if you want to. If you don’t want to, you’re under no obligation. But figure out what you want to do. It’s about what’s right for you, not what you think someone wants from you.” 

Natasha brings Maria into a hug, cradling her body. It’s the perfect hug. 

“This might be a bad time, but if you ever want to do something...I’d be fine with that.” 

Maria is left struck dumb, a pile of books left next to her. 

She decides that maybe instead of having dinner with people she honestly dreads talking to, maybe she’ll take Nat to the trivia night next Friday at her favorite bar. 

They might win something. 

- 

Natasha gets a handwritten note. 

She can tell it’s left-handed, written in slanted cursive, and written carefully. Handwriting tells a lot about a person. 

Trivia night is next Friday. You want to go? 

-Maria. 

Underneath is her phone number. 

Natasha texts her an embarrassing amount of emojis in response to the question posed. 

Maria texts back. 

I regret liking you 

oh fuck. 

hehe :) thanks maria i like you back 

Not the worst confession. Not the worst response. It’s a nice start. 

(Fury wins ten dollars. Maria does not like this.) 

[cordonia-continued]

In The Shadows

Book: The Royal Romance 1 & 2. Bastien’s story.

Pairings: Bastien. Liam x MC (Riley Taylor)

Warnings: slight swearing, slight angst

A/N: I thought it would be nice to see things from Bastien’s POV. Any similarities to anything else out there is unintentional and is purely coincidental. I fell in love with the TRR series late and have only just got into it. I felt that some of the chapters just needed a bit more - it goes along with my previous fanfic where Riley went back to New York briefly after the coronation ball.

All characters belong to Pixelberry.

Apologies in advance for any typos, grammar or spelling errors.

Chapter 3

The night of the Coronation Ball dawned and Bastien was once again in the shadows watching the festivities around him when he saw Liam lead Lady Riley into the maze. His heart constricted at the sight, he had been around Liam enough to know what his plans were for this evening, he had watched the young prince’s love for Lady Riley grow. Against his better judgement he had arranged the secret meetings they shared, made sure they weren’t disturbed.

He watched from afar as they emerged, laughing, kissing, straightening their clothes as they went back into the ballroom casting shy glances at each other. He closed his eyes and rubbed a hand over his face, Bastien knew that even if The King had known that his son had just declared his love for Riley he wouldn’t have cared. He was set on destroying the young prince’s life before it had properly begun.

And then it happened, just as Liam was about to choose her, the timing couldn’t have been any worse for her or any better for Constantine. Bastien closed his eyes, unable to face what he’d done as the beeps and buzzes of the phones rang out around the ballroom. Shame crept over him as he led Riley out of the room, his face flushed crimson and he cringed at the scene playing out in front of him. She pulled back from his grip and screamed for Drake; he had to be honest with himself hadn’t expected that, they must have got closer than he realised. He led her to the security office, apologising as he did so, none of this was her fault. He knew he had to act fast, the King was keeping Liam occupied until Bastien could get her out of the palace and away to the airport. He had arranged it so her bags were packed by the time she was allowed back to her room to change. The palace guards had taken her passport from her, but little did she know that flights had been booked long ago, a plane was strategically scheduled to take off after the news had broken.

He bundled her and her belongings into a waiting unmarked car, and that was it. She was gone. Bastien left the palace, he couldn’t handle the questions, the accusations flying around. He found a bar on the outskirts of the city and ordered a neat whiskey. He felt he deserved a night off for a change, he’s given his life up for that family, been constantly at their beck and call. He knew that Liam didn’t believe a word of the Tariq scandal, he could see it in his eyes. No doubt Drake had already told him about what happened that night. It was obvious to everyone that Riley would never cheat on Liam, well not with Tariq anyway. Now Drake, that was something that Bastien kept turning over in his mind, the way she called his name when she was being led out, the way Drake was there to save her that night from Tariq. It was clear to him from the coy looks that Drake was also in love with the American, that much was evident, but had he missed something between the two of them? Did she feel the same way about Drake? Bastien shook his head, no, he’d seen the way she looked at Liam surely she wasn’t leading Drake on as well...would she?

His phone lights up with yet another message, he ignores it like all the others he’s received tonight. After a few minutes it starts vibrating on the bar in front of him, he picks it up and looks at the caller ID. Drake. He hits the decline button and puts it back face down on the bar. He would love to switch it off but he daren’t, even on his night off he’s never truly off the clock. It buzzes again. He picks it up. Drake. Oh for fucks sake give up he thinks as once again he hits decline. It buzzes for a third time and this time he gives in and answers it.

‘What?’ He’s not in the mood for pleasantries.

‘What the fuck was all that about Bas?’ Drakes voice is loud and shrill. Bastien takes another sip of his whiskey. ‘I think it was quite evident what all that was about Drake.’

‘Where are you Bas? I’m at your office but you’re not here, you need to help us sort this out.’

‘I don’t take orders from you Drake.’ Bastien’s mood is making him cranky with his young friend.

‘What? Bastien what’s the matter with you? And where are you? Are you with her? Let me speak to her.’

‘No.’

‘Bastien, please.’ Drake begs.

‘Drake listen to me, you need to step away from this. Whatever it is that you’re thinking of doing. Don’t.’ Bastien’s tone was firm.

‘What the fuck Bas? You can’t seriously believe she’s done anything? I told you what happened that night, I was there. You said you’d step up security, check the room locks. Remember?’

‘Drake, it doesn’t matter what I believe. What’s done is done. I can’t do anything to change it. Go home, you can’t do anything either.’

‘I’m sure as hell gonna try Bas. I’m gonna go after her. Where is she? Was she sent back to the US? Back to New York? What flight is she on?’

Bastien remains silent, he rubs his forehead with his hand.

‘Bastien?’

‘Drake, please I’m asking you as a friend, go home, leave her. It’s for the best. This is bigger than you can know.’

‘How can it be for the best? She didn’t do anything. Liam knows that, so do I, and so will everyone else when she makes a statement, I can vouch for her.’

Bastien lets out a long sigh. ‘And who are they going to believe? Two commoners or a court full of nobles?’ He knows his words will sting Drake, he’s always had a chip on his shoulder about not being a noble. ‘They’ll think you’re just siding with her, without proof they won’t believe you.’

‘Nah fuck that shit, I’m going to go get her, she’s been sent back to New York hasn’t she?’ He can tell by Drakes voice that he’s angry and knowing him as he does he knows Drake’s prone to acting rashly when he’s angry.

‘Drake, please’

‘Bastien just tell me!’ Drake shouts

‘Yes’ Bastien feels like a brick has been dropped in his stomach, he knew this was going to end badly. He expected that it would be her fighting against being deported, demanding to speak to The King, causing hell until they let her go. But word from the men at the airport was that she went willingly in the end, resigned to her fate. They told Bastien that she sat sobbing, that even the Beaumont’s couldn’t convince her to stay. He can’t imagine Riley Taylor crying, Liam choosing Madeleine must have broken her heart. He knows there’s no stopping Drake when he’s set his mind to something, the lad would row a boat to the States if he had to.

‘Do not, I repeat, DO NOT let Liam get on that plane. Do you hear me Drake? He can’t leave, he CANNOT be seen to be going after her. Is that clear?’ Bastien demands.

‘Crystal’ with that Drake hangs up. Bastien rubs a hand over his face and downs his drink, ordering another one.

She came back with Drake. She’s got guts he’ll give her that. She’s been staying back at the Beaumont’s estate again. Constantine was pissed when he found out. He told Bastien that maybe he should have got rid of her after all.

Maybe it’s just to ease his conscience but Bastien is glad she’s back, she deserves a chance to clear her name, he hopes she’ll manage it, he’s only sorry he can’t help her. Even though he now serves King Liam, Bastien can’t disclose his previous duties to King Constantine. He assumes Drake has told Liam she’s back, but if he has then Liam hasn’t mentioned it. The poor King looks so dejected all the time, he puts on a front for the staff, the politicians and press, but Bastien sees behind the mask. Since the coronation Bastien has been reassigned to Liam’s personal protection, he’s tried to keep a distance so far, he can’t look the new king in the eye, he swears his betrayal is written all over his face. He’s not keen on Liam’s new fiancé either, she’s demanding and rude to the staff, considering all the schooling some of these nobles have had they haven’t been taught manners. Luckily she’s not at the palace often, however the engagement tour is going to test Bastien’s patience he can tell.

As the night of the engagement party draws closer Bastien has heard from his sources that Riley will be there. He’s still yet to figure out if Liam knows, from the way The King has been acting he doesn’t think he’s aware, it wouldn’t surprise him if that stupid Beaumont boy is planning some kind of surprise reunion, risky he thinks to himself making a mental note to keep an eye out for any confrontations and to make sure he diffuses them before they happen.

Bastien watches from the door as Lady Riley and Lord Beaumont greet Countess Madeleine, her smile is sly and snide, even though he can’t hear what she says from his position he’s sure it’s condescending. He tenses as he sees The King walk over to the the trio, he’s primed ready to step in if Riley so much as raises her voice to The King. It’s then that he’s convinced that Liam didn’t know Riley would be here tonight, it’s the first time he’s seen a genuine smile on his face since his coronation, however brief it was.

Thankfully the party goes smoothly, that is until Liam foolishly orders two dozen roses to be sent to the American’s room. He needs to let it go Bastien thinks, The King Father will be furious if he finds out, even though it’s not his problem anymore he’s sure Constantine will make it his problem.

Bastien doesn’t know how he did it but somehow Liam has arranged for her to meet him on his balcony, he knows it wasn’t via phone call or text that’s for sure. He pretends he doesn’t notice her scurrying around the grounds after the party, puts a call out on his radio for his men to hold off, reassigns them to the front of the house, tells them he’ll deal with it. Liam doesn’t need an audience for this. He can’t help but smile to himself as he watches her scramble over the railings of the Kings balcony, barefoot and shivering in her little blue dress. Liam’s not a fool, he must have known there would be security watching his room, he must have had faith that Bastien wouldn’t intervene. He hopes that Liam will end it here tonight and tell her to leave, but he knows the young king too well, no way is he letting her go without a fight. This whole situation is becoming way too complicated, he should have known she would come back. Bastien radios the guard assigned to Madeleine’s room, tells him to make sure he reports any activity directly to him, the last thing he needs is for her to show up and cause a scene.

He keeps a distance as the couple argue, she’s very clearly upset but she’s not crying. Bastien’s got to admire her strength, not too many girls would be able to keep control in a situation like this. His heart sinks as they kiss, even though she eventually pushes Liam away. He knew this would happen, they’re like a fucking real life Romeo and Juliette now he thinks, and he remembers how that ended for the star crossed lovers.

Liam comes to Bastien’s office a few days later, he enters the small room closing the door behind him.

‘Your Majesty.’ Bastien rises from his desk bowing to The King ‘I would have come to your office if I had known you wanted a meeting.’

‘It’s quite alright Bastien, I need your help on the Tariq situation and I thought it a discussion better placed here.’ Bastien’s stomach drops, he had been dreading this day.

‘My help Your Majesty?’ Bastien plays dumb. ‘Yes Bastien, please use your contacts to track down Tariq so we can confront him about what happened that night, find out why he was in Lady Riley’s room, I need to help her with this, it’s because of me she’s in this situation.’

‘Are you sure Your Majesty?’ Bastien questions, this is not something he wants to be doing.

The King looks at Bastien in confusion ‘Of course I’m sure, why would I not be sure?’

Bastien weighs up his options here, he was told by Constantine to get rid of Riley but he no longer serves Constantine. He could pretend to look into Tariqs whereabouts, or maybe just delay looking into it until after The Kings wedding to Countess Madeleine to keep The King Father happy.

‘It’s just...excuse me if I am speaking out of turn Your Majesty, but you are engaged to another woman. I’m not sure that getting involved in a scandal concerning a past suitor will give the right impression.’

Liam creases his brow at his security guard ‘Bastien Lady Riley deserves the chance to clear her name. Finding Tariq will provide that opportunity. We must do all we can to help her. But alas you are right, Countess Madeleine must not know of this. Please avoid discussing the matter in her vicinity.’

Bastien hesitates for a moment then walks over to his locked filing cabinet, pulling the key out of his pocket he takes the file marked Riley Taylor from the draw and hesitantly hands it to Liam.

‘What’s this?’ Noticing the name on the front of the file Liam swallows. ‘Why are you giving me this?’

‘Just read it Your Majesty and then come and see me tomorrow If you still want me to find Tariq.’

The Kings face turns crimson, the lines of his forehead crease once again. He grabs the file from Bastien’s outstretched hand.

The Kings voice raises in indignation ‘If you think anything in this file will change my mind Bastien then you don’t know me very well, I want Lady Riley to clear her name regardless of what her background is, I don’t care where she’s come from, I’m not interested in her past! Do what you can to find that man.’

The King turns on his heel and marches out of the office and down the hallway. However passionate his protests were Bastien notices that he took the file on Riley Taylor with him.

[relationshipsandpolitics]

Impeachment and My Ignorant Coworker

I watch MSNBC every morning and evening and read multiple online news sites and blogs.  So I’m fairly up to date on the issue of impeachment. For me, it’s such a slam dunk case that I can’t really understand how only 50-ish percent of people support it.  Then I spoke with a coworker.  My coworker is a white guy who is fairly disengaged from politics. He doesn’t read or watch the news and only comes across political stories when they interrupt sports.  His view is one I imagine is typical: the news is biased (though he doesn’t say in which way) and all politicians are unethical. But when I ask him what he knows about impeachment, he gives a depressing yet unsurprising answer.  

My coworker is aware that Trump has been dogged by scandals and threats of impeachment since the beginning and because of that, this current scandal is just more of the same. But he isn’t so sure that Trump has done anything so bad as to warrant impeachment, especially since the last time people made a stink about him, nothing came of it.  In other words, this current scandal is not a big deal and just politics as usual.  He simply doesn’t care.  He knows that impeachment is a big deal but has been so beaten down by the incessant drumming of it all that this latest issue is much ado about maybe something.

The goal for Speaker Pelosi has been to get the public to a place where impeachment becomes a politically smart move.  We’ll discuss the morality of that later.  To get the public to that place, the thinking has been that Democrats just need to make a really strong case for impeachment.  Speaker Pelosi has been consistent that the difference between Ukraine and everything involving the Mueller Report is that the Ukraine story they can sell to the public is far simpler to digest.  This is true.  But it misses a key point.  

Most Americans are barely paying attention.  When public hearings are held, and sensational headlines are written, a surprisingly large portion of the country do not come across them.  Times are substantially different than they were when Nixon resigned.  Back then, everyone tuned into the nightly news because there were only a handful of television stations and all of them were covering the impeachment proceedings. Today, despite there being more sources of news and information than ever, a smaller percentage of the population is seeing it.  Or they are getting so much conflicting information that they can’t make sense of it. If the truth is so confusing, why bother even trying to understand it?

Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are acting as though its still 1973.  They believe they are making a case to the American public based on mountains of documents and sworn testimony, which in turn will cause a groundswell of support across the populace.  Pelosi and the Democratic leadership are specifically counting on picking up the mythical undecideds and independents.  Maybe even some Republicans.  But while it is true that the needle has moved towards impeachment because of their drumbeat, at the end of the day most people who are not part of either side’s base aren’t paying attention. Independents and undecideds aren’t some uber-informed group of voters who are carefully weighing all the information before picking a side. They are more likely uninformed or deeply mistrustful individuals who Pelosi never had a shot of convincing.   There is a ceiling of support the Democrats can achieve, and my guess is they’ve basically hit that ceiling.  Yet the Democrats still believe they can reach these people.  They won’t, of course, unless you break into coverage of the Voice and hack every YouTube search to have Tom Hanks lay out the overwhelming evidence of criminal corruption.  The people trust Hanks.  Aside from that, what’s the solution?

The solution is to move forward on Articles of Impeachment right now.  You’re never getting the Senate Republicans on board at this point, mainly because the evidence already presented to the public is enough to convict and they still won’t do it.   Even as I write this, Senate Republicans are intent on passing a resolution condemning the House impeachment investigation, despite there being nothing untoward about it.

You’re also not moving the needle of support much more than it currently stands.  Gathering more evidence doesn’t equal more support, but it does waste time.  It brings us closer to the Presidential election, meaning that impeachment will dominate the Democratic primary instead of the issues that actually matter to voters than Democrats are great on (well some of them anyway).   If we reach March without an impeachment vote, support for impeachment will tank.  Everyone from the punditry class in the Beltway to the average accountant in Topeka will prefer not to impeach and just get on with the election.

But everything I said above is ultimately meaningless.  It doesn’t matter what the polls say or whether the majority of the electorate is ill-informed.  The people in the know are fully aware of what this administration has done.  They have committed multiple crimes.  Donald Trump is not alone in his corruptions. The entire Cabinet is guilty of abusing their positions to enrich themselves and their friends.  It’s really not difficult.  When a government official commits a crime, you prosecute him for that crime, political consequences be damned.  Impeachment is what is right, even if it’s not easy.   To those who say we need to wait and see how the public feels about this, I say to them that every day we drag our feet is another day a refugee stays in a cage.

The truth is that the evidence is already there.  We need to impeach because the President committed blatantly impeachable offenses.  Waiting on this is playing politics with a moral and ethical imperative, which will have the byproduct of being poor politics.  Democrats must vote to impeach now.  Release all the evidence to the public, get their key witnesses to testify, and vote to impeach.  For fuck’s sake.

[ruminativerabbi]

When “Sorry” Isn’t Enough

Like all of us, I suppose, I was surprised and more than just slightly taken aback by the revelation that the sitting governor of Virginia, a man known for his liberality and his commitment to civil rights, once placed a photograph of someone in blackface and someone else dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit on his page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook of 1984. Was either person in the photograph himself? He’s been oddly equivocal in answering what is in essence a simple enough question, but it hardly matters at this point—the bottom line was that he himself chose to place that picture on that page, which means that he either thought at the time that the photograph was funny enough to warrant permanent memorialization in that space or, even more disconcertingly, that it was in some way suggestive enough of who he was and/or what he stood for to make it reasonable for people looking back years later to remember him by looking at it.  As many have lately noted, it was a long time ago. But not that long! (The 1680s were a long time ago. The 1980s, not so much.) But the question isn’t really how long ago 1984 was, but whether the man who chose to adorn his yearbook page with racist images should be the governor of an American state now in the present, not in the distant or not so distant past. And another question asks itself as well: what kind of school would permit such pictures to be published in its yearbook in the first place? (Or is that one of those questions that is its own answer?)

But the focus in these last days has rightly been on the governor, not the school. Oddly, that confuses rather than clarifies the issue…because Ralph Northam has been a strong supporter of civil rights for all of his years in public service. So his non-racist bona fides—Northam left the field of pediatric neurology to become a United States senator in 2008—are not the issue at all. The question, therefore, is whether the past should outbalance the present…and whether apologizing for past errors of judgment should be enough to earn the right to move forward unencumbered by one’s own youthful stupidity.

The governor issued a statement in which he described the photograph as both “clearly racist and offensive.” And then he went on to apologize. “I am deeply sorry,” he said, “for the decision I made to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now. This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service…The first step is to offer my sincerest apology and to state my absolute commitment to living up to the expectations Virginians set for me when they elected me to be their Governor.”

That certainly sounds like a sincere effort to own up to what even his most ardent supporter would surely characterize as an error of judgment of monumental proportions. But is saying you’re sorry enough? Can you undo the past with mere words? Can regret in the present outweigh tasteless vulgarity in the past? Those are the issues I’d like to write about today.

At the heart of the matter is a fundamental philosophical question relating to the way the past relates to the present. Trees grow over the course of decades and their trunks become broader and thicker as the former outer layer of wood becomes one of the tree trunk’s inner growth rings and is superseded by a new outer layer. So, at least with trees, it’s all in there somewhere: the outermost layer of wood becomes interiorized as the past retains its physical presence within the ongoing tree. But is the same true of people? Is the eleven-year-old me in there somewhere? It’s hard to say. It feels as though he must be—where else could he be?—and yet the tree model doesn’t feel quite right: boy-me hardly lives within man-me in the same way that a tree’s inner rings are physically present within its trunk as living testimony to its past. Boy-me is more in there somehow than somewhere.

Nor is this mere philosophical musing: our entire criminal justice system rests on the principle that we bear responsibility for our own past acts because we are not ethereal projections or reconceptualizations of the people we were in the past but actually are those same people. And that, in turn, leads me to the pertinent question worth asking with respect to the governor’s racist tastelessness as a young man: since the deed cannot be undone but apparently does not rise to the level of criminal activity for which he could tried in a court of law, then what exactly should he do to address the issue? To that question, the chorus of responses has been varied and, each in its own way (I believe), off-mark. Giving him a pass merely because he doesn’t have a time machine and can’t return to 1985 to re-edit his yearbook page sounds idiotic to me. But maintaining that precisely because he can’t undo the past he should now withdraw into premature retirement and spend the rest of his days ruing a huge error of judgment from a quarter-century ago sounds not only excessive, but also profoundly counterproductive.

One of the features of our intellectual life at Shelter Rock is my annual series of lessons, undertaken every August and lasting through the High Holiday season, devoted to the section of Maimonides’ great law code, the Mishneh Torah, devoted to the law of t’shuvah. The Hebrew word, t’shuvah, is regularly translated as “repentance,” but the English words sounds to me like a slightly more august version of regret whereas t’shuvah involves constructively using some amalgam of remorse, shame, and guilt as a platform upon which to stand not while attempting to travel from the present into the past (which is impossible, see above) but while attempting to move meaningfully from the present into the future.

The text is rich and satisfying—challenging in some ways, but bracing in others and always inspiring. When considered alongside the book I think of as its companion volume, the Ḥibbur Ha-t’shuvah (“The Book of T’shuvah”) by Rabbi Menaḥem ben Solomon Meiri (1249-1306)—an understudied and underestimated work that I come to esteem even more highly each time I open it—a path opens up for poor Governor Northam to consider as a way forward out of his self-inflicted predicament.

In our tradition, the past cannot be undone but it can be addressed profoundly and meaningfully. The first step is always a public confession: t’shuvah cannot be done in private, let alone in secret. If the misdeed under consideration involved harm to another person, then you have to beg that person’s pardon in person and out loud. If the person is no longer alive, then you must gather a minyan by the side of his or her grave and there confess your sin and pledge to become a finer person in the future who has learned from the error in judgment that led to the event being repented. In every case, the viddui (that is, the public confession of wrongdoing) is an essential element in the larger process.

And then, having stepped into the world, you need to step out of it and demonstrate your resolve to grow into a finer iteration of yourself through a regimen of prayer, fasting, and self-denial. Jews, of course, have Yom Kippur as our national day devoted to doing exactly those things: fasting, engaging in various forms of self-denial, spending the day immersed in contemplative communal prayer. Rambam—as Maimonides is familiarly called even in scholarly circles—goes into all of this in great detail. And then, finally, he says this about the individual seeking to do t’shuvah for a specific misdeed: “Such a person,” he writes, “must be humble of demeanor and modest. If boors mock such a person by referencing the deed for which that person has repented by saying ‘you once did such-and-such a thing’ or ‘you once spoke in such-and-such a way,’ then the person who has done t’shuvah honestly will not respond in anger, but rather should listen carefully and take pleasure in their insults—because such taunts will lead to becoming even more ashamed of the past behavior in question and more filled with remorse, and that experience will not be degrading but elevating….”

And that is what I think Governor Northam should do. He seems to be a good man in many ways, but one who made a terrible mistake as a young man that now, all these years later, has hurt many people who must now wonder if they can trust him at all. There is a way forward and, speaking as a rabbi, I recommend our Jewish path of principled t’shuvah coupled with a public commitment to grow through this scandal into a finer version of himself, one even more devoted to the pursuit of civil rights for all than he has been in the past. A bit of public prayer probably wouldn’t hurt either.

And one more detail too, also from Rambam: “Once people have done t’shuvah for some specific misdeeds, it becomes absolutely forbidden to humiliate them by reminding them of their former misdeeds…and doing so is to break the commandment of the Torah that forbids individuals from oppressing each other unduly.”

Can this rule to applied to this last week’s other politician-apologizer, Representative Ilhan Omer (D- Minnesota), who seems so far to have made her mark on Congress solely by sending out anti-Semitic tweets and then apologizing for them? That will have to be the topic of a different letter!

[kaepop-trash]

Grievances

Rated: M for Smut, Angst.

Pairing: Jaehyun x Reader xYuta

Summary: The story of secrets, deceit and greed. Three characters with unlikely alliances and one common goal; power. Jaehyun is stuck between his own thirst for power and his need for the one thing that could take away everything. Yuta has ambition growing from an unlikely alliance and convinces himself to do anything to protect it. Between both of them is her, ambitious but with one weakness, she does all it takes for Jaehyun, even if it’s putting herself aside. But how long can she hold up her own fragile games?

Mini Masterlist

She couldn't stand it. The way he refused to share meaningful glances and secretive smiles. How he didn't even call her about work and she got used to his assistant's voice.

She sat beside him in the boardroom. All eyes on him and hers were no different. He talked about a dream, of democracy and goals but she stared at him.

“Is there something you'd like to add?” He turned to her, his insincere smile that only she knew how to distinguish. When she simply shook her head he moved on without another question, asking other people on his campaign like they were all equal in his eyes.

Her throat burned at his blatant ignorance of her presence and it stung from realisation of her pathetic need of his attention.

When her phone rang, she was thankful for the distraction. Getting up and walking out the room.

“You've never been to my house have you?” Sulhee said as (Y/N) entered a house grand in its structure.

“Haven't had the pleasure.” She answered politely and Sulhee laughed.

“Come. I'd like you to meet my father.” She said making (Y/N) hesitate but not refuse, following Sulhee.

“I don't think we've had the pleasure to meet, but I've heard many things about you.” Her father got up from his chair and took her hand in his as a greeting. (Y/N) smiled at him.

After having a pleasant conversation about the weather and politics, they both left and Sulhee insisted on walking around the garden with her.

“I’m going to start a non-profit firm to feed people who can't afford it. When Jaehyun gets nominated to a position in the administration, I want to be considered for ambassador.” Sulhee spoke with direction.

“You'll be his wife, that's unethical.” (Y/N) started like she was explaining to a child.

“No. Consider this my resignation letter. There are things I want to do, and I realise I can't do that while being a politician's wife. But I guess you know that too.” Sulhee gave her a empathetic smile.

“I always admired everything about you. Even when I saw you and him.” She paused, a frown naturally gracing her face, “From the first moment I just knew I was the imposter.” She breathed in deeply and turned to her with a smile.

“I envied your position of power, not because the man I love loves you. It took me too long to realise that. I want people to consider me valid in my own right, I don't want a part of my husband's influence.” She said with a decisive nod.

“It'll be bad. You realise it can't be him breaking up with you. He's run-” (Y/N) tried to explain.

“I'll release a statement. Any viewership that's sensitive to women. Say I want to do things, I can't be tied down yet. How Jaehyun was reluctant but agreed because my happiness is important to him too. Anyone who criticises either of us will look desperate or worse, misogynistic. If I do it right before the election it looks opportunistic, if I do it after we were deceptive.” Both of them cracked a smile at the irony.

“You'll need to do it now. But you'll need a reason, something that sparked your change.” (Y/N) calculated with furrowed brows.

“I'm leaving for Myanmar soon, I'm going to help with the refugee mistreatment there. I'll be loud and I'll be meaningful. In a few weeks I'll say my eyes were opened to the world and I want to keep doing this.” She sat down on a wrought iron chair and (Y/N) followed.

“It's flawless. There is no holes in this.” (Y/N) sounded so impressed Sulhee smiled, “What do you need me to do?” She asked.

“Getting a visa is hard.” Sulhee smiled sheepishly and (Y/N) laughed.

“That's it? The Secretary General's assistant owes me a favour.” She was already dialing on her phone.

She imagined it would be very different, she would fantasise about what would happen if Jaehyun wasn't engaged. Yet weeks passed and everyone found out from Sulhee’s statement.

“Did you know about this?” Jaehyun barged into her office one morning, his lips pursed and his forehead wrinkled.

“I made her the visa. Good morning by the way.” She looked up at him once then sipped her tea as she clicked on her laptop.

“Why didn't you tell me? This is a disaster!” He sounded absolutely livid.

“You haven't spoken to me in weeks remember?” She didn't offer him a glance.

"Stop being a child (Y/N) I'm trying to win an election. Look at me god damn it!” He banged his hand on the table so loud that she jumped, turning to him with shocked eyes before she got up with annoyance.

“I wasn't born yesterday Senator. I know how to handle a potential scandal.” She turned her laptop around to show him her screen, “People are calling you the spearhead of new generation of this country's politics. It's 7am and you're obnoxiously loud. Get out of my office Jaehyun, I have an election to win for you.” She sat down, not acknowledging him after that and he left with nothing else to say.

In three months, people had gotten over it. News moved fast and no one cared about a mellow breakup with justified reasons. In fact, Jaehyun wasn't the centre of news again till the elections were a month away.

“I am greatly humbled and also honoured that so many of you believe in me enough to give me your precious support.” Jaehyun spoke at his own rally, ignoring the fact that his campaign manager was missing. He ignored it for the past three months, not acknowledging the forced conversations and lack of personal moments. Jaehyun piled himself under the weight of the election and he knew she did the same.

There was no compromise with politics.

“I cannot believe the smiles and hope I see in all your faces today. And I promise that I will try as long as you want to serve you and help you.” The crowd cheered and applauded, so completely enthralled by the young man with promises of change and progress, selling the dream every American was willing to buy.

“Pennsylvania I promise you.” Jaehyun paused, the room holding on to his words as a smile erupted on his face, “That I will not rest till I've made sure the smiles on your face stay for a long time.” The crowd erupted in an uproar, standing up in submission and belief. Jaehyun was glowing from the energy, his skin sparking with the electricity he was spreading in the room with the art of his words.

As the crowd calmed down and Jaehyun prepared himself to speak once again, his press secretary ran up on stage, leaning into his ears and whispering in urgency. Almost immediately Jaehyun rushed off the stage, leaving a confused and charged crowd that complained as the press secretary calmed them down.

Yuta looked around the long corridor once again before turning back to her. It had been a hour since they came to the hospital and she hadn't said a word. She hadn't even moved as her gaze stayed fixated on the door ahead. Yuta considered saying something a few times, to at the very least place a hand of comfort on his shoulder. But he couldn't bring himself to, as he sat and heard the quiet mumbles of a hospital.

He settled at putting a hand on her knee, hoping he offered a small reassurance. He wanted to be there for her and it felt claustrophobic to not know how to comfort the person he could consider special.

They were having brunch, both of them talking about the election. Through the past few months, Yuta never found the right moment to ask why she was so forlorn. When they didn’t speak about the polls she only quietly ate.

“You should take a vacation after the election. You’ve earned it.” Yuta broke the silence, she looked up at him and smiled.

“I’ll have more work when he’s elected.” She sighed dutifully.

“Chief of Staff?” Yuta asked with curiosity.

“Naturally.” She said easily.

“Did he offer?” There was a silence at his words. (Y/N) watched Yuta for a moment, observing his expression. She looked away, casual surety in her eyes.

“He doesn’t need to.” She went back to eating and the silence returned.

When the phone call came, he didn’t hesitate to offer her a ride. Wordlessly accompanying her and waiting with her, offering silent comfort.

When her knee jerked, he looked up and followed her gaze. Jung Jaehyun rushed through the corridor with a frenzy in his eyes that Yuta could catch from a distance, his body guards also rushing behind him. Before he could come stand at her foot, she got up and walked up to him.

“Jae.” Her voice cracked for the first time since she came here with Yuta. She embraced him, burying her face deep in his chest as he brushed her hair, pain evident on his face.

Jaehyun glanced at Yuta, an unsure expression before he held her tighter, cooing her.

“I’m so sorry. I'm so so sorry.” It was all he could say. Her crying was louder this time, she tried to bury her face deeper to muffle the sound, but she only bawled.

“I don’t know why I’m crying.” She whined against his chest, loud sobs escaping her.

“He was your father.” Jaehyun’s voice was delicate, eyes rimming red. Both of them watched her carefully, pain etched on their faces in a way it hadn’t for a long time to either of them. For someone else’s loss. She pushed away from him after a moment, rubbing her eyes furiously and taking breaths till they were level.

“I need to see his body.” Her voice faltered but she composed herself. Jaehyun pulled her hand into his, holding it close to his chest.

“I’ll go with you. Then we’ll leave okay? Let’s not be here longer than we need to.” He rubbed his thumb soothingly against her wrist. She nodded, sniffing silently. Suddenly she stopped turning around with realisation.

“Yuta.” She said with a small gasp, remembering his presence.

“I’ll go, you don’t need too many people right now,” He looked up Jaehyun, a spark in his eyes. “Call me if you need. I’m always here for you.” He gave her a genuine smile.

“It was a cardiac arrest caused by high body temperature. The facility said he had a fever and antibiotics stopped working.” The coroner read out the report emotionlessly before slamming it shut and placing it on a metal tray.

“I’ll give you a moment.” He sighed, his footsteps echoing as he walked out of the sterile room.

Jaehyun watched her as she quietly looked at her father, lying immobile. Her eyes didn’t falter and her hands remained by her side. Jaehyun sighed softly, walking up behind her and brushing her hair of her neck before embracing her from the back.

“There’s no one except me and the dead. You don’t need to try so hard.” He breathed against her neck, placing his chin on her head. She put an arm around his and squeezed tight.

“He taught me how to ride horses. It sounds stupid but he told me that you need to be gentle to tame a horse and I never forgot that advice.” Jaehyun was almost relieved when he heard gentle sobs, holding her closer.

“It’s not like he was there anyway, but now he's.” She couldn't finish her thought at her own discretion. She stood there and allowed herself to be comforted by Jaehyun as she allowed herself to cry a little more.

“He wanted you to give his eulogy.” She sat across the older women, arms crossed and posture guarded. The women looked up, looking annoyed.

“When did he decide all this?” She spoke as she eyed the will the lawyers left with (Y/N). She looked up with a prominent frown.

“He wants us to invite his older business partners. He wants us to serve veal and he wants it to happen at the estate and he wants you to give his eulogy.” She spoke a little impatiently.

“Have you seen the will?” The women asked and (Y/N) sighed.

“Your lawyers will give you the details.” (Y/N) explained.

“The family estate.” The women ignored her.

“He left you your first apartment.” (Y/N) placed a file in front of her. The women sat back with confusion that turned to annoyance.

“I assume the estate is yours.” The women scoffed.

“After all these years you still haven’t changed.” (Y/N) sighed, sitting back promptly, defeat weighing down her voice.

“I made him you know, I was the reason your father had anything, and he had everything. Yet all he does is leave me that tiny apartment.” Betrayal played in her voice.

“He left it for you because that place has happy memories for you. Don’t be like this.” (Y/N) pleaded. The women laughed bitterly, shaking her head.

“He left it for me as a way to get back at me. You never saw your father for who he is, which is why he loved you that much.” The woman smiled victoriously.

“No, he loved me because my own mother was jealous of my father’s affection for me. And he didn’t leave you the estate because when it was going to be seized Jaehyun saved it.” She turned to (Y/N)’s words, a peculiar look in her eyes.

“How did Jung Jaehyun save our family estate?” She asked slowly. In all her years, (Y/N) had to admire her mother's talent for picking up the best information.

“Last year. When the court was going to seize the estate. Jaehyun filed a writ, he changed Pennsylvania law.” She avoided her mother's scrutiny.

“All for you? Jung Jaehyun sounds like world's most generous boss.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and sat back with her chin raised, a move (Y/N) had learned to associate with her mother's disapproval.

“He's my friend.” She sighed, already giving up on her mother.

“That's the biggest pity of it all. The father sends my husband to jail and The son uses my only daughter to his entitled whims.” She glared.

“Mother.” (Y/N) warned but even she knew it was fruitless.

“Your father raised you impeccably. You're smart and cultured the way a business tycoon’s daughter should be. Now look at you, you're waist deep in political mud. You aren't even running yourself, you get nothing from his accomplishments.” She spoke calmly, fully aware of that sound could travel outside the boardroom.

“Mr. Jung didn't send father to jail. My father stole money from him, something Mr. Jung lost a career in politics over. He stood in court and spoke the truth, something you and father should have done in the first place. You left long before that, I wasn't even expecting you to be there when my father was arrested, I only saw you in court. You aren't allowed to come here and treat me like a matured investment. If you know I'm smart you should know that my affairs are none of your concern.” She got up and picked up her coat, “I'll see you at the funeral, Mother.” She acknowledged her for the last time and left.

The next time (Y/N) heard, her mother had moved into the apartment.

[practicallyrational-blog]

A Brief Outline of Some Obvious Things

Let me just start off by making the obvious point that Citizens United was one of the worst things that has ever happened to this country. The other day I was listening to what was formerly known as the "Waking Up" podcast with Sam Harris, who, at the beginning of the podcast was explaining why he continues to refuse to run ads on his podcast and depends solely on individual contributions from listeners:

"If I were taking a lot of money from the New Yorker, would I be free to say that one of it's writers had just published something scandalously stupid? Maybe.

"But ... I don't want to have to think twice about whether something I think is important to say might upset a sponsor. And you don't want me to have to think about that either. My goal with this podcast is to create a forum for honest conversation of a sort that scarcely exists anywhere else ... And there is no way I can do that [while] depending on ads."

This is equally relevant in contemporary American politics which is why I've personally decided that I will never vote for another Presidential candidate that accepts campaign contributions from anything other than individual donors and is completely transparent about every dollar they receive to fund their campaign.

So let's talk about this for a paragraph or three. Currently there is a push for candidates and congresswomen and men to reject corporate campaign donations and, as of my last count, there are currently 52 members of congress who have publicly committed to rejecting donations from corporate PACs right now, and in future campaigns. This is huge. It allows these lawmakers more freedom to legislate without outside pressure from corporate interest groups and donors and this should be an automatic litmus test for anyone running for office. It is for me. So, I got to looking and of these 52 members, guess how many of them are Republicans?

2.

Francis Rooney and Phil Roe.

Every other Republican member of congress has currently refused to give up even a single dollar of their corporate funding, keeping them in submissive obedience to the interests of their donors. This should be all that anyone really needs to know about the motives and intentions of the entire GOP. Excluding, at least partially, of course, Rooney and Roe.

So think about what this means. Because the needs of you and I are often in conflict with the desires of corporate barons and billionaires, when policy creation or changes occur, who do you think is going to get their voice heard and have their needs met? In fact, who do you think is initiating the policy changes in the first place? Honest politicians?

Consider something else. Have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you were being literally, utterly f ... screwed by a company you worked for? Or a business you no longer wanted the services of? Your bank or a loan shark? An aggressive private towing company that won't take the boot off your car when you have to get to work? How hopeless does it feel to know that you stand absolutely zero legal chance fighting alone against a conglomerate like Wells Fargo or Walmart or Jim's Nice Guy Towing? No matter how right you are and wrong they were? Soak in that feeling for a minute. And let me ask you, and you can answer this for yourself, why do you think it's set up this way? How do you think it got like this?

So we have all this money flying around up there, above the rest of us. And to keep the masses ignorant of this greedy exchange we see an ideological media assault where old men in ties endlessly praise the Divine Virtue of "trickle down" economics and unregulated, Laissez-faire free markets. Why? Because this is the type of market within which this little dance with the devil can occur. This group of television and radio provocateurs, led early on, by Bob Grant and Rush Limbaugh, exploded onto the scene in the 80's after the revocation of the the FCC Fairness Doctrine which required broadcasters to present and report on issues of national importance with honesty and fairness. Rush Limbaugh, for example, moved to New York and started his radio broadcast in 1988 less than a year after the revocation.

The primary focus of the show, at least early on, was to create a boogeyman of what was referred to as the "liberal media" and to demonize any cooperative effort among the people to force the fair taxation of billionaires and establish social safety nets or humane legislation as GASP! SOCIALISM! The slippery slope. Which would actually make a pretty good name for a ride at an amusement park.

So, gradually at first, and then with increasing momentum through the 80's, we see an entire generation (mostly baby boomers) conflating and confusing the concept of Patriotism and the "American way" with supply side (Laissez-faire), trickle down economics, when the reality of our history tells a totally different story. I defer to the post World War II economic explosion and the 91% top marginal tax rate during that time. This economic golden era slowed drastically as the baby boomers began taking over in the 70's and came to a shit spewing halt with the Reagan corporate tax cuts and massive market deregulation in the 80's. I never knew about this growing up.

These heads with ties and mouth have made it laughably easy for policy makers to institute massive tax cuts for the ultra rich and deregulation of their companies because they had our parents and, by proxy, most of the rest of us convinced that of course, this was all being done in the name of good ole' American free market values. And we all knew, from listening to Reagan and watching watching Fox News (which exploded in the 90's) that the extra money would trickle it's way down to the rest of us in the end (wink, wink). Oh, and of course, we can say with confidence that all of this had absolutely nothing to do with the money that was and is being donated to install these cronies into our government in the first place. Citizens United is the culmination of the national corporate economic overhaul.

What's so devious about this tragic and immoral economic decay is that as it's occurring right in front of our eyes, half of the country is defending it. And it's generally the half of the country that is getting screwed the worst. None the wiser.

Fortunately, we have a newer, younger generation of internet savvy, fact checking Gen-X, Millenial and Gen-Z snowflake commie cucks who are finally starting to figure out what Mom and Dad didn't. The numbers are in and the old men are making less sense every day. Of course to any competent young google guru (say that 5 times fast) or fact checker, none of this stuff is checking out and the walls come crashing down fairly quickly. So, may I just say, Mr. Sean Hannity, hold on to your red tie, because the first wave of snowflakes were just sworn into congress earlier this month. And I have a feeling that we will be seeing some changes in an office even higher than that in the very near future. Here's to a better future for those of us left over to pick up the pieces.

[acsversace-news]

Ryan Murphy hates the word “camp.” He sees it as a lazy catchall that gets thrown at gay artists in order to marginalize their ambitions, to frame their work as niche. “I don’t think that when John Waters made ‘Female Trouble’ that he was, like, ‘I want to make a camp piece,’ ” Murphy told me last May, as we sat in a production tent in South Beach, Florida, where he was directing the pilot of “American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace,” a nine-episode series for FX. “I think that he was, like, ‘It’s my tone—and my tone is unique.’ ”

Murphy prefers a different label: “baroque.” Between shots, the showrunner—who has overseen a dozen television series in the past two decades—elaborated, with regal authority, on this idea. To Murphy, “camp” describes not irony but something closer to clumsiness, the accident you can’t look away from. People rarely use the term to describe a melodrama made by a straight man; even when “camp” is meant as a compliment, it contains an insult, suggesting a musty smallness. “Baroque” is big. Murphy, referring to TV critics (including me) who have applied “camp” to his work, said, “I will admit that it really used to bug the shit out of me. But it doesn’t anymore.”

We were outside the Casa Casuarina, the Mediterranean-style mansion that the Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace renovated and considered his masterwork—a building with airy courtyards and a pool inlaid with dizzy ribbons of red, orange, and yellow ceramic tiles. A small bronze statue of a kneeling Aphrodite stood at the top of the mansion’s front steps. In 1997, a young gay serial killer named Andrew Cunanan shot Versace to death there as the designer, who was fifty, was returning from his morning stroll.

The previous day, Murphy had filmed the murder scene. Cunanan was played by Darren Criss, a star of Murphy’s biggest hit, “Glee.” I’d visited the set that day, too, arriving to find ambulances, cops, and paparazzi swarming outside. There was a splash of red on the marble steps. Inside the house, Edgar Ramirez, the Venezuelan actor playing Versace, sat in a shaded courtyard, his hair caked with gun-wound makeup, his face lowered in his hands.

Now Murphy was filming the aftermath of the crime, including a scene in which two lookie-loos dip a copy of Vanity Fair into the puddle of Versace’s blood. (They sell the relic on eBay.) The vibe was an odd blend of sombre and festive; a half-naked rollerblader spun in slow circles on the sidewalk next to the beach. Murphy, who is fifty-three, is a stylish man, but on set he wore the middle-aged male showrunner’s uniform: baggy cargo shorts and a polo shirt. He has a rosebud mouth and close-cropped vanilla hair. He is five feet ten but has a brawny air of command, creating the illusion that he is much taller. His brother is six feet four, he told me, as was his late father; Murphy thinks that his own growth was stunted by chain-smoking when he was a rebellious teen-ager, in Indiana.

Murphy’s mood tends to shift unexpectedly, like a wonky thermostat—now warm, now icy—but on the “Versace” set he made one confident decision after another about the many shows he was overseeing, as if skipping stones. He also answered stray questions—about the casting for a Broadway revival of “The Boys in the Band” that he was producing, about a grand house in Los Angeles that he’d been renovating for two years. “Ooh, yes!” he said, inspecting penis-nosed clown masks that had been designed for his series “American Horror Story.” He approved a bespoke nail-polish design for an actress. A producer handed Murphy an updated script, joking, “If there’s a mistake, you can drown me in Versace’s pool!,” then scheduled a notes meeting for “American Crime Story: Katrina,” whose writers were working elsewhere in the building. Now and then, Murphy FaceTimed with his then four-year-old son, Logan, who, along with his two-year-old brother, Ford, was in L.A. with Murphy’s husband, David Miller.

“I never get overwhelmed or feel underwater, because I feel like all good things come from detail,” Murphy told me. It’s what got him to this point: the compulsion, and the craving, to do more. “Baroque is a sensibility I can get behind,” he said. “Baroque is a maximalist approach to storytelling that I’ve always liked. Baroque is a choice. And everything I do is an absolute choice.”

Murphy’s choices, perhaps more than those of any other showrunner, have upended the pieties of modern television. Like a wild guest at a dinner party, he’d lifted the table and slammed it back down, leaving the dishes broken or arranged in a new order. Several of Murphy’s shows have been critically divisive (and, on occasion, panned in ways that have raised his hackles). But he has produced an unusually long string of commercial and critical hits: audacious, funny-peculiar, joyfully destabilizing series, in nearly every genre. His run started with the satirical melodrama “Nip/Tuck” (2003), then continued with the global phenomenon “Glee” (2009) and with “American Horror Story,” now entering its eighth year, which launched the influential season-long anthology format. His legacy is not one standout show but, rather, the sheer force and variety and chutzpah of his creations, which are linked by a singular storytelling aesthetic: stylized extremity and rude humor, shock conjoined with sincerity, and serious themes wrapped in circus-bright packaging. He is the only television creator who could possibly have presented Lily Rabe as a Satan-possessed nun, gyrating in a red negligee in front of a crucifix while singing “You Don’t Own Me,” and have it come across as an indelible critique of the Catholic Church’s misogyny.

When Murphy entered the industry, he sometimes struck his peers as an aloof, prickly figure; he has deep wounds from those years, although he admits that he contributed to this reputation. Nonetheless, Murphy has moved steadily from the margins to television’s center. He changed; the industry changed; he changed the industry. In February, Murphy rose even higher, signing the largest deal in television history: a three-hundred-million-dollar, five-year contract with Netflix. For Murphy, it was a moment of both triumph and tension. You can’t be the underdog when you’re the most powerful man in TV.

On that sunny afternoon in South Beach, however, Murphy was still comfortably ensconced in a twelve-year deal with Fox Studios. On FX, which is owned by Fox, he had three anthology series: “American Horror Story”; “American Crime Story,” for which he was filming “Versace,” writing “Katrina,” and planning a season based on the Monica Lewinsky scandal; and “Feud,” whose first season starred Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis and Jessica Lange as Joan Crawford.

For Fox, he was developing “9-1-1,” a procedural about first responders. He had announced two shows for Netflix: “Ratched,” a nurse’s-eye view of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” starring Sarah Paulson; and “The Politician,” a satirical drama starring Ben Platt. Glenn Close was trying to talk him into directing her in a movie version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical “Sunset Boulevard.” Murphy was writing a book called “Ladies,” about female icons. He had launched Half, a foundation dedicated to diversity in directing, and had committed to hiring half of his directors from underrepresented groups. And, he told me, there was something new: a series for FX called “Pose,” a dance-filled show set in the nineteen-eighties.

It was no mystery which character in his current series Murphy most identified with: Gianni Versace himself. Versace was a commercially minded artist whose brash inventions were dismissed by know-nothings as tacky, and whose openness about his sexuality threatened his ascent in a homophobic era. Versace, too, was a baroque maximalist, Murphy told me, who built his reputation through fervid workaholism—an insistence that his vision be seen and understood. “He was punished and he struggled,” Murphy said, then spoke in Versace’s voice: “Why aren’t I loved for my excess? Why don’t they see something valid in that?”

[...] Murphy has long been a connoisseur of extremes and hyperbole, games and theatricality. He rates everything he sees and revels in institutions that do the same—the Oscars are a kind of religion for him. In Miami, at dinner with the “Katrina” and “Versace” writers, he played a high-stakes game in which he was forced to immediately choose one person in his circle over another; he demurred only when the choice was between Jessica Lange and Sarah Paulson. His go-to question is “Is it a hit or a flop?,” and he asked it about every show that came up in conversation, as I observed him giving shape to “Pose,” from scouting locations to editing dance footage. (He has other stock phrases. “What’s the scoop?” is how he begins writers’ meetings. “Energy begets energy” explains his impulse to add new projects. “That’s interesting” sometimes indicates “That’s worth noticing” but just as often means “That’s infuriating.”)

[...] His multitasking benefits greatly from the freedoms of cable and streaming: he has zero nostalgia for the twenty-two-episode network grind of a show like “Glee,” in which “halfway through Episode 15 you had nothing left to say, the actors were sick, the writers were sick, and it was fucking oatmeal until the end.” He favors eight or ten episodes, often with a small writers’ room, as with “Pose.” He writes scripts for some shows, whereas for others he gives notes; on a few projects, like his HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play “The Normal Heart,” he’s very hands-on. “We left blood on the dance floor,” Murphy said, affectionately, of his three-year collaboration with Kramer. “Versace” had one writer, Tom Rob Smith. But Murphy provided close directorial, design, and casting oversight, and he had a strong commitment to the show’s themes, particularly the contrast between Versace and Cunanan, two gay men craving success, but only one willing to work for it.

[...] In the meanwhile, Murphy had scored a ratings bonanza with Fox’s “9-1-1,” a wackadoo procedural featuring stories like one about a baby caught in a plumbing pipe. It was his parting gift to Dana Walden. “Versace” had been, by certain standards, a flop: lower ratings, mixed reviews. Artistically, though, it was one of Murphy’s boldest shows, with a backward chronology and a moving performance by Criss as Cunanan, a panicked dandy hollowed out by self-hatred. After the finale aired, a new set of reviews emerged. Matt Brennan, on Paste, argued that “Versace” had been subjected to “the straight glance”—a critical gaze that skims queer art, denying its depths. “Even critics sympathetic to the series seem as uncomfortable with its central subject as the Miami cops were with those South Beach fags,” Brennan wrote. Murphy was reading a new oral history of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” in which, in one scene, Roy Cohn denies being gay because, he barks, homosexuals lack power: they are “men who know nobody and who nobody knows.” The line echoes one in “Versace.” A homeless junkie dying of aids tells the cops, bitterly, why gay men couldn’t stop talking about the designer: “We all imagined what it would be like to be so rich and so powerful that it doesn’t matter that you’re gay.”

[alexsbrain]

Victim (1961)

    A commercial film done in the style of a thriller about a blackmail ring targeting homosexual men. No, it’s not the latest film at Cannes, it’s an English film from the sixties. Victim was made at a time when the physical love between two same-sex partners was punishable by law. By the late fifties many politicians and activists were questioning this law and fighting for decriminalization. Victim is a product of the nascent Queer rights movement in post-war England and the dramatic personification of the Wolfenden report which urged lawmakers to decriminalize homosexuality. Starring Dirk Bogarde, a gay actor and England’s favourite matinee idol, Victim not only transformed his career but helped sway public opinion, which resulted in the passing of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 effectively decriminalizing homosexuality. The film would receive criticism upon it release and throughout the years, yet it remains the first English language film to openly portray the terror of being Queer.

Barrett on the run

    The film begins with a man on the run. Jack Barret has stolen thousands of pounds from his firm and the police are closing in. On the run ‘Boy Barrett’ contacts his friends in an effort to elicit help or find temporary lodging. He continually contacts the barrister Melville Farr, who refuses to help him. While hiding in a road house café  the police nab him in a men’s lavatory trying to flush pages from his scrap book. At the police station the two detectives spell out the trouble, they believe Barret is being blackmailed because he is gay. When the police piece together his scrap book they find articles about the famous barrister Farr. As Farr arrives at the station he is told Barret has hanged himself. Panic sets in, Farr and Barret had been involved. As Farr returns home his wife senses his anguish but he shrugs it off, not wishing to tell her about his double life. Meanwhile the black mailers are starting to get greedy, demanding larger amounts of money from their victims and start setting their sights on Farr. Farr is determined to find the black mailers and put an end to their tyranny, even if it means fighting against those who want to remain in the closet and at the cost of his reputation.

    After the war there was a new sense of creative freedom in Europe, a cultural explosion in every artistic medium. European cinema was in a position to tackle themes and subjects considered too risqué for puritan American audiences. England’s penchant for theater positioned itself for the first English language post-war take on Queer rights. Unable to compete financially with the American industrial movie machine (Hollywood), England could instead craft films of high quality and a progressive social agenda.

    Victim is a product of the post war cultural boom, it’s not only an important film socially, it is also a well-crafted piece of cinema. Its use of film language is daft, and it never feels awkward or shoddy, a testament to the technical proficiencies of the English film industry. After modest success with a similarly progressive film, Sapphire, the crew reunited for Victim. With a script penned by Janet Green and John McCormick, the husband and wife writing team, director Basil Rearden and producer Michael Relph of Allied Film Makers started preproduction on Victim then entitled Boy Barrett. John Trevelyan of the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors) had several notes on the touchy subject. The BBFC’s role was not to asses a films commercial potential, only it’s content and even though, “to the great majority of cinema-goers homosexuality is outside their direct experience and is something that is shocking, distasteful and disgusting,” but since homosexuality was not forbidden by the board, unlike in America, and “the story was told with sympathy and compassion,” they were granted a seal with little reservation.  

“You knew of course that Barrett was a homosexual.”

    After several actors turned down the main role of Farr, for various reasons not all of which were legitimate, Dearden approached Bogarde in December of 1960 and he jumped at the chance to play the closeted barrister. Principal photography commenced on January 30th, 1961 to little fan-fare nor protest. Despite its controversial subject matter the film would wrap without much incident from the public or press.

    Some criticism of the film surrounds the restrained ‘tact’ which was used to tell the story. Today it can seem old fashioned or too subtle, yet the filmmakers knew that with such a racy subject matter limits had to be enforced to ensure the films success. Instead they cleverly disguised Victim as a thriller, the opening scenes invoke a Hitchcockian sense of danger, a panic-stricken suffocation as the police close in on Barrett. By using a well-known genre, known for it’s riveting audience response, the film could then tell a story which otherwise might have seemed too daring for cinema-goers. By introducing the familiar clichés of suspense, a man on the run and detectives, Victim can make audiences feel comfortable while introducing characters that in other terms might seem revolting. The compassion evoked from the viewer is one of the films strengths.

  Farr’s wife right before the confession

   The pivotal scene of film is when Farr confesses to his wife. It is a scene of great cinematic staging and blazing performance. After entering the parlor Farr’s wife demands he tell her the truth. Standing in the dark, she watches Farr walkover and turn on a light as her tells her about his ‘sordid’ double life. Unable to fully comprehend vague answers she pushes him for the truth, asking him if he loved Barrett like a man loves a woman, resulting in the famous dialogue delivered by Bogarde.

Quiet a scandalous admission for the early sixties. Bogarde thought of this film as incredibly personal, and it is one of his best performance which was responsible for transforming his career into the heavy avant-garde powerhouse he is known as today. In the opening scenes Barret calls Farr repeatedly. Farr answers the phone at his desk and tells Barrett he cannot help him then hangs up. Bogarde’s hand has a soft daintiness in the wrist while hanging up, this subtlety of gesture speaks volumes, at this moment the audience realizes that Farr is gay. It’s one of those brilliant moments for an actor where body language and staging reveal more than any line of dialogue could.

The compassionate detectives

    Several characters in the film represent the various levels and dichotomies of English society. The two main detectives in the story serve as a metaphor for the civil servant middle class. The lead detective displays remorse at Queer men’s predicament, even turning around his younger detective by paralleling puritan prosecution with homosexual persecution. They foreshadow the gradual, albeit lengthy, acceptance of the middle class of gay rights.

The common bartender 

   The bartender in the local pub serves his Queer patrons but is secretly disgusted by them. A female patron scolds him for his views, yet the bartender serves as a representation of the less educated working-class attitudes, or the mercantile class. They are more skeptical of homosexuals yet will still take their money.

The closeted elitists

    There are several Queer characters in the film who try to stop Farr from foiling the blackmailers. It is an analogy to those who wish to stay in the closet, usually wealthier men of the ruling class who do not want to risk losing their inheritance, or public standing, and will gladly live a double life, paying the blackmailers because they can afford to as it is preferable than living a public life of shame. These characters are portrayed unsympathetically and serve as juxtaposition to Farr’s noble outward attempts to right a wrong.

An unwelcome guest

    The female characters are split between disgust and acceptance. The girlfriend of one of Barret’s school chums is revolted by Barret and will not allow him to stay at their house while he is on the run. The lead blackmailer is also female, she too is revolted by homosexuals and enterprisingly exploits their wicked sins to her capitalistic advancement. Farr’s wife is surprisingly open to her husband’s sexuality. They share a broader love more akin to the sister brother relationship than man and wife. While the news of her husbands love for Barret shocks her, in the end the bond between the two characters is greater than sexual identity. The female pub patron, a model by trade, is open and accepting, in many scenes she is surrounded by Queer men sharing a laugh over a pint or a glass of sherry. He profession in the arts gives her a broader understanding of human desire, even if she is part of the working class.

  The sympathetic model

   Queer cinema has evolved exponentially over the last sixty years, but when Victim was released it was one of the first films to, “start the adult and serious approach to dealing with homosexuality.” Daring for 1961, it was the first English language film to have the word homosexual spoken aloud, and it does not hide behind metaphors or clever symbology. As a young man dealing with his own sexual identity English filmmaker Terence Davies recalled seeing victim in theaters as a teenager, “gay men, who for the first time saw credible representation of themselves and their situations in a commercial British Film.” With social media chattering over the last few years about the subject of representation among minorities and members of the LGBTQ community, filmmakers could take a cue from Victim. The act of including members of society that do not normally have broad representation goes a long way in normalizing those groups not only for themselves but for others as well.  

    One has to commend the makers of Victim, co-star Sylvia Sims called the film and Bogarde “brave,” and “revolutionary,” it gave a voice to a community that was still oppressed. Perhaps the greatest compliment an actor or filmmaker could be paid was found in a note sent to Bogarde. Lord Arran, the man responsible for sponsoring the bill that later became know as the Sexual Offence Act of 1967 in the house of Lords, thanked Bogarde for, “helping to push the public opinion in favour of decriminalization.” Today Victim stands as a fictional testament to some of the struggles faced by the Queer community and serves as a remainder to our history of persecution. Not only is Victim a time capsule, it is also a wonderfully crafted piece of cinema.

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Minions and Master – an army of obedient servants needed

from Gifts of Deceit – Sun Myung Moon, Tong-sun Park and the Korean Scandal by Robert B. Boettcher  (pages 144-148) An army of obedient servants would have to be recruited and trained to restore the Kingdom of Heaven to earth under Sun Myung Moon. They would have to work as people had never before worked because there had never been such a great mission. They would have to go wherever Moon sent them to raise the $300 million he needed for making his project worldwide and the billions more he needed to control the wealth of the planet. But Moon did not have shiploads of chained tribal people at his disposal when he arrived in America in 1971. Involuntary servitude was against the law. Could he make people think they were actually willing to be slaves?   He got the answer he wanted from idealistic American youth. He and they were ready for each other. They were people in the age group eighteen to twenty-four, in transition from adolescence to adulthood, student to professional, getting in or getting out of school, family life to life alone. For one in search of a coherent view of the world, college had the effect of making things more confusing by presenting so many different approaches to life without identifying one as altogether right. In the “real” world, problems abounded, from family disunity to the threat of nuclear destruction. At best, things were in disarray; at worst, life was chaotic, depressing. Such minds were fertile soil. Their idealism was the key. Describe how happy people would be if discord could be turned into harmony. Show how this can be done through unified love for God. Then play on the distance between what a person thinks he is and what he wants to be. Hold up ideals and make him ashamed of not living up to his own standards. Instill ideas of self-worthlessness. Make him feel guilty about putting concern for himself above group unity. The burden of guilt could be lightened by working as a family with others who believe the ideals can be attained here on earth. The family has a father who will lead the way. The harder one works for Father, the closer one gets to achieving the goal. Follow Father. God has shown him alone the path to perfection because he is the Messiah.   Moon taught a clear strategy for attracting prospective converts. Until the prospect is converted, he must not know that a strategy is being used. Later he will appreciate being deceived because the motive was his own salvation. First, all church members must make as many new acquaintances as possible. Befriend them by taking a personal interest; do not disagree with their views, whether right or wrong. Do favors. Find the right style to use on each kind of person. Classify his personality. Introduce him to a church member with a similar personality, but don’t reveal that he is a church member. Meet together like that two or three times. Get into conversations on current issues, ethics, or morality. Then say, “I know where there are many serious young people talking about things like this,” or “I have heard of some lectures about a new philosophy, very sincere, very interesting, talking about the problems of life. I would appreciate it if you would go with me so I can get your opinion on it.” The prospect will pay attention to the lecture because he has been asked for criticism. When he says it was wonderful, say, “Oh, I don’t know. Not necessarily so.” But suggest going again in order to learn more about it.   Chris Elkins was president of his fraternity at the University of Arizona when John Shea, a recent acquaintance, invited him to attend a lecture about something called the One World Crusade. What he heard was philosophical, nonreligious, and interesting. So he went again each week for a month or more. The One World Crusade was explained as a movement encompassing all aspects of life. He was impressed by the magnetism of the lecturer, Dr. Joseph Sheftick. He and his fifteen or twenty followers had an aura of confidence, friendliness, and sincerity. They related well to his own interests and seemed warmly concerned about him. As the lectures progressed, a Korean named Sun Myung Moon was mentioned as a great teacher, but the main stress was on the coming of a Messiah to build heaven on earth. It dawned on Elkins that Sun Myung Moon must be the Messiah in question, although no one had said he was. During dinner with the group one night, he stated that observation. Dr. Sheftick raised his head, sat up straight, and announced, “We have a new brother: Chris Elkins.”   Elkins did not affirm Sheftick’s declaration, nor did he deny it. He simply went along for the time being. In fact, he was seriously considering joining. The goals were so noble: peace and brotherhood at all levels. Fund-raising didn’t appeal to him, but he could swallow it because he felt he and the movement really belonged together. And the people gave him so much love and attention that he couldn’t just say no. His best friend tried to dissuade him. When his family protested, Dr. Sheftick warned that Satanic forces work best through those most loved.   Euphoria prevailed during his honeymoon period with the Moon cult. Then the atmosphere became more serious. Elkins didn’t like fasting and staying up all night praying aloud with the others. After a couple of weeks, it all seemed too heavy. Driving back to Illinois to visit his mother in the hospital, he was in a daze. He tried to think things out. What had he got into? Was this the life for him, separated from the rest of the world? The love … the concern … heaven on earth… . What if Moon was really what they said he was? Could he risk losing what they offered? From Illinois, he called the group. It felt good to hear their voices. He would return.   He resigned as president of the fraternity. The Moonies sent him to Phoenix to fund-raise by selling peanuts on the street. He was still restless because Satanic spirits were at work inside him, so he was grateful that another member was by his side at all times. His parents wanted the car back, but a leader chided him: “Who needs it more? Your parents or the movement?”   He was learning. The great crusade required everything he had. The attachment to Father must be total, as Father said: Your whole body, every cell of your body, every movement, every facial motion, even every piece of hair, every ounce of energy must be directed to this one point.   Just as other members were always with him physically, Father was always with him too: You must live with me spiritually all the time—while you are eating, while you are sleeping, while you are in the bathroom, while you are taking a bath, taking a rest, even in dreams you can be sitting with me and discussing with me. That’s the only way. This is the secret of our movement. Whoever has that basic, fundamental attitude and that spiritual power will perform miracles.   Spiritual regeneration required mental somersaults. What once seemed true was now false. What once seemed unreal was now real. The world Elkins had known since birth was the product of original sin. The fall of Adam opened the floodgates to Satanic spirits, which had inundated the lives of Elkins’s ancestors. If he gave himself to Moon completely, he could rid himself of that awful heritage and be restored…

Book review: Robert Boettcher’s Gifts of Deceit insightfully and thoroughly documents the activities and findings of the Fraser Committee. This congressional subcommittee (through its 1978 report) on International Organizations opened a window on a world in Washington which many would prefer to see closed forever. The report of this committee, informally called the Fraser Report, exhaustively documents and details Sun Myung Moon’s role in working to shape American foreign policy. It further names a whole host of characters including American politicians, military leaders, Korean diplomats, former Japanese prime ministers, not to mention President Dwight D. Eisenhower who, wittingly or unwittingly, wound up acting as agents or surrogates for Sun Myung Moon and his “Unification Church”. In addition to reading like a first rate who dunnit Boettcher’s book gives the reader a behind the scenes look at official Washington, which to this day has done nothing about the principal findings of the Fraser Committee: namely that the Unification Church has engaged in systematic violations of U.S law. Banking and currency laws, securities and exchange commission laws, Immigration and naturalization laws and charities fraud laws. Boettcher’s book is the first book which reveals the global geo-political ambitions of the Moon organization. It is a must for students of foreign relations, students of destructive cults, and for students of the U.S. Constitution – particularly those who take an interest in the first and the thirteenth amendments. Allen Tate Wood     2001

United States Congressional investigation of the Unification Church Robert Boettcher’s mysterious death – New York Times http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifts_of_Deceit

Bo Hi Pak and The Origins of KCFF

[jccamus]

Perspective | Facebook will now show you exactly how it stalks you — even when you’re not using Facebook

Perspective | Facebook will now show you exactly how it stalks you — even when you’re not using Facebook https://ift.tt/2O6ggiM

Even with Facebook closed on my phone, the social network gets notified when I use the Peet’s Coffee app. It knows when I read the website of presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg or view articles from The Atlantic. Facebook knows when I click on my Home Depot shopping cart and when I open the Ring app to answer my video doorbell. It uses all this information from my not-on-Facebook, real-world life to shape the messages I see from businesses and politicians alike.

You can see how Facebook is stalking you, too. The “Off-Facebook Activity” tracker will show you 180 days’ worth of the data Facebook collects about you from the many organizations and advertisers in cahoots with it. This page, buried behind lots of settings menus (here’s a direct link), is the product of a promise CEO Mark Zuckerberg made during the height of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal to provide ways we can “clear the history” in our accounts.

Facebook’s new tool isn’t nearly as useful as your Web browser’s clear-history button — it doesn’t let you reset your entire relationship with Facebook. But along with the transparency, it does give you a way to unlink some of its surveillance from your Facebook account.

You might be shocked or at least a little embarrassed by what you find in there. My Post colleagues found that Facebook knew about a visit to a sperm-measurement service, log-ins to medical insurance and even the website to register for the Equifax breach settlement. Even when your phone is entirely off, businesses can upload information about you making an in-store purchase. One colleague found 974 apps and websites shared his activity.

There’s not necessarily a new privacy violation here. Facebook has been partnering with websites, apps and stores to track and target customers for years. And it’s hardly alone. Lots of companies send information about us to ad and data firms. Think of it more as a reminder that we’re all living in a reality TV program where the cameras are always on.

To see what information Facebook has collected about you from other apps, websites and businesses, go to Settings, then Your Facebook Information, then Off-Facebook Activity.

Anyone who’s concerned about the power Facebook has to manipulate people and shape elections should care about how it tracks us. It’s easy to forget in the constant barrage of Zuckerberg’s privacy apologies and fines, but here’s the reality: Facebook keeps gathering more and more data about us, with few laws restricting how it can use it.

Rivals such as Google don’t offer anything comparable to the “Off-Facebook Activity” page.

“Despite how commonplace this activity is across the Internet, we believe it’s important to help people understand why they’re seeing the ads they see and to give them control over how their data is used, regardless of the services they use,” says Facebook spokesman Jay Nancarrow.

Regardless, I’ll take Facebook’s new tool as a win for us. It offers an opportunity to see in ugly detail how Facebook’s advertising surveillance system actually works. Chances are, it’s not at all like you think.

Why are you seeing that ad?

If all of this sounds confusing, it’s not your fault. A Pew survey published in 2019 found 74 percent of American Facebook members were unaware that the social network builds a dossier on each of us to target ads. Facebook makes its surveillance systems so convoluted and, frankly, boring that we’re less likely to object. I’m not letting that stop me.

Here’s the big picture: Everybody’s experience on Facebook and Instagram is different. Your feed might be filled with stories about luxury real estate and ads from Mike Bloomberg, while mine might be NASCAR and President Trump commercials. That’s because Facebook’s software uses the data it gathers about us to tailor what it shows us. Facebook also lets advertisers target messages to the people the data suggests might be most receptive — or, in the case of political advertisers, easily swayed.

Facebook uses some data to put you into “interest” categories, such as people who live in Washington and are into cats. You can see the boxes Facebook has put you in by looking under its “ad preferences” menus. (Click here for a direct link to view and, if you want, delete some of these categories.)

A part of this is easy to understand. Facebook obviously knows who your friends are, what you “like,” and what and where you post. You entered that information yourself.

But there’s also a world of information Facebook gathers that you didn’t volunteer to the social network — and probably didn’t know was being collected.

Facebook’s surveillance is hard to avoid. It doesn’t require you to click “like” or use a “login with Facebook” button. You don’t necessarily have to be logged in to the Facebook app or website on your phone — companies can report other identifying information to Facebook, which will marry up the activity to your account after the fact.

Your off-Facebook activity isn’t exposed to your friends; they won’t see it in the News Feed. The social network also doesn’t pass your personal information back to businesses — they just get the chance to target ads to people with Facebook accounts who triggered the trackers. A company could, for example, ask Facebook to show ads to people who looked at a certain style of shoe. (Off-Facebook activity doesn’t contribute to Facebook’s dossier of your ad “interests,” but the social network might use it to suggest groups, events or Marketplace items to buy.)

Thanks to the “Off-Facebook Activity” tool, I now know that Home Depot told Facebook when I visited its online store, viewed an item or added an item to a shopping cart. The Atlantic shared the pages I viewed and devices I used, which it says inform its distribution strategy and help it target campaigns. The Washington Post says it stopped using the Facebook tracking pixel, along with some other social-networking trackers, on content pages as of Oct. 24.

The Buttigieg campaign says it used the Facebook tracking pixel to target ads at people who have visited its website or engaged with its donation link. Peet’s Coffee didn’t respond to my questions.

Ring, which is owned by Amazon, let Facebook know when I installed or opened its app. Spokeswoman Yassi Shahmiri says Ring uses the information to “optimize our marketing campaigns on Facebook,” including advertising less to people who already own the product.

But is that a good reason to share information about my doorbell with Facebook? Shahmiri says Ring doesn’t share specific camera data, such as a motion detected at your door. But Ring does ping Facebook when I open the app, which is almost always when there’s someone at my door. Guess I was foolish to presume what happens on my doorstep stays between me and Ring. (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all tech with the same critical eye.)

Facebook says it puts limits on the information organizations can share with it. For example, they’re not supposed to pass along health and financial information. But it’s unclear how well Facebook polices this. Using forensic software, I found Facebook tracker code on the website for an HIV drug. Nancarrow, the Facebook spokesman, says that “a health site with a Facebook Pixel does not mean that they are sharing sensitive medical information with Facebook.”

Don’t businesses worry we’ll find this to be oversharing? Most probably never thought we’d find out. Facebook says companies are required to provide us “robust notice” that they’re sending data about our activity to the social network. But I found that very few explained this tracking in clear terms.

Facebook wants to paint surveillance as totally normal. Zuckerberg often says people want to see “relevant” ads. I wonder whom he’s asking. About 81 percent “of the public say that the potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits,” according to Pew.

What you can do

You can do a few things to fight back against Facebook’s surveillance, some of which haven’t been available before.

The new “Off-Facebook Activity” page includes ways to ask Facebook to cut it out. From that page, click on “Clear History” to tell Facebook remove that data from your account.

After you’ve done that, you still need to inform Facebook you want them to stop adding this data to your profile in the future. On the same “Off-Facebook Activity” page, look for another option to “Manage Future Activity.” (To find it, you may first have to click “More Options” — sorry, I know they’re not making this easy.) Click that, and then click the additional button labeled “Manage Future Activity,” and then toggle off the button next to “Future Off-Facebook Activity.”

An important caveat: Turning off your off-Facebook activity will mean losing access to apps and websites you’ve used Facebook to login to in the past. (Aside from privacy concerns, there are also security reasons why Facebook logins are a bad idea.)

While we’re adjusting things, I also recommend changing one other bad Facebook default setting. Under the settings menu, go to “Your Ad Preferences” (click here to go directly). Under the heading “Ad settings,” look for “Ads based on data from partners.” Make sure it is set to “Not allowed.”

Now I have to share a bummer: Changing these settings doesn’t actually stop Facebook from collecting data about you from other businesses. Facebook will just “disconnect” it from your profile, to use the social network’s carefully chosen word. Mostly they’re just promising they’ll no longer use it to target you with ads on Facebook and Instagram — which means you’ll be less likely to be manipulated based on your data. (Facebook has separately said that starting this summer we will be able to adjust a setting to see fewer political and social issue ads on Facebook and Instagram.)

So what can you do if you don’t want Facebook collecting all this data about you in the first place? That requires more hand-to-hand combat.

On your computer, use a Web browser that fights trackers, like Mozilla’s Firefox. Or go even further by adding an ad or tracking-blocking extension to your browser, such as the EFF’s Privacy Badger. My account tallied much less off-Facebook activity than most of my colleagues because I use Firefox along with Mozilla’s Facebook Container add-on, which prevents Facebook’s software from connecting with other sites.

In smartphone apps, where tracking is also increasingly common, tracking even is harder to stop. A few services, such as Disconnect’s Privacy Pro, scan app activity and block tracker traffic, but they may also interfere with the way apps function.

Or there’s the ultimate fix: Say farewell to Facebook and Instagram forever, and close your accounts. So far, though, that’s not a choice most people have been willing to make.

Read more from our Secret Life of Your Data series:

https://ift.tt/2vaLsHh via Washington Post February 7, 2020 at 08:14PM

[xtruss]

COULD THE SENATE CONVICT DONALD TRUMP? HERE'S WHAT MITCH MCCONNELL WORRIES ABOUT!

BY BILL POWELL , 11/15/19

Convincing 67 Senators to convict Trump will be tough. But Democrats knows a path to victory.

Mitch McConnell has reason to worry—and that means Donald Trump does, too.

To convict President Trump of an impeachable offense, the Democrats have to muster a two-thirds vote in the Senate: at least 20 Republican senators (and probably more like 22 because of expected Democratic defections) would have to break ranks. That math sounds unforgiving, and it's true that the road to 67 votes is a narrow and bumpy one. But the Senate majority leader and the White House fear that if more than a couple of GOP senators say they intend to vote against Trump, there will be something of a traffic jam as Republican senators turn against the president.

For starters, it's no secret that some senators can't stand Trump. Former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, famously a "never Trumper," said in September that if it were a private vote, 35 senators would vote to oust the president. Utah Senator Mitt Romney stands out among this group—and for Trump the feeling of disdain is distinctly mutual, never mind that during his transition the then-president-elect actually interviewed the former GOP standard bearer for Secretary of State. Romney recently called Trump's interactions with Ukraine's president "appalling." Trump called Romney "a pompous ass" on Twitter. Though Romney has said he has an open mind and will see where the facts take him, Trump vote-counters already assume his vote is lost.

The White House—and McConnell—have their eyes on two senators in particular: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. They are no fans of the president. Murkowski famously voted against the bill repealing Obamacare in 2017, thus helping save it and dealing Trump a bitter defeat. Collins, who is up for reelection in what is expected to be a close race next year, has repeatedly criticized Trump. She said he "made a big mistake" asking Beijing to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings there and called for the president to retract a tweet in which he compared the House impeachment investigation to a "lynching."

McConnell is worried their votes are not safe. In fact, in his role as Trump's sherpa—the calm hand who knows better than anyone how to count his caucus' votes—McConnell counseled the president to call Murkowski and pledge to work with her on an ambitious energy bill that the Alaska senator has been pushing for three years. He also told Trump to knock off the juvenile name-calling of Mitt Romney, which other senators found distasteful.

"[McConnell] has stressed to the president that he thinks he can keep the caucus together, but Trump needs to help," says a Senate source familiar with McConnell's thinking. "He can't just demand loyalty and expect to give nothing back. That's not how this is going to work."

The passionate partisanship that has kept Republicans aligned with Trump until now might work against the president and McConnell. University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato notes that "the nationalization of politics—how people feel about the president—is bleeding down the ballot to an extreme degree." In 2016, every state with a Senate race voted for the same party for senator and president—the first time that's happened since 1912, when the era of popular voting for the Senate began. And as Sabato says, "impeachment may be the ultimate nationalizing event" for Senate members.

Will the Senate convict Donald Trump (if the House impeaches him)? Mitch McConnell is worried

To understand the implications, consider the GOP senators up for reelection in purple swing states: first-term Senators Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona and Joni Ernst of Iowa. The first two are in races viewed as toss-ups; in Colorado Trump is deeply underwater and in Arizona only slightly less so. If the nationalization thesis holds, it could be risky for Gardner and McSally to vote to acquit an increasingly unpopular president.

Senator Ernst at this point is a slight favorite to be re-elected in Iowa, but the race will be tricky. Trump's trade war with China has hurt the state's agricultural sector. Ernst also, associates say, has complained about Trump's boorishness: the hush money payments to a porn star, the Billy Bush "locker room talk" video. She publicly has been supportive of Trump but privately isn't much of a fan.

If she defects, it could prompt some others—who are currently saying all the right things to the White House—to consider it, too. Tom Tillis of North Carolina is in a race considered a toss up. Trump won North Carolina in 2016, but is no lock next year.

This is the scenario the Trump White House dreads, and for good reason. The risk is not, at this point, that enough GOP senators will defect to oust him—at least not, again, based on what's currently known about the Ukraine affair. The risk is that even if he's acquitted, he begins to look politically weak in his own party, becoming a drag on down-ballot candidates.

Trump Impeachment Has More Evidence Than Nixon Faced: Watergate Witness

A Senate trial will be open and reasonably fair. It will not look like the president is being railroaded. It will be presided over by John Roberts, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the president's defense team will be allowed to cross examine hostile witnesses and call their own to testify. If, given that, several GOP senators still end up voting for removal, Trump potentially is a dead man walking. "He won't just look weaker going into the general election, he will be weaker," says a source close to McConnell. "If you get Joni Ernst and Martha McSalley, military veterans both, voting against you, you've got trouble."

Other GOP lawmakers are making their own calculations, driven by the ambivalence—usually expressed only privately—that many Republicans in both the House and Senate feel about Trump. Unlike the president, most are used to operating in traditional ways. The president's crassness, his chaotic White House, the recent sellout of the Kurdish fighters in Syria, the "lunatic" effort to strong arm the Ukrainian president to investigate Biden, as one senior Senate staffer describes it: all serve to make Republicans distinctly uncomfortable.

There's an ideological factor at play as well. The vast majority of GOP-ers in both House and Senate believe in longtime Republican policies like free trade and fiscal sobriety. The Tea Party elected 138 House members in 2010 largely as a protest against what was then viewed as out-of-control spending in Washington. In the Trump era, free trade is dead and no one ever talks about spending. "It's as if they've been lobotomized," says Justin Amash, the Michigan Republican who announced his intention to leave the GOP this summer. "I was a Republican, but not a Trump Republican. There are any number of people up here who feel the same way, they're just not willing to say so publicly."

The reason for that is simple: as politicians, they know how to read polls. And while in several recent polls a slim majority of Americans now believe Trump should be removed from office, his support among Republican voters remains rock solid. In a recent Fox News poll in which 51 percent favored his removal, only 16 percent of Republicans did. Trump's overall approval rating was 86 percent among Republicans.

Apostates within Trump's GOP are not treated kindly. Ask Francis Rooney, a representative from Naples, Fla. Last month he gave a television interview in which he equated Trump's Ukraine scandal with Watergate. "I'm very mindful of the fact that back during Watergate everybody said, 'Oh, it's a witch hunt to get Nixon.' Turns out it wasn't a witch hunt. It was absolutely correct."

The backlash from his district was swift, intense and stoked by a furious White House. Several constituents called his office and said if he wasn't prepared to support the president he should stand down. The reaction stunned Rooney; so much so that the next day, he took the advice and announced that he would not run for re-election next year. The episode, more than anything, showed "that this is not the Republican Party anymore," says political scientist Sabato. "It's the Party of Trump."

McConnell has already spoken directly with the president on "multiple occasions" about the impeachment trial, according to four Capitol Hill and White House sources. At this point, sources familiar with McConnell's thinking say, the majority leader does not disagree with the conventional view of the forthcoming impeachment drama: the country's founders made it difficult to remove a president. Based on his understanding of the facts surrounding the Ukraine affair, in which the president allegedly tried to leverage military aid in return for a Ukrainian investigation into political rival Joe Biden and his son, McConnell believes there is little chance Trump would be convicted in the Senate—particularly if a vote to impeach in the House proceeds strictly along partisan lines, which is expected.

McConnell, White House sources say, has told Trump that privately. He is said to be dismissive, too, of the charges Democrats are likely to bring in the House that the Trump White House obstructed their investigation into the Ukraine matter.

Asked if Trump could be convicted, GOP Senate staffers answer with a standard caveat: "If all we know [about Ukraine-gate] is out there now, and nothing new emerges or happens, then no, he would be acquitted," says one staff member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The bottom line, for them, is that the military aid money ultimately flowed to Ukraine, and the government in Kiev never investigated the Bidens. Trump's alleged intervention in the affair ended up being of no consequence, and the idea "that this amounts to an impeachable offense is a joke," as South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham puts it.

But with Trump, this source acknowledges, "you never know." After all, it was just one day after Robert Mueller's Congressional testimony about so-called Russian collusion—which buried Democratic dreams of impeaching Trump on that issue—that the phone call between the president and his Ukrainian counterpart took place.

An impeachment is fluid. Things may not proceed precisely as the political pros believe they will. If Trump loses key votes of support in swing states he needs to win the election, how nervous will the party get? Is it possible enough senators get so nervous they go to the White House and ask that Trump resign, rather than have to put lawmakers on record voting for or against him? Might a weak president put the GOP's hold on the Senate at risk next November?

As of now, the president's rock-solid GOP polls make that seem unlikely, and the Trump base would be enraged and very unlikely to vote for Mike Pence, Nikki Haley or anyone else who might gain the nomination in Trump's wake. Trump may survive and even flourish, much as Bill Clinton did after the GOP's misguided impeachment effort in 1998.

But it isn't a lock. Trump's election upended all political norms and expectations; his impeachment trial is likely to do the same.

— Newsweek

[crookedmediatranscripts]

Pod Save America - Episode 79

09.14.2017 “Amnesty Don”

“The Democrats reach a tentative deal on DACA with Trump, and 16 Democratic Senators sign on to Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan. Then New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joins Jon and Dan to talk about health care and the future of the Democratic Party, and Ana Marie Cox discusses Trump’s voter fraud commission.”

[MUSIC]

0:00:01

Jon Favreau: The presenting sponsor of Pod Save America is Blue Apron.

Jon Lovett: Blue Apron.

JF: Which now offers 30 minutes meals. In parentheses, that's meals every week that take 30 minutes or less to cook.

JL: I don't if you- if you didn't understand 30 minute meals, you shouldn't be operating a fucking stove.

[Laughter]

JF: But keep listening. Which are designed with your busy schedules in mind and made with some flavor and farm fresh ingredients you know and love. Get 30 dollars off your first meal, with free shipping by going to blueapron.com/crooked. Blue apron is a better way to…

JL: Trump is Rubio now.

JF: Cook.

[Laughter]

0:00:35

[MUSIC]

0:00:42

JF: Welcome to Pod Save America. I’m Jon Favreau.

Dan Pfeiffer: I’m Dan Pfeiffer.

JF: On the pod today, we have New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. And later the host of Crooked Media’s With Friends Like These, Ana Marie Cox. Also, this week on Pod Save the World, Tommy talks to Representative Will Hurd, Republican from Texas. First elected Republican on the show- on a Crooked Media show.

DP: Probably not great for him in the long run, is my guess.

JF: [Laughs] Poor Will Hurd. Career was going well until he joined a Crooked Media podcast. And Lovett or Leave it is on tomorrow. I actually don't even know who his guests are. So, sorry Lovett, didn't send me your guests.

[Laughter]

JF: Okay, so where should we start today, Dan? Let's start with- what did you think of the Hillary Clinton interview?

DP: You guys did a great job.

JF: Sweet.

DP: I’m not just blowing smoke up your ass.

JF: I’m just looking- I asked that, I was just fishing for compliments, really.

DP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys did do a great job. I knew you were taking it seriously when I saw the photo, and you and Tommy both had collared shirts on [JF: laughs] and Lovett was not, as far as I could tell, wearing a logo t shirt.

JF: No, Lovett was wearing his Senator Sweater. That's what he... [laughs]

DP: Yeah, you look like actual serious- you look like interns on your first day of work. No, I thought that was great.

JF: [Laughs] Yeah, no. It was- I thought it was good. Have you read the book yet?

DP: I am probably...50 pages in. I started last night, or the day- yesterday I started. It's- there is a great -- and you guys sort of hit on this in the interview, and you can see it- and you can hear it in her voice. And this is probably a microcosm of the entire Hillary Clinton experience in politics -- is there is great diversions between the book itself and the way the book is covered and talked about.

JF: Right. Completely symbolic.

DP: You know. And if you were to read- yeah, if you were to read the coverage you would think it was this bitter diatribe of casting blame on other people and... refusing to accept any responsibility at all for her loss. And it's pretty much...the opposite of that. And I- like, it's not an easy read. Because it's like, those are really dark times for everyone and, like reliving election day or Hillary Clinton's speech, which I watched in a gift shop in Dulles airport [JF: chuckles] with people crying all around me-

JF: Yeah, it was so awful.

DP: Those were hard things to think about. Or inauguration day, and putting yourself in her shoes. That's- it's honest, it's an honest- the parts I’ve read are, like an honest, very open, raw take on an absolutely brutal experience.

JF: Well yeah, I mean- and she does plenty of taking responsibility for her own mistakes. But it makes you- reading the book makes you realize, again, that we all made mistakes- we're all responsible for this. And I don’t know, I thought it was interesting that, you know- basically the point of the book is- or one use of the book is to learn from 2016 so we that don't repeat 2016. And, you know I think some of that is grappling with challenges that no candidate- no one candidate or campaign can control. Propaganda, whether that's Russia or Breitbart or Fox, like, you know political media that's obsessed with scandal more than policy, and sexism, racism, voter suppression and all that. And I think she does a great job of laying all that out. Some of what we need to learn is obviously grappling with challenges that candidates and campaigns can control. And that's your message, your policy, sort of like the career and life decisions you make prior to the campaign. Making sure your messages break through. And I think she's- in the book she does a really good job of acknowledging all those. I think she has less to say about how to change those things going forward. Because I think she honestly is not sure, you know? And neither are we clearly.

[Laughter]

DP: Exactly. Anyone who listens to this podcast knows those answers aren't clear. And it's not clear how applicable those lessons are to...any other situation other than Hillary Clinton v. Donald Trump. Because-

JF: Right.

DP: You know, like- I was talking to someone this morning about the book and I was saying how open and honest it felt, and raw, right, as I said, in the early pages. And the person said to me - if that Hillary Clinton had shown up in the campaign, would she have won? And your initial thought is, “Yes, of course.” Which is the- just the greatest trope of post-election coverage.

JF: I know.

DP: If the Al Gore who gave his final press conf-speech had shown up, then he would have won. It's- the thing about Hillary Clinton, though, is it's impossible. If she had- in- been sort of that casual and honest and human-like on the campaign, it would've been covered and treated as if it was a cynical political play to be in authentically more authentic. Like it's not- like there are- because of the way Hillary Clinton is covered and treated in the political conversation is just fundamentally different than anyone I can think of in my time in politics. It's just- you know you thought about this in the -- like when the book was coming out. My initial take was, “[Groan] I do not wanna relive the 2016 primary.”

JF: Yeah.

DP: And then there's this huge debate over, should Hillary Clinton write a book? Why is she writing a book? Why is she distracting us from 2018? It's like, that conversation only happens about Hillary Clinton, no one else.

JF: Right.

DP: Right, like, Bernie Sanders wrote a book.

JF: Yeah.

DP: No one said that about Bernie Sanders. [Laughs] So- John Kerry stayed on the political stage after he lost, no one complained about that. And it's just, just there is something about Hillary Clinton -- not herself. Not the person Hillary Clinton. The incorrectly wrongly unfairly vilified political persona of Hillary Clinton - which is, automatically turns every political conversation stupid. And I think that that- you sort of can understand- when you see the reaction to the book, it also helps you understand why the task before her in running for President was- not that she didn't make some mistakes, she certainly did - but the task before her was more challenging in reality than it probably was on paper. Because of- just the things that certain politicians have available to them are not available to her because people do not give- the political conversation does not give her the permission structure to actually do those things.

JF: Yeah, and I think the challenge was somewhat obscured by the fact that...she leaves the State Department with like a 60 something percent approval rating. Very well liked, higher approval rating that Barack Obama at the time, you know? And so, you think, “Okay, maybe all the problems that we've had in the past are in the past.” And they certainly were not. What'd you think about the Sanders stuff? The Bernie Sanders stuff? That was another...cause- I mean, look, it's funny when I said that- when I asked her the question about Sanders, I specifically phrased it so that she wouldn't have to talk about Bernie or attack Bernie. I wanted to know about this going forward as a party, are we a party that needs fundamental reform or change in our policy and our message? Or are we a party that almost won and needs some tweaking? So, I thought she would answer that and she used the occasion to go back and take a few shots at Bernie again.

[Laughter]

DP: Yeah. I mean, that was as aggressive as I have seen- well I mean, that's not fair. I don't wanna say it that way. But- I’m even hesitant to answer this question because...

JF: It's so scary, isn't it?

[Laughter]

DP: Yeah. we're- well, we're just- I mean it's scary for whoever- whatever side of the debate is going to, just, go right up in our mentions.

JF: Yeah.

DP: But, it- but even beyond that, it's just there- it is important and that this book and Hillary in the interview and in her larger press tour -- all of which is less consequential than her Pod Save America interview -- is in some part about learning the lessons, right? And it's the lessons about specific Democratic strategies. It's the lessons about...that America’s not exactly, in some ways, what we thought it was coming out of the Obama era. That sexism is, and I wanna get to that in a minute, is more- is a bigger force in politics than I think a lot of people imagined. Hillary Clinton was probably not one of those people who imagined that, given what she's been through in her life, and a lot of women, like Senator Gillibrand, have experienced.

JF: Right.

DP: But- so there's a whole host about it that are important for us to just understand what happened because it is a... seminal moment in American history. And hopefully we recover from it. But, the Bernie part- I understand her raw feelings and I...as I said to you earlier, I can only imagine how we would've felt, if we had gone through that long, bitter primary with Hillary Clinton, and then lost to John McCain. 

JF: Hm.

DP: I can imagine that we would have hat- carried- had a lot of grudges about that. So, I am sympathetic to the emotions behind that. And I do believe that many of Sanders' attacks on Hillary Clinton were unfair. And they were at their heart, pretty deep character attacks. But that also, that- he was not wrong- he had a case to make, he was running for President, he can make that. They weren't out of bounds, but they were tough. But I am not sure that Clinton’s assessment of Sanders' role post-primary is fair. He- I was in the convention when- hall when he put her name in a nomination. I-

JF: Which is interesting because she mentions that in the book. She's actually a bit more charitable to him in the book than she was during our interview and has been covered in the press. And she did not choose to emphasize those more charitable moments that she wrote about.

DP: You know- cause when she says, he should have argued with his supporters...I think what that- I don't- that doesn't mean -- I could be wrong -- but I don't think that means, like his prominent elected official endorsers or his former campaign staff, like Jeff Weaver or Tad Devine or some of the people we came to know on the campaign. Cause in my recollection they followed Bernie Sanders' endorsement and did what they could to help Sanders get out there and campaign for her. I think she means the quote-unquote “Bernie Bros” on Twitter. I’m just not sure...I’m not sure how he would have achieved that goal.

JF: I don't think he could have. I also think it's like- yeah, I mean...look to me this- what matters more than sort of the personal animosity that lingers between them is, you know, the policy message implications going forward. And it's interesting, in the book, and this was Ezra Klein’s first question to her, which I figured it would be. You know at one point in the book she talks about Democrats needing to bolder on their policies. And she starts talking about how they almost proposed universal basic income that was paid for with, you know, some tax on any company that makes money from natural resources -- so oil companies, and some telecom companies. And it's this extremely progressive policy. She talks about taxing net worth instead of income and all these things that, you know, I didn't even hear Bernie talk a lot about during the race and you can sort of imagine a race where she decided that she didn't want him to outflank her on the left and she started proposing these policies. But then again, you know, as she said to us, she has this responsibility gene and she always expects that once you get into the general election someone says, “How do you pay for all this?” And she felt like she couldn't make the numbers work. And you know that's just a very, it's a very Clinton thing.

DP: And I think it is- it's both, she has a responsibility gene and I have no doubt, having worked on campaigns and that the internal view was, we are probably gonna win this primary. It may be tougher than we thought but, you know you look at the delegate math and they were in pretty good shape, Super Tuesday on. Just a question of when they were gonna close it out, and there was also I’m sure, political fear about running in the general and some of these left-wing- these more progressive policies. Left-wing was the wrong term. I don't agree with that political analysis. I think the more progressive populist approach would have worked, but- I understand that. But I also understand her calculus in the primary is- let's say she went to, you know, “x” tax rate on the wealthy. Sanders- there's no world in which she can outflank Sanders.

JF: Yeah.

DP: He can always go to the left of her. Because he did not feel as compelled as she did to make the math work. And she- he was not running, at least until the- he did not think he was gonna be President so he was not- he was running an issues-based campaign to move the Democratic agenda and the political conversation of the country to the left. And he succeeded in that, and which we'll get to in a minute, with- he had great success in that. Hillary Clinton was worried that she was- you were accountable- we know this, you are accountable for your campaign promises when you get there. So, she gets elected and it’s like, “Where's your universal basic income plan? How are you gonna get it passed? What- is it gonna be in your first budget? Talk about it in the State of the Union-“ Like, she was thinking through governing and if you're thinking through governing it can be limiting principle in what can do in the campaign. And someone who does not feel limited by that reality can always get, always outflank you.

JF: Yeah. I mean look- I think if there's one silver lining to 2016, it is that both the primary and the general showed us that we all need to rethink what is- what does electable mean? What does politically feasible mean? And sort of expand the boundaries of what's possible and not be caught up in, you know, being too cautious or worrying about the politics of something. You know, try to go with the biggest, boldest policy goal that you can and then, you know don't make it too unreasonable and don't lie to people, but, you know set a big goal. And don't worry so much about, oh well this isn't politically possible. Well we'll get into this too when we get into our single payer conversation. Before we get to that, we should talk about what happened last night. So, during the campaign, Donald Trump said that young, undocumented Americans known as Dreamers, quote “Have to go.” And last week Jeff Sessions announced Trump would be ending the Obama-era program designed to protect these Dreamers from deportation. A few weeks before that, Trump threatened to shut down the government unless Congress funded his border wall. Last night at the White House, over Chinese food, President Trump reached a tentative deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to offer about 800 thousand young, undocumented Americans a pathway to citizenship in exchange for more border security, but no border wall. Art. Of. The. Deal. And of course, this morning he tweeted that no deal was made. But then he tweeted that Dreamers shouldn't be deported and that the wall would come later. Which is essentially the deal. Dan, what d'you think caused the change?

DP: He said no deal and then laid out all the provisions of the deal that Schumer and Pelosi announced last night. Once again rendering his press secretary, who tweeted there was no deal, looking like a fool in- out the world.

JF: Yep. That's right. So, what d'you think changed here? What do you make of this?

DP: I... I think...you asked me last week why Trump agreed to the debt ceiling deal with the Democrats. And my answer was, “He's dumb.” That is also still my answer today. [JF: laughs] And I- like when Trump talked during the campaign in an interview with Chuck Todd about the Dreamers and when you read the answer that he gives, it's entirely clear that he has no idea who the Dreamers are, what DACA is, what a change in policy means. He's just erring on the side of fewer brown people in America, which is like his default position.

JF: Yeah.

DP: Without thinking about it or anything else. And now- so he goes- this is a pretty simple Pavlovian response, I think. Which is- let's do all the pieces of this. Trump has enjoyed the press coverage that he has received from the world since his fairly minor deal with the Democrats a week or so ago. Trump still remains mad at Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell for screwing up health care and just being terrible at their jobs. And three, he was offered a way out of a problem and he took it without thinking about it. When you really boil this down, Trump is bad at deal making. Which I get the irony that the guy who ran as a great deal maker and wrote- had a book ghost written for him called “The Art of the Deal” is bad at deal making. But he's taking- like we said last week, he's buying his cars at sticker price. It is- he's taking the first offer and not even using a negotiating tactic where you're gonna demand the wall, and then you're gonna trade the wall for this other thing the Democrats wouldn't otherwise give you. So-

JF: Yeah.

DP: I say all that. I will add that I think this is good for the world. And I’m glad it's happening -- if it proceeds on the path that we hope it does.

JF: I think it is great. It is great all around. I mean, most importantly, it is good for the world and it is good for these young undocumented Americans. This is a win for actual people if- if it happens. We don't know. I mean, we have a long way to go, we should say, before this becomes law. You know, Paul Ryan has said before he's not doing any immigration measure in the House unless he gets a majority of Republicans on board. Now, he has also in the last couple days, he's spoken favorably about protecting Dreamers. So, you know unless there's a revolt in the House that sort of threatens Paul Ryan’s job, you know you could see him cobble together enough Republican votes. Then you know you get of course, just about every Democrat in the House will vote for this so you don't need a ton of Republicans, but he probably needs a good chunk of his caucus in order to save face. So, you can see this getting done but we're not there yet. But if it gets done it is, you know a huge policy win. It's a win for the Dreamers. Also- the other thing that’s a win is that Trump's base is so angry right now. [Laughter] So, some of media reaction last night, we're gonna actually- it- basically the MAGA media reaction is split here. Breitbart ran a headline that just said, “Amnesty Don.” Which is awesome. Ann Coulter said, “At this point who doesn't want Trump impeached.” Laura Ingraham was critical and Steve King, renowned racist from Iowa, said, quote “Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair.” It's just- I couldn't get enough of these tweets last night. It was so enjoyable to read these. The only people who are still with him of course are the biggest fucking lackeys in the whole universe, the crew on Fox and Friends and Sean Hannity. Those are the only people who stuck by him. Sean Hannity said, “McConnell failed so miserably with health care that now POTUS has to deal with Dem leaders.” So, he went with the “look what Mitch made him do” line of attack. [Laughter]

DP: I mean he's not wrong.

JF: Right. [Laughter]

DP: I mean, sort of. First and last time I’ll say that about Sean Hannity.

JF: But to twist this around like Donald Trump makes a deal with Democrats. And some of his support- the Fox team, who are basically just White House employees who aren't getting paid by the government - are like, “he's not- it's not his problem he made a deal to this amnesty deal. It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault because he didn't pass health care.” It is a little bit of a bank shot, there.

DP: [Giggles] Yeah. They are twisting themselves into a pretzel to- to stick with Trump. Look, I do not like it when Trump gets good headlines. Like, that makes me unhappy. But if Donald Trump is going to do the exact same thing that President Hillary Clinton was gonna do, I’m cool with that. Because this is the exact deal that Hillary Clinton would have struck with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell -- presuming they stayed in the- Republicans stayed in control of Congress -- to pass the DREAM Act.

JF: Yeah.

DP: It's been sitting there- this is a deal that's been out there for a long time. Republicans did not wanna do it with Obama because...they don't like to do things- because they were gonna- they were hoping they would win an election and get to do something about it and end the program and now...Trump is gonna do Hillary’s bidding. Which is...fucking wonderful.

JF: Yeah, I mean- look, Trump is a- a clear and present to the globe. [Laugh] And we need to, you know, elect him out of office or get him out of office as soon as we can, but while we're waiting for that moment, it's great if he will do things that we agree with. It's very simple to me. It's not like this is something that needs to like twist Democrats in a knot, you know, like “Should we be happy for Trump or not?” It's not about Trump. You're right that he's gonna- he will get some good headlines from traditional media and all the people in DC and the DC pundits and stuff like that. And it'll drive some of us crazy cause it'll be like, you know “Trump, the bipartisan independent deal maker blah, blah, blah.” But, like I said, it's both- substantively this is good, but also politically, I think- you know, one thing we missed a lot of during the campaign is how much conservative media sort of drives that base. And, I’ll say something else pretty crazy,  Steve Bannon- what Steve Bannon said on 60 minutes is right, in that this DACA decision, if it goes forward and they enshrine DACA into law, it will cause a civil war in the Republican party and you're seeing it already. Like, Breitbart and Coulter and some folks lining up on one side, very much against this decision, and then the Fox and Friends and Hannitys of the world still favoring Trump. I mean, this is gonna cause a huge political problem in their party which is also good for us. So, I think this is excellent.

DP: In the last 7 minutes or so, we have applauded something Donald Trump’s done, [JF: laughs] agreed with Sean Hannity, and affirmed a statement of Steve Bannon.

JF: What is-

DP: Our iTunes rankings are about to go in the toilet.

JF: [Laughs] What is happening today? Anyway, so, we'll see. I mean, look, I- the other question is, you know, how long does this new Trump last? Do we trust him? You know...I don't know.

DP: Approximately 7 minutes because immediately after the deal was announced, Trump went on a tweet storm against Hillary Clinton criticizing her for her book. So...

JF: Yeah, no. He's playing the hits there, you know...

DP: We are not- the independent, bipartisan, new, freshly pivoted Trump is bullshit. We will take this deal, presuming it comes to conclusion, any day of the week and twice on Sundays, but let's not pretend we have a new President. I will say one thing after having listening to you guys on Monday, as you know I shared your outrage about all of the ridiculous coverage overselling a- the simple moving of a debt ceiling vote as some sort of...Reagan-Tip O’Neil style tax reform-

JF: Yeah.

DP: Deal. But this is- and the argument was, he gave- there was no progressive principle- conservative principle that he sacrificed in order to do that deal. This is actually one where you can say he gave Democrats something they wanted, even if he also somewhat agreed with it, in exchange for almost nothing. But you know, we'll see. But there is an actual subst- this in an actual substantive bipartisan deal if it comes together. And the other thing was...good for Democrats but stupid.

JF: Well, yeah. I just don't wanna separate intention from result here. Like, the result is that he- he stumbled ass backwards into a great partisan deal. It certainly was not some strategy or intention or- you know, he just- everything is impulse. Like you said, he likes coverage when it's good for him, he doesn't like it when it's bad for him. He makes decisions about life and death and the country based on, you know, Fox and Friends versus Morning Joe. And also, he has some personal grudge with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell now so he thought he'd piss them off by having Chuck and Nancy over for Chinese. And suddenly we have a deal! [Laughter] So it's like...you know.

DP: That's- that is the best part of the whole thing-

[Laughter]

DP: Is that someone reported that...Trump believes that the policy issue on which he and Senator Schumer are closest is Chinese trade. So, they served Chinese food.

JF: It's problematic on so many levels. So many levels.

DP: It's just it's so...simplistic that it is just mind boggling. Like I would like to know what they'd serve for dinner if, like, Medicare reform was their closest issue. Or, I mean- it's just, it's so good. It’s so good.

JF: It's pretty great. Okay let's talk about health care. Speaking of health care. Two bills introduced yesterday. Let's actually start with the last-ditch attempt by the Republicans to repeal and replace ObamaCare. This is a piece of legislation from Lindsay Graham, Bill Cassidy, Dean Heller -- dirty Dean Heller -- and Ron Johnson. In some ways, this is actually the worst of all Republican health care plans, this last one standing. It hasn't gotten a lot of attention, but...basically this plan cuts the Affordable Care Act by 20 billion dollars and then it gives the rest of the money to the states to spend on whatever health care programs they want. But 20 states, mostly large populated states, also blue states, will lose anywhere from 35 to 60% of the funding they currently get from the Affordable Care Act because of a formula in the bill that gives sparsely populated red states more money. States could also get waivers that let insurers charge sick patients higher premiums and stop covering essential benefits like maternity care, prescription drugs. The estimate here is that 32 million people lose their coverage in 10 years, including 11 million on Medicaid, and premiums spiking 20%. So, no one thinks they ha- the good news is no one thinks they have the votes right now. McConnell didn't promise to bring it up. He told them to go find 50 votes on their own. Cornyn, who's the whip, the vote counter, said he didn't see the votes. Ted Cruz said they have about 44, 45 votes right now. We got Rand Paul as a no. And then the big thing is their deadline on this is September 30th. Once we pass September 30th, they go back to needing 60 votes to pass any kind of ObamaCare repeal and replace. And they can't do the reconciliation that only allows them- that only gives them 50 votes. What do you think of this, Dan? How worried should we be?

DP: Because I am not worried, we should probably be very worried. 

JF: Cool, cool.

DP: Like, I think we should- the odds are long for them and there doesn't seem to be a ton of appetite for it, but we thought the same thing the first time the House took it up. We thought the same thing when Dean Heller and others killed health care, then health care came back, then it was killed again, then it became finally killed- like, up until the clock strikes midnight on September 30th, we should maintain a healthy level of paranoia about the Republicans’ desire and ability to snatch health care away from people so they can give tax cuts to millionaires. Like, that's not gonna go away.

JF: Yeah. We're favored by the calendar here. And it seems like from Trump to McConnell to Ryan to all the rest of the Republicans, except the ones who introduced this bill, more of them are focused on tax reform and getting that done than they are on one more attempt at ObamaCare- at repealing ObamaCare. But, you know, once you get to a deadline suddenly all kinds of deal making starts happening. So, you know, everyone should be on the lookout.

DP: Yeah, I would say a not encouraging sign for the Republicans on this is when they had their press conference, they invited Rick Santorum, who-

JF: Why did they do that?

DP: Left the Senate a decade ago. No idea. I think they were like, short a Senator and they were like, “This guy was once a Senator, let's bring him along and maybe people forgot.” He got his ass kicked by Bob Casey in 2006.

JF: Yeah, here we are with former Senator Rick Santorum. He's gonna really- he's gonna juice this proposal. Alright, let's talk about single payer. So, Bernie Sanders introduced his Medicare-for-all bill yesterday, which is co-sponsored by 16 Democratic Senators. That's about a third of the caucus, including Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Al Franken, and our guest for today, Kirsten Gillibrand.

DP: Quick question, Jon, what do all of those people have in common?

JF: They may, possibly, be running for President in 2020, Dan.

DP: I was gonna say, other than Bernie Sanders, they are- have all been on the podcast.

JF: Oh! Good for us, huh? [Laughs] Yeah, by the way Bernie Sanders, come on the podcast.

JL: It's Lovett.

JF: [Chuckles] He’s here right now

JL: I think that there was something wrong with my email to the Bernie Sanders people. I think it's my fault. I think that I was try- in my attempt at raproshma, I think that I may have...not been the best person to reach out

JF: [Snickers]

DP: Did you send it to info@berniesanders.com?

JL: I did.

[Laughter]

JL: Was that not right? That's how people get us here.

DP: That's how Michael Cohen reaches the Kremlin, so it'll work for you, too.

[Laughter]

JF: Okay, so within 4 years, under this plan everyone in America would transition to a universal health care plan run by the government, just like Medicare is now. This is an extremely generous plan. More so than any single payer plan in the world right now- than other countries, more generous than Medicare itself. You would pay no premiums, no deductibles, no copays, no nothing. It would cover hospital visits, primary care, medical devices, medical lab services, maternity care, prescription drugs, vision, dental, the whole shebang. Also, importantly, it would aim to bring down costs, the cost of health care overall. We know now that the Medicare program is currently cheaper than private insurance. The government helps hold costs down. We have this screwed up system in America where we pay doctors and hospitals based on how much care they provide, and not necessarily the quality of the care they provide and the outcomes that we get. That's something that the Affordable Care Act tried to change. Medicare obviously has a lot more power to change this because of their bargaining power because of how many people are insured there. The deal with Bernie’s plan is, everyone would get about 4 years to transition from their current insurance plan to this new plan. How much? Hugely expensive. Sanders did not lay out the details on that. He did have a separate white paper that offered some possibilities for paying for it, including higher tax rates on high income people, a 1% federal wealth tax on the net worth of the wealthiest one tenth of 1%. All of these tax options add up to about 16.9 trillion dollars over a decade and... still not sure if that would be enough to pay for this. One thing I should say that's important is, higher taxes- you know, don't have to mean higher health care spending since no one would be paying premiums or copays anymore, so. Dan, what d'you think about this? How big is this?

DP: I mean, it's hard to overstate how fast...the politics have shifted on this. In 2009 when we were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act… two things. One, Max Baucus, who was a Senator from Montana who was in charge of the finance committee that was writing the bill, refused to hold a single hearing on single-payer on the belief that it was too politically toxic and would endanger passage of the Affordable Care Act. In the Affordable Care Act was a public option, which is a bridge to something like Medicare-for-all or single payer. And... conservative Democrats- there were not 60 votes in a time which Democrats had 60 votes to include that in the bill and it was stripped out, to the objection of many people -- including President Obama and the people on this podcast. And to go from that to the world in which every Democrat who is thinking about running for President believes that it is- that are willing to put their name on this bill, is a pretty stunning- stunningly quick change in the political firmament. What d'you think of the politics of it?

JF: It's interesting, I think that the politics of it are...good. I mean, you can start with, you know something like 64, 65% of Democrats now believe we should have a single payer plan. I think overall the politics are pretty good. I think telling people that instead of, you know, spending all this money in this country on you know, insurance companies and insurance CEOs, and prescription drug companies, and instead we're gonna spend care on people and people aren't gonna have to pay for care and we're gonna hold down the cost of health care. I think those are all good messages. I do think that...if you're an advocate of single-payer, if you're an advocate of this bill, which I am, you do need to think through how you're gonna pay for it and be honest with people about how you're gonna pay for it. And not take questions about how you're going to pay for it as... “Oh, well you're against this and you just must be in the pocket of insurance industry and you know, you're a shill and blah, blah, blah.” Like, we have a responsibility that if we're gonna put forward this plan, to tell people, “We want this. This is the best way to go. This is the best way to have health care in America. This is the best way to insure everyone and here's the way we pay for it and we're not afraid to talk about that.” So, that's what I think.

DP: So, if you were running the campaign of a 2020 candidate, would you tell them to put all the details out? In the course of a campaign, I’m not saying they have to do it in the run-up. So, you're out there, you're gonna give your, you know mandatory speech rolling out your healthcare plan, you think you gotta do the pay force?

JF: I think you gotta give the, some options for the pay- I think what Bernie did, which was a have a separate white paper that had a bunch of options for pay force, is a good idea. I would probably, like, if I was running a campaign, narrow those down, pick some, and go around and- and that would be the message, you know. I mean, at least you wanna get in the ballpark. I don't think you have to have this fucking scored, like the CBO would score it, while you're running for President. But I do think you need-I mean it's just part of the message, you know. It's one thing to just have ads that talk about this, it's one thing to go out there on the stump. At some point, you're gonna get in a debate, or you’re gonna get an attack and someone's gonna say, “Well, how do you plan to pay for this?” And you know you need to be able to give a reasonably good answer that's believable and you need to have a follow up when someone gives you a follow up. I think that's- that's all you need. And I think that's doable.

DP: Do you think you'd do that even if you're running against Trump?

JF: Oh, I think you do that especially if you're running against Trump. I think that's- I mean it's so funny. This is what we talked about with Hillary Clinton and she had this...like, I think it's mistaken to think that you need to have every detail worked out. But I think if you're running against Trump, it is an equally good message to say that you're going to pay for this by raising taxes the richest people on this country.

JL: Dan, it's Lovett.

JF: I knew he wasn't gonna be able to fucking...sit quiet for 5 minutes.

JL: It's 10! it's time for ads!

DP: The danger of moving the studio within 10 feet of his desk.

JF: The master of single payer over here.

JL: First of all- first of all, it's 10 o clock. I’d be talking at the studio too. This is how it goes. Isn't this one of the lessons though, that Republicans have spent a long time separating politics from policy, you know. Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney can run around talking about all the things they're gonna do to cut taxes. But when it comes time to paying for it, they're extremely vague or they just lie about it. Trump’s even worse. I mean isn’t one of the lessons of 2016 that-

JF: That we should be extremely vague and lie about it?

JL: No! Not that we should lie about it! But that- that we can- we can simply go back to you know, as a country we spend “x” on healthcare. We can make up for this by cutting what we spent on health care and by making people pay their fair share and leave it at that.

JF: Do you have numbers that make that work?

JL: What I’m saying, isn't what Hillary Clinton told us is, she was like, “I was waiting for the point where someone asked me do you have the numbers to make that work and in 2016 it didn't happen.”

JF: But she wasn't afraid about putting out the numbers. She was afraid about the political consequence about what the numbers would mean.

JL: But no, I’m not just talking about single payer. I’m saying that she put out all the numbers for her policies and she found that no one ever gave a shit.

JF: Well, if she didn't put out the numbers she certainly would've gave- don't you think the press would've been even tougher on her, if she didn't have any numbers to back up her policies? My thing is like- look-

JL: I don't know.

JF: If we're gonna advocate single payer, we have to be ready to defend the cost of it. And be proud of that.

DP: Let me say a couple things about this. One - the question is, do you wanna just win? And have no chance of passing single payer? Or do you wanna win and try to pass single payer? If you wanna win and try to pass single payer, you have to put enough details out that it is a reasonable proposal. If you were just gonna run on a vague notion of Medicare-for-all and just take the win and let the next President deal with it, then the more Bernie in the primary, Trump in the general election approach makes sense. I think on the larger politics of this, we shouldn't pretend that these politics are easy. Because you are at the end of the day, gonna move 90% of Americans off their current health insurance plan and onto another one. And convincing them, as we know from the Affordable Care Act, that even if people don't love their health insurance, the fear of the unknown exceeds their discomfort with the known.

JL: It's also true, Dan, that the- that you know we are watching a cautionary tale of this right now which is- they spent 8 years campaigning on a lie about health care but when it came time to govern, it's another matter.

JF: Yeah.

DP: That's right. I also think- I think the politics on this are tough. If you can't pass single payer in California or Vermont, passing it nationally is gonna be very challenging. But Democrats are 100% right to do this. It's the right thing to do. If we're ever going to get it done, people have to run on it and try to convince the nation it's the right thing to do. No one has- other than Bernie Sanders in the primary, no one has run on single-payer in decades, or made it the centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

JF: Yeah.

DP: We were able to shift the- one of the reasons why Trump feels compelled -- besides just enjoying Morning Joe commentary -- to do this DACA deal, is that we ran on immigration reform in 2012 and moved the political conversation from being largely anti-immigrant to looking for a comprehensive solution. And if Democrats wanna actually solve this problem, they have to run on it. And so, there's risks to it. But -- to the point you made earlier, Jon -- the traditional ideas of what we think about electability and how policy plays into electability and how resume and biography play into electability are out the window. And so, doing the right thing and being authentic and being bold about it is as best- as good an idea to win an election as we have out there.

JF: Yeah. I also think...the reason I like what Bernie did is it is an opening bid. And the opening bid is far to the left, so that you can sort of move back. And one of my lessons from the Obama years is, you know, the stimulus package, right? We started off with a stimulus package that we thought we could- that was not just the right policy but that we thought we could pass. And we also thought we needed a third of it to be tax cuts because we thought that would get Republicans and blah, blah, blah. And if we had to do it over again, I wonder, it's like- if we put out the stimulus package that we wanted -- that was the biggest, boldest, stimulus package possible, and then we negotiate it down to what we ended up with at our opening bid. Like if we- if we end up with instead of the extremely generous single payer plan that Bernie Sanders has laid out yesterday, if what we end up with is a robust public option that ultimately so many people choose because it's much better than private insurance, and the private insurance industry eventually just goes away because the public option is so popular-

JL: [Murmuring] Which we're not gonna say when we get behind that.

JF: Well- what we got behind yesterday says we're gonna eliminate the private insurance company- industry together all at once, so- you know, we gotta be comfortable with the rhetoric here. Then- you know, then that's pretty great, right? I think the important here is the goal at the end of the day is to get every single person covered, to bring down costs, and to make sure people can pay for health care in America. And we're saying, “This is the north star. This is what we wanna get to and let's figure out how to get there.”

DP: I think, to sort of boil this down, when you don't- when the politics for the things you want to do are not good- go change the politics, right.

JF: Right.

DP: The Democratic Party and the presidential candidates have agency here. They can make a- they can go to the country and convince them to do this and... that is the better way to do it than- it's better to decide what the right thing to do is and convince the country of that than...ask the country what they want and then just give that to them, right. So, you shouldn't dumb down your proposals to do the most politically expedient thing.

JL: Can I ask you both a question about this, which- so Chris Murphy has his version of a public option. It's a strong, public option where companies and individuals could buy into Medicare. Do you- I mean I- I wonder if that's not where we would ultimately land, right? It's kind of a more- it gives people the option and people can stay in their current health care if they want it. Do you think that we're sort of making these things too far apart, rhetorically? We've sort of made Medicare-for-all one thing, and the public option another. But part of me wonders if we can just say, we're for Medicare for all, whether it's a Bernie plan where everybody has- everybody is in it, or a Chris Murphy plan where everybody can buy into it or have access to it with a subsidy if they want. I mean, do you- like I’m just wondering if we've kind of made these things too far apart.

JF: I don't even know if we have made them far apart. When you dig into Bernie’s plan yesterday, it's a four-year transition. The first year just starts with the lowering the age to 55, which is like-

JL: Which Joe Lieberman stopped.

JF: Which is Sherrod Brown's plan. The second year is, you know, raising the age for young people and it kind of goes and meets them in the middle at the final year where it's like 35 or 45, right? And so even Bernie’s plan has this transition. And so, it is- I don't wanna exaggerate the differences as long as you're someone who's proposing, you know, a robust public Medicare plan that more and more and more and more Americans can buy into.

JL: Right.

DP: I mean the ultimate solution here is probably a transition period. Right? Where it's like, we're gonna do the public option and Medicare buy in that will transition into Medicare for all. As opposed to- it seems unlikely that we're gonna pass a bill and we’re gonna- two years later everyone's gonna be on Medicare and private insurance will be eliminated in this country. You will need to transition into it and -- because of what we tried to do with the public option and what we tried to do with the Medicare buy in that Liebermann killed -- we sort of know what the interim steps are. And every one of those steps is a huge benefit to the individuals who would take part in that program and the overall- and reducing costs and quality- and improving quality of care across the health care system.

JF: Yeah. Okay. When we come back, we will talk with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

 0:45:33

[MUSIC]

 0:45:38

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Squarespace.

JL: Squarespace.

JF: Squarespace is for people who are setting new goals-

JL: [Gasp]

JF: Starting businesses, changing careers, or launching a creative project. Squarespace gives people a powerful and beautiful online platform from which-

JL: It's new words!

JF: To make their next move-

JL: Ohhh. Spoke too soon.

JF: Into the world. With Squarespace people can lock down their next move idea with a unique domain, create a website to launch their idea, a portfolio to get their project out there, or an online store to officially open for business and more.

JL: If you wanted to open a moving company. You'd make your next move move with a moving website-

JF: You got it.

JL: with Squarespace.

JF: I think you got it.

JL: Make your next move move. 

JF: With moving.

JL: You're moving. With Squarespace.

JF: Whoo. Squarespace provides award winning 24/7 customer support and a unique domain experience that's fully transparent and simple to set up. There's nothing to install, patch, or upgrade ever. Make your next move move!

JL: If you were a jazz record store, you'd make your next move groove move with Squarespace.

JF: Use offer code CROOKED for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's offer code CROOKED for 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Make your next move-

JL: If you sold chew toys, you'd make your next move hoove[?] move with Squarespace.

JF: With Squarespace.

 0:46:55

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Sonos.

JL: Sonos.

JF: Tell your own Sonos story.

JL: I mean, where to begin.

JF: You got anything?

JL: Honestly, I was born. 

[Laughter]

JL: I lived. I like Sonos a lot. 

JF: Yeah.

JL: I have a Sonos in different rooms in my house.

JF: So, do we.

JL: I have the play base on which my television sits. I’ve been playing a video game called Prey. Now I will say that I-

JF: The Sonos ads always become more about your video games.

JL: That's fine.

JF: Talk about the rich sounds. Talk about the easy set up.

JL: Honestly when I’m being hunted by a nightmare in the game Prey, it feels like there's a nightmare in the room with me.

JF: It is very nice to walk from room to room -- [emphasizing pronunciation] Room to room --

JL: But then I use my glue gun, but it doesn’t work-

JF: And all you hear-

JL: Because the nightmare is immune to it.

JF: And all you hear is the same stuff because Sonos. It's like- it's great.

JL: Beautiful music or the sound of a squealing alien in the game Prey. Which is fantastic, if a little derivative of, you know, some of its inspirations.

JF: For the first time ever, Sonos is offering the listeners of Pod Save America 10% off one order of 1,000 dollars or less for any product on sonos.com. This offer is available for a limited time only and cannot be combined with other discounts or promotions. Use the promo code PSA10.

JL: Promo code PSA10!

JF: Capital P-S-A one zero at sonos.com to receive this exclusive offer. Lovett, it's sad that you don't have the Wi-Fi password so you can't control the Sonos in our new house anymore.

JL: Did you change the Wi-Fi password?

JF: We did. We did.

JL: That's a shame. I’ll get it from Emily

JF: Yeah. [Laughs] 

JL: Emily and I were talking about getting a Soothe massage, the other-.

JF: Oh, that's-

JL: The next time you're not around.

JF: Just gave out the milk for free there.

[Laughter]

JL: Don't say “give out the milk for free” again.

[Laughter]

JL: Anyway, this is about Sonos.

[Laughter]

JL: And you get 10% off- how much? 10% off 1,000?

JF: I thought you said that the other day, but it was Tommy. Tommy used that saying the other day.

JL: Don't milk the Soothe if you're gonna get the Sonos for free.

JF: I mean, you know, maybe it's a whole thing there. Yeah, I understand. Okay! Sonos!

JL: Sonos.

JF: Go get it!

JL: Get Sonos. What was it? 10% off? 1,000?

JF: 10% off. PSA10

JL: 1,000? That's a lot.

JF: Yeah.

0:48:49

[MUSIC]

0:48:53

JF: On the pod today, we are very lucky to have with us New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Senator Gillibrand, thanks for coming on the pod!

KG: You're welcome. I’m really excited to be on.

JF: We're glad to have you. So, yesterday you signed on to Bernie Sanders' Medicare for all act. And you've actually been a proponent of Medicare for all since your first Congressional race back in 2006. So, it seems like there are two big challenges here with this bill- with this legislation. One is figuring out how to pay for it. And two, just something- you know, we all worried about during the Affordable Care Act debate, persuading the 90% of Americans who have health insurance that we can transition them to a Medicare plan with, you know, little to no disruption in their lives. So, how do we meet these challenges?

KG: Well, I think the most important thing is to give people the opportunity to buy into a not for profit public option. I think it's really important to recognize that so much of the cost in health care today is the fact that we have these middle men called insurance companies that are for profit companies that have very high profit margins, fat CEO salaries, and quarterly obligations to their shareholders. And their goal in life is to make money, as they should be. That's what they are. They're for profit companies. We need someone who's running this that actually cares about people and puts people before profits and puts the health and well-being of Americans first. And so, you need at least a not for profit public option. And so over the 4 years under our bill -- and this is the part that I worked on to write – is, let people buy into Medicare at a price they can afford. And do it over 4 years so people can be eligible each year to buy in. And it lets people see how much less it costs if you're not guaranteeing fat CEO pay and profits for these insurance companies. Over time I think people will then begin to see it's not only less expensive, but it's higher quality care. And so, the reason why Medicare for all is so important is because you have to move away from a for profit system into a not for profit system. You cannot get, in my opinion, to universal coverage and affordability at the same time. And that's why states that have one or two providers are struggling. Because they might have a low population, they might have an older population, they might have a sick population. And so, those insurance companies can't make enough money and that's why they're not there. So, while ObamaCare did a lot to get us in the right direction, it protected kids up until 26, it said you can't be dropped coverage because of preexisting conditions. It made all these changes that really matter. It's still based on a for profit system and so it's still too expensive for a lot of middle class families, for a lot of small businesses. It's still too expensive. And so, to really get cost down you need to be able to take the insurance companies out of the equation and you need to be able to negotiate in bulk for the lowest cost for drugs. You have to be able to take on the drug companies and say, we deserve to be able to buy in bulk through Medicare or Medicaid and get lower prices for people.

JF: So- it's interesting, you mentioned adding a nonprofit- a not for profit public option. That was actually the plan that Hillary Clinton proposed in the 2016 election, adding a public option. And even though her and Bernie fought quite a bit over her plan versus his single payer plan, do you think those differences were over blown? Because, you know, you're talking about adding a public option and then ultimately transitioning to a Medicare for all single payer plan. Do you think this is just sort of a- a difference in how we transition, how fast we transition – what do you think about that?

KG: Well I think our goal has to be single payer. We have to get to a place where all Americans are covered no matter what, and that health care is a right and not a privilege. And that has to be the goal for all of us. But I think the buy in is the best way to transition because honestly if you give people a chance to have Medicare -- I can't tell you how many people when I’ve traveled around the state who've said to me, you know, “I’m 55 years old, I just got laid off, I don’t know why, you know I have to be in poverty to be eligible for Medicaid, it's not fair. Why can't I be eligible now for Medicare or Medicaid?” And it's just- it's what people want and it's not partisan. And as you mentioned, when I ran in 2006 I ran on Medicare for all. I said you need at least one not for profit public option. I said people should be able to buy in. And people liked it and that was a very Republican district. And so, it makes sense. It's really common sense. And it's all about where the money goes and the money should be going entirely towards health care, not to overhead, not to profits, not to CEO pay. And to your question of paying for it. People are gonna buy into this and it's going to be less than they're paying their insurance company. So, people are gonna save money and America’s gonna spend less money on healthcare and you're gonna get to the fundamental cost that's driving the fact that we spend so much more on health care in this country than other countries that have universal health care.

DP: Senator, like all things, this is a question of both policy and politics. What lessons, or- do you take, or concerns do you have about the fact that two of our most progressive states, Vermont and California -- where Jon and I live -- have tried to do single payer and run into great struggles politically? What lessons do you take from that as you think about how to do this nationally? In, you know, obviously a much different environment than California and Vermont?

KG: I think people just have to understand what it's about. When you really simplify it and say, should money be going to insurance company CEOs or insurance company profits, or should money be spent directly on your health care? It's really obvious to most voters. And so, when you present it like that, they say, of course I’d rather the money go to health care. I don’t need to fund insurance company profits. And so, it's- it's simplifying the system and then it's making all health care available to all people. And that's why having single payer, that's why having Medicare for all is really a very elegant solution that solves our greatest problem that too many people are priced out of health care today. It's really, in some circumstances for the most privileged among us, and it's just not right. It's morally wrong. So, I think if you talk about it in that way around the country, they're gonna support this. You know the debate sometimes becomes very toxic and misleading. And so if you really just speak truth to power, I think it's gonna work. And I think people want to have Medicare for all. I think they really- they know their grandparents or their parents are on Medicare. They know they generally like things. They'd like drug prices to be cheaper. We need to deal with that as a cost measure. And then you can begin to create a healthcare system that's not focused on fee for service, but is actually focused on well-being of patients.

JF: So, we interviewed Hillary Clinton on Monday and -- you know, you've been a strong supporter of her and you were in 2016 -- I asked her if she had any advice for women who are interested in politics, who are running for politics now- running for office now, on how to grapple with the kind of sexism she faced in the campaign. What kind of advice would you give to women who are running for office for the very first time? The thousands who have signed up to run since 2016.

KG: Well the first thing I would tell them is to believe in themselves and to make sure they know that their voice will make a difference. I started “Off the Sidelines” about 6 years ago to create a call to action to ask women to do exactly this. To run for office. If they didn't want to run for office, then to support another woman who shared your values, to vote, to become advocates, to be heard. And what we’ve seen since this President was elected is a resurgence of women who desperately want to be heard. And it all started in the Women's March. I mean, I don't know if you participated in any of the marches around the globe, but-

JF: Oh yeah, right here in LA.

KG: Millions- yeah millions of people came out and said, “I want to be heard.” And what was so brilliant about the March was its intersectionality, the fact that it didn't matter what you marched for. You could certainly march for women's reproductive freedom, but you could also march for Black Lives Matter, or you could march for immigration reform, or clean air clean water, or LGBT equality. It didn't matter. It was the first time for a lot of people to just put what they felt most strongly about and put it on a sign and carry the sign. And it was an action that I think really was a process in democratizing democracy in a way that was powerful and certainly meaningful for me and really inspiring. So, for all the women who are thinking about running, please run! We need you! And we need your voice. We need your perspective. You have a very different life experience than most people serving in government. As you know, we only have 20% in the Senate, 18% in the House. And it's not enough. It's just not enough. And so, issues that overwhelmingly impact women and families sometimes don't even get on the top 10 list. It's outrageous that we don't have national paid leave in this day and age, when every other industrialized country has it. We don't even have equal pay for equal work yet. And other things that, you know, perhaps because women see the world differently, having affordable day care or universal pre-k. These kinds of changes would make a difference. So, I just- I believe that we need women. We need the diversity of our country representing our country. And we just don't have it. We need more women of color, we need more African American and Hispanic, Latinas. We need more people running who are different than what we have today. And so, I’m hoping that women really feel this, intensely, that not only are they qualified but they're differences in life experience is what makes them more effective, more powerful, and more relevant for some of the problems we need to face today.

DP: Senator, I wanted to ask you about the deal -- or alleged deal -- that Senator Schumer and Leader Pelosi struck with Trump. And not- I guess I’m curious, not necessarily about the details of the deal, but how you think about Democrats working with Trump, while at the same time believing that he is an existential threat to a lot in this country. Is there a danger that he gets normalized by this? Or we're helping him out politically in ways that Senator McConnell certainly was not willing to do for President Obama?

KG: I don't think some of President Trump's hateful policies will ever be normalized and can never be allowed to be normalized. So, when he's objectifying and discriminating against transgender troops, you stand boldly against him and you say, why? That's immoral. When he wants to say that kids that are here under DACA can't stay, you stand up against him. But if he wants to do something good and his desire is to actually help people, there’s no reason you shouldn't do it. And in fact, it would be immoral if you didn't do it. If he wants to make sure we pass the DREAM Act tomorrow, I will be the first one to say, I will work with you to pass the DREAM Act tomorrow. So, we have to do both. When he does something that’s toxic, wrong, and immoral, we have to stand strong and fight hard. And if he wants to do something that helps people, that is our job- to work with him to help people. That is why we are here. We are public servants first. And if people let politics get in the way of helping people, they're not doing their jobs.

JF: So, you're someone who used to have a more conservative position on immigration when you first ran for Congress. Now, you know, you're one of the strongest advocates for a path to citizenship for undocumented Americans. Talk a little bit about your evolution on this issue, and also, you know, how you think Democrats should approach immigration policy going forward.

KG: Well, as an upstate House member, I just didn't have enough experience understanding the traumas that families face who are dealing with immigration in this country. My district was maybe 98% white and I didn't take the time to understand why this issue was so important and how harmful anti-immigration policies are. And so, when I was appointed to the Senate and was given the job of representing the whole state, I spent time with families all across the state to hear from them about what their lives were actually like. And I have to say I was horrified that I hadn't been sensitive enough, that I hadn't understood how difficult and challenging some of these hateful politics can be for a family. And I can't imagine what it's like to be a child whose parents could be shipped away at any moment. Like, I can't imagine the anxiety that they feel. And so, I feel so strongly now that we have to work much, much harder to protect these kids, to protect these families, and to really make the case about how important the history of immigration is in our country. I mean, we are a country founded by immigrants. Part of the strength of our democracy is because of our diversity. Part of the strength of our economy is because of our diversity. And I’ve met with refugee populations, with immigration populations, across our state who, when they come here all they do is grow the economy. They start businesses, they start families, they invest. And so, we need comprehensive immigration in this country. We need pathways to citizenship. We have to protect the kids who are under DACA and who are Dreamers. So, I just feel like our country- it's not about tolerating diversity, it's about the strength the diversity caused. Our country is stronger because of our diversity.

DP: Senator, we wanted to ask you about the amendment you're working on with Senator Collins, about protecting transgender troops. What would that do to address the situation of the new Trump policy? And what are the prospects, do you think?

KG: The prospects are very strong that we can actually pass our amendment. Senator Collins and I have worked on issues that affect military personnel for many years now. She and I worked together on repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. And we, you know, nobody thought we could repeal that policy. Even the advocacy groups were afraid to vote on that. But we did. And we pushed it because it was the right thing to do and goodness prevailed on that day. I think the same is true here. We don’t know how many votes we have, but we've just convince Senator McCain to support our amendment. Which is fantastic because he's seen by many Republicans as the leader on all things military. And so, what our bill will do is protect any transgender troops who are serving today and make sure that they cannot be discriminated against because of their gender identity.

JF: Senator, one thing we learned this week after interviewing Hillary on Monday is, you know from some of the responses, here's still a lot of deep divisions within the party between Bernie supporters, Hillary supporters. What are your thoughts on a message and policies that might unite the Democratic party in 2018, 2020, and beyond?

KG: Well certainly policies that really affect people deeply. Like Medicare for all. I think being willing to take on the drug companies and getting health care costs down is one of the biggest drivers of economic insecurity in this country today. I think focusing on rewarding work. Just listening to the challenges workers face across this country and then working so much harder to meet their needs. So, focusing on ways that reward work, such as obviously raising the minimum wage. But also investing in manufacturing, seeing ‘Made in America’ again. Making sure we invest in the kind of training and education that gets people right into the jobs that are available today. Having structural changes like paid family leave. I can't tell you how many people are forced to leave the work force because of an urgent family crisis, if they can even afford to do so. So being bold, being aggressive, speak about the vision for the party. I think free education is something we should absolutely fight for. Especially for these worker training issues. Like if you get laid off and your mid-career and you just need 6 months of training to get that job at that manufacturer, you know five miles away, that should be available at any community college, any local state school, for free. And so, the kinds of things we could do to level the playing field for workers and restructure the economy to reward work again. I mean this is a long conversation but, you know we have had an economy that is overwhelmingly dominated by shareholder value. It's overwhelmingly dominated by who owns things. And so, if we wanna refocus it towards who works in the economy, who actually are the people that build things, it's gonna take some really structural challenges. And I think if you incentivize companies to do things like profit sharing or employee ownership or creating a workplace policy that support workers first. Really investing in B corps and saying, if you're gonna focus on sustainability and have pro worker, workplace policies, you're gonna get a tax advantage, you know. If we're gonna do tax reform, let's increase tax benefits for companies that create their companies this way. And then support our unions. Our unions are our greatest voices for workplace fairness and to get higher pay for workers. And really help communities understand that if they have someone negotiating for them, they're gonna be more powerful. So really renew our commitment to helping unions be strong. Cause they- they put people first. And so, it's just this question of what do you do first, people or profits? And we are a capitalist country, we believe in capitalism, but we don't believe in greed. And that is the difference. That has been the divergence for the last several decades. And so, we have to reward good companies that wanna create jobs, reinvest in the middle class, and reinvest in their workers. And make it more profitable for those kinds of companies to succeed by investing in them.

JF: Awesome. Thank you so much, Senator Gillibrand for joining us. And please come back again.

KG: Thank you guys so much! I really appreciate you including me.

JF: Oh, absolutely. Take care!

KG: Take care, bye!

JF: Bye.

1:06:34

[MUSIC]

1:06:39

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Parachute.

JL: Parachute.

JF: What do you think?

[Laughter]

JL: I think Parachute is just terrific. We are back to using Parachute as the giveaway at Lovett or Leave It, for people who win the games. Sadly, we've not had a lot of people lose the games and I’m trying to figure out how to make them harder.

JF: Yeah. I could win any of those games.

JL: Well that's because you're a news junkie. That's because you’re a fiend. A Twitter fiend.

JF: Yeah. I’m gonna help you come up with the fake- the- you know how it's '”too fake to be true” or whatever that game is that you guys play? I’m a casual listener.

[Laughter]

JL: Too stupid to be-

JF: Two truths and a false?

JL: Too stupid to- don't- it's called “too Stupid to be true.”

JF: Too stupid to be true. I think- [giggles]

JL: Parachute.

JF: Parachute.

[Laughter]

JL: Parachute.

JF: We need more Parachute stuff. So, we have a pool at our new home and Emily-

JL: Must be nice.

[Laughter]

JF: And Emily wants robes, Parachute robes, for everyone who comes over-

JL: She mentioned robes to me-

JF: For when they come out of the pool.

JL: Separately.

JF: She wants to give our guests Parachute robes.

JL: Honestly, you know, it's ridiculous. Anyway- you- you know, look- you don't have to-

JF: It's cause they're comfortable!

JL: You don't have to live like the Sultan of Brunei to enjoy Parachute products whenever you want them.

[Laughter]

JL: We like Parachute. We need to take a trip. We need to do a Sunday trip-

JF: [While laughing hysterically] Sultan of Brunei!

JL: I don't where that- I don’t even know anything about the Sultan of Brunei. Maybe they sleep on a- maybe they sleep on very low count thread sheets that are uncomfortable.

JF: It's just one of those dog pools you fill up with a garden hose.

[Laughter]

JL: It's like the pool on the roof at the start of Weekend at Bernie’s.

JF: That’s right.

JL: You know what I’m talking about. Anyway-

Both: Parachute!

JF: You get towels. You get robes. Go get some!

JL: And sheets and bedding!

JF: Oh! There's something we're supposed to say, visit parachutehome.com/crooked for free shipping and returns. That's parachutehome.com/crooked for free shipping and returns. They offer a 60-night trial. If you don't love it, you just send it back no questions asked.

JL: No questions asked!

JF: Zero questions.

JL: Zero questions.

JF: Parachute.

JL: Parachute.

JF: Go get some.

1:08:30

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by the Cash app

JL: The Cash app. I, Jon, have ordered my Cash app card.

JF: Yes!

JL: And I signed it and personalized it and it will be coming in the mail.

JF: Can't wait. 

JL: We all can't wait. On bated breath, we wait for the arrival.

JF: You're gonna be throwing around that thing like it's nobody's business.

JL: And it is nobody's business. It's my business.

JF: but it is- [laughs] Who you send and receive money from.

JL: The point is, we're switching to Cash app.

JF: We're not using the other apps anymore.

JL: We're not using those other ones anymore.

JF: So, download it. Put in the code PODSAVE.

JL: PODSAVE.

JF: You get 5 dollars.

JL: You get 5 dollars.

JF: 5 dollars is going to hurricane relief.

JL: 5 dollars going to hurricane relief.

JF: That's Harvey and Irma. There’s many people in need. This is very important. So, download the Cash app if you haven’t already, or get your friends to. That's it.

JL: That's it.

JF: That's all we have to say about that.

JL: You have a group of friends and you're going out to dinner and you're going bowling and you're going roller skating and you're going to escape rooms. And the question becomes how do we settle up? You know?

JF: You're not exchanging wads of cash.

JL: Like animals. We're doing it with this Cash app.

JF: Code PODSAVE.

1:09:31

JF: Pod Save America is brought to you by Postmates.

JL: Postmates.

JF: Download the app. 100 dollars in free delivery credit.

JL: Download the app. 100 dollars in free delivery credit.

JF: Use it within 2 weeks.

JL: Within 2 weeks.

JF: Stuff comes to your house. It's food-

JL: I got a poke bowl last night-

JF: It could be electronics-

JL: On kelp noodles.

JF: Whatever there is in stores around you, the Postmate will bring it to you. That's the point.

JL: I saw this option that said, “Do you want your poke bowl on kelp noodles?” And I said, “Let's give it a shot. What's the worst that could happen? It's one meal.”

JF: I don't know what the worst that could happen. What is the worst that could happen?

JL: I don't know what the worst that could happen because I had a great time. Because you know what? Turns out, lesson learned from Postmates, I enjoy kelp noodles.

JF: Postmates.

JL: Postmates.

JF: Download today, use the code CROOKED. Get 100 dollars in free delivery credit.

JL: End of ad.

1:10:07

[MUSIC]

1:10:11

JF: On the pod today, we have the host of Crooked Media's with Friends Like These, Ana Marie Cox. Welcome!

Ana Marie Cox: Hello, guys.

JF: Hi, there. You just did an interview with our pal, Rembert Browne, right?

AMC: I did and if I do say so myself, it was fantastic. It was good for me. I hope it was good for him. I hope listeners appreciate it as well. We did a really deep dive into the piece that came out this week that he wrote that is a profile of Colin Kaepernick with a missing piece. Which is an actual interview with Colin Kaepernick, but in a way- like, just as a magazine nerd and as a writing nerd, I’m sure you guys appreciated this about the piece as well, which is that one of the things it's about is that it's not Colin Kaepernick's job to be a celebrity and be in profiles. And it's not his job to be interrogated by people about his beliefs.

JF: That is true.

AMC: He has a job. And he's doing it. Which is that he's an activist now, you know. He's not at the beck and call of reporters or other people that- that want to question him. Like he's doing what he needs to do.

JF: That's an interesting angle on it. I like that.

AMC: And it's just a great piece and obviously it's really current right now. Not just because we are, you know, in the middle of one of the most politically charged football seasons that we've seen in a while. But obviously, Jemele Hill at ESPN tweeted some truths about Donald Trump, including the fact he's a white supremacist. And not only did ESPN discipline her in some unspecified way, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders asked ESPN to fire her. From the podium of the White House. What's your guys' take on that -- as far as like, using the White House podium to ask for people to get fired?

JF: I mean it's fucking absurd, you know.

[Laughter]

JF: When- when reality television star Donald Trump ran around calling Barack Obama and others racist, we didn't call for his firing from the White House podium. But we could've.

AMC: Yeah.

DP: Perhaps we should have.

AMC: Yeah, you guys could've really nipped this in the bud. I think that's actually the real lesson here, right?

DP: Seriously. This is the- this is the baby Hitler question as relates to Trump.

[Laughter]

AMC: So, that's super ugly in, you know, race news this week. Other stuff too, what did you guys wanna talk about? What do you got left on the list?

JF: What we have left on the list is...we didn't talk about the antics- the Kris Kobach antics this week with Trump’s voter fraud commission. Kobach wrote a piece in Breitbart where he said that Hillary Clinton and Maggie Hassan won in New Hampshire because of illegal voting by out-of-state residents. This is, of course, false. Most of these are out-of-state college students who had every legal right to vote in New Hampshire. What's the deal with this dog and pony show here?

AMC: Well, in a way it encapsulates- it's a microcosm of everything that's wrong with the Trump administration. Which is to say that it's a poorly formulated idea that was poorly executed, that will have very few real-world ramifications beyond just re-solidifying bad ideas.

JF: Yeah.

AMC: Like Kris Kobach himself has said that he's not sure if anything is gonna come from this commission. But as you guys know, propping up the idea that voter fraud is something that is a real thing that we need to do something about, is itself a powerful idea. You know, that's a powerful tool to broadcast to the nation, that there is such a thing as massive voter fraud and that it's done on behalf of Democrats. The thing itself was almost literally a joke. Like, at one point they brought out antique New Hampshire voting machines to demonstrate? Like...like you would not pay a nickel to go see in a museum, you know?

JF: Yeah. What do you think about some Democrats who are calling on the Democratic members of this commission to resign? And they refused, saying, you know “We need to be here to sort of watch Kobach's antics.” What do you think about that?

AMC: I’m torn. I think that the main reason I would say that they should be there, is that one of the members of the commission - Hans Spakovsky, do you guys know how to pronounce his last name? It's just like one of those complicated-

JF: No, I’m not even gonna try. I have pronunciation issues on the podcast, so-

AMC: You know, eastern European sounding names, I don't know. He's one of the main architects of this voter fraud, fraud. He asked that Democrats not be a part of the commission. So therefore, I think that they should be. If one of the main perpetrators of this lie doesn’t want Democrats there, then I think Democrats should be there. I mean, I’m curious about- you know this is a question for a lot of people on the left right now, is how much you should be working with the other side. I’m sure you guys dived into the DACA thing, you know, should Democrats at all work with Trump or work with Republicans? I mean I think it's probably a case by case basis.

JF: Totally, yeah, I think it's case by case. I think on DACA it's our policy outcome so yeah, of course.

AMC: Yeah, right.

JF: It's not like- we gave up almost nothing. Or it looks like we're gonna give up almost nothing.

AMC: And I do think the Democrats being on Kobach's commission means that there's probably a little bit more transparency there. Like they'll fight for people to be able to come and see the commission’s hearings, at least. And see that they're a joke.

JF: Yeah, well okay, this is- you know I’ve been very critical of some of these folks who are in the Trump administration who are claiming they're there to like save America. And, you know, they're serving for that reason and I think that at this point they should absolutely resign and tell the country what's going on in the Trump administration and that would have a greater impact than them staying in there. Aside from some of those in national security roles like McMaster. But on this one, on the voting commission, I like that there are Democrats on the commission because it's a public commission. And I think that if you have Democrats there, they can speak out and call out Kobach's lies in- you know, to the public while it's going on. And I would imagine that if this commission comes to a conclusion that's insane and wrong, they will certainly not sign on to that and they can use that position to speak out.

AMC: And they will have some weight behind not signed on, right.

JF: Right.

AMC: They'll be able to say, “And this is why we're not signing on.” Rather than speaking from the outside. I do wanna- I mean people who are listening to-

JF: And they're speaking out now and they're not waiting, even. Which is nice.

AMC: Right, right. And I know people listening to this show know this, that voter fraud is not a problem. It doesn't really exist. But this is one of the most pernicious, like, urban legends that exists in America.

JF: Yeah.

AMC: My- my Trump supporting in-laws, you know, again are good example here. Like they earnestly believe that there's some kind of conspiracy around this. And they refuse to be shaken from it. So, the more that we can do to combat this and like just the- you know, the popular narrative, I mean, the better. And the best, the best way to combat it, though, I think is just continuing to fight against the, you know, unfair gerrymandering and just continue to just register people to vote and do voter turnout. There's no, unfortunately, like just make- make the evidence- put the evidence in the votes, if that makes sense.

JF: Yeah, and publicize some of these battles on the local and state level which our friend Jason Kander is doing so well. So, I think- I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.

DP: I think it's worth nothing that Hans van whatever, he was on the FEC. He was recess appointed because the junior Senator from Illinois, to much controversy, put a hold on his nomination. So, real prescient move there, Barack Obama.

JF: There you go. Alright guys, well. So, everyone should tune in- so, With Friends like These, your interview with Rembert Browne drops tomorrow-

AMC: Yeah.

JF: So, everyone, make sure you download.

AMC: It'll probably be a little long. I’m just gonna -gonna toss that out there I know people probably- I know some people don’t like when we do those, kind of bonus episode length stuff. But I think it's worth it. I think it's a really good piece.

JL: Ana, hey, it's Lovett. I wanna talk a little bit about salesmanship.

[Laughter]

JL: I would say that there are probable other qualities besides the length of it that people might enjoy. The interesting qualities of the conversation, the fascinating insights the Rembert brought to the table. Perhaps- perhaps long is a better thing because you'll be so engrossed in it you won't want to stop listening. Maybe you'll-

AMC: I think time will fly. I think people won’t even realize.

JL: Maybe you'll sit in your car-

AMC: I’m not even gonna say how long it's gonna be. Because people aren’t gonna know. Cause they’ll- they're sense of time will be warped by the investment that they'll have while they're listening

DP: I don’t know if you've been in a McDonalds recently but Americans like more.

[Laughter]

DP: More podcasts, less- same price.

JF: Guys, I think, I think we've bled right into the outro here.

[MUSIC BEGINS]

JL: We're in the outro.

JF: We're- it's here. Now we are. Because this episode is now long.

JL: And, music!

[Laughter]

JF: Also, guys-

DP: Can I add- can I add two minutes to this intro before we go?

JF: Sure.

DP: So, I was on a podcast last week called The Rights to Ricky Sanchez, which is the premiere Philadelphia of 76ers podcast.

JF: Oh yeah, I saw that.

JL: That's my favorite Philadelphia of 76ers podcast!

DP: And the host- well- good, because you came up in the podcast. One of the hosts-

JF: Now you've got his attention.

DP: One of the hosts -- yeah, now he's excited -- is a TV writer in LA- in Hollywood. And many years ago, he interviewed to be your assistant on 1600 Penn.

JL: Cool.

JF: Whoa. And now-

JL: How'd it go?

DP: You did not hire him.

JF: [Laughing]How'd it go?

DP: You did not hire him, but you did tell him the main part of the job was to- was to get you French fries whenever you wanted them.

JL: No!

[Laughter]

JL: No! That's exactly wrong!

JF: Yes!

JL: That's exactly backwards and now I’m glad I didn't hire this person-

JF: Elijah, this is the clip that we wanna use on social media.

JL: You can use this clip all you want because I vividly remember what I said, because I ended every interview by saying the same thing: “I am not kidding. If anyone brings me French fries, they're fired.”

[Laughter]

JL: And I’m gonna ask for them.

JF: Seems like there was a lot of firing.

JL: Yeah, we went through- I went through 40 people.

[Laughter]

JF: Alright guys, well that's all we have for today. We still have tickets to Pod Save America, which- which?

JL: Ann arbor.

JF: Ann arbor!

JL: What kind of operation is this?

AMC: That's where I’m gonna be! That's the show I’m in.

JF: Where Ana’s joining us.

JL: Where Ana is.

AMC: Yeah!

JF: It's crooked.com/tour. Also, you know Santa Barbara still in December, but that's a couple months away. But Ann Arbor! Ann Arbor's gonna be in October and we have a second show, so we still have tickets to the second show. Excellent. All your friends will be there.

AMC: Come see us, guys.

JF: We'll all be here. Alright guys, we will- we'll talk to you all on Monday. Take it easy.

JL: Take it easy?

DP: Bye, guys.

JL: End of show.

JF: Good night and good luck.

DP: Just mixing it up on the outro.

[Laughter]

JF: And that's the way it is!

[Laughter]

JL: Courage.

[Laughter]

1:20:53