Billie Eilish is perhaps the most talented artist of our generation…and I don’t throw that around lightly. At only 13, Eilish wrote “Ocean Eyes” alongside her brother Finneas and launched her prolific career. And at the fair age of 22, Eilish has 24 GRAMMY Award nominations and nine wins, two Oscars, two Golden Globes, and countless other accolades.
Beyond that, she recently announced her third album, HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, to be released May 17, 2024. She spent the days leading up to the announcement building excitement by adding all of her Instagram followers to her “Close Friends” list. Eilish had the most Instagram followers in 48 hours…with her count increasing by 7 million followers total.
While her debut album, when we all fall asleep…where do we go?, was a chart-topper in its own right, it landed Billie every GRAMMY it was nominated for at the ripe age of 18…Eilish has solidified herself as one of the most revered and sought-after popstars in the world.
Eilish recently caught media attention for quietly revealing her sexuality. In an interview with Variety, she states that she’s always liked girls…and assumed people always knew that. In a viral snippet from her new song, LUNCH, she details a love affair with a girl.
But people don’t only adore Billie for her catchy tracks that consistently top the charts. It’s not just her songwriting ability and unique vocals that keep us hooked. People love her because she’s unafraid to speak her mind.
Whether it be complaining about too many influencers being at an awards show, or calling out other artists for using unsustainable practices…Billie does not hold back.
Billie Eilish On Sustainability
Eilish home
rethinkingthefuture.com
The Eilish home is iconic for many reasons: it’s where Billie and Finneas recorded her debut album, countless other songs, and EPs, in an effort to conserve water there’s no grass, and the roof is covered in solar panels. And being environmentally conscious extends beyond the four walls of their home.
When the hottest young talent is discovered at such an early age like Eilish, record labels are chomping at the bit to sign them. It’s like when a D1 athlete is ready to commit to college…you have your pick.
But what Eilish and her mom, Maggie Baird, were looking for wasn’t about money or label-perks…they were seeking a solid sustainability program. And while that may seem like standard practice, most labels didn’t bring up environmental policies during these meetings at all.
After signing to The Darkroom via Interscope Records, the struggle didn’t stop there. Billie Eilish and her family have been consistent contributors to the fight against climate change.
Maggie Baird has since started Support + Feed, which focuses on the climate crisis and food insecurity. Support + Feed helped Eilish’s 2022 Happier Than Ever tour save 8.8 million gallons of water through plant-based meal service for the artist and crew members.
During Billie’s 2023 Lollapalooza performance, she aided the launch and funding of REVERB’s Music Decarbonization Project – which guaranteed all battery systems used during her set were solar powered. The MCD’s overall mission is to lower – and eventually eliminate –the music industry’s carbon emissions.
But more recently, Billie Eilish called out other artists for releasing multiple versions of vinyls in order to boost vinyl sales. In an interview with Billboard, she says,
“We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…”
Artists convince fans to buy different versions of their albums by offering exclusive features on each vinyl. Take Taylor Swift, for example, who released five separate vinyl versions of Midnights, each with a different deluxe “Vault” track.
While Billie may not have been trying to shade one artist in particular, the point is that she’s fed up. After being the rare artist in the industry who go out of their way to remain environmentally conscious, Eilish sets the bar high.
How Eilish’s New Album Is Sustainable
Billie for "Hit Me Hard and Soft"
William Drumm
Social media users were quick to claim Eilish was hypocritical by announcing that HIT ME HARD AND SOFT will have eight vinyl variations. However, each vinyl is made from recycled materials – either 100% recycled black vinyl or BioVinyl, which replaces petroleum used during manufacturing with recycled cooking oil.
This just illustrates that Eilish wasn’t directing criticism towards other artists for using vinyl variants to gain album sales…but she does think there are better ways to do it that benefit the environment without hurting their sales.
Sandra Day O'Connor's Nuanced Legacy
The Supreme Court judge who refused to enshrine her personal morality as law
Appointed by President Reagan in 1981, O’Connor spent 24 years as a Supreme Court Justice, retiring in 2006. Her New YorkTimes obituary makes an interesting point: while O’Connor was considered a conservative, the current Supreme Court’s increasing right-wing bias makes many of her opinions and rulings appear (gasp!) downright liberal.
Her is a decidedly mixed judicial legacy.
As the Times notes, at her confirmation hearings, she was questioned about the issue of abortion. She “called the procedure ‘offensive’ and ‘repugnant,’ and said that ‘it is something in which I would not engage.’” Yet she defended Roe V. Wade on several occasions.
“One of her most influential roles,” according to Politico, “was in the 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore, as she joined justices Anthony Kennedy, William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in a decision that led to George W. Bush’s 2000 election win.” The consequences of this hotly-contested election are still being felt – most especially in what is and what is not being done to stave off global warming and ecological collapse. Had Al Gore, a passionate environmentalist, reached the White House it is safe to say the planet’s health would be in far better shape than it is.
She supported affirmative action in college admissions. Reuters tells us: “O'Connor wrote in the ruling that colleges must strive for diversity ‘if the dream of one nation, indivisible, is to be realized.’” Reuters also informs the reader that her initial lack of support for gay rights changed over time. “In 1986 she voted to uphold a Georgia law prohibiting sexual relations between homosexuals but voted in 2003 to strike down a similar law in Texas.”
Comparing her to the most recent – Trump-appointed – Justices makes O’Connor seem like a figure from a distant past: a moderate who took the opinions of others into account, a judge who refused to enshrine her own morality as law.
A groundbreaking figure, indeed.
Faith, Politics, and Abortion: Is Joe Biden a Real Catholic?
If the USCCB had their way, no Catholic would be qualified for political office.
In 1960, as John F. Kennedy was running for president of the United States, a question of his faith became a major issue in the campaign.
Only one previous Catholic candidate had ever been nominated by a major party — Al Smith, a Democrat who lost badly to Herbert Hoover in 1928. Many protestant voters believed that Kennedy would be subject to the will of the Vatican and would serve the pope before he served the American people.
Kennedy managed to assuage those fears by assuring the voting public that his faith would be separate from his governance, stating, "I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair." But 60 years later, as Joe Biden settles into his role as the second Catholic president in America's history, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City has rejected this approach and reopened the question of whether a true Catholic should be allowed to be president.
Kennedy Special: JFK & The Pope | Historywww.youtube.com
According to Naumann, it is not enough that Joe Biden is the first president in decades to regularly attend Sunday church services. It is not enough for him to follow Catholic teachings in his personal life — to mourn his son Beau in funeral services at a Catholic Church and visit his grave in a Catholic cemetery. According to Naumann — who is the chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop's Committee on Pro-life Activities — Joe Biden may not call himself a "devout Catholic," unless he takes a political stance against legal abortion.
This declaration came a month after USCCB president Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles declared that Joe Biden had "pledged to pursue certain policies that would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity, most seriously in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender." As upsetting as that claim is, Archbishop Naumann managed to take his criticism a step further.
In an interview with the Catholic World Report, Naumann claimed that Joe Biden "is going to force people to support abortion through their tax dollars" and that he is "acting contrary to Church teaching." By his metric this means that "when [President Biden] says he is a devout Catholic, we bishops have the responsibility to correct him."
But, whatever their political disagreement might be, does it really warrant an attack on the sincerity of his personal faith? Leaving aside accusations of sexual misconduct — as those leveled against Trump are both more numerous and more egregious (and the Catholic Church's capacity for "forgiveness" has been made all too clear on this issue...) — hasn't Biden's private life demonstrated Christian virtue far more clearly than Donald Trump's?
Yet Naumann seemed to think that Donald Trump — a serial-adulterer, twice divorced, who has never engaged in regular church attendance — was a better ally for Christian morality. While Pope Francis slyly criticized Donald Trump for the hypocrisy of taking pro-life stances while tearing children from their families at the border — until the courts put a stop to the practice — Archbishop Naumann said that "the Trump Administration deserves our praise" for cutting off government funding to charities and non-profit organizations that provide abortions.
That statement came in August of 2020, just weeks after the Trump administration began a spate of federal executions that would go on to end the lives of 13 people between July of 2020 and January of 2021. While the Catholic Church — along with Naumann himself — has taken clear stances against the death penalty in all instances, Naumann did not seem to think this was as worthy of rebuke as Joe Biden's plans to reinstate funding for organizations that provide free and low-cost abortion services.
Naumann has not simply voiced his political disagreement or stated that the church opposes the stance; he has attacked the notion that a person can truly be a Catholic while supporting political policies that the the church opposes. He has essentially embraced the notion that the Vatican should dictate how a Catholic president governs a nation in which the separation of church and state is enshrined in the First Amendment.
To meet Archbishop Naumann's standard as a "devout Catholic," would Biden likewise have to maintain political opposition to gay marriage, divorce, and contraception? Considering the truly unhinged, outdated, and functionally evil anti-sex stances that the Catholic Church has continually taken — actively fighting the distribution of condoms in Africa at a time when AIDS was killing millions on the continent every year — any reasonable person should pray that Archbishop Naumann's vision of a Catholic president never exists.
We can ignore the fact that the modern notion that "life begins at conception" is far from consistent in early Christian doctrine. We can ignore the portion of the bible that seems to call for inducing a miscarriage in the case of adultery. We can ignore the fact that canonized theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to St. Augustine to St. Anselm differentiated between the early stages of pregnancy and the period after "ensoulment" — often associated with the "quickening" — when kicking and other fetal movement become detectable around 18 weeks.
We can ignore all of that, because the solidity of Catholic dogma has no relevance in secular law. Joe Biden could hold it as a religious belief that abortion is wrong — he could personally abhor the practice and even consider it murder — but there is no secular or scientific basis for that belief, so he would have no right to impose that view on anyone else.
For the vast majority of development, embryos and fetuses have non-existent or largely inactive brains. To claim that the supposed existence of a divine soul makes them as worthy of human rights as a conscious person whose body is being co-opted requires religious faith which the laws of a modern, secular nation cannot be allowed to incorporate.
This is the reality that predominantly Catholic nations like Ireland and Argentina have acknowledged in legalizing certain forms of abortion in recent years. Or would Archbishop Naumann like to challenge the devout Catholicism of the citizens of Ireland, as well?
Pro-Life Archbishop Joseph Naumann Shares Reaction to Pro-Abortion Policies | EWTN News Nightlywww.youtube.com
So while Naumann engages in baseless, partisan slander when he claims that Joe Biden is not "as orthodox in his Catholic faith as he is in doing what Planned Parenthood instructs him to do," there is a grain of truth in his statement. Because an organization like Planned Parenthood — with a basis in science and medicine (and completely removed from the beliefs of its problematic founder) — has a far more legitimate place in American politics than does the Catholic Church.
In the past, immense crimes have been done as a result of the Catholic Church's stance against the "moral hazard" of making sex safer or less shameful. Whether that means victims of rape being further traumatized by pregnancy and birth, HIV spreading in Africa, LGBTQ+ people being forced to deny who they are, or hundreds of children being taken from unwed mothers to die in the 1950s under the "care" of the Bon Secours nuns in Tuam, Ireland.
Maybe its time to consider the moral hazard of allowing men who have taken solemn vows of abstinence — and who all too often break them — to speak as authorities on matters of sex and sexuality that have nothing to do with them. At the very least, it's time for Archbishops Naumann and Gomez to recognize that a president's religious views "are his own private affair."
11 of the Cutest Pets That Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Has Lied About
The hashtag #AOCLied has been hijacked by pictures of cute pets, and we love it.
In the ongoing effort by conservatives to downplay January's violent attempt to overturn America's democratic process, they have set their sights back on one of their favorite targets — Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York's 14th district.
As an intelligent, charismatic, and progressive young woman of color from a working class background, who is very open and engaged with the public, she represents a significant threat to the core conservative ideal of convincing voters that the Democrats are evil. They therefore work tirelessly to undermine all of these positive attributes that make her such a promising symbol for the future of politics.
That's why they paint her as a dumb waitress who isn't qualified, who grew up rich, who has an weird face, who isn't even "really" Puerto Rican (they love to make a big deal out of the fact that some friends used to call her "Sandy," as if that makes her white), and who is generally deceitful. That last one is particularly important in their effort to undermine the disturbing account she recently shared detailing her experience of January 6th attack on the Capitol.
The event should not to be confused with the time she was adorably attacked by a constituent's dog. Rather, the attack on the Capitol was the horrifying attack that the whole country watched on the news and recognized as awful. But now that it's become clear that most of the GOP's base still wants Donald Trump to be defended against impeachment, there's been a concerted effort to recast the insurrectionist crowd as roughly the equivalent of an overeager bulldog, so we can all move on.
Ocasio-Cortez has a different perspective.
She described feeling that her life was under threat due to the close proximity of an aggressive mob, some of whom were equipped for violence and actively seeking out legislators and politicians whom they had been encouraged to (falsely) believe were stealing the election. If Mike Pence elicited chants of "Hang Mike Pence!" simply by endorsing the standard electoral process — after Donald Trump said, "If he doesn't come through, I won't like him quite as much" — what would this crowd have done to the Right-wing's perennial boogeyman of socialism?
The answer is, of course, that they would have killed her. A plot to kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer had been busted less than three months earlier. By that afternoon, Molotov cocktails and other homemade explosive devices had been found in the vicinity. So what reason could her political opponents offer to dismiss Representative Ocasio-Cortez's justified fear that she was at risk of dying — that an unseen man banging on the door of her office and shouting "where is she?" might not be friendly?
How could they dismiss the concern she expressed that she might not live to ever be a mother? Or the ways in which the experience exposed past trauma of her experience of sexual assault. They've dismissed it by pointing out the fact that she wasn't even in the Capitol building.
That's the "damning" information that has been spreading on Right-wing social media with the hashtags #AOCLied and "AlexandriaOcasioSmollett" — comparing her to Empire actor Jussie Smollett who (allegedly) hired two men to stage a homophobic attack for the sake of his career. Their logic seems to be: If she lied about experiencing the attack on the Capitol, maybe she was lying about being a survivor of sexual assault. as well.
They actually do seem to have a compelling point regarding her account of the day...until you take two seconds to look at a map. When you do take those two seconds, you realize that Representative Ocasio-Cortez was never more than a stone's throw from the mob. And if they had taken realized that, they would have been throwing those stones...
While it's true that the crowd didn't try to break into a building where she was located, the Congressional office buildings where she sheltered are connected to the Capitol building via underground tunnels, and the locations of her office — a short distance from the crowd erecting a gallows and calling for death — is public information.
The fact that she survived the day can be attributed to the fact that the most violent members of the crowd — some of whom had taken measures to be illegally carrying firearms — didn't bother to check Google. They had the means, and the likes of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz had fed them plenty of misinformation to provide motive. All they lacked was an opportunity — which Ocasio-Cortez was keen to avoid, hiding behind bathroom doors and donning a stranger's running shoes.
There is no legitimate reason to doubt the traumatic experience she described. So it was a pleasure to see the hashtags attacking her being hijacked by K-Pop stans, Paris Hilton aficionados, and by people focusing on real grievances — the lies AOC told to/about their adorable pets.
So without further ado, here are 11 of the cutest #AOCLied tweets:
With all these lies about pets, how can we trust her? Does she even have a French Bulldog named Deco?!
If you've know of any more pets that AOC has lied about, be sure to hit us up on Facebook or on Twitter with the hashtag #AOCLied.
Were Congressional Insiders Helping the Capitol Hill Attack?
AOC and others have shared frightening first-hand details from the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021.
Update 2/2/2021:On Monday night, Representative Ocasio-Cortez once again took to Instagram Live to share her experience of the attack on the Capitol building in more detail.
She talked about the frightening moment when an unknown man made his way into her office shouting, "Where is she?" as she hid behind a bathroom door believing that he was likely there to kill her — "this was the moment where I thought everything was over,"
Even the realization that this man was a Capitol police officer didn't feel like a guarantee that he was looking out for her safety — an uncertainty which friendly interactions between police and attackers would later justify. She described sheltering in Representative Katie Porter's office as they received reports of bombs being found and made contingency plans for escaping out a window or into a safer office.
The intensity and detail of her account are striking, as is her decision to share a personal context for how she processes the experience, relating that she is "a survivor of sexual assault," and noting that "when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other."
But perhaps the most important moment of the stream was her comparison of recent calls for us all to "move on" from the insurrection — often from those who stoked the misinformation that brought it on — to "the tactics of abusers," saying, "this is at a point where it's not about the difference of political opinion. This is about just basic humanity."
On Tuesday night, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York's 14th congressional district took to Instagram Live to share her experience of last week's frightening events at Capitol Hill.
Ocasio-Cortez has made a point of making herself accessible to the public, sharing her cooking, her gaming, and even her struggle to find affordable housing through social media. It's a practice that has contributed to the adoration of her fans as well as the vitriol of her detractors. But she has never shared anything quite as personal and affecting as her experience of the attempted coup on January 6th.
Jared Kushner Could Win a Nobel Prize, but BLM Deserves It
The Nobel Prize committee has the chance to signal a better future for a prize with a fraught past.
I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice — Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. "Letter From Birmingham Jail" 1963
Nominations have been announced for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize.
Among notable nominees are Ivanka Trump's husband Jared Kushner, politician and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Depending on your political biases, you likely find at least one of those nominations offensive, though it should be noted that the list of nominees is long, and anyone can be nominated.
In this case, Black Lives Matter was nominated by Petter Eide, a member of Norway's parliament. As for Jared Kushner, he was nominated along with former Special Representative for International Negotiations Avi Berkowitz — the famed Harvard law professor, Trump sycophant, and defense attorney for O.J. Simpson and Jeffrey Epstein. Kushner and Berkowitz played central roles in brokering the Abraham Accords declaring, "Peace, Cooperation, and Constructive Diplomatic and Friendly Relations" between the US, Israel, Bahrain, and the UAE.
The Abraham Accords: The PR of the 'peace deals' | The Listening Postwww.youtube.com
At face value many Americans would no doubt see the negotiation of a peace deal as more legitimate grounds for nomination than a protest movement that sparked violent confrontation with police and counter protesters around the country in 2020. And, if we look at the history of the Peace Prize, there is a sense in which they would be right — the prize has often been awarded for superficial diplomatic theater rather than the real and often messy work of addressing injustice.
The Fraught History of the Nobel Peace Prize
In 1928, Secretary of State Frank Kellogg received the prize for getting all the world's major powers to officially, meaninglessly renounce war...shortly before Hitler took power in Germany. Another Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, was selected by the Nobel Committee for negotiating a cease fire with Vietnam in 1973 — the same year it was revealed that he had masterminded a secret carpet bombing campaign in Cambodia, which is credited with giving rise to the genocidal Khmer Rouge.
More recently, in 2009, Barack Obama was given the Peace Prize just for being elected president — in a move Obama acknowledged as premature. And in 2020, Donald Trump's son-in-law and his buddy Avi were nominated for the award for arranging "peace" between nations that were never at war — with a substantial arms deal thrown in for good measure.
To put it bluntly, it would make nearly as much sense for Jared Kushner to win the Nobel Peace Prize as it did for a number of other recipients with dubious claims to peace work. By contrast, in 1948 the Nobel committee chose not to award anyone — rather than acknowledge Mohandas Gandhi's work in pushing for Indian independence from Britain.
Historically the committee has often erred on the side of the powerful — rewarding hollow and hypocritical displays of diplomacy over the controversy that tends to arise around grassroots struggles. So while it may be unlikely that Kushner and Berkowitz will receive the peace prize, neither would it really be surprising.
But with Black History Month kicking off, it's worth articulating not just why their diplomacy is underwhelming, but why the Black Lives Matter movement deserves recognition for advancing the global fight against injustice.
No Justice, No Peace
While extensive efforts have been made to paint the Black Lives Matter movement as violent, anti-White, and at the political fringes, in reality it is the largest and most racially diverse protest movement in American history. And considering the thousands of demonstrations that have taken place, involving many millions of individuals, the relative lack of violence from the protesters is much more worthy of note than a handful of dramatic scenes.
Compared to the January 6th Trump rally, where a crowd of around 30,000 spawned a violent insurrection — which was handled with kid gloves by the police and led to five deaths — the 15 million plus who participated in BLM marches in 2020 were remarkably peaceful. The same cannot be said for far too many of police who patrolled those marches and gave proof to the brutality that inspired them.
And though regrettable incidents of arson and violence have undeniably taken place in connection with BLM demonstrations, the alternative was not "peace."
What is often overlooked in discussions of peace is the reality of social and political injustice as among the most prevalent forms of violence on Earth. When millions of people, targeted through no fault of their own, are systemically dehumanized — their lives and their contributions devalued and their opportunities for life, liberty and pursuit of happiness both deliberately and incidentally truncated for centuries — that is violence that destroys lives on another scale altogether.
For Black Americans that obviously means slavery and its aftermath, as well as segregation and the continued legacies of practices like redlining. But it also means a so-called "war on drugs" that treats addiction as a crime rather than an illness and disproportionately targets and locks up Black Americans, depriving too many children of their parents.
It means racist police procedures like Stop and Frisk, as well as the implicit (and often explicit) racial biases of the officers themselves. It means making it nearly impossible for people convicted of felonies within this unjust, racist system to live within the bounds of the law, depriving them — as well as millions of Black Americans who haven't been convicted of anything — of the right to participate in democracy and change the system that treats them so cruelly.
And none of this even covers the immense wealth inequality that makes life harder for almost all Americans — though, again, the harm is leveled disproportionately against Black Americans. All of these ordinary and unacceptable aspects of American life are violence — "the negative peace which is the absence of tension."
They destabilize communities, families, and individual lives. And that violence came to a head in June, following the horrific killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer over a suspected counterfeit $20 bill.
While far from the only evidence of systemic racism in America, the murder of unarmed Black men, women, and children by police and by racist vigilantes who — more often than not — are allowed to walk free, is perhaps its most blatant and disgusting expression.
And the names of the slain — Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Philando Castille, too many more to mention — have become rallying cries.
With all the domestic resistance the protests met from people who insist on spitting "all lives matter!" (as if fighting for the value of Black lives implied otherwise) and "blue lives matter!" (as if the safety of police officers depends on their ability to shoot unarmed Black men, women, and children without consequence), it would be easy to lose sight of how much support the movement has received overseas. While the movement was started in America, the impact has been global.
"Injustice Anywhere Is a Threat to Justice Everywhere"
The reality of living as a dehumanized minority in a bigoted society is sadly all too common in the world. And while not everywhere is as bad in this respect as America, the recognition sparked protests of solidarity and of common cause around the world.
Like the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Black Lives Matter has continued the fight for America to live up to its promise. Because right now "the land of the free" is home to a carceral state where more people are imprisoned than anywhere else on Earth, and citizens are killed by police at a higher rate than in any comparable nation.
Because the systems that were deliberately set up to keep newly freed Black citizens oppressed following the Civil War were never truly purged — have been covertly bolstered and supplemented ever since.
That is not peace. Only a stable form of violence.
In 1964 the Nobel committee opted not to side with power. It was the same year the FBI sent a harassing letter to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., urging him to commit suicide.
He was considered by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — and many others in positions of power within the American government — to be an enemy of the state. There is even reason to believe that these forces were directly involved in his 1968 assassination.
His protest movement was disruptive to the normal order of American life that most white Americans were content to maintain. Many balked at the idea that it could be called peaceful. But the Nobel committee selected him for the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize. It was a serious signal that the world was watching how America handled peaceful dissent.
Did that make a difference in passing the voting rights act of 1965? Who can say? But the Nobel committee has a similar opportunity this year.
What Black Lives Matter has been fighting for in recent months is the "positive peace" King spoke of as "the presence of justice." With that in mind — and with some uncertainty remaining as to how a decentralized, leaderless movement of millions can receive an award — the Nobel committee should take seriously the option of selecting Black Lives Matter.
Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speechwww.youtube.com
There are no doubt many nominees whom the committee could select for the Peace Prize — including Jared Kushner. And some who would even be worthy — including Stacey Abrams.
But the significance of acknowledging a grassroots fight for justice that was centuries in the making (in a nation which — for all its flaws — continues to shape culture around the world) is too powerful to deny.
4 Ways This Inauguration Will Be Different From Any Other
An unprecedented inauguration for unprecedented times.
After a mob attacked the Capitol on January 6th and over 400,000 U.S. deaths as a result of the pandemic, this year's inauguration is going to look a little different.
Crowds will be small or nonexistent, events will be moved online, and security will be tougher than ever. It will be a day of historic firsts, both good and bad.Some things will change, but the important things will stay the same. The Vice President and President will take the oath of office, and it will be the same oath it always is: An oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
1. Minimal attendance
The actual swearing-in ceremony is the most important part of Inauguration Day. And for the most part, it will proceed normally. As dictated by the Constitution, President Biden will be sworn in at noon on January 20th. He will continue the tradition of being sworn in on the Capitol steps.
It'll be no less star-studded than usual, with Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Garth Brooks, among others, expected to perform. There will be the normal recitation of poems and prayers, all concluding with a speech from the newly inaugurated president.
However, instead of giving this speech to the crowd of hundreds of thousands that usually populate the National Mall on Inauguration Day, Biden will give his speech to around 1,000 people and more than 191,500 flags.
Instead of the usual 200,000 tickets distributed to members of Congress and passed out to their constituents, organizers released just over 1,000 tickets — one for each of the 535 members of Congress and one guest each.
To make up for the minimal attendance, the Presidential Inaugural Committee planted more than 191,500 American flags on the National Mall, meant to represent the American people who can't attend Biden's inauguration.
Flags are placed on the National Mall, with the U.S. Capitol behind them, ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, Monday, Jan. 18, 2021, in Washington.AP Photo/Alex Brandon
2. Virtual inaugural events
Inauguration Day is usually packed with events, all of which are usually packed with people. On a normal inauguration day there is not only the swearing-in ceremony but also a luncheon with lawmakers, a parade through DC, and finally the inaugural ball held at the White House. In a year where so many Americans have died of the novel coronavirus, the inaugural committee has decided to change how these events will be held.
The Inaugural Luncheon is usually a grand affair where all the members of Congress gather in the capitol for a three course meal immediately after the swearing-in ceremony. The tradition began in 1953, but this year it has been cancelled entirely.
The next event is the inaugural parade where marching bands, first responders, military units, and other proud Americans accompany the new president in his historic march from the Capitol to the White House. There has been some sort of formal inaugural parade since 1809, when James Madison was inaugurated.
This year, the parade will go virtual. Joe Biden will still make the trip from the Capitol to the White House, but there will be no cheering crowds. Biden will get a presidential escort there, which will include representatives from every branch of the military, as well as the drumlines for the University of Delaware and Howard University — Biden's and Harris' alma maters. But the main event will be the virtual "Parade Across America," featuring performances from all 56 states and territories.
The final events of the day are usually the swanky inaugural balls. The city is usually taken over by both "official" and "unofficial" balls. Official ones are sponsored by the Presidential Inaugural Committee, and guarantee that the president and his spouse will show up. Normally the whole city is taken over by donors, supporters, and celebrities celebrating the new president.
This year, instead of an inaugural ball, there will be a primetime television event. The "Celebrating America Primetime Special" will be hosted by Tom Hanks and feature an impressive celebrity lineup. Demi Lovato, Justin Timberlake, Jon Bon Jovi, Ant Clemons, Bruce Springsteen, John Legend and Foo Fighters will all perform. And Kerry Washington, Eva Longoria, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, José Andrés, Lin-Manuel Miranda and other big names will also be featured in some way.
Tom Hanks to host televised inauguration special featuring Justin Timberlake and Demi Lovato.Getty Images
3. Historic moments
This inauguration will be particularly notable because of its historic firsts. Kamala Harris will be sworn in as the first woman, first woman of color, first Black American and first Asian American to be vice president. Harris' husband, attorney Doug Emhoff, will also make history as both the first male and first Jewish spouse of a vice president or president.
Joe Biden comes with his own first: He will be the oldest person ever sworn in as president at the age of 78. He will also be only the second Catholic President in our country's history.
Donald Trump is also making history on Inauguration Day–by not attending. Trump plans to fly to Mar-A-Lago the morning of the inauguration and will not attend the ceremony or welcome the Biden family to the White House. It has been 152 years since a President refused to attend his successor's inauguration.
The last president to refuse to attend was Andrew Johnson in 1869, and he was also an impeached, one-term president. Vice President Mike Pence will be in attendance for the inauguration, as will former presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
Kamala Harris accepts the Democratic nomination for as first Black female vice presidential candidate in Wilmington, Del., on Aug. 19.Erin Schaff / NYT via Redux file
4. Higher security
Inauguration security is always taken very seriously by the secret service, but after the riot that breached the capitol and delayed the election certification on January 6th, this inauguration will have unprecedented levels of security. The FBI has warned of threats to D.C., including to lawmakers and federal monuments, and all of Washington is well aware of the possibility of armed groups demonstrating in the District on Inauguration Day.
Inauguration viewers should expect a visible military presence, since a total of 25,000 National Guard troops are authorized to help secure the inauguration. There is also a seven-foot-high, unscalable, razor-wire fence encircling the Capitol.
Unlike usual inaugurations, several Metro stations are closed, a large portion of the city will be restricted for drivers, and a number of bridges that cross the Potomac River and Anacostia River will be closed.
There are also security checkpoints throughout the city. Those checkpoints have already resulted in several arrests, including a Virginia man who had fake inauguration credentials, a loaded gun, and more than 500 rounds of ammunition.
The U.S. Capitol is seen behind a fence with razor wire during sunrise on January 16, 2021.Samuel Corum / Getty
This will be an unprecedented Inauguration Day, but after seemingly countless months of "unprecedented times," what else could we possibly expect?
Mike Pompeo's Multiculturalism Tweet Sums Up the Trump Era
The future looks pretty grim.
It seems fitting that the Trump administration would go out with a bang. It also seems fitting that the bang would be unbridled white supremacy and blatant racism.
After the white supremacist insurrection at the Capitol, tensions have been high in anticipation of the January 20th Inauguration, with the whole country waiting on edge to see what how the transfer of power will go.
For a while, it looked like they'd have to drag Donald Trump out of the White House by his platinum wig. For a moment, it looked like there would be a coup. But the reality is much less dramatic but more insidious. Trump loyalists, it seems, are spending their last days seeping as much vitriolic rhetoric into the country (and presumably the White House floors judging by the news of a pre-Biden deep clean) as they possibly can.
Outgoing Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, took to Twitter on his last full day in office to say, "Woke-ism, multiculturalism, all the -isms — they're not who America is. They distort our glorious founding and what this country is all about. Our enemies stoke these divisions because they know they make us weaker."
The image attached to the tweet reads: "Censorship, wokeness, political correctness, it all points in one direction — authoritarianism, cloaked as moral righteousness."
There's so much to unpack here.
The basic logic of his argument is hard to parse. From the tweet it seems that he believes that multiculturalism is a divisive tool used by "our enemies" to "distort our glorious founding" — though who he refers to and what our founding entails he does not specify.
The ensuing logic, however, makes claims that denounce authoritarianism and moral righteousness. In Pompeo's mind, multiculturalism somehow does not align with the individualism he thinks will save us from authoritarianism.
To pick apart the nonsense of his argument would be redundant, so it is instead easier to call it what it is: racist.
The tenuous thread of his logic rests on the shoulders of white supremacy. The narrative is familiar but no less frightening. Pompeo tells a short story of how our country was, and could be, so great if not for the threat of the encroaching "other" contaminating the nation's proverbial purity.
The ensuing language may be vague, but the purist sentiments of his rhetoric are clear. His focus on "multiculturalism" is a signpost that signals his issue is not just with the left, but with BIPOC communities.
Beneath his cacophony of buzzwords, the dangerous, fascist sentiments of the past four years are all encapsulated into a reminder that the Trump administration and the people who perpetrated the harm and violence of it does not stop with Trump.
In truth, the barely concealed violence of Pompeo's rhetoric is engrained so deeply into the fabric of the United States that he might be right: Despite its insistence to the contrary, the US has purported to be a multicultural nation but has always been ruled by white supremacy.
Though this country claims to be about diversity and inclusion, so much of its history points to the opposite. But this is not the argument Pompeo is making.
There are valid claims about how, occasionally throughout US history, multiculturalism and the famous "melting pot" end up diluting people's cultures into a vague shadow of what they used to be. Pompeo, as a descendant of Italian immigrants, is a direct result of the dilution of Italian culture for the mantle of whiteness that he is so secure inside.
However, Pompeo is not calling for a more nuanced understanding of race, culture, and ethnicity.
He's calling for the same thing Donald Trump called for that brought on the Capitol siege, the same thing that has allowed racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy to persist as ruling bodies of this country — a scapegoat.
His vague language is intentional. It invites dissatisfied, disaffeced white people to substitute their ideals and their issues for the distortions and divisions he mentions, while uniting them against "multiculturalism."
While similar rhetoric has been spouted by this administration in various forms, its usual targets are the general left, or progressives and democrats. The focus on "multiculturalism" bypasses the white liberals he could be appealing to for unity against the "divisions" in our country.
The invocation of "woke-ism," a convenient neologism he makes up to orchestrate this tweet, fabricates another giant to distract from the actual "isms" most people would turn to … like, racism.
In fact, just deleting the first two words of the tweet makes a different argument altogether. Yes, I do agree that "all the -isms" distort the ideal vision of the country, but we have different "isms" and different ideals.
What's most frightening about this sentiment is that Mike Pompeo reportedly has ambitions to run for President in 2024. His key to winning: taking over the MAGA mantle.
Pompeo's sentiments coupled with his ambitions serve as a reminder that Trump's legacy is not going away with a Biden Presidency.
Despite Biden's calls for "unity," Trump loyalists do not want unity between all Americans. They want the vitriolic energy that put them in power to persist so that they can stay in power.
I implore Biden then, to pull back his hands, to waste less time appealing to white supremacists and more time reaching towards the communities who (somewhat reluctantly for most) ensured his win.
So far, Biden has elected a historically diverse cabinet, one which seems to exemplify multiculturalism at its best. But to make it its best, it's important that we do not take multiculturalism to mean tokenization, but rather the active process of representation, celebration, and learning that it should be.
The Attack on Capitol Hill Wasn't Black Americans' Fight
"President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon...Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad." -Malcolm X.
The attack on Capitol Hill was another example of how President Donald Trump has emboldened white supremacy. His term in office has given racism and fascism a bigger platform and an official advocate. He proved that, at his command, MAGA fanatics will assemble to do his bidding.
As the world watched the descent of democracy, many were appalled at the visual. This was an attempted coup two weeks before the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. News outlets and politicians questioned how we, as a country, got to this point. But for Black Americans, this has always been our country.
The violence witnessed on Capitol Hill was a scene all too familiar for Black people. The difference was that we weren't the direct targets. Trump's base has antagonized and threatened violence against Black people while law enforcement abuses its power when interacting with us. The confrontation between the two entities responsible for our oppression was unexpected, but not surprising.
Many Trump supporters and members of law enforcement are cut from the same cloth. In fact, many members of law enforcement voted for him. Their belief in excessive force under the guise of law and order gives them what they feel is the right to harm anyone who goes against their authority. They are loyal to a flawed system and a man that keeps them in power and not to the country and its citizens seeking progress and peace.
Throughout this presidency, both sides have pledged their allegiance to each other. MAGA supporters have backed the Blue Lives Matter movement. Police officers have demonstrated leniency when dealing with unruly Trump disciples at rallies and protests. Both believe they are the good guys trying to make things great again.
[shorcode-Newsletter-Embed]
Black people have had to do battle with both. We've had to listen to the various lies spewed about the Black Lives Matter movement from supporters of the president while fighting police brutality daily. The assault on Blackness was a cause that unified them. Black people have warned the world of the dangers these factions were capable of for years. Those claims fell on deaf ears, until yesterday when they turned on one another.
For many Black Americans, yesterday was the manifestation of this country's inability to address domestic terrorism. Peaceful protests and resistance against police brutality are viewed in the same light as the insurrection. The anarchy and mayhem that GOP pundits accuse BLM of inciting was a direct order from their leader.
Their ignorance and arrogance gave them the courage to lay siege to a government building. But if angry Black protesters attempted the same actions, many lives would've been lost.
Suddenly, Trump supporters view themselves as oppressed. Their reign over the country is coming to a not so graceful end. Rather than humbly accepting defeat, they want to dismantle the establishment. The same establishment that helped empower them over the last four years.
Somehow this attack was yet another revelation for white Americans. Before Trump's election, the idea of police officers displaying a lack of regard for the lives of Black people was inconceivable to white Americans. The thought of parts of our government upholding systemic racism was unfathomable.
Last night, after a year of reckoning with the racism built into America's system, white Americans were forced to once again look at the enormous part white privilege plays in policing. But for Black people, it was simply a clear visual of America's decision on November 8, 2016, coming home to roost.
After Washington, Republicans Can Never Call BLM Protestors "Violent Extremists" Again
What's happening in Washington D.C. is beyond comprehension. And yet we should have seen this coming. Many of us did.
Our elected leaders, our democracy, and the very fabric of our nation are being threatened by the current attempted coup in Washington. MAGA protestors have invaded the Capitol Building and threatened the lives of our elected representatives. They are carrying guns, and disrupting democracy. They are terrorists, and they are not being stopped.
January 6 started as a triumphant morning for Democrats. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their races in Georgia. U.S. representatives gathered in the Capitol to count Electoral College votes. Even Mitch McConnell and Mike Pence renounced Trump's continued attempts to take over democracy. It seemed like a transition of power was going to happen smoothly.
But President Trump's supporters weren't going to let that happen. Their protest started peacefully outside the Capitol, and seemed like another group of Trump supporters making their last stand.
But somehow, MAGA protestors, Proud Boys, and attendees of this so-called "Save America Rally" broke through barricades and forced their way into the Capitol Building.
Somehow, improbably, the police and security allowed some to break into the building where our government officials — the people carefully and fairly elected to represent us all — were attempting to confirm the election of the next president.
The response to these protestors, and the inaction of the police and the National Guard, is almost unimaginably hypocritical. At Black Lives Matter protests throughout the summer, we saw teeming rows of cops circling protestors, shooting them with rubber bullets and arresting them in droves, often simply for marching.
Today, after destroying government property to break their way in, protestors appear to be walking peacefully around the Capitol, walking on the Senate floor, invading Nancy Pelosi's office, destroying property, striding over the marble floors, carrying machine guns. Members of Congress have been evacuated to secure locations.
If these had been Leftist protestors, if these had been Black and brown protestors, they would be in jail at best, or more likely shot by police.
Republicans constantly claim that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are necessary to preserve the safety of Americans and that the military requires billions to protect America. But where are these people now, as American extremists storm the Capitol?
What about when our own president goes against the prevailing logic of almost everyone else in positions of power and quite literally incites violence against the government? Where is the military, which is supposed to protect America, today? Where is the National Guard? Where is America?
Lost, certainly. Dead, possibly. It will take an act of magic or a miracle to revive us from this.
What we are witnessing is a collapse of massive proportions, an attempted coup that reveals the fragility of our democracy and the way Donald Trump has torn us all apart.
Currently, protestors are on the Senate floor. Members of Congress are cowering inside, calling their family members and assuring them they're alright.
A woman has been carried out on a stretcher, drenched in blood.
People are calling on the president — that insecure, unstable man — but his only responses have included tweets that demand the protestors to stay peaceful and respect the cops.
Perhaps some of Trump's supporters' delusions that he is remotely competent or sane are finally collapsing, but it is too little too late.
Let us never forget that the President urged protestors to fight. There is no logic here except the logic of a coup, except the logic of violence, except the logic of extreme greed and insanity that has always defined Trump but that has now exploded out of the woodwork and infected the minds of thousands of Americans.
There is no logic here, just the abstract soundscape of collapse. Yet no one should really be surprised. We knew that the Proud Boys were planning a boogaloo, a Civil War. The threads and the comments and the threats were all there. Time and time again, we ignored them.
We know that Trump supporters subsist on lies own media outlets. We know that they are being inundated with lies — disproven by countless lawsuits — that our election was fraudulent. We know that many of our own Republican leaders sowed these seeds, continuing to support Donald Trump as he built up his firestorm of lies and insanity.
We know that there are so many factors to blame here, a buildup in tensions from the pandemic to Black Lives Matter to Democratic victories that has exploded here today. We know that Americans are suffering and afraid, all of us.
And yet never — not in the whole summer of protests, not ever in recent American history — have we seen an unobstructed invasion like this.
On the news, the scene is horrifyingly mellow. White supremacists are walking around the Capitol, guns flying, without opposition, without election, without fact to sustain them. Everyone else is absent or cowering in fear. These people are, unforgivably, not being punished; they are being allowed to walk free.
How do we even comprehend this? For now, some of us can at the very least hold fast to the fact that when Republicans criticize the "radical Left" for "violent" protests (AKA looting and damaging of empty buildings, at the most extreme), we will be able to remind them of the time when the more radical sect of their party — led by their beloved president — quite literally committed terrorism and infiltrated the Capitol and threatened our elected representatives' lives.
If we get through this, we know that we have a Democratic Congress. We must hope that in addition to addressing the pandemic, these bodies of government somehow figure out how to stop this from happening ever again.
It's getting dark soon. Stay safe, stay strong, Americans. Realize that this is white supremacy knowing that it is losing power and lashing out in the way it always has — with violence, intrusion, and destruction.
Realize that this is in America's blood and we are in the process of draining it out, but it won't go quietly.
Realize this is the spirit of American violence — colonialism and racism and all of their aftereffects — rearing its many ugly heads and, like a hydra, refusing to die, just growing back.
Realize that there are terrorists in America, wearing familiar faces — faces we have been taught to respect but also faces that are willing to corner our democratically elected representatives, faces that are allowed to do so and, as I write this, are still doing so.
We are somehow closer and further than ever before from actualizing the dream of America, a world where everyone can be equal.
We are on the edge of Rome burning. We are both a promise of the best of humanity and a collage of the very worst of it. We can only hope that the truth will prevail in the end.
What's Going On with the Protests at the U.S. Capitol?
Trump supporters swarmed the U.S. capitol during today's Senate debate over the Electoral College votes.
This article was originally published at 3:55 p.m. on January 6. It was updated at 5:50 p.m. on January 6.
Less than a year after Black Lives Matter protesters were met with tear gas, rubber bullets, and countless instances of brutality from police officers across the country, Trump supporters are being let off rather easy for...also protesting.
January 6 marked the Senate debate over the Electoral College count, during which the soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and various other Trump cronies asserted that Joe Biden did not win the 2020 election (though he did) and the current president would have been reelected in a landslide if it weren't for massive voter fraud (which didn't exist).
As Senators debated in the capitol, a swarm of protestors — donning Trump swag, MAGA hats, and, yes, Confederate flags—began encroaching in. At around 2 PM EST, however, Capitol Police notified everyone inside the building to shelter in place. The protesters had, in fact, breached the capitol building.
A Timeline: Here's Video Evidence of What's Going On
First, Trump supporters began gathering outside the Capitol steps. As they inched up the steps, it appeared as though police officers did little to hold them back — save for a few spritzes of pepper spray.
It's a far cry from the violence that police enacted on Black Lives Matter protesters last summer.
Protesters then raised a cross outside of the Capitol (unclear if they plan on nailing Trump to it).
The Capitol's front doors were shattered as protesters then came inside, demanding to see senators.
Protesters were able to walk throughout the building with little to no pushback from security.
Protesters began getting violent with police officers in an attempt to reach the senate chamber. Chants of "U.S.A." echo throughout the building.
DC police reported that one person had been shot inside the capitol. MSNBC shared a clip in which a bloodied woman was shown leaving the capitol on a stretcher.
Protestors found their way to the senate chamber. No tear gas, no rubber bullets.
A source reportedly told Aaron C. Davis, investigative reporter for the Washington Post, that the Defense Department denied a request by DC officials to deploy the National Guard to the capitol.
President Trump's advice: "Stay peaceful," coming from the same man who told Black Lives Matter protesters, "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."
Despite bipartisan demands, Trump does not strengthen his language at all.
Reports of violence and injuries, including a woman shot in the neck, confirm escalating violence. Later in the evening, MSNBC confirmed that the woman who was shot had died.
After a confusing delay, more DC National Guard troops are finally mobilized to quell the mob.