Keith Baldwin is a teacher and a writer. He lives in Queens, NY. Tweet your anger at @kerobaldwin
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.
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.
Does Stormy Daniels Deserve to Blow Up Trump Plaza Hotel?
The former adult film star is the subject of a GoFundMe campaign for the demolition, but is she really the most deserving?
Long before he wreaked havoc across the United States and the world at large, Donald Trump inflicted his horrors on Atlantic City, New Jersey.
In that case, it was a string of failed casinos financed with high-interest junk bonds that he was never going to be able to pay off. Their collapse and the tremendous ten-figure debt he took away from them in the early 1990s was, at the time, Donald Trump's most public and embarrassing scandal.
It's a record he has since broken on numerous occasions — losing reelection, allowing over 300,000 Americans to die of a virus that other countries successfully contained, being associated with Rudy Giuliani — but the scars of Trump's early failure still mark Atlantic City. Where they haven't been rebranded or demolished, his massive, shuttered buildings have stood disused and dilapidated.
For Donald Trump, it may be enough to have his name scraped and scrubbed from these decrepit shells. But for the citizens of Atlantic City, they stand as stark reminders of how one wealthy, arrogant man helped to topple the local economy.
The tower of the Trump Plaza Hotel has been a particular problem in recent years. In its disintegrating state, it became a hazard to public safety, with chunks of its crumbling façade falling to the street below. There is a bright spot on the horizon, however.
Atlantic City's Revenge: Blowing Up Trump's Casino For Charity | The Beat With Ari Melber | MSNBCwww.youtube.com
This year the city has finally begun demolition on this piece of Donald Trump's legacy, with a pyrotechnic finale scheduled for February. The opportunity to push the button imploding the hotel's stripped-bare tower is being offered at auction, with proceeds going to the Boys' and Girls' Club of Atlantic City.
Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small has said that he hopes to raise "at least a million dollars," noting that he's "a pretty ambitious guy." Currently, the bidding stands at around $60,000, but it will remain open until January 19th — one day before Trump will be forced to relinquish the presidency to Joe Biden. A live auction among the highest bidders will follow on the 29th.
But should the privilege of erasing this blight — and publicly humiliating Donald Trump — really belong to the wealthiest person with a grudge against the soon-to-be-former president? Surely there's someone with a more legitimate claim to that honor.
That's what former adult film star Zoe Britton thought when she heard about the auction last Thursday. Britton tweeted the suggestion to crowd-fund a bid for her friend Stephanie Clifford — AKA Stormy Daniels — to push the button that topples Trump Plaza Hotel. Daniels enthusiastically signed onto the idea, adding the detail that the button should be modeled after a toadstool — a reference to her infamous description of the president's genitals.
The concept has since become a reality with a GoFundMe campaign that has so far raised a little over $1,700 to award the responsibility for that symbolic implosion to Stormy Daniels. But is she really the most worthy candidate?
For anyone who has somehow remained unaware of Daniels' history with Trump, the former adult film star had an (alleged) affair with Donald Trump in 2006. Back then he was merely the star of The Apprentice, and famous for being a rich assh**e and the basis for Biff Tannen's arc in Back to the Future Part II, and reportedly invited Daniels to dine with him when the two met at a charity golf tournament.
What (allegedly) followed from there was a whirlwind romance involving Shark Week, a periodical spanking, a promised role on Celebrity Apprentice, and a grudging resignation to physical intimacy. But the real drama is in the aftermath.
Several years after their (alleged) affair ended, Daniels reportedly shared details of her relationship with Donald Trump with a gossip magazine. Contrary to his enthusiastic attitude toward previous tabloid affairs, Donald Trump apparently didn't want his tryst with Daniels to be publicized. Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer at the time, intervened to squash the story — though rumors of the (alleged) affair were still published in Life & Style that October.
Not long after, Daniels reports that a man approached her in a parking lot with instructions to "leave Trump alone." Daniels had her young daughter with her at the time and recalls the man saying "That's a beautiful little girl — it'd be a shame if something happened to her mom," before leaving them. That was in 2011, but the fallout was far from over.
EXCLUSIVE - Stormy Daniels Details Sex with Donald Trumpwww.youtube.com
In October of 2016 — shortly before the 2016 election, and around the time of the infamous Hollywood Access "grab 'em by the p***y" tape — Fox News reporter Diana Falzone allegedly wrote an article on the affair that the outlet chose to shelve. Secretly Michael Cohen had arranged to pay Stormy Daniels $130,000 to keep her quiet — in violation of campaign finance law.
In January of 2018, rumors of the affair surfaced anyway. In the meantime, Donald Trump had become president. Stormy Daniels initially denied them — supposedly at the behest of her then-lawyer Keith Davidson, who may or may not have colluded with Michael Cohen to bury that story as well as the (alleged) Karen McDougal affair.
When Daniels eventually acknowledged the (alleged) affair and began sharing the sordid details, she became a target of Donald Trump's most ardent and unhinged supporters. She has received numerous death threats and was even arrested on flimsy charges by some politically-minded police in Ohio.
In short, Stormy Daniels' life was thrown into chaos by that brief, regrettable (alleged) affair with Donald Trump. And as a result of her coming forward, the scandal occupied America's attention for perhaps as long as any in Trump's tenure.
The legal issues that ensued eventually motivated Michael Cohen to renounce his longtime loyalty to Trump. He even went on to be a cooperating witness against Trump, offering congressional testimony that the president was a "con man" and a "racist" who had committed illegal acts of obstruction and self-dealing while in office.
In short, Stormy Daniels contributed perhaps as much as anyone in the last four years to the efforts to expose Donald Trump as the pathetic fraud that he is. And she has suffered for it.
On one hand, that seems like a strong case for letting Daniels push that momentous and possibly-toadstool-shaped button. But if she really wanted to, she could use some portion of the reported $800,000 advance on her memoir Full Disclosure to make a more serious bid.
On top of that, aren't their others who might be more deserving? Others who have done more to take Trump down, or who have suffered more as a result of his cruelty?
The honor could go to one of the contractors Trump has put out of work, or one of the families he tore apart at the border. It could go to any student who was bilked by Trump University, or any resident of Atlantic City who suffered the consequences of Donald Trump's financial recklessness.
It could go to E. Jean Caroll or any of the dozens of other women who've accused the president of sexual misconduct, or to Stacey Abrams, Gretchen Whitmer, or Martin Gugino. Or It could go to any of the loved ones of the 318,000 Americans who have died of COVID so far this year...
In the end, the people who deserve the honor of destroying one of Donald Trump's monuments to his own ego may outnumber even the numerous vanity projects on which he's plastered his name. But the best way to honor all of them is not through some symbolic bit of dramatic catharsis. It's by erasing the corrosive legacy Donald Trump has left on our government, our discourse, and our democratic institutions.
Unfortunately, that will take a lot more than the push of a button.
Meet the Man Kim Kardashian Is Trying to Save from Death Row
Brandon Bernard is scheduled for execution in December, more than 20 years after crimes he committed as an 18 year old.
With all the chaos of 2020, not a lot of attention has been paid to the fact that the federal government has started executing prisoners.
At the state level, of course, the death penalty has never taken a break. Over 1,500 prisoners have been executed in the U.S. since the 1970s. But until 2020, only three prisoners had been executed by the federal government.
Under President George W. Bush, Timothy McVeigh, Juan Raul Garza, and Louis Jones Jr. were executed between 2001 and 2003. Then, for more than 17 years, the federal government got out of the execution business.
It was last summer that Attorney General William Barr announced the Trump administration's plan to resume federal executions, and since July of 2020, eight federal prisoners have been killed by lethal injection. With less than two months left until Joe Biden's inauguration, four more men and one woman are scheduled for execution, but Kim Kardashian West is hopeful that at least one of those death-row inmates can be saved.
What Did Brandon Bernard Do?
Clemency Videowww.youtube.com
In June of 1999, 18-year-old Brandon Bernard joined a carjacking and abduction that was already in progress. Todd and Stacie Bagley had stopped to use a payphone in Killeen, Texas when a group of teenagers, led by 19-year-old Christopher Vialva, held them at gunpoint and forced them into the trunk of their own car.
The group drove around for hours with the Bagleys reportedly calling out for help and pleading with their captors. It didn't work.
At some point Bernard joined the group, bringing along a gun that he reportedly thought was strictly for intimidation purposes. But when the group arrived in a remote area of the Fort Hood military base, Vialva used that gun to shoot Todd and Stacie Bagley in the head.
When Brandon Bernard set the vehicle on fire, with the Bagleys inside, he believed that the couple were already dead, but medical examiners would later conclude that Stacie Bagley had died of smoke inhalation.
The pillar of smoke was visible from miles away. When police arrive on the scene, they arrested Bernard, Vialva, and two others.
Three other defendants in the case were minors at the time and were given lengthy prison sentences. But Bernard and Vialva were tried together as adults and treated as equally involved in the Bagleys' murders.
The Trial
There were a number of issues with how the case was handled. While Bernard is a Black man, 11 of the 12 jurors in his case were white. Bernard was appointed an attorney who had no experience with death penalty cases and who logged less than a quarter of the time such cases usually require.
In addition, multiple character witnesses were never called to testify on Bernard's behalf, and no case was made for the extenuating circumstances of his traumatic upbringing.
The prosecution, on the other hand, did not cut corners. Among others, they called on Richard Coons, a self-proclaimed expert on "future dangerousness," to testify that Bernard and Vialva were both too dangerous to be considered for lesser sentences.
Coons' approach to these cases would later be ruled unscientific and unreliable in a Texas court, but by that point he had already helped to secure death sentences for at least 25 defendants. At least 10 of those defendants — including Christopher Vialva — have since been executed.
Brandon Bernard is now 40 years old — a model prisoner, who expresses deep regret for the awful things he did as a teenager. Even if you generally support the death penalty — even if you agree with Vialva's execution — there are a lot of reasons not to agree with its use in his case.
So it's not particularly surprising that five of the jurors in his case and a prosecutor who fought to uphold his sentence have since come out to oppose his execution. And now Kim Kardashian has joined his cause.
Kim Kardashian and Criminal Justice
Over the weekend the 40-year-old reality star, mother of four, and wife of Kanye West shared her thoughts on the case via Twitter. With the hashtag #HelpSaveBrandon, she implored her 67 million followers to send a message to President Trump pleading for clemency on Brandon's behalf — before it's too late.
While she's still primarily known for her reality TV stardom, Kim Kardashian is currently studying to be a lawyer and has proven to be a powerful advocate for criminal justice reform.
She has helped to secure reduced or commuted sentences for a number of prisoners who are now free and was intimately involved in the successful push for Texas Governor Greg Abbott to grant a stay of execution to death-row inmate Rodney Reed. But her most high-profile criminal justice work has involved dealing directly with soon-to-be-former-president Donald Trump.
In 2018 she was instrumental in persuading Donald Trump to pardon Alice Johnson. In March of 2020, Trump welcomed Kardashian and Johnson to the White House along with three other women whose sentences he commuted — thanks in part to Johnson's own advocacy.
Donald Trump clearly saw these moves as a source of good publicity and touted his record on criminal justice reform in an attempt to sway Black voters to his side during his failed reelection campaign. But now that he no longer has an electoral incentive to intervene in these issues, will he care what Kim Kardashian has to say?
Donald Trump's Mixed Record
Billing himself as "tough on crime" and "your president of law and order," Donald Trump has made no secret of his aggressive approach to criminal punishment. His administration has pushed for harsher sentencing — including suggestions of the death penalty for drug offenses — and has attempted to make the federal death penalty easier to carry out by expanding the available methods of execution.
Trump himself has even refused to take back calls to execute the so-called Central Park Five, who have long been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. So what are the chances that he will care to step in on behalf of a man who has admitted his involvement is such grisly crimes?
How likely is Donald Trump — born into wealth, with a history of racial discrimination, and no apparent capacity for remorse — to sympathize with a Black man who had a difficult childhood and regrets what he did as a younger man? Now that he's no longer running for office, will he care to get involved? It may seem like slim odds, but it has to be worth trying.
Brandon Bernard is currently scheduled for federal execution on December 10th.
Lisa Montgomery — whose advocates argue was also denied a fair trial — is scheduled for execution on December 8th.
6 of the Best Comedy Bits Spawned from Donald Trump's Insanity
A tribute to the people who have made the last 500 years a little more bearable.
With the election behind us, and the Trump team's spurious legal cases being thrown out of court left and right, it's beginning to look like America will finally be able to leave the Trump era behind.
As many problems as we are still going to face after January 20th, it's a relief to know that we will no longer have to think, "Oh, god, he's the president..." every time Donald Trump says or tweets something offensive, dangerous, or moronic.
If he wants to spend the next four years sharing his thoughts on raking hurricanes or nuking wildfires, he will be able to do so from outside the White House, just like any other inmate citizen. But with two more months of Trump administration to go, the world is still bracing to see what kind of stunts he'll pull in his final days.
As such, there has never been a better time to acknowledge the people who have been so helpful at relieving some of the ever-present tension that has dominated each century week since 2016. These are the comedic bits that have helped to make the intense chaos energy of Donald Trump a little easier to process.
So, as Donald Trump fights his inevitable removal from office, we can at least thank him for gifting us some comedy gold—while doing everything in his power to destroy our country.
Shocking Election Result: Kanye West Concedes
In a shocking upset, Kanye 2020 turned out to be exactly as misguided as it always seemed.
Americans went to bed last night in state of tense uncertainty that we wished to end, but we've woken up to a finality that many of us are unwilling to face: Kanye West has conceded defeat in the presidential election.
The second most delusional narcissist in the race, Kanye launched his campaign brimming with blind ambition and some deeply offensive takes on Harriet Tubman, of all people. But when he finally ended the saga, it was without fanfare.
After celebrating his first ever presidential vote (for himself, of course), he delivered the sad news to his Twitter followers in the raw hours of Wednesday morning—when enough votes had been counted to confirm that he was not even close to getting a percentage of the vote in literally any state.
While early on in his campaign it had looked like there was a real and frightening potential for Kanye to become a so-called "spoiler" candidate—attracting enough voters away from a major-party candidate to tip the results—it doesn't look like that panned out.
Though he received a lot of support from Republican operatives—along with plenty of bad advice from the president's First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner—Kanye was not able to get on the ballot in the handful of states where his vote total might have made an appreciable difference. And his outsized confidence in his ability to attract write-in votes appears to have been misplaced.
Kanye put a lot of work into his campaign—including improperly using celebrity images and nearly trashing his marriage to Kim Kardashian West by tearfully sharing their private history with the issue of abortion, then implying that she had cheated on him... But ultimately, it wasn't enough to overcome the dominance of America's two-party system...or the general sense that he was still a Trump stooge who had lost his grip on reality.
Kanye Said Harriet Tubman "Never Freed Slaves" During His First Presidential Rallywww.youtube.com
Which brings us to this morning. With just around 60,000 votes for West currently tallied across the 12 states where he was on the ballot—amounting to about 0.2-0.3% of the vote in states like Colorado, Tennessee, and Vermont—Kanye did the only rational thing...by declaring his candidacy for 2024.
His initial tweet, "WELP KANYE 2024," has since been deleted and reposted without the "WELP," putting it in line with the more formal tradition of a three-year-early declaration. Still, it makes substantially more sense than announcing a presidential bid four months before the election. So...good for him.
Of course, it would be foolish to discount the chances of a billionaire reality TV star, self-promoting entrepreneur, and previously failed third-party candidate becoming president. After all, that was Donald Trump back in 2015. But whatever Kanye's prospects are as a future presidential candidate, for the time being, he will go back to being a musician, fashion designer, and possible aspiring cult leader. We can only hope that the same will be true of Donald Trump, once the results make it clear that he has lost too.
For the time being, that looks unlikely. Donald Trump, who spent much of recent months railing against mail-in voting and downplaying the threat of the deadly coronavirus pandemic—the threat which motivated the surge in mail-in ballots—is now expressing shock and suspicion that more of his supporters didn't vote by mail, meaning that the remaining ballots lean overwhelmingly toward Joe Biden. We should not be holding out for a "WELP TRUMP 2024" tweet anytime soon.
But as the results and the legal battles of the 2020 election unfold in the coming days—with the entire nation holding its breath—maybe we can at least leave behind whatever anxiety we had about Kanye's involvement in the whole mess. We can go back to listening to Late Registration with some added amusement—looking back at the strangeness of his rushed and erratic campaign with the clarity of hindsight about the "2020 vision" that Kanye promised us.
If Wikipedia Were Honest: American "Democracy"
The shining light of American democracy—a beacon for the world—is actually a smoldering dumpster fire
American "Democracy."
Americans do not live in a democracy.
Right-wing pricks will tell you that's a good thing. They will say that America's founding father's—in their immense wisdom—established the United States as a Republic, not a democracy, specifically to avoid the danger of the unruly masses inflicting their tyrannical will on out-groups and minority populations.
Leaving aside the fact that these revered men did not generally believe in the humanity of women, Black people, native Americans, and presumably men with facial hair—and that democracy mostly frightened them with the possibility of the unwashed masses voting to take away their powdered-wig money—there were actually some nice ideas in there.
For instance, they enshrined some rights with the intention of preventing the kind of religious conflict and ideological oppression that had torn Europe apart for centuries. That's great and all, but they never enshrined any right to vote, and if their intention was to use the intermediaries of a representative republic to prevent a majority from monopolizing democratic power and inflicting hateful tyranny on a powerless minority of the population, there's some bad news...
The roots of America's democracy problemwww.youtube.com
While our system has gotten more democratic in some ways—we now elect our senators through a direct popular vote, rather than having them selected by state legislatures—the consolidation of political power among a small percentage of wealthy elites has resulted in a powerful minority inflicting hateful tyranny on both the powerless majority and on truly oppressed out-groups.
It doesn't matter if most people don't want overpriced private healthcare, environmental degradation, regressive taxation, prohibitive abortion laws, immigrant concentration camps, and corporate overlords with the power to quash collective bargaining. The legislation that serves the interests of the wealthy and powerful—either directly, or by providing a distraction from the issues that actually affect our daily lives—is the legislation that consistently gets passed.
That's how the system is built at every level. As former president Jimmy Carter put it, we now live in an "oligarchy" where "unlimited political bribery" leads to "a complete subversion of our political system."
The Electoral College
The electoral college may be the most obvious example of how warped America's "democratic" institutions are. Each state was originally apportioned a number of electors based on their population of citizens, with each enslaved black person equal to 3/5 of a citizen. While those enslaved people would not be represented by the government, the men with the moral fortitude to treat them like subhuman cattle would be, and they believed that they deserved a louder voice because of all the human beings they owned.
Each state had the right to decide how its electors would be selected, either by popular vote or by state legislators; then those electors, though they had a "pledged" loyalty, could cast their vote for whoever they wanted to be president and have occasionally abandoned their pledges to vote for someone else.
The National Popular Vote v. the Electoral College [POLICYbrief]www.youtube.com
If that sounds like a frustrating board game where they made the rules excessively complicated as a substitute for making them, you know, work...you're starting to get the hang of it. Of course, nowadays we also have a national popular vote where we listen to what every voter wants—because every vote counts!—before turning our attention back to the electoral college and the handful of swing states where votes actually count.
In 40% of elections in this century the popular vote winner has lost the electoral college, and the will of the governed has been ignored in favor of some arcane rules written by men with syphilitic brain damage.
There is currently a push for states to embrace the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would assign a winning number of electors to whichever candidate won the national popular vote and eliminate the familiar routine of candidates chasing each other around contested states and ignoring most of the country.
But while the compact is only a few large states away from going into effect, it seems unlikely that it will come into effect any time soon. Because while you might think that voters in Texas would resent the idea of their votes having less than 1/3 the power of voters in Vermont or Washington D.C., they have been sold on the idea that their interests are best served by the current incarnation of the Republican party—which is heavily favored by the electoral college—rather than a version that was forced to actually listen and adjust to the populace...
And even if the compact went into effect, it's there's a good chance that the Supreme Court's current, wildly conservative 6-3 majority—5/6 of whom were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote—would overturn it.
Gerrymandering
Speaking of Texas and the disenfranchisement of voters, can you guess how many Left-wing congresspeople represent the famously liberal enclave of Austin?
If you guessed 1 out of 5, congratulations! If that's not what you guessed, you're probably pretty confused about why a city with a population under a million even has five congressional representatives (New York City, with a population of over 8 million, has 13 representatives in Congress), let why four of them are Republicans. The answer is gerrymandering.
Named after some old-timey guy named Gerry, Gerrymandering is the ancient practice of reshaping the boundaries of a voting district into grotesque contortions according to partisan calculations. If you can pick your voters, you can make sure that the voters never pick someone you don't like.
One of the most common versions of this is known as "cracking and packing," where a population with politics you don't agree with—say, the liberals in Austin–is either split up and diluted into various conservative-leaning districts or carefully contained to one hyper-liberal district—as with Louisiana's 2nd district, which contains both Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
This is how the Republican party has maintained a stranglehold on power since the 2010 redistricting, despite representing a smaller and smaller portion of Americans. This is why Pennsylvania Democrats—who won a significant the majority of votes in state races in 2018—still ended up being the minority party in the state legislature.
Gerrymandering is why—despite more Americans preferring the generally inoffensive corporate milquetoasts of the Democratic party (e.g. Joe Biden)—to the greedy, hateful and even more corporate shills of the Republican party (e.g. Donald Trump) are still dominant at the level of state legislatures, and remain nationally competitive.
Citizens United
In 1886—fewer than 30 years after ruling that Black Americans couldn't be citizens in the Dred Scott case—the United States Supreme Court decided on dubious grounds that, if the 14th amendment insisted that formerly enslaved people counted as full people (effectively repealing the "3/5 compromise"), then rich people's companies should count as people too.
It was the only way to make sure that the kind of rich assh*les who used to treat Black people like subhuman cattle—as well as their northern counterparts—could still have way too much power. it meant they couldn't be held accountable for any crimes they committed or debts they incurred through their companies.
Then, in 2010, the narrowly conservative Supreme Court ruled on the Citizens United case and endorsed that concept of personhood, with the addition that those corporate "persons" have as much freedom of speech as you or I—though, lacking mouths, they can only speak with their millions and millions of dollars.
That green, paper speech can be used to influence and manipulate political discussions to the preferences of the wealthy investors, meaning that companies like Uber and Lyft can fund advertisements that make it seem like their gig economy employees—"contractors"—would hate having health benefits and a minimum wage.
That's what's happening in California right now with the proposition 22 vote, where voters don't even know that the the deceptive "Yes on Prop 22" ads they're being fed are funded by massive corporations trying to rob their employees of those benefits.
The embrace of corporate money in political advertising is mirrored in the abandonment of public election funding in favor of big money donors. Increasingly, politicians only need to cater their messages to the ultra wealthy, and to the pet issues of their most devoted political bases—ignoring most citizens.
Voter Suppression
In another stunningly brilliant move by the Supreme Court (boy, wouldn't it be great if we could have placed three humane justices in the last four years...) in 2013 they gutted the voting rights act, ruling that the limitations on certain states to alter their voting systems without oversight were not necessary, because there hadn't been any racist alterations lately. In other news, if you haven't burned your hands on a baking sheet in while, you can probably throw out your oven mitts...
Since that time, those previously overseen states have closed over 1,600 polling places and instituted various discriminatory voter ID laws, as well as purging hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. Incidentally, when voter turnout is up, Democrats tend to perform better...
Education
In The Republic, Greek philosopher Plato (who was awful and ridiculous in many ways, but just leave that aside for now...) determined that strong universal education was fundamental to the functioning of society.
Without a proper education, individuals could not help to make informed decisions for their own interests and the general welfare of society. And if only some individuals are educated, there's nothing to stop those individuals from steering society—including education—to their own advantage.
Plato's best (and worst) ideas - Wisecrackwww.youtube.com
Unfortunately, that is exactly what is happening with people like current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in charge of American schools. Arguing for "school choice" (and for the kind of religious establishment the founding fathers tried to prevent) they deprive free public schools of their already skewed funding (tied to property values, because...evil), encouraging parents to seek private schooling, which is often a great option for the wealthy, and often an inadequate insult for working class families.
How are people supposed to properly exercise their democratic rights if their massively underfunded schools never taught them the basics of America's political system? The answer is: They aren't.
People like Betsy DeVos benefit when most of the citizens don't know their rights or understand what has been stolen from them. People like Betsy DeVos—and Donald Trump, and Mitch McConnell—benefit from the fact that we don't live in a true Democracy, and from the fact that most Americans don't have the education to realize how much better things could be—how much better they are in countries with functioning Democracies.
People like you and me (assuming you aren't a multi-millionaire) benefit when enough of us vote to push back against the oligarchy and assert our preference for Democratic rule. And maybe—if we keep it up—we might even get it one day.
Karens for Biden and Dicks for Trump: What Your Name Says About Your Vote
A new poll of voters names reveals some surprising results.
It should surprise no one to learn that Donald Trump has locked down the Dick vote.
President Trump and former vice president, Joe Biden, are currently polling around even among men nationwide—each receiving about 48% support, with a handful of voters still undecided. But when that category is narrowed to Dicks, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena college shows that Donald Trump takes a decisive lead, earning 64% of their support to Biden's 36%.
It would be tempting to point to Donald Trump's lifelong pattern of cruel, selfish, and inhumane approach to life as the key selling point for Dicks. And while that may well be a factor in how Dicks plan to vote, Donald Trump is an entirely different category of dick than these voters.
The Dicks that so overwhelmingly prefer him in this new poll are not defined by dickish behavior, but by their first name. Of course they may go by Rich, or Rick, or the uncut Richard—though if they don't like being called Dicks, they should really stop voting like such dicks.
The Poll
The poll asked over 17,000 respondents in 18 battleground states to provide their first names and voting preferences, resulting in a list of 102 names with more than 30 respondents.
The Origin Of The Karen Memewww.youtube.com
While that means the data on a name like Marilyn (44% for Trump, 56% for Biden) is pretty limited, with a high margin of error, the results for more popular names like John (53% for Trump, 47% for Biden) and Mary (48% for Trump, 52% for Biden) are probably pretty reflective of how people with those names are voting.
Of the 10 most popular male and female names on the list, the two with the widest margins are Richard (64% for Trump, 54% for Biden) and—shockingly—Karen (40% for Trump and 60% for Biden).
That result is particularly surprising, given the reputation that Karens have developed in recent years. synonymous with a caricature of entitled, middle-aged white women with swoopy blonde hair and who are eager to call the police on people of color over minor or non-existent offenses.
They're the women who go into stores without masks on, then shout about their civil rights when employees try to enforce mask policies. They're women like Amy Cooper, who called 911 about "an African American man threatening [her] life" when asked to put her dog on a leash by a man wielding dog treats...
That certainly sounds like the kind of person who would support a president with swoopy blond hair and who downplays the coronavirus pandemic and calls Black Lives Matter protestors terrorists. And yet Karens favor Biden by a margin of 20%.
While white women in general favored Biden by about 13% in a recent CNN/SSRS poll—compared to an approximate 2% margin for Trump over Clinton in 2016—this new poll suggests that Karens are an outlier, with a much stronger lean toward Biden.
Have we judged Karens too harshly? Are they not the entitled monsters we have memed them to be?
Are Karens Good Now?
The question of how Karens ended up with this reputation is closely tied to the question of how people with different names are likely to vote. While most of us don't choose our names, trends in baby names across years and regions (as well as cultural and socio-economic groups) can actually have pretty strong predictive power.
For instance, the fact that Jacobs strongly favor Joe Biden and Kamala Harris over Donald Trump and Mike Pence (35% for Trump, 65% for Biden) is hardly surprising when you consider the steep rise in popularity of that name from the 1970s to the early 2000s, and the polling for that name tracks pretty closely to polling for voters aged 18-49. As for Harpers or Masons, it's a pretty safe bet that most of them won't be voting for a few more years—and when they do, it will be for the President and VP Jake and Logan Paul.
This is also an informative way to consider the name Richard, which peaked in popularity in the 1940s. Considering Donald Trump's popularity among men over 70—who don't have to worry about the global climate collapsing in 2050—it's hardly surprising that he has a dominant lead in this group. Likewise for the Donalds polled; the fact that 78% of them preferred Trump probably has at least as much to do with demographics of a name that peaked in the 1930s as it does with Donald's oversized egos.
But the more you look at Karens, the more confusing it gets. The name Karen peaked in popularity in the 1950s and '60s, which means the average Karen is older than the average woman (even the average white woman in the US), yet Karens in The New York Times/Siena College poll buck demographic trends, favoring Biden even more than their younger cohorts.
What could this mean? Have Karens been shamed by meme culture into examining the prejudices and entitled behavior that earned them this level of infamy? Were they always more tolerant than we gave them credit for, taking the fall for the Nancys (57% for Trump, 43% for Biden) and Janets (67% for Trump, 33% for Biden) of the world? Or is the problem more complicated?
Maybe Trump is too much of a Karen himself to appeal to Karens. Trump, who loves to use the threat of police violence to control unruly minorities, may be spoiling the Karens' favorite trick. After all, in any given room only one person can talk over everyone else.
Maybe the Karens are sick of Donald Trump always being the loudest Karen in the room. Maybe they want to know that, if they ever get the chance to speak to America's manager, they'll be able to bully him into giving them a free round of appetizers—or at least a better deal on their health care...
While there are numerous possibilities, for the time being—at least until through election day and however long it takes for the votes to be counted—maybe we can all cut America's Karens some slack and apologize for misjudging them. Sorry, Karens.
Also, if you meet a Dick, keep in mind that there's about a 64% chance that he deserves a swift kick in his richard.
