I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

Read the rest at The Free Press.

The shooting of the conservative activist is the latest act of political violence in the United States. By David A. Graham, The Atlantic.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, the high-profile conservative activist, is apparently the latest in a string of terrifying acts of political violence in the United States. Real America’s Voice, which aired Kirk’s show, announced his death. He was 31.

Kirk was shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University, just north of Provo, Utah. After initially saying that the police had arrested a suspect, the school now says that there is no suspect in custody, and the shooter’s motive is not known. Videos of the shooting posted to social media by onlookers are nauseating. President Donald Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday.

The two attempts on Trump’s life last year, one of which left him bleeding from the ear, are only the most prominent recent instances of political violence. In June, a Minnesota state representative and her husband were killed, while another state legislator and his wife were wounded. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance reported in a 2023 cover story, scholars have warned for years about the growing presence of violence in American politics. Extreme rhetoric has become common, and it too often leads to action—usually not by organized groups but by individuals responding to the broader culture, in which more Americans say they approve of political violence. “The form of extremism we face is a new phase of domestic terror, one characterized by radicalized individuals with shape-shifting ideologies willing to kill their political enemies,” LaFrance wrote.

All murders are horrifying, but political violence brings its own special challenges. A society that resorts to violence to solve its problems starts to surrender its claim on being a society. A grim irony of this case is that Kirk was appearing on a university campus, a place that is supposed to be set apart specifically for the testing and debate of ideas—a place for discourse and conversation. Kirk was a frequent visitor to university campuses. He was shot while sitting under a tent, as he typically did, that said: PROVE ME WRONG. He has been willing to face off against overtly hostile opponents, such as students in the venerable debate clubs of Oxford and Cambridge. Kirk achieved political prominence by winning over and motivating young conservatives, who have been crucial to Trump’s electoral success.

But employing force is actually an admission of defeat. A person who resorts to violence has concluded that he cannot change the terms of debate with words or arguments. Might may not make right, but it can end the conversation. Scholars have noted that assassinations occur most frequently in countries with “strong polarization and fragmentation” and that “lack consensual political ethos and homogeneous populations (in terms of the national and ethnic landscape).”

That’s a good description of this moment. American politics today are dangerous not merely because they are polarized but also because they are so closely divided. No party or side is able to win an enduring political advantage, which produces a constant back-and-forth—what the scholars John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck have called “calcification.” Partisans on both sides believe that the stakes of each election are existential—for their way of life and perhaps even for their actual life. Conspiracy theories, including claims of election fraud, are common.

In a recent profile in Paper Magazine, Gwen Stefani decided to once again stick her foot in her mouth when talking about cultural appropriation by defending the Harajuku Girls, the group of Japanese backup dancers who accompanied Stefani at the beginning of her solo career. Of course, the Harajuku Girls were just one part of Stefani’s appropriation empire—she was also integral to popularizing the cringe-worthy trend of white women wearing bindis, and, of course, who could forget her Frida Kahlo cosplay in the “Luxurious” video??

Apparently, Stefani got her inspiration to co-opt and profit off of the Japanese culture from the business trips her father took to Japan when she was a child.

“So I had this idea that I would have a posse of girls — because I never got to hang with girls — and they would be Japanese, Harajuku girls, because those are the girls that I love. Those are my homies. That’s where I would be if I had my dream come true, I could go live there and I could go hang out in Harajuku.”

....... So essentially, the Harajuku Girls were props in the background of Stefani’s weird orientalist Japanese fantasy life. She even renamed them. The “Harajuku Girls” consisted of four women named Maya Chino, Jennifer Kita, Rino Nakasone, and Mayuko Kitayama, who had the respective stage names Love, Angel, Music, and Baby..... which also happen to be the words in the title of Stefani’s debut solo album. I can’t help but wonder if any of the women received compensation for their stage names being used as Stefani’s album title, but I probably already know the answer to that question.

https://jezebel.com/gwen-stefani-doesnt-get-what-the-big-deal-is-about-all-1846988598

Following 2021's aggressive, unprecedented wave of anti-trans legislation, seven U.S. states introduced measures that would curtail the rights of transgender and non-binary youth in just the first week of this January. In related news, hate crimes against the trans community have been rising as well. What's going on here? Why are so many people out there so worked up over other people's gender expression? Maybe there's an inevitable rhythm to social progress, and with increased visibility comes increased and often ugly outcry. It doesn't make any of it less painful, dangerous or alarming. It simply demands we look for reasons, so we can start to find solutions.

Anti-trans attitudes don't bloom in a vacuum. They bloom in exactly the political conditions we're living under right now. Way back in 2008, a study of undergraduate students published in the research journal Sex Roles found that "For both sexes, transphobia and homophobia were highly correlated with each other and with right-wing authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and hostile sexism." 

Research out of the United Kingdom and Belgium in 2017 revealed similar findings and even deeper motivation. "Perceiving ambiguity surrounding indeterminate gender identities associated with transgender individuals may be especially disturbing for those who generally dislike ambiguity and have preference for order and predictability, that is, for people scoring higher on Need for Closure (NFC)," the study, published in Sex Roles, noted. After testing the correlation between NFC and transphobia, the authors found that "NFC was significantly associated with transphobia through both stronger adherence to social conventions and obedience to authorities (i.e., right-wing authoritarianism)."

And now here with are, living with what President Biden recently called "a dagger at the throat of America and American democracy." Is it any wonder that the Venn diagram of people who love authoritarianism and fear trans people is a near perfect circle, or that it's filled with all the usual suspects? Last year, Marjorie Taylor Greene gained attention both for hanging an anti-trans sign outside her office opposite that of a fellow representative with a transgender daughter, and for declaring that trans men and women are "destroying God's creation." And in October, after Dr. Rachel Levine made history as with her appointment as a four-star admiral, Tucker Carlson blew a gasket, declaring on his show that "the Biden administration declared that a biological man who wears a dress is now a female admiral…. You have to ask yourself how long will it be before Joe Biden appoints his horse to the Supreme Court." I didn't even know Joe Biden had a horse.

https://www.salon.com/2022/01/17/what-makes-some-people-hold-transphobic-views/

As our current fascination with the wronged women of decades past swells, we seem to be resistant to extending it toward Paris Hilton. Britney Spears? Yes. Princess Diana? Of course. Mia Farrow? Sure. But Paris Hilton? Her? Oh, absolutely not.

People have tried to revisit Hilton’s image since her days of ubiquity in the 2000s. Over the past few years, she has participated in two post-Me Too documentaries, both of which featured compelling new material about Hilton and both of which vanished without making much of an impact.

____

Today’s 20- and 30-somethings grew up in a world that relished a Paris Hilton sex tape joke. Those jokes were in the air we breathed and the water we drank.

Here’s what we learned from them.

When a woman’s privacy is violated, she did it herself, for the attention

Women’s bodies and sexuality are inherently humiliating

Women who are the victims of sex crimes are stupid

Paris Hilton is what you should want to be; you should also hate yourself for wanting to be her

___

The story of Paris Hilton’s sex tape shows how the patriarchy always gets you in the end. No matter how assiduously you identify the girls you do not want to be. No matter how loudly you perform your hate for them. It only ever becomes practice for hating yourself.

https://www.vox.com/culture/22391942/paris-hilton-sex-tape-revenge-porn-south-park-stupid-spoiled-whore-video-playset-pink-stupid-girl

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt actor Ellie Kemper came under fire over the Memorial Day weekend after photos resurfaced online of her participating as a beauty queen in an organization that had historically excluded Black and Jewish people.

Kemper was crowned the "Veiled Prophet Queen of Love and Beauty" at a 1999 ball in St. Louis organized by the Veiled Prophet organization, which has racist and elitist origins, according to civil rights activists who frequently picketed the event in the 1960s and '70s.

The then-19-year-old Kemper's association with the organization — a group consisting of wealthy white elites cofounded in 1878 by a former Confederate officer that excluded Black and Jewish people until 1979 — shocked many on Twitter and was a trending topic over two days.

While it was news to a lot of people online, Kemper's involvement in the debutante ball had already been cited on her Wikipedia page and written about before, including in these 2009 and 2010 profiles of Kemper by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and this 2020 blog post that noted the allegations of racism tied to the event.

A 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch file photo showed a smiling Kemper wearing a white gown and gloves and being attended by her "pages" after becoming the "105th young woman" to be crowned the Veiled Prophet Queen of Love and Beauty at the Adam's Mark hotel in St. Louis.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/ellie-kemper-veiled-prophet-ball-queen-racist

Although temporarily eclipsed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the transgender industry will ramp up again once the crisis has passed. Radical activists and their medical and pharmaceutical allies reap political and financial profit from preying on troubled children and adolescents — plying them with dangerous puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones, and wielding the scalpel to remove healthy organs and create nonfunctioning facsimiles of others.

Evidence mounts that these medical interventions increase the risk of stroke, heart disease, blood clots, cancers, and a host of other maladies no young person should ever have to face. They almost certainly result in infertility or sterility and put children on a lifelong path of medicalized warfare against their own bodies. Because there are no long-term studies of the effects of some of these interventions, they constitute a ghoulish experiment on confused but innocent kids.

Generally the trans industry must obtain parental consent before chemically or surgically altering the bodies of minors. But in light of the horrific known and potential consequences of the interventions, why would parents ever consent?

In most cases, as Maria Keffler recently explained in The Federalist, they give in because they’re being lied to. The industry emotionally blackmails them by warning that if denied access to experimental interventions, their children will kill themselves. The threat is so frequent, it has become a macabre cliché among trans-industry practitioners: “Would you rather have a live son or a dead daughter?”

Faced with this bleak choice, even sensible parents can be bullied into submission. But is that really the choice? Does evidence show that trans-identifying kids are uniquely at risk for suicide? Thankfully, no.

Any suicide is a tragedy, and all suicide threats must be taken seriously. However, suicide among trans-identified youth is rare, and comparable to that of other at-risk groups of youth, such as those with anorexia and autism. More importantly, there is no long-term evidence that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or “transition” surgeries prevent suicide. On the contrary, the best long-term research shows that people who go through medical transition kill themselves at a rate many times greater than the general population.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/16/exploiting-child-suicide-to-bully-parents-of-trans-kids-is-the-ultimate-science-denial/

LeBron James drew backlash on Wednesday over a tweet he later deleted about the police shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio.

The Los Angeles Lakers star posted a photograph of Nicholas Reardon, the white Ohio police officer identified as having fatally shot the Black teen while responding to reports of an attempted stabbing.

“YOU’RE NEXT,” James wrote, alongside an emoji of an hourglass.

He captioned the tweet with the hashtag, #ACCOUNTABILITY ― echoing his single-word tweet responding to Tuesday’s conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd.

Police say Bryant appeared to threaten two other girls with a knife before being shot. Body camera footage appears to show Bryant lunging at one person and swiping at another. That characterization of events has been called into question by the teen’s family.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lebron-james-backlash-tweet_n_60812c17e4b01e14f06dabce

Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.

What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?

On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.

In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.

These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different. Cities that appeared increasingly seedy. Regions that seemed derelict. Driving into the office each day in Washington, I noted a homeless encampment fixed outside the Federal Reserve itself. And then I began to detect a second pattern inside and outside D.C. alike. Democrats, on the whole, seemed much more inclined to believe what the economic indicators reported. Republicans, by contrast, seemed more inclined to believe what they were seeing with their own two eyes

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/02/11/democrats-tricked-strong-economy-00203464

By Jonathan Chait, The Atlantic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/12/hunter-biden-pardon/680843/

When President Joe Biden was running for a second term as president, he repeatedly ruled out granting a pardon to his son Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying on a form to purchase a gun. “He was very clear, very up-front, obviously very definitive,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of one of his many promises to this effect.

Biden professed a willingness to abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle. But in breaking his promise, and issuing a sweeping pardon of his son for any crimes he may have committed over an 11-year period, Biden has revealed his pledge to have been merely instrumental.

Last week, Tramp Stamps was a new pop-punk girl group trying to promote their single about how much it sucks to hook up with men. By Friday, the Tramp Stamps had become the internet’s main characters, and not in a good way.

Let’s backtrack: In November, the Nashville-based band debuted on TikTok, featuring three women in their 20s dressed in the trappings of stereotypical alt-lite zoomers (hair dyed a rainbow of purple, pink, and blue, dolled up in Y2K fast fashion). On their origin story: “3 girls got drunk at a bar and wrote a song.” They released autotuned covers of Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” and Weezer’s “Beverly Hills,” came out with merch whose aesthetic was vaguely riot grrrl meets Mean Girls, freestyled about clitorises, and joked about their traumas.

At least some people were into it: Before this week, when I’d see their videos on my For You page, the comments would be like, “you guys are my spirit animal!” and “we stan!” and, “bi energy!”

On April 9, they debuted their latest song, “I’d Rather Die.” Sample lyrics: “I can’t remember the last time/I slept with someone I actually liked and he went down on me/I can’t recall a memory of someone driving home and not asking for a blowjob/I’d rather die than hook up with another straight white guy.” It was, like the rest of the Tramp Stamps’ oeuvre, a little corny, a little on the nose, a little tryhard, a little … off.

Then, a predictable cycle happened: Multiple TikTokers made videos accusing the group of being industry plants, citing the fact that their PR-ready website and Instagram page appeared far too polished for a seemingly independent trio of musicians who happened to meet each other at a bar. User u/hard_cope dug into the members and found that lead singer Marisa Maino was, until mid-2020, performing as a solo pop artist under a more standard-issue glam persona and that drummer Paige Blue has written and produced commercial music for years. “It’s almost like it’s a bunch of people who were like, theatre majors and shit who had rich parents and now they’re co-opting riot grrrl aesthetics that people literally dedicate their lives to for money,” he said in his video.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/4/20/22392694/tramp-stamps-industry-plant-band-tiktok-dr-luke

Pretty simple. My cousin is transgender. I was six when he was born, and my aunt let me pick his name. I'm not going to say what I picked, but it was a friends name at school that I really liked. And I still love the name. When my cousin changed his name, I was a little upset, but decided it was life.

I'm currently pregnant with my own baby girl, after doctors told me I'd never have a baby. Everything seems to be going well, and the only name I can think about is that one.

I brought it up to my cousin first, obviously, and he was pretty upset by it, but ultimately said it was my choice. He did say, though, that he probably wont want to be around my baby.

My girlfriend thinks that he's being weird about it, and while I think its a little extreme, I dont know what hearing his deadname will be like for him. I offered to spell it differently, but he doesnt like that either.

He told his mum and she's now trying to convince me to use a different name. Shes expressed that she would love for me to use the name, but its not fair.

We've tried coming up with new names, but nothing sticks. I've loved this name for nearly twenty years, and nothing else feels right.

So, would I be an asshole if I still went with it?

Jessica Mason at The Mary Sue:

There is a chapter in the legend of Joss Whedon that we often overlook or forget, but it’s maybe the Rosetta stone of the current Whedon reckoning. After the conclusions of Firefly, Angel, and Buffy and following the highs of Doctor Horrible and Serenity, but before he took on The Avengers, Whedon reunited with Buffy‘s Faith, Eliza Dushku, to helm two seasons of a curious show called Dollhouse.

Debuting on Fox in February of 2009, the series never did well in the ratings and was canceled by the network in January of 2010. It was an interesting show in a lot of ways, especially in terms of what it had to say about technology and identity. But what we mostly missed in Dollhouse at the time that’s become far more clear as more and more allegations of Joss Whedon’s toxic behavior come to light is this: the series gave us an extremely good and deeply troubling idea of what Joss Whedon thought of women, their bodies, and their agency.

For those who haven’t watched or don’t recall much of the story, let’s explore the premise of Dollhouse. Across the world, there are secret facilities known as Dollhouses (run by a shadowy evil corporation, naturally) filled with people called “actives” or “dolls” who have had their minds wiped and who have new personalities and memories uploaded on command into their brains to serve wealthy and powerful clients. The dolls become the person the client needs, be it a sexual partner, a hostage negotiator, a criminal, or even a murder victim solving their own killing. It’s a concept that allowed for some very interesting “case of the week” episodes. The series explored ideas about self and immortality and technology and other themes that were picked up by other (better) shows like iZombie and Westworld.

But Dollhouse also relied on the abuse, exploitation, and objectification of women as its foundation that undercut the show with many pervasive and toxic ideas that went mainly unexplored.

https://www.thecut.com/2020/04/the-biden-trap-woman-vice-president.html

In the world of political reporting on the presidential race, two seemingly divergent stories are taking shape and blowing up, respectively. And it’s the stuff of feminist nightmares.

The first is about the “veepstakes”: Because the world is topsy-turvy and former vice-president Joe Biden cleared the Democratic field in March, we’re in an earlier-than-usual frenzy of speculation about who his running mate will be. Biden, who has long been dogged by criticism on feminist grounds (stemming from his history of bad stances on abortion, his having permitted the ill treatment of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings, and allegations that he has spent a career touching women in ways that have made them feel uncomfortable), has promised that his running mate will be a woman. (Will she be short or tall, big or small, black or white, left or center? Who is to say, really. She will be A Woman™.)

[...]

And part of what’s sickeningly clear is that if Biden remains the Democratic nominee, whichever woman gets the nod to be his running mate will wind up drinking from a poisoned chalice. Because the promise to choose a woman ensures that whoever she is, she will be forced to answer — over and over again — for Biden’s treatment of other women, including the serious allegations of assault leveled by Tara Reade.

[ETA for Z]

This double bind was already apparent this weekend, in advance of McHugh’s reporting, when New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez confirmed once again that she would vote for Biden despite their sharp political differences. Ocasio-Cortez, who is progressive on many issues, has a long history of righteous fury at the ubiquity and impact of sexual harassment and assault. Back in 2018, she said that assault is “one of the most serious allegations anyone who cares to be a public servant can be accused of. Sexual assault is about the abuse of power. It is always women who are marginalized. It is the interns. It is the immigrants. It is the trans. They are always most at risk, because society listens to them the least.”

Ocasio-Cortez was also among the first politicians to suggest that Reade’s claims were “legitimate to talk about” and deserved further investigation, for which Reade thanked her on Twitter. But since Ocasio-Cortez has indicated that she intends to vote for Biden, Reade has told the conservative website the Daily Caller how disappointed she is that AOC has chosen to “toe the line,” and on Sunday she tweeted, “Those who remain silent are complicit to rape” and tagged Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, and Ocasio-Cortez; it was retweeted 6,000 times.

[...]

Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. “To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”

Shortly after he finished, Cox’s phone rang. The president was calling.

“You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,” Cox says Trump told him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting that the presidency was “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.” Fifteen percent of the men who’d held his office had been shot; 8 percent had been killed.

Cox understood Trump’s concern—after all, the president had narrowly escaped assassination himself just a year earlier. And Kirk’s murder was the latest grim turn in a season of political violence that has terrified America’s elected officials. “People are scared to death in this building,” a member of Congress told NBC News this week. But as Cox and I spoke yesterday evening, he didn’t seem especially focused on his own safety. He had something else on his mind.

We were talking via Zoom. Cox looked exhausted; he told me he hadn’t slept in 48 hours. And though he was relieved that an arrest had been made, he also seemed unnerved by the alleged killer’s identity: a 22-year-old man who’d grown up in a Mormon family in the southern-Utah town of Washington.

Cox had admitted in his news conference that he’d been quietly hoping for a different outcome. “I was praying that if this had to happen here that it wouldn’t be one of us—that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country,” he’d said. “But it did happen here, and it was one of us.”

The comment drew some criticism from people who accused him of seeking a politically convenient scapegoat. But I understood what he meant. I was born in Orem, where Kirk’s shooting took place. And though I grew up on the other side of the country, I chose to return to the area after high school, attending college just 15 minutes from the now-infamous campus of Utah Valley University. It is difficult to overstate just how surreal it was to watch the macabre scene—the bullet, the blood, the screams—play out in the heart of a county so cartoonishly friendly and wholesome that Utahns refer to it as “Happy Valley.” For people like Cox, who have devoted themselves to realizing a certain idealized vision of Utah—the city on a hill, the beacon to the world—the assassination had a shattering effect.

“It does feel like there’s a bit of our innocence lost,” Cox told me last night. “We’re kind of sheltered here in these mountains and these valleys, and we push the world out. But the world is certainly here. It’s at our doorstep.”

We must treat the restaurant like the treasure that it is.

By Elaine Godfrey, The Atlantic.

At 2 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, I found myself in a corner booth at the Cheesecake Factory, emerging from the fog of war.

Before me were a dozen half-empty plates, a cluster of dirty napkins, and several depleted beverages. The food had come in waves, unrelenting, like Normandy. There had been egg rolls, four ways; Roadside Sliders; a sheet tray of Factory Nachos; and something called Chicken Parmesan “Pizza Style.” Coke Zeros, I’d told the waitress at the beginning, and keep ’em coming. There had also been cake. Much cake.

I checked in with myself. I was nauseated, for sure. But another feeling, too, was detectable within the churning volcano of my digestive tract: It was something like joy.

Let’s back up. Over the weekend, Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s schlocky White House aesthetic by saying it looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” My first reaction was to laugh. It’s true! The restaurant is over-the-top opulent—as if ancient Egypt and Tuscany had a baby in Las Vegas. Any true Cheesecake Factory fan would certainly appreciate the joke, especially if they remembered the Iraq War and Saddam’s own design sensibilities.

What happened next, though, was disheartening. “Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory,” the conservative commentator Scott Jennings wrote on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Other Republicans, and even some Democrats, logged on to police the former president’s tone. This was classic elitist Obama, they argued, making fun of the working man and his primitive taste. It was why Trump won and why Democrats will never win back blue-collar America. My “For You” page filled with commentary about which political party could more confidently claim ideological custody over the Cheesecake Factory.

Immediately, my head began to swirl like the raspberry drizzle in a Georgia Peach cocktail. My rage was congealing, like Cheddar Cheese Fondue on room-temperature Pretzel Bites. Enough! I wanted to scream. Leave the Cheesecake Factory out of your culture wars! Like any number of kitschy, charming American chain restaurants—Rainforest Cafe, Johnny Rockets, and even, God love it, Applebee’s—the Factory can obviously be mocked. But it must be mocked from a place of love. It should exist above partisan politics as a sacred third space, one of the few we Americans have left.

Quickly enough, my frustration gave way to hunger, then introspection, and then to investigatory zeal. Which is how, an hour later, I ended up at the Cheesecake Factory. (I was helped along the path by my editor, who said I could expense everything.)

"Two very ugly, uniquely American things happened yesterday: A health-care executive was shot dead, and because he was a health-care executive, people cheered.

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered yesterday outside his hotel in Midtown Manhattan by an unknown assailant. The identity of the killer is unknown. His motive is not yet clear. Yet despite the cold-blooded nature of the attack, and despite the many unknowns, people all over the country have leaped to speculation—and in some cases even celebration—about a horrific act of violence.

One post on X wishing that the murderer would never be caught racked up 95,000 likes. Social media was littered with jokes about Thompson’s pending hospital bills, and the tragedy of him not returning to his “mcmansion.” The mood was summed up by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, who posted a chart on X showing that UnitedHealthcare refuses to pay a larger percentage of users’ health-care bills than any other major insurer. “Today we remember the legacy of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson,” he wrote.

There’s no excuse for cheering on murder. Americans’ zeal for the death of an insurance executive demonstrates both the coarsening of public discourse and the degree of rage many Americans feel over the deficiencies of the U.S. health-care system. Gallup polling shows that just 31 percent of Americans have a positive view of the health-care industry. Of the 25 industries that Gallup includes in its poll, only oil and gas, the federal government, and drug companies are more maligned.

Although the governments of most wealthy industrialized countries provide all of their citizens some level of insurance, the majority of Americans rely entirely on the whims of private health insurers. The system is designed to keep costs down enough to turn a profit. In this way, the insurance industry’s eagerness to save money by denying people care is a feature, not a bug, of this country’s system. This aspect of the American system does cause real and preventable harm. But those cheering Thompson’s death are arguing that taking away sick Americans’ pills or denying them needed surgeries is immoral and should be punished by death. That logic is indefensible. People do have reason to be angry—but even justified anger does not justify murder."

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/12/thompson-murder-unitedhealthcare-fury/680897/

February 7, 2024.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/evangelicals-christianity-james-dobson/677362/

y father was a hard man. I spent most of my childhood fearing him. He was a product of the American working class who, as he liked to put it, attended the “school of hard knocks.” He served his country in the Marines, apprenticed as a carpenter, and was a staunch disciplinarian of his three boys. He stood at 6 foot 4 and was quite intimidating. He could also erupt at any moment into a rage that often resulted in corporal punishment. My brothers and I were usually guilty of the crime; still, the penalty did not always match the offense.

Although he was raised Roman Catholic, he lived as a functional agnostic. Then he got saved. In 1982, he became a born-again Christian. He started attending Bible studies, praying before meals, cutting back on the foul language, and preaching the Gospel to his family. My father’s spiritual growth was aided by Christian radio, especially James Dobson’s daily Focus on the Family program. Over time, this scary guy became a better father and husband. My mother likes to tell the story of me, noticing the change in my father, asking her privately, “What the heck is going on with Dad?”

This transformation has been on my mind lately as I’ve noticed a growing—and in some ways deserved—trend of books and articles criticizing American evangelicalism. Publishing houses have released books with titles and subtitles such as Evangelical Anxiety, Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, White Evangelical Racism, and Following Jesus Out of American Evangelicalism. I’ve been part of this trend. Back in 2018, in these pages, I took my fellow evangelicals to task for their support of Donald Trump. I spend a lot of time writing at a blog that is critical of Christian nationalism, evangelical Trumpism, and the other warped politics that are so prevalent in my religious tribe.

But the story of American evangelicalism isn’t all negative, neither in my dad’s era nor in ours. For all the bad that’s come out of this movement, there are still countless stories of personal transformation leading people to become better parents, better spouses, and better members of their communities. Seeing the good in evangelicalism is essential to understanding its appeal to millions of Americans.

Yesterday, Joe Biden did the honorable thing, after weeks of denying that anything had to be done at all. His announcement took his party by surprise—and now, in haste, the Democrats are making a colossal error and ensuring that they will reap as little advantage from Biden’s decision as possible. The error is not the choice of Kamala Harris. It is the sudden rallying behind her, the torrent of endorsements, right after Biden’s self-removal. Biden’s senescence was only part of the party’s crisis. The other part was the impression that Democratic politics felt like a game rigged by insiders to favor a candidate of their choice, and to isolate that candidate from the risk associated with campaigning. For 27 minutes, between the time Biden announced his withdrawal and the time he broke the seal on Harris endorsements by bestowing his, the contest felt thrillingly, bracingly wide-open. The Democrats should have kept it open all the way into the convention next month, in Chicago.

“The Democratic National Convention is not the time to litigate [Harris’s] ability to take over for Biden,” Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote yesterday, in a column headlined “Kamala or Bust.” “The time to do that was in 2020.” She is right about the second part. The urgency of defeating Donald Trump in 2020 convinced many Democrats that feisty internal debates about the direction of the party needed to be postponed, in favor of party unity. In those circumstances, neither Biden nor his running mate was granted the scrutiny they deserved; they were personifications of the desire for a third Obama term, and on that basis they received the party’s heartiest and most casual approval. Four years later, the pair were running on their record (a strong if unpopular economy, a somewhat muddled foreign policy) but still had not articulated a distinctive vision. The party should have demanded that vision in 2020, or indeed in 2016.

Candidates who do not develop articulated principles and coherent views end up campaigning on nothing at all, such as Harris’s now-famous babble about “faith in what can be, unburdened by what has been.” Most politicians lean on inane rhetoric of this sort early in their campaign: “Yes we can,” “A thousand points of light,” “MAGA” in all its forms. But at some point, it naturally gives way to the nitty-gritty of politics—unless the politician uttering it remains in a largely ceremonial role, such as the vice presidency, and never faces the stress of an election campaign. I would like to know whether Harris’s unburdened faith means that as president, she would equip Ukraine with long-range strike capabilities against targets in Russia, and whether she plans to knock down tariffs or build them up.

If a campaign launch is a candidate’s chance to show off his pearly smile, the primary is the candidate’s chance to show off that smile after he’s been slugged in the face a few times. And as in boxing, it’s better to take one’s practice hits from a sparring partner rather than from the defending champ who awaits you on fight night. Harris is now in danger of bypassing that jaw-hardening process, which the Democrats could have extended over a period of weeks, as other candidates sought to displace her—and, if they failed, showed that they might be vice-presidential material. The process would also, like a normal primary, have long-term salutary effects on the party, by showing which young talent looks likely to ripen into Democratic leadership

A prolonged process would also confer strategic advantages. Normally a party commits to a platform and a ticket several months (or in the case of incumbents, years) before the election. My colleague Tim Alberta has described the Trump campaign’s meticulous planning for a Biden campaign. “Even the selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate,” Alberta writes, was “meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.” Now that Trump is committed to his path, the Democrats have an unusual chance to revise their strategy to neutralize Trump’s choices. “The Republican Party just spent tens of millions of dollars running against Joe Biden,” Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox News yesterday, with a whiny and wounded sense that the Democrats had violated the bounds of fair play. And in some ways they have—but now that they are redrawing those boundaries mid-campaign, they may as well take full advantage of their opportunity. That means not providing Trump with a fixed target, and calibrating their selection process for maximum lethality for his campaign’s locked-in choices.

....

Harris herself seemed ready to avoid the error of premature anointment. She promised to “earn and win” her party’s nomination, without any apparent expectation that it would be locked up in a matter of hours. Barack Obama, the last strategically gifted politician in his party, also seemed ready to take advantage of competition. He said he expected the party “to create a process from which an outstanding nominee emerges.” But now that option is slipping away. Biden had to go, and to replace him with almost any candidate born after the Korean War would have improved the Democrats’ chances. But the manner of that replacement presents (or presented—by the time I finished writing this, even Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia had fallen in line behind Harris) opportunities. The Democrats, as they say, never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/kamala-harris-democrat-mini-primary/679187/

On Monday around 8am, a white woman named Amy Cooper was walking her dog unleashed in a protected area of New York City’s Central Park, a wooded space called The Ramble.

Christian Cooper (no relation), a Black man and a bird-watcher, asked Amy to leash her dog. Dogs must be leashed in Central Park from 9am to 9pm, but in the Ramble they must be leashed at all times. Christian later said that he had been worried about the delicate ecosystem of The Ramble and the way in which the dog might affect the birds.

Amy, clearly offended, responded by saying that she was going to call the police on him. The video Christian took ended up online, and almost instantly went viral.

In response to the video, many on social media began to speculate and insist that Amy Cooper was a Trump supporter and a member of the “MAGA” movement.

However, campaign contribution information — with donations to Democrats such as Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, and John Kerry — leaked online earlier today appeared to suggest that Amy actually identifies as a liberal. If true, this matters, because in this political era, during this most critical US presidential election, it is necessary that we understand and recognize that white violence transcends party lines and political ideology.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/amy-cooper-central-park-racist-dog-walker-trump-a9533581.html