On Tuesday night, two things happened at once, and the country will be tempted to remember only one of them.

The first made me go quiet at my kitchen table. Chris Pappas won election to the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, becoming the first openly gay man ever sent to that chamber, and part of the margin that handed Democrats the Senate. In Indiana, J.D. Ford, the first openly gay person ever elected to that state’s legislature, unseated a Republican incumbent and is headed to the House. In Texas, of all places, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win statewide in more than thirty years, after a campaign in which anti-LGBTQ+ messaging was reportedly Paxton’s single largest category of advertising, and in which the vice president of the United States stood on a stage and used “gay” as a punchline against him. Talarico is straight, and he won anyway.

And on Long Island, in a district Donald Trump carried, a gay Democrat named Chris Gallant, whose private photographs were leaked against him precisely because someone believed that seeing him would be enough to end him, came within about two points of flipping a seat the forecasters had rated safely Republican. He conceded the election on Wednesday, down by roughly 6,700 votes in the closest race of the incumbent Republican Nick LaLota’s career. In the same breath, Gallant called LaLota a brother in arms and told the district he was still their neighbor, which is to say he refused the shame he was supposed to feel from the photo leak to the very end. Whatever that is, it is not the story of a man sunk by leather. It is the story of a man who nearly won the unwinnable while carrying the exact weight that was supposed to be disqualifying.

Put those results next to one another and a sentence forms that would have been unimaginable a decade ago: In 2026, you cannot reliably win an American election by making a man’s gayness, real or invented, the center of your campaign. Republicans tried it in Texas and lost the whole state. They tried it on Long Island and watched a red seat nearly flip. The oldest weapon in the drawer — the one that raised me, the one that could empty a lunch table in the 1990s — is losing its edge at the ballot box. Voters keep looking at the openly gay candidate and sending him to Washington.

That is the headline, and it is real, and I am not going to let anyone talk me out of being moved by it.

But here is the second thing that happened Tuesday night. In the same hours, often on the same ballots, and it is the part the rainbow-wave coverage is already rushing past. In Arizona and Nebraska, voters approved measures to bar transgender girls from girls’ sports. In Colorado, two measures aimed at transgender young people, one on sports and one restricting certain surgical care for minors, are narrowly passing. In Washington State, an initiative to keep transgender girls out of girls’ sports passed comfortably. The same electorate that refused to punish a Senate candidate for being gay reached down the ballot and punished trans kids for existing.

This is the thing I need people to see before the celebration hardens into a story we tell ourselves. The contempt did not disappear on Tuesday. It relocated. A political movement that has learned it can no longer win by hating gay men has not given up the strategy. It has updated the target. The MAGA machine that aired the Paxton ads and laughed at Vance’s joke is the same one now writing ballot measures about 11-year-olds, because cruelty still tests well when it is aimed at the group with the least power to answer back. Gays are simply the part of the community that got powerful enough to be left alone.

I know this pattern in my body, because I have watched it my whole life. The fear moves. First it was the plague, then it was the gay man as predator, then it was marriage as the end of the world, and each time the broader culture eventually got bored or ashamed and the fear went looking for a new address. Right now the address is a trans child in a locker room. The people who found that child did not arrive by accident. They are the same people, running the same play, because it is the only play they have ever had.

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So I want to be careful about the victory lap, even as I take one. It is a genuine and hard-won thing that Chris Pappas will be a senator and J.D. Ford will be a congressman, and that a straight man in Texas could not be destroyed by being called gay. Those wins are not small, and the people who did the work to make them real earned every bit of the joy. 

But a movement does not get to accept its own seats at the table while the youngest and most defenseless members of its own community are voted off the field in four states on the same night. This is not a win we get to keep cleanly. It is a split screen, and if we only look at our half of it, we become exactly the kind of people who could be bought off with a little representation while someone else pays the bill.

The refusal to be ashamed won some rooms on Tuesday. I felt it. The task now is to extend that refusal to the people the machine has decided to hunt next, to say as loudly for trans kids what the voters of New Hampshire and Indiana and Texas just said for us: that you do not get to make a person’s existence a punchline, or a wedge, or a ballot measure. We learned that lesson about gay men the slow and brutal way. The whole point of learning it is to spare the next group from learning it alone.

Chris Gallant did not quite win. But he came close enough to prove the old weapon is dulling. The question Tuesday really asked is whether we will hand the people wielding it a new one, or finally take the thing out of their hands.

The post Gay candidates won where it was supposed to be impossible appeared first on Salon.com.

When the pied piper loses his audience, we must ask whether the people have rediscovered their conscience or simply found a new tune to follow.

On Tuesday night, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement saw what happens when political influence collides with the everyday realities of the people it seeks to lead.

The 2026 midterm elections brought a dramatic shift in political power. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate, flipping Senate seats in states such as Texas and Kansas, which were long thought to be out of reach, and winning House districts Trump easily carried just two years ago. 

Voter polls placed the president’s approval at approximately 38%, with roughly six in 10 voters saying he was a factor in their vote. But beneath those numbers lies a more consequential story. Americans are confronting the cost of living, the economic consequences of tariffs, the uncertainty of war with Iran and diminishing confidence in American leadership abroad.

Trump promised his voters he would drain the swamp, end foreign wars and bring prices down. Yet many Americans went to the polls questioning whether those promises had been kept. Unlike the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who rid the town of its rats, Trump now faces an electorate concerned that the problems he promised to eliminate have instead multiplied. 

In the original story, the Piper fulfilled his bargain. He played his pipe, led the rats into the river and freed the town. But when the townspeople refused to pay him, he returned to exact revenge by leading away their children. 

Critics argue that Trump reversed that bargain. Rather than delivering the relief promised to ordinary Americans, the administration has left many struggling with economic uncertainty while continuing to demand political loyalty. Over and over again throughout the midterm campaign, Trump urged supporters to vote as though he were personally on the ballot. In this telling, the Piper did not eliminate the rats. He added to them, and still he expected to be paid.  

Trump’s supporters see a different story. They point to immigration raids and mass deportations, deregulation and challenges to established political institutions as evidence that the president delivered on important commitments. From their perspective, voters who rejected those policies after experiencing the consequences resemble townspeople who accepted the Piper’s services, but refused to honor their bargain. 

Both interpretations expose a fundamental ethical question: When does political loyalty cease to be an expression of shared principles and become an abdication of independent judgment? 

In a democracy, voters are not obligated to follow the music indefinitely. They retain the right to question the destination, reconsider promises and withdraw their support. Political loyalty is not a debt citizens owe their leaders. It is a trust that leaders must continually earn.

Albert Hirschman, an American economist and author of “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,” distinguished between voice (working to change an organization from within) and exit (abandoning it). A vote against an incumbent is often itself an act of a voice. But where voters withdrew their allegiance from a party or movement altogether, Tuesday looked more like an exit. Hirschman saw loyalty as what keeps members inside, speaking up rather than leaving. His framework suggests that when loyalty silences voice instead, exit becomes the only remaining option. 

But elected officials carry a different and greater responsibility. 

Like the children of Hamelin, many Republican lawmakers followed the music toward an uncertain destination. Unlike those children, however, they had the authority — and the responsibility — to question where they were being led. Some embraced the president’s direction; others followed him despite reservations, knowing that dissent could invite a primary challenge. After all, they had seen others who challenged his leadership pay a considerable political cost. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy lost their Republican primaries to Trump-backed challengers. 

Political cooperation is essential to governing. But cooperation becomes ethically troubling when loyalty to an individual displaces the obligation to question, deliberate and act independently. The oath of office is not a pledge of allegiance to a president, a party or a political movement. It is a commitment to uphold the Constitution. A president can command attention, share public debate and place enormous pressure on members of his own party. But the ability to demand loyalty does not create a moral entitlement to receive it. 

The children of Hamelin’s Pied Piper tale had no part in the broken bargain, yet they paid its price. In our democracy, ordinary Americans and future generations often inherit the consequences of political decisions, and today they are paying a price. Economic instability, weakened public trust and the costs of war do not disappear when an election ends. A leader’s success cannot be measured solely by the number of people willing to follow along with them. It must also be measured by what happens to those who never chase the tune. 

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The election has shifted power in Washington. Democrats, after winning sizable, historic victories throughout the country, will soon have an opportunity to exercise congressional oversight and reinforce the institutional independence our constitutional system requires. 

But changing who holds the instrument does not necessarily change the music. 

Democrats now face their own ethical test. Will they exercise power with the transparency, accountability and respect for constitutional checks they demanded from their opponents? Will they welcome dissent within their own ranks? And will they resist the temptation to substitute partisan loyalty for independent judgment?  

An election can change the balance of power overnight. It cannot, by itself, restore public trust or guarantee ethical leadership. That requires leaders willing to place constitutional responsibility above political convenience, institutions prepared to exercise meaningful oversight, and citizens who refuse to surrender their judgment to the most compelling voice in the room. The first six months of the 120th Congress must be defined not merely by a change in political power, but by a demonstrable commitment to ethical reform, transparency, and accountability. The American people did not vote simply for a change in leadership. They voted for a government worthy of their trust.

The Pied Piper’s greatest power was not simply his ability to play a captivating tune. It was his ability to persuade others to follow without questioning where their journey would end. 

Political ethicist Dennis Thompson called this the problem of many hands: When many officials each contribute a small part to a collective outcome, responsibility seems to dissolve until no one bears it. So, when political loyalty becomes more important than independent judgment, who bears responsibility — the leader who plays the tune, or those who willingly follow? Thompson’s framework does not allow individual lawmakers to hide behind presidential leadership, party discipline or collective decisions. Nor does it assign blame equally. Responsibility depends on each official’s authority, knowledge, contribution and the alternatives available to them. By that measure, those who knew better and had the power to act cannot claim they were merely following the music from the leader in the red hat.

When the music finally stops, the question is not simply who will lead next. 

It is whether we have learned to listen differently.

The post Trump reversed the Pied Piper’s bargain, and voters stiffed him appeared first on Salon.com.

For all the horrible things Donald Trump has wrought upon the world — and there are so, so many — he’s also taught us some important lessons. Trump is proof of several truths: A red-meat-and-stress-addled heart can withstand otherwise unthinkable conditions with the federal government’s medical secrets; reality television ruined the world; and, if we’re not careful, we’re all liable to become parodies of ourselves one day, crying about it online.

That latter bit is certainly true for filmmaker Taika Waititi, whose otherwise tacky-yet-progressive veneer cracked last weekend when he took to Instagram to condemn the poor reviews of his latest film, “Klara and the Sun.” After a torrent of bad press and worse box-office performance, the film’s distributor, Sony, opted to scale back the movie’s wide release, reducing the sci-fi dramedy’s reach from 2,000 theaters nationwide to 800, most of which returned a meager profit. Never one to take his mediocrity on the chin, Waititi deflected the negativity outward, which, as we know, always paints someone in a good light!

Waititi reposted a graphic claiming that “Klara and the Sun” was “rebounding” with a 78% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 53-point gap from the film’s 25% critics score. (For what it’s worth, neither number should ever be used to accurately measure a film’s quality.) “I haven’t read a review of anything aimed at me or my peers in 15 years,” Waititi captioned the post. “But I do listen to the people . . . Let’s spare a thought for those sad, lost souls who couldn’t achieve their dreams of becoming artists, and thus settled, and became critics. Irrelevant. Out of touch. Obsolete. In the bin.”

Reading Waititi’s emoji-peppered caption, I was surprised to find it so carelessly evoked the Trumpian crybaby approach to social media. Whether on X or his own Truth Social, Trump’s favorite way of addressing critics and opponents has long been to toss out adjectives at will. Tack a “SAD!” at the end of Waititi’s caption, and it could easily pass for one of Trump’s poetic musings. (If only Waititi had gone so far as to parrot my personal favorite Trump quip about Barney Frank by saying, “The critics looked disgusting, nipples protruding, in front of my movie. Very very disrespectful.”)

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Ironically, all those admonishments in Waititi’s caption are also fitting descriptors for the state of Donald Trump’s agenda, the one imitated by his legions of Republican cronies spread out across America, hoping to be elected in Tuesday’s midterms. But judging by the results, MAGA’s influence is waning fast. Seven Senate seats flipped, historically red states turned blue and a spate of monumental wins popped up nationwide. The MAGA bubble popped in real time. Americans have seen firsthand what little good fascist ideology does for the average, working-class person. And though the country may not become great again overnight, it appears the last 12 years of freefall have finally been suspended — at least for now.

Not to be all, “Oh, won’t someone think of the celebrities?” about it, but such overwhelmingly positive election results left me wondering what happens to someone like Waititi, whose childish outburst is straight from the MAGA playbook. For over a decade, Trump has used social media to peddle broadly disparaging, dangerous rhetoric that has legitimate impact outside the phone screen. The reckless hatred comprising MAGA ideology is so potent that it’s bled into the ways even otherwise progressive people wield their power, like crude oil painting an ocean black. And while refuting film critics isn’t akin to Trump’s most damning sins, Waititi’s mockery is a symptom of a problem that won’t be washed away by one blue wave, no matter how sizable.

One would think that Waititi would know better. For one, the guy is 51 years old, certainly experienced and well-established enough to let a flop roll off his back. How fitting that his biggest success is the anti-fascist yet aesthetically tasteless political satire, “Jojo Rabbit,” which won the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in 2020, just as the Trump era was revving up for its second leg. That film, about a 10-year-old Hitler Youth who begins to grapple with the realities of life in 1940s Germany, examines propaganda’s influence and the power of hegemony, even if it often lacks the nuance and perspective such a satire warrants. For better, or more often, for worse, Waititi’s writing displays a self-possessed vulgarity that gets in the way of his more salient observations. Case in point: It’s downright ludicrous to stake your name on a film renouncing hate, then take aim at critics — people not exactly matched in influence to someone like Waititi — just six years later.

But this is the rot that social media creates. Whether it’s Instagram, X, TikTok, or YouTube, these sites have incentivized and monetized incendiary opinions. Their algorithms push small people into major power. What was designed to ostensibly be a great equalizer has only divided the world more, making animosity easily accessible to anyone who gets their rocks off on sewing discourse through cruelty. 

For some time now, arts critics have been easy targets on these platforms. Gone are the days of the critic playing dilettante, having intellectual conversations over martinis and cigarettes at the month’s salon for like-minded individuals. To be a critic today — to pursue one’s passion for art and writing and learning, all rolled into one — is to subject oneself to a pretty bleak existence. In most cases, the pay is meager. The hours are long. The job is demanding. And virtually no one has the patience or attention span to read an entire article anymore, let alone engage with its ideas. A legitimate critic doesn’t stumble into the job just to point and laugh; they write because they have real passion for what they cover. Surely someone like Waititi would say the same when he begins a new project after a string of flops.

What Waititi fails to realize is that he’s not punching up or down, but laterally. This is artist versus artist. If the context is right, a good piece of criticism can be as life-altering as a good film. But that’s hard to see when the internet has built such a wide chasm between people, reducing the impact of writing in favor of scrolling. Along with social media’s effect on human behavior, it’s had a heavy hand in blunting the journalism industry. If everyone’s a critic, then no one is, and that’s precisely why monitoring Rotten Tomatoes scores like they’re poll numbers is futile and ridiculous.

But it’s not just Waititi who’s vulnerable to this unique form of MAGA-tinged, social media-brained psychosis; critics can fall prey to it, too. Whether it’s a filmmaker, a film critic, or just your average filmgoer, social media has confined us all to its machine. No one is exempt from consumer tech’s sway. And if a writer or filmmaker wants to make a splash, tossing out an inflammatory opinion aimed at a peer is a surefire shortcut. I’ve seen this affect critics’ prose over time, with certain writers (or their outlets) favoring button-pushing pull quotes and headlines for attention. But in most cases, no critic is happy to spend two hours watching something they find insufferable. No matter how gleeful Siskel and Ebert used to look sparring over movies, their industry was built on intellectual debate in pursuit of cinematic resonance, not schadenfreude.

 

What’s most concerning in Waititi’s response is his foul self-importance, which is the real stain of MAGA politics. While an artist should avoid burdening themselves with hypothetical responses to their work before it’s even out in the world, considering the eventual reaction is worthwhile. Engaging with other people’s perceptions is a practice we could all stand to do with more grace and tact. Contemplating a differing opinion shows maturity and humility, not absolute agreement. Pointing a finger won’t do anything for a person’s growth, artistic or otherwise. America’s politicians are only just beginning to relearn that lesson, understanding the value in trying to address problems, rather than gesture toward them with a shrug.

If America’s blue wave is indeed going to usher in a new era where politicians actually act in favor of the people, and Trumpian artists like Waititi make themselves look foolish on Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram, we owe some props to one of the century’s most prolific liberals. Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” actually got a few things right. In last month’s companion piece to “The Social Network,” Sorkin posited that the average American would soon be mobilized by their fatigue with MAGA politics and social media. But his director’s eye lacked style and discernment. Sorkin responded to criticisms with pleasant diplomacy, even questioning his own merits as a director versus a screenwriter. “I’m worried that the parts of directing that I’m not good at are those parts you can’t learn,” he admitted.

While there may be truth to his concern, Sorkin’s introspection is precisely the kind of pause this country could learn from. If living in MAGA-world for a decade has taught us anything, it’s that things aren’t just good because one person says so. Uniformity is the enemy of art, and blind trust is the scourge of politics. There is no future without recognizing the subtleties existing between the lines. The only thing that is, to quote Waititi, irrelevant, out of touch and obsolete is the arrogance in thinking anyone could know it all.

The post Taika Waititi’s Instagram crash out is a Trumpian sore loss appeared first on Salon.com.

Election Day brought a big blue earthquake of anti-Trump sentiment that rumbled as far inland as Kansas and shook GOP ground in the Carolinas and Texas. By the time late victories rolled in on Tuesday night, there had been so many wins that subsequent Democratic pickups had begun to feel more like aftershocks, even in states that haven’t voted blue since Bill Clinton was in the White House.

Florida narrowly missed the quake, with Republicans winning all the major statewide races by the thinnest of margins. The one-time quintessential purple state, a so-goes-the-nation bellwether with a relatively even amount of registered Republicans and Democrats, turned remarkably red in the Trump era following Barack Obama’s back-to-back wins in 2008 and 2012. The state legislature redrew its maps to enshrine a supermajority, and a post-Covid influx of GOP transplants seeking lower taxes and lax regulations shifted the balance significantly. A Democrat hasn’t made a fight of the governor’s race this decade, and no Democratic Senate candidate has come close to winning since Bill Nelson lost his reelection bid in 2018.

Angie Nixon felt different. The Jacksonville organizer and bookstore owner ran a proudly democratic socialist campaign, advocating for universal healthcare in a state beset by multiple insurance crises and affordability issues. Her polls looked good up to Election Day, and on Tuesday night, victories across the country made her race in the Sunshine State look winnable. Ultimately though, Nixon could not replicate the victories of other rabble-rousers like Dr. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Talarico in Texas. She lost to incumbent Ashley Moody, who was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis to fill the seat left vacant by Marco Rubio’s confirmation as secretary of state, by less than two percentage points. Moody outspent Nixon by more than double to barely eke out a majority. 

The Florida Democratic Party deserves some blame for being woefully behind the times. After a 2019 squeaker between DeSantis and the progressive Andrew Gillum, the party moved as fast as it could from any candidate that might excite its base. They ran a former Republican for governor in each of the last two gubernatorial races, no doubt depressing turnout and enthusiasm among the Democratic base with their moderate picks. 

But a close look at the rest of the Florida races reveals the culprit in Nixon’s narrow loss. Despite a gerrymander meant to calcify Republican supermajorities in the state and a political stiff in the form of David Jolly at the top of the ballot for governor, the GOP lost seats in the state legislature. The energy in Florida and, remarkably, throughout the South, was with anyone running against Republicans. The blame for Nixon’s defeat lies almost solely with national Democrats and their stubborn refusal to back Nixon with either messaging or money. 

Since her shock primary win in August, Nixon has complained about Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee recalcitrance to anyone who will listen. In September, she told MS NOW hosts Symone Sanders Townsend and Eugene Daniels that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was less than thrilled about her race.

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“When I did speak with Sen. Schumer on the phone, it was basically a ‘we will see,’” she said. “He’s going to look into it. That’s what was said, that he’s going to look into it.”

Nixon went on to say that Democrats were wary of throwing in behind a Black woman in the South following Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss: “Folks are a little gun-shy because, unfortunately, Vice President Harris lost as a Black woman, and so people are being very hesitant in terms of funding Black women, especially in the South.”

In later interviews, she claimed that national Democrats wrote off Florida in advance, declining to put money behind her candidacy because they believe the state is “racist.” 

The pale blue dots on Florida’s election map tell the story. The democratic socialist was able to win in Miami-Dade County, despite a Cuban-American population that shudders at anything that sounds like revolution. On the other end of the state, typically Republican Jacksonville swung to the left. An enthusiastic push in the state’s timidly liberal cities could have narrowed the gap in favor of Nixon and added tens of thousands of votes to her final total. According to analysis by Wesleyan Media Project, the national party and affiliated PACs spent 10 advertising dollars in Iowa for every one they spent in Florida in the race’s final weeks, and it showed. The Hawkeye State now has a new Democratic governor-elect and senator-elect.

 

It was the same story throughout the South. Democrats overperformed in states where the national party bothered to fight. Blue Texas became a reality because of seemingly unlimited spending — it was the most expensive Senate race in history — and national messaging hits on behalf of Talarico. Louisiana and Mississippi offered two incredibly close Senate races in states long assumed to be GOP strongholds. In Louisiana, Democrat Jamie Davis lost to Republican Julia Letlow by only two points. As New York Times contributing opinion writer Steven Rattner pointed out, Davis kept the race close despite receiving zero advertising dollars from the national party in October, per the WMP’s analysis.

Mississippi, though, could turn out to be a miracle — in spite of the DSCC. With 96% of precincts reporting, Democrat Scott Colom, a district attorney, leads the incumbent Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith by only 138 votes, with around 15,000 provisional ballots outstanding.

Speaking to Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Mississippi state Rep. Cheikh Taylor, a Democrat, blamed the nail-biter on a lack of investment from the national party.

“Early money always helps. Monies have come to the state of Mississippi, just not through the traditional means, though the DNC. We all know that the Colom campaign was locked out of that $30 million contribution to U.S. Senate races,” he said. “Even though the money didn’t come, in Mississippi, we figure it out.”

Don’t get me wrong. Colom, Davis and Nixon all deserve praise for their stunning performances, even if at least two of them came up short. Tuesday night’s news offered a rare glimmer of hope in a bleak few years, but Democrats had a chance to permanently rebuke MAGA — and instead they squandered it based on their own misconceptions about the South.

Grabbing two more close races via some well-placed funding for the party’s nominees would have left them in a much better position to harry and harass the president and block his MAGA agenda over the next two years. All it would have taken was not capitulating in advance.

The post Angie Nixon could have won Florida. National Democrats failed her appeared first on Salon.com.

Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic, America has been in a funk. The whole country has seemed to be in a sour mood, unhappy with everything, feeling as if the world has gone off its axis and life is out of balance. The trauma of that experience was probably far deeper and more injurious than we wanted to admit, so we just sort of sleepwalked as events cascaded around us, feeling emotionally distanced and impotent. 

We finally woke up and shook it off. For the first time in six years, the American people took back control of their own destiny and issued a stunning, overwhelming rebuke to the Republican Party, which had fallen back into power during that period of national somnolence and took a wrecking ball, figuratively and literally, to the country. America, it seems, decided to save itself. 

The historic landslide Democratic victory in Tuesday’s midterms elections is far more thorough than even the most positive polls had indicated. Analysts assured us that while it looked likely the party would gain at least a House majority, the so-called real victory would be if Democrats reduced the margins in red states, which would serve as a warning to Republicans that they had gone too far. Nobody really expected that Democrats would actually win in places like South Carolina, Kansas, Iowa or perhaps even Mississippi, where, as I write this, Democrat Scott Colom has a 43-vote lead over GOP incumbent Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. 

Political polarization was assumed to be set in stone; the GOP’s redistricting gambit and the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act meant that Democrats could not expect to flip more than a handful of seats, and the party was facing one of the most inauspicious midterm Senate maps in recent memory. At this moment, they are expected to end up with 245 to 255 seats in the House and possibly 55 seats in the Senate, an unthinkable outcome as recently as yesterday morning. 

It will be a while before we see the final tally, but the results are so obviously decisive that even Donald Trump cannot fatuously claim that this election was stolen. All the threats against election workers and plans to contest the outcome are empty in the face of such a victory. It is finally, once and for all, clear that the country does not want the insanity and chaos that Trump has wrought. 

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According to voter polls — formerly known as exit polls — the top issue for voters was the cost of living, as expected. Reversing the tariffs and putting an end to the war with Iran would be the obvious ways to begin to alleviate some of the stress, followed by restoration of funding for healthcare and other vital safety net programs. Rolling back Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy would go a long way as well. But the president Trump has already promised to be “Mr. Veto,” so the prospect for a new era of bipartisan comity with the White House does not look good. 

It’s always possible that congressional Republicans will feel chastised enough that they will work with Democrats to create veto-proof majorities on those issues, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The best the Democrats can hope for is that Trump decides he needs to do something positive for his legacy besides building his ballroom and renaming the Atlantic Ocean, and he agrees to compromise on something. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that either. But that doesn’t mean Democrats shouldn’t pass the legislation — and make Trump and Republicans block it. 

As great as it is that Democrats will decisively control both houses of Congress, that big tent brings with it some perennial problems that are likely to manifest themselves again. The red state-blue state divide represents a structural problem that has always been around, and it has been a specific problem for Democrats going back to at least the time of Franklin Roosevelt. Progress is hard to attain when, to maintain a majority, your coalition must include some who are opposed to it. During Roosevelt’s long presidency, the Democratic coalition included powerful southerners who controlled many congressional committees, and they would simply not pass anything that included civil rights or equitable federal programs. By the end of the 1930s, they had successfully joined with northern Republicans to block much of what remained of the New Deal agenda. 

Eventually, as we know, most of that bloc migrated to the GOP, but until fairly recently it’s always been a somewhat fluid dynamic with a few conservative states in the heartland, the West, Southwest and even the South that would elect conservative Democrats. In the last Congress, we dealt with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate, and it was like pulling teeth to get legislation passed as they used their leverage to extract concessions and block progressive initiatives. 

In the not too distant past, Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., cosponsored tax cuts, supported the Iraq War resolution and even delivered a keynote speech at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Centrist senators Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, along with the conservative Blue Dog Caucus in the House, successfully blocked progressive provisions of the Affordable Care Act. There were other so-called mavericks throughout the 1990s and 2000s who would join with the GOP or leverage their position to thwart liberal initiatives.

I only bring this up to remind people that with the addition of these red state legislators will come a whole set of problems. But given the alternative, they are good problems to have. While the pundits have already begun their ritual of handwringing over the possibility of progressives “overreading the mandate,” the reality is that everyone else understands that the most important priority for Democrats, as a now powerful force of opposition, is to put a check on Trump and begin the critically important process of oversight and accountability. One suspects that on this issue there will likely be unity among all the factions. MS NOW reports that their voter poll showed that 90% of voters said that government corruption was a crucial or major factor in their House vote. That also tracks with the findings of a recent Gallup poll. I would say that’s a pretty clear mandate and a good place to start. 

Whatever problems await the Democrats, and there will be many, this was the result we have needed ever since Trump first won the presidency 10 years ago. The damage he has caused in this decade of destruction is immeasurable, but maybe, just maybe, we have finally reached the beginning of the end of our long national nightmare, and we can begin the process of renewal and reformation.

The post Democrats better hope they don’t have another Manchin in their midst appeared first on Salon.com.

Ten years ago, watching the dawning of the Trump era on Fox News felt appropriate somehow. Notice that I didn’t say it felt right; after all, we were sinking into an anti-Enlightenment Age propped up by Rupert Murdoch’s propaganda machine. Nothing about any of that felt right.

Still, once the phrase “President-elect Donald Trump” became as inevitable as Thanos, and Fox’s anchors giggled like ascendant supervillains, staring into that snarling maw seemed like the responsible thing to do.

Training my focus on CNN and MS NOW in time to catch 2026’s predicted blue wave promised to be just as illuminating. Back in 2016, while everyone else on CNN struggled to make sense of what was happening, commentator Van Jones somberly characterized the results as “whitelash against a changing country.”

Shortly after Trump was inaugurated, he turned against CNN full force, branding it and every other outlet denying favorable coverage as fake news. Trump’s 2024 victory further endangered any media outlets outside of the right-wing echo chamber, as he hit news organizations with obscenely ridiculous legal complaints to force them to bend the knee.

So we’ll pardon Jones for his deliciously petty reaction to what Jake Tapper, the emcee of CNN’s “Election Night in America” telecast, awkwardly described as a “blue-nami.” By the time the Democrats took control of the House and Senate, the previously funereal Anderson Cooper was gleefully eager to hear what Jones had to say. And his colleague did not disappoint, delivering what may have been the night’s most satisfying monologue.

“If you join a cult, at some point the cult leader takes you to Jonestown and tries to get you to drink the Kool-Aid,” he observed as chastened GOP pundit Scott Jennings sat inches away. “This is Jonestown for the Republican Party. They drank the Kool-Aid, and they have candidates that are dropping like flies across the country because they did not stand up to this guy when he was doing things that were wrong . . .

“You join a cult, at some point, you go to Jonestown,” Jones repeated in closing. “That’s where you are tonight, Republicans.” Then he pretended to pass a cup to his Trumpian counterpart.

Election night news coverage is a stressful affair in the best of times. In 2026, CNN and MS NOW, the channel formerly known as MSNBC, entered the fray as battered underdogs. MS NOW is now owned by Versant, a group of cable channels spun off from NBCUniversal. CNN, part of Warner Bros. Discovery, will soon be owned by Skydance and its Trump-allied owner David Ellison.

Neither newsroom can claim relief over what’s on the horizon, which is why Cooper led CNN’s coverage with the air of an undertaker greeting democracy’s mourners. America’s major news outlets have been taking it on the chin with the rest of us — including Cooper, a former “60 Minutes” correspondent who fled Bari Weiss’ CBS takeover only for Ellison to come for his cable news shire anyway. Blue wave or not, CNN’s future is uncertain.

So although MS NOW may be scrappier and looser these days, at least its reporters and pundits aren’t working through an institutional existential crisis. That fatigue showed up in how CNN’s Magic Wall wrangler, John King, lived cautiously from moment to moment, allowing only a mild display of wonder as he shifted between the largely scarlet 2024 map and the much bluer 2026 version.

“What’s happening right now?” King wondered. “What’s the right word? Is it a rebuke? Is it repudiation? Is it shellacking? Is it a spanking? I mean, at the moment, this is the collapse of the president’s party on live television as you watch it play out.”

And for the first time in a decade of watching election nights, it was a joy to experience — like learning how to hope again.

Peddling optimism isn’t the job of any journalistic organization, of course. But knowing what CNN’s newsroom is contending with regardless of this election outcome makes their composure especially admirable. The CNN team had a 10-ton weight pressing down on them and still managed to convey the sense of celebration presumably gripping most of its viewers.

Most people tune out election night noise regardless of whether the vote goes in their favor, perhaps gleaning what they can from the flashy graphics and chyrons. This gave MS NOW’s Ali Velshi an advantage at the network’s Big Board now that his former co-worker Steve Kornacki has moved over to NBC. Both have earned fandoms by injecting levity into managing each election’s data flood.  On Tuesday night, Kornacki inspired a meme simply by being captured on his new network’s Kornacki Cam as he walked down a hall.

But Velshi kept his version of his predecessor’s two-step going, buzzing around on MS NOW’s Big Board with a hummingbird’s energy. “Annie Andrews is outperforming, and Darlene Graham is underperforming,” he rapidly blurted, breaking down the Democratic challenger’s road to her unexpected win in South Carolina over the late Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sister, before turning to the camera with a delightfully bemused look to say, “This is a totally weird conversation that we are having. Right?” It’s true. After years of polls overstating the Democrats’ chances, it did feel strange to have underestimated how much they’d win. 

Still, Rachel Maddow‘s ebullience from the moment MS NOW’s coverage began was tough to beat. Before a single result came in, she cheerfully offered, “So far, the one thing we can definitively say is that Americans like our democracy, and they are enjoying using it in record numbers in this cycle.”

Once Democrats claimed majorities in the House and Senate a few hours later, she let loose. In calling the race for Pennsylvania’s 8th congressional district for Democratic Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, Maddow couldn’t resist calling her Republican opponent, Rob Bresnahan, a “sometime ghost hunter” as her colleagues snickered in the background. 

This is an understandable reaction to voters’ referendum on the president’s unpopular and economically detrimental policies. Americans, regardless of partisan stance, are struggling to afford the basics. But as Chris Hayes pointed to the shock of so many Democratic upsets, he noted that high prices aren’t the only thing forcing this drastic change. “The rot that is coming from the top of the country is very, very, very clearly on voters’ minds,” he said.

So if Jones wants to indulge in a little grave dancing, so be it.

It was even better to see other correspondents take stock of all the history made on Tuesday night. New Hampshire voters chose a Democrat, Chris Pappas, to join the U.S. Senate, making him the first out gay man elected to the chamber.

Voters turned Texas blue and elected four Black governors – including former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who became the first woman and the first Black person to be elected governor in Georgia, and the first female Black governor in our country’s history.

Once that state’s contest for governor was called for Bottoms, MS NOW’s team tapped Symone Sanders-Townsend to contextualize what that meant for voters and Black women. Sanders-Townsend reminded us that when Trump calls Georgia to gripe, it will be Bottoms on the other end of the line. She’ll also be the one to ensure the 2028 election is certified for the rightful winner.

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But when Sanders-Townsend’s colleagues asked her to share how Bottoms’ victory made her feel, her reaction hit home. “After the 2024 presidential election, for myself and Black women all over this country, it felt like a repudiation of us,” she said, holding back tears. “…There were Black women, myself included, that felt like, ‘Well, maybe America just does not want us.'”

So to Sanders-Townsend, and all the other Black women disappointed by their fellow citizens in 2024, Bottoms’ victory said, “Georgia wanted Keisha.”

That moment didn’t diminish Jones’ take on what this election night meant to him. “This is like Christmas and a birthday and an Easter bunny and Halloween!” he said. “This is the repudiation of Trumpism that people have been hoping for, seeing American democracy stand up.”

But by allowing herself to cry on camera, Sanders-Townsend broadcast a different kind of signal. She let us know that on this night, and for the first time in a long time, it was OK to ease into some sense of relief. And that’s better than the fleeting pleasure of retaliatory pettiness, well-earned though it may be.

The post The petty joy of a blue election night appeared first on Salon.com.

Pretend I’m on the ballot, the president of the United States repeatedly told American voters over the last several weeks. Millions of voters did exactly that. Be careful what you wish for, my dude. 

The astonishing results of the 2026 midterm elections do not just represent a rebuke or a political setback for Donald Trump. Those neutral-sounding terms of art are not remotely adequate. This was a historic smackdown, a massive, crushing defeat on a scale suffered by no incumbent president in living memory. It represents this nation’s collective awakening — admittedly rather late in the game — to this individual’s uniquely poisonous effects on our public life and civil society.

Many larger political questions will emerge from this epic defeat, which will see any and all surviving elected Republicans (not that there are many) scurrying for cover and trying to establish as much distance as possible from Trump. They will lose his number. They will profess that they were never convinced MAGA believers, or that they secretly disagreed with the ICE reign of terror, with the war in Iran, with the disastrous tariffs, with the ideological assault on liberal democracy. 

Is JD Vance still a plausible 2028 presidential contender, having hitched his wagon to this tyrant, who has now been thoroughly pantsed in public and exposed as a pathetic loser? Will Pete Hegseth get even one more opportunity for podcaster-style flexing before the defanged Pentagon press corps? Let’s give Marco Rubio an infinitesimal amount of credit for creeping quietly through the corridors of power and staying out of the headlines. Whether his neocon mouse act is enough to survive the Trumpocalypse moment remains to be seen. 

In his inimitable style, Trump is already blaming others for this defeat. He has accused Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who lost his seat to Democrat Gina Hinojosa in one of Tuesday night’s numerous shockers — of being a RINO sellout. As impossible as it is to talk about honor with these people, that is an act of dishonorable treachery, given how eagerly Abbott has crawled and begged and prostrated himself before the Trumpian throne. 

Then again, in an ass-backward way, Trump has a point. He didn’t do this all by himself; no one could have managed that. He loaded up the pipe with bigotry and xenophobia and fear and insane conspiracy theories, and adult Republican humans who used to believe in wrong-headed but somewhat sane political doctrines inhaled it all eagerly, persuading themselves that the resulting high would insulate them from the failure of their ideas. It only made the problem worse — all the problems, really — and they should have seen that coming.

The president corrupted and enslaved a historic American political party with a complicated but illustrious history, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. I’m not the biggest fan of that party either, but it has certainly had its moments, including the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress and the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate. Trump insisted that it surrender everything to him — its principles, its history and its soul, if political parties have such a thing — and as in every fable about making a deal with the devil, now it has been destroyed.

We don’t know how this election would have turned out in the unimaginable alternate universe where Trump stayed out of it. But he didn’t. He forced Sen. John Cornyn out of the race in Texas, in favor of Ken Paxton. Look what happened. He picked Darline Graham to replace her late brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, in South Carolina. Look what happened. He picked Mike Collins to run against Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and Michael Whatley to run against former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina. Look what happened. He praised Ohio Sen. Jon Husted’s rear end and embraced gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s noxious campaign ad. Look what happened there, too.

And that’s without considering the supposedly ingenious MAGA strategy of redistricting congressional seats in one state after another, with the objective of locking in a permanent Republican majority. How will that play out over the longer term? That’s impossible to say, but in 2026 it seems to have unleashed an extraordinary backlash. Forget all the hand-wringing about purple districts and swing districts; the congressional map is a nationwide wipeout. As I write this, the New York Times is predicting a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives of 256 seats. That may or may not hold up, but however this ends, it’s likely to be the biggest midterm swing in more than 30 years. 

Are there still die-hard MAGA Republicans in deep-red exurbs or rural districts who will continue to profess fealty to Trump in the wake of this catastrophe, and perhaps even maintain that it’s all some kind of grand misunderstanding? Yeah, sure. Any cult movement has its true believers and willing sacrifices. Years after his resignation, the postmistress in the rural town where I spent summers as a kid never took down the portrait of Richard Nixon. Then she retired and moved away, someone else took the job and Nixon’s picture wound up out back, in the dumpster. 

That’s about where we are. Trump has always been poisonous. Republicans are finally learning that the hard way.

The post Donald Trump is now radioactive appeared first on Salon.com.

Among all the gruesome details of allegations both old and new of rape and sexual abuse, there’s one four-word phrase in the new congressional report on Jeffrey Epstein that says a lot about why Donald Trump seems especially unhinged these days: “No statute of limitations.” Led by Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released their findings on the president’s long and close relationship with the deceased sex offender. The report, citing testimony from 11 women, “indicates that Trump abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside, and in coordination with, the most infamous sex trafficker in history.”

The media response to the allegations was muted, despite compelling new evidence about the extent of Epstein’s sex trafficking ring, suggesting more powerful men were involved than have faced legal repercussions. Perhaps the report was overshadowed by the midterm elections. Or maybe there’s a sense this is “old news” and won’t move the needle. But if Raskin has his way, we’ll all look back to this release as the opening chapter in a season of accountability not just for Trump, but also for various administration figures and MAGA cronies who have enjoyed the legal shield of a Republican congressional majority.

Democrats are expected to win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in the midterm elections. If they do, Raskin and investigators will have a lot more power to investigate not just Trump and the White House, but also various Republican donors, right-wing business interests and other MAGA-aligned power players who have been taking full advantage of the atmosphere of corruption the president has created. The Epstein report is likely just the beginning. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Democrats “are laying the groundwork for an array of inquiries into President Donald Trump, his family and his administration.” Various business and political leaders are meeting with their lawyers, worried about what Democrats could uncover with this new power. 

“I haven’t seen this much investigative activity in anticipation of a change in control of a house of Congress ever,” Michael Bopp, who runs a congressional investigations division for the law firm Gibson Dunn, told the Post. 

There are plenty of signs that it’s dawning on people around Trump that he will be out of office in two short years and that, as the latest Epstein report indicates, the statute of limitations has not run out on many possible crimes committed under the White House’s protection. A recent Zeteo profile of Stephen Miller showed that the White House deputy chief of staff is worried about going to prison if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028. Congressional Democrats keep talking about impeaching Pete Hegseth, and the defense secretary is clearly anxious, reportedly making calls and begging Sen. Marsha Blackburn to appoint him to her Senate seat if, as expected, she wins the Tennessee governor’s race this week. Having a Senate seat would not only prevent impeachment; it could make prosecuting him for alleged war crimes much harder as well. 

In October Elissa Slotkin of Michigan set off a massive panic on the right when she suggested that there should be a focus on “signature cases” against “people who enabled” Trump. The Michigan senator wanted a “deterrence message” for anyone considering working for Trump, letting them know that committing crimes or otherwise assisting in illegal or corrupt activity might result in “a ton of problems” for them that aren’t worth the risk of legal liability. Fox News and other outlets tried to spin this as Slotkin threatening the mass arrest of young staffers, but the hysteria belies their real worry: Democrats might be able to compile enough evidence that prison is a real threat for many of the people working for Trump. 

Slotkin’s remarks clearly rattled the White House. Since then, Trump has repeatedly put out word that his underlings should not have to worry about obeying the law because mass pardons are on their way. A few days after Slotkin’s warning, sources inside the White House told the Washington Sun that administration lawyers are looking at “blanket pardons for all employees involved in particular policy areas, such as deportations, war or trade.” 

Still, the White House is facing serious staffing issues. A September report from the Partnership for Public Service found that people Trump hires quickly leave. Not only have there been a record number of resignations, nearly half of the quitters worked less than a year for Trump. 

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On Monday, Trump himself also told the New York Post that widespread pardons are on the table, not just for his staff, but for allies like Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Musk has good reason to be worried. His brief tenure running DOGE has raised a whole host of questions about what laws were broken by him or by staff carrying out his orders. He’s also under suspicion of messing with Ukraine’s Starlink access, crippling its defenses against the invading Russian military. This may explain why Musk spent nearly half a billion dollars — more than any single donor in history — trying to tilt the elections in the GOP’s favor. 

Trump and his family members should also be sweating. Trump has often interpreted the Supreme Court’s grant of presidential immunity as all-encompassing, but as Raskin told the New Yorker, he doesn’t see it that way at all. He outlined how the president has made billions in office, roughly $1 million a hour, and that there’s a great deal to learn about where that money is coming from. The Supreme Court’s decision technically only covers crimes committed during the commission of official presidential duties. By definition, Trump’s external money-making enterprises aren’t that. His children are deeply involved in the family business as well. And as the Epstein report made sure to note, some of the crimes Trump and his associates have been accused of committing with his old friend Epstein carry no statute of limitations.

It’s tempting to wave all this off as inconsequential, because Trump and his cronies were able to escape severe ramifications the last time around. But to dismiss this talk would be a mistake, in no small part because Democrats need their feet held to the fire. The corruption this time around is far worse than it was in Trump’s first term, more flagrant as the air of lawlessness led to a level of carelessness that creates more prosecutable evidence. The next Democrat in office may not be like Joe Biden, who shied away from aggressive prosecution of Trump and his allies. Some of the politicians whose names are being bandied around — like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York or Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia — have been highly focused weeding out MAGA corruption. 

Then there’s the matter of political will. Before now, it was hard to drum up sufficient political support for accountability because voters simply didn’t care enough about corruption. But as the New York Times reported last week, the issue is a rising source concern for voters. Democrats, for one thing, are doing a better job of linking Trump’s self-dealing to the economic problems of ordinary people. For another, the Epstein scandal has broken into national consciousness, and even Republicans are struggling to sufficiently explain why Trump, despite signing a bill to release all Justice Department files related to the case, is refusing to do so.

With these winds at their back, Democrats have a much better chance of being able to conduct thorough investigations — and pursue criminal consequences for those found to have broken the law. 

The post MAGA panics as post-midterm investigation season looms appeared first on Salon.com.

Move over, Haley Stevens: There’s a new competitor for the most pathetic reaction to plummeting political fortunes. Elon Musk, the former Trump administration member and the world’s richest man, has seen the midterm election forecast for conservative candidates, and he’s responded by petulantly playing with his toys.

The X owner started “Anakin-posting” on Monday. The purely online phenomenon finds far-right and MAGA nerds recasting Star Wars’ Anakin Skywalker, the man who will become Darth Vader, as a tragic hero and paragon of traditional values. A typical post uses generative AI to reframe the “Star Wars” films’ genocidal space monk as a masculine, hyper-conservative, attentive father. Musk’s post shows Anakin, as played by actor Hayden Christensen, sitting on a throne surrounded by his children, Luke and Leia, and his wife, Padme. The AI illustration has pulled liberally from all three trilogies, placing the adult faces of Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher on the children. Natalie Portman’s Padme appears to be wearing her makeup and crown from “Black Swan.” The Sith first family is surrounded by 1970s-era storm troopers and 2010s imperial guards.  

“This is what they stole from us,” Musk captioned the computer-generated photo of his sci-fi fan fiction.

For the unfamiliar, Anakin was a member of an order of space knights. As a young man, he began having prophetic dreams of his wife dying in childbirth. Consumed by ambition and anger, and desperate to avoid the fate he envisioned, he was manipulated by several elderly politicians into betraying his chivalric order, killing many of his fellow knights and slaughtering an entire school full of squires for fear of retribution. Unable to save his wife, and grievously injured from a battle with his former mentor, he became a running dog of a fascist empire that aimed to rule the entire galaxy. 

Right-wing young men have warped that story through the established MAGA lens of “returning to tradition,” picturing a world where having the conviction to kill a bunch of toddlers is celebrated. 

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The typical example of “Anakin-posting” expresses rage at a stagnant economy or lack of prospects by sharing images of Christensen’s Anakin looking stoic. MAGA influencers like Jack Posobiec have added a dash of intergalactic racism, sharing images of a young Anakin surrounded by literal aliens to hint at a pro-segregationist message. Others have reimagined Anakin’s mentors as chiding liberal scolds, grafting pink hair and a keffiyeh onto Obi-Wan Kenobi. In the pathetic galaxy of Gen Z men, anything from mid-century magazine ads to a Disney-owned sci-fi epic for children can be a stand in for their cultural grievances. 

Enough time has passed between the prequels and the present that Anakin can be presented as a brooding badass. The primary criticism of the movies at the time concerned Christensen’s portrayal of Anakin as a whiny child throwing a deadly tantrum. The knotty and boring political intrigue subplots of the films have been forgotten, making it easy to gloss over Anakin being a stooge for politicians playing a game beyond his ken.

Musk, in particular, does have reasons to empathize with the “Star Wars” villain. After believing he had found a way to reshape the government toward his own ends via DOGE, he was booted when the program proved deeply unpopular. Seeing visions of a blue wave washout, he used his financial superpower to try and avoid what appears to be an oncoming loss. Separated from the levers of power and now half a billion dollars poorer, Musk has been forced to play-act a scenario where he won. His image-generating toy gave him the happy ending that politics, relationships and wealth couldn’t.

But all the AI bots can’t undo the facts of Anakin’s story. He was ultimately killed by the evil emperor he served, dying in front of the son he abandoned. His “return to tradition” was a last-minute awakening, when he was forced to confront all the harm he had done and the miserable life he had led. Now there’s something for Musk to aspire to. 

The post Elon Musk is using Anakin Skywalker to cope with the midterm forecast appeared first on Salon.com.

Loss aversion is a phenomenon in psychology and behavioral economics. Defined simply, it means that the pain experienced from a loss is felt twice as much as winning. In politics, that intensity manifests itself in motivation. If you take something away from people, they are going to feel it more acutely than promising them something, and the theft produces a backlash. 

That’s what appears to be happening right now with Black voters. Across the country, they have been lining up to vote early, presumably against Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s MAGA agenda, in astonishing numbers, particularly in the South. That this comes only six months after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais should not come as a surprise.

In the Trump era, Republicans have become experienced at taking rights away from the American people. For women, it was the roll back of their constitutional rights when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, sparking a backlash in that year’s midterm elections. Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, immigrants have come under assault from a xenophobic administration intent on carrying out mass deportations via masked, secret police rampaging through neighborhoods. The LGBTQ+ community, and trans people in particular, have seen their rights stripped away. 

These policies have come as a shock to some Americans who never thought Trump would go there, and they have also opened the eyes of others to the cruelty at the heart of MAGA, overseen by the highest court of the land. But to many Black Americans, the GOP’s agenda and behavior will not have come as a surprise. After all, it’s been at the core of their history going back to before the country’s founding.

Black Americans know what it means to have their civil rights taken away from them. They understand fully the fear of being targeted by brutal, marauding gangs of armed men. In the decade following the Civil War and the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments, Black people began to participate fully in civil society. Mississippi elected two Black U.S. senators and a lieutenant governor, and former slaves and their offspring enjoyed freedom of speech, movement and opportunity. But the white members of Southern society would not let that stand, and as soon as the federal government withdrew its troops, they stepped in with legal and social barriers to deny Black Americans their rights, this time backed by vigilante and state violence that became Jim and Jane Crow. 

Almost a century had passed by the time Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, a period characterized by subjugation and violence by the white majority. But Black America kept fighting, against all odds, until they won. 

This year, we have seen yet another attempt by reactionary politicians and judges to turn back the clock. After the Callais decision, several Southern states reverted immediately to form and radically redrew their congressional districts to favor the white majority, making it much more difficult for voters to elect a Black federal and state representatives.

They may come to regret that decision. This isn’t 1955 (or 1855) anymore, as much as Donald Trump would like to make it so, and the Black community is once again mobilizing. According to experts, early voting data is showing something unexpected: The vote is being driven by young voters rather than just those who went through the earlier battles. It’s muscle memory for the Black community.

After 2024, when Trump won a surprising 15% of the Black vote — nearly doubling his share of 8% in the 2020 election — Republicans thought they were defying history to make great inroads within the community. Then, incredibly, the administration began attacking Black America. The result is what some politicos are calling a “Blacklash,” and it could very well be decisive in some places where nobody expected the Democrats to do well. And even if it doesn’t result in flipping seats, it’s a shot across the bow. 

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In Mississippi, prosecutor and former judge Scott Colom, who is Black, is running an excellent race against Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, the GOP incumbent. Colom has made some very clever advertisements which have garnered a lot of national attention, but Republicans and Democrats alike had largely ignored the race until just a couple of months ago. Polling has tightened, and the GOP has dispatched an influx of luminaries, including Trump himself. For the first time in years, Democrats from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris, along with a long line of senators, have descended on the state to support Colom. Former President Barack Obama even cut an ad for him. Mississippi has the largest population of Black voters of any state in the country. If Colum gets a big Black turnout with just enough disaffected whites, he could win. 

Louisiana, after giving birth to the case that saw the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gut the Voting Rights Act, has been winnowed down to one majority Black district in a state that is one-third African-American. But there has been a surge in Black participation akin to what is seen in presidential years, which could prove decisive in a race for Louisiana’s open Senate seat that has been a sleeper until the last couple of weeks. According to a recent poll, Republican Julia Letlow and Democrat Jamie Davis are tied. Among voters who have already cast their ballot, Davis — who is Black — holds a six-point advantage, and 34% of early votes have been cast by Black Louisianans.

Then there’s South Carolina, which has seen Trump make three desperate appearances to shore up Darline Graham’s torpid campaign. The endangered incumbent, foisted upon South Carolina Republicans by the president himself following the sudden death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, is not getting the job done. As numbers cruncher Nate Silver pointed out, a recent New York Times poll showing the race essentially tied is not an outlier; she is in deep trouble. As of late October, the Times reports, “Black voters accounted for around 28 percent of early votes, while making up around 20 percent of the overall electorate in recent cycles. The trend is not unlike what we’re seeing in Georgia and North Carolina thus far.” If that holds true through Election Day, we could see the biggest upset of the whole campaign, largely due to Black South Carolinians saying “Enough is enough.”

In a few short hours, all the ads, mailers, signs and rallies will mercifully come to an end. I am cautiously optimistic, but like many, I’ll never celebrate prematurely again. There is good reason, though, to feel more positive than we have in a long time. Trump and his acolytes have overreached. Opting for the big tech credo of “move fast and break things,” they vastly overestimated their abilities — and the American people’s tolerance. 

They have also aroused a group of Americans who know what it is to lose their rights and privileges. With all that history and so many battles, Black Americans have shown what it takes to never give up.

The post Black voters could sway the midterms in surprising places appeared first on Salon.com.

Of all the celebrities I’d bet on botching their Halloween getup, Martha Stewart would have been the longest shot. The doyenne of gracious living’s holiday game is legendary, which NBC’s “Today” acknowledged by hosting her on Oct. 30 as half of an Olympics-themed couples costume, with Craig Melvin dressed as Snoop Dogg.

The next day, Stewart, who has an estimated net worth of $400 million, proudly showed off on Instagram that in 2026, she decided to cosplay a poor person. Not just any old poor, a dirty one. Stewart smudged her face with gray makeup, cut a few rips in her least-loved jeans, sliced up a gleaming white cardigan and held up a clipboard that read, “I Am Hungry Help Me!!”

As out of touch as that is on its own at a time when many Americans struggle to afford groceries and fuel, the photo also features one of her purebred French bulldogs and a Chow Chow, each flawlessly groomed, posing for the camera.

Stewart soon took down the post, but the internet never forgets. She has now apologized twice: First, she posted a Sunday statement to NBC News saying, “I am distressed that my Halloween costume yesterday, which was intended to bring more awareness to the very serious subject of homelessness, has offended people, which was never my intention.”

That evening, Stewart followed up on Instagram with, “It’s hard to admit when you’ve really screwed up. My earlier statement didn’t go far enough. I know many people are suffering economically. Wearing a costume like I did was insensitive and not funny. I am very sorry.”

In addition to Stewart’s ill-conceived effort to raise awareness of the unhoused crisis, the offending image was part of a carousel promoting her QVC candle collection, which she touted as “perfect for Halloween!!!”

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Since the entire brand of America’s foremost tastemaker is to discern the good things from tackiness, the debacle has bewildered longtime fans. “Hundreds of people on your professional team, as well as countless friends… no one warned you?” posted one follower, Jamie M. Timbre, in a reply to her Instagram mea culpa. He’s right. Where was her daughter Alexis? Was Snoop too high to talk her down from this mishap?

“I mean I’ll always love ya girl,” Timbre added, “but whew.”

The post Martha Stewart makes a grave Halloween costume mistake appeared first on Salon.com.

Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t win last week’s election in Israel. But he didn’t exactly lose it either. The real loser may have been Israel’s fragile democracy, already corrupted from within, perhaps past the point of no return, by Netanyahu’s decades-long death-grip on power.

On the eve of a momentous election in the United States, the parallels are both inexact and unavoidable. Israelis must now decide what kind of country they will have, or at least what kind they aspire to have. They must decide whose votes actually count, and whether some citizens are more equal than others. 

Those same questions also confront Americans, both in this week’s midterm elections and, in a more general sense, on the larger political and historical stage. No doubt it is tempting for liberals and progressives to express outrage at the blatant flaws and contradictions of Israeli democracy. But to invoke the Christian tradition here, it might be better to remove the plank from your own eye before trying to remove the speck from your brother’s. 

On the surface, the electoral arithmetic in Israel appears straightforward. Parties opposed to Netanyahu’s far-right government won 67 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. So a majority coalition of anti-Netanyahu forces is clearly achievable, right? You would think so, except that 19 of those 67 seats were won by Israel’s “Arab parties,” an all-time high, and that startling fact has thrown the entire political system into confusion.

Netanyahu and his allies have spent the last week airing groundless allegations that the election was fraudulent or rigged, a refrain that Americans are likely to hear a great deal in coming days. What the Zionist far right means is that too many Israeli Arabs — meaning the Palestinian population that remained in Israel after the state was created in 1948 — decided to vote this time, an outcome that no one expected, and that none of the parties representing the Jewish majority particularly wanted. 

Now, in a masterstroke of historical or perhaps biblical irony, Israel’s Arab minority — which is not a monolithic group in political or cultural terms, and until now has never been electorally significant — holds the balance of power, and perhaps the nation’s future, in its hands. 

Gadi Eisenkot, the former general who leads the centrist-Zionist opposition to Netanyahu, promised during the campaign not to form a government with Arab support. Over the last several nights, thousands of demonstrators in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have urged him to do precisely that, since the only realistic alternative is the grim default setting of Israeli politics: another wobbly right-wing government headed by Netanyahu, which means more brutality and destruction in Gaza, more war with Iran and more settler violence in the West Bank. 

As Gideon Levy of the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz explains it, 

The future of Israel now depends on its Arab citizens and on the attitude of its Jewish citizens toward its Arab ones. Eighty years after the Nakba and the establishment of the Jewish state, Israeli Palestinians may determine its fate. Is there greater historical justice than that?

The election’s unexpected results are “a cause for rejoicing,” Levy writes, in that they have presented Israelis with a clear choice “between a government led by Benjamin Netanyahu and a government that includes the Arab parties.” If the “change bloc” within the Zionist majority cannot accept a coalition with Arab Israelis, he continues, “they will make it clear that they are actually the same as Netanyahu, that they prefer even the devil Netanyahu over repressing their racism. … [E]veryone will know that racism is the supreme value in this country, across the board, above any other value.”

That ferocious language certainly does not represent mainstream Israeli opinion, but it’s fair to say the strong emotion beneath Levy’s words is far more widely felt. I don’t think it’s possible for a non-Jewish observer (such as myself), however well educated or sympathetic, to understand the anguish felt by Jewish people — wherever they live, and whatever their political views — at the enormous distance between what Israel originally represented to the world, or claimed to represent, and what it represents now.

I’m old enough to remember when most American liberals and progressives viewed the state of Israel in overwhelmingly positive terms, as a locus of charismatic or heroic renewal for the people Hitler couldn’t kill, infused with the spirit of European socialism and, not far below the surface, the collective guilt of the Holocaust. I grew up in one of the most left-liberal corners of America, surrounded by educated adults who supported the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam War, hated Richard Nixon and loved Israel. Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan were beloved celebrities; the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, as narrated by U.S. media, were straight-up battles between the forces of light and darkness. 

That says more about the moral blindness or willful innocence of American liberalism, I must admit, than it says about Israel. In any event, when I saw Joe Biden’s fateful bear hug with Netanyahu on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport in the aftermath of the dreadful Oct. 7 attack, I understood it. I recognized the country Biden was coming from, because I came from there too: It was the Democratic majority of the not-so-distant past, when Israel was embraced as a light to the nations and left-wing radicals who brought up the Palestinian cause were being unreasonable hotheads, if not openly antisemitic and a little bit Nazi. 

What Israel has become during Netanyahu’s long and destructive reign is now clear to most of the world, and most of all to the many Jewish or Israeli critics who have been speaking difficult truths for many years, often at enormous personal cost. I am disinclined, however, to judge too harshly those who cling to the vision of Israel as an exceptional nation — one that has stumbled, perhaps, but may yet regain its true path. 

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Like I said earlier, we should mind the plank in our own eye first. Isn’t that the same vision that many Americans still cling to? That somehow, on the other side of this dreadful phase of our history — yes, a full decade of Donald Trump, but I’m afraid the damage goes back a lot further than that — the “indispensable nation” variously articulated by Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama is still there, still retrievable, still bending its moral arc toward justice.

Americans and Israelis are conjoined by history, for better or worse, and now see each other as distorted reflections, through a glass darkly, as the King James Bible puts it. We face versions of the same decisions this week, about whose votes count and whether the highfalutin words of our constitution apply to everyone. About whether to see terror and tyranny for what they are, and turn the page.

The post The dark paradox of Israel’s election — and ours appeared first on Salon.com.

In any other election cycle, a viral Fox News gaffe would have registered only as a momentary laugh. Last week, reporter Lucas Tomlinson was covering a South Carolina rally for incumbent Republican Sen. Darline Graham, who is seeking to serve a full term following the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham. In reality, the event was more about Donald Trump, who had flown to the Palmetto State to help shore up Graham’s candidacy, which increasingly appears to be at-risk. Spotting a middle-aged white man with a beard, Tomlinson assumed he was about to get some choice footage of a gushing Trump superfan. Instead, Tom Hoyle, with an admirable deadpan, joked that he had turned out for the rally because he was too young to have witnessed the 1978 Jonestown massacre, in which 918 followers of Rev. Jim Jones died after drinking a fruit drink laced with poison. “There’s nothing like seeing a cult right up front, man,” he added.

“All right, maybe this is not a Trump supporter,” Tomlinson said, scurrying away. 

The surreal moment capped what has been a desultory midterm election season for Fox, a network that bills itself as “news” but has long been seen by fans and detractors alike as Republican propaganda. Despite their largely worshipful coverage of the president, Trump has been complaining that the network isn’t doing enough to salvage the campaigns of the GOP. 

“FoxNews is spending far too much time putting on the OPPONENTS of Republican Party Candidates,” he recently posted on Truth Social, echoing his prior complaints that the network focuses too much on the Democrats running this cycle than on their Republican opponents. 

Trump is not wrong about the coverage tilt. According to Media Matters, during this election cycle the network has mentioned the names of Democratic candidates at over three times the rate of Republicans. That disparity, though, doesn’t mean the coverage is sympathetic. To the contrary: Fox producers likely recognize that this year’s GOP field of candidates is deeply uninspiring. Some, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is seeking a Senate seat, are so repulsive that even lifelong Republicans can’t pretend to like them.

This season, Democratic candidates are making more compelling TV, particularly the charismatic incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Michigan’s Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running against Paxton. The most Fox News can hope for is to hijack these candidates’ ability to command attention, and then use it to drive negative polarization with endless “who do these people think they are?” outrage. But then again, the network knows its audience. 

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye recently noted, it’s not like Fox News knows what else to do. The hosts, she writes, have been grabbing wildly at straws, praying they can find any story to spark culture war hysteria that will distract voters from serious issues like inflation, the war with Iran or the metastasizing deportation crisis. The network tried to make hay out of the French riots, but even Fox viewers struggled to see why student protests in Paris matter to America. It attempted to pretend Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., was calling for mass arrests of young Republicans when she was asked during a recent appearance about holding the GOP accountable, but that never really caught on either. A last-minute gambit to feign outrage over Barack Obama’s recent joke comparing Trump’s White House decor to the Cheesecake Factory fizzled out as well, likely because it simply reminded people of how the current resident is defiling the People’s House. 

Part of Fox’s problem is immediate. Many voters’ economic woes are sky-high, making it hard for culture war nonsense to feel relevant. But there’s also a longer-term problem for the network, which is that they don’t make as much sense as they used to.

Fox News has long existed to dress up gutter bigotries and far-right paranoia in the clothes of respectable news coverage, mostly through the use of dog whistles and innuendo. In the past, winks at some of the fouler ideas out there was enough to titillate the audience while keeping up the pretense of respectability. But now, that stuff seems dated and out of touch. 

This is an era when, as Jamelle Bouie of New York Times said on YouTube, the actual president offers “Klansman-level racism” from the campaign stump, calling Black people “low IQ,” flinging a slur for transgender people at Democratic politicians and suggesting that El-Sayed’s Muslim faith makes him a terrorist. Right-wing social media, especially the Elon Musk-owned X, reads like Stormfront message boards from the 1990s, with Musk himself regularly promoting white nationalist ideas and memes. Former Fox hosts Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson offer their former employer stiff competition by being more dishonest and outrageous than the lawsuit-wary network can be, with segments suggesting only supermodel-hot women get raped or that Holocaust deniers have a point. 

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But according to Salon’s Alex Galbraith, one Fox host seems to be getting sick of his network’s culture war strategy. Jesse Watters has complained openly on air about how bad the GOP is doing and how Fox coverage isn’t doing much to excite their audience. In one particularly telling segment, he lashed out about the relentless attention Fox News gives to non-stories from the WNBA, including hysteria over trans players, of which there are zero.

“I don’t want to push this story anymore!” Watters said. “I want to leave this story alone! I am no longer talking about the WNBA. As of now, I boycott this segment.”

Although his reasoning may differ, the host is right that the Fox fixation on the WNBA is stupid. The league has become such an obsession on the right because, plainly put, many male conservatives hate seeing female athletes perform feats they couldn’t even manage in their youth. They want to end professional women’s sports and return to the sexist delusion that all men are stronger and faster than all women. This much is evident in how real-life right-wingers behave toward the WNBA, such as going so far as to buy tickets so they can throw sex toys at the players. 

Fox hosts are careful to never say outright that women shouldn’t play sports; that, as they well know, could alienate millions of Republican voters, especially women and fathers of female athletes who are more moderate on this issue. Instead, the network attempts to hijack the antipathy many conservatives feel toward female basketball players with their traditional wink-and-nudge coverage, pretending they want to “clean up” the sport. This preserves the illusion that the right doesn’t hate female athletes while portraying the players — the white ones at least — as fragile, helping to reassure an insecure male audience. 

In the past, this kind of tap dance has worked. Now, as Watters implied, it’s floundering, feeling much too tepid when compared Fox’s online competitors and actual politicians flinging unprintable slurs. Watters suggested as much during another segment, when he argued that Republicans need more “fear porn” if they want to win.

His use of the word “porn” is telling. Watters was arguing that it doesn’t do to be coy any longer — that only the hard-core stuff will move the base. But for Fox News, that would come at the cost of losing advertising dollars and the eyeballs of less radical viewers. This is a true dilemma — and it’s one that couldn’t happen to a more deserving network. 

The post Fox News loses its grip on the culture wars appeared first on Salon.com.

Walmart recently published a list of things it promises not to do to its customers.

“We price the product, not the person,” Walmart CEO John Furner announced in a September letter to customers. “Your income, shopping history, urgency or what we think you could pay won’t change the price,” he promised. Nor, he said, would the retailer’s AI shopping assistant, Sparky, use information customers shared to raise prices or conceal cheaper options.

This was nice to hear. I hadn’t previously considered that telling a computer I needed toilet paper might result in an emergency toilet-paper rate. There is something faintly unnerving about the specificity of a corporate reassurance, particularly when it introduces several possibilities you hadn’t thought to worry about.

It made me preemptively nostalgic for the little paper price tag beneath a box of cereal. There’s something reassuringly stupid about it. It tells you what the cereal costs. It doesn’t know how much money you make, whether you’re in a hurry or what the temperature is outside. Unless an employee comes along with a new sticker, the person reaching for the same box ten minutes later sees the same number. A modest achievement, perhaps, but one I’m growing increasingly fond of.

The appeal isn’t really the paper. It’s the transparency of the arrangement. As retailers gather more information about their customers and acquire increasingly sophisticated pricing tools, shoppers risk knowing less about why they’re paying what they’re paying. The problem isn’t simply higher grocery bills. It’s the possibility of a transaction in which one side can examine the other in exquisite detail, while the other can barely see the rules.

What prompted the letter from Furner is that Walmart is expanding its use of electronic shelf labels, little screens that let employees update prices digitally from a central computer instead of replacing stickers by hand. The change makes sense. Furner points out that updating paper tags is tedious work, and he’d rather employees spend their afternoons helping customers than tending to a small forest of adhesive rectangles. Digital labels can also help ensure the price on the shelf matches the price at checkout.

And electronic labels aren’t, in themselves, surge pricing. Walmart says it doesn’t use them to change prices according to who is shopping or the time of day. But efficiency is a different question from trust. Making a price easier to change isn’t necessarily a problem. Making it harder to understand how that price was reached might be.

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We’ve already accepted a surprisingly elaborate set of conditions for saving money on groceries. Download the app. Make an account. Remember the password. Clip the digital coupon before you leave home. After handing over our personal information and completing several minor administrative tasks, we’re permitted to save 75 cents on yogurt. The store, meanwhile, gets a rather detailed account of our preferences. What happens when that bargain runs in reverse?

Last December, Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative found that shoppers using Instacart were sometimes shown different prices for identical groceries from the same store at the same time. At one Safeway in Washington, D.C., an 18-ounce box of Signature SELECT Corn Flakes appeared for $2.99, $3.49 and $3.69, depending on whose screen you were looking at. 

Instacart said the shoppers were assigned to pricing experiments randomly, not sorted by income, demographics or browsing history. It ended the tests after the investigation. That distinction matters, especially because the research didn’t establish that anyone’s personal habits were being used against them. But it demonstrated how quietly prices can diverge when the shopper sees only the number assigned to her. You can’t question a difference you have no way of seeing.

I buy a lot of black beans. Enough, presumably, that a supermarket’s software could identify me as a woman with firm opinions about legumes. If that earns me a coupon, wonderful. I’m considerably less enthusiastic about the possibility of an algorithm deciding that my apparent dependence on black beans means I could stand to pay another 30 cents per can. It’s one thing to recognize a loyal customer. It’s another to recognize a captive audience.

Other pricing algorithms raise different questions (McDonald’s, for instance, faces a lawsuit alleging AI-assisted price coordination among franchises, which the company denies). Prices have always fluctuated; coupons have always rewarded some shoppers more than others. Nor should computers be banished from the business of deciding what things cost. But the supermarket is not an airline, and dinner should not require the same vigilance as booking a flight.

Walmart’s promise is worth taking seriously. The company has drawn a clear line around how it says it will use customer information, and that’s preferable to leaving shoppers guessing. But it’s a corporate commitment, not a rule every retailer must follow. And the fact that a supermarket now feels obliged to assure us it won’t charge extra because we seem hurried or financially comfortable suggests how strange our expectations have become.

Perhaps it’s naive to want a supermarket not to use what it knows about me against me. Still, I don’t need the price tag to know me. I need it to tell me what the cereal costs.

The post The strange new math behind the price of your groceries appeared first on Salon.com.

In the title of his 1997 bestselling adventure tale, “Into Thin Air,” mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer employs a double entendre so clever that its effect is extraordinary. Throughout the book, Krakauer recounts his attempt to summit Mount Everest the year earlier in what would become, at the time, the mountain’s deadliest season. I’ve been momentarily halted by that title each time I’ve picked up my tattered $5 thrift-store copy over the last few weeks. It’s witty, but not grim; accurate but also imaginative. In three words, “Into Thin Air” conveys not only the literal effect of Everest’s high altitude and how quickly the mountain can take a life, but also the ardent, almost fatuous confidence of those who choose to climb it.

The dissonance between reason and ambition is what makes “Into Thin Air” such a compelling read. For someone like myself, who knows next to nothing about climbing, Krakauer powerfully elucidates the pull of a mountain like Everest and the trance-like state in which it ensnares its adversaries. Unlike some climbers, Krakauer can wax poetic while staying honest about the stakes. He writes about mountaineering as a spiritual practice, good for the mind and body alike, while questioning why some find that clarity only by staring death in the face. In that respect, extreme climbing is an incredibly selfish endeavor. Before he begins his push for the summit, Krakauer remembers his wife, Linda, telling him before he left for Nepal: “If you get killed, it’s not just you who will pay the price. I’ll have to pay, too. For the rest of my life.”

That sentiment echoed in my mind throughout “Everest: The Other Side,” the remarkable new documentary from National Geographic, helmed by “Free Solo” and “Nyad” co-directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The film is brutally honest in its depictions of cold human narcissism and the relentless pursuit of glory in the name of nebulous spiritual fulfillment. Yet it’s just as candid about humanity’s collective desire for all those things in one form or another.

We are an arrogant species, frustrated by our humble place in this ecosystem. And yet, we feel everything intensely. When we love, we want to take that love to the ends of the Earth. We want physical proof of emotions we cannot put into words. Maybe then all of this will mean something.

As “Everest: The Other Side” asserts, nothing in this already mystifying life is ever so simple. The film’s subjects, mountaineer Jim Morrison and his partner Hilaree Nelson, found love at the edge of the world and made a life together, with Morrison becoming co-parent to Nelson’s two young sons. But their shared lust for adventure created a prickly tension within their family unit, a strain between their passion and parentage that sits at the documentary’s emotional center.

Like those pulled by devout religion or extreme acts of faith, Morrison and Nelson are powerless before their distinct higher calling — especially with the literal highest calling of all, Everest, in their sights. They don’t just want to summit the mountain from its treacherous north face; they want to be the first people ever to ski down it. In their quest, personal glory and public vanity are forever at odds. Such a wanton, helpless display of pride makes for a character study as gripping as it is frustrating. From that disharmony, “Everest: The Other Side” forges a uniquely human story of actualization at all costs, revealing the true price of a life spent looking up and not around.

Because this is National Geographic, the film is only partially concerned with relaying that price. This documentary is made for IMAX-loving, secondhand adventure seekers. Those who want sweeping shots of impossible sights won’t be disappointed. 

But while “Everest: The Other Side” includes countless breathtaking sequences of Earth’s tallest mountain and plenty of nail-biting anxiety in the eventual summit push and ski attempt, those moments are merely the film’s selling points. The crux of this story is on Nelson and Morrison’s shoulders, and their sincerity flies in the face of good judgment and self-editing, giving viewers a palpable sense of their egos. This isn’t to say that either of them is a raging narcissist who cares only about themselves, but there’s no doubt that their sport’s seismic, life-altering dangers are on full display, warts and all.

Early in the film, Nelson tries to communicate the draw of climbing, and how fundamentally at odds it is with her role as a mother. “People ask me, ‘How do you find balance?’” she says. “There isn’t. It’s just chaos. You’re just hanging on. You want to be with your family, but you have a passion, and you want to work, and you need to make money. You’re all over the map.”

It would be easy to dismiss Nelson as selfish, or, at the worst and most damning, a bad parent. How can someone have young children and decide to part with them for two months for a climb that is about, at face value, little more than bragging rights? How can a parent let their children spend two months wondering if their mother is dead or alive?

These are easy questions to ask from the comfort of a living room or the cushion of a theater seat, but much harder to answer when you’re living the life. It’s important to remember that, in life, most of us have desires that would yank us in severe directions. It reminds me that cult experts will tell you that any of us could fall into the clutches of a cult, and those of us who argue otherwise are likely among the most vulnerable. Anyone who insists they are too self-aware to be pulled into something that goes against their own interests is admitting that they don’t know themselves or humanity very well. That’s one of life’s great mysteries: Why do we do things that we know are wrong, or bad for us? Death and taxes might be certain, but so are mistakes and regret, no matter how much we’d like to believe that we’re big enough to let go.

Conflict is ever-present in Morrison, who chooses to climb Everest despite its perils. For him, the adventure is about more than pride or titles; it’s about honor and love. The journey is intended both to strengthen his bond with Nelson and honor the memory of his late wife and their two children, who died in a horrific commuter plane crash in 2011, a decade before he and Nelson decide to attempt Everest. Recalling the aftermath, Morrison tells how climbing brought him clarity. Unable to move from the edge of his driveway, consumed by grief, he eventually found the strength to simply walk up the slight incline and into his home — a microscopic example of the human spirit’s extraordinary tenacity he hopes to commemorate in the Everest climb. 

But more tests lie ahead. The route to Everest proves demanding in heart and health. And while training together for the big summit push by climbing a lower peak in Nepal in 2022, Nelson loses her footing in an avalanche the size of a small snow drift. On a ski slope, the drift would be minor. But on a mountain, every movement is measured. Nelson is swept away and under the snow, toward a cliff. We see it happen in real time, captured on a helmet GoPro. The moment is almost unassuming in its speed, but it permanently shapes everything that follows. Nelson is lost amid a series of avalanches, and the clock starts ticking.

Counting the seconds seems futile. But climbing is futile, too. For Morrison, left to search for his partner amid the snow, hazardous ridges and cliffs, it all seems like a waste. More pain, more trauma, more memories that are left for only one person to hold onto. I was immediately reminded of what Krakauer’s wife told him by satellite phone before he began his push from Everest’s base camp. “Saying goodbye to you was one of the saddest things I’ve ever done,” he remembers her saying. “I guess I knew on some level that you might not be coming back, and it seemed like such a waste. It seemed so f**king stupid and pointless.”

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It’s hard not to dwell on that sentiment, already knowing what and who Nelson would leave behind if disaster struck. On some level, and to some people, it is all stupid and pointless. But that split second fortifies Morrison, confirming that his quest to Everest is for everyone that he’s lost, and every heartstopping moment along the way. It’s a spiritual pursuit, the kind that we make when we travel to a family member or friend’s favorite place to scatter their ashes; the kind that we make when we give eulogies, or just sit in the grass, staring into space, thinking about everything and nothing, everyone and no one. 

Some may be driven to climb Everest just to say that they did it, while others are looking for something else, something with no name. They want to pierce the heavens and reach through the atmosphere to grasp the indescribable truth that unites us all. And if they don’t make it back down to share that peace with the rest of us, it might be enough to experience it just once.

The post Are Mount Everest climbers dreamers, or just cultists? appeared first on Salon.com.

I had this fantasy as a kid that started with me giving an impressive performance on “Wheel of Fortune.” I’d smoke the other contestants under the watchful eye of a suitably wowed Pat Sajak, crucially solving the prize puzzle and winning the grand prize of seemingly every game show: a vacation package built around “a trip to sunny Florida.”

I’d ride the free plane ticket home and spend a few days with my family in Orlando, just a few hours away from where we actually lived, on a vacation that for once wasn’t spent in relatives’ living rooms. We’d hang out in the Goldilocks Zone, far enough away from home to avoid nagging responsibilities but close enough to sell to my overworked parents. Home was not far away when we needed to return, but why not take a few days off to lounge by the pool?

I never shared that half-baked dream with anyone, especially not with any Latin American authoritarians, but my strategy for stealing some time for poolside lounging seems to be the preferred second act for failed right-wing leaders from Central and South America. When defeated presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro fled Brazil for Miami earlier this week, he was taking part in a long tradition of conservative losers hopping a jet to the land of gun shows and foam parties. 

Thanks to its proximity to the Caribbean and South America, its significant immigrant population and Miami International Airport’s status as a hub for flights to and from points south, many a deposed leader has followed a route familiar to Super Bowl champions and snowbirds. When the rabble in the street gets too close to the presidential palace for comfort, they keep half an eye on Florida real estate, much like Northeast Corridor retirees. 

It isn’t surprising that the first notable leader to make the leap in modern memory came from Cuba, an island you can reach from Florida with a suitably kitted-out lawn chair. Facing the collapse of his government amid anti-democratic crackdowns and widespread labor unrest, Cuban President Gerardo Machado hightailed it to Florida in 1933. He would die in Miami just six years later. 

Cuban military dictator Fulgencio Batista spent the next several decades seemingly readying himself to follow Machado to the Sunshine State if and when he needed to make a quick exit. In fact, Batista purchased a home in Daytona Beach and lived there for several years following his initial ouster in the mid-1940s. He returned to power via a military coup in 1952, which in some ways lit the spark for Fidel Castro’s toppling of the Cuban government at the end of the decade. Forced out for the last time, Batista flew to Jacksonville and unsuccessfully requested asylum in the U.S. (He’d have done a lot better under our current president, no doubt.) He wound up fleeing to Spain, then in the grip of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and spent the rest of his life in Iberian exile.

Anastasio Somoza was similarly denied safe harbor in the U.S. in 1979, after fleeing Nicaragua in a cargo plane headed for Miami. President Jimmy Carter declined to play host to the last member of a family dynasty that had ruled Nicaragua for 40 years. Somoza made it to Miami as his regime collapsed during the Sandinista revolution, then moved on to the Bahamas and ultimately to Paraguay, then under the rule of military dictator Alfredo Stroessner. It was no safe refuge: He was assassinated there by a Sandinista strike team just a year later.

The pitter-patter of Florsheim-shod feet heading for the Northern Caribbean hasn’t slowed in the 2000s. Deposed dictators, embezzlers and dissent-crushers have flooded into South Florida like the regular king tides. The Miami New Times published a morbid map of the stars in 2010, pointing out the addresses of various subtropical Mussolinis and disgraced generals and boasting that Miami makes “Casablanca look like a Daffy Duck cartoon.”

Former Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada ran to South Florida following revolts over his plans to export Bolivian natural gas to the U.S.. Notoriously corrupt Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli scarpered in similar fashion, though he was ultimately arrested by U.S. authorities in 2017 and sent back to serve a prison term.

With our own fash-flavored president making his official residence in Palm Beach, and his kids nearby in Jupiter, his Brazilian buddies were obvious candidates for taking their talents to South Beach. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro left for the southernmost red state after his defeat in the 2022 election, though he’s now back in Brazil serving a lengthy prison sentence on house arrest. His son Eduardo, also a former Brazilian elected official, landed Florida around the same time, but has now moved to Texas. Flávio Bolsonaro’s whereabouts since he deplaned at Opa Locka Executive Airport a few days ago are not entirely clear.  

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Florida has long had a significant right-wing Latin American population, thanks in large part to the many Cuban refugees who fled there in the wake of Castro’s 1959 revolution. And for the Bolsonaros, Florida is likely to feel more like home than anywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. The state is home to more than a fifth of the Brazilian population in the U.S.

Though Flávio Bolsonaro initially boasted of being Brazil’s rightful president after landing in Florida, he seems to have ditched that line subsequently. Recent events have proven that we can never count out Brazil’s first family of fascism, but it isn’t likely they can use Florida as a base of operation for launching a reactionary coup. Outside of Batista’s complicated story, which didn’t end well for him, history has not been kind to those who hope to use an enforced vacation in the House of Mouse as a path back to the presidential palace. 

The post Flávio Bolsonaro follows a well-worn right-wing path: Exile in Florida appeared first on Salon.com.

Ahead of Tuesday’s midterms, Democrats are biting their nails and enduring sleepless nights, wondering whether they will be forced to endure yet another election that has so often characterized the Trump era: close races that seem inevitably to go to the Republicans. All the fundamentals and polls indicate a possible blowout and a big one, but after watching Americans shockingly elect Donald Trump the first time, live through his Big Lie and witness his historic comeback only two years ago, no one can feel confident that this era of chaos, corruption and cruelty might finally be beginning its descent into the dustbin of history. We thought we were here before, and it didn’t end well.

There are reasons to be hopeful, though, even if you assume that the polls are underestimating Republican enthusiasm for their leaders once again. While there have been misses in the polling over this past decade, it hasn’t manifested in midterms as it has in the races with Trump on the ballot. In those years, the polling was pretty much on the money. Democrats have done very well in all the off-year and special elections this cycle, and although that’s no guarantee, it has to be considered a good sign. 

The big difference this time is that Trump’s approval rating is hovering close to 30%, a lethal number, and he has presided over a high cost of living and a war of choice with Iran, both things he promised would never happen if he were president. The one election he lost in 2020 was the result of his mismanagement of the only crisis he faced, the Covid-19 pandemic, and this second term has solidified the impression among many voters who were inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt anyway, that he simply doesn’t know what he is doing. 

One sign that should give Democrats some real comfort in these last couple of days is Trump’s performance on the campaign trail. To say the 80-year-old has lost a step is an understatement. Sure, he barnstormed through all the battleground states and even attempted to shore up enthusiasm in places that should not need his presence to get out the vote. But his patented “weave” is unraveling at every stop. 

Trump has taken to doubling down on the weirdness, going on about men’s bodies to a truly bizarre degree, being under the impression that because his trained rally goers will ritualistically cheer anything he says, this is a winning message. His recent comments warning people to stay away from Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club, because they would be unable to afford the hamburgers could not be more in keeping with his apparent pursuit of Marie Antoinette’s legacy. 

But most embarrassing for the president is that he is no longer the singular star of the Trump show. As POLITICO reported, after years of ragging on Democrats for bringing celebrities on the campaign trail and bragging that he didn’t need any to help him fill up stadiums, the president has invited some to join him at campaign rallies — although one could scarcely call them A-listers. The cast leans heavily on older athletes, from retired NFL players to race car drivers, although Trump did manage to talk at least one genuine country music star, Jason Aldean, to join him in a rally held just a few miles from his home. Rapper Nicki Minaj has become a staple on the trail, and the president’s old friend Mike Tyson is often with him. Trump simply can’t carry the show by himself anymore. 

This is the most expensive campaign in history, with Elon Musk alone spending more than $400 million in money he dug out of his couch cushions, but the total spending on both sides has reached upwards of $16 billion, the vast majority of it to benefit the Republicans. The fact is that it doesn’t appear to have done them much good. In fact, their spending is almost all coming from large donors like Musk, while their small donor base has shrunk considerably. That’s usually a sign of a lack of enthusiasm, and it doesn’t bode well for Tuesday’s results. 

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The election’s stakes are profound. America crossed the Rubicon in 2024 when it invited Trump back into power after he tried to overturn the election, was convicted of fraud, and was revealed to have possessed and leaked classified information after he was out of office. The media and the nation’s elites interpreted that victory as a sign that Trump was some sort of magical superhero, and that it was in all their interests to join with him and reap the rewards. The result has been nothing short of catastrophic, revealing gaping holes in our constitutional order, weaknesses in our democratic system and a void in our society where moral authority used to be. America has never been perfect, and it always falls short of its professed ideals, but this political era has stripped away the belief that we have any at all. 

The corruption on display, coupled with a lack of concern for the lives of ordinary people, is breathtaking. And while it remains shocking that tens of millions of Americans still support this administration, it seems that a majority may have finally had the veil lifted from their eyes, allowing them to see the incompetence, grift and megalomania for what it is.

It’s hard to see how a nation founded on the ideas espoused in the Declaration of Independence can survive without even the pretense of ethics or universal values. At the moment, the American creed is simply “to the victor go the spoils,” by which Trump is not just imperiously referring to the foreign countries he seeks to colonize. He’s talking about America itself.

There can be no more questions about what the Republican Party is capable of, and as weak as he appears on the campaign trail, Trump is clearly frustrated and angry. Reporting suggests that he plans to double down on all of it the minute the election is over. If the American people somehow fail to forcefully repudiate Trump and the oligarchs who use and manipulate him, it’s unlikely we’ll get another chance.

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I’ve never been great at the whole Halloween thing. By the time I remember it’s happening, all the good sweets are gone from grocery store shelves, so any visiting trick-or-treaters get butterscotch suckers, breath mints or candy corn. I don’t do costume parties. I never got the point of carving pumpkins.

But movie and TV marathons? Sign me up – along with a lot of other homebodies. The horror genre is bigger than ever, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report that says this year’s domestic box office reached nearly $1.3 billion as of the start of October.

Horror’s surge has also yielded more films designed to play with our perception as opposed to the “Saw”-style torture porn dominating years past. Think “Obsession” or “Backrooms,” both of which are among the 10 highest-earning movies of 2026 thus far. That’s good news for anyone who isn’t partial to splatter flicks or slashers but still enjoys a creep show that makes you think, especially ones that are more thoughtful than scary. If that’s your speed, the following options may be perfect for your reclusive Samhain.

 

 

(Manuela Hidalgo)

“Black Zombie”

I will bet good money the first bong-ripping undergrad to declare that all horror is metaphor cited George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” as a prime example. That’s not wrong; Romero’s 1968 benchmark established the modern cinematic zombie as a stand-in for mindless capitalist consumption. But “Black Zombie” rewinds to the monster’s Haitian roots to examine an even darker origin tied to that country’s shared history with ours.

You may be wondering why I’d recommend a documentary in a horror roundup, let alone one that explains how the modern movie flesh gobbler began as a manifestation of white fear. The answer is that Maya Annik Bedward’s film doubles as an impressive cinematic syllabus.

By braiding America’s media history with its national history, Bedward and her assemblage of academics, creatives, authors and Vodou practitioners invite us to think differently about the prejudices driving movies like, say, Victor Halperin’s 1932 effort “White Zombie,” or 1943’s “I Walked with a Zombie.”

“Black Zombie” opens with a truth that has long escaped those fascinated by the shambling undead. To some, they’re simply mindless hunters. But Haitians understand the horror of zombies to be one of dispossession, a curse enacted by enslavers that binds victims to mindless servitude, denying them liberation in the afterlife. But long after Romero transformed them from blank-eyed puppets to ravenous murder machines, Bedward’s film demonstrates how Hollywood’s version of the zombie impacts America’s perception of Vodou, Haitians and immigration.

“Black Zombie” not only asks us to think differently about an overexposed subgenre, but also thoughtfully examines Vodou’s central role in the revolution that drove out French colonizers, and France’s imposition of debt to punish Haitians for winning their freedom.

All of this informs the zombie’s continued proliferation across popular culture, in films like “World War Z” and shows such as “The Last of Us” and “The Walking Dead.” They’re terrific entertainment, certainly. But each is, in its own way, built upon decades’ worth of misrepresenting Haiti’s syncretic faith to the detriment and demonization of a people. At the same time, “Black Zombie” recognizes this subgenre’s cultural resilience, arguing that recognizing the zombie’s true roots broadens its narrative possibilities.

Proving that point, one of Bedward’s subjects, a Vodou priest, says he grew up loving Wes Craven’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” despite its message that visitors to his country risk having their nuts nailed to a chair.  “It’s a fantastical world to scare children,” he says, before adding that his main problem is its inaccurate messaging about his faith. “We say, ‘Wow – Haitians are devils.’ That’s what we’re taught.”

I’d nearly forgotten about that movie. Now I might rewatch it for the first time in decades and expect to be horrified for entirely different reasons.

Available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango.

 

(© Amazon Content Services LLC)

“Carrie”

Stephen King’s classic may be more than half a century old and has undergone multiple adaptations, but it endures because its central moral that high school is hell never ages. Still, Mike Flanagan’s interpretation has divided the audience. Some, including King, appreciate Flanagan’s kinder portrait of Carrie White (Summer H. Howell) as an innocent unjustly sequestered from the world by fundamentalist parents who repudiate her extraordinary power. Others disagree with Flanagan’s alteration to the story’s climactic scene, which shifts culpability for the prom massacre from Carrie to a character created expressly for the series.

Pretty much everyone questions the season finale, which hints at taking an “X-Men”-style turn for its recently greenlit second season.

As someone who accepts nothing is sacrosanct now, not to mention a fan of the creator’s other adaptations, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” I appreciated Flanagan using Carrie’s story to critique ignorance, knowledge suppression, and the dehumanizing effect of social media.

Besides, nearly all the key elements of “Carrie” remain. The bullies are still awful, and the famous “plug it up” shower scene in Brian DePalma’s 1976 standard-setter is worsened by her tormentors posting Carrie’s frightened sobs on social media.

 

Some changes retain the spirit of past performances. Carrie’s mother Margaret (Samantha Sloyan) is still an abusive religious zealot fond of locking her daughter in a prayer closet, for instance. But after the law forces her homeschooled girl to join the festering sin den that is their local public school, Margaret throws herself into advocating for parents’ rights, entirely disregarding her teen’s desire for a “normal” adolescence.

Part of the additional fun Flanagan has with this marquee property is strewing cultural Easter Eggs throughout. Some nod to what’s happening in America, such as when Carrie discovers the school library and gravitates straight to books that have been banned from classrooms and community libraries across the country. Another winks at “Army of Darkness” fans; look for the logo on Margaret’s work uniform.

By the time we reach Carrie’s bloodbath, we may be left to question whether she’s simply a bullied victim pushed beyond her limit or some version of a Final Girl empowered to vanquish tormentors who earn their reckoning. Even if you don’t ultimately see Howell’s Carrie that way, it’s a fine dance with one of horror’s oldest friends.

“Carrie” is streaming on Prime Video.

(Crave and Christopher Lawrence)

“Yaga”

For adults, Halloween is an excuse to mingle sensuality with morbid themes. Why cosplay as a grizzled cop when you can be a flirty detective? Why settle for pretending to be a humpbacked wiccan when you can troll for hookups as a sexy witch?

“Yaga” has it all ways, resplendent with softcore interludes dangled between clue-finding excursions and unexpected chicken violence. The latest infatuation bait from Crave, the Canadian streamer that brought us “Heated Rivalry,” also gives us a new view of Hudson Williams and his naked hindquarters.

Only now, they’re humping away in a mystery taking place in a verdant seaside community called Whittock. There, dirtbag P.I. Charlie Rapp (Noah Reid) is drawn into a tense partnership with Carson (Clark Backo), a no-nonsense cop fatigued with her colleagues’ disrespect.

At first, Carson is repulsed by Rapp’s slimy overstepping, but she slowly learns not to loathe him. Implied in this, perhaps, is that a spell has ensnared the two as they probe the disappearance of rich playboy Henry Park (Williams). This pursuit leads them to encounter free-range poultry in odd places, along with strange symbols, a variety of nubile temptresses and a roommate, Logan (also Williams), who resembles Henry to an unsettling degree.

The show’s title has nothing to do with John Wick. It refers to the mythical Slavic crone, Baba Yaga, who either gives heroes a boon or lures wayward children to a forest hut that moves around on bird legs. Playwright Kat Chandler’s interpretation leaves open the question of whether our impressions of its witch are unwarranted or dead right, further muddling our judgment with the introduction of Carrie-Anne Moss’ university professor, Katherine Hargrove.

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Katherine announces herself by cozying up to Rapp over the manuscript for her new book titled “Sexy Bones,” thrilling him with her mature lady erotic energy. As she flirts with and antagonizes the private dick, along with other townies, it grows increasingly baffling as whether she’s friend or foe. Much like our titular enchantress.

This adaptation of Chandler’s play looks like a cop drama tangled with witchy murder, but from a longer TV perspective it’s really a haunting by the ghosts of erotic TV shows past. Remember “Red Shoe Diaries” and its moaning sax riffs? Like that anthology once did, “Yaga” banks on the power of smut to compel you. It’s a cheap indulgence, but what Halloween candy isn’t?

“Yaga” is streaming in the U.S. on AMC+.

 

 

The post It’s scary how watchable these stories are appeared first on Salon.com.

Before the prestige drama era, people rarely associated nobility with the small screen. In old Hollywood’s thinking, television was cinema’s inferior cousin. Syndication ranked even lower. And syndicated science fiction shows? Total jokes.

Sir Patrick Stewart, who died Wednesday in Los Angeles at 86, changed these impressions when he accepted the seven-year mission of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” As Jean-Luc Picard, the captain who inherited the helm of USS Enterprise from William Shatner’s James T. Kirk, Stewart embodied franchise founder Gene Roddenberry’s humanist outlook.

Picard, the actor’s greatest TV legacy, is a paragon of grace: empathetic, dedicated to a mission of understanding and devoted to preserving what is best about Starfleet.  And Stewart’s shaping of the character ennobled television in ways cosmic and small.

By treating his Starfleet commander as if he were a Shakespearean protagonist, Stewart transformed a franchise at a crossroads into a fresh, thoughtful look at human possibility. This guiding principle traveled through “The Next Generation” and subsequent movies, along with the recent Paramount+ “Star Trek” spinoff, “Star Trek: Picard.”

By the time Stewart’s final voyage with “Star Trek” debuted in 2020, Picard was less of a Starfleet hero than a wise man exhausted by politics and cruelty. And “Picard” was as much a response to Trumpian callousness as “The Next Generation” was to our culture’s fatigue with materialism by 1987, when it premiered.

“If the ‘Trek’ universe presented a leader like Picard, it may be because back then, we all thought we were just shy of getting to a better place with regard to how we treat each other,” I recalled in 2018. “Of thinking beyond ourselves, our immediate desires and thirst for gratification, and embracing our differences as strengths. It was a lovely illusion.”

When Stewart joined the Trek universe, he was largely unknown to Americans – save for the eagle-eyed nerds who recognized him, perhaps, from John Boorman’s “Excalibur” or David Lynch’s “Dune.”  His Starfleet captain eschewed Captain Kirk’s swagger, though that didn’t mean he was all business. Picard is a man given to philosophical debates and genteel pursuits like horseback riding and fencing. He isn’t infallible, but he constantly demonstrates all the ways people could be better, not than others, but than we ourselves once were.

This is the essential definition of nobility, expanded upon over 178 episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”

Many factors contributed to that syndicated series’ success and Stewart’s resultant popularity as the man behind one of TV’s most beloved characters. “The Next Generation” ensemble featured some of TV’s most adored talent, including Jonathan Frakes and LeVar Burton, on a crew steered behind the scenes by Roddenberry himself. It went on to win 17 Emmys and a Peabody.

But Stewart’s gravitas, honed over many years of British stage performance, made Picard the show’s gravitational center, and he was proud of that. Long after TV catchphrases became associated with hackneyed scripting, Picard unironically claimed a few of the best, including “make it so” and “engage,” delivering them each time with an air of aristocratic confidence.

Stewart came from humble origins, however: He was born on July 13, 1940, in a West Yorkshire industrial town, and raised in a house lacking an indoor toilet or running hot water.

“What identifies an individual as a king is how other people behave towards him,” says a quote attributed to the actor. “All authority is assumed, and if other people don’t accept your authority then you don’t have it. Perhaps the critical thing to being a convincing figure of authority is actually not to try too hard.”

That understanding gives fresh insight into the passion he brought to his greatest starring roles and the smallest.

The authoritative voice we associate with Picard ordering his tea “Earl Grey, hot,” was fine-tuned over a career that began with training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he enrolled in 1957. Shedding his working-class Yorkshire accent during his studies, Stewart’s regal elocution won him his stage debut in 1959 in an adaptation of “Treasure Island.” From there, his career was largely defined by his 16 years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where he started in 1966, before joining the Royal National Theatre in 1984.

As The Independent cited in a 2003 story, when a reporter once implied the two-time Laurence Olivier Award winner was slumming it by linking himself to the Trek universe, Stewart replied, “Sitting in the Captain’s chair of the Enterprise is rather like sitting on the throne of England, though marginally more important.”

The Crown didn’t take offense; Queen Elizabeth II conferred Stewart’s knighthood in 2010.

We can credit the actor’s innate emotional agility for his commitment to every part, or a versatility earned over decades of playing many major heroes and villains the Bard scribbled onto parchment. Whatever it was, Stewart’s charm was in his refusal to let snobbery dictate his life or career path. While most of his career was spent onstage, you’ll find his name in the credits of many films and shows and hear his baritone in a slew of video games and animated work.

Although his association with “Star Trek” and Picard came to define how people perceived him, Stewart’s merry attitude about his claim to fame let us appreciate his range. While his casting as the mutant telepath Professor Xavier in the “X-Men” cinematic franchise resulted from his time in the starship captain’s chair, his multiple collaborations with “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane showcased his playful side.

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People who have never watched a single “Star Trek” episode can easily pick out his voice from every other guest on “Family Guy” or know him as Stan Smith’s self-important CIA boss Avery Bullock on “American Dad!” The sheer joy of watching Stewart’s comic turns in shows like “Extras” or hearing his voice in ludicrous contexts was magnified by the majesty he lent to his dramatic work. He owned his portrayal of Gurney Halleck in “Dune” so completely that nobody blinked when he dashed into a battle scene bellowing mightily while clutching a pug, of all things.

But it was Picard—who retired as an admiral— that forever landed Stewart in our minds and hearts. He never minded that fact.

“Halfway through season 3 of ‘Next Generation,’ I no longer knew where Jean-Luc started and Patrick Stewart left off,” he told reporters at a Television Critics Association press conference in 2020. “We became melded, and he has never left me . . . He has always been there, and it’s a relationship that I am happy to continue with.” Thanks to his prolific presence in movies, shows and on screens large and small, we can keep that relationship alive too.

 

 

The post Patrick Stewart, the “Star Trek” captain who elevated television appeared first on Salon.com.

In the opening sequence of “Other Mommy,” Ursula (Jessica Chastain) is making lunch for her daughter, Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), when she asks if the girl would like to “come into her heart.”

It’s an odd request, but that’s because this version of Ursula is not actually Ursula. She is an entity that Bela calls Other Mommy — who looks exactly like her real mother, except that Other Mommy can contort her body into freaky spider-like shapes that scare the hell out of Bela and her stay-at-home father, Russ (Jay Duplass). Also, Other Mommy seems to want to kill or otherwise possess Bela, which is not exactly maternal. Other Mommy promises to nurture Bela, but clearly she represents the worst type of matriarch imaginable: one who is frightening, controlling and dangerous.

The scary mommy has been an archetype in storytelling for as long as stories have existed. We’ve seen it in fairy tales, animated films produced by studios ranging from Disney to Laika (in a way, “Other Mommy” is just “Coraline” in live-action form), multiple seasons of Ryan Murphy shows, and, of course, everywhere in the horror genre, from “Psycho” to  “Hereditary.” But the scary mommy is really having a moment this spooky season.

In addition to “Other Mommy,” Hulu is streaming a new series called “Phony” that has a similar premise: a kid — this time a teenage boy played by Sam Nivola — believes his mother (Connie Britton) has been replaced by an imposter who looks like the real thing but has sinister intentions. Two other streaming series, “Crystal Lake” on Peacock and “Carrie” on Prime Video, place two of the horror genre’s most famous scary mothers in new contexts. Even real life has given us a scary mommy for the ages: Donna Arthur. The estranged mother of Democratic Ohio gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton remained married to Cledith Arthur, who was charged with raping Acton as a child. Donna Arthur later criticized her daughter in a recent attack ad produced by Acton’s Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy. It should be no surprise that there has been intense backlash to that ad. Society and pop culture, not to mention basic decency, have taught us, over and over, to be horrified by a vicious mother.  

What’s notable about the latest batch of scary mommy releases is that, for the most part, they offer more nuance in their depictions of motherhood than previous examples of the trope often allow. The moms in these movies and shows are, generally, not entirely demonized even if they sometimes do monstrous things.

“Other Mommy” comes closest to outright blaming its central maternal figure for all the bad things that happen in her home. (Spoilers ahead.) The powers held by the bad version of Ursula seem to grow the more that Bela feels neglected by real-life Ursula, who works constantly and often gets home late. While she loves her daughter, Ursula ultimately admits that she hadn’t initially wanted kids. “I’m sorry for not being the kind of mother that you deserve,” she tells Bela in one of the film’s key moments.

Director Rob Savage and screenwriter Nathan Elston do not solely blame Ursula for the problems within her family unit. Her husband is a bit of a slacker who gets high in the middle of the day, and the Other Mommy, a shapeshifter, assumes other forms aside from that of Ursula, including Bela’s babysitter. But the movie strongly suggests that Other Mommy would not have shown up at all if Ursula had simply given her daughter more attention, which is more of a tradwife-adjacent take than I expected walking into the theater. Oddly enough, “Verity,” released in theaters a week before “Other Mommy,” has a lot more fun slyly toying with and ultimately negating the idea that a professionally successful mother (Anne Hathaway’s best-selling author Verity Crawford) must secretly resent her children.

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The three aforementioned scary mommy streaming series go much farther out of their way to depict their respective parents as flawed individuals who do care about their kids. In much of the first season of “Phony,” Connie Britton’s Ellen comes across as a totally caring and attentive mom to her boy Sonny. His suspicions about her arise after he’s injured in a car accident and becomes convinced that she looks slightly different post-crash. (CGI alters Britton’s features just enough to make her appear noticeably off.) But she has a very close relationship with him and, even after her supposed heel turn, makes a sincere effort to get him treatment when he begins to struggle emotionally. Her biggest sin is perhaps being too protective of him and overly involved in his life. The only reason she is scary is that Sonny thinks she might be and we’re not sure whether to believe him.

“Crystal Lake” and “Carrie” have the unenviable task of taking scary mommies we already know and helping us understand their motivations in new contexts. “Crystal Lake,” an eight-episode prequel to the original “Friday the 13th,” delves into much — perhaps too much? — more detail about how and why Pamela Voorhees (Linda Cardellini in this version) descended into grief and homicidal madness following the drowning death of her son, Jason, at Camp Crystal Lake. In the 1980 “Friday the 13th” the identity of the murderer of all those horny young counselors isn’t revealed until late in the movie, when we realize Pamela, bitter that the camp has reopened, is the perpetrator. Reminder: the homicidal, goalie-masked version of Jason Voorhees doesn’t appear onscreen until “Friday the 13th Part III.” So even though we all think of Jason as the villain of the franchise, one could reasonably argue that the OG baddie is Pamela, the person responsible for most of the kills in the first film and, arguably, for influencing Jason to keep on killing. Jason Voorhees is, according to previous lore, a literal son of a bit*h.

In “Crystal Lake,” the Linda Cardellini version of Pamela Voorhees still slaughters numerous people, but she’s more than just a one-dimensional crazy bit*h. She’s complicated and more capable of selflessness than the first movie takes the time to suggest when it’s not busy knifing poor Kevin Bacon in the chest. The series, by contrast, invites us to feel empathy toward her, or at least acknowledge the suffering she endured in her life even before losing her son.

“Carrie,” developed by Mike Flanagan, the streaming world’s master of horror, attempts something similar but even more extreme. It moves the familiar story about a bullied, sheltered teenage girl to the present. The plot points that are key in Stephen King’s novel and its subsequent adaptations remain. Carrie (Summer H. Howell) is still taunted in the girls’ locker room after she panics over getting her period, and she still loses it in a way that turns the senior prom into a massive, telekinetically-generated disaster. But all of this happens in a world where social media exists, and some of the mean girls at Carrie’s high school wield it like a bucket of pig’s blood that can be dropped on anyone, at any time. The bullying is both more insidious and more soberingly recognizable.

As in the original, Carrie’s mother, Margaret, is a conservative Christian who wants to shelter her daughter from the outside world as much as possible. But unlike the most well-known version of that character, portrayed by Piper Laurie in Brian DePalma’s 1976 adaptation, Margaret is not a melodramatic, over-the-top, completely irrational zealot. 

As portrayed by an excellent Samantha Sloyan, Margaret still punishes Carrie by frequently shoving her into a prayer closet, but she’s also more grounded in her humanity. She’s conservative in a more modern sense: she’s driven by conspiracy theories, overly protective of her daughter, mistrustful of the government, and deeply Christian even though she does not always act like it. There are also times when Margaret’s opinions are actually correct, as in the first episode when Carrie starts going to public school and must participate in a shooter drill for the first time. Margaret confronts the principal and tells him that Carrie was rattled by the drill and that the whole exercise is traumatizing to students. I never thought I would watch any adaptation of “Carrie” and say to myself, “You know, Margaret White makes a good point.” But there I was, saying exactly that.

Not every element in these films and shows works, nor do any of them completely whitewash their characters’ more deplorable tendencies. But as a collective, they signal that it’s important to look beyond our culture’s tendency to demonize mothers and women in general. Simply being a good mom or a terrible one (within, you know, non-murderous reason) is not the only thing that defines a woman. Weirdly, this fact is also made clear in the most talked-about film of the moment, “You Can See Everything,” in which Elizabeth Holmes, who genuinely seems to love her children, also uses them as a shield in the documentary.

In the very first scene, we see and hear her partner, Billy Evans, talking on the phone about his hopes that directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim will show a more relatable, likable side of Holmes and prove she is not a monster. As the camera pans out, we eventually see that Holmes is sitting in the room with him. She is holding a baby, the youngest of her two kids, and gently snuggling with the child.

“Look at this nice mom taking care of an infant; surely she’s a nice lady who would never defraud anyone or even tell a single, small lie,” the image desperately wants to tell us. But in the end, even being a good mom isn’t enough, on its own, to persuade most rational viewers that Elizabeth Holmes is completely innocent of everything of which she’s been accused. Because just as a scary mommy may have some valid reasons that explain some of her behavior, a seemingly caring mommy can also be kind of scary.

The post Scary mommies are everywhere, but this time with more nuance appeared first on Salon.com.