James.galbraith

The Georgia Republican said it under questioning as she tries to fend off a push to disqualify her from reelection.

Republicans tell their state supreme court to stuff it, and Trump federal judges give them a thumbs-up.

ORLANDO, Fla. — On the heels of the state’s so-called ”Don’t Say Gay” law, the Florida Department of Education has quietly dropped out of a 31-year-old CDC survey of students that includes questions of mental well-being, suicidal thoughts, sexual orientation and gender identity. Mental health advocates called the move “an incredibly dangerous precedent” and said the data produced by the survey is essential for understanding the struggles of adolescents and teens and guiding public policy. The department did not respond to a request to explain the decision. Norín Dollard, a senior policy analys…

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Utah Republicans may be about to change their official position on abortion to be extra punitive. Their official party platform currently reads, “We strongly oppose abortion, except to preserve the life of the mother or in cases of rape or incest,” but at their state party convention, Utah Republicans will consider a measure to take out the rape, incest, and life of the mother exceptions in favor of, “and encourage adoption,” The Salt Lake Tribune reports.

Bob McEntee, the delegate who is proposing the change, offered up a stream of comments that strongly suggest he has never met a woman, let alone had a conversation with one.

RELATED STORY: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs 15-week abortion ban into law without exceptions for rape or incest

“I want people to understand that there’s a long line of people that want to adopt a baby. However hard it might be if they get through that pregnancy and give that child up for adoption, I think that would be a better solution,” McEntee said.

”However hard it might be,” he said of pregnancy and childbirth, which kill people in this country every single day. Utah's pregnancy-related mortality ratio was 25.6 per 100,000 live births in 2019.

Listen Jennifer Fernandez Ancona from Way to Win explain what how Democrats must message to win on Daily Kos' The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld

Of course, most pregnant women don't die. But they all—every single one—experience a major and painful medical event. They all experience limitations on daily life for months at a stretch. Many find their ability to do their jobs and therefore pay their bills seriously compromised. And that’s not taking into account the major traumas of victims of rape or incest who Bob McEntee thinks should be required to live every day with pregnancies criminally forced on them. Or people who Bob McEntee thinks should be required to live every day with pregnancies that actively and predictably endanger their lives.

Bob McEntee doesn’t want to talk about any of that, though.

“It’s kind of ugly language. We don’t need to talk about rape or incest. That almost sounded like a permission slip to go get an abortion if this happens. We want to put in people’s minds adoption,” McEntee said.

It’s kind of ugly language? Gosh, imagine dealing with the ugly reality. McEntee apparently doesn’t expect he’ll have to deal with that reality, though, whereas the language is something he might just be able to ban from his life.

The Utah Republican platform in its current state, with the ugly language exceptions, reflects that of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which also has those exceptions. McEntee disapproves.

“I think the LDS Church has given kind of light value to the life of an unborn baby in this case, even though it could be distressing to the mother. We’re not asking lawmakers to outlaw abortion because of rape or incest. We just want to remind people not to forget about adoption as an alternative,” he told the Tribune.

Oh. You’re trying to put it in the official platform of the party that controls state government, but you’re not asking for abortion to be outlawed in those cases. While your party has outlawed it even in cases of rape or incest in state after state in recent months. This move to change the official Utah Republican platform is, what, entirely rhetorical? Despite the backdrop of Republican state after Republican state taking extremely concrete action on exactly this issue?

A 15-week abortion ban in Florida without exceptions for rape or incest. A ban in Oklahoma that not only doesn’t include rape or incest exceptions but threatens medical providers with jail. The six-week ban in Texas with copycats in Idaho, Missouri, and more. In this context, a state Republican Party eliminating exceptions from its platform is not just some reminder about adoption. (Which, news flash, everyone knows is an option. They don’t need the reminder.)

The degree of flippant waving-off of the reality of pregnancy, rape, and incest is staggering. Every single word out of this man’s mouth oozes disregard for women’s lives. But this is the mainstream Republican Party these days—the range of attitudes toward women’s bodily autonomy ranges from dismissive to actively hostile.

RELATED STORIES:

Oklahoma governor signs bill banning abortions, threatens providers with prison time and fines

Legendary reproductive justice activist advises women to start talking openly about abortion

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“Groomer” accusations against liberals and the LGBTQ community are recycled Satanic Panic.

A renewed moral panic, stoked by the far right and trickling into mainstream conservatism, has come on the heels of an abrupt shift in the fight for gay rights in America. Following the recent passage of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and a wave of other homophobic and transphobic legislation throughout the country, current right-wing rhetoric has focused on accusations of “grooming.” The term — which describes the actions an adult takes to make a child vulnerable to sexual abuse — is taking on a conspiracy-theory tone as conservatives use it to imply that the LGBTQ community, their allies, and liberals more generally are pedophiles or pedophile-enablers.

Attempting to reframe the controversial Florida law, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw described it as “the Anti-Grooming Bill” in early March, tweeting that if you’re against it, “you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” Those familiar with QAnon will recognize this bizarre leap in logic. Pushaw adopted language that QAnon conspiracy theory believers and the related #SaveTheChildren crusaders have used to imply that liberals are, if not pedophiles themselves, advocates of pedophilia.

This rhetoric has long existed among fringe conspiracy-theory-mongers and extremists, but Pushaw’s usage helped turn grooming into a mainstream conservative talking point. Fox News has run several segments devoted to pedophilia throughout March and April. During the same period, numerous Fox pundits began describing the behavior of parents and teachers who want to allow children to express their transgender identity as grooming; one Fox and Friends guest suggested children were “being ripened for grooming for sexual abuse by adults,” while America Reports guest Charlie Hurt said affirmative care for trans children “goes beyond just predatory grooming” into “psychological torture.”

Accusations of pedophilia were also a refrain during the March 2022 confirmation hearings for new Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. After Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) falsely accused Jackson of giving child pornographers unusually lenient sentences and “soft” treatment, other conservatives, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and the Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway, ran with the idea that Jackson and anyone who supported her confirmation was supporting or sympathetic to pedophilia.

The result of this fear-mongering is grim: Vice reports that users of extremist right-wing websites like Patriot.win recently tried to publicize the address of a school superintendent who they claimed was “grooming” children. In March, the superintendent placed a school nurse on leave for allegedly making inappropriate statements on Facebook about a student who may have been receiving gender-affirming care.

Claiming the superintendent was “supporting leftist grooming in her schools” by implicitly protecting the welfare of a potentially trans student, one Patriot.win user wrote that she “needs to be executed by our judicial system.” Other users made violent references to hangings and gallows in response to various debates over trans identity. There’s concern that these online threats could lead to real-world physical violence; as Vice noted, many of the platforms pushing this current narrative are home to extremist communities, including some that were involved in planning the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

Framing homosexuality as a wicked specter and queer people as pedophiles is one of the oldest narratives in the homophobic playbook; proponents of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and other recent anti-gay and anti-trans legal actions across the US have been all too happy to recycle it. Only now, due to the paranoiac tendency of the modern right wing, it’s also being expanded and applied to LGBTQ allies, to educators whose work gets caught in the cultural crossfire, and to liberals writ large.

Put simply, the right’s “grooming” accusations allow it to attach evil to anything it sees as a threat to its values.

What is “grooming?”

Grooming is the process by which adults make children or young people vulnerable to sexual assault through compliments, isolating tactics, and other actions that shift the child’s circle of trust and increase the adult’s power over them. Some on the right do seem to be using the dictionary definition of the term, borrowing ideas and language from decades of moral panic equating homosexuality to pedophilia. But “grooming” seems to be functioning more broadly right now as a catchall label for other flavors of right-wing alarmism.

First, there is “grooming” turned up to 11, invoking the term in its most conspiratorial sense: grooming children to be victims of a high-level global sex cult — a conspiracy theory that converges with various other right-wing homophobic and anti-Semitic conspiracies. This involves belief, or performed belief, in an elaborate system of grooming, kidnapping, pedophilia, sexual abuse, and sex trafficking carried out by elites in government.

This conspiracy theory is what led to Pizzagate and the subsequent real-world attack on a Washington, DC, pizza parlor in 2016; Pizzagate then evolved into QAnon. QAnon’s main tenet involves the claim that powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood celebrities are kidnapping children, both for sex trafficking and to harvest their glands to make youth serums. The “harvesting the blood of virgins for immortality” trope comes to us straight from medieval hysteria over witches and alleged female serial killers. QAnon has straightforwardly reproduced this trope, and come shockingly close to mainstreaming it.

Increasingly, though — and perhaps most worryingly — conservatives also seem to be using “grooming” to mean left-wing indoctrination generally. This idea suggests that educating children on certain political issues like the struggle for gay and trans equality (or as many right-wingers frame it, “gender ideology”) is just as dangerous, or even exactly the same, as “grooming” them to be pedophile victims or victims of an international sex cult.

None of these fears make rational sense. A teacher educating students on queer or genderqueer identity does not make that teacher likely to be a pedophile about to prey on children. There also remains zero evidence of a powerful pedophilic sex cult run by Democratic politicians, let alone local schoolteachers. That’s not to say that organized child abuse and systems of trafficking don’t exist, but trying to make a causative link between liberalism and pedophilia requires intentional reality distortion by the lawmakers and media voices making these claims.

The thing is, grooming accusations aren’t concerned with making sense; they’re about stirring up fear, anger, and hysteria — which is why they sound exactly like the kinds of fringe conspiracy theories that have been around for centuries. The new pedophile conspiracy rhetoric is essentially the same as all the old pedophile conspiracy rhetoric, but with an added layer of wrongness.

The new Satanic Panic is the same as the old Satanic Panic

The mythical association of the occult with terrible fates befalling children began to take distinct shape during the Middle Ages. Medieval fairy tales from “Sleeping Beauty” to “Hansel and Gretel” are full of children encountering terrible witches; many of these tales also function as coded anti-Semitism. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales invokes the trope of ritualistic child murder at the hands of a sinister Jewish cabal.

The threads of arcane rituals, anti-Semitism, and child endangerment are interwoven and embedded in many early stories, and sometimes they spilled into real-life conspiracy theories. The anti-Semitic belief that Jews were ritually murdering children became known as “blood libel,” which exists both as a term for ritual murder as well as a metaphoric expression of the idea that the Jewish people crucified Christ. Accusations of ritual child murder, usually accompanying accusations of witchcraft, cropped up throughout the Middle Ages, sometimes leading to anti-Semitic riots.

The core themes of these tales have endured in Western culture for hundreds of years, but they enjoyed a rebirth of sorts in the late 20th century. The explosion of hysteria-fueled attention to these narratives, known as the Satanic Panic, can be traced to two bestselling books that were both ultimately discredited. 1972’s The Satan Seller, a debunked false memoir by a Christian evangelist named Mike Warnke, recounts Warnke’s completely fabricated youth as a high priest engaged in unspeakable satanic rites, including child murder and sexual assaults. His “memoir” spawned a number of copycat “conversion” narratives written by young men fresh from the counterculture, claiming to have discovered Christianity after childhoods raised in dark satanic cabals.

Next, and far more influentially, came 1980’s Michelle Remembers, co-authored by controversial psychologist Lawrence Pazder and his wife Michelle Smith, who was originally Pazder’s patient. Pazder claimed to have regressed Smith using hypnosis and uncovered her horrific childhood memories of occult abuse at the hands of the Church of Satan. Michelle Remembers would ultimately be thoroughly disproven, but not before it gave rise to a widespread cultural belief in “satanic ritual abuse” and was used as a textbook by law enforcement when investigating allegations of such abuse. Though entirely false, Michelle Remembers directly influenced the wrongful imprisonment of dozens of people throughout the ’80s and ’90s and continues to provide a template for current conspiracy theories about child abduction, ritual abuse, and secret sex cults.

It’s also important to note the evangelical aspect of these tropes in the modern era, where the line between allegory and literalism gets especially muddy. Millions of evangelical Christians have been taught to think of themselves as engaged in a metaphysical war, for which they must “put on the full armor of God” to root out evil in their midst. It doesn’t help that decades of “Christian fantasy” writing have transformed real-world social issues into matters of angelic and demonic warfare, and taught Christians to see themselves as battling directly for souls against evil liberals.

American politics has always tended toward hyperbole — but figurative language is turning increasingly literal

The Satanic Panic never went away, and its concerning influence on politics in the US makes sense. In a seminal 1964 essay, historian Richard Hofstadter delineated what he called “the paranoid style of American politics” — a tendency toward hypervigilant, alarmist belief born from a combination of “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.”

Hofstadter succinctly outlined the longstanding history of American political figures claiming the existence of various “secret cabals,” shrouded “in every possible disguise,” who are “at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions.” He observed that the conservatives of the 1960s felt particularly dispossessed: “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”

Add “satanic ritual abuse and pedophilia” to this description and you have a boilerplate for modern right-wing conspiracy theories about liberalism, with plenty of anti-Semitism baked in. The sudden swerve toward the mainstream that the grooming accusations have taken aligns with decades of propaganda stating that American educational and social systems are all secretly socialist, communist, or otherwise out to destroy conservatives.

What’s more, the element of urgency around saving children lends the conspiracy theorists an implacable moral righteousness. As Hofstadter argued, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and compromise is unacceptable. What could be more absolutely good than protecting children from the absolute evil of pedophilia?

There are deep ironies in all of this. The first is that in their urgent zeal to “protect” children from the “evils” of homosexuality and gender-affirmative care, conservatives are proactively endangering queer and trans children. Decades of research have established the link between negative social environments and poor LGBTQ mental health, and the link between allowing kids to safely express their sexuality and gender identity and positive mental health. (And here are 13 more studies just to fully drive the point home.)

Failing to provide safe, supportive environments for LGBTQ and questioning kids leads to high levels of depression, self-harm, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts — significantly higher rates than straight and cisgender kids. In other words, the most vulnerable children, the ones most in need of protection, are the ones who are directly imperiled by the recent wave of homophobic and transphobic legislation, and by the pernicious rhetoric associating their identities with pedophilia.

The second irony is that the notion of “grooming” — slowly conditioning someone over time to accept a belief or a state of being that could harm them — arguably applies to the grooming conspiracy theory itself. Conservatives, even the ones closest to the fringe, didn’t just wake up en masse one day and decide to accuse all liberals of being pedophiles. The ideas behind these latest conspiracy theories have taken years to circulate and gain traction throughout right-wing communities. Over time, as conservatives’ trust in mainstream journalism, academic research, and expert authority figures has eroded, a strain of alarmist thinking has increased, fueled by public figures like Donald Trump.

In such an environment, misinformation can flourish and conspiracy theories can take root. What we’re seeing now is the latest iteration of years of toxic fringe beliefs and a growing willingness to exchange outlandish hyperbole for literal beliefs. We’re seeing this play out in real life in increasingly disturbing ways and violent extremes, from familial alienation to the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot — events that do not and cannot take place overnight. We might well say that a decade of reactionary right-wing politics has groomed many otherwise rational conservatives to accept the latest rhetorical escalation, and its grim real-world impacts, without a second thought.

The bizarre, bountiful state of weed snacks, from olive oil to shrimp chips.

Felicity Chen knew she was not going to be able to get her mom to smoke weed with her. It wasn’t for lack of trying — in the past, Chen had been open about her cannabis use with her mother, Huang, a 64-year-old Taiwanese immigrant. But smoking was an especially daunting idea for her mother, who struggles with asthma. To help combat the ailment, Chen’s father had gotten into backyard beekeeping, and harvested honey to soothe Huang when her symptoms got particularly bad.

It was 2017, and recreational cannabis had recently been legalized in her home state of California in November 2016. Chen realized she could infuse her dad’s honey with cannabis, and after some experimentation, her brand, Potli, was born. Now, Chen has built a CBD product line and THC product line that intends to meet consumers where they are — think flavor enhancers like infused sriracha and olive oil, or Asian snack staples like shrimp chips, ginger chews, and even fortune cookies. The company has made over $1 million in revenue since its inception, according to Chen.

“Not that I don’t want to indulge in a brownie, but it’s not something I’m reaching for every single day,” Chen told me in an interview. “Our products are something you can build a ritual around.” Adding honey to tea is something that even the most risk-averse consumers could see themselves doing. Drizzling some olive oil on a pasta dish feels relatively harmless, even fancy. “We wanted to do it in a way that does not change people’s behavior, but enhances and elevates the behaviors they already do,” Chen said.

Traditionally, “edibles” are often associated with baked goods like homemade pot brownies, which can be somewhat unpredictable in terms of dosing and quality. You might’ve encountered some variety of gummy candy in recent years, wrapped in aggressively colorful packaging that promises to bring the consumer of its contents to another planet. These days, though, the THC snack marketplace looks very different — chips and candies and chocolates and cocktail kits and other products that are meant to get consumers high without smoking a puff — and it is blossoming into a cornerstone of American relaxation and consumption culture.

Potli

The methods by which consumers can choose to experience cannabis have grown more creative and more similar to the marketplace that already exists for our other vices (like caffeine and alcohol). There’s Rose Delights, which makes cannabis-concentrate edibles from fine ingredients, like d’Anjou pears and ume plum syrup. There are torta capreses and torta biancas, branded around images of southern Italy. You can buy rosemary sea salt crackers to liven up a charcuterie board, or tortilla chips to go with your salsa, and cookies and popcorn and gummy candy in every flavor combination imaginable.

Beverages are an especially fast-growing category. Take Levia, for example, an infused sparkling water brand with corny flavor names like “Achieve” and “Dream.” There’s Vibations, an energy drink mix powder branded toward athletes and the health-conscious. An infused lemonade brand, simply named Good Stuff, adorns its bottles with whimsical animals playing jazz instruments, and for those who drink one of the billions of cups of coffee Americans consume every year, there’s even cold brew out there. And there’s no shortage of liquors and alcoholic spirit replacements — think craft cannabis cider; a cocktail mixer called Mxxn, pronounced “moon”; and of course there’s Cann, a leading THC drink that leans into the wellness vibes that people are reaching for across all Big Beverage categories.

Cannabis curiosity in the United States is growing. Forty-nine percent of Americans say they’ve tried cannabis, while the number was just 30 percent in 1985. As Luke Winkie reported for The Highlight, Americans overwhelmingly agree that cannabis should be legalized for recreational and medical use. During the pandemic, weed sales increased significantly in several states as people were stuck at home, and sales are expected to reach $45.9 billion by 2025.

Regardless of the fact that recreational weed is legal in 18 states and Washington, DC, more people are arrested over marijuana possession than any other drug, according to a report from the ACLU. There is inherent racism when it comes to marijuana in the US — Black people are more likely to be arrested and convicted for possession of cannabis, and Black and brown people have more trouble obtaining provisional sales licenses.

Pro-cannabis legislation, too, has been often delayed. In March, industry writer Mary Jane Gibson reported for Vox that the road to legalization and decriminalization in America has remained shaky. Despite the fast growth of the industry — there are about 430,000 jobs and counting in cannabis, and one in three Americans has lived in a state with legal access to weed — it is unclear when marijuana will no longer be classified as a Schedule 1 illegal drug or what future policies will look like. Many regulations operate state by state, and, despite past promises, the Biden administration doesn’t seem too pressed about changing things.

All of this has created an element of confusion as the THC product market continues to boom in some areas. While CBD is the cannabinoid that has run through the health and wellness world, THC is its edgier cousin, and many are wary of its growing presence. Andrea Hernández, a food and beverage trend analyst and writer of the industry newsletter Snaxshot, says this shift was inevitable.

“This is similar to what happened with tequila and mezcal, where once one hits the mainstream, then the other has sort of a meteoric rise,” she told me. “But there’s still that gap in education where not everybody is familiar with what a specific dosage of THC or CBD even does.”

Many consumers don’t know what to expect from these products because they are so new. The decline of public interest in CBD likely at least partially stems from this burnout; CBD was everywhere, but without real regulation or education, consumers are beginning to shy away from it. THC brands are also limited geographically and growth-wise — the current regulations confine companies to finding consumers exclusively in states like California or Massachusetts, and force them to wait to expand across the country. It creates disjointed information from state to state and consumer to consumer, who may not be receiving clear messaging on THC use at all.

“There’s been that surge in interest, but I still think that there’s a lot of limitation in terms of who’s bridging that education gap and setting expectations correctly for the mainstream consumer who’s not really an industry expert,” Hernández said. In markets outside the US, she doesn’t see this issue arise with as much frequency. “It’s mind-blowing just how normalized and just how embedded cannabis is in social outings abroad,” she said. “I’m not sure how much this can scale in the United States if restrictions aren’t relaxed at the same pace that THC demand is booming.”

Hernández says that while legislation tries to catch up with the market, consumers have a personal responsibility to do their research before indulging in THC snacks. Inexperienced users should educate themselves about cannabinoids, dosing, and the effects of different consumption methods instead of blindly experimenting with THC and hoping for the best.

“This stuff isn’t something that’s for transcending into another plane. It’s just a way to unwind without alcohol or something else,” she said. “Because, to be honest, it’s so funny how we normalize drinking alcohol, and we turn it into happy hour, but we’re ingesting a little depressant.”

Artet is one beverage brand that hopes to expand through the United States as restrictions ease up. Founded by cousins Xander Shepherd, Zach Spohler, and Max Spohler, the company was born out of their desire to seamlessly fit cannabis into typical, everyday social moments, which largely tend to revolve around alcohol. A joint might scare some people off in an adult setting, their thinking went, but a cannabis beverage can potentially have an elegant feel.

Artet, which is “tetra” backward, as in tetrahydrocannabinol, has a fancy ring to it, and is inspired by Italian aperitivo culture.

“The flavor profile is a little bit sophisticated, but it draws inspiration from the history of these spirits where it doesn’t have to be for everyone, but the people who love it really love it,” Zach Spohler told me. “To an extent, cannabis is the perfect aperitif. It can open your mind, your mood, your palate. The social aspect of cannabis felt like a tight narrative to link a drinking experience to, while normalizing cannabis as a legitimate ingredient in mixology,” he said.

It’s likely a lucrative venture — the global cannabis beverage market alone is projected to be worth $2.8 billion by 2025. A vision of happy hours fueled by cannabis could be possible in America one day, or wellness juice boutiques where you can add THC to your smoothie. Liquors like Artet make this future a likelier one, especially with Instagram-ready artsy designs that can stand front and center on a bar cart. These weed beverages can make their beholders seem forward-thinking and modern — another chic status signaler in a beautiful bottle.

Artet

“Beverages are the most universal socializer that exists — ‘Let’s grab coffee in the morning together, get beers after work, let’s get a juice after we work out.’ Our belief was always that cannabis would have a rightful place in that kind of societal behavior,” Shepherd said. “We have a long way to go before we have mass cultural adoption, but in places like California, we’ve gotten a lot of people understanding the benefits of using cannabis in cocktail moments.”

Cannabis edibles have occasionally gotten a bad rap, due to the sometimes unpredictable nature of their onset and effects. They can take up to a full hour to kick in, and the effects can be very different depending on dosage amount and the user’s own tolerance and metabolism. When it comes to users under the age of 18, studies show they can experience adverse symptoms such as lethargy and confusion, and at worst vomiting, chest pain, respiratory difficulty, and seizures when exposed to high THC dosages.

Artet appears like a natural addition to a bar cart, which maybe makes it a little more clear that it is not intended for children. However, with other THC snacks, some people worry about the possibility of products being accidentally consumed by kids. It’s a longstanding public health fear, and the lack of consumer education and continued restrictions do not help the situation. Big candy brands have even sued over lookalikes before. However, widespread claims that weed candy is intentionally passed out on Halloween to poison children have remained baseless for years.

“People have had children and alcohol in their homes for a very long time and have been able to create guardrails to prevent kids from trying things that are off limits. I think that’s a parental choice that parents can make in terms of how they create those delineations,” Shepherd said.

In terms of safety, Hernández, the food trend analyst, notes that some of these brands have child-proof packaging that aims to prevent kids from eating THC products. It’s more reasonable, then, to have consumption concerns about adults. “When people say they’re just going to have a quick snack, sometimes you’re mindlessly eating and you’re like, fuck, I just ate half a bag of chips, right? How do you teach correct dosage when something has that feeling of a snack?”

Experts say that like any drug or recreational activity, safety in this new frontier is dependent on consumer education and responsibility. “Who wants to be Everclear? No one,” Chen said. “There are beers of cannabis, and whiskeys of cannabis, and then there’s the Everclears. At the end of the day, that’s not what every consumer needs.”

She would know: Chen’s mother, Huang, has come around on THC. Now, during allergy season, she likes to mix a dose of Potli honey in with a cup of tea.

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Tuesday marks the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the violent attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people and injured 680 others. The domestic terror attack was carried about by two white supremacist, anti-government, right-wing extremists in the Michigan Militia.

As the nation reeled in horror at the specter of homegrown and deadly political terrorism, one teenager in Missouri decided to step up to defend the terrorists: 15-year-old Josh Hawley, who would go on to become a U.S. senator who is using his vaunted position to achieve the aims of those terrorists from the inside. Hawley wanted to explain the terrorists, and to defend the mindset of the militia movement that led the two men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, to murder.

“Many of the people populating these movements are not radical, right-wing, pro-assault weapons freaks as they were originally stereotyped,” Hawley wrote. “Dismissed by the media and treated with disdain by their elected leaders, these citizens come together and form groups that often draw more media fire as anti-government hate gatherings.”

He described these militia members as “Feeling alienated from their government and the rest of society.” That alienation, he said, leads them to “become disenchanted and slip into talks of ‘conspiracy theories’ about how the federal government is out to get them.” And by the way, he continued, the Los Angeles police detective whose racism was exposed during the OJ Simpson trial, Mark Fuhrman, should not be called a racist. “In this politically correct society, derogatory labels such as ‘racist’ are widely misused, and our ability to have open debate is eroding,” he wrote.

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Seems like 15-year-old Josh Hawley has a lot in common with Sen. Josh Hawley, the man who raised his fist in solidarity with the terrorists who swarmed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the deaths of five people.

That same day, Jan. 6, Hawley went on to vote to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results. He was one of the eight Republican senators attempting to subvert the voters and the Constitution. Seven Democratic senators called for an ethics probe of both Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz over their apparent enthusiasm for the insurrection.

Hawley responded to that with yet another column, this one claiming he was the victim of cancel culture for what he called “representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.” He insisted he was defending the “basic principles that join all Americans together—the right to speak freely, to debate openly, and to address our differences graciously without fear of being silenced or punished for dissenting views.”

A little over a year later, the same Hawley who seemed to imply that the violent attack on the Capitol was somehow addressing differences “graciously” is still pandering to the extreme conspiracy theorists. Hawley twisted Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s experience as a judge and member of the Sentencing Commission to imply that she was somehow a protector of pedophiles, that she was somehow complicit in the sexual abuse of children.

That’s another conspiracy theory that nearly resulted in mass bloodshed when a North Carolina man shot up Comet Ping Pong restaurant in northwest Washington in December 2016 because he was convinced that the restaurant was a hub of child sex slavery. Edgar Maddison Welch is one of those “alienated from society” people Hawley empathized with as a teen. He, by some miracle, didn’t harm anyone when he fired three shots inside the restaurant, surrendering after he found no evidence that children were being held at or trafficked from the pizzeria. He was sentenced to 36 months of probation by Jackson, the same judge Hawley has tried to smear. Coincidence?

It’s all enough to make you wonder how many white hoods Josh Hawley keeps hidden way in his closet.

The bench is stocked with Trump hacks making policy, and will be for a long time.

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday to refuse to hear a death row inmate's appeal, even with a juror's admittance to holding racist sentiments. In the case of Kristopher Love, a Black man convicted of capital murder in the course of a robbery in Texas, prospective jurors were asked if they harbor bias against members of certain races or ethnic groups and if they believe some races or ethnic groups "tend to be more violent than others," according to elements of the case laid out in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion.

The juror in question, No. 68, answered "no" to the first question but "yes" to the second. "He explained that ‘[s]tatistics show more violent crimes are committed by certain races. I believe in statistics,’” Sotomayor wrote of the juror’s words.

She said in her opinion: “When racial bias infects a jury in a capital case, it deprives a defendant of his right to an impartial tribunal in a life-or-death context, and it ‘poisons public confidence’ in the judicial process.”

The juror also claimed that he had seen statistics to this effect in “news reports and criminology classes” and that his answer was based on those statistics, rather than his “personal feelings towards one race or another.” He said according to court documents that he did not “think because of somebody’s race they’re more likely to commit a crime than somebody of a different race” and he told the defense that he would not feel differently about Love “because he’s an African American.”

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Love's attorney tried to get the juror excluded before he was seated, arguing that “leaving this man on the jury would be an invitation” to a possible death sentence based “on his preconceived notions and beliefs that have to do with the race of the defendant.” The court denied the attorney's challenge without explanation, and Love was convicted and sentenced to death, according to Sotomayor’s dissent.

Love argued on appeal that he was “denied the constitutional right to an impartial jury” because the trial court seated a “racially biased juror.”

Sotomayor wrote:

Rather than address this federal constitutional claim on the merits, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas held that, ‘even if we assume that the trial court erred in denying Appellant’s challenges [to the juror at issue and another prospective juror] for cause,’ Love could not show any harm under Texas law.

Sotomayor deemed the lack of appeal review a violation of the Sixth and 14th Constitutional Amendments guaranteeing the right to an impartial jury. She wrote:

Instead, the Court of Criminal Appeals “assume[d]” that the juror at issue was biased, but concluded that allowing him to sit on the jury was harmless.2021 WL 1396409, *24. That is an inherently contradictory determination. If the juror were indeed biased, then because he sat on the jury, Love’s conviction and sentence “would have to be overturned.”

Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan joined Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion. “Over time, we have endeavored to cleanse our jury system of racial bias. One of the most important mechanisms for doing so, questioning during voir dire, was properly employed here to identify a potential claim of bias,” Sotomayor wrote. “Safeguards like this, however, are futile if courts do not even consider claims of racial bias that litigants bring forward.

“The task of reviewing the record to determine whether a juror was fair and impartial is challenging, but it must be undertaken, especially when a person’s life is on the line.”

Legal experts and journalists called out Republican justices and appeals court officials alike for their inaction. Slate legal reporter Mark Joseph Stern tweeted: "The court's refusal to consider Love's case is another good example of how the six conservative justices can effectively overrule left-leaning precedent by simply letting bad decisions stand."

Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor, tweeted that "racism in the law can never be 'harmless error.'"

“Justice Sotomayor dissent rightly states that Texas appeals court reached an ‘inherently contradictory determination' by reasoning that allowing a biased juror could be harmless error,” Wu said in another tweet. “In upholding this decision SCOTUS upholds racism in the law by pretending it can be ‘harmless.’"

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This decision is what happens when judges don’t care what the law actually says.

So, you’ve probably heard by now that Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump-appointed judge in Florida, issued a sweeping opinion striking down the Biden administration’s requirement that passengers wear masks on airplanes, trains, and similar methods of transportation.

This requirement from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provided that “a person must wear a mask while boarding, disembarking, and traveling on any conveyance into or within the United States,” although it contained a few exceptions. For the moment, it is not in effect, as the Biden administration weighs whether to appeal the judge’s order. Hours after the decision, the country’s four largest airlines dropped their mask requirements — prompting confusion, sometimes mid-flight.

Mizelle is the apotheosis of former President Donald Trump’s approach to selecting federal judges. Appointed to the bench at age 33, Mizelle was fresh off a clerkship for Justice Clarence Thomas and working as an associate at Jones Day, a large law firm closely associated with Trump, when she received her lifetime appointment to the federal bench. At the time, Mizelle had just eight years of experience practicing law — meaning that she had not even yet completed the nine-and-a-half years of practice that Jones Day typically requires for its lawyers to become partners of the firm.

But what Mizelle lacks in experience, she made up for in her ability to rack up conservative credentials. In addition to her Thomas clerkship, Mizelle clerked for two other prominent members of the conservative Federalist Society. At a 2020 speech to that organization, she quipped that paper money is unconstitutional.

Mizelle was also nominated by a president who was about to be repudiated by the American public — Trump officially named her in September 2020, two months before Joe Biden defeated Trump in both the popular vote and the Electoral College. The Senate confirmed her while Trump was a lame duck, a week-and-a-half after the election was called for Biden.

Mizelle’s opinion in Health Freedom Defense Fund v. Biden, the case striking down the masking requirement, is so poorly reasoned that it is difficult not to suspect that it was written in bad faith. Its primary argument is that federal law permits the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require businesses to clean up contaminants that can spread disease, but that the law does not permit the CDC to actually prevent such contamination from occurring in the first place. But, to arrive at this interpretation of the law, Mizelle takes extreme liberties with statutory text.

I do not believe that Judge Mizelle is as incompetent as her opinion suggests. When Mizelle was up for Senate confirmation, the American Bar Association determined that she “has a very keen intellect, a strong work ethic and an impressive resume,” despite the fact that she lacked enough experience to be traditionally qualified for the federal bench. By all accounts, Mizelle is a smart early-career attorney who could be a very effective advocate. Neither Justice Thomas nor Jones Day have a reputation for hiring rank incompetents, though the former, in particular, is known for hiring hardline conservatives.

The most likely reading of her opinion, in other words, is that she simply disagreed with the Biden administration’s masking policy, and concocted a justification for striking it down. That approach should trouble anyone who cares about democracy, regardless of what they think about mandatory masking on airplanes.

Mizelle’s opinion is an abomination against textual interpretation

Health Freedom turns on a federal law that empowers the CDC to “make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession.”

This statute also gives several examples of actions that the CDC is allowed to take, including regulations providing for “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings” as well as any “other measures” the CDC determines “may be necessary.”

So this law is broadly worded, and it specifically gives the CDC the power to enact “sanitation” regulations that protect public health. Mizelle gets around the law’s broad wording largely by defining the word “sanitation” very narrowly and misreading other portions of the statute.

The word “sanitation” doesn’t mean what Mizelle says that it means

Mizelle begins her analysis by arguing that this list of examples limits the CDC’s authority to make regulations — an assumption that, in fairness, is grounded in the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the statute. Thus, according to Mizelle, if the law authorizes the masking requirement, “the power to do so much be found in one of the actions enumerated” in the statute’s list of examples. The masking rule must be a regulation providing for “inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation,” or something similar.

But that shouldn’t be a problem. The word “sanitation” appears right there in the statute, and the masking requirement is a classic sanitation regulation. Its whole purpose is to prevent passengers from spewing a dangerous contaminant into the air that can infect other passengers. And, as Mizelle admits in her opinion, dictionary definitions of the word “sanitation” include “measures that keep something clean.” She even quotes dictionaries that provide definitions such as “the use of sanitary measures to preserve health.”

Nevertheless, Mizelle refuses to give the word “sanitation” its ordinary meaning, instead claiming that this word’s meaning must be limited “to measures that clean something, not ones that keep something clean.”

Suppose, for example, that many toilets installed in airplanes had a design defect that causes them to spew sewage into the cabin. Under the ordinary definition of the word “sanitation,” the CDC could order airlines to fix these toilets to prevent passengers from being exposed to sewage in the first place. But, under Mizelle’s definition, the CDC would have to wait until passengers were wading through feces before it could order the airline to clean it up.

Mizelle reaches this creative interpretation of the statute by pointing out that the word “sanitation” appears in the same company as other words, such as “fumigation” or “disinfection” which involve the removal of existing contaminants and not preventative measures. “Words grouped in a list should be given related meaning,” she claims, quoting from a 1990 Supreme Court opinion.

But beyond semantic sophistry, Mizelle offers little explanation for why the common element uniting words like “fumigation,” and “disinfection” is that they involve efforts to clean something up that is already dirty. Another element uniting these words with the word “sanitation” is that they all describe ways to prevent people from being exposed to a disease — such as by requiring people to wear masks so that they don’t readily spew Covid germs into the air.

Mizelle also briefly notes that the statute CDC relies upon to require masking has historically been used for more modest regulations, such as “quarantining infected individuals and prohibiting the import or sale of animals known to transmit disease.” But Covid-19 is the most serious public health crisis since the late 1910s, and arguably the most serious crisis of any kind to face the globe since World War II. So it’s unsurprising that the CDC used its authority more aggressively to confront a historical crisis than it did to fight more ordinary diseases.

And really, why on earth would Congress write a statute to permit the CDC to clean up a mess, but to forbid it from preventing that mess from occurring in the first place? As Mizelle’s opinion shows, a lawyer of sufficient ability can offer come up with a legalistic justification for nearly any result that they want. But that’s not the role of a judge.

The rest of Mizelle’s opinion is even less persuasive than her interpretation of the word “sanitation”

In case there’s any doubt that Mizelle is not operating in good faith, the next segment of her opinion erases any doubt. Mizelle invents a distinction between CDC regulations governing “property” and CDC regulations governing “an individual’s liberty interests” that is directly counter to the statutory text.

As explained above, the CDC’s power to require masks on mass transit flows from a statute (42 U.S.C. § 264(a)) which permits the CDC to “make and enforce such regulations as in [its] judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.” Mizelle claims that this provision of the statute must be read to only permit the CDC to regulate “property” because it is followed by three other provisions (42 U.S.C. § 264(b–d)) that give “the CDC power to directly impose on an individual’s liberty interest.”

But this reading of the statute is plainly wrong. The provisions she cites are placing limits on the general authority over property and individuals that is granted in the first part of the statute. To illustrate, read the text of one of the three provisions Mizelle describes as giving the CDC authority over individuals:

Regulations prescribed under this section shall not provide for the apprehension, detention, or conditional release of individuals except for the purpose of preventing the introduction, transmission, or spread of such communicable diseases as may be specified from time to time in Executive orders of the President upon the recommendation of the Secretary, in consultation with the Surgeon General.

Unlike the primary provision of the statute, which gives the CDC the power to “make and enforce” regulations, this later provision contains no language authorizing the CDC to do anything. Instead, it places a limit on the CDC’s power to issue regulations under the primary provision. The primary provision gives the CDC the power to issue regulations limiting individual liberty, while the subsequent provision provides that the CDC must satisfy certain conditions if it wants to apprehend, detain, or conditionally release an individual.

The other two provisions that Mizelle relies upon, which can be read here, similarly place limits on the CDC’s power to issue regulations. But they create no distinction between “property” and “individual’s liberty,” as Mizelle suggests.

In any event, there’s no need to get more into the weeds here. The point is that, while federal law does place some explicit limits on the CDC’s authority, there is no language whatsoever suggesting that the CDC’s sanitation regulations only apply to “property.” Mizelle appears to have just made this distinction up.

The elected branches, and not judges, should decide public policy

Although current polling data specifically on airplane mask mandates is hard to find, a Harris poll from early April found that 60 percent of people wanted the transportation mask mandate to be extended, and only 21 percent strongly opposed it.

Other polls, however, suggest that mask mandates more broadly are starting to fall out of favor. An Axios/Ipsos poll, which was released last week, found that “the number of Americans who support their state or local government requiring masks in all public places has also dipped below 50% for the first time — now, 44% support such a requirement, down from 50% last month and 67% at the beginning of the year (during the height of the Omicron variant).”

Republicans like Mizelle, however, have long supported rolling back masking rules. A February Ipsos poll found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Republicans “support government entities lifting all restrictions, compared to just 23% of Democrats.”

In any event, regardless of whether Mizelle ruled the way she did because she wanted to substitute conservative policy preferences for the Biden administration’s, or because she believed that popular opinion was on her side, this is not how a democratic society is supposed to function.

In 2020, the American people elected Joe Biden president. That means that Democrats will have an outsized say in determining America’s public health policy for the duration of Biden’s tenure in office. If the voters decide that Biden handled this responsibility poorly, then they will have the opportunity to swap in a different president in 2024.

The appointment of Mizelle — and other, similarly ideological judges — by Trump was intended to short circuit this democratic process. Trump gave dozens of Federalist Society stalwarts the power to block literally any federal policy. And, especially in the public health context, Trump’s judges are using this power quite aggressively.

Are you dumb enough to think your next senator is going to end inflation? If so, you're the voter they're looking for.

How the "don't say gay" law contains a ticking time bomb that could destroy it.

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It’s all about the energy bills.

Alicia Cruz was homeless before she and her four daughters moved into a newly vacant apartment in Lancaster City, Pennsylvania, about three years ago. As she stood in the kitchen and watched dirty water clog up the sink, the landlord promised he’d have it fixed before they moved in.

But it was just the beginning. The ceiling of her apartment was cracked; the heating was inadequate, so she and her daughters are usually freezing; due to water damage, they regularly deal with roaches. She’s tried to leave but couldn’t find suitable alternatives she could afford.

“If I knew then what I know now, I probably would have ran out the door and stayed homeless a little longer,” Cruz testified to Pennsylvania state lawmakers in December, later adding: “To this day, the landlord won’t fix this place, but he wants to collect my rent money. It’s just really sad.”

The nation’s affordable housing crisis has gotten some semblance of attention — with journalists writing stories on the rising cost of rent, the scarce supply of new housing, the looming threat of eviction — but one aspect of the crisis has gone consistently overlooked. On top of the severe housing shortage that currently exists, nearly 6 million homes nationwide have moderate to serious home health hazards. They require repairs that, if left ignored, will make them uninhabitable, and eventually they’ll disappear from the market altogether.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition, a research and advocacy group, estimates a shortage of 7 million affordable housing units for low-income renters, but those figures don’t account for all the existing affordable units that stand at risk of demolition.

Issues like lead paint, leaky roofs, and knob-and-tube wiring don’t just leave tenants and homeowners in substandard, unsafe housing. They also leave families — mostly poor families — shut out from energy efficiency programs the federal government already funds to upgrade homes. Due to inflexible program restrictions, homes with outstanding repairs aren’t eligible for existing weatherization subsidies, despite those families arguably needing them the most. Addressing this problem could help solve both the affordable housing and the climate crisis at once.

Low-income households in particular have a lot to gain from the federal Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP), which provides funds to repair or replace heating and cooling systems, treat windows, or make any of the other upgrades that can not only reduce home energy use but also substantially reduce utility bills. But as it stands now, it’s people living in homes with no mold, asbestos, or structural issues who can access those WAP funds. Low-income homeowners and renters must first find the resources to fix their units, with some repairs running as high as $50,000.

The sheer number of homes barred from weatherization due to outstanding health and safety issues is immense. In Connecticut, for example, between 2017 and 2019, nearly 25 percent of income-eligible homes were barred from weatherization upgrades. Steve Luxton, who heads a nonprofit focused on helping Philadelphians weatherize their homes, told me 55 to 65 percent of those in his city who apply for WAP assistance are denied because of structural issues. And nationally, according to a recently published E4TheFuture analysis, 10 to 30 percent of income-eligible clients are deferred from weatherization upgrades each year for health and safety problems, with those deferrals on the rise.

Not being able to weatherize homes doesn’t just present cost burdens for low-income households, it also has a direct impact on the climate crisis. The energy required to cool, heat, and provide electricity to residential buildings accounts for 20 percent of annual energy use in the US, with older homes emitting more carbon.

Included in the $1 trillion infrastructure bill Congress passed in November was a $3.5 billion investment in the federal weatherization program, with the stated goal to increase energy efficiency, increase health and safety, and reduce annual energy costs for low-income households. A 2015 Department of Energy evaluation of WAP found the energy efficiency upgrades it subsidized led to households saving an average of $283 per year on their bills.

The Biden administration estimates the new infusion of funds from the infrastructure bill will allow the government to help 450,000 households weatherize over a decade. But low-income homeowners and tenants will remain shut out from the new money if they aren’t able to make the repairs they need.

“There will always be a tension, saying, ‘Okay, should I spend a thousand dollars to fix that roof when I could weatherize someone else’s house now?” said Charlie Harak, senior attorney for energy and utilities issues at the National Consumer Law Center. “But I’d go so far as to say that often the houses most in need of weatherization get walked away from.”

It’s certainly not easy to come up with money for those repairs. If you’re a low-income homeowner, you would likely struggle to get an affordable home improvement loan from a bank. You may have less than optimal credit, and depending on where your house is located, the house itself may have low equity. If you’re a renter, your landlord probably feels little pressure to make your unit energy efficient, given that it’s tenants, not the property owners, who typically shoulder the electricity and gas bills.

According to US census data, low-income households spent an average of 8.1 percent of their income on energy costs, compared to 2.3 percent for wealthier households. It’s not uncommon for poor families to pull back on other expenses, like medicine, groceries, or child care to cover their energy bills.

Jeff Genzer, who has served as counsel for the National Association of State Energy Officials since 1986, told me the intersection of housing and energy issues is one of the most difficult problems he’s worked on in his career. Steve Cowell, executive director of E4TheFuture and a longtime energy efficiency advocate, said the problem originates from treating health and safety issues as a footnote.

“The whole energy efficiency world that developed over the last 30 years was focused on pieces of the puzzle, and primarily the costs and benefits of energy on an economic dollar basis,” he said. “The health, safety, and conditions of a home has just been seen in the background, a side deal.”

Experts like Cowell have been trying to urge attention on the so-called “non-energy impacts” of weatherization, such as reduced asthma, reduced missed days of work, and fewer home fires. One evaluation published in 2016 assessed that each weatherized Massachusetts housing unit yielded an estimated $1,381 in combined savings to the individual household and society, with some of those savings coming from literally preventing deaths.

The climate crisis has made this harder to ignore

When the energy efficiency movement got its start in the 1970s following the oil crisis, talk of reducing carbon emissions was simply not a salient consideration for policymakers and practitioners, and wouldn’t become one for years.

But as the stakes of the climate crisis have grown clearer, the last 10 years have marked a sea change for the energy efficiency movement. While in prior decades policymakers could ignore home upgrades when they deemed weatherization not “cost-effective,” today they have to wrestle with the fact that the low-income renters living in subsidized apartments are using even more energy than other households, typically because their units are older and built with less efficient tech.

One study published in 2019 by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) found that making energy upgrades — including to residential buildings — could cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050. Upgrades to homes and buildings could save 30 percent on average for most buildings, ACEEE wrote, while installing sensors, automated controls, and other smart software could reduce energy use by another 15 percent.

The carbon emissions produced by old, decrepit housing are not the only environmental threat. A warming planet also threatens to put more homes into disrepair or wipe them out from the existing housing stock altogether, exacerbating our housing shortage. For example, if a fire or natural disaster doesn’t completely destroy a unit, the owner has to decide whether to then repair or demolish it. Affordable rental units are more likely to be demolished than rebuilt, given the tight profit margins they operate on.

Upgrading home energy systems won’t make those homes more capable of withstanding the effects of climate change. As Carlos Martín, the director of the Remodeling Futures Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, told me, energy efficiency upgrades are climate mitigation steps; they would help reduce future emissions to make the crisis less severe. But addressing home repairs, like fixing broken roofs, floors, and windows — those investments would strengthen existing housing stock to better withstand more frequent storms, flooding, and heat.

The growing affordable housing crisis has brought increased pressure to this situation. Depreciation is one of the top three threats to preserving existing affordable housing. It’s a hard issue to mobilize around though, because, like global warming, it’s a crisis we’re hurtling toward but haven’t yet reached. Weatherizing affordable homes could help avoid that fate; lowering maintenance costs can improve a property’s cash flow, which can then be used to reinvest in other capital needs.

More than a quarter of American households in 2020 reported difficulty paying their energy bills. Harak, from the National Consumer Law Center, noted that failure to pay utility bills is considered a breach of the lease in most subsidized housing, leaving the renter highly vulnerable to eviction.

“It’s a significant issue from an aspect of equity,” said Andrew Aurand, vice president for research at the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “If these people are priced out, where would they actually go?”

A first-of-its-kind legislative fix

In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are exploring a legislative solution to this problem, through a first-of-its-kind bill in the nation. Introduced in March by Democratic state Sen. Nikil Saval, the Whole-Home Repairs Act would provide eligible residents with grants up to $50,000 to make needed home repairs, and small landlords could apply for the same amount in forgivable loans. The bill would also aim to ramp up investments in workforce development, to address the growing shortage of qualified workers able to address the repairs.

By finally fixing up the homes, tenants like Alicia Cruz would not only be able to live in safer and healthier environments, they’d also be finally positioned to access weatherization dollars. More than 280,000 occupied homes across Pennsylvania are estimated to have moderate to severe physical issues, ranging from exposed wiring to failed plumbing and leaky windows. Environmental justice activists note that making the housing repairs would also help those being targeted with offers by property developers, and help more seniors age in their own homes, a strong preference for many elderly families who live on fixed incomes.

Genzer, of the National Association of State Energy Officials, told me he thinks Saval’s proposal is an “excellent bill” but that the $50,000 price tag for repairs “tells you a lot” about how difficult this problem can be politically.

Still, it’s not a long shot. Though Saval is a left-wing Philly Democrat, his bill has captured support from some heavyweight Republican legislators in Harrisburg, including Republican Sen. Pat Browne, chair of the state appropriations committee. Another is Sen. Dave Argall, chair of the state government committee, who has worked on blight issues for more than a decade.

“I represent a lot of struggling old mining communities where most of the coal mining stopped in the 1940s and 1950s,” Argall told me. “What I liked about Sen. Saval’s bill is if we help fix up the housing before they completely go to rot, that’s better for the people living in the homes, better for the next-door neighbor, and better for the taxpayer if they don’t have to fund millions and millions in demolition costs.”

Argall said he thinks the bill has “a very good chance” of passage in this year’s budget cycle, though the precise dollar amount is still being negotiated. Saval is pointing to the state’s $6 billion budget surplus and unspent Covid-19 relief dollars as strong sources to seed the new program.

Saval campaigned on affordable housing issues, but his office said data released last spring by the progressive polling firm Data for Progress was particularly instrumental in shaping some of their thinking around the politics. A survey of likely voters across Pennsylvania found 87 percent of respondents supported weatherizing homes to make them more energy efficient, including 83 percent of Republicans and 90 percent of independents.

While the home repairs bill would not itself go toward making energy efficiency upgrades, it would position more homes to be able to access the WAP funds. “We’re trying to make that federal money work more effectively,” Saval told me.

On the federal level, the Department of Energy has been slow to take this problem seriously, though advocates say conversations are starting to happen. The pandemic also elevated the conversation around staying home, indoor air quality, and respiratory illness.

“There’s some new efforts to think through this,” said Cowell, of E4TheFuture. “But they still struggle to decide if weatherization should go beyond just the straight economic savings.” The federal agency still doesn’t require states to report the number of homes deferred from the weatherization program for repairs, and not all states track those “weatherization walkaways” consistently.

Some states can dedicate a portion of their Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funds for weatherization, a pot of money that tends to have a bit more flexibility than WAP funds in how it can be spent. Still, spending patterns for LIHEAP vary dramatically across states, and most of the money still goes for its primary purpose — helping poor families defray the cost of their energy bills. In 2015, less than 10 percent of total federal LIHEAP funds were used on weatherization.

In Congress, weatherization has bipartisan support, but there’s been less momentum to address the home repair issues that prevent energy upgrades. Still, Democratic Rep. Dwight Evans, who represents Pennsylvania’s Third Congressional District, including parts of Philadelphia, told me he thinks Saval’s Whole-Home Repairs Act could become a national model. After all, Pennsylvania is showing how blight issues can bring collaboration across the aisle. And a Data for Progress poll from January found investing in energy efficiency for buildings to be one of the most popular climate policies nationally, especially given high energy prices.

“I think this program has great potential — it can be a vital part of the federal, state, and local investment that we need,” Evans said. “I’ve supported and voted for increased federal investments in affordable housing, and this would fit well with that.”

They'll refuse to participate in debates, and delegitimize every part of the election process from start to finish.

On Tuesday afternoon, an Axios reporter tweeted about Fox News’ verified account on Truth Social, Donald Trump’s social media platform. Shares in the disastrous tech endeavor spiked, and then that Axios reporter deleted the tweet. According to Axios, this is because it turns out, the account—which was promoted by parody cow account litigator Devin Nunes himself, is fake news. No, not “fake news” in the way Fox News isn’t really news; fake news as in Fox News says they have no account on Truth Social.

To quote a Fox News spokesperson speaking to Axios: "We are not on Truth Social."

Devin Nunes, the CEO of Truth Social, reportedly tweeted out a screenshot of the account on the platform and lied, saying, "Great to have RSS feed for @FoxNews now LIVE here on TRUTH!" Nunes has not been available to comment on this news. I guess being the CEO of a social media company that just launched must mean hiding from news and social media outlets?

This is just the latest stumble by the Trump media platform. The platform launched with major delays back in February, and the revelation that the application’s design might very well face a copyright infringement lawsuit. This was followed by the predictable, but still bad, news that for all Trump and other “freedom” warriors’ griping about “censorship,” the Truth Social app was fine with banning and censoring all kinds of folks.

RELATED STORY: Top executives jump ship, numbers down, Trump sad, Truth Social is a disaster

This led to late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel saying, “Truth Social has been such a disappointment so far, Trump may have to rename it to ‘Don Jr.’” As funny as that joke is, the sentiment was echoed by reports that Donald Trump himself was heard barking, “What the fuck is going on?” into a phone when discussing his social media platform.

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Most recently, Josh Adams and Billy Boozer—the company’s chiefs of technology and product development—had resigned from Truth Social over the past couple of weeks. Adams and Boozer were considered technology architects for the Truth Social platform and their departures are yet another sign that the rats are fleeing the flaming garbage barge that is Truth Social. 

According to Mashable’s Matt Binder, Truth Social seems to be in the bot-like practice of setting up big-company accounts, setting that company’s RSS feed to post, and making it look as if those companies have official accounts with the service. It’s a classic bit of propaganda with plausible deniability—if you don’t put a “verified” check on it, and add a small label that denotes this is a “bot” account. If one has the wherewithal to follow through on that small “bot” label, the app will explain that the account is not sanctioned or run by the company (i.e. NFL) represented in the account. However, the Fox News kerfuffle includes Truth Social’s CEO, Devin Nunes, promoting the new account as an officially sanctioned one.

The clearly right-wing media play by Trump and Nunes and whoever is pumping and dumping money behind the scenes has not gained the traction they hoped. Prominent right-wing and ultra-right-wing media personalities like Glenn Beck, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson are still nowhere to be found on the platform.

But the good news for pump and dumpers, the “special acquisition company”—that is, the shell money behind Truth social—Digital World Acquisition saw its publicly traded share price rise with Nunes’ fake news.

Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee spent the whole of the Kentanji Brown Jackson confirmation hearings playing law professor. Just look at the filibusters he subjected her to on both days of her hearings.

Lee, who lectured Jackson on Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 58, and the separation of powers (“Congress is accountable to the people at regular intervals,” he mansplained to her) seemed to take a very different view of the separation of powers, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the vote after the 2020 election. According to text messages sent to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and seen by CNN, Lee was spending his all his time trying to overturn the will of the voters to keep and toss the election.

It’s not an exaggeration to say he was spending all his time on this: Beginning from Nov. 7, the day after Joe Biden was declared the winner, he texted Meadows a statement signed by a bunch of conservative group leaders to urge Trump to “exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy” in challenging the results. In multiple texts that day, he volunteered his “unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections.”

RELATED STORY: New texts expose pro-Trump lawmakers' push to overturn election before 'sh*tshow' at Capitol

Apparently Lee—Sen. Constitutional Law Professor—is also Mr. Gullible, because his steady diet of Breitbart News, the Washington Examiner, and Byron York had him supposedly convinced of fraud! “This fight is about the fundamental fairness and integrity of our election system,” he told Meadows. “The nation is depending upon your continued resolve. Stay strong and keep fighting Mr. President.”

Lee was also a big Sidney Powell booster, having arranged a meeting for her to brief Republican senators early on—Nov. 9—and urging Meadows to get her on board. “You have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately,” Lee wrote to Meadows while pushing Powell. “I’ve found her to be a straight shooter,” he said.

At least until Nov. 19 and that press conference—the Rudy Giuliani melting one where Powell, Giuliani, and Jenna Ellis went all conspiracy theory about voter fraud and Dominion and shit. “I’m worried about the Powell press conference,” Lee texted Meadows. “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here,” he said. Which might be the one redeeming bit for Lee’s intellect in this text dump. “Unless Powell can immediately substantiate what she said today, the president should probably disassociate himself and refute any claims that can’t be substantiated,” he advised. And look what happened.

From November through Jan. 6, this is what Lee was doing: trying to overturn the election. He said so himself! On Jan. 4, 2021, Lee texted Meadows, hurt that Trump lashed out at him for not being sufficiently committed to overthrowing the election. “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him,” Lee whined. He went on: “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.”

“We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement indicating how they would vote.” Lee was all in on having the states overturn the election. On Nov. 23, 2020, he was insisting that “Something is not right in a few states,” pushing for recounts “in PA, WI, GA, and MI.” On Dec. 8, he texted: “If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path.”

On Jan. 3, he was still at it: “Everything changes, of course, if the swing states submit competing slates of electors pursuant to state law.” Here he was lamenting his “grave concerns with the way my friend Ted is going about this effort,” presumably speaking about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, adding if the states didn’t come up with competing elections, “this could help people like Ted and Josh to the detriment of DJT.” Add in Sen. Josh Hawley to people on his shit list.

Here’s what he was thinking there: not 2020 and relitigating that one, but 2024. “I don’t think the president is grasping the distinction between what we can do and what he would like us to do,” as in object to the count as Cruz and Hawley were planning. “Nor do I think he’s grasping the distinction between what certain members are saying that sound like they could help him, but would really hurt him. He’s got a very real opportunity for a win in 2024. That opportunity could be harmed in multiple ways this effort.”

Lee is arguing that would be fine for partisan state legislatures to decide that they were going to ignore the results of the election, throw out the vote, and appoint electors that would vote for Trump. That was his “Constitutional” argument. “I know only that this will end badly for the president unless we have the Constitution on our side,” he texted in the lecture delivered to Meadows on Jan. 3. “And unless these states submit new slates of Trump electors pursuant to state law, we do not.”

That’s Lee’s judicial philosophy and interpretation of the Constitution. If you want to steal an election, it’s legal if you have the states do it. To be clear, Lee was involved, deeply involved, in the plot for Trump to steal the election. Beyond that, Lee wanted to make sure that Trump wasn’t closing off his opportunity to run again and win in 2024. Even as Trump was trying to steal this election.

Mike Lee—not to mention Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley—has no business being on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He has no business determining who is qualified to serve on the federal judiciary. He has no business being in the Senate, come to that, but his months-long collusion with the White House disqualifies him from ever, ever questioning any nominee again.

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From targeting teachers who include lessons about American history, which keeps being erroneously labeled “critical race theory,” to banning books, GOP supporters have no limits. In the most recent incident of conservatives meddling in youth education, a children’s book author was forbidden from reading his book at an Ohio school.

Author Jason Tharp was banned from reading his book “It’s Okay to Be a Unicorn!” to students at an elementary school in the Buckeye Valley Local School District after the principal called with concerns that the book would “recruit” students “to become gay.”

“I just straight up asked him, ‘Does somebody think I made a gay book?’ ” Tharp told The Washington Post. “And he said, ‘Yes. … The concern is that you’re coming with an agenda to recruit kids to become gay.’ ”

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In an interview with WBNS, Jeremy Froehlich, the interim superintendent said the concern arose from one parent who visited his office on April 6. “They just wanted to make sure that we vetted the book and our staff thought that they had vetted it,” he said.

Tharp’s book was written in 2017 for children who felt like they needed to be seen. He told the Post he developed the unicorn character to remind his readers that it’s okay to be different.

“I sat down and tried to figure out what kind of character would be nonthreatening, that they will be instantly lovable, and I would be able to kind of get them … to be invested in the story,” Tharp said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I was like, ‘Kids like unicorns.’”

According to Tharp, the main message behind Tharp's series of children's books is pushing self-confidence, boosting self-esteem, and speaking out against bullying.

But of course, for some, a book featuring a blue and purple unicorn underneath a rainbow was too controversial.

However instead of arguing, Tharp respected the school official’s wishes and offered another book to read, “It’s Okay to Smell Good!” This book about a skunk seemed more fit, especially since it had no rainbows. Yet moments after his call with the principal, he received an email noting that higher-ups did not want him reading any books at all. Instead, he was asked to present without any reference to a book.

While the school district was against the book though, several parents were angry with the superintendent’s decision. An emergency school board meeting was held on April 8 to address the issue, during which multiple community members expressed their disappointment over the book being forbidden.

“It’s a rainbow. The fact that we had to take all of the students’ artwork down—it was gut-wrenching, and we couldn’t even believe we were in that position to do so, but we did what we were told,” Kaylan Brazelton, a parent and educator at the elementary school, said at the meeting.

This isn’t the first time assumptions about books have negatively impacted people’s careers. Last month, an assistant principal at a Mississippi elementary school was fired after reading the children’s book “I Need a New Butt!” to second-graders. The book was deemed inappropriate by the superintendent.

According to WSYX, the nationwide book bans have become more popular following the passage of Florida's “Don't Say Gay” bill. The outlet reported that at least two Ohio lawmakers introduced similar legislation this week that would bar discussions mentioning sexual orientation and gender identity in some school grades.

NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams would not commit Friday to making his tax returns public, breaking decades of custom with past mayors and executives throughout the country who willingly disclose their filings.

President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul were all expected to release their tax returns Friday.

“I will comply with whatever rules are in place, you know we do our disclosure also. I think that’s sometime in May,” Adams said at a press briefing, likely referring to a financial disclosure to the city's Conflicts of Interest Board. “Whatever rules are in place to ensure transparency for those who are in public office, I am going to comply 100 percent.”

The city conflicts board requires local elected officials, candidates and policy makers to submit a complete picture of their income, assets and liabilities but does not require disclosure of their tax returns.

When a reporter asked Adams if he could get a firm commitment to release the filing the mayor responded, "No, you can't."

Last year Adams refiled his taxes after POLITICO reported that the then-mayoral candidate failed to properly disclose rental income on recent returns.

There's no city rule requiring mayors to make their returns public, but refusing to do so would mark a shift in transparency from past administrations. Former Mayors Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg and Bill de Blasio all released their tax forms during their tenures that go back to 1994. Famously, former President Donald Trump did not.

Adams had left off any mention of rental income on his 2017, 2018 and 2019 tax returns. He owns a multi-unit attached row house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and from 2017 through 2019, reported collecting up to $50,000 a year in rent on the property, according to financial disclosures on file with the Conflicts of Interest Board. But he made no mention of that to the IRS.

His team initially provided a letter from his accountant, Clarence Harley, who wrote in February 2021: “The income from the residential rental activity was offset by ordinary and necessary expenses, such as interest, property taxes, insurance, fuel consumption, depreciation, as well as other out-of-pocket expenses [that] generated a loss…Accordingly, the real estate activity was not declared.”

The filing was amended and re-released to the public.

But following POLITICO’s reporting, the news outlet The City found more inconsistencies in September in Adams’ returns, such as reporting zero days of living in his Brooklyn property.

At the time, an Adams campaign spokesperson said the accountant filled out the wrong number of days. The spokesperson said the filing would be amended and made public for the second time. That has not occurred.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: California, which aims to have a carbon-free power grid within 25 years, got a short glimpse of that possibility earlier this month. The state's main grid ran on more than 97% renewable energy at 3:39 p.m. on Sunday April 3, breaking a previous record of 96.4% that was set just a week earlier, the California Independent System Operator said Thursday in a statement. While these all-time highs are for a brief time, they solidly demonstrate the advances being made to reliably achieve California's clean energy goals," said California ISO CEO Elliot Mainzer said in the statement. Power production from the sun and wind typically peak in the spring, due to mild temperatures and the angle of the sun allowing for an extended period of strong solar production, the grid operator said. While hitting the new renewable record is remarkable, the state has found itself scrambling for power supplies during the past two summers as it has added more intermittent sources and retired natural-gas plants for environmental reasons. California has set a target to have a zero-carbon power system by 2045.

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After three decades serving as the senator from California, a serious conversation is brewing about whether or not Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein is capable of continuing in her role.

Feinstein’s hometown paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, reported that in multiple conversations with unidentified sources, people confirmed what many say has been going on for years: The senator has difficulty remembering conversations and people she knows and depends heavily on her staff. As painful as it is to admit, perhaps it’s time this great leader steps aside.

“It’s bad, and it’s getting worse,” one unnamed Democratic senator told the Chronicle. An unnamed staffer for a Democrat in California said, “There’s a joke on the Hill, we’ve got a great junior senator in Alex Padilla and an experienced staff in Feinstein’s office.”

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Many of those who spoke about the 88-year-old senator did so prior to the death of her husband Richard Blum, a wealthy financier who died in February following a long battle with cancer. They say his death took a toll on her.

“The last year has been extremely painful and distracting for me, flying back and forth to visit my dying husband who passed just a few weeks ago,” Feinstein wrote in a statement sent to the Chronicle on March 28. “But there’s no question I’m still serving and delivering for the people of California, and I’ll put my record up against anyone’s.”

Sen. Alex Padilla told the Chronicle that he’s familiar with the conjecture around Feinstein’s mental capacity, but he added, “as someone who sees her multiple times a week, including on the Senate Judiciary Committee, I can tell you she’s still doing the job and doing it well.”

Padilla is not the only lawmaker who came to the senator’s defense. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a statement to the Chronicle denying that she’d seen anything out of the ordinary with regard to the senator.

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“Senator Feinstein is a workhorse for the people of California and a respected leader among her colleagues in the Senate,” Pelosi wrote. “She is constantly traveling between California and the Capitol, working relentlessly to ensure Californians’ needs are met and voices are heard.”

She added that it was “unconscionable that, just weeks after losing her beloved husband of more than four decades and after decades of outstanding leadership to our City and State, she is being subjected to these ridiculous attacks that are beneath the dignity in which she has led and the esteem in which she is held.”

Still, numerous staffers told the Chronicle confidentially that it was a challenge working with Feinstein. The outlet reports a high turnover in her office.

“It’s really hard to have a micromanager who is not fully remembering everything that we’ve talked about,” one staffer told the Chronicle. “My biggest concern is that it’s a real disservice to the people of California.”

Feinstein began her career in 1970, serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for eight years. Following the assassinations of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Feinstein took over as mayor of San Francisco and served for a decade.

Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992 and in 2013, she and California Sen. Barbara Boxer became the first pair of women to represent a state.

Feinstein’s term officially ends on Jan. 3, 2025, but if she continues to serve through Nov. 5, 2022, she will become the longest-serving woman in U.S. Senate history.

On Wednesday, the Tennessee State Senate voted 22-10 to pass a bill that criminalizes homelessness in the the Volunteer State. The bill, sponsored by right-wing extremist state Sen. Paul Bailey, “expands punishments for unauthorized camping on state-owned property to all public property.” It will now be sent to Gov. Bill Lee’s desk for his signature. It is expected to be signed into law as Lee is the kind of guy who ignored children’s pleas to not allow “permitless” gun ownership in Tennessee.

The bill gives local authorities the discretion to bring more severe charges against unhoused Americans. Proponents of the bill say that they’ve tried nothing, and since nothing has worked, we need to allow police to scatter encampments of unhoused people, or threaten them with jail. Opponents of the bill say that instead of wasting resources on destroying campsites, we could apply that same energy and purpose towards building housing that people can afford, or even help subsidize homes and shelter for people.

During the state senate floor debate on Wednesday, Republican state Sen. Frank Nicely got up to talk about homelessness and the need to light a fire under homeless folks. Nicely is given to revisionist history lessons lauding treason and fascism, and Wednesday’s tedious folkism was no different. In fact, this was an inspirational story about Adolf Hitler.

Nicely began by saying: "I haven't given y'all a history lesson in a while and I wanted to give a little history on homelessness." Maybe one of the reasons Nicely hasn’t y’all’d up a history lesson for a few months is because the last time he did, he told the world that the South not only didn’t lose the Civil War in 1865 when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered—they’re actually “winning.”

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Nicely then launched in: “Nineteen and ten, Hitler decided to live on the streets. So for two years Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. So, a lot of these people it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler's case a very unproductive life.”

Let’s follow your logic: Hitler was homeless for a time and then became the historic monstrous antisemite who ruined a mustache and set of names for generations, and this means that homeless people can be important people to history—but don’t be Hitler. Or be like Hitler, but more “productive?”

Side note: The Tennessee blunderhead even got this history wrong: Hitler was fancying himself a struggling artist in Vienna, Austria, and went from being unhoused in 1909 to a men’s hostel set up exactly for the purpose of housing homeless Germans in 1910.*

Double side note: According to City-Date.com and bestplaces.com, the Strawberry Plains region of Tennessee that Nicely represents matches the financial demographics of the medians in income and housing costs of the rest of the state, but is also about 95% white. That’s pretty homogeneous for Tennessee. Guess that’s where that “we didn’t lose the Civil War” talk comes from?

Nicely’s comments were in opposition to Democratic state Sen. Brenda Gilmore of Nashville, who wondered how criminalizing being poor helped children. “It just breaks my heart that we are criminalizing people who have no where else to go. And if you take and incarcerate their parents, then I think that again only multiplies the issue of taking their parents away from these children simply because they are poor.”

RELATED STORY: Tennessee Republican stands in chamber, claims the Civil War isn’t over—and the 'South is winning'

Open Table Nashville’s Paula Foster said the state senate’s vote filled her with “Sadness and disgust.” She went on to point out the obvious need for real solutions. “The answer to homelessness and we’ve said it over and over is more housing. We need to put the resources that we are spending making more laws that are clearly inhumane into the resources we need to build more housing units.”

Cathy Jennings, director of the local news paper sold by homeless people, The Contributor, told the Tennessean: "The only answer to homelessness is housing. Not fines. Fines just push people out of sight, further away from existing services, and make it harder for them to become housed.”

Director of Homeless and Supportive Housing in Chattanooga Sam Wolfe told News Channel 9: “If every single person experiencing homelessness in our community showed up to shelters and said, 'Yes, please give me a place to sleep,' the reality is that there's not enough spaces for them.” Being diplomatic, Wolfe went on to try and appeal to the drip of humanity that may or may not be left in Tennessee GOP legislators. “I think that really underscores the importance for us to act sooner rather than later to create those options for folks. It doesn't take an ordinance going through the Senate for anyone to look in our community and see that the problem of homelessness is far greater than it ever has been.”

Here is the American embarrassment that is Frank Nicely.

*The hostel was set up and funded by wealthy Jewish families, by the by.

Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board is a testament to just how much Republicans have radicalized on race.

A new case just arrived on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” that could upend a quarter-century of higher education policy and end diversity programs that were once on the cutting edge of conservative thinking. Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board is a significant escalation in the school admissions wars, because it rests on the assumption that the current crop of Republican judges will not tolerate diversity programs that do not explicitly consider race.

Twenty-five years ago, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush signed a law creating the state’s “top 10 percent” rule, which, as the name implies, guarantees Texas students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class admission to state-funded universities. The program is still in effect today, although the state’s flagship school, the University of Texas at Austin, now only accepts the top 6 percent of students due to an increase in applicants.

The 10 percent rule was enacted in response to a 1996 federal appeals court decision, which struck down an affirmative action program at UT-Austin’s law school. But it quickly took on a political life of its own. As a candidate for president, and later as president, Bush touted the 10 percent plan as a conservative alternative to affirmative action programs that explicitly took account of race when deciding who to admit.

The idea behind the plan was that it would open the doors of Texas’s best public universities to students at predominantly Black or Latino high schools, many of whom historically were unlikely to attend places like UT-Austin.

And yet, this program, which was a centerpiece of Bush’s higher education proposals and which has been emulated by red and blue states alike, is now threatened by the Coalition for TJ case pending before the Supreme Court. Coalition for TJ involves a highly selective public high school that switched less than two years ago to an admissions process that mirrors the Texas rule, partially to create a more diverse student body. The arguments advanced by the plaintiffs in this case potentially threaten any program undertaken for the purpose of fostering diversity at selective schools.

The Coalition for TJ plaintiffs, moreover, have a very real shot of prevailing. The Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican supermajority, is increasingly hostile toward any effort to lift up racially disadvantaged groups. And it is widely expected to strike down affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina next year.

But a victory for these plaintiffs would still be an enormous escalation by the Supreme Court, as it would potentially rule out programs that are race-neutral — meaning that they do not require school officials to consider the race of individual applicants when deciding who to admit — but that were enacted in order to foster greater diversity.

“Race-conscious” versus “race-neutral” programs, briefly explained

The Supreme Court has heard a string of cases, stretching back to Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), involving university admissions programs that are “race-conscious,” meaning that they explicitly took account of race when deciding which students to admit. In Bakke, for example, the Court struck down a medical school admissions program that set aside 16 of the school’s 100 seats in the incoming class for Black, Asian, Native American, or “Chicano” applicants.

Bakke and other, more recent decisions, however, also made clear that race-conscious programs are sometimes allowed. While schools cannot use quotas or other mathematical formulas that give an advantage to applicants of a certain race, current law permits schools to consider race when deciding among similarly qualified applicants, all of whom are likely to thrive at the school.

That could change soon, however. Right now, two cases are pending before the Supreme Court which challenge race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. These more modern affirmative action programs also give some preference to applicants who would add racial diversity to the school, but only in fairly marginal cases. Under Harvard’s system, for example, race is one of several factors — other such factors include athletic ability, legacy status, or economic disadvantage — which can “tip” an outstanding applicant who would otherwise be rejected into the small pool of Harvard applicants who are accepted.

Coalition for TJ, by contrast, involves a race-neutral system for selecting who is admitted to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”), a public magnet school in northern Virginia known for its outstanding STEM instruction and high levels of college matriculation for graduates. TJ draws its students from nearby middle schools.

Until recently, TJ used a battery of three standardized tests to screen applicants. The top performers on these tests were then designated “semifinalists,” and admitted students were selected from among these semifinalists based on their GPA, test scores, teacher recommendations, and several writing assignments that semifinalists submitted as part of the application process.

In late 2020, the school changed its admissions process and modeled it after Texas’s 10 percent plan. Under the new system, each middle school that is eligible to send students to TJ receives a certain number of slots equivalent to 1.5 percent of the school’s eighth grade class size — so, much like the Texas system, the top applicants from each of these middle schools are guaranteed admission.

After these seats are filled, the school also admits about 100 more students, who are evaluated based on factors such as their GPA and an essay submitted by applicants. Certain underrepresented applicants, such as those from middle schools that historically sent few students to TJ, or students from low-income families, are also given a preference.

Notably, neither the old system nor the new system takes explicit account of an applicant’s race. Indeed, under the new system, school officials who screen applicants are not told each applicant’s race, gender, or name. TJ’s admissions program, in other words, is “race-neutral,” using a set of criteria to screen applicants that do not include race.

Yet, while TJ’s system is race-neutral, there is considerable evidence that the local school board decided to change the school’s admissions process, at least in part, because of concerns that the old process did not produce a student body that resembled the racial demographics of the local community.

In June of 2020, for example, the school released demographic data on its freshman class which, according to a federal judge, showed that the “number of Black students admitted was too small to report.” Shortly thereafter, the school principal wrote a message to students and parents stating that “we each have a responsibility to our community to speak up and take actions that counter racism and discrimination in our society,” and noting that the school’s student body “did not reflect the racial composition” in the local school district. A school board member later commented that “we must recognize the ... unacceptable numbers of African Americans that have been accepted to TJ.”

In the final five years that the school used its old admissions process, Asian Americans received at least 65 percent of offers to matriculate at TJ. In the first year that the school used the new process, by contrast, just over 54 percent of admitted students were Asian American. Meanwhile, other racial groups gained ground. About 7 percent of the students offered admission in 2021 were Black.

The Supreme Court has historically favored race-neutral programs that increase racial diversity

The Coalition for TJ plaintiffs emphasize the evidence that TJ changed its admissions process as part of an intentional effort to racially diversify the school. According to their court filing asking the justices to block the new system, this system requires Asian American applicants “to compete for seats at TJ in a system intended to discriminate against them because of their race.”

If this argument — that race-neutral programs are suspect if they are motivated by a desire to increase racial diversity — succeeds, it could sound the death knell for similar race-neutral programs intended to diversify schools and universities, including the top 10 percent plan favored by Bush. Advocates of programs like it haven’t been shy about their own intentions to use race-neutral means to foster student diversity.

As a candidate for president, for example, Bush touted Texas’s program and a similar program in Florida as a way to “affect the pool of applicants of minority students available for higher ed in a positive way.” Similarly, in a 2003 speech delivered when he was president, Bush praised top 10 percent-style programs in California, Florida, and Texas as a way that “diversity can be achieved without using quotas.”

The Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisions, moreover, largely endorse Bush’s view that schools may try to achieve greater levels of racial diversity, and that race-neutral programs are the preferred method to do so — although the Court’s decisions also give schools slightly more leeway to use race-conscious programs than Bush would have allowed.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), for example, the Court acknowledged that “numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals.’” The idea is that students don’t just learn from their instructors, they also learn from the varied experiences of their classmates. So a student of any race who attends a racially diverse school will receive a superior education.

More recently, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2016), the Court echoed the idea that the desire to increase “‘student body diversity’ ... is, in substantial measure, an academic judgment to which some, but not complete, judicial deference is proper.” While racial quotas and the like are forbidden, schools have some leeway to set admissions standards that foster diversity.

Fisher also held that race-neutral methods of promoting diversity are preferred to race-conscious methods. Indeed, if a school wishes to use race-conscious admissions standards, it must first prove that a race-neutral method “would not promote its interest in the educational benefits of diversity ‘about as well and at tolerable administrative expense.’”

Under current law, in other words, public schools and universities have a legitimate interest in fostering racial diversity, and they may intentionally design their admissions standards to increase the likelihood that students from underrepresented racial groups are admitted. Schools with race-conscious admissions programs may struggle to justify those programs in court, but the Supreme Court has historically treated race-neutral programs intended to enhance diversity as benign.

But there’s no guarantee that the Court will continue to view such race-neutral programs as acceptable. Fisher was a 4-3 decision, with retired Justice Anthony Kennedy writing the majority opinion, and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg joining the majority. Both Kennedy and Ginsburg were replaced by archconservative Trump appointees. (The reason only seven justices decided Fisher is that the case was handed down after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death created a vacancy on the Court, and Justice Elena Kagan was recused.)

The Court’s current Republican supermajority has shown extraordinary hostility toward laws intended to promote racial equality, and it is well to the right of an earlier generation of Republicans, like former President Bush. In 2006, for example, Bush signed legislation reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act, which forbids race discrimination in elections, but the current Supreme Court has since largely dismantled this historic piece of civil rights legislation.

It’s not hard to imagine, in other words, that the Court’s current majority could hold that any policy motivated by a desire to increase opportunities for underrepresented racial minorities is constitutionally suspect.

If you ask some (okay, many) conservative pundits, Democrats are “grooming” children. As in, grooming them to be abused by pedophiles. Some Republicans have even accused Democrats of being pedophiles themselves.

The grooming charges lump together concerns that kids are being introduced too early to sexually explicit material, to the existence of transgender people, and to non-heterosexual sexual orientations. In March, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed what critics have dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that discourages teachers from discussing gender identity or sexual orientation in classrooms. Versions of the measure have been proposed in at least a dozen other states. Referring to the bill, DeSantis’s spokesperson Christina Pushaw tweeted, “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.” A pastor even organized an “anti-grooming” rally at Disney’s headquarters in California.

This type of rhetoric is damaging in its own right. As the commentator David French writes in his newsletter, “Throwing around accusations of pedophilia, sympathy for pedophilia, grooming, or sympathy for grooming is a recipe for threats and violence”—an assessment that some historians endorse. This latest pedophilia panic overlaps with the false beliefs of the QAnon movement, which fueled the Pizzagate incident in 2016.

But bills such as Florida’s are also likely to have a chilling effect on comprehensive sexual education in schools, with deleterious effects. Comprehensive sex ed doesn’t just help prevent bullying; it helps kids have healthier relationships of all kinds, improves their communication skills, and even boosts their media literacy. Compared with abstinence-only sex education or no sex education at all, comprehensive sex ed helps reduce teen pregnancy rates. One meta-analysis found that European countries, many of which offer comprehensive, mandatory sex ed, including for young children, tend to have the lowest rates of child sexual abuse in the world. Sex education is “the exact opposite” of grooming, says Nora Gelperin, the director of sexuality education at Advocates for Youth, a sex-ed nonprofit. “Sex education, even when started in the earliest grades, has shown to be protective for kids, especially around child sexual abuse.”

A 2020 study that examined three decades of research on sex education found that comprehensive sex ed that begins in elementary school can help prevent child sex abuse, among other benefits. “Stranger danger”–type language isn’t recommended these days; about 93 percent of child sexual-abuse victims know their abusers. Instead, these programs help children identify the difference between appropriate and inappropriate touching, the difference between “tattling” and keeping unsafe secrets, and how to identify abusive situations. In other words, sex ed isn’t grooming—it helps protect kids from grooming.

Modern sex ed also seems to give kids a sense of empowerment, including by teaching them the correct names for their own genitals. “Predators are less likely to select a child who can accurately talk about those body parts,” Gelperin says, “than a child that is ignorant of what those body parts are actually called.” It also makes kids less likely to victimize one another: One program for eighth graders, called Safe Dates, was associated with lower rates of physical and sexual dating violence four years later, compared with a control group.

Experts recommend starting sex education as early as kindergarten and teaching it the way you would math. Five-year-olds don’t tend to learn geometry, but they do learn about numbers and shapes. Similarly, experts say kindergartners don’t need to be told about, for example, orgasms, but they are encouraged to understand what their body parts are and how to protect themselves from unwanted touching.

One of the best-regarded American sex-ed curricula is “Rights, Respect, and Responsibility,” or the “3Rs,” developed by Advocates for Youth and available for free online. For kindergartners and first graders, the lessons focus on preventing bullying, setting boundaries about touching, and learning what types of things make babies (elephants, but not pizza). The most explicit section covers the proper names of genitalia, including an explanation that most girls have a “hole” called “the vagina that is used when a female has a baby.” The use of correct anatomical terms is meant to ensure that kids are understood if they ever report abuse. But also, “this is your body and you have a right to know what the different parts are called,” the curriculum explains.

The first-grade lesson plans also include a section about gender identity, in which teachers are encouraged to say something like “You might feel like you’re a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts. And you might not feel like you’re a boy or a girl, but you’re a little bit of both. No matter how you feel, you’re perfectly normal!”

Though this message does not exactly comport with a socially conservative worldview, it hardly amounts to “grooming” children to be molested by pedophiles. The argument for providing information on sexual orientation and gender identity in elementary school is that children are likely to encounter these concepts in the wild. Between 2 million and 4 million American children are being raised by a non-straight parent. Some children might either be transgender themselves or have a parent who is. Advocates of this type of curriculum say these concepts can be explained more accurately in school, and help make kids who are not straight or cisgender feel welcomed.

But just because the “3Rs” curriculum is recommended doesn’t mean it gets taught. Far from it: Sex ed, like all lesson plans, varies dramatically by school district, and usually reflects the values of the surrounding community. For example, Texas, which has more children than almost any other state, does not require high schools to teach sex ed. As of 2017, most Texas schools districts took an abstinence-only approach to sex ed, and though the state has recently introduced some discussion of contraceptives in middle school, abstinence must be emphasized. Instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation is not currently offered in Florida from kindergarten to third grade, the ages targeted by the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

Most European countries do provide comprehensive sex ed in every school, however. Experts link Europeans’ superior sexual-health outcomes—lower teen pregnancy rates, lower rates of sexual abuse, and lower STD rates among young people—to better, earlier sex ed. In Western Europe, sex ed tends to be mandatory and blunt, and start before kindergarten; it’s like the “3Rs,” but more graphic.

In the Netherlands, sex ed begins before many kids can read. “From age 5, children are taught about reproduction, about pregnancy and birth of a baby,” says Elsbeth Reitzema, the sexuality-education program officer at Rutgers, a Dutch nonprofit that helps run the country’s sex-ed programs. “They also learn the main physical differences between boys and girls, about the genitals and their functions. By the end of primary school, children have learned about reproduction, pregnancy, and birth. They know that a woman, if she is fertile, can become pregnant through sex in the manner of penis-in-vagina sex.” They also learn about being intersex, transgender, and nonbinary. When they’re 11, kids learn about masturbation.

One popular Dutch sex-ed curriculum explains to fourth graders that “the clitoris is a very sensitive place. Touching it can give a nice feeling,” according to Beyond Birds and Bees, a 2018 book in part about the Dutch approach to sex ed by Bonnie Rough, who has written on the same topic for The Atlantic. “It is not customary for parents to take their children out of the lesson,” Reitzema told me. “Should parents object to the lessons, then the school will explain what the content of the lessons is. This usually removes the parents’ resistance to the lessons.”

In Sweden’s mandatory sex-ed program, 7-to-9-year-olds learn “about all body parts, and discuss gender,” Hans Olsson, the country’s senior adviser on sexuality education, told me. “School has a duty to counteract limiting gender patterns, already at [the] preschool level.” Also in preschool, kids learn about bodily integrity and name their sexual organs. Rather than the proper terminology, though, Swedish kids use snopp, which is like “willy,” and snippa. (“Don’t know the equivalent word in English,” Olsson said.) Starting in fourth grade, Swedish kids learn about LGBTQ issues.

Sara Zaske, the author of the German comparative-parenting book Achtung Baby, told me that her 7-year-old daughter’s class in Berlin read the children’s book Mummy Laid an Egg without asking parents’ permission first. The picture book, which was originally published in English, features cartoon drawings of “Daddy’s tube” and “Mummy’s hole,” along with the ways “mummies and daddies fit together.” Unlike in the United States, Zaske writes in her book, “German kids learn much more about sex than conception.” German schools cover STD prevention, yes, but also masturbation, orgasms, and homosexuality. Zaske quotes one doctor in an article on the city of Berlin’s official website as saying, “Sex education cannot begin early enough.”

Rough and others don’t see these types of lessons as “giving children ideas” about sex and sexuality. After all, adults openly do things—drink alcohol, use the stove, drive—that kids can’t. Kids understand when an activity is for adults only. She and other advocates reject the notion that telling kids about different sexual orientations or gender identities “turns” kids gay or gender-nonconforming. “Teaching about the topics is not creating new LGBTQ students,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, a sexuality educator and co-author of the “3Rs” curriculum.

But most important, early sex ed opens up lines of communication between kids and responsible adults. “If we start giving off the impression that sex is a topic that when you ask me a question … that I’m going to start acting weird and funny and dishonest about it, they quickly pick up that this is something off-limits,” says Emily Rothman, a health-sciences professor at Boston University. “So they’re either gonna think, Well, I can go to my friends or I can go to the internet.” By which she means: to porn.

The larger point of this kind of instruction is what the Dutch call “sexual assertiveness”: “If somebody is saying or doing something that makes your body feel uncomfortable, you’ve been taught how to notice that and what to do next,” Rough told me. One aim of communicating freely about sex with a teacher or another trusted adult is the “development of a trusting, trustworthy relationship with a grown-up who has the child’s best interests at heart.”

Meanwhile, only a quarter of U.S. public schools report that students practice communication, decision making, goal setting, or refusal skills as part of sex ed, Rough writes in her book. Instead, some American children learn about sex through porn, through experimentation, or, tragically, from an abuser. Because so much of American sex education treats sexual activity as dangerous or shameful, kids who are victimized by adults may feel that they have to keep it secret. European children who learn about their body, and are warned about inappropriate touching, can better protect themselves. There, Rough writes, “those who prey on children can no longer benefit from their ignorance.”

As EVs hit the road, gas stations will have to adapt or risk going out of business.

Slowly but surely, electric cars and trucks are taking over American highways. The White House aims for half of new vehicles sold in the US to be EVs by 2030, and auto giants like GM and Volvo want to go all-electric in a similar time frame. As utility companies hurry to expand the number of charging stations — a critical step for the EV transition — the future of the gas station is in doubt.

Right now, gas stations are a regular part of American life, a place drivers go on a daily or weekly basis to fill up and sometimes grab a snack. But the fuel pump plus convenience store concept has much less to offer the country’s small but growing number of EV owners.

While some gas stations have taken the leap and installed charging ports alongside their pumps, people tend to do the lion’s share of their EV charging at home. And since EV chargers can be installed in almost any location that’s connected to the power grid — they’re now available in office garages and rest stops, and will soon be in some Starbucks parking lots — the gas station is increasingly unnecessary for some Americans.

“The beauty is that you’re not locked into a gas station,” argues Rob Barrosa, a senior director of sales and marketing at Electrify America, an EV charging network and subsidiary of Volkswagen. “How do we get the power to where we want it? That’s a much easier problem to solve than having to deal with big huge gas tanks that you’ve got to bury into the ground.”

This is worrisome news if you’re in the gas station business. Boston Consulting Group analysts estimate that if EVs do take off, as much as 80 percent of the fuel retail market could be unprofitable by 2035. Should demand for gasoline completely disappear, many of the more than 100,000 stations throughout the country would be at risk of going out of business. If they’re not able to sell fuel, gas stations would struggle to make money since people typically buy products at their convenience stores while they’re filling up.

So if these businesses want to survive, they need to start reinventing themselves for a world beyond gas. That could be hard to do, or even impossible. Installing EV chargers in existing gas station locations can be quite expensive. Meanwhile, those locations might become irrelevant as car manufacturers, charging station companies, and the government race to build a brand new network of EV chargers.

Some are already imagining what a post-gas station future might look like. It might be as simple as electrified parking spots placed throughout a city, or lead to futuristic road stops where people can go to the gym or stroll through a garden while their EVs charge. One thing is certain, though: EVs are bound to change our built environment.

How to retrofit a gas station for EVs

Gas stations currently serve as middlemen between the fossil fuel industry and drivers. Oil companies need a place where they can easily distribute their product to customers, and drivers need a convenient, reliable spot to fill their gas tanks. And again, gas stations aren’t just in the business of selling gas and diesel. They also make money by selling food, alcohol, cigarettes, and lottery tickets, among other things. Some gas stations offer mechanic services; some have restaurants inside them.

To adjust this business model for the EV era, some gas stations are now installing Level 3 chargers, which can deliver as much as 20 miles of range per minute, alongside their old pumps and convenience stores. Some of these fast chargers make EV charging almost as speedy as filling up a gas tank the old-fashioned way, and they’re much faster than what people typically use at home. Several gas station owners who have or are installing Level 3 chargers told Recode that their goal is to become “fuel agnostic” and appeal to EV drivers as well as those with gas-powered cars.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

But for many gas stations, the cost of an EV charger outweighs the benefits. The charger itself can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is a tough expense for a small business. The overall cost can be much more, since installation often involves drilling through asphalt and laying electrical wiring, and sometimes gas stations also need to buy transformers to boost the overall electrical capacity of their sites. Chris Bambury, who operates several gas stations in California, told Recode that setting up just four EV chargers at one of his locations would have cost about half a million dollars if government and utility programs hadn’t covered about 90 percent of the bill.

An even bigger challenge is that gas stations already face intense competition from other public EV chargers. Data collected by the Department of Energy shows that, of the public charger locations the agency fully tracks, there are currently more public chargers located at hotels and inns, shopping centers, and government buildings than there are at gas stations and convenience stores. This is a limited picture of the nation’s charging network, and it doesn’t include the large number of chargers built by private companies like Blink, Electrify America, and Chargepoint. These companies also seem to prefer installing these chargers in places with parking spots connected to the grid, where EV drivers can find something to do while charging, like go to a grocery store or a restaurant.

The fight over the future of charging

For a number of reasons, the government really wants to convince people that EVs are just as easy to use — and can go just as far — as gas vehicles, so it’s building a huge number of charging stations in convenient locations. To accelerate this effort, the White House plans to spend $5 billion as part of a goal to build more than 500,000 public chargers across the country by the end of the decade. That money will be distributed among the states, and the hope is that there will eventually be chargers at least every 50 miles on the US Interstate Highway System. Meanwhile, local and state governments are giving grants to businesses that install chargers on their premises.

Gas stations aren’t exactly enthusiastic about the government’s efforts to put EV chargers anywhere and everywhere. In Georgia, where several automakers want to build new EV-focused manufacturing plants, gas station trade groups are advocating for legislation that would limit the state power authority’s potential role in EV charging. At the national level, lobbying groups that represent the gas station and convenience store industries have pushed back against a proposal in Congress to build EV chargers at public rest stops on the interstate because, they argue, it would undermine gas stations’ ability to compete.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle facing gas stations: Charging an electric vehicle is often as simple as parking it. Many EV owners buy chargers that plug into a standard home wall outlet just like their laptop or phone, and that virtually eliminates the need for frequent refueling trips. These are typically less expensive Level 1 chargers that take a few hours to fully recharge a battery, which is perfectly acceptable for charging a vehicle overnight. And since the average EV can travel 260 miles on a single charge, most people only need to plug their cars in once a day.

Courtesy of Electrify America

So even if gas stations do install fast chargers, people who are traveling long distances may be their main customers. This situation is already playing out in Norway, where about 90 percent of new cars sold are now electric or hybrid. While gas stations have moved quickly to install charging ports, many EV drivers in Norway are only visiting them on a monthly basis.

The rise of EVs could actually lead to a new generation of pit stops. Some private companies, for instance, are opening their own luxurious destinations with multiple charging stations. Electrify America plans to open a series of flagship, EV-focused travel lounges with solar canopies and event spaces that could possibly offer valet services and curbside deliveries in California and New York later this year. Automakers are also experimenting with the idea of premium charging stations. In California, Tesla has already opened a charging hub for its vehicles that incorporates a lounge, an espresso bar, and free wifi. Porsche and Audi are developing similar plans for stations of their own.

None of this is necessarily surprising. New innovations often make old technology obsolete. After all, the phasing out of travel by horse also meant the demise of the horse-drawn carriage industry and the repurposing of stables. Now, after a century spent building complex infrastructure around gas-powered vehicles, another transition seems inevitable. This means that EVs aren’t just transforming the kind of cars people drive, but also where they take them.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

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