On Wednesday, The Girl Scouts organization came under fire Wednesday for a social media post that was deleted only after gaining some internet backlash. In response to Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to the Supreme Court, the organization posted an image to their Twitter and Instagram accounts celebrating her as the fifth woman appointed to the highest court since its inception. But the post quickly erupted into controversy as Barrett has been scrutinized for her anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ stances.

The posts have since been deleted from the Girl Scouts’ social media accounts, but they featured an image of all five women who have been appointed to the Supreme Court — Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Barrett. The accompanying text read, “Congratulations Amy Coney Barrett on becoming the 5th woman appointed to the Supreme Court since its inception in 1789.”

However, the post did not have the nonpartisan “girl power” message the organization thought they were conveying. People criticized the posts for celebrating a woman who wants to take rights away from women and girls, particularly when it comes to reproductive healthcare. 

A short time later, the posts were taken down. “Earlier today, we shared a post highlighting the five women who have been appointed to the Supreme Court. It was quickly viewed as a political and partisan statement which was not our intent and we have removed the post,” the Girl Scouts tweeted. “Girl Scouts of the USA is a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization. We are neither red nor blue, but Girl Scout GREEN. We are here to lift up girls and women.”

In a statement to Refinery29, a spokesperson for the Girl Scouts USA explained that congratulating women justices was a “tradition,” and aimed at highlighting accomplished women. “This has been construed to be a political statement, but that was not our intention and we removed the post to minimize the negative conversation. For over 100 years we have and will continue to work for equality and to break down barriers for girls everywhere and support increasing the presence of women across all levels of government.”

But, as people pointed out, the personal is political. “Political questions are questions of morals, values, and humanity. Are these not the things you are there to help teach, @girlscouts? We are all deeply impacted by politics. We should be teaching young people to be fluent in it,” MSNBC analyst Brittany Packnett Cunningham said on Twitter. “Because if your young women WERE fluent in politics and the ways in which political decisions gave been leveraged to diminish our autonomy over generations, not only would they not celebrate Amy Coney Barrett, they wouldn’t *become* Amy Coney Barrett… And it is NOT lost on us that the reason you took it down was because it was ‘seen as partisan,’ not because it celebrated a woman who has and will harm women and justice.”

As people were tweeting their disappointment with the organization, which has been celebrated in recent years for things like its inclusion of trans girls, historian Alexis Coe, who wrote a recent biography of George Washington called You Never Forget Your First, shared that she was not surprised about the Girl Scouts’ tweet. Coe said that this summer, the Girl Scouts asked her to be on a panel, which Coe pointed out was all-white. The Girl Scouts responded that they were aware of the overwhelming whiteness of their panel and the reason for that was because history wasn’t the “wheelhouse” of the person scheduling the event. “Welp you found me and two other white women historians soooooo,” Coe pointed out. 

This tracks. In June, the Girl Scouts asked me to be in a panel and I pointed out it was entirely white.

They were aware and explained that “history isn’t my wheelhouse.” Welp you found me and two other white women historians soooooo pic.twitter.com/c7lkXPiSPg

— Alexis Coe (@AlexisCoe) October 28, 2020

This is not the first time the organization has been criticized for appearing to align with conservative politicians. In 2017, the Girl Scouts came under fire for their participation in President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In response, they again reiterated their nonpartisan status, and defended the move by saying their “movement is made up of individuals who hold political beliefs and convictions as varied as our nation itself” and that “because every girl has a home at Girl Scouts, every girl in our movement is allowed her own ideas, opinions, beliefs and political ideology.” Last year, some conservative Americans boycotted Girl Scout cookies because Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been a scout.

At a time when the two political parties are so polarized in their views — and when one party literally wants to take away rights from the vast majority of Americans — it’s worth asking whether it’s even possible to be apolitical while commenting on politicians. The answer, judging from the response to the Girl Scouts’ attempts, is no.

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ACB's Confirmation Calls Expanding The Court

Jared Kushner Wants Trump To Keep ignoring Doctors

Tucker Carlson Claims To Have Biden "Evidence"

Jared Kushner, who seems adamant on beating a dead horse (the horse being his failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic), is once-again proving how wholly unqualified he is for his job. Despite the obvious nepotism that afforded him the title of senior advisor to the president, Kushner was also, for some reason, put in charge of the COVID-19 task force — despite having no medical training or expertise. And in true Trumpian fashion, he’s failed nearly every step of the way. But new audio tapes from interviews between Kushner and Bob Woodward are providing an even more damning portrait of those failings.

In the tapes, it is revealed that Kushner was actively hostile to and openly disregarding the advice of doctors when it came to how to handle the pandemic, which has so far claimed the lives of over a quarter of a million Americans. And his ultimate goal was for the Trump administration to get “the country back from the doctors.”

Kushner — a real estate executive who has handed the reins on the country’s largest public health crisis in a century— shamelessly tells Woodward about his efforts to wrest control of the response from the hands of the doctors who were advising him. In the April interview which was acquired by CNN, Kushner describes three phases of the pandemic, which was at that point still hammering New York City: “the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase.” 

After Trump’s reopening plan was announced, Kushner told Woodward it was “the beginning of the comeback phase” which “doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.” It was then when Kushner referred to the guidelines for reopening the country’s economy as “Trump getting the country back from the doctors” so he could “own the open-up.” 

At the time Kushner did the interview, 40,000 people had already died from the virus. But this is only further evidence that the Trump administration is working in denial of our current health crisis. On Wednesday, while the U.S. was setting single-day records for new virus cases, the White House sent a news release declaring “ending” COVID-19 as one of the successes of the administration. In July, Kushner’s national testing plan was scrapped because the administration worried that more testing would lead to more cases, which would look bad for Trump and his reelection bid. The task force he was running was criticized for having no coherent strategy or national scalability, let alone direction from medical professionals.

These new tapes don’t reveal anything we didn’t already know about the Trump administration: from the beginning, they have cared more about their own optics in handling the pandemic than they cared about the lives of the American citizens they were supposed to protect. Their coronavirus response was not botched because they are inept — it was intentionally botched because they didn’t care enough to listen to the experts. Kushner admitted as much, and now we can hear the words directly from his mouth.

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Hundreds Were Stranded After Trump's Omaha Rally

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On Wednesday, a New York Times quiz about refrigerators and politics (yes, really) almost immediately blew up the existential diaspora currently known as the internet. In the already-viral quiz, readers are asked to guess — based on the inside of a person’s refrigerator — whether they are voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden for president. The quiz was created from hundreds of people responding to a survey asking who they were voting for and whether they would take a photo of the inside of their fridge.

At the time of publishing this, over 5 million guesses had been made on the quiz, with the results showing that people are right just about half the time. “The current scores suggest that as a whole, we can’t distinguish people’s politics from glances into their fridges much more reliably than if we just flipped a coin,” the Times wrote. But perhaps that was the point in the first place — to show that making assumptions about someone’s politics by looking in their fridge is pointless. And this brought many readers to their next question: why, then, does this quiz need to exist at all?

The “data” surrounding this is — if nothing more — a needlessly classist example of how Americans operate, particularly when it comes to assuming someone’s political positions. And as such, the Times was immediately scrutinized for engaging in stereotypes and turning them into a game only a week before one of the most contentious elections in modern history.

Am I missing something or is the Fridge Quiz just a test of our classist assumptions (I mean if that’s the point, kudos?)

— Sophie Chou (@mpetitchou) October 28, 2020

uh so this “fridge quiz” thing is just an excuse for people to indulge in classist stereotypes and pretend they’re useful despite clearly stated evidence to the contrary, right? or am I missing something?

— Camila Domonoske (@camilareads) October 28, 2020

Here’s the fridge of a working-class voter, during a pandemic, recession, and hurricane recovery. Get bent, NY Times. pic.twitter.com/7wfPMYabYV

— ⚜️”Rob” Anderson for Louisiana (@RobAnderson2018) October 28, 2020

The Times tried to account for this by acknowledging that guessing people’s politics based on their fridge contents might seem fun, but actually ties into more serious issues. “While the challenge of guessing a family’s politics based on a refrigerator may be a playful way to consider our similarities and differences — and our assumptions — the images are also personal glimpses into American lives, and anyone playing the game may have noticed some bare refrigerators,” they wrote. “Empty or nearly empty fridges were split roughly evenly between Trump and Biden supporters, and it’s hard to know whether an empty refrigerator is, say, a spare someone felt safe photographing or a sign of a household without enough food.”

But without context, food insecurity is presented as an issue divorced from politics when the reality is that Trump has made the issue worse for working-class people. Earlier this month, a federal judge struck down Trump’s plan to cut food stamps for 700,000 Americans — something he tried to push through in the middle of a pandemic, no less. “Where’s the picture of the fridge belonging to the family who had to wait in line at the food pantry in order to feed their kids?” asked Twitter user Kim Brown.

Whether the intent of the article was to provide 5+ million Americans (in counting) with a hard look in the mirror (which is probably already full of existential dread), it only just reinforced the classism that exists in America to begin with. Right down to a person’s refrigerator contents.

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Hundreds Were Stranded After Trump's Omaha Rally

Joe Biden Just Called Trump On His BS

Why Is Kamala Harris Being Criticized For Dancing?

Trump supporters were quite literally left out in the cold after a rally on Tuesday evening. Thousands of people attended the Trump’s Omaha, Nebraska campaign event, braving the weather to listen to the president rile up his base at Eppley Airfield. However, due to mismanagement and ill-preparedness of event organizers, many were left stranded outside of the event, waiting for buses to come to shuttle them back to their cars which were parked in lots. As swarms of MAGA supporters spent hours waiting to leave the rally, several began to suffer ill effects from the cold, with a few who had to be treated for hypothermia. Trump, meanwhile, immediately boarded Air Force One when the event ended and left the state.

As of Wednesday, at least 30 people were reported to have been treated or monitored in some capacity by medics. According to the Trump administration, the buses were delayed due to “a traffic jam.” But his supporters were reported to be suffering from signs of fatigue and confusion, which are symptoms of hypothermia, on a local police scanner. Since many cars were up to four miles away from the venue, some people walked, while police and airport maintenance vehicles attempted to assist others who were making the trek. CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny, who attended the rally, called the event a “chaotic cluster.”

President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally. “We need at least 30 more buses,” an Omaha police officer just said, shaking his head at the chaotic cluster that is unfolding.

— Jeff Zeleny (@jeffzeleny) October 28, 2020

Thousands of people left out in the cold and stranded in #Omaha, #Nebraska after a #Trump rally. I’m told the shuttles aren’t operating & there aren’t enough busses. Police didn’t seem to know what to do. Some walked. I saw at least one woman getting medical attention. pic.twitter.com/oIkmixaZt0

— Jeff Paul (@Jeff_Paul) October 28, 2020

But this isn’t a new occurrence for the MAGA-clad crowd. Trump’s rallies have been accused of being reckless, especially during a pandemic. Since Trump has been on the 2020 campaign trail, Herman Cain died of COVID-19 after attending an indoor Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in July. And, at least five counties have reported higher rates of the virus after a Trump rally took place there.

But it’s not just COVID-19 that the Trump administration is subjecting people to: they appear to be failing to take attendees health and well-being into account in other areas, too. Aside from Omahans being stranded in freezing weather, two weeks ago at Vice President Pence’s rally at The Villages, Florida, at least one attendee became faint in the heat and had to be escorted out of the venue in a wheelchair. Some states, like Virginia, have tried to block Trump’s rallies from happening, calling them a “severe public health threat,” which seems to be more true than ever.

It’s unsurprising that an administration who has been so cavalier about a deadly virus that they allowed themselves to get infected would care so little about the health and safety of their supporters; what’s saddest, however, is the number of people willing to risk their lives for an administration who couldn’t care less about them.

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So, Can You Really Change Your Vote?

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As November 3 approaches, the calls for people to vote are reaching a crescendo. There’s a clear narrative around the importance of exercising your right to go to the polls, vote by mail, or even volunteer this election. And, with so many swing states in play, individual votes really do count, and the stakes are sky-high: We are fighting for nothing less than the preservation and expansion of the rights of the most marginalized communities in this country.

But blanket calls to “vote at all costs” often overlook important context: Not everyone can vote. There are many reasons, aside from legal ones, that people might be disenfranchised and therefore unable to exercise their right to vote. A major one that isn’t talked about nearly enough is the way that intimate partner violence can impact someone’s ability to vote in elections, both during the relationship and after it ends.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), one in four women will experience abuse at the hands of a partner, and The Network/La Red estimates that 25-33 percent of LGBTQ+ people will experience abuse by an intimate partner. At its foundation, domestic violence is about power and control: an abuser seeks to establish dominance over someone through tactics of physical, emotional, and/or sexual violence. That can extend into all areas of life, including one place where people can reliably demonstrate their agency: the voting booth.

“Voting is an act of power, which is why abusers often seek to interfere with victims exercising their right to vote,” says Adrienne Lawrence, an attorney and former domestic violence counselor who has also been a repeated election official. In particular, she says, that “women seeking to vote have faced retaliation for nearly a century where husbands objected to [them] exercising their right to vote.”

For someone who is currently in an abusive relationship, there are many complex reasons why they might not be able to vote — or even want to. They could be being actively controlled or monitored by their abuser, or simply disempowered from years of psychological abuse. Tactics used by abusers can include isolation, emotional abuse, gaslighting, and controlling behaviors. The way that can manifest around access to the democratic process can be an abuser withholding relevant information related to election dates or locations by throwing out mail, or berating their partner until they think they aren’t smart enough to vote. It can be not allowing them to leave the house to go vote or stranding them without access to transportation, or coercing them into voting the way their abuser wants them to.

Survivors who exist at multiple axes of oppression can find even more barriers to voting. For example, in communities with large numbers of immigrants, often with limited English proficiency like in the Asian-Pacific Islander community, “trying to get information about when and how to vote or who to vote for is much more easily monitored by an abuser, especially if an abuser speaks English and the survivor does not, and candidates haven’t done a good job of doing outreach in multiple languages,” Grace Huang, Director of Policy at the Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence, tells Refinery29.

Tawni Maisonneuve has experienced several of these barriers, telling Supermajority News that she “stopped registering to vote” during her first marriage because the emotional abuse she suffered at the hands of her husband made her “feel as if [she wasn’t] even intelligent enough to vote.” Maisonneuve said her partner controlled how she voted by telling poll workers she was “slow” so he needed to help her with her ballot. After leaving their abusers, many survivors may still not feel they have a right to show up to the polls, because the scars of abuse can last long after a relationship has ended.

But there are other, more concrete reasons for survivors not to vote: Many fear for their safety if they register. Registering to vote requires giving your address and personal information, which will then become a public record. If an abuser is someone who surveils, threatens, or stalks their victim after they have left the relationship, they could potentially look up their address in voter registration databases to find them.

“Fun fact: as a DV survivor I cannot register to vote because doing so makes my address public,” wrote Twitter user @IndigenousAI. “Anyone who is fleeing or hiding from an abuser is automatically disenfranchised from the political process and this is a feature, not a bug.”

In a state that requires someone to show up in person to vote, a survivor could be putting their safety at-risk by going to the polls. “Especially as we are hearing about people standing in line for hours on end, which poses another risk for people separated from their abusers,” says Huang. “We are hearing about counties where there is only one place to drop off ballots or only one polling place. The fact that you’re having to stand in line potentially puts people at risk who may be hiding from their abusers.”

Most states have Address Confidentiality Programs that allow survivors of intimate partner violence to keep their home address out of public records (Georgia, Michigan, and Hawaii are exceptions). However, there are a lot of hoops people have to jump through in order to qualify. For example, in New York state, there is a law that allows survivors to obtain a court order in the county where they are registered to vote to have their registration kept separate. This law also allows survivors who fear for their safety to be excused from going in person to their polling place, if they are worried their abuser might be waiting for them there. In order to apply for the exception, however, requires a court order to be acquired and brought to the Board of Elections.

Even more restrictive is the law in New Jersey, which only applies to people who have filed a restraining order and have documented proof of their abuse. There are countless reasons that victims choose not to file restraining orders against or call the police on their abusers, which include fear and threats.

“Some ways in which an abuser may obstruct or influence a victim’s right to vote would meet the definition of voter intimidation under 18 U.S.C. § 594,” says Lawrence. “Unfortunately, voter intimidation is unlikely to be charged because intimidation is often subtle and undocumented. Also, survivors often are reluctant to testify against their abusers, making prosecution even more difficult.”

When people are kept from exercising their right to vote because of fear of discrimination or abuse, it is a form of voter suppression. “The pandemic means we’re all in closer quarters, meaning abusers have more access and control over their victims,” Ruth Glenn, President of the NCADV, told Supermajority News. It has also meant an increase in domestic violence. “Given that domestic violence has increased during COVID-19, Black women face domestic violence at higher rates, and Black women are a strong voting bloc, you would think the candidates would do more to remove the voting barriers a number of Black domestic violence survivors face,” said Lawrence.

In order to mitigate some of those barriers to voting for survivors of domestic violence, Lawrence suggests policies that could help improve access, like statewide programs that preserve voter information privacy and remove barriers of entry to such programs; political information websites adding escape buttons to their webpages that enable prospective voters to close out of the webpage immediately and without detection; election official training on spotting voter intimidation and potential domestic violence situations; and voter registration programs at women’s centers and shelters.

What it comes down to is the fact that the system is failing survivors of intimate partner violence, thereby suppressing their ability to exercise their Constitutional right to vote. “When it comes to voting,” Lawrence admits, “domestic violence can create a host of hurdles imposed both by an abuser and by the system.”

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Behind The Racist History Of The Electoral College

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After a prominent Trump supporter criticized a photo of former Vice President Joe Biden hugging his son, Hunter, Twitter became a confusing party-line battle ground. The black and white photo, the two men are embracing while Hunter looks into the camera and Joe kisses his son on the cheek, became the subject of backlash from Republicans, who labeled the tender father-son moment as “inappropriate.”

The brouhaha began with a tweet from John Cardillo, a Trump supporter, former NYPD officer, and radio host. “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Cardillo asked, posting the photo to his feed. The implication was that there was something unnatural about Biden’s relationship with his younger son, something devious.

But Cardillo is clearly following a precedent put forth by Trump, who tried to use Biden’s relationships with his son as a “gotcha” during the first presidential debate. In the weeks since, Biden received similar criticism when text messages between him and Hunter were leaked and revealed. In the texts, the Democratic nominee messaged his son who was in rehab, writing, “Good morning my beautiful son. I miss you and love you. Dad.”

Despite what Republican trolls may allege, the photo and texts simply reveal a loving relationship between Joe and Hunter Biden — one where a father is expressing affection, both physically and verbally, towards his son. But the invented controversy revealed toxic ideas around masculinity and manhood in the United States, combined with a heavy dose of good ol’ homophobia.

Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you? pic.twitter.com/XDMIsgjUKI

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) October 22, 2020

While this all might just be another last ditch effort from Trump’s team to undermine the Biden campaign (you know, along with the pointless investigation into his Amtrak trips, and allegations that he helped set up Rudy Giuliani’s Borat cameo), it does speak to our current culture of platonic affection between men, which, at one point in time, was the norm. But when the idea that homosexuality was actually perversion began to solidify, men stopped touching each other so much.

In a society that has taught men and boys that to be physically intimate with each other is a sign of gayness, and that gayness is associated with femininity and, therefore, weakness, it remains rare to see two men in a non-romantic relationship show the kind of love and affection we see in the photo of the male Bidens, even when those men are family members.

It’s worth noting that there are countless pictures of Trump kissing and being overly affectionate with his daughter, Ivanka, that have no garnered the same accusations of “inappropriate touching” from his supporters that this one photo of the Bidens has (and, let’s be real, the way Trump touches Ivanka actually does veer into inappropriate and uncomfortable at times, especially when he says that if they weren’t related he would “probably date” his daughter). But it’s also worth noting that the image, which was taken in 2016, was captured during the first interview between Joe Biden after his other son, Beau, passed away.

But by implying that there is something wrong with that photo, the men critical of this are actually just telling on themselves: They are demonstrating their toxic and harmful ideas around masculinity and manhood, and reinforcing ideas around homophobia that end up hurting straight men the most. The reinforcement of this criticism will only deprive men of the touch and affection that all humans need, touch that provides safety, comfort, and emotional support. We force straight men to seek all their physical affection from their women partners instead, and we deprive young boys of the kind of affection they deserve from the men in their lives, like their fathers.

“Boys imitate what they see,” Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson write in their book Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys. “If what they see is emotional distance, guardedness, and coldness between men they will grow up to imitate that behavior.” The authors ask, “What do boys learn when they do not see men with close friendships, where there are no visible models of intimacy in a man’s life beyond his spouse?”

Joe Biden is a man who knows grief: he has lost a wife and two children, including Hunter’s older brother, Beau. He holds tightly to the son he has left because he knows the pain of losing one. What Joe Biden’s words and actions have shown us over the last week is not that he is weak or that he coddles his son. What they’ve shown us is that, even when no one is looking, he is the kind of father that other men should strive to be and that he refuses to give into some of the most harmful scripts around American masculinity. Hunter is lucky to have a father like that.

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Biden's Honesty About His Son's Addiction Matters

Trump Used A Racist Dog Whistle To Criticize Obama

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At a campaign event in North Carolina on Wednesday, President Trump responded to a speech given by President Barack Obama earlier that day at a Biden campaign event. In his speech, the former president openly and scathingly criticized his successor in ways he has not previously. It was another effort to galvanize voters ahead of the contentious November 3 election day, but predictably, Trump felt the need to fire back — and to make sure to throw in a racist dog whistle while he did it.

“I think the only one more unhappy than crooked Hillary that night [of the 2016 election] was Barack Hussein Obama,” Trump told his North Carolina rally crowd, at which point they burst into chants of “Four more years!” But Trump’s inclusion of Obama’s middle name was intentional — he knows that many of his supporters adhere to the racist birtherism theory that Trump himself has promoted, which is the belief that Obama was born in Kenya and smuggled into the U.S. as an infant and is therefore not eligible to hold the office of president. Obama’s second name is often used as a form of proof regarding the demonstrably false claim.

But this wasn’t enough to distract from the former president’s earlier speech. For his part, Obama’s remarks came during a drive-in rally in Pennsylvania — his first in-person speech on behalf of the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ticket. Obama, like most of the Democrats, has generally chosen not to stoop to levels of personal insults or playing dirty that Trump employs, a tactic that has been criticized by people who believe the Democratic establishment needs to throw out the old rules of civility and play by the Trump playbook in order to beat him. Obama’s speech Wednesday had shades of that.

“His TV ratings are down. So you know that upsets him,” Obama said, in a targeted comment aimed to insult the president’s obsession with his ratings. “But the thing is, this is not a reality show. This is reality. And the rest of us have to live with the consequences of him proving himself incapable of taking the job seriously.” Obama continued by making a dig that the poor job Trump has done in taking over the presidency: “He did inherit the longest streak of job growth in history, but just like everything else he inherited, he messed it up.”

As the election draws nearer and Biden’s lead in the polls continues to grow, the Trump campaign is throwing everything they can at the wall to see what sticks: From sending Tiffany to a mess of a Pride event, to baselessly investigating Biden’s Amtrak trips. Desperate times call for desperate measures and that’s exactly how Trump looks right now: desperate.

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545 Migrant Children Can't Find Their Parents

Michelle Obama Calls Trump's Actions "Racist"

Why Is The GOP Investigating Biden's Amtrak Trips?

With 13 days left before the election, the Trump family is all hands on deck: Ivanka is learning guitar, Tiffany is reminding us she has gay friends, Eric accidentally and inaccurately “came out” on national television, and Don, Jr. is continuing to engage in his favorite pastime: “owning the libs.”

Unlike the 2016 campaign, Don, Jr. — the eldest and perhaps most volatile Trump child — has been at the forefront of the Trump 2020 campaign. But his contributions seem to begin and end with his role as his father’s angry mouthpiece, doubling down on conspiracies, racist tweets, and attacking social media censorship at random.

Over the course of the Trump presidency, Don Jr. went from being his father’s veritable second favorite adult child (first prize went to Ivanka), to taking on the role of Trump’s keeper — rushing to his defense at a moment’s notice. For instance, in 2017 he live-tweeted James Comey’s hearing, adding his own commentary and explanations while effectively drowning out and overriding the Republican National Committee’s carefully crafted messaging.

“Knowing my father for 39 years when he ‘orders or tells’ you to do something there is no ambiguity, you will know exactly what he means,” Trump Jr. tweeted, implying Comey had added or assumed meaning to his father’s words. Then, in 2018, there was his insistence that his father was not racist because he is friends with “rappers,” and in 2019, he went on The View to acknowledge that his father was “controversial,” but insisted he “has been working tirelessly to bring back the American dream [for those] who’ve watched politicians with no business experience send that American dream abroad to countries that hate our guts.”

But as the election has crept closer, Don, Jr. has upped his game. On September 9, he went to a Trump rally in Duluth, Minnesota where he disputed the allegations that his father had called fallen soldiers “losers” (despite there being multiple witnesses attesting to Trump actually saying this). “Everyone in the room is on the record as saying it didn’t happen,” Trump Jr. told the crowd. One attendee told the Duluth News Tribune that Don, Jr. “sure is on fire for his father.” Later that month, when the New York Times dropped the bombshell story about Trump’s taxes, Don, Jr. dismissed the criticism by saying, “people don’t understand what goes into a business.”

Even more recently, on October 5, he issued a defense of his dad’s seemingly indefensible decision to potentially expose Secret Service members to COVID-19 during his drive around the Walter Reed hospital so he could wave to his crowd of supporters. “I had heard from someone that some of the agents that were around him were actually people who had already tested positive in the past, therefore had antibodies. I’ve been told that,” he told FOX6, which was not able to confirm those claims. Later that month, even Fox News cut him off when he wouldn’t stop ranting about the media’s coverage of Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein while pushing QAnon theories. He has now gone so far as to promote videos using deceptive editing tactics to push a false narrative about his father’s political opponents, and then battle with Twitter and Facebook for removing any falsified content he posts.

Don. Jr.’s commitment to defending his father is no accident, though — he has been clear that loyalty is a Trump family value. “We got into this thing standing shoulder to shoulder in an elevator, and that’s how it will always be… This fight, defending our father, and delivering on the promises has brought our family closer together than ever before,” he told Fox News earlier this year. He also admitted that when it comes to defending his father against what he sees as biased attacks from news media doing fact-based reporting, he “kind of enjoy[s] the fight.” 

In lieu of developing a political identity — or any identity of his own, really— Trump’s eldest son has chosen instead to be his father’s surrogate. Whether he’s doing it because he believes hitching his wagon to his father’s career will benefit his own, or he’s doing it because he believes it’s the only way he can earn his father’s love and respect, the only thing Don, Jr. has to show for himself is his continued defense of an indefensible man. Or, maybe he really is the real-life Kendall Roy.

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Where In The World Is Ivanka Trump?

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On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union reported on a court filing that there are currently 545 migrant children unable to find their parents. According to their report, the children were separated from their parents at the Southern border of the U.S. by the Trump administration, and about two-thirds of those parents have already been deported to Central America without their children. The lawyers from the ACLU and other pro bono law firms had been tasked by a federal judge with locating the parents of the children.

But this is not news to immigration activists, who estimate that thousands of children have been separated from their parents as part of a Trump-ordered initiative that began in 2017 and 2018. The administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy officially started in 2018 and was protested fiercely. It was ended a couple of months later via an executive order by a federal judge in San Diego. In response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the judge ordered the federal government to report the number of children who had been separated from their parents as part of that policy. But as that research continued, it became clear that separations had begun much earlier than the Trump administration had admitted. Instead of beginning with the implementation of their “zero tolerance” policy in April 2018, they had actually begun in July 2017 as part of a “pilot program.” 

Even worse, unlike the majority of parents who had been separated in 2018 and who remained in custody by the time zero tolerance was ended by the executive order, the majority of the more than 1,000 parents separated from their children under that pilot program had already been deported by the time the federal judge ordered them to be reunited with their children. When the children were separated during the pilot program, the Trump administration kept hardly any records about what happened to their families and had no reunification plans in place.

“When the administration started separating families at the southern U.S. border … there was no plan to track the families or even reunite them, even though their own experts warned these separations were causing harm,” Nan Schivone, the legal director for Justice in Motion, a U.S.-based migrant rights organization working to track down the deported parents, told KQED. “And here we are three years later, still dealing with the fallout.”

And the fallout is immense. For the children who were ripped away from their parents, theirs is an ongoing trauma. When their parents were deported, case workers would have to find a way to break the news to the children, often using maps and puppets to show the children how far it is between the United States and the child’s home country.

“We would have to say, ‘In many, many days you will be reunited with your parent, but we have to do a lot of paperwork,’” Alma Acevedo, who formerly worked for Bethany Christian Services, a foster care and adoption agency that has a federal contract to house immigrant children told the New York Times in 2019. “The kids would… start crying and it wasn’t just tears, it was screams.”

As it stands now, lawyers and advocates say they are committed to continuing to search for the parents for as long as it takes. They are on the ground in countries like Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, sometimes with as little information as a name and a last known location, looking for the people whose children remain in the U.S. without them.

“People ask when we will find all of these families, and sadly, I can’t give an answer. I just don’t know,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, told NBC News. “But we will not stop looking until we have found every one of the families, no matter how long it takes.”

This process has been complicated by the coronavirus pandemic. The search committee has so far been able to contact the parents of more than 550 children and, according to NBC News, says that about 25 of them may be able to come back to the U.S. for reunification.

Lawyers are also focused on holding the government officials responsible for the policy to account. “It is critical to find out as much as possible about who was responsible for this horrific practice,” Gelernt said.

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On Monday, news broke that Jeffrey Toobin, a writer for the New Yorker and a political analyst for CNN, had been suspended. The reason given was because he had “unintentionally” exposed his genitals to his co-workers on a Zoom call. The mere fact that it had taken this long into the pandemic to have a high profile Zoom exposure was surprising enough that many people began sharing their stories of accidentally disrobing on camera (toward the beginning of lockdown, I accidentally flashed my child’s preschool class, believing myself to be out of the camera’s frame, for example).

Soon though, innocent stories of accidental flashing gave way to people — specifically, journalists on Twitter — defending Toobin, since, you know, “it happens to the best of us,” as if, you know, “the best of us” are all pantless during calls with our co-workers. But as more information came to light about the incident, it became clear that this was not some simple accidental flashing after all, and was something more serious: VICE broke the news that Toobin had actually been masturbating on the call. While the new reveal should have changed the nature of the narrative around the incident, instead, even more jokes came fast and furious, flooding our feeds.

As “Zoom Dick” trended on Twitter, Etsy sellers worked to make “I Survived The Zoom Dick Incident of 2020” mugs, and new details revealed that the incident had occurred during a New Yorker election simulation (whatever that is!). People couldn’t get their “you mean election stimulation” and “erection stimulation” jokes off fast enough. The hashtag #MeToobin was full of riffs, including quips about Toobin “just trying to multi-task” and questions about whether his case would “stand up” in court.

While the impulse to joke about the absurdity of getting caught masturbating on a video call with high profile people like Jane Mayer, Masha Gessen, and Jelani Cobb is understandable, and it’s true that humor can be used as a coping mechanism for people who have experienced indecent exposure themselves, the reality is that jokes about Toobin and his exposed penis is both essentially dismissive of a serious incident and also damaging to progress around the ongoing problem of workplace harassment. Though we are at a place where people (mostly) understand that rape jokes are not funny, when it comes to other incidents of sexual violence — which is what masturbating at your non-consenting co-workers is — we don’t seem to comprehend their seriousness.

And this is serious. It’s on par with someone masturbating on a train or in some other public space. The fact that Toobin did this to his co-workers is particularly horrible, as it makes the situation incredibly personal and violating. When we joke about it, we are lessening its impact. We are minimizing the severity of the act of power and violence, allowing others to sweep it under the rug as not a big deal because, hey, everyone laughed about it.

But not only is there nothing funny about what Toobin did, it also reveals a longstanding pattern of excusing his unprofessional behavior. A powerful man within the industry, Toobin is also rumored to have inappropriately propositioned women in the past. In all these situations, he likely thought he could get away with it; either he would not be caught or, if he was, no one would say anything about it because of his position and influence.

Toobin has apologized for the “embarrassingly stupid mistake,” and perhaps it was a mistake that the camera was still turned on, but jerking off either on, or immediately following, a video call with your co-workers is not a mistake — it is an act that requires intention. Part of the thrill may have been related to the fact that he knew there was risk of getting caught, or that he was doing something he should not be doing in a place he should not be doing it, as is often the case with exhibitionism. And, in this instance, he involved non-consenting people: his co-workers. 

Despite this, some men in media are rushing to defend him. In a now-deleted tweet, Vox reporter German Lopez wrote, “Not sure someone getting caught doing something almost everyone does should be a national story.” While it is true that most people masturbate, it is not true that most people do so on a work call— which is the defining distinction in this incident. Meanwhile, NPR’s Peter Sagal has praised Toobin’s political commentary, while CNN’s Brian Stelter focused on the fact that this was a “pivotal moment in the run-up to the election,” rather than on the harm Toobin may have caused.

In a strange deployment of the concept of Occam’s Razor, The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf tweeted: “When Occam’s Razor suggests someone humiliated himself through a combo of technological error, pandemic circumstances, bad judgment, & bad luck, it seems like we should react w/ empathy, politeness, & forgiveness, as we would want to be treated, rather than punitive mockery.” Attributing the act of masturbating in a work meeting to “pandemic circumstances” and “technological error,” as if the situation were only a problem because Toobin was forced to be on a video call because he had to work from home as a result of our nation’s public health crisis belies its seriousness.

Even if Toobin thought his camera and microphone were off, he still knew he was in a work meeting. And unless you are a sex worker whose job it is to engage in sex acts with consenting coworkers, masturbating in a work meeting is never appropriate, under any circumstances. (I cannot believe I have to type that sentence, but here we are.)

Ultimately, these responses are telling about how we really view sexual violence, particularly in digital space. In an age when cisgender men are still known to send unsolicited pictures of their penises on dating apps and think no big deal of it, is it really so surprising that people will also minimize the seriousness of Zoom masturbation? It can be hard to conceptualize the harm when the predominant narrative implies that the removal of physical proximity also removes the threatening nature of the act. But sexual violence is about power. Toobin was so secure in his that he thought nothing of masturbating during a work meeting, with at least the subconscious assumption that his position would insulate him from any potential fallout.

The jury is still out as to whether Toobin will suffer any real consequences from this; if the powerful white men in media’s responses to the matter are any indication, he won’t. And the jokes that people are making at the expense of the victims of Toobin’s indecent exposure allow the rest of the media to continue to minimize the severity of his actions. Despite all the laughter surrounding the “Zoom dick” incident, though, it’s actually not that funny at all.

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After nearly a week of Senate hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, we’ve gotten several viral moments from the experience, but nothing near the outrage that characterized the Brett Kavanaugh hearings several years ago. Yes, some people were taken aback when Barrett held up a blank notepad after being asked what notes she was using to answer questions. And, true, many were incensed when she could not list all five of the First Amendment freedoms (something asked on the citizenship test, and which people can be denied citizenship for not knowing). And there was a lot of consternation when Barrett refused to answer a question about whether presidents should commit to a peaceful transfer of power. But, mostly, pointed criticism of Barrett has been muted — which is exactly what Trump and Republicans assumed would happen, and why they nominated a candidate who could hide behind the shield of white motherhood.

The harshest critiques of Barrett have been leveled at her by left-leaning Democrats, and have centered around her lack of knowledge regarding the basics of the Constitution and how the legal system works, but they’ve avoided going after Barrett personally, even though there is a direct connection between her personal religious beliefs and her potential rulings. In part, this avoidance has been a response to the fact that Republicans preemptively created a narrative in which they said it would be bigoted if Democrats attacked Barrett’s motherhood or her Christianity, even though she has said the latter directly informs her views on things like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.

This narrative created by the GOP was not done on the spur of the moment, and, in fact, its availability as a framing device is a big part of why Republicans saw Amy Coney Barrett as the perfect pick for the Supreme Court. They were relying on the fact that, as a society, we have been trained not to criticize people like Barrett: white women, mothers, Christians.

Her white womanhood allows her to be seen as innocent, good-intentioned, and “pure” — despite the fact that she has shown she favors stripping rights away from countless people in this country. Her status as a mother is an indication that she cares about family and children — despite the fact that she doesn’t care if other people will be able to plan their families with the same freedom she had while planning hers. Her Christianity is used to signal that she is compassionate and a person of faith — despite the fact that religion has been historically used to justify colonization and slavery and other horrific abuses. In this way, her identity as a white Christian mother is a shield — but it is also a weapon.

“White women are positioned as the virtue of society because they hold that position as the mother, as the keepers of virtuosity, all these ideologies that we associate with white motherhood and white women in particular, their certain role in society gives them power,” Dr. Apryl Williams, an assistant professor in communications and media at the University of Michigan and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, told TIME.

In this way, Barrett is not unlike Serena Joy in Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a comparison that has been frequently made on social media — and not just because Barrett’s sect of Catholicism may have served as inspiration for the book. Barrett has said she supports constitutional originalism, saying “constitutional text means what it did at the time it was ratified and… this original public meaning is authoritative.” This is, of course, an interesting statement to make considering that adherence to the original version of the Constitution would mean, as a woman, she wouldn’t be able to vote or sit on a jury — let alone on the Supreme Court.

Similarly, Serena Joy made her career writing texts that argued women shouldn’t be able to have their own careers, texts which eventually “relegat[ed her] to the role of decorative, insignificant housewife at the very moment she proved herself capable of running the world,” Sady Doyle wrote in 2017 for Elle. Serena Joy, Doyle says, is an example of oppressive leaders getting “smart enough to sell us poison in an on-trend, very blonde package.” So, it seems, is Amy Coney Barrett.

And while it’s easy to refuse to drink from a bottle clearly stamped with a skull-and-crossbones, it’s a lot harder to do that when it’s presented without that label. The GOP knows this, and is aware that the optics will be terrible if a Democrat attacks Barrett. It a man does it, he will be painted as aggressive and a misogynist. And if a woman — particularly a Black woman or women of color — forcefully interrogates Barrett’s oppressive positions, she stands to get dismissed as “angry.” Republicans are counting on Barrett’s whiteness, her womanhood, and her motherhood, to insulate her from the degree of criticism she deserves, and which any other nominee to a lifetime position would receive.

This weaponized white womanhood is an important part of the Republicans’ larger strategy. They can call themselves “feminists” for putting more women from their party in leadership roles, but those women are almost exclusively white and nearly always want to quash the freedom of those who are not. Ivanka Trump is a good example of the emptiness of “Girl Boss Feminism,” as are Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks and Kayleigh McEnany — all of whom are willing to lie while smiling to defend an administration that veers ever more closely into fascism.

Barrett is a culmination of those women, with the added protection of motherhood and religion, as if any of those things have prevented her from making decisions like blocking the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from preventing racially motivated employee-transfers in Chicago, or criticizing and pushing back against the Affordable Care Act.

The GOP is counting on societal constructs that tell us that white women are essentially harmless to counteract the criticism a man might withstand in a similar position, which is why Barrett is the GOP’s ultimate maneuver to outplay Democrats, a Trojan Horse of right-wing principles wrapped up in an unassuming package. Tempted, then, as many people might be to marvel at the exterior aspects of Barrett that we’ve been trained to admire — her devotion to faith and family and femininity — it’s essential to remember that all of that masks an army of arch-conservative values, which she’s more than willing to deploy to take away the freedoms of anyone who doesn’t fit into her ideal worldview.

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During the Vice Presidential debate last week, there was an special guest the internet could not stop talking about — and it wasn’t Sen. Kamala Harris or Vice President Mike Pence. The Fly™ has since become something of a celebrity, and on Wednesday night’s Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow finally asked Kamala Harris about the creature that landed on Mike Pence’s head for two full minutes.

“We could see it at home, could you see it sitting next to him?” Maddow asked. Harris then pursed her lips together, gave a pained smile that looked like she was trying not to burst out laughing, and slowly nodded her head “yes.” Maddow put her head down on her desk for a moment to catch her breath and then, like the rest of us, wanted to know more. “Did you have feelings about… like did you have the instinct to…” she started, making a swatting motion with her hands. Essentially, the question we’ve all wanted to ask: did Kamala have the urge to swat the fly away?

Harris answered with great humor and a twinkle in her eyes. “You know, Rachel, I think that it’s important that we kind of find a way for all of us to move on. And, you know, fly away from this subject onto something else,” Harris said, through laughter, showing the world that she was quite good at making puns, too. “Yeah.” 

Rachel Maddow: We could see [the fly on Mike Pence’s head] at home. Could you see it next to him?
Sen. Kamala Harris: … pic.twitter.com/Iu0LwOGPfL

— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) October 15, 2020

The fly became the hottest topic of the debate, with people making jokes about how its presence was symbolic. The Biden campaign even immediately began selling fly swatters on their website with the text “Truth Over Flies” on the handle (they sold out almost immediately). But while the fly added a bit of levity to an otherwise boring night, conversation about it shouldn’t detract from the content of what Pence said, including his lies about the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, dodging questions about climate change, and his uncomfortable obsession with fracking.

What this exchange between Harris and Maddow has shown us is that Kamala Harris has more restraint and self-control than most other humans, because she managed to sit next to Mike Pence while a fly sat on his head for over two minutes and manage not to burst out laughing. I could never have achieved such a feat.

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