In a bombshell report on Politico, a former Occupy Wall Street organizer is accused of working with conservative news site Breitbart.com to disrupt rallies held by Trump rivals -- including Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) -- during the primary season.
According to Hadas Gold, a source claims that Aaron Black, an associate with Democracy Partners, tipped off reporters at Breitbart about upcoming disruptions and provided them with raw video.
Black recently showed up in Project Veritas videos made by conservative provocateur James O'Keefe, claiming to work with the Democratic National Committee. Those videos led to accusations that contractors associated with the DNC were responsible for disrupting Trump rallies and led to the firing of several employees.
According to Gold's source, Black coordinated with Breitbart correspondents by email, phone and in person when following Rubio on the campaign trail while dressed as a robot. Rubio was under attack at the time for his repetitive comments in the GOP debates.
Following an appearance by Rubio in New Hampshire where the robot got into a brief scuffle with the candidate's New Hampshire campaign chairman, Breitbart published the story immediately.
The Breitbart website is closely aligned with Donald Trump's campaign -- with the CEO of the conservative website pulling double-duty as acting CEO of Trump's campaign.
Donald Trump advocate Kayleigh McEnany was relatively subdued Monday afternoon after receiving a lecture on what consent means when she attempted to defend his latest comments about an adult film star who alleged he groped her.
Following revelations from Jessica Drake, who accused Trump of grabbing and offering her $10,000 for sex, the GOP nominee told an interviewer: "Oh, I’m sure she’s never been grabbed before.”
Addressing the flood of women who have accused him of sexually assaulting them, Trump added, “These are stories that are made up, these are total fiction. You’ll find out that, in the years to come, these women that stood up, it was all fiction. They were made up. I don’t know these women, it’s not my thing to do what they say. You know I don’t do that. I don’t grab them, as they say, on the arm.”
Asked about Trump's comments, McEnany attempted to diminish them.
"I heard this as buttressing the early part of the argument which is, 'I never did this, I don't know this woman,' in the end saying, 'I'm sure she's never been grabbed before,'" McEnany said before adding, "I really think this is much ado about nothing."
Given a chance to respond, MoveOn spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre, lectured the Trump spokesperson about the big picture when it comes to her boss and his treatment of women.
"I think it's clear Donald Trump has no idea what sexual assault means," she began. "Which is incredibly dangerous for someone who wants to be president of these United States."
"I mean, look, one in five women are affected by this," she continued. "And for him to say that, all it does is opens up old wounds and it's not new, right? He showed he didn't understand sexual assault when he made those comments after the Access Hollywood tapes. He showed he didn't understand sexual assault after these 11 women or 12 women have come out now, made these allegations. And now he's showed it again today. Honestly, as a woman, it's incredibly insulting and it's disqualifying."
On Monday night, Wolf Blitzer went at it with Donald Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller about the GOP nominee's continued attacks on the media and press freedom.
Miller suggested that there has been a media bias against Trump over the course of the election to which Blitzer said, "There's no doubt that there's a bias. Conservatives are biased, liberals are biased."
However, Blitzer made an important point about media freedom. He said, "The whole point, though, is you don’t go after the First Amendment and freedom of the press. That is sacred, as you know, as I know, our viewers know."
He added, "You don’t try to undermine that and say you’re gonna change the rules of the game, because free press is so critical to our country. I assume you can agree with me on that."
Miller shot back with, "As does Mr. Trump. The First Amendment is very important." Blitzer wasn't interested. Before Miller was able to finish, Blitzer said, "Well, he attacks the president almost every rally, he points at the journalists who are trying to do their jobs, and he says to the crowd 'look at them.'"
Blitzer continued, "And then he uses some really awful words to describe reporters who are working really hard, Jason, just to get the news out. They're doing their job."
Republican nominee Donald Trump has been at the center of various scandals over the last few weeks. The latest, revealed by the Telegraph, involves campaign fundraising.
On Monday, the outlet exposed key Trump proponents who "were prepared to accept illicit donations from foreign backers." In return, undercover reporters expected to receive political power and influence should Trump win the election on November 8.
The Great America PAC, a Donald Trump Super PAC was reportedly seeking $2 million in funds from a Chinese donor to elect Trump this fall.
A consultant from the Great America PAC, Jesse Benton said the funds would "definitely allow us to spend two million more dollars on digital and television advertising for Trump."
When asked about their connection to Benton's donor ploy, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told the Telegraph, "We publicly disavowed this group back in April. This is public via Federal Election Commission filings."
Republican politician Newt Gingrich had a cryptic message about victory dances for TMZ and the Clinton campaign on Monday.
When a TMZ photographer approached him for a comment on whether it was too early for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton to be "spiking the football" and celebrating a win in the race to 270, Gingrich pulled out his college football knowledge.
Gingrich said, "The University of Wisconsin tried that once and lost in overtime." According to TMZ, he was likely referring to a 2013 football game between the University of Wisconsin and Arizona State University in which UW celebrated prematurely and then lost.
So Gingrich's advice to the Clinton campaign? Don't start your victory laps just yet.
According to FiveThirtyEight projections, Clinton's chances of winning the White House in November are 85.4 percent, whereas Republican nominee Donald Trump's chances are just 14.6 percent.
Some of this comes down to this year's 11 battleground states, where Clinton is polling at 46.4 percent in a Politico weighted average. Trump's numbers come in at 41.6 percent.
In the swing states of Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin, Clinton is polling ahead.
In the remaining two states — Ohio and Iowa — Trump is in the lead.
Even so, Gingrich wants the Clinton camp to know that the election hasn't ended yet.
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was shut down Monday afternoon when she attempted to use a faulty Wall Street Journal story to promote another "scandal" involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Appearing with MSNBC host Steve Kornacki, the Trump spokesperson cited a Wall Street Journal report that inferred collusion -- once removed -- between Hillary Clinton and the wife of an FBI official running for office.
"Governor Terry McAuliffe giving a half million dollars to the super PAC for a candidate whose husband just happens to be the number three at the FBI in charge of the e-mails?" Conway tossed into the conversation over Donald Trump's latest speech in Florida.
"Hey, if we're going to talk about that story, let's introduce all of the facts, and then let's talk about it," Kornacki shot back.
"Because the story here, for the people who didn't see this, is that there was a candidate for the state senate in Virginia back in 2015, and that candidate was given money by a political action committee that's controlled by Terry McAuliffe, who was the governor of Virginia," Kornacki continued. "That candidate's spouse had a position at the time in this campaign with the FBI, but that position had no oversight role in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails. It was not until after the campaign was over that that individual was promoted into a position of some authority, of some responsibility for this."
"So, are you -- are you suggesting here that essentially they went -- there was sort of foresight on the part of the Clinton campaign to enlist Terry McAuliffe, to ask a political action committee to give money to a candidate whose spouse would months later be placed into a position of partial responsibility over an investigation that at the start of that campaign hadn't even begun?" the MSNBC host asked.
"At least I got you to spend two or two and a half minutes on it, that we otherwise wouldn't have --" Conway feebly replied.
Kornacki then went in for the kill.
"You said it's a big story?" he pressed."I'm asking you why it's a big story, because everything I just ran through doesn't sound like too big of a story to me. It sounds like something if you put it in a headline, it might be rough, but when you put the context out there, it's different. So, I'm asking you, what is the scandal there?"
Conway then changed the subject to talking about Bill Clinton talking to Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an unrelated subject.
U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton slammed rival Donald Trump on Monday for saying that the week-old effort to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the control of Islamic State was going badly.
“He’s basically declaring defeat before the battle has even started,” Clinton said at a campaign event in New Hampshire. “He’s proving to the world what it means to have an unqualified commander in chief.”
In a tweet on Sunday, Trump, the Republican nominee for the Nov. 8 election, said the “attack on Mosul is turning out to be a total disaster. We gave them months of notice. U.S. is looking so dumb.”
Iraqi and Kurdish forces, backed by the United States, have mounted a huge assault on the area surrounding the city, the last stronghold of Islamic State forces in Iraq. They have retaken about 80 Islamic State-held villages and towns since the offensive was launched on Oct. 16, but have yet to move on the city itself.
Trump reiterated his position during a rally on Monday in St. Augustine, Florida, where he also urged supporters to vote early and declared his campaign ahead of Clinton's.
"So now we’re bogged down in Mosul. The enemy is much tougher than they thought. They’ve had a lot of time to get ready," Trump said. "It’s a horrible, horrible situation that’s going on. Why did we have to tell them we’re going in?"
The operation could last weeks, or even months. Islamic State on Monday mounted counterattacks across the country against the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces, trying to deflect attention away from the Mosul campaign.
Trump suggested last week during the final 2016 presidential debate that the U.S.-backed attack on Mosul was orchestrated to help Clinton in her White House bid.
With just over two weeks to go until the U.S. election, Clinton, President Barack Obama's first-term secretary of state, is ahead of the New York businessman in national opinion polls. Both candidates have been focusing on a small set of political swing states that could decide the contest.
Seeking to cement a wide advantage she holds with women voters, Clinton enlisted the help of firebrand U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who blasted Trump over allegations that he tried to grope or kiss several women without their consent over a 20-year span.
“He thinks because he has a mouthful of Tic Tacs that he can force himself on any women within groping distance,” Warren told a raucous crowd of 4,000 at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “Well, I’ve got news for you, Donald Trump. Women have had it with guys like you.”
'NASTY WOMEN'
At least 10 women have said Trump made unwanted sexual advances, including groping or kissing, in incidents from the early 1980s to 2007, according to reports in various news outlets. Trump has denied the women's allegations, calling them "totally and absolutely false" and promising on Saturday that he would sue his accusers.
Warren's mention of Tic Tac mint candies referred to a moment in a 2005 video that surfaced earlier this month in which Trump was heard boasting about groping and kissing women.
Warren also referenced Trump calling Clinton “a nasty woman” at last week’s debate, a phrase that quickly caught fire on social media, sparking hashtags and T-shirts.
“Get this, Donald, nasty women are tough,” Warren said. “Nasty women are smart. And nasty women vote. And on Nov. 8 we nasty women are gonna march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”
Clinton praised Warren for taking the fight to Trump. “She gets under his (Trump’s) thin skin like nobody else,” the candidate said.
At an event for farmers in Boynton Beach, Florida, earlier in the day, Trump disputed multiple national and state polls that show him lagging Clinton and accused the media of distorting poll results to discourage his supporters from voting.
“I believe we’re actually winning,” Trump said.
Just the day before, Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, acknowledged that the candidate was trailing in the race, saying in a TV interview, “We are behind.”
According to the Reuters/Ipsos States of the Nation project, which surveys the vote in battleground states, Clinton leads Trump in most of the states that Trump would need to win to have a chance of amassing the minimum 270 Electoral College votes needed to capture the White House.
According to the survey, she had a better than 95 percent chance of winning, had the election been held last week. The mostly likely outcome would be 326 votes for Clinton to 212 for Trump. The Electoral College votes represent a tally of wins from the states.
(Reporting by Luciana Lopez in New Hampshire and Steve Holland in Florida; Writing by James Oliphant and Jeff Mason; Editing by Frances Kerry and Jonathan Oatis)
‘When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called the People’s Stick.’
Mikhail Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy (1873)
Populism is in the air: it’s the topic of the moment, the subject everybody wants to discuss, to dispute, to praise, or to loathe and condemn. Journalists and scholars understandably concentrate on the American and European cases (Trump, Le Pen, Hofer and all that), yet much can be learned about populism from elsewhere, and by examining carefully its history.
Russian populism is an important case in point. Born during the 1860s, populism in that country remains interesting and important, for several reasons. It highlights the way populism is a species of political hypnotism whose talk of “the people” turns real, breathing and blinking people into a phantasm. The Russian case reveals as well why populism has a close affinity with violence, and why intellectuals, who should know better, are often prone to develop an aesthetic fascination for the subject, and the substance, of populism. Finally, and of great importance in making sense of the contemporary grip of Putinism, the Russian case shows that the language of populism, for all its talk of the urgent need to pit the people against the political establishment, can be absorbed by osmosis into the structures of government. In doing so it enable those who govern to rule in the name of “the people”, who become the victims of state power.
The Russian case also reminds us that the ideology of populism is seductive because it has “democratic” qualities. Known locally as narodnichestvo, 19th-century Russian populism was the local substitute for American, British and French-style representative democracy. Russian populism, defended by an intelligentsia that considered itself the only free beings in a political order of slaves, called for Russian unity and government through the Russian people, in opposition to the combined power and authority of the Tsar, the Church and the landed nobility. Populism was born not simply of a bad local reaction to the revolutionary ideals of “representative democracy” that Napoleon’s troops had tried (and failed) to impose by force on the Russian lands. Russian populism registered and absorbed those ideals by acknowledging that the commoners were no longer to be treated like scum. It praised them and spoke constantly of the narod (“people”, “folk”) and the “people’s will”.
Buried deep in the politics of populism everywhere is simple mindedness, the worrying urge to deal with the complexity of the world through wilfully simplified formulae. The Russian case was among the earliest examples. It thrived on a metaphysical, almost apocalyptic presumption: that a clean revolutionary break with the past was both necessary and possible, and that popular upheaval would result in the abolition of dehumanising power structures. This upheaval would be followed by a cleansing, a clarification of the true nature of things which would lead, finally, to full human emancipation.
Populists emphasised the people’s rustic, tellurian qualities. Russian populists generally disliked industrialisation. They were not friends of technical progress, and rejected as false the whole modern idea of the liberation of humanity through the domination of nature driven by markets and science. The populists saw no need for representative mechanisms, for they thought of themselves as bearers of the unchanging essence of the Russian people. That is why state-organised capitalism guided by parliamentary democracy was for them a miserable chimera, an unworkable fantasy that was bound in practice to produce delusion and unhappiness, founded on slavery.
Petr Tkachev (1844-1886)
What then was the political alternative? Russian populists were often at their own throats; no generally agreed vision surfaced. Although they dominated the opposition to czarism during the second half of the nineteenth century, especially from the 1870s, the populists never formed an organised political party and refused a coherent doctrine. It was a movement comprising various organisations and factions, including the anarchists, the Nihilists and the Social Revolutionaries. Their ranks contained regicides, anti-capitalists, and eccentric figures, like Petr Tkachev (1844-1886), who reportedly urged the rebirth of Russia by eliminating every person over the age of 25 years. The populists suffered frequent political setbacks, as in the summer of 1874, when peasants failed to embrace their ascribed role as “the people” by handing student populist agitators clad in peasant clothes over to the Tsar’s police. The harsh realities of czarism nevertheless kept them going, at times united, above all in their emphatic rejection of monarchy and “bourgeois” representative democracy.
Russian populists typically described themselves as “apolitical”, meaning that they had no truck with plutocracy, petit-bourgeois or bourgeois electoral politics and its corresponding fantasy of taking up seats in a parliament. Populists put their faith in a new revolutionary subject - the peasants and small producers - and they were convinced that Russia could leapfrog the age of industrial capitalism and representative government. The typical populist was a Janus, V.I. Lenin wrote, “looking with one face to the past and the other to the future”. Most populists embraced a version of Aleksandr Herzen’s alternative - originally mediaeval - vision of the natural harmony of the mir, the free association of peasants, empowered periodically to redistribute arable land and through its decisions granting each and every peasant an equal say in determining how to live their lives as equals. Populism stood for the protection of the people in the mir by the mir. It imagined the new Russia as a decentralised confederation of self-governing units, as a new type of post-democracy freed from the evils of serfdom, industrialism, capitalism, and the violence of the territorial state.
The point was to change the world by upending old Russia. Tens of thousands of young populists heeded the call (first spelled out in 1868, in a famous article by Mikhail Bakunin in the émigré journal People’s Cause) to “go to the people”. Others known as Jacobins drew the conclusion that “the people” were incapable of liberating themselves. It followed from this that, since their role could only ever be that of a negative, destructive force, the people needed, as a lion needs a tamer, strong leadership provided by a tightly-organised vanguard that would help fashion revolution out of the chaos sparked by popular uprisings. Then there were populists who were so convinced that the Russian state (as Petr Tkachev explained) was “suspended in thin air” and “absolutely absurd and absurdly absolute” that its rulers deserved assassination.
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s L'attentat de Berezowski contre le tsar Alexandre II (6 June 1867)
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Their first two attempts to kill the Tsar and the czarist system with one violent blow - a plot to blow up the emperor’s train, and an explosion in the Winter Palace prepared by Stepan Khalturin (1857 - 1882) - failed.
Stepan Khalturin (1857 - 1882)
It was third strike lucky. On March 1st 1881, a bomb thrown by the Russified Pole Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856 - 1881), a member of the underground party called “The People’s Will” struck down and killed Alexander II. Many populists were overjoyed; but their spirits soon slumped. The regime of Alexander III arrested and executed five accomplices (Hryniewicki was killed by his own bomb), flatly rejected calls for a freely elected National Assembly, then tightened the screws of repression. Populist violence fed despotism, followed by revolution, then yet more despotism. Russians were forced to wait in the queue for constitutional representative democracy - where they are still waiting, two generations later.
Michiko Kakutani did not actually name Donald Trump in her New York Times review of Volker Ullrich’s Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, but the review was hard to read as anything but a comparison. “Regardless of whether this review was intended as an article length Trump subtweet, that’s the reception it’s getting,” wrote a Washington Post observer.
In a way, those who saw Trump in Kakutani’s review were doing history since comparison is one of the tools by which historians try to understand the past. But does comparing Trump to Hitler or Trumpism to fascism elucidate either of them? Or does it warrant the charge of Godwin’s Law?
I raised the issue with sixteen historians of fascist-era Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain, asking whether they would define Trump as a fascist and leaving them to decide how broadly they defined the term.
The vast majority did not consider Trump a fascist, with the most common specific objection that Trump does not lead a coherent movement with a specific ethos. “He has no normal political organization as distinct from a publicity team,” responded Stanley Payne, a noted authority on fascism history. “The major fascist movements certainly did, almost by definition.”
The second most common objection was that Trump is not undergirded by a paramilitary or that he does not advocate more political violence, granting his comments about “Second Amendment people.”
A few scholars said the definition of fascism is so limited that it cannot be applied outside the context of the 1920s-1940s. “As I see it,” David D. Roberts wrote, “fascism was a trajectory or process that exhausted itself.”
Most of the historians I asked named many similarities between Trump and Hitler, as Kakutani seemed to do, but almost all qualified them as particulars or matters of rhetorical style rather than sufficient proof of fascism.
About half thought a comparison with Mussolini was more apt. They cited Trump’s “I and I alone” demagoguery, his “exaggerated masculinity,” his attempt to synthesize notions of the left and right, his stress on leading a movement instead of a party, and his claim to be uniquely outside the system.
Instead of finding the similarities between Trump and Hitler convincing, many of the respondents found it far more compelling to compare the historical moments in which fascism and Trump arose. Academic historians’ focus on context should not be surprising since they are masters at analyzing the contexts for past events, trends, and people. It’s how they explain how things came to be.
Harvard historian of modern Japan, Andrew Gordon, told me that he thinks there are “overlaps” in “the contexts that in the past are understood to have generated fascism or support for it and in the context of the US today.”
“Trump has tapped into some impulses or segments of American society that resemble fascist impulses and constituencies,” wrote Michael Ebner, an expert on Mussolini’s Italy at Syracuse, like, “Xenophobia, focus on internal enemies of the nation, … protectionism.”
Professor Marla Stone, author of The Fascist Revolution in Italy, responded that she is struck by comparisons to the German and Italian contexts in which so many were “willing to support a candidate who clearly states his intention to rule outside the confines of democracy. The loss of faith in democratic institutions and the democratic process is a striking similarity.”
Sasha Pack, who teaches comparative fascism at SUNY Buffalo does not think Trumpism is fascism, and sees many differences in the two historical conditions that gave rise to each, but said that, “the parallels are worth pointing out anyway, not because they have predictive value, but because they provide an analytical exercise to help us better understand the Trump movement.”
Perhaps that’s the value of Kakutani’s review and the fact that so many readers seemed to draw their own comparisons—it amounted to an analytical exercise.
Yet it could be that historians’ concern about the similarities between fascist and Trumpist historical moments is scarier than Kakutani’s implicit comparison. Candidates come and go, while contexts tend to be long-lasting. Trump seems on course to lose the election, but the conditions that allowed his rise should persist. Professor Roberts, who just published a new book, Fascist Interactions, does not think that Trumpism is fascism, but “that doesn’t rule out the possibility,” he wrote, that from the Trumpist atmosphere, “something as bad as or even worse than fascism could emerge.”
No, historians don’t engage in prediction, but their work and what they see in this election certainly inclines them to expect something bad could always emerge.
John Broich is an associate professor in the history department at Case Western Reserve University where he teaches WWII history from the British Empire perspective.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vented at an adult film star on Monday who has accused him of groping her.
Over the weekend, actress Jessica Drake said that Trump kissed her and two of her friends without permission. She also claimed that he later offered her $10,000 for sex.
In a Monday interview on New Hampshire radio station WGIR, Trump lashed out at Drake.
"These are stories that are made up, it's total fiction," Trump told radio host Jake Heath. "You'll find out that in the years to come, these women that stood up, it's all fiction. They were made up. I don't know these women."
"It's not my thing to do what they say. I don't do that," he continued. "I don't grab them -- as they say -- on the arm. One said, 'He grabbed me on the arm.' And she's a porn star! This one that came out recently, 'He grabbed me and he grabbed me on the arm.'"
Trump added sarcastically: "Oh, I'm sure she's never been grabbed before."
"This are lies," he insisted. "These are fabricated stories, have no truth to them whatsoever. And it will come out in the future. You watch."
Listen to the audio below from WGIR, broadcast Oct. 24, 2016.
Donald Trump has said in the past that he wants to change our country's libel laws to make it easier for people like him to sue critical media outlets -- and now we have a better idea of what he's considering.
Per LawNewz, Trump this week told Miami-based television station WFOR-TV that he wants to change our libel laws so they're a lot more like the ones in England that allow people to more easily sue media outlets for publishing or broadcasting false information.
"Well in England they have a system where you can actually sue if someone says something wrong," he said. "Our press is allowed to say whatever they want and get away with it."
Trump then bizarrely tried to tout himself as a champion of the free press, even though he had just said that media outlets should get sued if "someone says something wrong."
"I’m a big believer tremendous believer of the freedom of the press," he said. "Nobody believes it stronger than me but if they make terrible, terrible mistakes and those mistakes are made on purpose to injure people. I’m not just talking about me I’m talking anybody else then yes, I think you should have the ability to sue them."
What makes this so strange is that public figures already can sue media outlets if they can prove that false information was printed with either malice or reckless disregard for the truth. What Trump seemed to have been calling for earlier, however, was a looser standard that would apply to any incorrect information, regardless of whether it was published with intent to harm.
Later in the interview, Trump fumed that the government couldn't force media outlets to publicly apologize to him for getting facts wrong.
"Over here they don’t have to apologize," said the candidate who has never once apologized for getting something wrong during his whole campaign. "They can say anything they want about you or me and there doesn’t have to be any apology."
Pro-marijuana advocates Cheech and Chong posted a hilarious meme that perfectly captures those that fight the legalization of weed.
The photo is a group of pizzas with the caption, "These are the innocent victims destroyed by cannabis."
While the post is a silly way to encourage their fans to support legalization, their information isn't wrong. John Oliver exposed the impact the pharmaceutical industry has had in getting people hooked on opioids and the astounding increase in heroin overdose in the last few years. But marijuana couldn't be more different than heroin, pharmaceuticals and even alcohol.
One of the biggest anti-pot arguments is that there is a risk of people dying because of marijuana. One way could be because the user is driving under the influence. The problem with the logic is that we've legalized alcohol and don't seem to be ready to enact prohibition to stop drunk driving. Secondly, drunk driving is incomparable to driving under the influence of marijuana. Even CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta explained in his three-volume series "Weed" that frequent users of cannabis seem more able to handle vehicles than the casual user.
A second myth that pot can kill you is because it is more unhealthy than cigarettes. Weed is typically smoked without a filter, using self-rolled joints, glass pipes or bongs and some argue that it the lungs aren't protected as a result. A 2012 study disputes that. “Occasional and low cumulative marijuana use was not associated with adverse effects on pulmonary function," the study reads. So, if one was smoking a package of joints a day like people smoke cigarettes it might be true, but heavy users only smoke a joint or two a day and the typical user even less.
Another myth is that marijuana is addictive and can become a gateway drug. Studies on marijuana are difficult to do because the plant is federally outlawed, so hopefully more detailed information can be gathered about this. For now, a 1994 study outlines that a mere 9 percent of pot users become addicted. Scientists say that sugar is more addictive than marijuana.
The gateway-drug myth comes from heavy drug users saying that they first started using drugs when they tried marijuana. Correlation doesn't necessarily equate causation, however. There are so many other factors that can be in play in these incidents. Users also likely drank alcohol before smoking marijuana. They could have been born into a community that used ineffective "just say no" anti-drug campaigns. There are also plenty of marijuana users who only smoke marijuana and never graduated to heavier drugs. Nothing could debunk that myth better than the entire state of Colorado. If weed was such a gateway drug, Colorado would have the highest heroin overdoses in the country. They don't. States where pot is illegal have the highest deaths.
Ultimately, experts Cheech and Chong should have the answers. As longtime users, they're certainly an excellent case study into whether weed will kill you. Cheech turned 70 in July and Tommy Chong turned 78 in May.
Full legalization of recreational marijuana is on the ballot in California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Arizona and Maine. Florida, Arkansas, Montana and North Dakota have medical legalization on the ballot.
Even after mounting evidence of Donald Trump’s exploitative and demeaning treatment of women, his standing in the polls still hovers above 40%. On the face of it that’s more than a little shocking – but less surprising is the gender split among his supporters.
A recent summary of gender differences in the polls compiled by FiveThirtyEight found that women favour Trump’s female opponent, Hillary Clinton, by 15 percentage points overall; men, on the other hand, favour Trump by five. It’s true that many Republican women are standing by their man, but that’s not enough for Trump to win women’s vote overall.
No surprise at all to gender researchers, though, is that the first time a woman threatens to break through what Clinton called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” of the US presidency, her nominated opponent is the embodiment of the “male chauvinist pig” – a man, usually in a position of power, who publicly expresses the opinion that women are by nature inferior to men and best relegated to the kitchen and the bedroom.
The term male chauvinism first emerged after World War II as more women entered paid employment. This threatened the self-esteem many men derive from their dominance over women in the family, the economy, and society at large.
The use of the term chauvinist pig became more widespread as women in the US demanded not just employment, but the employment equality supported by affirmative action and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The epithet was in vogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of second wave feminism.
Yet these gender equality gains are modest and fragile. Men’s masculine identity is still linked to their economic role, and a man’s chauvinist pig can resurface if this is threatened. But not all men are equally vulnerable to this threat.
Across the divide
All workers shared in the prosperity of the postwar era – but things began to change in the late 1970s, when wage inequality among men rose sharply in ways that affect their economic advantage over women.
Wage returns on a university degree steadily increased for both women and men, but the gender gap remains largest at the top of the wage distribution. In other words, the wage gains of high-skilled women are not likely to threaten the masculinity of high-skilled men. In contrast, the gender wage gap has almost disappeared among the least-skilled men and women.
Low-skilled men’s wages stagnated as the US de-industrialised and the real value of the minimum wage declined. Collectively-bargained, high-wage manufacturing jobs evaporated; they were replaced by precarious, low-wage service sector positions. The upshot is that a couple or family could not survive for long on a low-skilled husband’s income alone.
The men most affected by this transformation are now lining up for Trump like no other segment of the electorate. As reported by The Atlantic back in March 2016, white men without a college degree form the core of Trump’s supporters.
Without economic advantage, a man’s inner chauvinistic pig can break out to reassert dominance over women in another way. One way is to objectify women, as Trump was recorded doing with Billy Bush in 2005. Trump’s coarse comments may have scared away some of the Republican mainstream, but plenty of his supporters have dismissed them as typical masculine “locker-room talk” (a defence even shock-jock Howard Stern rejected).
Male chauvinists also use the state to assert their dominance over women. An example of this among a fair number of Trump supporters is the Twitter feed #repealthe19th – a cry to repeal the amendment that gave women the right to vote.
But women did not principally cause the economic woes that have left some voters so desperate as to think a chauvinist like Trump can save them. Indeed, it’s precisely men like Trump who have used their power and privilege to widen the gap between the haves and have nots.
Trump’s chauvinism will never make America greater than it is right now. Instead, his campaign has revealed just how damaging male chauvinism can be. And now, with his hyper-masculinity threatened by Clinton’s edge in the polls, Trump is attacking the very democratic process a presidential candidate should passionately defend.
Assuming that not even Donald Trump can destroy American democracy, the real challenge begins for whoever is sworn in as president on January 20 2017. Americans need more economic security for their enlightened sides to shine through again. This means more good jobs at living wages for men as well as women. Only then can the country begin to close the social chasms revealed and fuelled by Trump’s campaign – and only then can we banish chauvinism to the past, where it belongs.
