Message To Ken Burns: What Lincoln Said About Our Founders On Slavery

           (By Lee Habeeb and Vince Benedetto, Dec 30, 2025)

It was 1860 and America was at an inflection point. It wasn't just slavery that was on trial: the Founding Fathers' vision itself was up for grabs. A growing segment of America’s population—mostly in the South—was convinced that the authors of the Constitution were fundamentally pro-slavery. It’s a claim, ironically, that’s been repeated ad nauseum about our founders for the past few decades in progressive academic circles, too, a claim that runs throughout the most recent documentary by Ken Burns, The American Revolution.

That's why it’s worth turning to Abraham Lincoln—a president universally admired by historians, Burns included. What did the Great Emancipator have to say about the matter when he was alive, and why did Burns and his team leave his most famous address on the subject out of the documentary?

In 1857, Lincoln tipped his hand on the subject of slavery and the founders' intention in his condemnation of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling. Far from being hypocrites, Lincoln believed they were visionaries.  "They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them," Lincoln said. "In fact they had no power to confer such a boon. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit."

Then came Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union Address in New York City that propelled the little-known politician from Illinois to national prominence. It was less a speech than a defense of our founders on the subject of slavery and a constitutional argument for the use of federal power to restrict slavery in the territories. He deployed a tool he’d used many times before as one of America’s best trial lawyers: evidence.

Lincoln prepared for months, scouring Jonathan Elliot's The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution and official records of Congress, too. Like a detective, Lincoln followed the 39 founders' actions to determine whether they’d acted to limit or abolish slavery or to contribute to its preservation or expansion.

Lincoln began by transporting listeners to 1784. The issue at hand was land in possession of the federal government known as the Northwestern Territory. Four of the eventual signers of the Constitution were present, and three voted to prohibit slavery in the new territory.  In 1787, the issue reappeared. Two more of the 39 signers of our future Constitution were present, and both voted to prevent slavery in the Northwest Territory.

And in 1789, the very first federal Congress under the new Constitution renewed the Northwest Ordinance, setting rules and rights for the new territories. And again, banning slavery. Here is Lincoln once again.  "The bill went through all its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed both branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous passage," he said. "In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution....George Washington, another of the "thirty-nine," was then President of the United States, and, as such approved and signed the bill."

By Lincoln's final calculations, 23 of the 39 signers of the Constitution had a voting record on the issue of slavery. Of the 23, 21—91 percent—voted to prohibit or limit its expansion. Of the remaining 16 signers with no record, Lincoln's research revealed strong anti-slavery sentiments.  "If we should look into their acts and declarations…, it would appear to us that on the direct question of federal control of slavery in federal territories, the sixteen, if they had acted at all, would probably have acted just as the twenty-three did," he said. "Among that sixteen were several of the most noted anti-slavery men of those times—as Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris—while there was not one now known to have been otherwise, unless it may be John Rutledge of South Carolina."

Lincoln demonstrated beyond any doubt that our founders believed slavery was a moral wrong.  "Neither the word slave nor slavery is found in the Constitution, nor the word property even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery," he wrote.  This was done intentionally, he noted, to "exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man."

Burns, an admirer of Lincoln, ignored Lincoln’s speech in The American Revolution and downplayed the history-making achievement of our founders when, in July of 1787, they outlawed slavery in territory that nearly doubled the size of America and would become the free states of Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Burns instead closed out his documentary with these words by historian Vincent Brown: “If we take the words of the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson, all men–let’s say men and women–are created free and equal, Jefferson clearly didn’t take that seriously as a slave holder, but I do.”

One man who has written about Jefferson and the founders extensively is Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, who would surely disagree with Brown.  "The astounding thing is not that some of our founders were slaveholders. There was a lot of slavery back then, and for all recorded time,” Arnn noted in a speech a decade ago. “The astounding thing—the miracle even, one might say—is that these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery."

The Burns documentary, brilliant in many parts, also did a poor job of contextualizing slavery. Not mentioned was any note of the trans-Saharan slave trade from the seventh to 20th centuries, when between 10 million and 18 million Africans were sold and transported, or other countries that dominated the transatlantic slave trade (Brazil with nearly 6 million slaves traded, Britain 3.2 million, France 1.4 million, Spain 1.1 million, the Netherlands 550,000 and America 305,000).

"Very few Americans know that slavery was common throughout the world as well as in Africa," said Sandra Greene, professor of African history at Cornell and author of Slave Owners of West Africa. "Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I."

While 11 million to 12 million people are estimated to have been exported as slaves from West Africa during the years of the slave trade, millions more were kept in Africa, according to Greene.  "It's not something that many West African countries talk about," she said. "It's not exactly a proud moment because everyone now realizes that slavery is not acceptable."

Burns also spent little to no time on the burgeoning abolition movement around the world.  "While slavery is as old as humanity, abolitionism is a relatively recent phenomenon," historian Katie Kelaidis wrote. "It's not difficult to trace the explosion of the worldwide abolition movement to the decade the Declaration of Independence was signed."

The study of American history should not whitewash the ills of slavery and must include the impact of segregation and racism in American life. Burns and his team did great work on both fronts and a terrific job including Black and Native American voices into the rich narrative of our nation. But misrepresenting our founders' intent on the subject of slavery–by design or omission—is not just a sign of bad scholarship and bad history, it’s an act of bad faith.

Lincoln’s own words make the definitive case of our founders' intent on the subject of slavery. Burns ignored it, but Lincoln’s Cooper Union Address lives on for all to see and read.

https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/cooper.htm

Vince Benedetto is the founder and president of the Bold Gold Media Group. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he is an avid historian and head of the Churchill Society of Pennsylvania.

 

Supreme Court Showdown Exposes Shaky Case Against Birthright Citizenship

 (By John Yoo, MSN.com, 12 December 2025)

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear challenges to President Donald Trump’sDonald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment automatically makes all babies born on American territory citizens. Trump’s effort to overturn the traditional reading of the constitutional text and history should not succeed.

Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment provided a constitutional definition of citizenship for the first time. It declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." In antebellum America, states granted citizenship: they all followed the British rule of jus soli (citizenship determined by place of birth) rather than the European rule of jus sanguinis (citizenship determined by parental lineage). As the 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone explained: "the children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally speaking, natural-born subjects, and entitled to all the privileges of such." Upon independence, the American states incorporated the British rule into their own laws.

Congress did not draft the Fourteenth Amendment to change this practice, but to affirm it in the face of the most grievous travesty in American constitutional history: slavery. In Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded that slaves — even those born in the United States — could never become American citizens. According to Taney, the Founders believed that Black Americans could never become equal, even though the Constitution did not exclude them from citizenship nor prevent Congress or the states from protecting their rights.  The Fourteenth Amendment directly overruled Dred Scott. It forever prevents the government from depriving any ethnic, religious or political group of citizenship.

The Supreme Court. Getty Images© Valerie Plesch/picture alliance via Getty Images

The only way to avoid this clear reading of the constitutional text is to misread the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Claremont Institute scholars (many of whom I count as friends) laid the intellectual foundations for the Trump executive order; they argue that this phrase created an exception to jus soli. Claremont scholars Edward Erler and John Eastman argue that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" requires that a citizen not only be born on American territory, but that his parents also be legally present. Because aliens owe allegiance to another nation, they maintain, they are not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States.

The Claremont Institute reading implausibly holds that the Reconstruction Congress simultaneously narrowed citizenship for aliens even as it dramatically expanded citizenship for freed slaves. There is little reason to understand Reconstruction — which was responsible for the greatest expansion of constitutional rights since the Bill of Rights — in this way.  This argument also misreads the text of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Everyone on our territory, even aliens, falls under the jurisdiction of the United States. Imagine reading the rule differently. If aliens did not fall within our jurisdiction while on our territory, they could violate the law and claim that the government had no jurisdiction to arrest, try and punish them.

Critics, however, respond that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" must refer to citizen parents or risk being redundant when being born on U.S. territory. But at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, domestic and international law recognized that narrow categories of people could be within American territory but not under its laws. Foreign diplomats and enemy soldiers occupying U.S. territory, for example, are immune from our domestic laws even when present on our soil. A third important category demonstrates that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was no mere surplusage: At the time of Reconstruction, American Indians residing on tribal lands were not considered subject to U.S. jurisdiction. Once the federal government reduced tribal sovereignty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it extended birthright citizenship to Indians in 1924.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s drafting supports this straightforward reading. The 1866 Civil Rights Act, passed just two years before ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, extended birthright citizenship to those born in the U.S. except those "subject to any foreign power" and "Indians not taxed." The Reconstruction Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment because of uncertainty over federal power to enact the 1866 Act. If the Amendment’s drafters had wanted "jurisdiction" to exclude children of aliens, they could have simply borrowed the exact language from the 1866 Act to extend citizenship only to those born to parents with no "allegiance to a foreign power."

United States Supreme Court (front row L-R) Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts, Associate Justice Samuel Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan, (back row L-R) Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pose for their official portrait on October 7, 2022, in Washington, D.C. Getty Images© Getty Images

 We have few records of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification debates in state legislatures, which is why constitutional practice and common-law history are of such central importance. But the few instances in which Congress addressed the issue appear to support birthright citizenship. When the Fourteenth Amendment came to the floor, for example, congressional critics recognized the broad sweep of the birthright citizenship language. Pennsylvania Sen. Edgar Cowan asked supporters of the amendment: "Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen? Is the child born of a Gypsy born in Pennsylvania a citizen?" California Sen. John Conness responded in the affirmative. Conness would lose re-election due to anti-Chinese sentiment in California.

Courts have never questioned this understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court upheld the citizenship of a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. The Chinese Exclusion Acts barred the parents from citizenship, but the government could not deny citizenship to the child. The Court declared that "the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens." The Court rejected the claim that aliens are not within "the jurisdiction" of the United States. Critics respond that Wong Kim Ark does not apply to illegal aliens because the parents were in the United States legally. But at the time, the federal government had yet to pass comprehensive immigration laws that distinguished between legal and illegal aliens. The parents’ legal status made no difference.

President Trump is entitled to ask the Court to overturn Wong Kim Ark. But his administration must persuade the justices to disregard the plain text of the Constitution, the weight of the historical evidence from the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and more than 140 years of unbroken government practice and judicial interpretation. 

A conservative, originalist Supreme Court is unlikely to reject the traditional American understanding of citizenship held from the time of the Founding through Reconstruction to today.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/john-yoo-supreme-court-showdown-exposes-shaky-case-against-birthright-citizenship/ar-AA1S4cBE?ocid=socialshare

The Trump Family’s Long History With Immigration

 (By Tal Kopan and Curt Devine, CNN, 20 April 2017)

President Donald Trump has made overhauling the nation’s immigration system a central promise of his administration – and Tuesday he announced new efforts to get companies to “buy American (and) hire American.” But when it comes to hiring, he should know quite a bit about looking abroad.

The Trump family’s business ventures have made use of virtually every part of the US immigration system over time – including reported instances of illegal labor on two Trump-branded building projects.

Businesses run and owned by Trump and his adult children have been certified to legally hire 1,371 foreign visa workers since 2001, a CNN analysis of visa records shows. In addition, Trump-branded real estate has raised at least $50 million in foreign investor money through a program that gives foreign investors access to green cards, according to the company that did the development of the real estate.

Those permits have reflected the wide spectrum of the US immigration system.  The Trump enterprise has made use of low-skilled permits for vineyard seasonal workers, for example, and has used high-skilled visas to bring in models for its modeling agency.

Trump has telegraphed a hard-line position on immigration, and many of his administration’s hires have signaled a move to clamp down on the US immigration system. But Trump has not spoken at length about how his own business dealings influence his approach to the US immigration system. The White House has not responded to a request for comment about how Trump’s life experiences will influence his policy decisions.

Here’s a look at the ways Trump and his family have engaged with the US immigration system:

H-1B visas

How Trump businesses used it: In their business ventures, the Trumps’ businesses have received 283 H-1B visas since 2001. The high-skilled visas have been used for Trump’s modeling venture, Trump Model Management, Mar-A-Lago, the Trump Corporation and businesses associated with his hotels and resorts.

Melania Trump also used H-1B visas as a model to work in the US before she was granted a green card, according to a letter from her attorney released last year.

What it is: Often referred to as high-skilled visas, H-1Bs are “specialty occupation” permits, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services. They cover a variety of fields, including science and technology fields like computer programming, and most types require higher education degrees. Other specific categories include research related to the Department of Defense and modeling.

What the political fight looks like: H-1B visas are in high demand by powerful industries, including Silicon Valley, the medical field and academia. The demand far outstrips the supply, and powerful lawmakers like unlikely allies Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, have long sought to overhaul the program. Indian outsourcing companies are often accused of abusing the visas to take jobs away from other American employers.

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On Tuesday, Trump announced as part of his “Buy American, Hire American” initiative an executive order that calls for a review of the H-1B visa program, with the goal of reforming the program. Legislation on H-1Bs has long failed to advance on H-1Bs in Congress despite Grassley, Durbin and others’ efforts, but the administration this year took some steps to change the way the visas are distributed.

The Friday before the application cycle opened for 2017, USCIS and the Justice Department issued new guidance and policies to make it more difficult for computer programmers to gobble up the visas. While restrictionist immigration groups have sought to cut back the number of visas, as they have with virtually all forms of legal immigration, most lawmakers have sought reforms that would allow the US to attract top talent from around the world and encourage them to stay, especially in the STEM fields.

Asked about H-1B abuse during the primary, Trump said during a CNN debate in Miami: “I know the H1B very well. And it’s something that I frankly use and I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We shouldn’t have it. Very, very bad for workers. And second of all, I think it’s very important to say, well, I’m a businessman and I have to do what I have to do.”

H-2B and H-2A visas

How Trump businesses used it: Trump businesses have received 1,024 H-2B visas since 2000, according to a CNN review of Labor records. Those visas have gone to Mar-A-Lago, Jupiter Gold Club, Lamington Farm and the Trump National Golf Club for jobs like cooks, waiters and waitresses and housekeepers. Trump Vineyards has received 64 H-2A permits since 2006, a CNN review found, for agricultural work.

What it is: H-2B visas are temporary authorizations to fill non-agricultural jobs with foreign workers. H-2A visas are specifically for temporary agriculture jobs. Employers are required to establish there are no qualified American workers to fill the positions and that hiring the workers will not affect American workers’ wages. The jobs can be either seasonal, one-time need, based on peak operations or intermittent.

What the political fight looks like: The H-2B programs are controversial but also necessary to many regional economies. The industries that use the H-2 visas, primarily agriculture and food service, also tend to draw heavily on undocumented labor when workers are unavailable legally or the system is perceived as too onerous. Employers in the H-2 program are usually required to provide certain wages, transportation and housing for workers, which can be a burden on businesses that feel they can use undocumented labor for cheaper pay. The program has also been found to be ripe for abuse, as the Government Accountability Office laid out in a 2015 report questioning the effectiveness of penalties built into the program – without which it is difficult to ensure the prevention of exploitation and abuse of workers.

Another concern for employers in the program is that the jobs must be temporary. But some agriculture industries like dairy farming require labor year round, making it difficult for them to use the program to import labor, which they have difficulty finding legally in the US.

Like other forms of immigration, several lawmakers on both sides of the aisle would like to boost the number of permits and make them easier for employers to use, in part to alleviate the demand for undocumented labor. Members of Congress, especially those from heavily agricultural districts, pay attention to the issue. But on the other side of the equation, restrictionist groups, who are represented in the administration by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, believe these guest worker programs take jobs away from Americans, and thus should be heavily curtailed.

Asked during the 2016 primary about his use of foreign workers during the 2016 primary, Trump defended his Mar-A-Lago property’s hiring to The New York Times, saying in an interview, “There are very few qualified people during the high season in the area.”

EB-5 visas

How Trump businesses used it: A project by the family company of Trump’s son-in-law and top White House adviser, Jared Kushner, called Trump Bay Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, raised $50 million, or one-quarter of its funding, from EB-5 investments, a company representative confirmed to CNN. The property uses the Trump name but was not a project managed by the Trump Organization. Kushner Companies has not otherwise made us of EB-5, the representative said, although new deals being pursued by the company have drawn scrutiny in recent weeks.

Because EB-5 investment does not require disclosure, it is also difficult to know fully how many Trump-branded properties could have benefited from it; Trump also licenses his name to properties that his company does not directly develop.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment on its use of EB-5.

What it is: The EB-5 program allows foreign businesspeople and their families to apply for green cards, eventually leading to citizenship. To qualify for the program, would-be applicants must make a qualifying investment in a US enterprise and demonstrate they plan to “create or preserve” 10 US jobs, according to USCIS. The Department of Homeland Security has proposed rule changes that would increase the investment threshold over $1 million.

What the political fight looks like: The program has drawn criticism from members of Congress on the left and right, who assail EB-5 as essentially selling citizenship to wealthy foreigners – many of whom are based in China – although they acknowledge it does have value as a way to spur investment in the US and job growth. Some rural lawmakers complain that the program unfairly benefits major cities that are already economically well off.

Lawmakers that represent major metropolitan areas, like the New York delegation, have often defended the program.  EB-5 is currently tied to government funding, which expires at the end of April. Despite years of reform efforts, lawmakers have repeatedly extended the program in continuing resolutions funding the government. At a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on the topic, lawmakers signaled they would not allow another reauthorization without reform, but with five legislative days left this month before funding runs out, leadership has moved to avoid any controversies that might slow down passing funding.

Family visas

How the Trump family used it: Trump’s family also has a personal connection to immigration, with his grandfather, mother and two wives being immigrants themselves. Melania Trump is Slovenian, but began modeling in the US with H-1B visas and was given a green card in 2001, before she married Trump. Trump self-sponsored herself for residency, according to a letter by her attorney released during the campaign. She became a US citizen in 2006.

Trump’s grandfather was himself an immigrant to the US, joining his sister from Germany in the late 1800s. Trump’s mother was an immigrant from Scotland, coming to the US in her teens to work as a domestic servant. His first wife, Ivana, was also an immigrant, coming to the US via Canada from Czechoslovakia. Ivana became a US citizen in 1988, 11 years after she married Trump.

Melania’s sister, Ines Knauss, lives in New York, but neither she, family attorneys nor the White House answered an inquiry about whether she was sponsored for a visa or residency by her sister.

What it is: In addition to business-related visas, the US offers unlimited visas for “immediate relatives,” according to the State Department. That includes spouses of US citizens, unmarried children of US citizens under 21, orphans adopted by US citizens and parents of US citizens who are at least 21 years old. There are also limited numbers of visas for more extended family.

 What the political fight looks like: Proponents of immigration reform and restrictionists alike have sought to address “chain migration,” a term used to describe the practice of bringing immigrants to the US largely based on their familial connections as opposed to the merits of what they could offer the US. Restrictionists especially have viewed the US system as too lenient, and Trump himself spoke of the need for a “merit-based” immigration system in his joint address to Congress.

Illegal labor

How they used it: There have been two incidents in which Trump-related projects reportedly used undocumented immigrants as labor.

Trump faced a lawsuit in the 1980s that accused him and business partners of withholding wages from undocumented Polish immigrants and union workers hired by a contracting company called Kaszycki & Sons to demolish the building that would make room for Trump Tower. Trump testified he did not know the workers were undocumented and blamed the contractor for hiring them.

A judge ruled in 1991 that Trump and his associates owed the workers more than $300,000 plus interest. The ruling was appealed, and the case was eventually settled under a sealed agreement, according to a source familiar with the proceedings.

Separately, The Washington Post reported in 2015 that it interviewed workers on the construction of Trump’s hotel in the nation’s capital who said they entered the country illegally, several of whom were still lacking authorization to live and work in the US. Trump’s spokespeople at the time said the company requires its contractors to comply with hiring laws and check status of employees, and denied hiring any undocumented immigrants to build the hotel.

What it is: Non-citizens of the US are not allowed to live and work in the country without proper authorization. That could be a green card, or a particular type of visa, but foreigners who live and work in the US without proper authorization – including expired visas – are considered undocumented immigrants. There’s an estimated 11 million of them in the US.

What the political fight looks like: Illegal immigration has been arguably the most contentious fight of the landscape. Trump made cracking down on it the focal point of his campaign, pledging to vastly step up border security and deportations and detentions of undocumented immigrants.

Many Democrats and moderate Republicans agree with Trump’s stated objective to deport serious criminals here illegally. But they have also called for a compromise solution that allows undocumented immigrants who have lived in the US for years, sometimes decades, raising families and contributing to their communities, to have a pathway to legalization and citizenship. Trump has said the “bad” ones need to be dealt with first.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/04/18/politics/trump-family-immigration-visas/index.html

JD Vance Can't Even Be Authentic In His Nerdom

 (By Hayes Brown, MSNBC, 10 August 2024)

JD Vance on July 22 in Middletown, Ohio.

 Since former President Donald Trump tapped him to be his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has become the poster child for the Democrats’ new favorite word — “weird” — as his stiff demeanor and atrocious policy beliefs have been placed center stage. It’s in this harsh spotlight another of Vance’s traits has come to the forefront: He’s a big ol’ nerd. There have been pieces written about his devotion to the classic fantasy series “The Lord of the Rings” and the way it’s shaped his worldview. More recently, he and his wife, Usha Vance, gave interviews talking about his time playing “Magic: The Gathering,” a card game that draws heavily on fantasy tropes.

I want to underscore that these two descriptors — “weird” and “nerd” — are not synonymous. As a card-carrying nerd myself, I would have to say that Vance’s love of stereotypically geeky interests has nothing to do with his creepy tendencies. If anything, he has shown himself to be the worst kind of nerd, one who reinforces the toxic masculinity that was at one point inseparable from overarching geekdom. It is to Vance’s discredit that he will likely be unable to see how deeply his rejection of all things “woke” isolates him from a community that has come to embrace the “good weird” that doesn’t fit into his homogenized vision of America.

Let’s start with Vance’s ties to M:TG (not the GOP congresswoman from Georgia). Earlier this week, an interview with Usha Vance aired on “Fox & Friends,” aimed at helping to soften her husband’s image and defend his now infamous “childless cat ladies” comments. “He has all sorts of dorky interests that anyone of our age could relate to,” she told Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt. Those interests, Earhardt told her co-hosts, include playing the collectable trading card game.

Vance denied that it was a current interest when Semafor asked him about it Wednesday, calling it a “phase.” More interesting, though, was the reason he said he ditched the game:

The big problem with transitioning from being a 13-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering to being a 15-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering. So I dropped it like a bad habit.

He may have meant it as a laugh line, but it speaks to something very real about how gatekeeping has worked in nerd spaces. It’s true that back when Vance would have been playing, as depicted briefly in the movie adaptation of his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” the game was not exactly popular among young women. Even as of 2015, only an estimated 38% of the game’s players were female, according to one of Magic’s designers. But arguably much of that was due to the self-reinforcing habits of male players who would scoff at any girl who could possibly try to compete against them. How many of the 15-year-old girls whom Vance wrote off as having no interest would have been interested in learning how to play alongside him?

It’s only relatively recently that the game’s owner, Wizards of the Coast, itself a subsidiary of Hasbro, has realized how much of the population was being excluded from playing (and buying cards) thanks to the perceived gender norms around the game. Since then, it has moved to eliminate the sexist art that was the norm for the cards’ illustrations and tried to make the game feel more inclusive overall. It’s a shift that of course drew some backlash from the JD Vances of the world.

Beyond this specific issue, I’d argue that Vance is bad at being a nerd, given how deeply he has clearly missed the point of “The Lord of the Rings.” J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal work was born in part out of his view of the horrors of World War I. It stresses the need for fellowship among different groups against the forces of evil and a rejection of the desire for ultimate power. As The New York Times’ David French and Jamelle Bouie have separately noted, there’s little evidence that those messages sunk in with Vance.

Vance shares that obliviousness with his benefactor, billionaire Peter Thiel, who made his fortune as an early investor in PayPal. After all, Thiel named his giant data analytics company Palantir after the all-seeing orbs that the villains use to spy on the heroes in “The Lord of the Rings.” As a reference, that’s a deep enough cut to really show off one’s geek credentials while displaying exactly zero comprehension about why Thiel’s pursuit of military contracts would be something that the story’s protagonists would frown upon.

We can see this determination to miss the values for the merchandise among many branches of nerd culture. Recently, a post on Reddit’s r/Conservative message board detailed how a group of “Star Trek” fans were appalled to hear politics brought up at a Las Vegas convention. It’s truly a mystery as to how these supposed fans missed the very transparent left-wing tilt throughout the “Trek” franchise, which is set in a post-capitalist utopia where diversity is the greatest of strengths.

Along with this purposeful blindness comes the lack of recognition from Vance and those like him that the nerds have won. Geek culture has become a pop culture Goliath. The most popular franchises in the world have realized that it matters that everyone gets to see themselves in the stories being told. For Vance and others, it’s not their interests in comic books or sci-fi that sets them apart now. What’s weird is their refusal to share that win with anyone who doesn’t fit the outdated stereotype of who and what a nerd is.

Considering who Vance has become, it’s easy to clock the kind of nerd he once was. Over the last eight years, he’s transformed himself from someone who correctly saw Trump as a threat to the country into Trump’s potential vice president. Much like with Magic, he has opted to drop his morals like a bad habit, showing that he’s more than willing to shift and change himself to try to fit in with his chosen in-group. In doing so, he’s become the kind of nerd who has chosen to punch down out of fear of being punched himself.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/jd-vance-can-t-even-be-authentic-in-his-nerdom/ar-AA1oz1An?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=DCTS&cvid=aff3a34aebf94e6ebe672a41328f1a46&ei=27

‘I Think We Should Throw Those Books In A Fire’: Movement On Right To Target Books

 (By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, 10 November 2021)

 Perhaps the most infamous quote of the 2021 Virginia governor’s race — and indeed of any 2021 race — belongs to Democrat Terry McAuliffe: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

What many people might not have fully processed is that the quote stemmed from a debate about books in schools. Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin (R) had attacked McAuliffe for, as governor, vetoing a bill to allow parents to opt their children out of reading assignments they deem to be explicit. The impetus was a famous book from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “Beloved,” about an enslaved Black woman who kills her 2-year-old daughter to prevent her from being enslaved herself.

While that effort took place years ago, it was rekindled as a political issue at a telling time. Not only are conservatives increasingly targeting school curriculums surrounding race, but there’s also a building and often-related effort to rid school libraries of certain books.

The effort has been varied in the degree of its fervor and the books it has targeted, but one particular episode this week showed just what can happen when it’s taken to its extremes. Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.  “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”  Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

It’s easy to caricature a particular movement with some of its most extreme promoters. And there is a demonstrated history of efforts to ban books in schools, including by liberals. Such efforts have often involved classics such as “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” for their depictions of race and use of racist language more commonly used at the time the books were written. More recently, conservatives have often challenged books teaching kids about LGBTQ issues.

But advocates say what’s happening now is more pronounced.  “What has taken us aback this year is the intensity with which school libraries are under attack,” said Nora Pelizzari, a spokeswoman at the National Coalition Against Censorship.  She added that the apparent coordination of the effort sets it apart: “Particularly when taken in concert with the legislative attempts to control school curricula, this feels like a more overarching attempt to purge schools of materials that people disagree with. It feels different than what we’ve seen in recent years.”

Even as the news broke Tuesday in Virginia, another school board just outside Wichita, announced that it was removing 29 books from circulation. Among them were another Morrison book, “The Bluest Eye,” and writings about racism in America including August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fences,” as well as “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.,” a history of the white supremacist group. The books haven’t technically been banned, but rather aren’t available for checking out pending a review.  “At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” a school official said in an email.

The day before, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued an executive order calling on state education officials to review the books available to students for “pornography and other obscene content.” Abbott indicated before the order that such content needed to be examined and removed if it was found. He reportedly did not specify what the “obscene content” standard for books should be.  Abbott added Wednesday that the Texas Education Agency should report any instances of pornography being made available to minors “for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”

The effort builds upon a review launched last month by state Rep. Michael Krause (R), who is running for state attorney general. Krause is targeting books that “contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Krause doesn’t say what he intends to recommend about such books, but he accompanied his inquiry with a list of more than 800 of them, including two Pulitzer Prize winner “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and Pulitzer finalist “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

There has also been an effort by Republicans in Wisconsin not focused on books, but broadly on the use of certain terminology in teaching students. As The Hill’s Reid Wilson reported about the state GOP’s particular effort to ban critical race theory from schools:

[State Rep. Chuck] Wichgers (R), who represents Muskego in the legislature, attached an addendum to his legislation that included a list of “terms and concepts” that would violate the bill if it became law.  Among those words: “Woke,” “whiteness,” “White supremacy,” “structural bias,” “structural racism,” “systemic bias” and “systemic racism.” The bill would also bar “abolitionist teaching,” in a state that sent more than 91,000 soldiers to fight with the Union Army in the Civil War.  The list of barred words or concepts includes “equity,” “inclusivity education,” “multiculturalism” and “patriarchy,” as well as “social justice” and “cultural awareness.”

Back in September, a school district in Pennsylvania reversed a year-long freeze on certain books almost exclusively by or about people of color. A similar thing happened in Katy, Tex., near Houston, where graphic novels about Black children struggling to fit in were removed and quickly reinstated last month. Many such fights have been concentrated in Texas.

There has also been a recent effort by a conservative group in Tennessee to ban books written for young readers about the civil rights struggle. Supporters cite the anti-critical race theory law the state passed earlier this year. And school officials in Virginia Beach recently announced they’d review books, including ones about LGBTQ issues and Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” after complaints from school board members.  Indeed, oftentimes the books involved are the same.

As the Los Angeles Times reported this week, such battles are part of a much larger debate over excluding books that has been injected with new intensity amid the anti-critical race theory push and now, apparently, with the demonstrated electoral success of that approach.  The Spotsylvania County, Va., example is an important one to pick out. While the two members floating burning books have aligned with conservatives, the vote was unanimous. It was 6-0 in favor of reviewing the books for sexually explicit content. School officials expressed confidence in their vetting process but acknowledged it’s possible certain books with objectionable content got through that process.

The question, as with critical race theory, is in how wide a net is cast. Sexually explicit content is one thing; targeting books that make students uncomfortable or deal in sensitive but very real subjects like racial discrimination is another.  There is clearly an audience in the conservative movement for more broadly excluding subjects involving the history of racism and how it might impact modern life. And while it’s difficult to capture the targeting of books on a quantitative level nationwide, this is an undersold subplot in the conservative effort to raise concerns about what children might learn in school.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/10/i-think-we-should-throw-those-books-fire-movement-builds-right-target-books/?utm_campaign=wp_todays_headlines&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_headlines&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3541dc9%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5%2F59698df69bbc0f6d71c2fb70%2F44%2F71%2F618cf7c59d2fdab56b84bbc5

Marvel And DC Comics Face Backlash Over Pay: ‘They Send A Thank You Note And $5,000 – The Movie Made $1 Billion’

 As comics giants make billions from their storylines and characters, writers & artists are speaking out about the struggles for fair pay.

(Sam Thielman, The Guardian, 9 August 2021)

Watch any superhero movie and you will see a credit along the lines of “based on the comic book created by”, usually with the name of a beloved and/or long-dead writer or artist. But deep, deep in the credits scroll, you will also see “special thanks” to a long roster of comic book talent, most of them still alive, whose work forms the skeleton and musculature of the movie you just watched. Scenes storyboarded directly from Batman comics by Frank Miller; character arcs out of Thor comics by Walt Simonson; entire franchises, such as the Avengers films or Disney+ spinoff The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, that couldn’t exist without the likes of Kurt Busiek or Ed Brubaker.

The “big two” comic companies – Marvel and DC - may pretend they’ve tapped into some timeless part of the human psyche with characters such as Superman and the Incredible Hulk, but the truth is that their most popular stories have been carefully stewarded through the decades by individual artists and writers. But how much of, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s (MCU) $20bn-plus box office gross went to those who created the stories and characters in it? How are the unknown faces behind their biggest successes being treated?

Not well, according to Brubaker who, with Steve Epting, revived Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes to create the Winter Soldier, portrayed by Sebastian Stan in Marvel’s films and shows. “For the most part, all Steve and I have got for creating the Winter Soldier and his storyline is a ‘thanks’ here or there, and over the years that’s become harder and harder to live with,” Brubaker recently wrote in a newsletter.

“I have a great life as a writer and much of it is because of Cap and the Winter Soldier bringing so many readers to my other work,” he added. “But I also can’t deny feeling a bit sick to my stomach sometimes when my inbox fills up with people wanting comments on the show.” (Marvel told the Guardian it had to “decline to comment out of respect for the privacy of [Brubaker and Epting’s] personal conversations [with the company].”)

Comic creators are “work-for-hire”, so the companies they work for owe them nothing beyond a flat fee and royalty payments. But Marvel and DC also incentivise popular creators to stay on with the promise of steady work and what they call “equity”: a tiny share of the profits, should a character they create or a storyline they write become fodder for films, shows or merch. For some creators, work they did decades ago is providing vital income now as films bring their comics to a bigger audience; they reason – and the companies seem to agree – it’s only fair to pay them more. DC has a boilerplate internal contract, which the Guardian has seen, which guarantees payments to creators when their characters are used. Marvel’s contracts are similar, according to two sources with knowledge of them, but harder to find; some Marvel creators did not know they existed.

A Marvel spokesman said there was no restrictions on when creators could approach the company about contracts, and said that they are having ongoing conversations with writers and artists pertaining to both recent and past work. A DC spokesman did not return multiple requests for comment. But the use of these contracts is at these companies’ discretion and the promised money can fall by the wayside.

“The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” Jim Starlin, who created Thanos, recently told the Hollywood Reporter; Starlin negotiated a bigger payout after arguing that Marvel had underpaid him for its use of Thanos as the big bad of the MCU. Prolific Marvel writer Roy Thomas got his name added to the credits of Disney+ series Loki after his agent made a fuss. But these are creators that Marvel needs to keep happy; things can go very differently if nobody cares when you complain.

Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote a run of Marvel’s Black Panther and followed Brubaker and Epting’s Captain America run with his own a few years later, says that he believes Marvel has moral obligations to its artists and writers that go beyond contracts.  “Long before I was writing Captain America, I read [Brubaker and Epting’s] Death of Captain America storyline, and Return of the Winter Soldier, and it was some of the most thrilling storytelling I’d ever read,” Coates says. “I’d rather read it than watch the movies – I love the movies too – but it doesn’t seem just for them to extract what Steve and Ed put into this and create a multi-billion dollar franchise.”

Coates says he feels fairly treated when it comes to his own work, but he is adamant that lesser known names deserve better treatment from the big studios, no matter what their contracts say: “Just because it’s in a contract doesn’t make it right. If I have some kind of leverage over you, I can get you to sign a contract to fuck you over. It’s just legalist.”

Over the decades, Marvel and DC have become parts of Fortune 500 companies: the Walt Disney Company owns Marvel, and DC is owned by a subsidiary of AT&T. Now, deciding what share of the success their comic creators deserve is a matter of complex wrangling between Marvel and DC, which want to maintain good relations with their talent, and the vast bureaucracies above them.

Among creators, there is a general sense that it has become harder to get paid at Marvel. One source told the Guardian that Marvel subtracted its own legal fees from a protracted negotiation over royalty payments. Others who have worked for DC and Marvel say both count on artists and writers preferring not to spend time chasing them for royalties.

“Lawyer up, always, with comic book company contracts,” says Jimmy Palmiotti, longtime writer of DC characters such as Jonah Hex and Harley Quinn. “They are not in the business of feeding you the math.” Once a year, freelancers are allowed to audit the returns on their creations for DC and Marvel, but Palmiotti says it happens too rarely: “I can count on one hand the number of creators who’ve actually audited a major comics company.”

According to multiple sources, when a writer or artist’s work features prominently in a Marvel film, the company’s practice is to send the creator an invitation to the premiere and a cheque for $5,000 (£3,600). Three different sources confirmed this amount to the Guardian. There’s no obligation to attend the premiere, or to use the $5,000 for travel or accommodation; sources described it as a tacit acknowledgment that compensation was due.  Marvel declined to comment on this, citing privacy concerns. “We can’t speak to our individual agreements or contracts with talent,” said a spokesman.

Several sources who have worked with Marvel say that remuneration for contributing to a franchise that hits it big varies between the $5,000 payment, nothing, or – very rarely – a “special character contract”, which allows a select few creators to claim remuneration when their characters or stories are used. There are other potential ways to earn more – many former writers and artists are made executives and producers on Marvel’s myriad movies, cartoons and streaming series, for example – but those deals depend on factors other than legal obligation.  “I’ve been offered a [special character contract] that was really, really terrible, but it was that or nothing,” says one Marvel creator, who asked not to be named. “And then instead of honouring it, they send a thank you note and are like, ‘Here’s some money we don’t owe you!’ and it’s five grand. And you’re like, ‘The movie made a billion dollars.’”

Both Marvel’s “special character contract”, or DC’s equivalent, a “creator equity” contract, are ways to keep creators happy enough that they don’t hold back all of their original creations for competitors. DC pioneered these contracts back in the 1970s and 1980s, responding in part to Marvel’s treatment of Captain America creator Jack Kirby. Jim Shooter, then Marvel’s editor-in-chief, refused to return original art to Kirby unless he signed a lengthy release form allowing the company to adapt his creations – including the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Black Panther and the X-Men – without any compensation. DC saw an opportunity to score PR points, and offered Frank Miller, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons what appeared to be much better contracts for works such as Ronin and Watchmen. (The company used a technicality to renege within a few years).

Brubaker has recalled once attending Comic-Con, where he watched Roz Kirby yell at Jim Shooter about his mistreatment of her husband in the middle of a panel on creators’ rights. (The panel, incidentally, included Moore and Miller, who were celebrating the apparent fairness of their own contracts at DC.) Decades later, Brubaker helped Marvel find success with his Captain America run with Steve Epting. According to sources, Brubaker and Epting showed up in tuxedos to the premiere party for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie directly based on their comics, only to find that they weren’t on the list. Brubaker texted Sebastian Stan, the actor who played his and Epting’s character, Bucky Barnes, and he let them in.

Some creators told the Guardian that they did not know that Marvel even had the special character contract like DC. In fact, the Guardian has seen an application for the “Marvel Special Character Contract”, in which creators can formally ask Marvel whether one of their characters qualifies for extra payouts. In the application form, Marvel explicitly reserves the right to tell creators their characters aren’t original enough to get the bonus, warning that “the decisions are final” and not subject to appeal. DC uses the same measure; in 2015, the studio was criticised for cancelling payments to writer Gerry Conway for his character Power Girl, which the company retroactively decided was derivative of Supergirl and therefore ineligible for the contract, according to Conway. He no longer receives payments for her, he confirmed to the Guardian. DC did not respond to request for comment.

The Power Girl incident highlights how ethically fuzzy these contracts are, since they’re issued by DC and Marvel, drawn up unilaterally by the companies, and paid out when the companies account for their many films, TV shows, video games, trading cards, action figures and sundry other merch. One creator, who asked to remain anonymous, said he and other creators sometimes go to Target to take pictures of action figures of their characters for which payments are due, to demonstrate that their cheques are short.

DC and Marvel came into their own at a time of change in copyright law. The Copyright Act of 1976 gave artists the one-time right to cancel their contracts with IP holders, an option many exercised after witnessing the mistreatment of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were left penniless. Artist Al Jaffee once claimed his pay cheques from EC Comics were issued with contracts on the back, so he couldn’t cash them without signing over the rights to his work. This was a common practice throughout the industry, including at Marvel, and one that was reevaluated in the wake of the act.

As comics publishers evolved into major media operations, their staff grew concerned about mistreatment of talent. There were famous fights over royalties, and thorny questions over what credit was due to thousands of co-creators working in a shared universe. In 2000, a consortium of publishers founded a charity to directly aid artists who’d fallen on the hardest times, called the Hero Initiative. (Marvel is a founding member, and AT&T lets employees donate directly from their paycheques.) By the 1980s, people who worked in comics at every level were fans, in the same way that even the ushers on Broadway can sing and dance if called upon. In 1986, DC editor Paul Levitz and DC president Jeanette Kahn were working on new schemes to more fairly compensate writers and artists. Moore, Gibbons, and Miller’s contracts were meant to usher in a new era of fairness. It was a long time coming: some were already looking askance at DC after its treatment of Siegel and Shuster came to light during the production of the 1978 film Superman.

But Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen was a huge success, going through multiple reprints – unprecedented for a graphic novel – and DC never had to let its right to republish lapse, so it never did. The pair had a right to a share of merchandise profits; DC produced merch, classified it as “promotional items” and told Moore and Gibbons they weren’t owed anything. The vaunted in-house contracts that can make creators’ lives livable can always be subverted.

To the extent that there is any semblance of fairness in the industry now, it’s primarily Levitz’s doing, alongside Kahn and Karen Berger, who is now at Dark Horse Comics. Levitz left DC in 2009, but his influence is still felt across the industry.  “You want to create a situation where you never get to the old Russian joke where they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work,” Levitz says. “You want people to win when the companies win. I’m proud of the fact that we improved the quality of how we treated creative people.” More than one creator recounts calling Levitz to ask for more money because of a scene in a lucrative Batman movie that lifted plot points or names from their work, then being shocked when they got it.

Many of his peers say that Levitz was a bulwark against meddling by executives at Warner Brothers. For years, he blocked the publication of Watchmen sequels, of which Moore and Gibbons disapproved – something DC did soon after Levitz left, to widespread condemnation. Without another Levitz, the “big two” are once again attracting the criticism that led to the creation of these elusive “special” contracts in the first place. Some creators have left the medium entirely, but others have founded their own studios, such as Image and Dark Horse, providing creators with alternative outlets. As Marvel and DC may find, more creators – Brubaker and Jupiter’s Legacy creator Mark Millar are already among them – will simply not work for them again.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/09/marvel-and-dc-face-backlash-over-pay-they-sent-a-thank-you-note-and-5000-the-movie-made-1bn?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1

Oscars Analysis: How Chadwick Lost, Frances Won and the Show Went Off the Rails

 (By Scott Feinberg, The Hollywood Reporter, April 26,2021)

Sunday night's 93rd Academy Awards brought an end to the longest Oscar season in 87 years — one that considered 14 months' worth of films, and that wrapped up 441 days after the 92nd — at downtown Los Angeles' Union Station, which, as others have noted, was fitting, because it was, in some ways, a trainwreck.

The show was produced by extremely talented people (Steven Soderbergh, Stacey Sher and Jesse Collins) under unenviable circumstances (during a global pandemic, with most commercial films pushed to next season when more movie theaters will have reopened, etc.). But the Oscars are not graded on a curve, and unfortunately far too many decisions about the ceremony were badly miscalculated.

I can only assume that the producers insisted upon and the Academy granted them final cut, and the producers, recognizing that nothing could stop this from being the lowest-rated Oscars in history, decided to try a bunch of out-there stuff: not only not having a host (for the third year in a row), but also having no comedy bits, music performances or film clips; giving a biographical sketch of virtually every nominee; waiting until deep into the show to present a highly anticipated award; presenting not one but two Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Awards on the air; not playing off any longwinded acceptance speeches; and presenting best picture as the third-to-last award of the night, rather than the last.

The good news, I suppose, is that we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Academy's longtime accountants, PwC, do not share the voting results with the producers before the envelopes are unsealed, because there is no way that the producers would have chosen to end the show with the best actor Oscar going not to the late Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom), whose widow was in attendance and ready to give a speech, as she had at virtually every other awards show this season, but instead to Anthony Hopkins (The Father), who apparently couldn't be bothered to show up.

The producers gambled, hoping for a big emotional moment to end the show, and unfortunately lost in shocking fashion — not because Hopkins isn't a worthy winner (he is), but because the night ended with a gut-punch rather than a group celebration. (For the record, best picture has been the last award presented at every Oscars ceremony since 1972, when Charlie Chaplin was given an honorary award after best picture was announced. It also was not last at several ceremonies early in the Academy's history, but was at the vast majority of them.)

What, by the way, was all the hoopla about the telecast being like a movie? Yes, it was shot with high-def cameras, but other than that? It feels like that was something the producers felt they had to say in order for the telecast to receive the classification of a film/TV production, which, in turn, allowed them to have attendees go maskless while on-camera — which itself was a bit questionable, not because it wasn't safe (everyone in attendance was COVID-tested multiple times), but because it doesn't really model best practices for the world at a time when even the vaccinated president of the United States is still masking up, and sets up Hollywood to be called "a bunch of hypocrites."

Anyway, more interesting than the show is how we wound up with the 23 winners that we did.

Chloé Zhao's Nomadland was the best picture frontrunner from start to finish, which is not an easy thing to sustain (ask the folks behind La La Land), especially in a season as long as this one — people often tire of the same narratives and winners.

The Academy's preferential ballot makes predicting best picture trickier than it used to be, but the reality is there weren't any alternatives to Nomadland of the same caliber, and no one fellow nominee ever really gained enough momentum to seriously threaten it — not even the Netflix-backed Mank, with its field-leading 10 noms, or The Trial of the Chicago 7, a movie theoretically built for the preferential ballot.

Nomadland is a beautifully made movie that has something to say about America today (even if it is set a few years ago), and when people head into the Dolby for future Oscars ceremonies and scan the names of past best picture winners, nobody will blink an eyelid when they see Nomadland among them, as it also would have won in most recent years, as would have Zhao, who became the second woman and first woman of color to win best director. In other words, no pandemic-era asterisk necessary.

Something that should be noted about Nomadland's rise and endurance: It's a testament to the taste and understated but effective campaign skills — working within a budget — of Searchlight's departing chiefs Nancy Ultey and Steve Gilula (and their team), class-acts who previously won top honors for Slumdog Millionaire, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman and The Shape of Water and, deservedly enough, get to go out on top.

Another notable thing about Nomadland's victory: It is the first truly female-centric best picture winner since Terms of Endearment 37 years ago! Winners like Chicago and Million Dollar Baby had male leads alongside female leads, but Nomadland was The Frances McDormand Show.

It's appropriate that McDormand became only the second woman to have won at least three best actress Oscars (Katharine Hepburn won four) — she's that good — although it must have been tough for Glenn Close to have to watch that from the audience, as Close's loss in the supporting category (for the decidedly mediocre Hillbilly Elegy) makes her 0-for-8, the worst Oscar record of any actress ever. Poor Diane Warren also lost again, making her 0-for-12 in the song category.

I was one of the few who predicted McDormand's win, reasoning that if Academy members loved Nomadland as much as they seemed to, then they clearly must have loved McDormand's performance, too, since the two are inextricable. Moreover, in a season in which the top contender, according to one Academy member with whom I corresponded, was "apathy," one could feel confident that voters actually watched Nomadland, if no other film, prior to voting.

Promising Young Woman was also a best picture nominee, meaning it, too, was widely seen and admired, so I assumed Carey Mulligan also had a real shot. But I never really bought the idea that Viola Davis was going to win for Ma Rainey, even after her surprising SAG Award win, given that the Academy overlooked her film in the best picture category. (This fact should have also given many of us more pause in assuming that Boseman would win over Hopkins, whose film, The Father, was a best picture nominee, and had already proven popular enough to win BAFTA Awards for Hopkins and adapted screenplay.)

It's unfortunately brutally hard to win an Oscar as a film's sole nominee, especially this year, when Academy members who did vote saw fewer movies than in years past, and, I would guess, the percentage of Academy members who voted at all was lower than in any other year. Frankly, I suspect that most voters cast their final ballots without having even watched The United States vs. Billie Holiday (featuring Andra Day's Golden Globe-winning performance) or Pieces of a Woman (for which Vanessa Kirby won Venice's best actress prize).

By the way, the fact that most voters only watched a handful of nominees is also probably why, to the surprise of most, the best original song Oscar was awarded to "Fight for You" from Judas and the Black Messiah — a best picture nominee — and not to more heavily campaigned songs from, say, a film that was in contention for but missed a best picture nom ("Speak Now" from One Night in Miami), a non-English-language film ("Io si [Seen]" from The Life Ahead) or a Will Ferrell comedy that was otherwise never part of the awards conversation ("Husavik" from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga).

Sometimes, though, a true underdog can ride a wave all the way to the winner's circle — pardon the pun, you'll get it in a moment — as was the case with the documentary My Octopus Teacher. It was amazing to watch the organic rise of this film, which was not even one of Netflix's internal top priorities until relatively late in the season, when it became undeniable that people simply loved the movie and told all of their friends about it. The fact that it ended up beating Time and Crip Camp is something that would have been unimaginable just a few months ago. It's a great win for South Africa and octopuses everywhere.

Meanwhile, five years after #OscarsSoWhite, the Academy certainly seems to have significantly addressed its struggles with inclusion. Not only was the best picture directed by a woman and the best director that same woman, but both supporting acting winners were people of color (Judas' Daniel Kaluuya and Minari's Yuh-jung Youn, who gave the speeches of the night); the best original screenplay winner was a promising young woman (Promising Young Woman's Emerald Fennell); Ma Rainey's Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson became the first-ever Black winners of the best makeup/hairstyling award; statuettes were awarded to H.E.R., one of the writers of "Fight for You," and John Batiste, one of the composers of the score for Soul, both people of color (Soul, incidentally, was the first Pixar film to feature a Black protagonist); and, in one of my favorite results of the night, Two Distant Strangers, a film about police brutality, won best live-action short, making writer/co-director Travon Free the first-ever Black winner of that award.

The Oscars producers also leaned into diversity in their selection of presenters, which is admirable, although one can't help but wonder what middle-America made of the fact that only four of the 18 presenters — Bryan Cranston, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford and Joaquin Phoenix — were white males.

The ratings will be out tomorrow. My guess is they will not look pretty. It will be interesting to see how the Academy and ABC react as they begin thinking about the next Oscars ceremony a year — or, more likely, just 10 months — from now, back at the Dolby. But for now, and perhaps for years to come, the conversation regarding the 93rd Oscars will probably center on how a planned farewell to a wonderful actor and gentleman, Boseman, went so terribly wrong.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/oscars-2021-analysis-how-chadwick-lost-frances-won-and-the-oscars-went-off-the-rails

Big Oil’s Master Class In Rigging The System

(By Sheldon Whitehouse and Elizabeth Warren, Washington Post, 09 August 2016)

The writers, both Democrats, represent Rhode Island and Massachusetts, respectively, in the U.S. Senate.

For years, ExxonMobil actively advanced the notion that its products had little or no impact on the Earth’s environment. As recently as last year, it continued to fund organizations that play down the risks of carbon pollution. So what did ExxonMobil actually know about climate change? And when did it know it?  Reasonable questions — particularly if ExxonMobil misled its investors about the long-term prospects of its business model or if the company fooled consumers into buying its products based on false claims.

So now the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York are investigating whether ExxonMobil violated state laws by knowingly misleading their residents and shareholders about climate change. Those investigations may be making ExxonMobil executives nervous, and their Republican friends in Congress are riding to the rescue. House Science, Space and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) and his fellow committee Republicans have issued subpoenas demanding that the state officials fork over all materials relating to their investigations. They also targeted eight organizations, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Rockefeller Family Fund and Greenpeace, with similar subpoenas, demanding that they turn over internal communications related to what Smith describes as part of “coordinated efforts” to deprive ExxonMobil of its First Amendment rights.

Take a breath to absorb that: State attorneys general are investigating whether a fraud had been committed — something state AGs do every day. Sometimes AGs uncover fraud and sometimes they don’t, but if the evidence warrants it, the question of fraud will be resolved in open court, with all the evidence on public display. But instead of applauding the AGs for doing their jobs, this particular investigation against this particular oil company has brought down the wrath of congressional Republicans — and a swift effort to shut down the investigation before any evidence becomes public. So far, both AGs and all eight organizations have refused to comply. We say, good for them.

Let’s call this what it is: a master class in how big corporations rig the system. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Smith has received nearly $685,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry during his career. Now he is using his committee to harass the investigators and bully those who dare bring facts of possible corporate malfeasance to their attention. Undoubtedly, the oil industry wants no further attention, much less court-supervised discovery, into whether it has spent decades deliberately deceiving the public about the harms associated with its product. So here come Smith and his Republican colleagues with threats of legal action designed to sidetrack state investigations and silence groups petitioning the government to address potential wrongdoing.

There’s plenty for the AGs to investigate. The Union of Concerned Scientists, for example, issued a 2015 report, “Climate Deception Dossiers: Internal Fossil Fuel Industry Memos Reveal Decades of Corporate Disinformation,” and a 2007 report, “Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science.” Both reports document how the industry has protected its bottom line by funding front organizations and scientists to put out junk science contradicting what peer-reviewed scientists, and even the industry’s own experts, were saying about how its products affected the environment.  

Union of Concerned Scientists President Ken Kimmell rightly dismissed the committee’s request, saying, “Mr. Smith makes no allegation that UCS violated any laws or regulations, and his claim, that providing information to attorneys general infringes on ExxonMobil’s rights, is nonsense.”  Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman are also fighting back. In separate letters, they told Smith that they have no intention of complying with the committee’s request. “The Subpoena brings us one step closer to a protracted, unnecessary legal confrontation which will only distract and detract from the work of our respective offices,” Schneiderman wrote.

Smith is not the first fossil-fuel-backed Republican in Congress to come to the industry’s defense. In May, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), recipient of $1.8 million in oil and gas industry contributions since 1989, called the state AGs’ investigation a “misuse of power” and “politics at its worst.” The greater abuse comes when congressional committees appear to operate at the behest of the industries they are meant to oversee.

Congressional investigations and hearings have a unique ability to focus a nation’s attention and bring facts of public importance to light. As committee chairmen, Smith and Inhofe can direct their committees’ authority as they see fit, but using that power to stifle lawful state investigations doesn’t advance the First Amendment, it tramples on it.  So we have an alternative suggestion. If Chairmen Smith and Inhofe are concerned about the First Amendment rights of ExxonMobil, they should each call a hearing, ask ExxonMobil executives to testify, and give them the opportunity to set the record straight. A committee chairman could do little more to protect any person’s right to speak freely than to give that person the chance to testify before Congress. We would love to hear what they have to say.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/big-oils-master-class-in-rigging-the-system/2016/08/09/03ea2df6-5e48-11e6-9d2f-b1a3564181a1_story.html?wpisrc=nl_headlines&wpmm=1