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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Daughter Slams Pepsi Protest Ad in One Tweet

Mother Jones

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Bernice King, the daughter of legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., has added her voice to the criticism sparked by Pepsi’s controversial protest ad.

The commercial, which was released Tuesday as a two-and-a-half minute video, depicted reality TV star and model Kendall Jenner walking through a demonstration. As police stare down the protesters, Jenner approaches one of the officers to hand him a Pepsi. The gesture appears to defuse tensions, which prompts cheers from the protesters.

The ad quickly became the target of derision, with many calling it “tone-deaf.” Critics also argued Pepsi was co-opting the imagery of recent minority-led protest movements for profit. On Twitter, people pointed out that the scene of Jenner handing a Pepsi to an officer closely resembled a widely-shared photo of a Black Lives Matter protester being arrested during a 2016 protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

On Wednesday, King took to Twitter to share her thoughts about the controversy, posting a photo of her father being pushed back by police officers during a protest. In a particularly cringeworthy bit of timing, the Pepsi ad’s Tuesday release came on the same day of the 49th anniversary of King’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee:

In a statement Wednesday, Pepsi announced the ad would be pulled immediately.

“Pepsi was trying to project a global a message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark, and we apologize…We are pulling the content and halting any further rollout. We also apologize for putting Kendall Jenner in this position.”

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Martin Luther King Jr.’s Daughter Slams Pepsi Protest Ad in One Tweet

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

Mother Jones

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump the tycoon railed against big banks, claimed he cared passionately about the little guy, and vowed to make the economy work for struggling middle-class Americans. But after winning, he placed the American economy in the hands of Gary Cohn, the chief operating officer and president of Goldman Sachs. In January, Trump named Cohn chairman of the National Economic Council, the president’s top financial and economic whizzes. Cohn would be the highest authority on the economy within the White House. He quit his Goldman Sachs gig, but he left with an estimated $285 million severance package and agreed to sell a $16 million-stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Cohn certainly lives in a different economic reality than most Americans, and thanks to financial disclosure forms released on Friday night by the White House—which cover 180 of its officials and staffers and detail their finances when they arrived at the White House—the public can see just how different.

In 2015 and 2016, according to the form for Cohn, he earned between $39 million and $45 million from Goldman Sachs. This includes salary ($1.8 million last year), annual $5.4 million cash bonuses, and tens of millions of dollars in stock options, dividends, and interest. This doesn’t count what he brought in via various Goldman Sachs-operated retirement accounts. Nor does it take into account the money he pocketed from his sprawling brokerage accounts, which included Goldman Sachs investment funds. Cohn also had millions invested in hedge funds, real estate properties around the country, and numerous companies, including that Chinese bank, a high-end cosmetic retailer, and multiple medical technology firms. All told, it appears Cohn earned as much as $75 million last year.

Cohn is not the only Goldman alum to join the Trump administration. Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary, worked at Goldman for years, and last month Trump hired another former Goldman Sachs top executive to be Mnuchin’s No. 2 at Treasury. The bank has been wildly successful over the last two decades, but it also has become a symbol of Wall Street’s excesses. It played a key role in the 2008 financial crash that led to a nationwide economic meltdown. During the campaign, Hillary Clinton was slammed repeatedly—by both her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders and Trump—for giving paid speeches to Goldman executives. And before he wrapped up the GOP nomination, Trump attacked Republican rival Ted Cruz, pointing out that Cruz’s wife worked at Goldman Sachs and that he had received a loan from the firm.

Cohn’s full financial disclosure can be found below.

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Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (PDF)

Gary Cohn Financial Disclosure (Text)

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Goldman Sachs Has Been Very Good to Trump’s Top Economic Adviser

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The Republican Health Care Bill Is In Deep Trouble

Mother Jones

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Jonathan Chait has a question:

No, no, no, no, no! Remember when we thought it might be better if Donald Trump won the Republican primary because Hillary Clinton would be sure to beat him? Then James Comey came along.

Shit happens, people, and there’s no predicting it. I doubt that the Republican bill can pass the Senate, but it might. The only thing we should care about is taking every possible opportunity to stop it, whenever and wherever we have a chance. Period.

(Besides, I doubt that voting for this bill will do much harm to Republicans when the midterms roll around. That’s still 20 months away, and besides, at least the yes voters can say they did everything they could to repeal Obamacare but leadership screwed it up.)

And speaking of the Republican bill, apparently the whip count really is falling short. So now the vote has been postponed to Friday. Maybe. It all depends on whether Paul Ryan and Donald Trump can figure out something else to capitulate on in order to win the votes of the crackpots in the Freedom Caucus.

Oh, and one more thing: CBO has rescored the bill. The original version reduced the deficit by $337 billion. The new one reduces it by only $150 billion. But that’s already out of date. They’ll have to score it again after Ryan and Trump finish negotiating with the conservatives. But it’s worth noting that Ryan doesn’t have a lot of headroom left if he also needs to negotiate with moderates who want a slightly less brutal program. Another $150 billion and the bill won’t reduce the deficit anymore. And if it doesn’t reduce the deficit, it can’t be passed under reconciliation.

But wait! One final thing: earlier I noted that the Republican bill is allowed to repeal only the elements of Obamacare that directly affect the budget. So if Republicans try to add provisions that repeal, say, essential benefits or pre-existing conditions, the Senate parliamentarian is likely to rule that they have to be jettisoned. However, as the presiding officer of the Senate, VP Mike Pence has the final word on this. He could just declare the parliamentarian wrong and allow the vote to go forward.

But what justification would he offer? As it happens, Republicans already have one handy. Last year, a number of them made the argument that the “direct effect” rule should be applied to the whole bill, not to its individual parts. In other words, Obamacare can be repealed completely because Obamacare as a whole directly affects the budget. If Republicans go down this road, that’s what you’re likely to hear.

However, my guess is that if Pence does this, he’ll lose a whole bunch of votes from moderate senators who won’t be a party to something that effectively kills the filibuster. So it probably can’t pass the Senate either way.

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The Republican Health Care Bill Is In Deep Trouble

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Trump’s Doubts and Ignorance on Nuclear Treaty Worry Experts

Mother Jones

President Donald Trump’s apparent ignorance and skepticism of a key nuclear arms reduction treaty between the US and Russia have nuclear arms experts concerned about the country’s vulnerability on one of its most important national security issues.

According to a report Thursday from Reuters, when Russian President Vladimir Putin brought up the 2010 New START treaty on a recent call with Trump, the American president had to ask his aides what the treaty was. He then expressed doubts to Putin about extending the treaty, according to the report, and called it a bad deal.

“The Reuters report…suggests that he’s extremely ill-informed about the most serious foreign policy, national security issues a president needs to know,” says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization focused on arms control policy. “His cluelessness is dangerous in the sense that if he doesn’t understand the risks of nuclear weapons and commonsense measures to reduce the risks, he is, and the nation is, vulnerable to missteps.”

According to Reuters, during Trump’s first call with Putin as president on January 28, Trump denounced New START as a bad deal for the United States and had to “ask his aides in an aside what the treaty was.” The White House didn’t comment for the story and referred Reuters to the public readout of the call, which makes no mention of discussions about nuclear weapons policy. White House press secretary Sean Spicer wouldn’t comment on the story during Thursday’s public press briefing and said the readout was the only resource the administration would make available.

The treaty, negotiated by President Barack Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, was ratified by the US Senate by a vote of 71 to 26. Kimball says that’s because it was seen as a key step toward reducing both nations’ deployed nuclear stockpiles and included monitoring of both sides. “So in a time of tension with Russia,” he says, “this provides transparency and predictability, and it means that neither side can vastly increase their nuclear arsenals, which were already far larger than any reasonable measure would suggest they need to be.”

Kimball adds that the opposition to the treaty when it was signed in 2010 seemed to revolve around the perception that the deal allowed Russia to deploy nuclear weapons at a greater rate than the United States and wouldn’t allow the United States to modernize its nuclear arsenal. He points out that a Pentagon review of the US nuclear arsenal found that the country could further reduce its stockpile by up to one-third without affecting US nuclear capability, so the idea that nuclear capability is somehow hampered by New START is not accurate.

Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a nuclear arms reduction advocacy organization, says in an email that Trump’s opposition to the deal seems to be political and could ultimately damage US national interests.

“The treaty had the overwhelming support of America’s military, intelligence, and national security leaders,” Cirincione says. “The fact that Donald Trump seems to be taking his nuclear policy advice from far-right ideologues who opposed the pact should be deeply troubling to every citizen…He seems unable to set aside his peculiar personal prejudices from his own strategic goal of improving relations with Russia. He is tripping up his own agenda.”

Kimball says the Reuters report suggests that Trump is not prepared to handle the complexities of nuclear policy. “This is the guy who now has a military officer shadowing him everywhere he goes,” he says, “carrying a 45-pound black briefcase that can be used by the president to transmit the launch codes to strategic command in Omaha to launch as many as 900 nuclear warheads in under 10 minutes, and no one has to agree with Mr. Trump about doing that. He has an incredibly awesome, almost sole authority to launch these weapons. He holds the fate of the planet in his hands, or in the briefcase that follows him everywhere, and this report today, it’s incredibly disturbing because it suggests that he is clueless about this important nuclear risk reduction agreement and does not have a clear strategy for further reduce risks with Russia and other countries.”

He also said that any attempts to brush this report off as just another odd statement out of the White House would be missing the bigger picture.

“This is not a 6 a.m. tweet in response to a cable news show,” Kimball says. “This is a complex conversation with the president of Russia, and he’s speaking about an extremely important treaty governing US and Russian nuclear forces. This is not your usual daily White House unusual statement. This one’s a little different.”

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Trump’s Doubts and Ignorance on Nuclear Treaty Worry Experts

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"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

Mother Jones

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Despite a decade of working to help America in Iraq, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was welcomed to the United States with handcuffs. Darweesh had received a special immigrant visa on January 20 for his work as a contractor, engineer, and interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul. But when he arrived at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday night, he was among the refugees detained upon arrival in the wake of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.

On Friday afternoon, Trump banned refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspended all refugee resettlement to the United States for 120 days, denied entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), and reduced the number of refugees to be resettled this year by more than half. After nearly 19 hours of detention and a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Darweesh was released on Saturday. Countless others remain stuck in limbo.

While Trump’s executive order claims to be in the interest of “protecting the nation,” experts in national security and counterterrorism who spoke with Mother Jones argue that it poses potentially disastrous immediate and long-term security threats to the nation and US personnel overseas.

“Not only is it immoral and stupid, it’s also counterproductive,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism case officer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. “We’ve got military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel on the ground right now in Syria, Libya, and Iraq who are working side by side with the people, embedded in combat, and training and advising. At no time in the US’s history have we depended more on local—and I mean local—partnerships for counterterrorism. We need people in Al Bab, Syria; we depend on people in a certain part of eastern Mosul, Iraq; in Cert, Libya. At the exact moment we need them most, we’re telling these people, ‘Get screwed.'”

Kirk W. Johnson, who spent a year on the reconstruction in Fallujah in Iraq with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), echoes Skinner’s fears: “This will have immediate national security implications, in that we are not going to be able to recruit people to help us right now, and people are not going to step forward to help us in any future wars if this is our stance.”

The US-led war on ISIS is but one front in a constellation of fights against extremist groups that could be hampered by Trump’s decision. “The US is officially banning people in these countries at the same time we’re trying to build up local support to fight ISIS,” Skinner says. “It takes a long time to build trust with these people. This is like the Abu Ghraib thing. You have to start over, say, ‘Okay, starting now, trust me.’ How many times can you get away with that?” It also sends a message that groups like the so-called Islamic State can exploit. Elizabeth Goitein, the codirector of the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program, says, “The message this projects is that America sees Muslims as a threat—not specific actors who are intent on committing terrorist acts. The message that America really is at war with Islam will be ISIS’s best friend.”

BuzzFeed reporters Mike Giglio and Munzer Al-Awad spoke with five current or former ISIS fighters who cited Trump’s divisiveness as a factor that will weaken America. They added that his rhetoric against Muslims will help them reinforce their narrative that America and the West are fighting not just terrorism, but Islam itself. “Trump will shorten the time it takes for us to achieve our goals,” said one.

Meanwhile, the very allies who have operated alongside US personnel in war zones for years—contractors and translators like Darweesh—are once again being abandoned. For the past decade, Johnson has been leading an effort to resettle Iraqi allies, many of whom, he says, face torture, kidnapping, and death after collaborating with American soldiers. It all started in 2006 when he heard from an Iraqi USAID colleague who’d been identified by a militia. The militia left a severed pig’s head on his door step, along with a message saying that it would be his head next. Despite his years of helping the United States, the US government offered no help, and he had to flee the country with his wife.

Johnson discovered that there was no mechanism in place to help US allies like his colleague, and he began a personal crusade to change that. Since then, through legislation and a special immigrant visa platform, Johnson’s efforts have helped thousands reach the United States, but the process is cumbersome, long, and often too late for the people who need it most. Johnson speaks of interpreters “who were having legs shot off, cut off, their wives raped, their children abducted.” Some of his colleagues were even killed. And though Johnson has been critical of the process for years, now he’s in the “awkward position” of defending it, because it was at least better than shutting those allies out as a matter of policy.

Skinner, Johnson, and Goitein all point out that the executive order reads as if whoever wrote it had no understanding of, or done any work with, US refugee admissions programs. Indeed, a senior Department of Homeland Security official reportedly told NBC News that career State Department and DHS officials had no input in the order, saying, “Nobody has any idea what is going on.” Johnson says, “It reads as though 9/11 happened yesterday, and that 9/11 was carried out by refugees, which it wasn’t, and it creates a series of policy prescriptions to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, as if the stringent measures that have been put in place over the past 15 years to screen refugees don’t exist.”

Johnson, exasperated at the thought of US allies being turned away by the very country they spent years helping, adds, “These people who are directly and immediately impacted by this have done more to help our country than just about every breathing American has—especially the president. Shame is not a strong enough word for today. This is a disgraceful moment.”

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"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

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A Stray Email Exposes a Prison Company’s Rebranding Efforts

Mother Jones

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CoreCivic, the private prison company formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, has been working with a communications firm that boasts an “aggressive media strategy” for countering investigative journalists. CoreCivic apparently retained the Alexandria, Virginia-based firm to manage its reputation following the publication of a Mother Jones story in which I detailed my four months working as a corrections officer at a CoreCivic-operated prison in Louisiana.

The prison company’s connection to the PR firm came to light through a recent email sent by CoreCivic spokesperson Jonathan Burns to Hillenby chief operating officer Katie Lilley. Burns copied Texas Public Radio reporter Aaron Schrank on the email, presumably unintentionally. Schrank forwarded the email to me. The email suggests that Hillenby has been assisting CoreCivic in developing its public response to my reporting.

A two-page set of talking points, titled “Get the Facts on Mother Jonesâ&#128;¨,” were attached to the message. Burns said he wanted to have the talking points, which CoreCivic originally issued last summer, “handy” during a “Metro Commission meeting,” and asked Lilley if she could have it “CoreCivic-ified first,” referring to the company’s recent decision to change its name and logo. The meeting Burns mentioned may be a reference to a meeting in Nashville, where CoreCivic is based and where it has a contract to run the Metro-Davidson County Detention Facility.

The talking points label me as an “activist reporter” who sought to “force onto Mother Jones readers a rehashed and predetermined premise instead of a factual and informed story.” The document focuses largely on the fact that I sought employment as a prison guard rather than simply interviewing CoreCivic about their company. It accuses me of having “jeopardized the safety and security” of the prison and its employees by writing about the things I had witnessed and experienced there, rather than reporting them to my supervising officer. The memo also criticizes me for neglecting to speak “to a person supportive of our company and the solutions we provide.” CoreCivic declined multiple interview requests while I was reporting my article. I also sent the company more than 150 questions seeking responses and further information.

CoreCivic and Hillenby’s executives did not respond to requests to comment for this article.

It’s unclear what, if any, steps Hillenby has taken to help rebrand CoreCivic. On its website, Hillenby doesn’t name many of its clients and describes its campaigns in general terms. The firm claims it has successfully curtailed the publication of investigative reports “with every national television network, investigative cable news programs and several other print, digital and broadcast outlets, including hardline activist media.” For example, it claims that its “aggressive media strategy” succeeded in pushing an investigative report by an unnamed broadcast company to be “indefinitely delayed” and “likely dropped.” The firm says it helps companies “incorporate certain language” in their correspondence with investigative reporters to “introduce the concept of legal risk.”

The PR firm’s top executives, Rob Hoppin and Katie Lilley, previously worked at Edelman, one of the world’s largest PR firms. Edelman has used controversial strategies while performing corporate facelifts. In 2006, it created Working Families for Walmart, a supposedly grassroots group of Walmart supporters. Its blog posts turned out to have been written by Edelman employees. Edelman also helped organize “Wal-Marting Across America,” a blog written by a road-tripping couple who recorded their overwhelmingly positive interactions with Walmart employees. Edelman flew the couple to Las Vegas and furnished them with a mint-green RV adorned with the Working Families for Walmart logo. It’s unclear if Hoppin and Lilley worked on those campaigns, though both were on Edelman’s Walmart account at the time, according to their online bios.

A few weeks after I stopped working at the prison, in early 2015, CoreCivic notified the Louisiana Department of Corrections that it planned to terminate its contract to operate the facility, which had been set to expire in 2020. According to DOC documents, the state had asked CoreCivic to address numerous issues at the prison involving security, staffing levels, training, programming for inmates, and a bonus paid to Winn’s warden that “causes neglect of basic needs.” Shortly following the publication of my article last June, the Justice Department announced it would phase out its use of private prisons.

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A Stray Email Exposes a Prison Company’s Rebranding Efforts

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Will Donald Trump Gut Science at NASA?

Mother Jones

The threat of climate change was thrust into the public consciousness in June 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen told a congressional committee that researchers were now 99 percent certain that humans were warming the planet. “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” he said.

In the three decades since Hansen’s dramatic testimony, NASA has played a leading role in researching climate change and educating the public about it. The space agency’s satellites track melting ice sheets and rising seas, and its scientists crunch the data showing how quickly the Earth is warming.

James Hansen, then a top NASA scientist, testifying about the links between global warming and drought at a 1989 Senate hearing Dennis Cook/AP

But if Donald Trump’s advisers get their way, NASA won’t be studying the Earth as much as it has in the past. Bob Walker, a former GOP congressman from Pennsylvania who counseled Trump on space policy during the campaign, has referred to the agency’s climate research as “politically correct environmental monitoring” that has been “heavily politicized.” Walker (inaccurately) told the Guardian in November that “half” the world’s climate scientists doubt that humans are warming the planet.

Walker wants to shift new climate research from NASA to other government agencies, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “My guess is that it would be difficult to stop all ongoing NASA programs,” he told the Guardian, “but future programs should definitely be placed with other agencies.” NASA, he says, should focus on deep space exploration. (As my colleague Pat Caldwell points out, “Since Trump isn’t promising any additional funds to NOAA for these new responsibilities, the result could be pressure to cut back on climate change research.”)

Trump hasn’t actually endorsed Walker’s proposal, and some experts doubt that such a transition could ever be implemented. But his comments have garnered plenty of backlash from the scientific community. “We’re not going to stand for that,” said astrobiologist David Grinspoon in a recent interview with Indre Viskontas on our Inquiring Minds podcast. “We’re going to keep doing Earth science and make the case for it. We’ll get scientists to march on Washington if we have to. There’s going to be a lot of resistance.”

Grinspoon, a researcher at the Planetary Sciences Institute, receives NASA funding for his work. But he’s quick to point out that he doesn’t do Earth science. During a follow-up interview, he told me that even though he and his space science colleagues could personally benefit if funding was shifted away from Earth research, he would still staunchly oppose such a move. “I will defend the NASA Earth science division with everything I’ve got,” he said, adding that Walker’s proposal “would be disastrous to our overall efforts to understand the Earth and the other planets, which is really the same effort.”

Grinspoon’s argument that Earth science and space science are inseparable might sound odd to someone who has been listening to Walker or some Republicans currently in Congress. “I would suggest that almost any American would agree that the core function of NASA is to explore space,” Ted Cruz, whose Senate subcommittee oversees NASA, said in 2015 while complaining that Earth science used too much of the agency’s budget. “I am concerned that NASA in the current environment has lost its full focus on that core mission.”

Grinspoon says the view espoused by Walker and Cruz is based on a “misconception” that Earth science is somehow “frivolous” or not really “key to NASA’s main mission.” That’s simply wrong. “You cannot study other planets without referring to Earth and without applying the techniques and the insights of Earth science,” he argues. “And you cannot really do a good job understanding the Earth without the insights from planetary exploration.”

Grinspoon points to the “great revelation that started the Scientific Revolution 400 years ago”: Galileo’s telescope research demonstrating that the Earth is a planet orbiting the sun and that other, similar, planets are doing the same thing.

In the modern era, Grinspoon is particularly interested in his colleagues’ research demonstrating the impact people are having on our planet—he’s the author of Earth in Human Hands, a recent book exploring the role man has played in altering our world. But he points out that NASA’s Earth science program goes far beyond climate change. “It’s a broad-based effort to understand the Earth system,” he says. “And out of that research has come a realization that climate is changing—a wide range of indicators: from changes in sea ice to droughts and changes to the hydrological cycle, and movement of species, and the documentation of urbanization and deforestation.”

“We’re going to stop looking at Earth from orbit because we don’t like what we are seeing and the conclusions that leads us to?” he adds, incredulously. “That’s nonsense.”

Galileo Galilei got in trouble for mixing Earth science and space science. Wellcome Images

But what about Walker’s proposal to shift NASA’s climate work to NOAA? That, too, is nonsense, Grinspoon says. “NOAA is tiny compared to NASA.” The move would require a massive expansion of NOAA’s capabilities that would set American research back 20 years. “If we gutted NASA Earth science, it wouldn’t be NOAA or some other agency that would take the lead,” he says. “It would be the Chinese and the Europeans and the Japanese.”­

Fortunately, Grinspoon is pretty convinced that the threats to Earth science are mostly “loose talk.” While he’s worried that NASA research programs could lose some funding, he doesn’t think Trump or Congress would really try to stop it altogether.

Other experts I talked to agree. “It’s not at all clear that they are even going to propose this,” says Josh Shiode, a senior government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He points to a recent Science magazine interview with Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), who chairs the House subcommittee in charge of the budgets for NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation. While Culberson wouldn’t promise that Earth science programs would continue to be housed in NASA, he didn’t endorse Walker’s proposals either. “Nobody in the Earth sciences community should be concerned in the least,” he said. “All of us in Congress are strong supporters of keeping a close eye on planet Earth.” Shiode says the idea would face even longer odds in the Senate, where a number of mainstream Republicans would likely oppose it.

Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, also doubts that Congress would attempt to eliminate NASA’s Earth science budget. A bigger concern, he says, is that Trump—an infamous global warming denier—could appoint officials who would interfere with the ability of climate scientists at the agency to publicize their research.

The key, says Rosenberg, will be for the public—scientists, politicians, and concerned citizens—to hold the Trump administration accountable. NASA’s researchers will continue doing groundbreaking climate change work, and Americans, he says, “need to let the government know that they demand this information.”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Will Donald Trump Gut Science at NASA?

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The Crazy Story of the Professor Who Came to Stay—and Wouldn’t Leave

Mother Jones

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Elizabeth Abel walked up to the front door of her house for the first time in four months and rang the bell. She’d just flown halfway around the world to drop in, unannounced, on the man who’d taken over her home.

When he came to the door, Abel says, the man didn’t seem surprised to see her—or the police officer standing beside her. “Oh, hi,” he said.

Abel peered behind him into her living room, which was practically empty. Most of her furniture was gone: a dining table and four chairs, two easy chairs, an antique piece. Her books and rugs were nowhere to be seen. Even the artwork had been taken off the walls.

As Abel walked around the place she’d called home for three decades, she had the distinct feeling that her life had been erased. In the family room, a small sofa, a table, and a television had been removed. Out on the back deck, the wooden table and benches were missing. The bedrooms were emptied out, her mattresses crammed into the office. Closets were sealed with blue painter’s tape. She turned to the man, who had been renting her place for the past several months—without paying. “What is going on here?” she demanded. “What are you doing?”

In October 2015, as she was planning a semester-long research trip to Paris, Abel logged on to SabbaticalHomes.com to find someone to rent her house. The site bills itself as a sort of Airbnb for academics; its motto is “A place for minds on the move.” Abel, an English professor at the University of California-Berkeley, quickly received a bunch of responses, the first of which came from a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College named David Peritz.

Peritz visited Abel’s cozy two-bedroom Spanish Revival in Kensington, a pocket of suburban affluence just north of Berkeley. He’d grown up in nearby Sonoma County, and he said he and his wife and their teenage son were spending some time on the West Coast to be close to family and friends. Peritz liked what he saw—the view of the Golden Gate, the office in the detached garage. There was one small thing, however: His wife had severe allergies, Peritz told Abel; could he store the small rug in the bedroom elsewhere for the duration of the rental? She was hesitant at first but agreed when he later suggested a storage facility.

Abel, now 71, didn’t feel much of a connection with Peritz, two decades her junior. Still, she thought to herself, “Oh, come on. He’s a professor.” She found him polite and gracious, and she didn’t bother asking for references, let alone do a background check. She didn’t notice until much later that his personal checks lacked a home address. Why would she? That was precisely the point of Sabbatical Homes; unlike Craigslist or Airbnb, it was opening your home not to random people, but to colleagues. (As the site’s founder put it in a press release, “There is an implicit degree of trust amongst academics.”) When Abel discussed her would-be renter with her husband, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology who spends most of the year at the University of Texas-Austin, she didn’t mention any misgivings.

So in January 2016, Abel headed to the Latin Quarter to work on a new book on Virginia Woolf, and Peritz moved into her home.

In early February, Abel noticed that Peritz hadn’t paid the rent by the first of the month, as they’d agreed upon. After a week’s delay and several apologies, the money appeared in Abel’s account. “Okay,” she thought, “he’s a little disorganized.”

In March, Peritz again failed to pay on time. He said his wife had an emergency dental procedure that they’d had to pay for out of pocket, and he once again profusely apologized for the inconvenience. Getting worried, Abel gave him a chance to break the lease, but he declined, promising to catch up on his payments.

By the time April 1 came and went without a rent check, Abel had had enough. She wrote Peritz to tell him she was taking him to small-claims court. Around the same time, Abel’s neighbors began writing her increasingly concerned emails. One of them had even seen Peritz taking her furniture down the driveway to the office in the garage late at night. They rarely, if ever, saw his wife or son.

Abel got in touch with the Kensington Police Department, which sent an officer by the house to talk with Peritz. The officer emailed Abel to tell her that he thought Peritz was “trying to establish squatters rights or lock you out,” and that she should have a cop accompany her when she eventually came back home. Someone from the police department would tell her she should start the eviction process as soon as possible. It might take weeks, even months, to get Peritz out of her house.

It’s not easy to evict someone in California. Generally that’s a good thing—especially in the Bay Area, one of the nation’s most expensive places to live. In a region where it’s not uncommon for one-bedroom apartments to rent for more than $3,000 a month, there’s an obvious incentive for landlords to find excuses to force out tenants and jack up the rent.

When a tenant stops paying rent, the eviction process goes like this: First, he or she must be served a three-day notice of what he owes. Once that notice has expired without payment, the landlord has to file what’s known as an unlawful detainer complaint, which must then be served to the renter along with a court summons. The renter has five days to respond, and either party can request a court date within the next 20 days. Along the way, the case can get delayed for any number of reasons, stretching out the process to a couple of months. In the meantime, the tenant stays put, rent-free.

This process was set up in part to protect tenants from predatory landlords. But in some instances it has provided cover for people looking to score a few months of free housing. In 2008, SF Weekly reported that there were between 20 and 100 serial evictees operating in San Francisco—bouncing from home to home without ever paying a dime.

The sharing economy has provided new opportunities for grifters to game the system. So-called Airbnb squatters—like the pair of brothers who refused to leave a Palm Springs condo in the summer of 2014 after paying one month’s rent—have become more common. It’s enough of an issue that Airbnb has a page devoted to the topic; it warns that local laws may allow long-term guests to establish tenants’ rights.

“I’m always amazed at how many risks people take with their home,” says Leah Simon-Weisberg, the legal director at a Bay Area tenants’ rights organization and a commissioner on Berkeley’s rent board. “You let these total strangers in, you know nothing about their credit, you’ve never met them before, and you let them into your home with your stuff. I mean, it kind of blows my mind.”

A day after Abel cut her sabbatical short and flew home to confront Peritz in person, she sent him an email to confirm that she wanted him out so she could move back in on May 1.

Peritz responded several days later. He wrote that he wasn’t “presently in a position to vacate the premises.” He also told her he’d been in touch with an attorney, and said if Abel tried to evict him, they’d end up in court, which “could be expensive, time consuming and draining for both of us.”

Peritz also blamed Abel for his inability to find a new place to stay, claiming that she had “submitted a false feedback report” on SabbaticalHomes.com. The lawyer, he said, had called it a “textbook case of libel.” “I realize that your intentions in making that report were good,” Peritz wrote, “but it remains the case that what you reported was false and that we have been damaged by it.” He said if she was willing to negotiate or arbitrate a settlement, he was “amenable to releasing you from all potential liability that could result from your false report.”

Abel was stunned. Not only had a tenured professor who lists “social contract theory” among his research interests exploited her trust, but now he was digging in and dragging things out. How much time, effort, and money would it take to get back into the home where she’d raised her son, written a couple of books, and lived for the better part of her adult life?

In early May, Abel moved into a neighbor’s house right across the street from her home. There, in an upstairs bedroom, she set up what she semi-jokingly refers to as “command central.” “I became,” she says, “relatively obsessed with all this.”

The room had two windows, one facing Abel’s home. She would often sit in the comfortable chair she’d placed next to the front window—alongside a stack of folders full of correspondence with her lawyer and various state and local agencies. Every day, she looked out and saw Peritz’s red pickup truck parked on the street.

With the help of a private investigator, Abel began to learn about Peritz’s erratic rental history. For starters, she discovered that when he first reached out to her—assuring her in an email, “We have sublet and house-sat several times before, and have references to say that we are responsible, considerate, quiet, clean and reasonably easy going”—he was in the middle of being evicted from another rental home in Berkeley. (The case was eventually settled out of court.) The PI also turned up at least one eviction attempt in New York City, as well as multiple federal and New York state tax liens.

There was more. After Abel had complained to SabbaticalHomes.com, the site’s founder, Nadege Conger, alerted several other users whom Peritz had been in touch with and blocked his account. When he created a new account with a different email address, that was blocked, too. Conger also connected Abel with a New York City couple, both professors, who’d threatened Peritz with a lawsuit when he stopped paying rent while subletting their apartment in 2015. When the couple returned from a six-month trip, they claimed Peritz owed them approximately $5,375. Photos show that their apartment was a mess: Furniture was broken, paintings had gone missing, and the floors had been stripped from what looked like repeated scrubbing. (Peritz had told them in an email that he’d been mopping frequently to keep down the dust from construction next door.) The couple didn’t write a negative review of Peritz because they didn’t think it would make much of a difference, and they didn’t contact his supervisors at Sarah Lawrence—a small liberal arts college in nearby Westchester County—because they feared a lawsuit.

Armed with this information, Abel reached out to people who knew Peritz—colleagues at UC-Berkeley, old classmates, anyone who might have some insight into his motivations. Some of his longtime friends agreed to try to convince him to leave her house, and soon.

As May stretched on, an anonymous blog called David Peritz—Unlawful Detainer popped up. “Do Not Rent Your Home to David Peritz,” the site blares; Peritz’s official headshot is stamped “Serial Evictee.” It’s not clear who made it; Abel says she had nothing to do with it. (“I wouldn’t know how to, first of all,” she told me.)

Abel eventually reached out to Sarah Lawrence to see if it might investigate Peritz’s behavior. In a brief, apologetic response, Dean of the College Kanwal Singh wrote that the school “cannot take any action in this case as it has nothing to do with the College.”

Abel’s colleagues at UC-Berkeley, on the other hand, weren’t shy about getting involved. She had seen that Peritz had a copy of a book by political scientist Wendy Brown; figuring that he might admire Brown’s work, Abel asked her and her longtime partner, renowned gender theorist Judith Butler, if they’d mind contacting him. They agreed.

Butler sent Peritz two epic, eviscerating emails. The first began, “I have recently become aware of your scurrilous behavior—effectively squatting in the home of my colleague, Elizabeth Abel. If you are not out of that apartment within five days time, I will write to every colleague in your field explaining the horrible scam you have committed.” The second, written less than a week later, bore the subject line “your miscalculation” and included this withering coup de grâce:

…please accept the fact that you have painted yourself into a corner, and that you have to leave promptly, and with an apology and a payment plan, in order to avoid any further destruction to your professional and personal world. Your itinerary of self-destruction is a stellar one.

Brown’s email was equally harsh. “It’s past time for you to leave. And in case you are wondering whether there are any future possibilities of teaching at Berkeley, the answer is an emphatic no,” she wrote. “The game is up.”

I’ve reached out multiple times to Peritz to get his side of the story. In his response to my initial email, he denied “the veracity of most of what is said about me” on the blog about him. He said he would meet with me, if only to correct the record. He then stopped responding to my emails and phone calls. After a later exchange of messages to set up a meeting, Peritz said his lawyer had “strongly advised” him against commenting further. He ultimately responded to just one of the many questions I emailed him and his attorney.

Without hearing from Peritz, it’s impossible to know why he’s jumped from one messy rental fight to another. Some of his old friends shake their heads at his situation but will not speculate on the record about his motivations. One longtime acquaintance declined an interview request, writing in an email, “David Peritz was once a friend of mine, and I am reluctant to play a part in a story that would make his life more difficult.”

As news of his run-in with Abel has spread among the academic community, it has trickled into his professional life. While Peritz was in California over the summer (and part time in the fall), he gave lectures in a number of continuing-education institutes and at area senior centers. A group of students pushed to cancel his continuing-education classes at UC-Berkeley and other Bay Area universities. Acknowledging the buzz about Peritz’s rental history, the director of San Francisco’s Fromm Institute, a nonprofit offering classes to retirees, told a group of colleagues in an email that he’d written Peritz to assure him that “attempts to besmirch your reputation will have no bearing on our mutually rewarding relationship.” (The director, Robert Fordham, responded to a request for comment by writing, “Prof. David Peritz continues to be a teacher at the Fromm Institute who is highly evaluated by his students for his work in the classroom with them.”)

Peritz returned to Sarah Lawrence to teach this past fall; a college spokeswoman declined to comment for this story. But it appears that he will continue to live at least part time in the Bay Area through the spring. He told me in an email that he was making frequent trips between New York and California to help care for his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. “I will continue to do so so long as I am able to,” he wrote. “I have done some teaching in the Bay Area to help offset the costs of my trips.”

According to the course registry for San Francisco State University’s continuing-education program, he’ll be teaching a class there starting in January. The name of the course: “Ethics and Politics of New Technology.”

In late May, a superior court judge ruled in Abel’s favor: Peritz had to vacate her house by 4 p.m. on Memorial Day and pay what he still owed her starting in the fall.

When the day came, she gathered across the street with a few friends and neighbors, watching Peritz slowly load his truck. At four o’clock, Abel crossed the street, walked up to Peritz, and asked for the keys. He handed them over, and, after a testy back-and-forth about his belongings that were still inside the house, Abel’s friends hauled them out to the curb.

When Peritz drove off, Abel popped open some champagne and her friends toasted his departure. He was finally gone.

Moving back into her house, though, wasn’t without incident. First of all, Abel had to move all her furniture back into her house from her office and basement, where Peritz had stored it. And when she went to put her pictures back on the walls, Abel realized she couldn’t figure out where exactly they’d previously hung: The nails had been removed, the holes had been spackled over, and the walls had been repainted.

Abel holds out hope that her experience could lead to a change in California’s eviction laws, or at least keep someone else from being duped. And while her trust in people was “radically challenged” by her encounter with Peritz, she says she has felt that soften as time has gone by. “I still feel that most people are trustworthy,” she says. “It’s something about my temperament and inclination to believe what people say.”

According to the terms of their settlement, Peritz was scheduled to begin paying Abel his back rent at the end of September, though she resigned herself to never seeing that money. But one night, Abel returned home to find an envelope containing an $800 money order—his first settlement payment. It had been slipped through the mail slot in her front door. “He does manage,” Abel told me the next day, “to keep one off-guard.”

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The Crazy Story of the Professor Who Came to Stay—and Wouldn’t Leave

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Here’s Evidence Steve Bannon Joined a Facebook Group That Posts Racist Rants and Obama Death Threats

Mother Jones

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Stephen Bannon, whom Donald Trump tapped as his chief strategist in the White House, has come under fire for his self-admitted promotion of the alt-right, a haven of white nationalists, when he was head of far-right Breitbart News. His defenders have insisted Bannon is no racist or anti-Semite. But Mother Jones has uncovered another clue about Bannon’s political personality: Bannon joined a conservative Facebook group that has featured racist and extreme material. This material includes posts urging a military coup against President Barack Obama, featuring an image of the president dressed as an SS officer, celebrating the Confederate flag, highlighting a photoshopped picture of Obama with watermelons, praising a police officer who called Obama a “F*cking Nigger,” and calling for Obama to be “executed as a traitor.”

This Facebook group is for an outfit called Vigilant Patriots, which claims its goals are defending and upholding the Constitution and preserving “our history and culture.” As of Friday morning, it listed nearly 3,600 members, including Stephen Bannon, who apparently joined the group seven years ago.

Vigilant Patriots is a collection of right-wing Facebookers, including members who hail militias and decry Muslims, immigration, progressives, sellout Republicans, and the president with hateful, violent, and racist rhetoric. It has an active Twitter feed that is virulently anti-Islam. Its website does not seem to be functioning currently.

Bannon has not engaged in much public activity on Facebook. He is listed as a member of 31 groups, most of them conservative, with several comprising supporters of Sarah Palin. (Bannon once made a gushy documentary about the tea party star.) A search of Facebook turned up only a handful of posts attributed to Bannon, none on the Vigilant Patriots page.

With Facebook, there is always the chance an account could be a spoof or phony. But the Facebook account attributed to Bannon—the one that joined the Vigilant Patriots group—does appear to be legitimate. The Facebook page for the Breitbart radio show that Bannon once hosted contains a post from Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor, that linked to Bannon using this particular Facebook account. The Facebook page for Bannon’s Palin documentary also linked to this Facebook account for Bannon. And a private and official Facebook group for media professionals lists Bannon as a member using this Facebook account. Bannon had to be added to this group by a Facebook staffer. (Facebook would not confirm whether this account belongs to Bannon.)

This Bannon Facebook page joined a group that has provided a platform for extremism and racism. The Vigilant Patriots page on Facebook pushes a vicious mix of agitprop and conspiracy theory. It has published calls to arrest, impeach, and execute Obama. A 2012 post declared that Obama must be arrested as a “terrorist” for “Treason, Espionage, Sedition and Fraud” and derided him as “an Illegal Commander-in-Chief.” A long anti-Obama rant from a member in 2011 called for hanging the “traitor.” A different member referred to Obama as “the muzzie usurping lying POS traitor.” (“Muzzie” is a derogatory term for a Muslim.) A group member in 2013 said Obama “must be tried, convicted, and executed as a traitor.” One member railed, Obama “still occupies the office because white members of Congress are too afraid of being branded racist to file Articles of Impeachment against him. It’s time to stop the charade. He is destroying America. Black, White, Green, Brown, or Purple, the man is a traitor. IMPEACHMENT NOW!”

One Vigilant Patriot offered this critique of Obama:

America is in danger of a complete take-over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Our military and governmental resources have been subverted to benefit the cause of Islamic Jihad…As RADICAL as that sounds, an Islamic take-over is the ONLY fact that snaps all of the puzzle pieces together and makes sense of the last 25 years of American History. Barrack Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood TRAITOR to America. He stands convicted in the eyes of all true American Patriots.

A group participant claimed that Obama wants to “enforce Marshall sic law” to stay in the White House.” And one post contended that US troops were purposefully bringing back Ebola from Africa.

There’s a lot of hate among the Vigilant Patriots. A participant assailed Obamacare as “totalitarian socialist” and claimed that Rahm Emanuel, an Obama aide who became mayor of Chicago, had “justified mistrust of Jews by the KKK.” Another proposed putting the “criminal news media into prison” (with Obama and Hillary Clinton). One post suggested adopting the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance. Another declared that the Koran is a “declaration of war on you, your family, your friends, all you hold dear.”

Mother Jones sent a Trump spokeswoman and Trump’s presidential transition team a request for comment and a series of questions. The questions included the following: Did Bannon create this Facebook account? Does he personally control the account? Why did he apparently join the Vigilant Patriots group? Does he agree with the views expressed on this Facebook page? Does Donald Trump believe it would be appropriate for his senior staff to associate with a group that promotes racist material and death threats directed against Obama? The Trump spokeswoman and the transition team did not respond.

Bannon appears to have been rubbing Facebook elbows with racists and haters. On Thursday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager, said Bannon “treats everyone kindly” and “has the ear and trust” of Trump. For those claiming Bannon is getting a bum rap on the white nationalist issue, this Facebook connection between Bannon and the Vigilant Patriots will not make their work any easier.

Here is a sample of the content posted on the Vigilant Patriots Facebook page:

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Here’s Evidence Steve Bannon Joined a Facebook Group That Posts Racist Rants and Obama Death Threats

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Minnesota Cop Who Killed Philando Castile Is Charged With Second-Degree Manslaughter

Mother Jones

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The suburban police officer who shot and killed Philando Castile during a Minnesota traffic stop is being charged with second-degree manslaughter, John Choi, Ramsey County’s top prosecutor, announced on Wednesday.

Castile, 32, was shot by officer Jeronimo Yanez last July. According to Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, who was also in the car along with the couple’s young daughter, the officer fired his weapon as Castile reached to get his ID, after Castile informed Yanez he had a (legally permitted) gun. Reynolds live streamed the aftermath on Facebook, and her video sparked weeks of protests in Minneapolis and nationwide.

Officer Yanez’s use of deadly force “was not necessary, was objectively unreasonable, and was inconsistent with generally accepted police practices,” Choi said. “No reasonable officer—knowing, seeing, and hearing what Officer Yanez did at the time—would have used deadly force under these circumstances.” Yanez’s discharge of his firearm also put Reynolds and her daughter at risk, Choi added. The officer will be charged with two counts of reckless discharge of a firearm as well.

The charging documents revealed new details about the incident: Through the driver’s side window, Yanez asked Castile for his driver’s license and insurance information. Castile provided Yanez with an insurance card and then informed Yanez that he was carrying a weapon. Yanez said “okay” and told Castile not to reach for it. Castile—apparently still reaching for something—responded, “I’m not reaching for it.” Yanez yelled, “Don’t pull it out!” Castile’s girlfriend assured Yanez that Castile wasn’t reaching for the gun. Yanez again ordered Castile not to pull his gun out, and seconds later, he fired seven shots. Castile died on the scene soon after.

Another document, made public by the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department, showed that Castile had a legal permit to carry a firearm.

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Minnesota Cop Who Killed Philando Castile Is Charged With Second-Degree Manslaughter

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