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The biggest star at the Golden Globes this year was climate change

Early during the Golden Globes on Sunday night, an emotional Jennifer Aniston read a statement from Russell Crowe, who was being honored for his role in the Showtime miniseries The Loudest Voice. Crowe could not be there to accept the award himself; he was in his native Australia protecting his family from catastrophic wildfires that have ignited millions of acres and killed 25 people.

“Make no mistake,” Aniston said, reading Crowe’s statement. “The tragedy unfolding in Australia is climate change based.”

Crowe’s warning was just the first of many to come from the stage during the 77th annual Golden Globes. Multiple actors used their few moments onstage to talk about the climate crisis and voice support for Australians facing devastating wildfires.

Patricia Arquette, who won the award for best supporting actress in a series for The Act, begged viewers to vote in 2020, so as to avoid future disasters like the one unfolding in Australia. “For our kids and their kids, we have to vote in 2020,” she said.

Cate Blanchett, who was presenting an award, said, “When one country faces a climate disaster, we all face a climate disaster, so we’re in it together.” She also gave a shout-out to volunteer firefighters who are battling flames in Australia.

Joaquin Phoenix, who nabbed an accolade for Joker, said it was time for climate-conscious celebrities to start walking the walk. “It’s great to vote, but sometimes we have to take that responsibility on ourselves and make changes and sacrifices in our own lives,” he said, adding: “We don’t have to take private jets to Palm Springs for the awards.”

Fittingly, the extravagant ceremony itself was greener than usual. Stars dined on the ceremony’s first-ever all-vegan menu and drank water out of glass instead of plastic bottles. The Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation even said it plans to “upcycle” the red carpet that stars walk in on — that is, they’ll reuse it for future events. As for the private jets, we’ll see if Phoenix’s version of flygskam has any impact.

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The biggest star at the Golden Globes this year was climate change

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Mississippi Still Won’t Make Domestic Abuse Grounds for Divorce

Mother Jones

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There are several grounds for divorce in Mississippi, including impotency, adultery, and even “habitual drunkenness.” But domestic violence is not one of them, and it won’t be anytime soon, after recent legislative efforts to add spousal abuse to Mississippi divorce law failed in a state House committee on Tuesday.

Battered spouses in Mississippi often argue that they have suffered “habitual cruel and inhuman treatment,” which qualify as grounds for divorce under state law. Domestic violence advocacy groups in the state say that the “habitual” standard requires a high burden of proof of recurring violence. But many cases of abuse, which often occur in private, are unable to meet this standard unless there is photographic evidence or a witness. Advocates also argue that the current law does not sufficiently cover spouses dealing with emotional or financial abuse.

In order to address these problems, Republican state Sen. Sally Doty introduced a bill earlier this year that would add domestic violence to the 12 grounds for divorce available in the state. The bill passed the Mississippi Senate by an overwhelming margin and seemed poised for an easy victory in the House. But when the bill arrived in Mississippi’s House Judiciary Committee, Chairman Andy Gipson, a Republican, quickly objected.

Gipson argued that the measure did not clearly define what constituted domestic spousal abuse and suggested the addition would lead to a sharp uptick in divorces in the state. “To me the way it’s worded could possibly be interpreted that if someone raised their voice at their spouse, is that domestic assault?” he asked, according to the Clarion-Ledger. “If that’s the case, then a lot of people would have a ground for divorce in Mississippi.”

According to local news outlet Mississippi Today, Gipson, who is also a Baptist pastor, said that at a time when “we need to be adopting policies that promote marriage and people sticking together, I have some serious concerns about opening the floodgates any more than they already are. I think the floodgates are already open and this just tears the dam down.”

Mississippi state law prefers that both parties agree to end a marriage, allowing couples with a mutual desire for a divorce to cite “irreconcilable differences” and move forward in the process. But when one party refuses to accept the divorce, things can become complicated. In those cases, the person seeking to end the marriage must reach an agreement with his or her spouse on the terms of the divorce or claim one of the grounds provided under state law. The final decision to grant the divorce is left to the courts.

This is the second time in two years that an effort to add domestic violence to Mississippi’s divorce laws has failed. Last year, a similar measure, also introduced by Doty, died in the state Senate after other new grounds for divorce were added to the bill.

Gipson has declined to consider at least one other divorce law proposed this year: He refused to advance a bill adding extended separation to the grounds for divorce. His actions suggest that few divorce proposals would ever win his support. “If there’s a case of abuse, that person needs to have a change of behavior and a serious change of heart,” Gipson said yesterday. “Hopefully even in those cases restoration can happen.”

Update, 8:52 p.m. EST: In a statement posted to Facebook, Gipson defended his decision to scuttle the domestic abuse bill, citing the “cruel and inhuman treatment” standard as sufficient protection for abused spouses. “The law already provides a clear way out of a marriage for victims of domestic abuse, without the need for another bill,” he wrote. “To deny this reality is to ignore the current state of Mississippi law.”

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Mississippi Still Won’t Make Domestic Abuse Grounds for Divorce

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

Mother Jones

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He must have been exhausted. We have all been exhausted, watching America shout down common sense and set ablaze the last few defensible vestiges of circa-1787 political and economic philosophy. But as much as it all weighed on many of us, he carried extra baggage. He had literally written the book on Donald J. Trump’s bent psyche and business. He had forgotten more dirt on Trump than reporters of my generation ever dug up.

But Wayne Barrett, longtime Village Voice investigative political reporter and mentor to hundreds of journalists, wasn’t tired. He wanted to work, man; and work he did, even as he was driven away to the hospital for the last time, dying there at 71 late Thursday. Wayne needed all the time allotted to him, because America needed him.

When it became clear a year ago that Trump actually might ascend to lead the nation’s oldest political party, Wayne’s 1992 investigative biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, got a reprint—and an instant audience among other journalists. Based on digging Wayne had done since the ‘70s, it’s the keel on which a great deal of the best Trump reporting was built.

Trump was only one of the big whales Wayne hunted, though. He wrote two books on Rudy Giuliani, scorching his largely bogus 9/11 heroism, along with his relationship-wrecking and influence-peddling. In 37 years at the Voice, and recently in other fair corners of the internet, Wayne put the screws to Ed Koch, Al D’Amato, Mike Bloomberg, and multiple Cuomos.

Over the past 18 months, Wayne fielded a steady stream of calls and emails. Reporters asked for help with a distant mob name, a defunct company, a disgruntled counterparty. “I got some stuff on it in the basement,” he told me on the phone last year when I ran a very specific bit of ‘80s Trump trivia past him. “Come on up and dig.”

Lots of reporters took him up on similar offers, a steady queue of them making the pilgrimage to the Brooklyn house he shared with his wife, Fran, to chitchat and sift boxes on boxes of notes and clippings downstairs. He was there for all of us, even if it the scheduling occasionally had to be done by one of his research interns.

Ah, the interns. Wayne maintained an army of them to dig through databases, cajole sources, connect dots, and frequently co-author pieces with him. Like the paper’s size, the Voice’s office space shrank over the years, and six of us at a time might pile into Wayne’s cube for a quick confab. I once tried to spread out into the mostly empty next-door cubicle, which worked fine for a week until Nat Hentoff ambled in and cussed me out for a good three minutes, yelling to have his goddamn desk back.

The interns of Barrett Nation. You know them, even if you don’t realize it. They shape Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Politico, ABC News, every major New York paper, and certainly this magazine, as my former colleague Gavin Aronsen and I have written. We are not all journalists now, and those of us in the profession aren’t all investigative reporters—one of my cohort is a book reviewer of some note and another is a fast-paced entertainment reporter, but goddamn, if you are hiding dirt, they will find it.

I loved Wayne, even when he was screaming at me, a rite of passage any of his interns can describe. He pursued truth and exposed sin with the zeal of a young Jesuit, which was fitting, since he’d considered taking up the cloth before a debate scholarship sent him to St. Joe’s College in Philly. I’d had a similar upbringing, joining the military instead of the church, debating in school, and seeking an outlet for my inflamed sense of justice.

Wayne had that fire, and lighting up other people was how it manifested sometimes. We were in a serious business. We had to be thorough, accurate, fairâ&#128;&#145;even when we were breaking shit.

But it was all to an end. If Wayne burned for justice, he practiced it, too, singing his protégés’ praises to recruiters, offering a crash weekend at his beach place down the shore in Jersey, taking a sincere interest in his charges’ spouses, children, money and family issues. “He was a family man” is often a hollow note in these kinds of tributes. But family—his and everybody else’s—truly was Wayne’s greatest pleasure, and the reason he couldn’t not needle the greedy who screwed the rest of us.

For more than a year, we watched Republicans slouching toward Trump Tower, saying that yes, seriously, they believed this debauched tycoon with a rambling sales script and an unadulterated id could handle the nukes. We saw Russia tossing gasoline on the fire, beheld our media colleagues collapsing under the weight of takes and think pieces on how maybe facts don’t matter. Now we watch the Queens-bred Caligula begin to rip up the things that make America an idea worth defending. And Wayne’s illness, exacerbated by his all-consuming work, has chosen this moment to take him from us.

We are allowed to be exhausted and dispirited and fearful. This has all really happened, and the ineptitude and malice of the incoming administration will cost lives and livelihoods. But we are not allowed to stop. Wayne wouldn’t let us.

I worked for Wayne when Rudy Giuliani was making his last serious stab at a presidential bid, and we spent a lot of time running down new stories on the candidate. His campaign had looked formidable early on, but hizzoner flamed out spectacularly and retreated into private consulting.

Was it bittersweet, I asked Wayne? His white whale, the subject of years of his life’s work, was finished and never coming back.

Wayne laughed. It was the laugh of a man who wasn’t about to retire from the truth-digging, shit-kicking business, no matter how good or bad it might get. “He’ll come back, man,” he said. “These guys always come back.”

The fun part, Wayne said, was that the good guys came back, too.

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Wayne Barrett Exposed The Real Trump. Now There’s Only One Way To Honor Him.

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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

Mother Jones

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At a Trump campaign rally last week in Spokane, Washington, Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for “playing the women’s card” to gain campaign support. When citing Clinton’s criticisms of him, Trump mimicked the candidate, straightening his shoulders and flattening his voice to convey a cold, prim demeanor. He concluded the performance with the pronouncement: “All of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore…You know what? The women get it better than we do, folks. They get it better than we do.”

The audience erupted into cheers and applause.

Moments like this one—where Trump’s unabashed political incorrectness and machismo are on display—resonate with many of his supporters. But his message in Spokane made headlines in part because the notion that men have it worse off than women echoes a central tenet of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), a network of activists who believe that in many contexts, men are a disadvantaged class. New York magazine even offered its readers a quiz: “Who Said It, Trump or a Men’s Rights Activist?”

It seems like a no-brainer that men’s rights activists would admire Trump’s rhetoric on gender and thus support his candidacy for president. But several leaders of the movement who spoke to Mother Jones are ambivalent about Trump, at best—one has even donated to Hillary Clinton—and say that many others in their community haven’t been won over by Trump’s bluster. But why do many members of a group that would appear to be his natural constituency not support Trump for president?

“It’s nice to hear him say” things that align with the men’s rights movement says Dean Esmay, now a contributor to and formerly the managing editor of A Voice for Men, a blog and men’s rights discussion hub, but those talking points aren’t enough. “Somebody had the guts to say that men have it tougher than women, it gives you an emotional rush,” he continues. “But when you listen, where’s the meat behind it? What’s he offering? I see nothing.” Trump isn’t offering much by way of policy substance, Esmay says, both on issues key to MRAs, such as incarceration or the treatment of fathers in family courts, or on others.

“Why do I think he would make a bad president?” asks Esmay. “Because he is a loose cannon. You don’t know what he’s going to do. We have a student loan debt bubble that’s going to burst. We have a middle class that’s imploding. And Donald Trump is going to fix it all by saying ‘Believe it, baby?’ Give me a break.”

Warren Farrell, widely-considered the father of the men’s right’s movement and the author of one of its foundational texts, The Myth of Male Power, says he’s a “very strong supporter” of Hillary Clinton. He has attended several campaign events for Clinton and donated the allowed maximum of $2700 to her primary campaign. Still, Farrell says he thinks Hillary is “the worst candidate in recent history, in my lifetime, on gender issues from the perspective of understanding and having compassion for men.” But Farrell, who has a Ph.D. in political science, still supports Hillary in part because, he says, “Even though I care about men’s issues a lot, I care about this country being led by the most competent person.”

“Its very hard for me,” he continues, “because Trump does have a clue about what’s happening with men’s issues. But Trump is the quintessential example of the immature man and men at their worst.”

Farrell falls into a more liberal faction of the men’s rights community, says Gwyneth Williams, a professor of politics at Webster University who also studies men’s movements. But some of Farrell’s more conservative colleagues also have serious concerns about Trump.

“I think Trump was right on for saying that men are afraid of upsetting women,” says Paul Elam, the CEO and founder of A Voice for Men. But Elam notes that he doesn’t buy that Trump would be “some sort of savior for” the men’s rights movement, and that there are other Trump positions he finds especially worrisome.

“Trump talks a lot about building a wall and the outlandish proposition that he’s going to stop drugs from entering the country—which is impossible” says Elam. He’s wary of a candidate who would further criminalize drugs, leading to greater incarceration of men. While Trump hasn’t directly promised this, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of Trump’s surrogates and a potential vice-presidential pick, has said he supports the criminalization of marijuana use. That’s why both Elam and Esmay say that the possibility that in a Trump administration Chris Christie might be elevated to a position of power might push them to vote for Hillary.

But many men’s rights activists are definitely not Clinton fans: Both Elam and Esmay referred to her as a “lizard” in speaking with Mother Jones, and men’s rights forums on Reddit and elsewhere are filled with anti-Hillary sentiments. But in spite of their Clinton scorn, many MRAs say that it’s obvious that Trump is more swagger than substance. “Trump doesn’t have the ability to successfully call out Hillary on her sexism. He is to sic crass and doesn’t grasp the issues,” writes one user on the men’s rights subreddit. Another sums things up: “Trump VS Clinton. Whoever wins, America (and the world?) loses.”

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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

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Donald Trump Denies "Masquerading" as His Own Spokesman

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is shooting down a report by the Washington Post that claims the real estate magnate and presidential hopeful used to call members of the press pretending to be his own spokesman. According to the Post, he used the pseudonyms John Miller and John Barron—two names Trump admitted under oath in 1990 to using “on occasion.”

Speaking on the Today Show on Friday, Trump dismissed the allegations as a “scam,” saying the voice captured in the phone call recording did not resemble his own.

“You’re telling me about it for the first time, and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all,” Trump said. “I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice, you can imagine that. This sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams.”

Earlier on Friday, the Post published audio from a 1991 phone call reportedly recorded by People magazine reporter Sue Carswell. In the audio, Carswell can be heard talking to a man who introduced himself as John Miller but sounds very much like Trump. The report goes on to cite other journalists who recalled a John Miller or John Barron contacting them, sometimes as far back as the 1970s, through similar guises to promote Trump with flattering stories.

To hear the recording in its entirety, head to the Washington Post.

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Donald Trump Denies "Masquerading" as His Own Spokesman

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Meet the black activist who derailed a big polluting project before ​graduating college

Meet the black activist who derailed a big polluting project before ​graduating college

By on 18 Apr 2016commentsShare

Destiny Watford was a 17-year-old student at a south Baltimore high school when she asked a roomful of students if they suffered from asthma. To her dismay, every single hand went up.

That was three years ago, when Watford was in the middle of a fight to stop Energy Answers International from building a solid-waste incinerator in the Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay. Her mother, along with many friends and family members, had asthma, and her neighbor died from lung cancer. The culprits seemed obvious to Watford: the medical-waste incinerator, coal pier, and slew of chemical plants surrounding Curtis Bay that foul the air. A proposed solid-waste incinerator, the biggest of its kind in the United States, was poised to move in a short walk from her high school.

Watford, along with other young people from Curtis Bay, decided to fight, largely by pressuring public officials. Last month, they scored a victory when state regulators pulled the incinerator project’s permit. For her efforts, the Goldman Environmental Foundation named the 20-year-old Watford one of six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday.

The award is fitting for Watford, who works with Free Your Voice, a human rights committee of United Workers. In 2015, the Goldman was presented to six people, including Berta Cáceres, an activist for indigenous rights who was killed in Honduras last month. It’s a prize for people who bring attention to the consequences that environmental inequities bear on their communities.

Watson, for instance, drew a connection between Baltimore’s environment and riots following the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed, 25-year-old black man who died in police custody after getting arrested for no good reason. Residents rioted while officials fumbled to bring charges against the officers responsible for Gray’s death; Maryland’s governor declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew and deployed the National Guard on Baltimore. Watford wondered why reporters weren’t asking what she called deeper questions about the environment in which the riots were taking place.

When I interviewed Watford, I asked her how she felt about winning. Her response was about winning the fight against the incinerator, not about winning the Goldman and its $175,000 award. A 20-year-old who’s more excited about stopping a waste incinerator than about winning a pile of money? Meet Destiny Watford, a young person who puts her community first. Here’s an edited portion of our recent conversation:

Q. Early on, you linked the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore riots, and the environment. Why?

A. Before we even learned about the incinerator, we were learning about our basic human rights. When we found out the incinerator was proposed to be built in our community, it violated every single value, belief, and basic human right that we had. When it come to the death of Freddie Gray, when it comes to incinerators, when it comes to the crisis in Flint, Michigan, those issues are different, but they’re not separate. They’re all issues of injustice — of systematic injustice, which we’ve been fighting against.

Q. What about environmental justice in particular? What do you think grassroots activists should understand about winning campaigns against big polluters?

A. When polluting developments are proposed, they’re usually in poor neighborhoods. They’re proposed in places where it’s perceived that our voices aren’t very strong, that there won’t be a public outcry, or that there isn’t a lot of power and so there won’t be a lot of pushback or resistance. And a lot of times, those are communities of color. It always comes down to who or what has power. When we’re resisting against an established system that creates developments like the incinerator, it’s really important to have power in communities if you are to win.

Q. You won a big victory against the proposed incinerator, but your community continues to be plagued by toxic pollution. What’s next for you?

A. As it stands now, all the air quality monitors have been removed from our community, so we don’t even know how much worse it’s gotten for us. As far as pollution goes, and how to even begin to figure out how to deal with it, I’m not completely sure, but there needs to be some sort of accountability. For instance, we’ve been working to bring in air quality monitoring to issue health impact assessments about the existing pollution in Curtis Bay. We need to measure and know what kind of specific pollution there is, how it’s affecting people, and how to deal with it.

Q. Yours is hard work. What gets you up in the morning to do it?

A. Just knowing an incinerator was going to be built in the community where I grew up, where my family grew up attracted me to working against it. Watching my nephews and other small family members grow up here, and watching neighbors and schoolmates — I mean, Curtis Bay is my home. I want to protect my home and the people that I care about. And the more I worked on the campaign, the more I came to realize that places like Curtis Bay have been taken advantage of and used for so long, and it’s really important to me that does not become our fate. That’s what gets me going.

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Meet the black activist who derailed a big polluting project before ​graduating college

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

Mother Jones

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In response to my post yesterday about the tradition of truthtellers in Democratic primaries,1 a reader emails: “Offhand my guess would be that a lot of Bernie supporters think Obama proves that an outsider/rebel/truthteller can both win and end up a very successful president.” Another reader tweets the same sentiment:

Hmmm. I don’t think either of these is true. Obama didn’t run in the truthteller tradition. He ran more in the JFK/Clinton tradition: a young guy bringing the voice of a new generation to the White House. Obama was inspiring and wildly popular, but he didn’t spend his time explaining that we all had to face up to endemic corruption or tidal waves of money or demographic Armageddon. Just the opposite. He mostly sanded the rough edges off that kind of stuff. It was all hope and change and ending the partisan bickering in Washington.

As for Bernie supporters, I don’t think they view Obama as a rebel or a truthteller. Bernie himself is careful not to criticize Obama, but a lot of his supporters see Obama as basically a disappointment: just another squishy centrist who made some incremental progress and called it a day. In the end, we still don’t have universal health care; the banks are still running things; the Republican Party continues to obstruct; and rich people are still rich. That’s the very reason we need a guy like Bernie in the Oval Office.

This is certainly my impression, anyway. Am I wrong?

1A theme that Jamelle Bouie touches on in a much longer, more nuanced piece here about the Bernie insurgency. It’s well worth a read.

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Bernie Supporters Are Mostly Disappointed in Obama

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Ben Carson Wants You to Know That He Has 67 Honorary Degrees. 67!

Mother Jones

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This is—and no, I’m not kidding—from presidential wannabe Ben Carson:

It’s discouraging to know that we’re at that stage in our country where people don’t care so much about the truth. It’s just what’s sensational, what’s the shiny object. It’s all “Who’s in the football game? Who’s on ‘Dancing With the Stars’? Who’s yelling the loudest?” And I’m not sure that’s what we need right now because we’ve got some real big problems in our country.

Yes, this is from the person who, to this day, has not uttered a single plainly true statement according to Politifact.1 It’s from the person who, along with Donald Trump, has been the ultimate shiny object in the Republican race. Then there’s this:

When I was appointed director of pediatric neurosurgery, pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins wasn’t on the map. By 2008, it was ranked number one by U.S. News & World Report. A weak person doesn’t do that. A weak person isn’t named one of 89 living legends by the Library of Congress on the occasion of its 200th anniversary. A weak person isn’t selected by CNN and Time magazine as one of the 20 foremost physicians and surgeons in America. That was before they discovered that I’m conservative. A weak person doesn’t have all of these honorary degrees. Most people of accomplishment have one, maybe two or three honorary degrees at most. It’s the highest award that a university gives out. I have 67. That’s probably not indicative of a weak person who doesn’t get things done.

Jesus. Does this guy ever listen to himself? He really is Trumpesque, isn’t he? Just substitute honorary degrees for polling reports and lower the voice about ten decibels, and they could be twins. Carson must have an inferiority complex about the size of Mt. Everest.

1Even Donald Trump has one, for chrissake.

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Ben Carson Wants You to Know That He Has 67 Honorary Degrees. 67!

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This is What It’s Like to Be a Muslim Schoolkid in America Right Now

Mother Jones

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“Are you part of the 9/11 or are you ISIS?” “Did you ever kill anyone?” “Are you going to bomb this place?” These are some typical questions that 12-year-old Abdu Rrahman Mohamed says he’s been asked by his non-Muslim classmates week after week in his Long Beach, California, school, he told youth radio VoiceWaves.org last week.

Earlier this year, a high school teacher in Richmond, Texas, sent all his students home with a new study guide he had created, with the title, “Islam/Radical Islam (Did You Know).” In the study guide, which had not been approved by the school, the economics teacher presented fictional statements as if they were facts, including, “38% of Muslims believe people that leave the faith should be executed.” The teacher also wrote up instructions for what to do “if taken hostage by radical Islamists.”

In Weston, Florida, a high school French teacher allegedly called one 14-year-old Muslim student a “rag-head Taliban” in February. The student’s father, Youssef Wardani, a software engineer and an immigrant from Lebanon, said his son, an honor roll student, now hates going to school.

These are not isolated incidents. The federal government, leaders of Muslim organizations, many Muslim students, and parents report an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric and abuses in classrooms.

Last week, during an event hosted by the nonprofit organization Muslim Advocates, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch expressed concerns about what she sees as an uptick in anti-Muslim incidents in schools. The Department of Justice has partnered with the Department of Education to advise schools on anti-bullying measures. Lynch added that the DOJ is investigating MacArthur High School in Irving, Texas; the school in September called the police and suspended 14-year-old Ahmed Muhammad when he brought a clock he had made to school, to show it to his engineering teacher. School administrators assumed it was a bomb.

Recent figures from a 2014 California survey of students by the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA) show that 55 percent of Muslim students in California reported being the target of verbal abuse and insults. That’s twice as many students as those who report being bullied based on gender and race nationally. The survey also found that 29 percent of students who wear a hijab reported offensive touching or pulling of their headscarves. One student said, “They would call me a terrorist and ‘towel head’ and throw rocks at me.” Another student reported, “Someone threatened to kill me if I went to school on 9/11.”

Research shows that students who are bullied do worse academically, and abuse can reappear later in life; former victims have reported struggles with depression and anxiety, as well as risks of suicide.

Perhaps most concerning in the figures and news reports is the number of anti-Muslim incidents that have originated from teachers and administrators, as was the case with Ahmed in Irving. One in five Muslim students in California said they experienced discrimination by a teacher or an administrator. Of these, only 42 percent said reporting a problem to an adult made a difference.

This poses a challenge for advocates and parents who are working to combat Islamophobia in schools. While students, especially in high schools, play a large role in combating any form of meanness and abuse at their schools, adults play a greater role in setting the tone of their classrooms and enforcing positive social norms.

The rise in bullying of Muslim students is a reflection of the rising Islamophobia in the United States since 9/11. As Mother Jones‘ Edwin Rios reported last week, “The most recent FBI data indicates that hate crimes based on race, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation have dropped across the board—with the exception of crimes against Muslim Americans. In 2014, even as the total number of hate crimes dipped nearly 8 percent from the year before, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose 14 percent.” And on Sunday, the New York Times‘ Laurie Goodstein found that in the aftermath of attacks in Paris and the mass shooting in San Bernandino, California, “Muslims and leaders of mosques across the United States say they are experiencing a wave of death threats, assaults and vandalism unlike anything they have experienced since the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.”

(Are you a Muslim student who doesn’t feel safe in your school, or is your school a good model that others should learn from? I’d love to hear from you. Email me at krizga at motherjones.com.)

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This is What It’s Like to Be a Muslim Schoolkid in America Right Now

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America Has Lost Its Soul. This Unforgettable New Singer Has Found It.

Mother Jones

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Eric Taylor

The man now known as Fantastic Negrito is wearing a three-piece checkered suit with a crisp, mustard-yellow shirt. Two small holes mark the knees of his pants, and orange striped socks flow into his tan leather shoes. The 47-year-old singer-songwriter hammers away on his Goodwill-bought guitar in a ravaged section of downtown Oakland, California, talking about how this is the place “where the real shit comes from.” Need to test a song? “Hit the streets. It’s very unsafe, and that’s good—strangers tell you the truth.”

Xavier Dphrepaulezz (his real name) isn’t supposed to be here, not really. Ever since he made it to what people keep telling him is “the big time,” he’s had to sneak out. Last February, he beat nearly 7,000 contestants competing for a chance to perform in an NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert, and he’s been on a meteoric rise ever since: His EP of raw, impassioned roots music reached No. 7 on Billboard‘s blues charts in February and was iTunes’ No. 7 blues album in August. His managers want him to save his voice for the paying gigs. They’re asking him: Why would a venue pay 10 grand if you keep playing in the streets for free?

But this is where it all began—at train stops and doughnut shops—before the “international sensation” talk, the courtship from major record labels, and invitations to play music festivals like South by Southwest and Outside Lands. His success happened so fast, seemingly overnight: “I throw up before every show, man. Terrified.”

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America Has Lost Its Soul. This Unforgettable New Singer Has Found It.

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