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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

by JacelynPittard Posted on May 7, 2017

Mother Jones

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Scaachi Koul‘s writing has it all—a gut-busting sense of humor, clear-eyed honesty, and striking introspection that she jokes is a symptom of narcissism.

In her debut book, a collection of essays titled One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Koul, a culture writer for BuzzFeed, applies her sharp wit to tricky issues of race, culture and identity: what it means to be “lighter” than other Indians on a family trip to India, for example, and how she balances her life with her conservative South Asian parents’ expectations. I called Koul and we had entirely too much fun talking about women’s words, finding boldness, and pubic hair, of course.

Mother Jones: Part of what you talk about in the book is existing in spaces where you feel unwelcome in. It seems like you manage to be really outspoken in those spaces—where do you find that sort of boldness?

Scaachi Koul: I have the unfortunate inability to be quiet, and it did not serve me very well when I was a kid. I used to get in trouble all the time for…actually, the same stuff I get in trouble for as an adult. In my later life, it’s been beneficial, but when I was younger I didn’t know how to control it or what to do with it. I’m not sure it’s so much about finding boldness as it is about retaining control at this point, because being mouthy has never been my problem. That’s very easy for me. But now I think a lot about when it’s worth it and what I’m doing it for. When you’re a kid, it’s really obnoxious because you’re just being a dick all the time. I think that’s probably the same case with being bold or bossy or mouthy. Those things are great to have, but if they are uncontrolled and wild, it can hurt you in the long term.

MJ: It must be kind of gratifying to be able to turn your obnoxious qualities from childhood into a way to make money as an adult.

SK: Yeah, why not, right? Listen, I would also like to buy a boat. So why not try to make a profit?

MJ: What made you decide to write the book?

SK: It’s a delicate balance of narcissism and self-interest and money and the hope that you can write something and other people understand it. I write for the internet all the time, but there is something very different about writing a book that you’re asking people to buy. It feels like a different beast. But you hope that you write this thing that appeals to people in this really meaningful way. I grew up on the internet, but the things that formed my understanding of the world and made me feel less isolated were books. That’s the altruistic answer, and then the other version is, “Oh, I’m obsessed with myself.”

MJ: I feel like I’ve been reading more and more books that are memoirs or essay collections from really incredible women—I don’t know if more are being produced or if it’s just what I’ve been hungry for, so it’s what I’ve been feeding myself. Have you been reading that sort of thing, or have you been feeling intimidated or empowered by those works?

SK: While I was writing the book I avoided other memoirs, because I don’t want to get distracted or pick up somebody else’s voice. So for the year that I was working on it really heavily, I didn’t read anything else, and that was actually around the time that Lena Dunham and Jessica Valenti’s books had come out. I know that right now it feels like there’s so many memoirs by young women in particular. I don’t know if it’s that there’s more—I think there’s just been a shift on the way we talk about them, and I think the internet has shaped that. I also find that for every dude who’s really dismissive of what I’ve written, there are five women who are like, “No, I get it. Don’t worry about it. It makes sense to me.”

MJ: The book is really vulnerable in places. Did you grapple with a lot of anxiety while you were writing it?

SK: I had some anxieties about my family reading it. For one, I don’t really want my parents to read about my weird, gross body. My brother read it and he immediately was like, “This is gross. There’s so much about your vagina in here.” I’m like, “Yeah, tough. Deal with it.”

MJ: Men have been writing like that for a long time.

SK: Exactly. I have had to listen to you talk about your penis for 30 years. Get over it.

MJ: I saw your tweet about your parents having read the book.

SK: My mom read it and she was appropriately sad and confused. We didn’t talk details or anything. She said she liked it, but she was clearly quite bummed out about portions of it. My dad hasn’t read it, because he knows that it’ll give him a heart attack, and I don’t think his body can take it. So he’s making a wise decision. I abide by that policy of writing about your family as if they’re all dead. So with the exception of changing some names, that’s pretty much how I handle things, in that I can’t control your perception of what you think happened. I only have my version. I’m sure there’s stuff in there that they disagree with, but I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s libelous. I don’t think they’re going to sue me.

MJ: You also write quite a bit about existing as a woman on the internet. Any advice for outspoken ladies who want to use Twitter without losing their minds?

SK: It’s so tricky. I don’t know of a social-media entity that’s really invested in how women and girls are treated. I can only speak to media Twitter, which is a very specific section of the internet. But for the women that I talk to who are in media and who use Twitter, I always hear from them that they have this anxiety about going private because they feel like it’s antithetical to the point of it. I don’t understand that at all. If you feel like you don’t want to play, don’t play. Go private. Don’t use it. You don’t need to really use it at any great capacity if you just want to tweet your work and go home, that’s fine. I like the format. I think it’s fun sometimes. But I also recognize that it can be deeply unfun, and I had a year of really not understanding why I was using it at all. I could not see any benefit. I was exclusively getting yelled at and I didn’t feel like my work was getting promoted in any way. It was just like people had access to me in this really awful way.

I have friends who do not really use the internet beyond like Google and recipes or sometimes they read the news on it and I guess they have Netflix. And that to me is so weird. Because I use it for everything. And they go to the bank. That’s crazy to me. They go to the bank? Adorable.

MJ: That’s quaint.

SK: It doesn’t make any sense. But you should have people like that in your life, because when you go to them and you’re like, “Oh my God. I just found out that there’s like some text thread going on about one bad tweet that I sent,” they look at you like you have landed from another planet. They will bring you a perspective that will give you some comfort. Which doesn’t mean that the abuse you’re dealing with isn’t real. And it doesn’t mean it’s not serious, but at the same time it can give you some comfort, because there are people everywhere who are not using the internet like we are using it.

MJ: I also really appreciate your style of clapping back at trolls.

SK: That’s something else that like sometimes it’s funny and sometimes it’s really not. There are days where they say things and it cuts you to the quick and you don’t have anything funny or witty or cute to say in response. It took me a while to remember that I didn’t actually have to answer all of them. Sometimes when I have responded to them, I have felt myself starting to unravel. I’ve had friends send me notes being like, “Hey, you sound crazy.” This was like funny or whatever, but you sound insane.” And then I have to go back and I’ll read it again and be like, “Yeah, this is nuts.” Get off the internet. Leave your phone at home and go outside and go do something in the tangible world, where nobody knows what your Twitter handle is.

MJ: It’s a good friend that will tell you when you’re being crazy on Twitter, though.

SK: You need those people who tell you to like shut your pie hole.

MJ: Let’s talk about the things you wish you didn’t have to say to white people.

SK: Oh, god. I could write a second book about the things I wish I didn’t have to explain to white people. I wish I didn’t have to explain why they have to pronounce my name correctly or spell it correctly. I’m very tired of explaining that making jokes about my name sounding like Sriracha isn’t funny because it actually doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not funny. I don’t get it. I would really love to stop explaining why it’s obnoxious when they ask me where I’m from and I say, “Calgary” and they say, “No, where are you really from?” I would love to not have to explain where Kashmir is because they will press me and ask me again, and I’ll say that’s where my family’s from and that’s also not satisfying. I would love to stop explaining why I don’t really enjoy Indian weddings. I would like to not have to tell people that I don’t know how to thread eyebrows. They think all brown girls know how. By the way, I’ve never even gotten my eyebrows threaded. My mother went straight to waxing because my brows are formidable. There was no like, “Oh, we’ll use this gentle threading process.” No, no, no. We’ve got to use chemicals.

MJ: Your niece has such a major presence in the book. What do you hope she’ll gain from it if she reads it when she’s older?

SK: I signed it for her, assuming she will read it when she’s like 65. Her mother said she would give it to her when she’s 16, which is probably a better, more realistic age. But that’s only in 10 years. I hope she gets some context about our family that she won’t otherwise have. It feels so weird. I feel like I gave her my diary and I was like, “Good luck.” I don’t know how eager my 17-year-old niece will be to read about like my pussy hair, but I guess she should have that option.

MJ: I mean, presumably she’ll have some too.

SK: To be honest she’s seven and I’m already talking about my pubic hair with her, so at this point I don’t think it’s going to be that much of a shock. She asked when it came out if it was about her and I was like, “Yeah, pretty much.”

MJ: Smart kid.

SK: Well, she, like her aunt is a narcissist, so we’ve just got to make sure everything’s about us. I hope it gives her some understanding of a portion of her. I’m very curious about what her life is going to look like. I worry a lot about her growing up to be self-loathing the way I was. I was really self-loathing about being brown when I was a kid. I really resented it. And I hope that she doesn’t feel like that about herself as she gets older. My parents are there and they sort of pull her into this version of her identity. I hope she doesn’t hate that. And if she does, then hopefully the book will help reverse some of it or give her something to like.

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White People, Please Stop Asking People of Color Dumb Questions

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It’s Pretty Sad That the President of the United States Needs to Watch Briefing Videos Like This

by WillyNiles9 Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Thursday morning, Mother Jones fellow Ashley Dejean reported on a classified memo which revealed that Donald Trump’s “daily briefing book typically contains reports on only three topics, typically no more than one page each.”

On Thursday afternoon, American Urban Radio White House correspondent April Ryan asked the president a question about the Congressional Black Caucus that provoked a response suggesting Donald Trump thinks all black people know each other.

On Friday night, occasional Mother Jones contributor (and my brother) Harry Dreyfuss published a video neatly tying those two stories together.

Excerpt from – 

It’s Pretty Sad That the President of the United States Needs to Watch Briefing Videos Like This

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

by ChristeHeron Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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You’ve probably heard that a gunman entered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC yesterday and started shooting. He didn’t hit anyone, though, and it’s not clear if he was even trying. So why was he there? He says he was trying to “self investigate” an allegation that Bill and Hillary Clinton ran a pedophilia ring out of the restaurant.

No, this is not me being smug and elitist again this morning. This is an honest-to-goodness conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, and it’s been making the rounds for a while. Why? Because the owner of Comet Ping Pong is both gay and a longtime supporter of the Democratic Party. And that’s not all!

It’s known, for instance that Bill Clinton and Donald Trump flew on the private plane of convicted child abuser Jeffery Epstein. Tony Podesta, the brother of the Clinton aide whose emails were hacked, was a friend of Dennis Hastert, a Republican politician who earlier this year was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and has admitted abusing boys. The Jimmy Savile scandal in the UK has featured in speculation as an example of a serial child abuser getting away with his crimes.

So far this has no connection to Donald Trump, and perhaps you’re thinking that’s another silver lining, aside from the fact that no one was hurt in the attack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with only one silver lining today. You see, Gen. Michael Flynn, who will soon be Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor, tweeted this a few days before the election:

And that’s not all. Here is Michael Flynn Jr., who is not just Flynn’s son. He is also Flynn’s chief of staff and closest aide. Here he is yesterday, after the shooting:

There’s much more in Flynn Jr’s Twitter feed following this, all pointing in the same direction: he is a complete crackpot. And he is one of the closest confidantes of his father, who is also a crackpot. And Flynn Sr. is the top national security aide to Donald Trump, who is well known to have a weakness for conspiracy theories already.

Obviously Democrats have no influence over Donald Trump’s White House. But presumably Republicans do. They need to figure out a way to get Flynn booted from the NSA position and as far away from Trump as possible. This isn’t an amusing joke, and it’s not just politics anymore. It’s a serious national security weakness.

UPDATE: It’s hard to keep up these days. In the tweet at the top of this post, Flynn Sr. isn’t referring to Pizzagate. He’s referring to a different pedophilia allegation involving Hillary Clinton. According to Truepundit.com, it linked “Clinton herself” and her “associates” to money laundering, child exploitation, sex crimes with children, perjury, obstruction of justice, and “other felony crimes.”

I even wrote about it back when it happened. It’s been a busy two weeks since then. Sigh.

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Republicans Need to Step Up and get Gen. Michael Flynn Out of the White House

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Tig Notaro Is Not Afraid of the Dark

by IvaTruebridge Posted on November 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Bob Chamberlin

For democracy in America, 2016 was a particularly rotten year. But comedian Tig Notaro’s Terrible, Horrible, Very Bad Year is already four years in the rearview. If you’re familiar with Notaro, whose deadpan routines invariably leave audiences in stitches, you probably know the basic outline: In 2012, she was stricken with a stubborn intestinal illness (aptly named Clostridum difficile), split up with her girlfriend, buried her mother—and got a cancer diagnosis that resulted in a double mastectomy. But Tig being Tig, on the night after her diagnosis, opted not to cancel a show scheduled at Los Angeles’ Largo club. Instead, she went onstage and transformed her personal shit-show into a bold tragicomedy routine (“Hello, I Have Cancer!”) that would propel her to far greater fame. You can read more about all of that in our 2013 interview with Notaro here.

The gods have since been kind to the 45 year old. The cancer—knock wood—has stayed away. Her career is kicking butt. And more importantly, she met and fell for actress Stephanie Allynne—they were married last year; in July Allynne gave birth to twin boys, Max and Finn.

Beyond touring and cuddling babies, Notaro’s big project has been her semi-autobiographical Amazon Prime series, One Mississippi, recently renewed for a second season. In this decidedly dark comedy, a lightly fictionalized “Tig,” still shellshocked from losing her breasts to cancer, travels from Los Angeles to her Mississippi hometown to say goodbye to her mother, attend the funeral, and sort through her mom’s affairs. She stays at the home of Bill, her super-uptight stepfather, where elder brother Remy—a sweet, hapless guy who never ventured too far, emotionally or otherwise, after high school—lives in the attic. It’s basically the story of a dysfunctional family coming together around tragedy to work through their issues, which include a mother’s dark secret and resentment at parents who failed to see that Granddad was molesting their little girl.

Yeah, like I said, dark. But if anyone can find levity amid darkness, it’s Mathilde O’Callaghan Notaro (please, call her Tig), who famously noted in that 2012 Largo set that “tragedy plus time equals comedy”—not that she bothered to wait.

Mother Jones: Happy Thanksgiving! First things first: How’s your health?

Tig Notaro: Good as far as I know. I go in every three months and get checked out and I’ve gotten good news for four years now. Waiting on the big five-year marker, which is a huge…marker.

Mother Jones: So now you’re not only married to this lovely actress, but you have twin boys. Had you previously imagined yourself as a mom—before or especially after your cancer diagnosis?

TN: Oh, yeah! That was like my main focus in my life, trying to have a child. When I got sick, it threw everything off course.

MJ: Wait, you’re not joking.

TN: No! There’s actually a whole movie about it on Netflix.

MJ: Alas, I haven’t seen it. But you famously had a big breakup not long before you were diagnosed with cancer. I mean, I can’t imagine. I’m curious whether going through that made you despair about whether you’d ever meet somebody new?

TN: It was definitely a concern. I didn’t know what my fate was as far as being alive. I didn’t know whether I’d be attractive to anybody. Even when I was healthy I was always concerned if I would ever meet somebody I would fall for the way I ultimately did for Stephanie.

MJ: Would you say there was any positive side of going through this hell, insofar as the relationships that emerged from it?

TN: Well, I’ve had a really positive response after my story went viral and I’ve shared vulnerable aspects of my life. I would say the positive aspect of all of that is knowing people had comfort in knowing they weren’t alone in the world, or could see somebody that made it through that kind of horrific time period. I still get letters daily from people sharing their stories or thanking me for sharing mine. That’s been positive. Also, I think it’s really shortened the amount of time I can deal with hogwash in the world. Laughs.

MJ: I can totally see that. So, you’ve taken to showing off your mastectomy scars. You’ve performed topless a few times. And in One Mississippi, you take it a step further and expose your chest during this awkward sex scene. I’m sure this is the first time, other than that Ken Burns cancer documentary, that I’ve seen mastectomy scars in a TV series. What was your thought process leading up to doing these things.

TN: It all was born out of fear of my own body and discomfort and insecurities. And wondering how I would get used to myself and my body just being out in the world—whether it was just me alone, or dating, or anything really. I think my brain just has a natural way of going to what would be the most insane thing, the least likely option. When I announced I had cancer on stage, it was my brain leaping to that insane moment of, “There’s no way I could start a show saying, ‘Hi, I have cancer!'” And also for me to have these scars, and then think, “Oh my gosh, what if I did stand-up and not even acknowledge that my shirt was off, or that I have scars.

MJ: So this is your basic approach to life?

TN: I think so. I think it’s jumping immediately to reality and truth without giving much time in between.

MJ: Would you have considered doing any of this pre-cancer?

TN: I mean, my chest wasn’t much bigger than it is now before the surgery. But I probably wouldn’t have gone on stage topless. I didn’t have a point to it or a political statement that really resonated with me that would make me think I needed to do that. And I felt my surgery was a nice collision of politics and comedy in the silliest way possible, because I talk about airplanes and things like that while my scars are on clear view.

MJ: One Mississippi is billed as semi-autobiographical. Let’s talk about the “semi” part. How far from reality are these portrayals?

TN: The actress who plays my mother, I feel like she is my mother. When she walks on set and when I interact with her, I can’t see her as anyone other than my mother. She’s so perfectly cast that even my stepfather, my brother, family friends are blown away. My real-life stepfather is warmer than Bill on the show, and he has more of a sense of humor, but he definitely has very rigid ways that pop up even still. He’s come a long way since my mother died and I got sick, but John Rothman, the actor, really plays that part of him phenomenally. He’s so fun to be in scenes with and to watch. He’s so good. The guy that plays my brother, it’s that same thing. There are elements there that are similar, but it’s certainly not his twin. I wanted a total guy’s guy, but that had a heart—believably flawed. I feel like actor Noah Harpster walks those lines perfectly.

MJ: Bill, the stepdad, is this this super-uptight, controlling guy who is terrible at expressing emotions, and yet he’s likeable because he’s really trying.

TN: That’s what I said in the writers’ room. I want people to see Bill as, oddly enough, a hero in some ways. That he’s really trying and really got everyone’s best interests in mind. I wanted to show these flaws, but have people say, “Love that guy.”

MJ: What do the real-life Bill and Remy think of these portrayals?

TN: They love the show! My stepfather watched the whole series the day it came out and sat down and wrote me a letter, and just raved about it.

MJ: Your fictional biological father shows up at your mom’s wake, and he’s a bit of a yahoo. What can you tell me about your real father?

TN: He passed away, actually, while I was making the pilot. He was very charismatic and kindhearted, but also had a gun or a knife in his cowboy boots at any given moment, and he was always kind of struggling in life to find happiness and make ends meet. He really did mean well, but was just a little misguided in ways. What is nice is at the end of his life, he was married to his wife for 20 years and he had a nice relationship with three other children—my brother and I weren’t as involved in his life as his other kids, but it was nice to know he had that in the end.

MJ: What about your own character? Is TV Tig much different from real Tig?

TN: Well, I think it was important for me to show that I’m flawed like everyone else. I didn’t just want to be the one who was always looking around at the weird family members. I wanted to make my mistakes. But when people ask me about my acting, I’m like laughs, “I really just tried to remember my lines and do my best.” I didn’t really have any huge plan.

MJ: But you’re on stage performing monologues all the time.

TN: Sure, but it’s so different when there’s a camera inches away from your face and you’re crying or doing something very emotional. In standup, you don’t have anything near you except a microphone. There’s something a lot more self-conscious feeling when there’s cameras coming in for close-ups. It makes you very aware. But yeah, the character isn’t too far off from me.

MJ: The tricky thing with “semi-autobiographical” is that we get confused about what’s real and what’s not.

TN: I think that’s the fun part.

MJ: Sure. But in particular when there’s heavy stuff, like your character has memories of being molested. And you say to yourself, “Wow, I’ve never heard Tig talk about this. Did that really happen, or is it fiction?”

TN: Mmm.…I don’t know. Laughs.

MJ: Well, what I wanted to ask was, if it is fiction, given all your character is going through, why lay even more baggage on her?

TN: But who’s to say that’s the end of the baggage? Who’s to say that’s not how life goes? I had a conversation with Ira Glass about the idea of randomness and that time period in 2012. He was saying people think randomness is kind of a spread-out, odd pattern of events. But randomness can be all in the same place. I was foolish to think, “Wow, everything’s happened to me. Nothing can happen to me now.” That’s just not how it works.

MJ: Density may vary.

TN: Yeah. Life can very genuinely and realistically pile things on. It doesn’t dole out the heartache and pain, or joy, perfectly.

MJ: Well, it sounds like you’ve had your share of joy lately!

TN: I truly turn to Stephanie every day and express appreciation for our relationship and my life. I can’t believe I’m breathing and happy and thriving. I hope life doles things out excessively on this end, because it’s euphoric.

MJ: What was the hardest part about going back to re-create this awful period of your life?

TN: The fun part is people thinking they know my story because there’s a book out, and the Netflix movie, but with this show, I can say with confidence, “No, you can actually tune in and there’s a different story.” There’s the skeleton of what happened or what you think you know, and then to be able to fictionalize and move things around with the timeline and facts and people. There are moments and interactions that never happened—moments with my mother that never happened. It was still very therapeutic. True or not, it gave me a feeling for what other people in my family may have been going through. Playing with the moment brought out thoughts and emotions I had never considered. Of course I knew people were struggling around me, but I really was able to get in touch with that very quickly.

MJ: In the pilot, you’re alone in the hospital with your mother when she dies.

TN: In real life, I was at my mother’s side for 14 hours. And I was alone. It was brutal, and I wanted to show the emotional and drawn-out and not-glamorous part. In movies, you just see somebody close their eyes, and you go on to the next scene.

MJ: So let’s talk about your real name, Mathilde. I had to look it up. I didn’t know you and your mom shared the same first and middle names.

TN: Yeah, my grandmother had the same first name as well. It’s pronounced “mat-teel.”

MJ: Do you think you would have been successful in comedy using that name?

TN: Laughs. Who knows? I always wonder, aside from even my name, what if my parents never split up? What if my mother never died? It swirls in my head all the time.

MJ: I read that your brother nicknamed you Tig when you were two.

TN: Yeah. His name is Renaud in real life.

MJ: So you were named by a three-year-old?

TN: Yes.

MJ: What’s the family lore about why Tig?

TN: I think he couldn’t say Mathilde. I don’t know why Tig. There’s some theory that my grandmother, even though she was named Mathilde, she went by “Thilde” and maybe he was trying to say that. I don’t know. But it’s been with me for 43 years.

MJ: It’s great the show was renewed. It seems like you left plenty of doors open to take it in new directions.

TN: I think so. I just hope people keep watching. I’m so proud of One Mississippi. We’re going into the writers’ room in January, and I think we’ve got plenty to talk about.

You can catch Tig Notaro live in her post-Thanksgiving tour of the western United States, with bonus stops in Vancouver, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

HBO/Scott McDermott

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Tig Notaro Is Not Afraid of the Dark

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Our Food System Relies on Immigrants. Here’s How One Waiter Is Coping With Trump’s Election.

by FerneBlubaugh Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Enrique Diaz, 24, leads a busy life. He works 50 to 60 hours a week as a waiter at a restaurant in Lower Manhattan and takes classes at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, where he’s close to earning a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology. On November 8, Diaz suddenly got a new challenge: contending with an incoming president who wants to purge him—and his family—from the country.

Enrique Diaz

President-elect Donald Trump ran on a platform of bare-knuckled xenophobia, insulting Muslims and Mexicans and vowing to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants. Since the election, he has reiterated those sentiments, declaring he would assemble a “deportation force,” appointing white nationalist Steve Bannon as his chief White House strategist, and tapping a notorious immigrant-basher, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), as attorney general.

As I noted in this pre-election post, the Trump program amounts to a direct attack on the very people who feed us. The entire food system, from farm fields to meat-packing floors to restaurants, is shot through with immigrants, large numbers of whom are undocumented.

To get an idea of what it feels like to work in the food system while being targeted by the incoming administration, I interviewed Diaz for Bite podcast.

He moved to Brooklyn at eight years old, when his parents migrated from Mexico City without papers. Still living in Brooklyn, he currently has a two-year work permit under a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a policy created by a 2012 Obama administration executive order. DACA is intended to protect the approximately 1.7 million people in Diaz’ circumstances: undocumented young adults who migrated to the United States before their 16th birthday. DACA doesn’t offer a path to citizenship; it allows people who quality to apply for work permits and gain temporary protection against deportation.

Trump has vowed repeatedly, including on his campaign website, to rescind DACA “immediately.” So in addition to juggling 12-hour restaurant shifts and college classes, Diaz—whose brother also has DACA status —now has to contend with a promised immigration crackdown.

I talked to Diaz about his experience on Election Day, which started with a stint volunteering as a translator at a Brooklyn polling booth, and also about how the Trump victory went over with his fellow immigrants at work and at home with his family. “I’m afraid, I’m terrified,” Enrique said. “But I can’t show it at home”—he feels like he should maintain a calm face for his parents. Such stress reverberates through the food system.

Bite is Mother Jones‘ podcast for people who think hard about their food. Listen to all our episodes here, or subscribe in iTunes, Stitcher, or via RSS.

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Our Food System Relies on Immigrants. Here’s How One Waiter Is Coping With Trump’s Election.

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It’s Time to Pay More Attention to Jared Kushner

by MalorieL60 Posted on November 15, 2016

Mother Jones

Chris Christie was fired as the head of Donald Trump’s transition team last week. This week, two members of Trump’s transition team for national security have also been fired. What’s going on? The Washington Post says this:

A former U.S. official with ties to the Trump team described the ousters of Rogers and others as a “bloodletting of anybody that associated in any way on the transition with Christie,” and said that the departures were engineered by two Trump loyalists who have taken control of who will get national security posts in the administration: retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Rogers had no prior significant ties to Christie but had been recruited to join the Trump team as an adviser by the former New Jersey governor. At least three other Christie associates were also pushed aside, former officials said, apparently in retaliation for Christie’s role as a U.S. prosecutor in sending Kushner’s father to prison.

Smoldering vengeance is about what we’d expect from Trump and his extended family, so I’m provisionally ready to believe this is what’s going on. Remember this?

Aboard his gold-plated jumbo jet, the Republican nominee does not like to rest or be alone with his thoughts, insisting that aides stay up and keep talking to him. He prefers the soothing, whispery voice of his son-in-law.

Kushner is Trump’s very own Grima Wormtongue! And he really, really, doesn’t like Christie. This is from July:

Sources close to Jared Kushner, who is Ivanka Trump’s husband, say that Kushner has been telling them that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie will be Vice-President over his dead body. Kushner, who is playing an increasingly active role in the campaign, has a bitter history with Christie. Christie, when he was the US attorney of New Jersey, prosecuted his father, Charles Kushner, in a case that grabbed national headlines. The elder Kushner, pled guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005. He received a 2 year prison sentence.

Wait. Kushner’s father engaged in witness tampering? Oh yes:

The federal witnesses he had attempted to retaliate against were his sister and brother-in-law, who were cooperating with that same investigation. Kushner paid a prostitute $10,000 to lure his brother-in-law to a motel room at the Red Bull Inn in Bridgewater to have sex with him. A hidden camera recorded the activity, and Kushner sent the lurid tape to his sister, making sure the tape arrived on the day of a family party.

Maybe we should be less worried about Steve Bannon and more worried about Jared Kushner. No, scratch that. We should be worried about both. But Bannon is already getting plenty of attention. I have a feeling maybe Kushner should too.

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It’s Time to Pay More Attention to Jared Kushner

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

by Elyse Corder Posted on October 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Best of Enemies co-director Robert Gordon confessed to me a while back that his biggest fear was that “people won’t go see this movie because they think it’s going to be boring.” It isn’t. The documentary—which premieres October 3 at 10 p.m. on PBS (Independent Lens)—chronicles the often fiery debates between William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal that ABC aired during the 1968 election cycle in an effort to boost ratings. “It sounds like a dry documentary because people forget how witty these two guys are,” Gordon told me.

Gordon and co-director Morgan Neville—whose Twenty Feet From Stardom won the 2014 Oscar for best documentary—skillfully weave archival footage together with interviews with the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Brooke Gladstone, Dick Cavett, and Buckley’s brother Neil. The movie climaxes during one of the duo’s final debates at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago where, while discussing Vietnam War protesters, Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” The latter’s response, which could even make Donald Trump blush, was perhaps the first viral sound bite in modern media history. “Now listen, you queer,” Buckley retorted, twitching with anger. “Quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Indeed, the televised verbal brawls between these two brilliant intellectuals anticipated the culture wars that would define, for decades to come, America’s political struggles—and how the media would cover them. I sat down with Gordon in San Francisco not long ago to chat about the de-evolution of our political discourse and the challenge of making a film about conversations that took place decades ago.

Mother Jones: How did this project come to pass?

Robert Gordon: In 2010, a friend of mine acquired a bootleg DVD of the debates and shared it with me, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is today’s culture wars expressed by these two guys.” As a documentarian, you are always looking for that cache of film you can use to build a movie from; there was 2.5 hours of raw debate. It seemed so relevant to the division in the country that I just thought, “Let’s get on this immediately.”

MJ: Had you worked with Morgan Neville before?

RG: This is our fifth film together. Between the fourth and fifth, he made 20 Feet From Stardom and got the Academy Award. I called him up and said, “Way to go Morgan! You’re really putting the pressure on us now.” But it’s a big help having that accolade. People who don’t know us are more willing to trust us; it’s the stamp of legitimacy.

MJ: Was it challenging to get backers on board with such an unconventional documentary subject?

RG: Yes, it took a while. Most said to us, “This is all very interesting, but why do you see it as relevant today?” And since the movie has been made, the response has been, “I can’t believe how relevant to today this footage is.”

Gore Vidal (front) and William F. Buckley get primped for their clash. Independent Lens

MJ: Most of your past work has involved music. What made you want to stray from that subject?

RG: Most everything I’ve done has been about music, but music as a way to talk about bigger social issues, bigger cultural moments or movements. I don’t see it as that big of a leap. The debates are the operatic vignettes that recur, and it’s quite musical to me. The important thing to me is that my documentaries are about changes in America, and so is this.

MJ: It was quite a year, 1968. How did you decide what historical and cultural context to include?

RG: There were cultural touchstones that have been investigated over and over and over, and we didn’t want to redo those. And there are a lot of them to work with. I mean ’68, like you said, it’s rife with material, with cultural disagreement, violence, internationally—it’s all there. But we wanted to focus on our guys and what they stood for and where those changes occurred in relation to them.

MJ: But you did incorporate some major historical events into the film, like the riots outside of the DNC in Chicago.

RG: Yeah, totally, but only because it was there. It felt like the fighting on the street was being played out by these two guys in front of the glare of the national TV camera.

MJ: Was there anything that surprised you while researching these two men?

RG: I was surprised at the vigor with which Vidal pursued Buckley and his other enemies. Vidal seemed to thrive on animosity and on feuding, and at the same time could be very charming. You see him on Dick Cavett, and there’s a certain charm to him, you like to watch him, you like to see him talk, and I thought, “Well, surely this ‘man of ice’ was a put-on.” But then you read things like his obituary on Buckley, and, you know, he is a man of ice.

MJ: So did you feel like you had to hold back your own opinions about Vidal and Buckley?

RG: The film wasn’t about our personal views and our personal politics. That would have undermined the film’s potential. One of the interesting things I learned in the course of it was Buckley, whose politics I tend not to agree with, was strong enough to publicly change his mind on the Iraq War. He had come out very for it when it began, and over time, when he learned more about it, he changed. And that’s a brave position for someone in his situation. I think it’s very honorable and admirable.

MJ: There is that moment after the famous blowup between Buckley and Vidal when you pan through all the interviewees in the documentary sitting in shocked silence. And then Dick Cavett goes, “The network nearly shat.” Were those really these people’s reactions?

RG: That’s taking liberty in the editing room, is what it is. It was Cavett’s response that suggests that those were their real responses, because I asked Cavett about it and you see him turn and think, and he has a long silence, and then he gives that very funny answer, and we thought, “Wow, what if we extend that silence? Because that’s kind of musical in a way.” And we tested it and it was like, “Ohhh, this is funny.” And it never hurts to be funny.

The showdown Independent Lens

MJ: Yeah, the film has a lot of funny moments; Vidal and Buckley are very entertaining to watch.

RG: These guy were so smart, and they had a command of so many things: history, philosophy, economics, and, people forget, of humor as well. They were smart, witty guys.

MJ: I was struck by how intellectual their rhetoric was. It seems ironic that these debates helped inspire the trashy political debate we now see on cable.

RG: Yes, TV is pursued for the lowest common denominator. Networks, which had been civil to a fault up to that point in time, have worked themselves up to the point where all they are is a series of Roman candle explosions. The reason that the audience built for Buckley and Vidal is that, in addition to their cattiness, they were offering a lot of ideas and a lot of exchange, and they were humorous, too. It wasn’t just that explosive moment that made this what it was. But TV today seems to want to have you come back from a commercial and go right into a fight turned up to 10, and three minutes later go into a commercial—and that’s success! People have been introducing the show in theaters as “delicious,” and I think that suggests an appetite for more integrity on television; more intellectual exchange, less vacuous shouting.

MJ: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to imagine someone citing Pericles on network TV now!

RG: Yeah, I watched the Vidal-Buckley debates with a dictionary the first few times because I wanted to learn the words, and they were saying things I didn’t know, and what did it mean, and why were they choosing those words, and whom were they quoting? Wouldn’t you like to watch a half an hour of political TV and then take your notes and go look up what they were talking about? You glean what you need to glean, and then afterward you can take home more—it’s a prize that comes in the box!

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You Thought 2016 Was Intense? Watch This Exclusive Clip of the Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley Brawl

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

by MarcellaEstell Posted on August 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Sylville Smith, the 23-year-old black man whose shooting by police sparked riots in Milwaukee earlier this month, suffered from bipolar disorder and attention deficit disorder, according to his mother, Mildred Haynes. Smith had chosen not to take medication, Haynes told me, because he thought that admitting to mental illness would impede his ability to get a concealed-carry license. “He didn’t want to be disabled because he wanted a gun,” she told me. Her son had been shot twice in the past, and robbed four times, Haynes said. He wanted the weapon to protect himself.

Wisconsin is a concealed-carry state. Applicants who have been committed for treatment for mental illness or drug dependency are barred from receiving a permit, but people are not required to undergo a mental health evaluation when they apply. Haynes earlier told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that her son had, in fact, obtained a permit. Police officials have said the gun in Smith’s possession at the time of his death was stolen from a home in a nearby town.

In our interview, Haynes also told me that Smith had an Individualized Education Program (IEP) in elementary and high school, a specialized plan for students with learning disabilities, mental health issues, or other impairments. He had problems with comprehension and understanding, she said, and he spent time in special-education classes from elementary school onward. He also was suspended from school for behavior related to his condition.

Smith was shot by a Milwaukee police officer earlier this month while fleeing from a traffic stop. According to the official account, the officer chased Smith, who turned toward the cop holding a gun. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said body camera footage of the incident, which has not been released, confirms the police account. The department has not publicly identified the officer, but Milwaukee residents have been spreading his name and, in some cases, home address on social media—the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel says it has confirmed that this officer was the shooter.

Other recent shootings by police have involved subjects with a mental illness. Korryn Gaines, killed by Baltimore County police officers during a standoff earlier this month, had “developmental and behavioral injuries,” depression, and mood swings due to childhood lead poisoning, according to a lawsuit filed against her former landlord. In July, a health worker was inexplicably shot in North Miami after an officer took aim at an autistic patient the victim cared for. The officer, according to the police, mistook the toy car the patient was holding for a gun.

A report by the Treatment Advocacy Center last December found that 1 in 4 police encounters involve a person with mental illness, and that people with mental health problems are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than are people who lack such problems.

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The Black Man Whose Killing Sparked Milwaukee Riots Had Bipolar Disorder

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

by HiltonFryman68 Posted on August 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

I met Damien Coestly on my first day on the job as a guard at Winn Correctional Center, a private Louisiana prison then run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). I’d been sent to monitor the suicide watch cells in the segregation unit. I pulled my chair across from Coestly’s cell as he sat on the toilet, his body hidden under his tear-proof suicide smock. He told me to “get the fuck out of here” and threatened that if I didn’t he would “get up on top of this bed and jump straight onto my motherfucking neck.”

Read more: Reporter Shane Bauer’s four months as a private prison guard

When I was at Winn, inmates on suicide watch were kept in solitary confinement. They weren’t allowed to keep much more than a small amount of toilet paper, their suicide smocks, and suicide blankets. They had to sleep on a steel bunk, often without a mattress. They also received worse food than the rest of the prison population: A typical meal consisted of one “mystery meat” sandwich, one peanut butter sandwich, six carrot sticks, six celery sticks, and six apple slices. There were no mental health professionals stationed in the unit, just me and another guard watching over four inmates in their cells.

“This dumb-ass motherfucking CCA. This tops the charts in non-rehabilitation,” Coestly told me, leaning against the bars of his cell. “This Winnfield, man. Till you shut this mothafucker down, it ain’t go’ change.” He tried to hand me a Styrofoam cup through the food slot, asking if I would sneak in some coffee for him. At dinnertime, he demanded a vegetarian bag from the Special Operations Response Team (SORT), the SWAT-like tactical squad that was patrolling the unit. He didn’t get one, so he picked the meat out of his sandwich and ate the bread and carrot sticks. Afterwards, I watched him sleep, wrapped in his suicide smock like a cocoon.

After I quit my job at Winn in March 2015, a lawyer in Louisiana told me that a woman named Wendy Porter had read about me working at the prison and wanted to talk to me. Her son was Damien Coestly. Porter told me Damien had committed suicide six months after I’d seen him. He had just turned 33.

Johnny Coestly remembers the last time he saw his younger brother Damien. They were in a hotel room in a New Orleans suburb, laughing and joking as a hurricane raged outside. Damien, then 20 years old, was on the run. A few months earlier, three men had confronted him in a club. One was angry because Damien had been “messing” with his girlfriend. The man spit in his face. Damien shot all three, killing one.

Not long afterwards, Damien was arrested and sentenced to 30 years. He ended up in Winn. As an ex-felon, Johnny says he was never allowed to visit. He and Damien frequently talked on the phone, but the calls ended when Johnny got locked up for selling drugs. Then, on June 12, 2015, one year into his sentence, Johnny was suddenly told to pack his stuff and was put on a bus to Winn. He thought he was going to see his little brother for the first time in 13 years.

Johnny hadn’t yet finished the intake process at Winn when a guard took him into a room where the warden and the prison’s mental health director were waiting. They had bad news: Damien had attempted to kill himself in the segregation unit that afternoon, and had been sent to the hospital, unconscious. “It’s like my world had stop,” Johnny wrote me using the prison’s email system. Before the information could sink in, Johnny was put back on a bus and shipped to another prison across the state.

At first, Johnny refused to believe that Damien would try to take his own life. His brother had never said anything to him about depression or suicide. At Winn, however, Coestly’s fragile mental state was no secret. Prison records obtained from the Louisiana Department of Corrections by Anna Lellelid, the lawyer who currently represents his family, show that he went on suicide watch at least 17 times in the three and a half years before he died. One inmate wrote to me that Damien had told him “he was not going to do all his time. When the time came and he was at peace with God he was going to kill himself.” This inmate also said Coestly had expressed regret for killing the man who’d spit on him. “He said that he rather be in the same place that that guy was than do his time in prison.”

In records obtained by Lellelid, Winn’s part-time psychologist noted, “Inmate stated that he was feeling depressed and worried that he was going to kill himself, because he was hearing the voice of the person that he killed and that he was telling him to kill himself and join him.” On another occasion, a prison counselor wrote, “He says he’s done with CCA and his life.” CCA responded to one question about Coestly’s death for this article; it has yet to respond to more than 20 additional questions sent more than a month ago.

Earlier this year, I visited Wendy Porter at her home outside New Orleans. She was wearing a t-shirt that read “God is Good!” and a floppy purple cap to cover the scars from her recent brain surgery. When I’d initially contacted her, one of her most pressing concerns was how to pay the bill the hospital had sent her for Damien’s medical records. It was clear that she’d had a hard life. Her two remaining sons were in prison. Their fathers and Damien’s were either behind bars or dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” says Wendy Porter. James West

She was navigating her loss while reckoning with the fact that she’d missed a lot of her boys’ childhood because she’d been smoking crack. “When I would put the crack in a pipe, I would be looking in a mirror asking God to please help me,” she said as we talked in her living room. When Damien got locked up, she was serving a short prison term. Yet she was eager for me to know that she never stopped loving her kids. She quit using drugs and got back into their lives. Even when they were in prison, she would always send them what little she could scrape together.

After Damien died, the prison turned his belongings over to Porter. Everything he owned fit into a single box. When she eventually opened it, she found sugar packets and years of letters she had written him. There was a photo of him sitting in a prison yard in front of a row of books—biographies of Malcolm X and Che Guevara and titles on astronomy, astrology, and health. There was a grievance form in which Coestly claimed he’d mailed the gold caps from his teeth to his mom, but they went missing. (CCA turned down his complaint.) There was another in which he complained that the rehabilitative efforts at Winn were inadequate and that he’d been on a wait list for 12-step and mental health programs for two years. (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed this complaint.) “Just because I have 20 years left in prison doesn’t mean that I’m nonexistent and that I don’t matter,” he wrote.

Mixed in with Coestly’s paperwork was a printout from CCA’s website on which he highlighted the phrase, “We constantly monitor the offender population for signs of declining mental health and suicide risk, working actively to assist a troubled offender in his or her time of need.” Yet mental health staffing at Winn was thin while I was there. It consisted of one part-time psychiatrist, one part-time psychologist, and one full-time social worker for more than 1,500 inmates. (CCA confirmed this, adding that “The staffing pattern for mental health professionals at Winn was approved by the Louisiana Department of Corrections.” However, DOC documents show that it had asked CCA to hire more mental health employees at Winn.) The prison’s single social worker told me most Louisiana prisons had at least three full time social workers. Her caseload, she said, included 450 inmates with mental health issues.

Coestly was about 21 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

In a 2014 grievance, Coestly claimed that while on suicide watch in Winn’s Cypress unit he was jolted awake by two guards who dragged him out of his bunk, cuffed him, made him stand naked in the hallway, and slammed him against the wall repeatedly. In another complaint, he wrote that he and other inmates were left on suicide watch with no guards to monitor them. He claimed that two inmates then came into the tier and threw milk cartons full of feces on the inmates in the suicide watch cells while the guards stood by, doing nothing to stop them. “Check the cameras ASAP because this incident is going to ruin Winnfield’s reputation with this criminal act,” he wrote. “I fear for my life back here in Cypress because there’s nothing but chaos back here.” (It is not clear if CCA received or reviewed these complaints.)

Coestly’s family believes his suicide could have been prevented. Courtesy of Wendy Porter

Among the records turned over to Porter was a sheaf of legal documents. Coestly had been studying law in prison. After bringing a case against Winn in state court over two pairs of shoes taken by guards, the Department of Corrections asked CCA to reimburse him $47.32. Was he preparing a more substantial case against the prison? According to Lellelid, Coestly had collected documents from lawsuits brought on behalf of inmates who had committed suicide in custody. He had filed at least one grievance claiming that guards were putting him on suicide watch, naked, without consulting the mental health staff. (DOC policy stated that mental health professionals should make suicide watch assignments whenever possible; in their absence, they were to be notified immediately to assess the inmate as soon as they could.) He had appealed to the Louisiana Department of Corrections to review his claim, a necessary step before an inmate can file a federal civil rights claim. The DOC denied his appeal.

Coestly didn’t just protest on paper. He frequently went on hunger strike. At times it was because the prison would not give him a vegetarian meal as he’d often requested. The prison didn’t offer vegetarian options, so he ate the regular meals without the meat. Other times, he stopped eating because he felt he was not receiving adequate mental health services. Once, the prison psychologist reported in Coestly’s medical records that Damien was on suicide watch and “upset because he felt that he was not getting the appropriate care from mental health.” He wrote that Coestly complained that claiming to be suicidal was the only way to get a meeting with the psychiatrist. “Inmate has a long history of playing games and trying to manipulate the system,” the psychologist wrote.

Winn’s assistant chief of security, whom I’ll call Miss Lawson since she asked not to be named, was one of the CCA employees assigned to investigate Coestly’s death. She told me that he had been on suicide watch for “a couple weeks at least” when a SORT officer decided to take him off watch and put him in a regular segregation cell without, she noted, the approval of mental health staff. (State policy says that “suicide watch may be discontinued or down-graded only by a mental health professional or physician.”) “Me and the social worker got on ’em bad about moving him,” Miss Lawson recalled.

Coestly was put in a cell with an elderly man who was severely mentally ill, Miss Lawson told me. Unlike inmates on suicide watch, prisoners in segregation were not supposed to be under constant watch. Guards were supposed to check on them every 30 minutes. An inmate who had been a few doors down from Coestly in seg later told me that he saw Damien taken out of his cell to make a phone call. Afterwards, the prisoner heard Coestly tell a SORT officer he was feeling suicidal. The officer said he would return to get Coestly, but never did. Coestly repeated several times that he was going to kill himself, the inmate recalled. Miss Lawson said that according to prison policy, that should have gotten him automatically placed on suicide watch.

Related: Watch former guards and a prisoner recall life in a private prison James West

On the afternoon of June 12, 2015, the man in the cell next to Coestly—I’ll call him Tony—pounded on the metal above his door. “Dude is hanging himself!” he shouted. SORT officers stormed down the tier with pepper spray in hand, shouting, “Who the fuck is beating?” (Tony likely had been in Cypress because of me. I’d caught him with synthetic marijuana and he wound up in seg.) Tony told me some details of that day through JPay, the prison’s monitored email system. He wrote that “CCA could of saved Damien’s life if only they would of listened to him when he told them he had some problems.” He asked me to pay him for the full story. When I declined, he refused to tell me more.

Miss Lawson told me Coestly had tied a sheet to the top of his cell’s bars, looped it around his neck, and jumped off the top bunk. When the SORT officers arrived, his cellmate, sedated by sleeping medication, was struggling to hold up Coestly so he could breathe. Coestly was still alive and taken to a hospital, where his mom saw him. “It was bad,” Porter recalled. “He had skin rolling off his ankles.” Coestly remained shackled even as he lay unresponsive, she said. “Why you got shackles on him? What you think—he going to break out and run?”

Coestly remained on life support for 19 days. Porter said that her son had once been a “thick something” who liked to work out. But when he died, “He was so little.” An autopsy found that he weighed 71 pounds, nearly 50 pounds less than he had weighed six months earlier.

An excerpt from Coestly’s death certificate

In their reports about the incident, Miss Lawson said, CCA’s SORT officers “covered up a lot of stuff they shouldn’t have.” She said that video from the prison’s cameras showed that it had been an hour and a half since they had done a security check on Coestly’s tier. “If they had been going up and down the tiers like they were supposed to, then it wouldn’t have happened,” she believes. No Winn employees were ever disciplined as a result of the investigation, she said.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter into a private prison

I asked CCA spokesman Steven Owen about Coestly’s death. “You have your facts wrong in this case,” he wrote back. “The warden at Winn requested compassionate release for Mr. Coestly from the Louisiana Department of Corrections, which was granted. The inmate was hospitalized when he passed away.” Beyond noting that Damien did not actually die at Winn, he provided no further details. Lellelid confirmed that the DOC had granted Damien a compassionate release, but only as he lay in the hospital and “because he was brain dead.”

Coestly’s mom and brother hope to pursue a lawsuit against CCA for negligence in Damien’s death. Yet it is unlikely that the question of who is responsible for Coestly’s death will ever be decided in court. Louisiana law only allows a year for family members to file a wrongful-death lawsuit. And despite her recent involvement in her sons’ lives, Porter gave up custody of Damien when he was about five. Legally, her aunt, who became Coestly’s guardian, could have brought a case against CCA over his death. But she has advanced Alzheimer’s and does not understand that Damien is dead.

“I would love to sue them for the anger they caused my son, the pain,” Porter told me. “He suffered. He weighed 71 pounds. That was like somebody starving.” Her voice cracked. “I keep food in my house. I give people food!” she shouted, weeping. She paused and took a deep breath. “It’s all about a dollar. That’s what you is, a dollar sign to them. You know what my son said? He said it over the phone. He said, ‘When I get through with them, they’re going to shut this place down. It ain’t fit for an animal.'”

Additional research by Madison Pauly

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"He Weighed 71 Pounds. That Was Like Somebody Starving."

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

by KatlynKaufmann Posted on July 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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As a string of gun rampages continues in America and beyond, more evidence is emerging that copycat mass shooters are on the rise—a danger amplified and accelerated by social media. Two mass shootings this month build on disturbing patterns seen in other recent cases: an attack on police officers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and another on mallgoers in Munich, Germany, whose perpetrator displayed a host of behaviors underscoring this troubling phenomenon.

The attacker in Baton Rouge, a 29-year-old black Army veteran who killed three cops and wounded three others before a SWAT officer took him out, was prolific on social media before he struck. Among the many YouTube videos Gavin Long made of himself and shared via Twitter and Facebook are ones where he expressed his admiration for the mass killer who gunned down officers in Dallas just 10 days before Long’s own attack. “With a brother killing the police you get what I’m saying—it’s justice,” Long declared about the Dallas attacker—himself a young black Army veteran who had served in a war zone.

The gun rampage carried out in Munich last Friday by 18-year-old Ali Sonboly threw that city into chaos over fears of a multipronged terrorist attack. (Early reports of active shootings these days invariably are fraught with misinformation—a similar unfounded panic hit Dallas—though Munich had plenty of reason to overreact, with Germany increasingly targeted by ISIS.) But Sonboly, the lone perpetrator who killed nine people and injured numerous others before committing suicide as law enforcement closed in, appears to have had no connection to Islamist terrorism.

Instead, investigators have uncovered a range of evidence suggesting Sonboly was a textbook copycat attacker. The many parallels with past cases are striking:

Obsession with prior mass shooters
One such piece of evidence was literally a textbook: In the apartment where Sonboly lived, investigators found a German-language edition of Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. The book’s author, American psychologist and school shootings expert Peter Langman, told me that his “heart sank” when he learned of that discovery. It was not the first time an attacker displayed an interest in Langman’s case studies. The 18-year-old who went on a rampage at Arapahoe High School in Colorado in December 2013 also had a copy of the book. Investigators in Munich also learned that Sonboly had collected news coverage and other information on past attacks, a behavior familiar from the Newtown killer and many other mass shooters.

Such content helps fulfill the need of aspiring killers to find people they can identify with, says Langman. “Having a role model or an ideology that supports their violent intentions may serve the purpose of transforming what is otherwise aberrant and abhorrent into something admirable,” he says. “It validates their urge toward violence.”

Targeting an anniversary
Sonboly went on his rampage precisely five years after one of Europe’s worst massacres in modern history, the attack carried out in July 2011 in Norway by a lone killer who took the lives of 77 people and injured hundreds of others. As with the Norway massacre, which took place primarily at a youth summer camp, most of Sonboly’s victims were teenagers.

A game the Munich perpetrator reportedly was “obsessed” with

The desire to strike on the anniversary of a high-profile mass killing is not uncommon among would-be copycats, as I documented last year in my investigation of the “Columbine effect.” Since 1999, at least 14 perpetrators who emulated the Columbine killers have plotted to attack schools around the United States on that same date in April.

“Pseudocommando” ambitions
Forensic psychologists specializing in threat assessment have documented numerous mass shooters who cultivated a “pseudocommando” image—those who were obsessed with military weapons and paraphernalia and aspired to a “warrior mentality.” In Sonboly’s case, he may have nurtured such tendencies in part through first-person shooter games, including Counter-Strike: Source, a game that German investigators said he was obsessed with.

Weaponizing social media
Particularly chilling is how Sonboly apparently used Facebook to try to lure young victims to a McDonald’s restaurant across from Munich’s Olympia shopping mall, where he shot seven of his victims. (According to investigators, he may either have hacked a teenage girl’s account or created a phony Facebook page where he promised free food at the restaurant.)

Other recent rampage shooters have used social media as a tool in their attacks: In August 2015, an enraged ex-TV journalist gunned down two former colleagues in Virginia during a live broadcast and then posted his own footage of the killing on Facebook and Twitter, in what was dubbed the first “social-media murder.” And in June, the mass killer who struck inside an Orlando nightclub logged onto Facebook while he was in the process of killing, to see if news of his attack had gone viral. Threat assessment experts warn of more of this behavior to come.

A pre-attack pilgrimage
Another disturbing facet of Sonboly’s attack planning connects to a previous case: Investigators found evidence that he began preparing for the rampage about a year ago, after he visited the site of a 2009 school massacre in Winnenden, Germany. “We found a manifesto of his, in which he considers such attacks,” said Robert Heimberger, the chief of the Bavarian State Criminal Police. “From photos we found on a digital camera, we know that he visited the site and took pictures there.” Heimberger added that Sonboly was “obsessed” with the school shooting in Winnenden.

How the media inspires copycat mass shooters—and six ways it could stop doing so

Other mass shooters have engaged in these types of pilgrimages, seeking inspiration, tactical information, or both. As my investigation last year also showed, there are three publicly known cases in which perpetrators traveled to Columbine High School from other states as they plotted lethal attacks, two of which were ultimately carried out. (One took place in Washington state and another in North Carolina; an attack planned for a school in Utah was thwarted.) And those are just the cases that have been reported in the media—there have been more. In the course of my research on mass shootings, several veteran law enforcement officials have told me about other cases—involving Columbine as well as other sites of high-profile attacks—that have drawn these kinds of visits. (The officials, from regional and federal law enforcement agencies, shared this information under the condition that the details remain private.)

The rise of ISIS-inspired attacks in Europe and the United States has only further complicated the question of what motivates individuals to carry out mass shootings. A complex set of factors plays into this, from mental health to the role of social media. In the aftermath of Orlando, popular wisdom quickly settled on “ISIS terrorist”—but as I reported then, some threat assessment experts suggest that explanation, favoring the ideological over the clinical, may have been too simple or possibly even wrong.

Over the last few months, as I’ve spoken with threat assessment and security experts who work in a wide range of settings around the country, I’ve been struck by a similar theme from many of them: Threat caseloads have been growing, and their “op tempo” has been rising. A bitterly contentious political climate, the threat of terrorism, and global instability undoubtedly are factors. But with mass shootings heavily in the air these days—perhaps in part because of unwarranted hype from the media—some top security experts are concerned that we’ve entered “a new normal.”

During and immediately after the Baton Rouge attack earlier this month, I happened to be attending a conference with numerous law enforcement officials and security experts; unsurprisingly, the atmosphere among this typically stoic group of professionals included some palpable emotion and concern. One veteran school security leader from Colorado spoke of dealing with a record threat caseload over the past year. A leader of a SWAT unit from a Northeastern state described to me the added security contingencies he was now tasked with putting in place for any public events drawing crowds—now there is the added layer of protecting the police as they protect the public.

There is a troubling sense of streams converging, of thresholds being crossed.

“I think that the more the taboo against mass murder is broken, the easier it becomes for the next perpetrator. Thus, it seems to me that this phenomenon is feeding on itself, growing with each new incident,” says Langman. “For those who feel like they are nobody, the path to becoming somebody is very simple—get a gun and shoot a lot of people.”

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The Chilling Rise of Copycat Mass Shooters

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