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Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said About Global Warming

by bT2jW9hX8q Posted on December 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump has a lot of things to say about global warming. He’s called it an urgent problem, and he’s called it a hoax. He’s claimed it’s a scam invented by the Chinese, and he’s denied that he ever said that. He’s promised to “cancel” the historic Paris climate agreement, and he’s said he still has an “open mind” on the matter.

Some environmental activists have pointed to Trump’s unpredictable statements as evidence that he might not follow through on his campaign pledges to dismantle the Obama administration’s climate legacy. But Trump has already put one of the nation’s most prominent climate skeptics in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency transition. And just last week, one of Trump’s top aides assured Americans that the president-elect still believes climate science is mostly “bunk.”

For those keeping score at home, here’s a timeline of the Donald’s thoughts on global warming. We’ll update it from time to time.

12/6/09

Read the full the letter at Grist.

Trump signs a letter calling for urgent climate action. As Grist reported earlier this year, Trump and three of his children signed a 2009 letter to President Barack Obama calling for a global climate deal. “We support your effort to ensure meaningful and effective measures to control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today,” declared the letter, which was signed by dozens of business leaders and published as an ad in the New York Times. “If we fail to act now, it is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet.”

2/14/10

Trump changes his mind, says Gore should be stripped of Nobel Prize because it’s cold outside. According to the New York Post, Trump had changed his tune by early 2010, telling an audience at one of his golf clubs, “With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore…Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.” (He would later say he was joking about the Nobel Prize being rescinded.)

2/16/10

Trump claims scientists admitted global warming is a “con.” Around this time, Trump caught wind of the so-called “ClimateGate scandal,” in which climate deniers wrongly claimed a trove of hacked emails showed that scientists had conspired to fabricate evidence of global warming. Trump said (inaccurately) on Fox News that there was an email “sent a couple months ago by one of the leaders of global warming, the initiative…almost saying—I guess they’re saying it’s a con.” He added that “in Washington, where I’m building a big development, nobody can move because we have 48 inches of snow.”

11/6/12

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese.”

12/6/13

Trump declares global warming a “hoax.” As an unusually powerful ice storm ripped through the southern part of the United States, Trump announced that climate change is a “hoax.”

Jan. 2014

Trump says scientists are in on the hoax. On January 6, Trump went on Fox News to discuss a severe cold snap that set records across the country. “This winter is brutal,” said Trump, adding that climate change is a “hoax” perpetrated by “scientists who are having a lot of fun.” Trump kept up this line of argument throughout the long and miserable winter.

2014

Trump donates money to fight climate change. At some point in 2014, Trump donated $5,000 of his foundation’s money to Protect Our Winters, an advocacy group dedicated to “mobilizing the outdoor sports community to lead the charge towards positive climate action.” As the group’s website explains, “If we’re serious about slowing climate change, it’s imperative that we decrease our dependence on fossil fuels and focus on cleaner sources of energy and electricity.”

An entry in the Donald J. Trump Foundations’s 2014 tax filings

According to the New York Daily News, Trump made the donation at the request of Olympic snowboarding gold medalist Jamie Anderson, who was one of the contestants on Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice reality show. Anderson was participating on behalf of Protect Our Winters, which, she said on the show, “brings light and inspiration to climate change.” Still, Trump remained a climate change denier. During the season premier, which aired in early 2015, Trump suggested that New York’s cold weather undermined Gilbert Gottfried’s belief in climate science:

6/17/15

Trump says it’s “madness” to call climate change our “No. 1 problem.” The day after announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where he said he was “not a believer in man-made” warming. He added, “When I hear Obama saying that climate change is the No. 1 problem, it is just madness.”

9/21/15

“I’m not a believer in man-made global warming.” During the GOP primary race, Trump kept up his climate denial. Here he is on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show: “I’m not a believer in man-made global warming. It could be warming, and it’s going to start to cool at some point. And you know, in the early, in the 1920s, people talked about global cooling…They thought the Earth was cooling. Now, it’s global warming…But the problem we have, and if you look at our energy costs, and all of the things that we’re doing to solve a problem that I don’t think in any major fashion exists.”

12/1/15

Trump says it’s “ridiculous” for Obama to pursue the Paris climate agreement. The long-anticipated Paris climate negotiations began barely two weeks after the city was struck by a devastating series of terrorist attacks. As the talks kicked off, Obama called the summit “an act of defiance” against terrorism and urged the world leaders gathered there to agree to an ambitious deal to combat global warming. Trump took to Instagram to express his disapproval. “While the world is in turmoil and falling apart in so many different ways—especially with ISIS—our president is worried about global warming,” he said. “What a ridiculous situation.”

What is Obama thinking?

A video posted by Donald J. Trump (@realdonaldtrump) on Dec 1, 2015 at 8:12am PST

12/30/15

“A lot of it’s a hoax,” and “I want to use hair spray.” During a campaign speech in Hilton Head, South Carolina, Trump criticized Obama for worrying too much about “the carbon footprint” of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change—an issue that Trump proceeded to conflate with the hole in the ozone layer. “I want to use hair spray,” complained Trump. “They say, ‘Don’t use hair spray, it’s bad for the ozone.’ So I’m sitting in this concealed apartment, this concealed unit…It’s sealed, it’s beautiful. I don’t think anything gets out. And I’m not supposed to be using hair spray?” He then returned to the subject of the climate hoax: “So Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, okay? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

1/24/16

Trump says his claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax was a “joke.” At a Democratic debate in January, Bernie Sanders criticized Trump, noting the real estate mogul “believes that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.” Trump responded the next day on Fox News, suggesting that his infamous 2012 tweet was a joke. “I think the climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax,” said Trump, according to PolitiFact. “A lot of people are making a lot of money…And I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China, because China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less. They have very—you know, their standards are nothing. But they—in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.”

May 2016

Trump wants to build a sea wall to protect his resort from global warming. Politico reported that one of Trump’s golf clubs asked officials in County Clare, Ireland, to approve construction of a sea wall to guard against the dangers of sea level rise and “more frequent storm events.” According to an environmental impact statement submitted with the application, “If the predictions of an increase in sea level rise as a result of global warming prove correct…it is likely that there will be a corresponding increase in coastal erosion rates…In our view, it could reasonably be expected that the rate of sea level rise might become twice of that presently occurring.”

5/5/16

“Trump digs coal.” Shortly after clinching the GOP nomination, Trump traveled to West Virginia, where he was endorsed by the West Virginia Coal Association. At a rally in Charleston, Trump pointed to signs being waved in the crowd. “I see over here: ‘Trump digs coal,'” he said. “That’s true. I do.” Trump promised to bring back coal mining jobs by repealing Obama’s “ridiculous rules and regulations.”

Coal miners wave signs at Trump’s May 5 rally in Charleston, West Virginia. Steve Helber/AP

5/26/16

Trump pledges to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement. In a major speech on energy policy, Trump said that during his first 100 days in office, he would “rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including” his landmark climate regulations, “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement,” and “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs.”

7/26/16

Trump says he “probably” called climate change a “hoax.” In a remarkably odd exchange on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly asked Trump whether it was “true” that he had “called climate change a hoax.” Trump replied that he “might have” done so following the release of the ClimateGate emails. “Yeah, I probably did,” he added. “I see what’s going on.” Trump went on to say that fossil fuels “could have a minor impact” on the climate but “nothing compared to what they’re talking about.”

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
9/26/16

Trump picks leading climate skeptic to run the EPA transition. Hours before Trump’s first debate with Hillary Clinton, word leaked that he had chosen Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute to lead his transition efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell has a long history of opposing efforts to fight climate change; he’s even accused climate scientists of “manipulating and falsifying the data.” As we reported, “Ebell has called…Obama’s Clean Power Plan ‘illegal’ and the Paris Climate Accord a ‘usurpation of the Senate’s authority.’ Any small increase in global temperatures, he has said, is ‘nothing to worry about.'”

9/26/16

Trump denies saying climate change is a Chinese hoax. During the first debate, Clinton noted that Trump “thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese.” In response, Trump simply lied. “I did not, I did not,” he said. “I do not say that.” Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway later attempted to clarify his position, telling the Huffington Post, “What he has said is, he believes climate change is naturally occurring and is not all man-made.”

11/23/16

Trump has “open mind” on Paris agreement but still thinks scientists are misleading us. In an interview with the New York Times two weeks after his victory, Trump made a number of confusing and contradictory statements about climate science and policy. Asked if he still planned to pull out of the Paris agreement, Trump said, “I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully.” He conceded that there is “some connectivity” between humans and climate change,” adding, “It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.” He claimed that the “hottest day ever” was in 1898. He said climate is “a very complex subject. I’m not sure anybody is ever going to really know.” He once again invoked ClimateGate, declaring, “They say they have science on one side but then they also have those horrible emails that were sent between the scientists.” And, apparently in contrast to his request to build a sea wall in Ireland, Trump even speculated that sea level rise would actually improve the Trump National Doral golf course in Florida. (He may be wrong about that.)

11/27/16

Trump’s “default position” is that climate change “is a bunch of bunk.” Following Trump’s confusing New York Times interview, incoming White House chief of staff Reince Priebus sought to reassure supporters that the president-elect is, in fact, a climate change denier. “As far as this issue on climate change, the only thing he was saying, after being asked a few questions about it, is, ‘Look, I’ll have an open mind about it,'” Priebus explained on Fox. “But he has his default position, which is that most of it is a bunch of bunk. But he’ll have an open mind and listen to people.”

12/1/16

Ivanka Trump “wants to make climate change…one of her signature issues.” According to Politico, a “source close to” Trump’s daughter Ivanka said the first daughter “wants to make climate change—which her father has called a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese—one of her signature issues…The source said Ivanka is in the early stages of exploring how to use her spotlight to speak out on the issue.”

12/5/16

Donald and Ivanka Trump meet with Al Gore.

This story has been updated. Natalie Schreyer contributed to this article.

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Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said About Global Warming

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These Are the Books We’re Giving Our Friends This Year

by Monique7546 Posted on December 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Every year, Mother Jones receives hundreds of worthy books, but there are always a handful that truly stand out, the ones we end up foisting on friends and family. Well, friends and family, here you go, in no particular order. Also, be sure and check out the Best Cookbooks post by food and ag writer Tom Philpott, and stay tuned for photo book picks from photo editor Mark Murrmann and the year’s best music from critic Jon Young (on Sunday).

The Hopefuls, by Jennifer Close. Beth, the twentysomething protagonist of Jennifer Close’s wryly observed new novel, is an aspiring journalist loving life in New York City. But when her husband, Matt, gets a job in the Obama administration, Beth reluctantly agrees to follow him to DC. Thanks to Close’s eye for detail, The Hopefuls is like a still life of Washington in 2008. She masterfully captures both the contagious enthusiasm and wonky snobbery of DC’s rising political stars and their hangers-on. One character is forever telling anecdotes about senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, pretentiously referring to him as “Ax.” Another refers to Obama as “the senator”—a subtle humble brag that he’s worked for the president since way back when. Beth is miserable in this dreary social circle—until she and her husband click with a charismatic couple from Texas. And before she knows it, Beth herself is swept into this world of political strivers. Ultimately, The Hopefuls is as much about friendship as it is about politics—and about what happens when the two collide. —Kiera Butler, senior editor

My Father, the Pornographer, by Chris Offutt. This memoir is not a salacious romp, as the cover might suggest, but a slow-burning examination of Chris Offutt’s strained relationship with his late dad, a prolific author of smut and sci-fi. Offutt focuses less on the giant pile of kinky material he inherited than how it affected his childhood, his family, and his sense of self. His final plunge into his father’s most secret, and shameful, obsessions is worth the wait. —Dave Gilson, senior editor

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, by Mary Roach. This latest book from the perpetually curious Mary Roach looks at the weird yet deadly serious science of keeping soldiers alive. In a globe-trotting tour of labs, training grounds, and a nuclear sub, Roach explores how fighting men and women sweat, sleep, and poop. “No one wins a medal” for this obscure, often gross, survival research, Roach writes. “And maybe someone should.” Like her previous books Gulp and Stiff, Grunt oozes bodily fluids, flippant footnotes, and weapons-grade wordplay. —D.G.

The Arab of the Future 2: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1984-1985, by Riad Sattouf & Such a Lovely Little War: Saigon 1961-63, by Marcelino Truong. Two of the most affecting memoirs of the year are graphic novels by French cartoonists who grew up astride two cultures. The Arab of the Future 2 picks up where its predecessor left off: Riad Sattouf, the adorable six-year-old son of a Syrian father and a French mother, is adjusting to his new life in his father’s village outside Homs in the mid-1980s. Sattouf’s bubbly illustrations belie the bleakness of his surroundings, and the violence and misogyny he witnesses.

Marcelino Truong’s beautifully illustrated tale follows him and his two siblings in their move to Saigon as the Vietnam War heats up. While the kids are enthralled by the war and oblivious to its horrors, their French-born mother breaks down as she sees just how quickly things are falling apart. The two authors’ artistic and narrative sensibilities differ, but their work is united by common themes: surreal childhoods amid geopolitical conflict (Sattouf and his playmates battle the Israeli Army; Truong and his cousins pretend to fight the Viet Cong) and idealistic fathers (Sattouf’s dad is a Qaddafi- and Saddam-admiring pan-Arabist, while Truong’s is an official in the US-backed South Vietnamese government) who are blind to the strife afflicting their countries—and families. Read together or separately, these comics pack a surprising punch. —D.G.

Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, by John Edgar Wideman. In his first book in more than a decade, the acclaimed African American author and Brown University professor John Edgar Wideman explores the saga of Emmett Till’s father, who was court-martialed and hanged by the United States military well before the notorious lynching of his son by white racists in Mississippi. Via a Freedom of Information Act request, Wideman obtains records from Louis Till’s military trial and interrogates the file from every angle—filling in the gaps with his own vivid imagination and recollections. Part history, part memoir, part mystery, part fiction, this insightful book reveals as much about the author as it does about his subject. As Wideman put it to me in a recent interview, “To write a story about Louis Till puts me on trial.” —Michael Mechanic, senior editor

The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. You’ve probably heard plenty about 2016’s National Book Award winner for fiction, but I’ll pile on anyway. Whitehead’s riveting slavery saga reimagines the underground railroad as a literal thing, but he doesn’t dwell too heavily on that plot device. The story follows a pair of escapees from a Georgia plantation as they move north along the railroad, pursued by a determined slave catcher. Among other things, they stumble across a bizarre eugenics experiment in South Carolina and a vile campaign of ethnic cleansing in North Carolina. Whitehead’s character-driven tale brings into visceral relief the horrors, the cruelty, the stark inhumanity of an economy based on captive black labor. And he reminds us, too, of the grim fate that awaited Southern whites brave enough to oppose the system. —M.M.

The Fortunes, by Peter Ho Davies. Given the extraordinary success of Chinese Americans today, it’s easy to forget how tough white society made things for their forebears who flocked here during the Gold Rush or who were imported as cheap labor for railroad companies—only to later be scapegoated and officially excluded by an act of Congress that would remain in force until 1943 (just in time for the interning of Japanese Americans). Davies’ outstanding new novel reminds us how things were (and still are, if the 2016 election is any indication). The experiences of Davies’ characters—a poor laundry boy hired on as a railroad magnate’s valet, an ambitious Chinese American starlet—highlight the tightrope walk of maintaining one’s culture while striving for acceptance in a resentful society. The Fortunes feels particularly timely now that we’ve handed the White House keys to a man who threatens to register and exclude Muslim immigrants, and to deport Americans (for really, what else can we honestly call them?) brought here without papers as toddlers. —M.M.

While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man’s Descent Into Madness, by Eli Sanders. One night in 2009, a disturbed young man named Isaiah Kalebu entered a Seattle home through an open window and raped and stabbed two women, killing one. He was sentenced to life in prison, but local journalist Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the case, kept digging. While the City Slept, his compassionate examination of the lives that collided that night, relates how a bright but abused boy grew into a violent criminal and, as one psychiatrist put it, “became his illness.” The book plays double duty as tribute to those whose lives were upended and a meticulous indictment of the way we fail fellow citizens with serious mental disorders. —Madison Pauly, assistant editor

Pumpkinflowers, by Matti Friedman. This is a 21st-century war story, with all of the IEDs, propaganda videos, jihadi groups we’re accustomed to—but one told in the restrained, introspective style of the World War I writers Friedman turned to for inspiration. It’s partly an engrossing personal story, partly a history of a forgotten chapter in Middle East conflict, and one of the best-written books I’ve read in years. —Max J. Rosenthal, reporter

Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi. This ambitious debut novel sparked a bidding war and landed Gyasi a seven-figure contract just one year after she graduated from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Following seven generations across two continents, Gyasi manages to fit the many stages of slavery’s plunder into a relatively slim volume, to dazzling and often devastating effect. Though some of the storylines unravel a bit toward the novel’s end, the emphasis on global slavery’s ramifications in West Africa, told with rich and lively characters and language that hums, makes this well worth the commitment. —Maddie Oatman, story editor

Real Food, Fake Food: Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating and What You Can Do About It, by Larry Olmsted. We’ve all been told to steer clear of artificial ingredients, but how much do you know about fake—meaning fraudulent—food? Turns out, it’s everywhere, including in your kitchen right now. Olive oil, parmesan cheese, fish fillets, red wine; it would seem the more scrumptious the victual, the more likely it is to be a sham. Olmsted gives us the lay of this seedy landscape with momentum and aplomb. He demystifies the process by which fake ingredients end up in your shopping cart, explains why some of these deceitful foods could be a real threat to your health, and sheds a light on the government policies and shortsighted commercialism that landed them there. —M.O.

Swing Time, by Zadie Smith. Award-winning author Zadie Smith’s fifth novel interweaves two narratives. One involves the unnamed narrator’s childhood friendship, wrought by a shared passion for dance. The other one revolves around the narrator’s adult travels to Africa in the employ of a pop star as she grapples with her own biracial identity. Penned in Smith’s inimitable, winding style, Swing Time looks unflinchingly at race, gender, parenting, love, and friendship. In places, I found the book an unnerving reminder of my own childhood, of parents who seemed invincible and maddeningly certain about the course of their offspring’s future. —Becca Andrews, assistant editor

March: Book Three, by Rep. John Lewis and Andrew Aydin; illustrated by Nate Powell. Police brutality, segregation, voting rights: Many of the big issues of the 1960s are alive and well today. The March graphic-history trilogy tells the story of the civil rights movement through the eyes of Rep. John Lewis, onetime chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—a group at the center of the struggle. In poignant detail, the March books, totally 600 pages, put us at the heart of the battles over desegregation and black suffrage. We meet the movement’s leaders and witness the ugly local clashes leading up to the March on Washington. In the third installment, which earned a 2016 National Book Award, the beatings and defiance of “Bloody Sunday” stand in sharp contrast to Lewis’ pride on President Barack Obama’s inauguration day. The book, and the trilogy, offer lessons for modern strivers on how far we’ve come—while serving as a reminder of how far we have yet to go. —Edwin Rios, reporter

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, by Matthew Desmond. In a tome filled with heartbreak, Desmond, a sociologist who teaches at Harvard, embeds with eight families who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads in the segregated city of Milwaukee. Rich in history and bolstered by engrossing research, Evicted vividly captures with empathy the lives of those caught up in deep poverty as they reel from the consequences of losing their homes. In doing so, it elevates the importance of affordable housing in today’s society. “Housing is deeply implicated in causing poverty in America today,” Desmond told me in March, “and we have to do something.” —E.R.

A Rage for Order: The Middle East in turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS, by Robert F. Worth. This is not your typical Middle East manuscript—no bird’s eye view of battlefield advancements or policy analysis on the region in collapse. Rather, Robert F. Worth, the longtime correspondent for the New York Times, managed to be on the ground seemingly everywhere that mattered during the zenith of the Arab Spring, and takes us a journey inside the lives of those whose hopes rode on the Arab Spring’s promise and whose lives changed—or ended—forever once the popular uprisings collapsed into insurgencies and civil war. It’s a beautifully written, moving account that brings humanity and heart to a region typically only considered in terms of conflict and chaos. —Bryan Schatz, reporter

God Save Sex Pistols, by Johan Kugelberg, with Jon Savage and Glenn Terry. Curator, author, and all-around underground know-it-all Johan Kugelberg released the end-all Sex Pistols ephemera collection earlier this year, and just in time; soon after, Joe Corre, son of punk impressarios Malcolm McClaren and Dame Vivien Westwood, celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistol’s first single by burning more than $6 million worth of rare, original Sex Pistols and UK punk memorabilia. Though the original artifacts were lost to Corre’s piqued sense of anti-nostalgia, God Save Sex Pistols lovingly showcases photos, letters, flyers, records, posters, shirts—everything related to the band that once terrified parents and politicians. The book also serves as a more focused compendium to Kugelberg & Savages’ excellent 2012 book, Punk: An Aesthethic. —Mark Murrmann, photo editor

I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, by Ed Yong. Few writers know how to explain science clearly, and even fewer science writers compose genuinely gorgeous prose. Ed Yong is that unicorn. I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us is the most elegant guide I’ve seen to our still-primitive understanding of the microbiome—the gazillions of tiny critters living within us. Like Nietzsche peering into a microscope, Yong urges us to think beyond “good” and “bad” microbes: “These terms belong in children’s stories. They are ill-suited for describing the messy, fractious, contextual relationships of the natural world.” Context is everything. “The same microbes could be good in the gut, but dangerous in the blood,” Yong writes. One of the many functions of mother’s milk, one scientist informs him, may be to “provide babies with a starter’s pack of symbiotic viruses”—and that’s a good thing. “Every one of us is a zoo in our own right—a colony enclosed within a single body,” he writes. “A multi-species collection. An entire world.” —Tom Philpott, food and ag correspondent

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank. His forward-looking autopsy may seem like a contradiction in terms, but Thomas Frank had the dirge of the Democratic Party cued up before primary season. Still, the shock of November 8 catapulted the virtuosic Listen, Liberal from insightful to downright prophetic. Frank meticulously charts the Democrats’ suicidal slide from a party of the factory floor to one of late-summer galas on Martha’s Vineyard. He hits on all the major missteps—the decline of middle-class wages, the bank bailouts, the trade deals, the technocracy (oh, the technocracy!)—all of which were later parceled out by the flabbergasted into grasping post-election think pieces. Frank’s book is lacerating and urgent, but also titillating, witty, and downright fun to read. It will no doubt give some establishment Dems the strong urge to throw the book into the ocean—indeed, their proximity to the coast and ability to conceivably do just that is part of the problem. This, for my money, is the best nonfiction of 2016. —Alex Sammon, editorial fellow

Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays, by Cynthia Ozick. Narratives of decline seem to be particularly in, but no one can render this notion quite as beautifully as Ozick. At 88, she’s been around the literary block, and she can’t help but lament the state of the American traditions of reading and writing. “What’s impossible not to notice,” as she put it to me earlier this year, “is the diminution of American prose.” To read Ozick is enriching for her startling vocabulary alone, though her intellectual force is also something to behold. This essay collection stakes out the critical cultural importance of literary criticism, and does so with the linguistic expertise of a poet—peaking with a vivid disemboweling of the term “Kafkaesque,” for all its faux-literary worth. One thing, for Ozick, is certain: The road to cultural aridity is paved with 3.5-star Amazon reviews. —A.S.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J.D. Vance. If you want to understand how Donald Trump took over the GOP, and how he won so many Rust Belt counties that voted for Barack Obama, this is a good place to start. Vance uses the story of his childhood in a dying steel town to highlight what he sees as cultural shortcomings and political delusions among the region’s white working class. “We talk about the value of hard work,” he writes, “but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese.” There’s plenty to disagree with in Vance’s analysis—his insistence on blaming “welfare queens” for their financial problems, for example. Still, for all of us asking, “What just happened to my country?” Hillbilly Elegy provides some invaluable clues. —Jeremy Schulman, senior project manager, Climate Desk

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These Are the Books We’re Giving Our Friends This Year

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Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

by AngieCervantes Posted on November 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Are Republicans really going to start off the 115th Congress by mucking around with Medicare?

For nearly six years, Speaker Paul D. Ryan has championed the new approach, denounced by Democrats as “voucherizing” Medicare. Representative Tom Price of Georgia, the House Budget Committee chairman and a leading candidate to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of health and human services, has also embraced the idea, known as premium support.

….Democrats say that premium support would privatize Medicare, replacing the current government guarantee with skimpy vouchers — “coupon care for seniors.” The fear is that the healthiest seniors would choose private insurance, lured by offers of free health club memberships and other wellness programs, leaving traditional Medicare with sicker, more expensive patients and higher premiums.

….Republicans say their proposal would apply to future beneficiaries, not to those in or near retirement. But the mere possibility of big changes is causing trepidation among some older Americans.

….“I’m scared to death,” said Charles Drapeau, who has multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer, and takes a drug that costs more than $10,000 a month. “We don’t know exactly how it will work, but just the fact that they are talking about messing with Medicare, it’s frightening to me.”

Just for the record, that drug is actually $10,500 every four weeks. So Mr. Drapeau should be 14 percent more scared to death than he already is.

But back to Medicare vouchers premium support. It’s pretty plain that it would be worse for seniors than the current Medicare system. After all, if it were better, Ryan wouldn’t feel like he has to exempt current Medicare recipients. But everyone currently on Medicare is keenly aware of how their benefits would be affected by Ryan’s vouchers, and if they aren’t, AARP will tell them in no uncertain terms. So they’ll fight Ryan’s cuts tooth and nail.

So why is Ryan doing this, anyway? I suppose because it’s one of the few ways to open up a significant amount of budget room for his gigantic tax cuts. If you want big tax cuts, after all, you need big spending cuts too, and that means cutting big programs. Unfortunately for Ryan, there really aren’t all that many big spending programs, especially once you take defense off the table. So he has little choice but to chop away at Medicare if those top marginal rates are going to come down.

And yet, why now? In one sense, I suppose doing it right at the start, when political capital is highest, makes sense. You do the hard stuff when you have the biggest majorities and everyone is eager for change. That’s why Obama went after health care first. At the same time, this would be a huge, messy battle that would almost certainly be wildly unpopular. Medicare is probably even more beloved than Social Security, after all. A battle like this could easily up in an epic defeat, and wipe out whatever goodwill the new Congress has.

So it’s a bit of a mystery. I don’t think Ryan can win this battle unless he offers up a plan that doesn’t really save much money. That’s possible, of course: just take a look at the difference between Ryan 2011 and Ryan 2014. But if you don’t save much money, what’s the point?

I dunno. If it were me, I’d do the popular stuff first. Cut taxes, build the wall, repair some bridges, bomb the shit out of ISIS, etc. More to the point, if I were Donald Trump, that’s what I’d do. Trump wants to be adored by the masses, not hated by them. Voucherizing Medicare is very definitely not the way to get there.

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Voucherizing Medicare Is a Death Ride for Republicans

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Ben Carson may soon oversee the country’s affordable housing. Yes, that Ben Carson.

by keithmelendez866 Posted on November 23, 2016

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and right-wing pundit, told Fox News that President-elect Trump has asked him to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. (Trump tweeted that he is “seriously considering” Carson for the post.)

Carson has already turned down a chance to be Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services on the grounds that he is unprepared to run a federal agency. So how is HUD any different? Good question.

Carson lacks any relevant experience. HUD is charged with developing affordable and inclusive housing. Under the Obama administration, it has promoted smart-growth goals, such as linking low-income housing with mass transit.

During Carson’s unsuccessful campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he never proposed any policies to promote low-cost or integrated housing. Asked on Fox about his knowledge of HUD’s work, Carson pointed to his experience growing up in a city.

Trump is also reportedly considering Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino to run HUD. Under Astorino, the county has failed to comply with a 2009 settlement in which it agreed to build more affordable housing.

So Trump will nominate either someone wholly unqualified or someone who opposes affordable housing. It’s almost as if the luxury real-estate developer once sued for discriminating against black tenants doesn’t care about affordability or integration.

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Ben Carson may soon oversee the country’s affordable housing. Yes, that Ben Carson.

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How I Came to Grips With My American Exceptionalism

by GustavoPimentel Posted on November 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

The fluorescent circus of Election 2016—that spectacle of yellow comb-overs and orange skin and predatory pussy-grabbing and last-minute FBI interventions and blinking memes hewn by an underground army of self-important internet trolls—has finally come to its unnatural end. I had looked forward to this moment, only to find us all instantly embroiled in a new crisis. And unfortunately, it’s easy to foretell what, or rather who, will move into the bright lights of our collective gaze now: Americans are going to continue to focus on…well, ourselves.

We are obviously not, for instance, going to redeploy our energies toward examining the embarrassing war that we’re still waging in Afghanistan, now in its 16th year—something that went practically unmentioned during election season even as fighting heated up there. (You can be sure that Afghans have a somewhat different perspective on the newsworthiness of that war.) We are also not going to spend our time searching for the names of people like Momina Bibi, whom we’ve—oops—inadvertently annihilated while carrying out our nation’s drone program.

For his part, Donald Trump has pledged to “take out” the families of terrorists, a plan that sounds practically ordinary when compared to our actual drone assassination program, conceived by President George W. Bush and maintained and expanded by President Barack Obama. And while I don’t for a moment pretend that Trump’s electoral victory is anything less than an emergency for our republic—especially for the most vulnerable among us, and for every American who believes in justice, equity, or basic kindness—it’s also true that some things won’t change at all.

In fact, it’s prototypically American that an overlong and inward-looking election spectacle (which will, incidentally, have “big-league” international implications) will be supplanted by still more inward-looking. And this jogs my memory in a not-very-pleasant way. I can’t help but recall the moment, years ago and 8,000 miles away, when I was introduced to my own American-centered self. The experience left an ugly mark on my picture of who I am—and who, perhaps, so many of us are, as Americans.

Eight years before I heard about a guy in Yemen whose cousins were obliterated by an American drone strike in a procession following his wedding celebration, I gleefully clicked through the travel site Kayak and pressed “confirm purchase” on a one-way ticket to Kathmandu. This was 2008, shortly before Barack Obama was elected, and my boyfriend and I—a couple of twentysomethings jonesing to see the world—were about to depart on what we expected to be the adventure of our lives. Having worked temporary stints and squirreled away some cash, we stashed our belongings into my mom’s damp basement and prepared for a journey meant to last half a year and span South Asia and East Africa. What we didn’t know as we headed for New York City’s Kennedy Airport, passports zippered into our money belts, was that, whatever we’d left behind at my mom’s, we were unwittingly carrying something far heftier with us: our American-ness.

Adventures commenced as soon as we stepped off the plane. We glimpsed ice-capped peaks that rose majestically out of the clouds as we walked the lower Everest trail. And then—consider this our introduction to the presumptions we hadn’t shed—we ran into a little snafu. We hadn’t brought along enough cash for our multiweek mountain trek—apparently we’d expected Capital One ATMs to appear miraculously on a Himalayan footpath.

After we dealt with that issue through a service that worked by landline and carbon paper, we took a bumpy Jeep ride south to India and soon found ourselves walking the sloping fields of Darjeeling, the leaves of tea shrubs glinting in the afternoon light. Then we rode trains west and south, while through the frame of a moving window I looked out at fields and rice paddies where women in red or orange or turquoise saris worked the land, even as the sun set and the sky turned pink and reflected off the water where the rice grew.

Things would soon get significantly less picturesque—and in some strange and twisted way, the farther we traveled, the closer to home we seemed to get.

We arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, in January 2009, on a day when thousands of people had flooded into the streets to protest a recent and particularly bloody Israeli attack on Gaza. Hamas, firing rockets into southern Israel, had killed one Israeli and injured many others. Israel retaliated in an overwhelming fashion, filling the Gazan sky with aircraft and killing hundreds of Palestinians, including five girls from a single family, ages four to 17, who were unlucky enough to live in a refugee camp adjacent to a mosque that an Israeli plane had leveled.

As I hopped off the matatu, or passenger van, into the scorching Kenyan heat, I was aware that 50,000 angry protesters had gathered not so far away, and certain facts became clear to me. For one thing, the slaughter of hundreds of civilians, including several dozen children, in what was to me a faraway land, was a big effing deal here. That should probably go without saying just about anywhere—except I was suddenly aware that, were I home, the opposite would have been true. Those deaths in distant Gaza (unlike nearby Israel) would barely have caused a blip in the American news. What’s more, if I had been at home and the story had somehow caught my eye, I knew that I wouldn’t have paid it much mind. Another war in a foreign country is what I would’ve thought, and that would have been that.

At that moment, though, I didn’t dwell on the point because—let’s be serious—I was scared poopless. There was a huge, angry protest nearby and we’d just gotten word that the crowd was burning an American flag. Israel, it turned out, had used a new US-made missile in its assault. According to the Jerusalem Post, it was a weapon designed to minimize “collateral damage.” (Tell that to the families of the dead.) The enraged people who had taken to the streets in Mombasa were decrying my country’s role in the carnage—and I was a skinny American with a backpack who’d arrived in the wrong city on the wrong day.

We got the hell out of there as soon as we could. Early the next morning we climbed aboard a rusty old bus bound for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I felt a wave of relief once I’d settled into my seat. I was looking forward to a different country and a new vista.

That new vista, it turned out, materialized almost at once. Our bus was soon barreling along a rutted dirt road, the scenery whipping by the window in a distinctly less-than-picturesque fashion. In fact, it passed in such a blur that I realized we were going way too fast. We already knew that bus accidents were common here; we’d heard about a recent one in which all the passengers died.

When we hit what undoubtedly was a yawning pothole on that none-too-well kept road, the windows shook ominously and I thought: we could die. By then, my slick hands were gripping my shredded vinyl seat. I could practically feel the heat of the crash-induced flames and had no trouble picturing our charred bodies in the wreckage of the bus. And then that other thought came to me, the one I wouldn’t forget, the one, thousands of miles from home, that seemed to catch who I really was: No not us, we can’t die! was what I said to myself, pressing my eyes shut. I meant, of course, my boyfriend and I. I meant, that is, we Americans.

It was then that I felt an electric zap, as the events of the previous day had just melded with the present dangers and forced me to see what I would have preferred to ignore: that there was an unsavory likeness between my outlook and the American credo that thousands had been protesting in Mombasa. We can’t die, was my thought, as if we were somehow different—as if these Africans on the bus with us could die, but not us. Or, just as easily, those Palestinians could die—and thanks to US-supplied arms, no less—and I wouldn’t even tune in for the story. Clutching my torn bus seat, I was still afraid, but another sensation overwhelmed me. I felt like a colossal jerk.

Of course, as you know because you’re reading this, we made it safely to Dar es Salaam that night. But I was changed.

I’d like to say that my egocentricity about which lives matter most is uncommon among my countrymen and women. But if you spool through the seven-plus years since I rode that bus, you’ll notice how that very same mindset has meant that Americans go wild with panic over lone wolf terror killings on our soil, but show scant concern when it comes to the White House-directed, CIA-run drone assassination campaigns across the world, and all the civilian casualties that are the bloody result.

The dead innocents include members of a Yemeni family who were riding in a wedding procession when four missiles bore down on them, and Momina Bibi, that Pakistani grandmother who was tending to an okra patch as her grandchildren played nearby when a missile blasted her to smithereens. And don’t forget the 42 staff members, patients, and relatives at a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killed in an attack by a US AC-130 gunship. Depending on which tally you use, since 2009 we’ve killed an estimated 474 civilians, or perhaps 745, outside of official war zones—and far more civilians, like those dead in that hospital, within those zones. The horrifying truth is that the real numbers are likely much higher, but unknown and unknowable.

Meanwhile, duh, we would never fire a missile at a suspected terrorist if innocent US civilians were identified in the vicinity. We value American life far too highly for such wantonness. In 2015, when a drone struck an al-Qaeda compound in Pakistan, it was later discovered that two hostages, one of them an American, were inside. In response, President Obama delivered grave remarks: “I offer our deepest apologies to the families…I directed that this operation be declassified and disclosed… because the families deserve to know the truth.”

But why so sorry that time and not with the other 474 or more deaths? Of course, the difference was that innocent American blood was spilt. We don’t even try to hide this dubious hierarchy; we celebrate it. In that same speech, President Obama reflected on why we Americans are so darn special. “One of the things that makes us exceptional,” he declared, “is our willingness to confront squarely our imperfections and to learn from our mistakes.”

If you hailed from any other country, it might have seemed like an odd, not to say tasteless, time to wax poetic about American exceptionalism. The president was, after all, confessing that we’d accidentally fired missiles at two captive aid workers. But I can appreciate the sentiment. Inadequate though the apology was—”There are hundreds, potentially thousands of others who deserve the same apology,” said an investigator for Amnesty International—Obama was at least admitting that the United States had erred, and he was pointing out that such admissions are important. Indeed, they are. It’s just…what about the rest of the people on the planet?

The Trump administration will probably espouse a philosophy much like President Obama’s when it comes to valuing (or not) the lives of foreign innocents. And yet there’s part of me that must be as unworldly as that twenty-something who flew into Kathmandu, because I find myself dreaming about a new brand of American exceptionalism. Not one that gives you that icky feeling when you’re riding a speeding bus in another hemisphere, nor one at whose heart lies the idea that we Americans are different and special and better—which, history tells us, is actually a totally unexceptional notion among powerful nations. Instead, I imagine what would be truly exceptional: an America that values all human life in the same way.

Of course, I’m also a realist and I know that that’s not the world we live in, especially now—and that it won’t be, for, at best, a very long time.

Mattea Kramer is at work on a memoir called The Young Person’s Guide to Aging, which inspired this essay. Follow her on Twitter.

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How I Came to Grips With My American Exceptionalism

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White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s Victory and Early Appointments

by ElveraDelee369 Posted on November 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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White nationalists gathered in downtown Washington, DC, on Saturday to celebrate the election of Donald Trump as a victory for their movement. As protesters outside carried signs decrying racism, the mood among the approximately 250 white nationalists inside the Ronald Reagan Building was jubilant.

“The alt-right is here, the alt-right is not going anywhere, and the alt-right is going to change the world,” Richard Spencer, a white nationalist who popularized the term “alt-right” to describe the ascendant right-wing movement centered on xenophobia and often racism and white supremacy, told reporters at a press conference during an all-day conference hosted by his group, the National Policy Institute. “And you all need to pay attention to this.”

White nationalists and white supremacists have cheered Trump’s election and rejoiced in the appointments he has made so far in his administration, including former Breitbart News chairman Steve Bannon as chief strategist and Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama as attorney general. Spencer called Bannon’s appointment a “wonderful thing.” In July, Bannon, who was still running Breitbart, bragged to Mother Jones that his website had become the “platform for the alt-right.” Spencer said he largely agreed with that statement. “It’s clearly moved away from the conservative movement, it was pro-Trump, and it was also a site that tons of people on the alt-right liked, they get their news from, they share.”

Spencer also spoke approvingly of Sessions, who made a name for himself as the top foe of immigration in Congress. Sessions is also known for allegations that he made racist comments when he was an attorney in Alabama—charges that derailed his 1986 nomination for a federal judgeship and will come up again in his confirmation hearings to become attorney general. When Mother Jones asked at the press conference whether Spencer agreed with the neo-Nazi writer Andrew Anglin, who on Friday said that the appointments of Sessions and Bannon meant that he was getting everything he wanted from Trump, the crowd at the conference began to cheer at the mention of Sessions. “It’s getting what is realistically possible,” said Spencer. “Jeff Sessions, again, is someone who is not alt-right but who seems to see eye to eye with us on the immigration question. I think Jeff Sessions might very well resonate with something like a long-term dramatic slowdown of immigration.”

Spencer said Sessions would roll back the Obama administration’s enforcement of civil rights laws as the head of the Justice Department. “The fact that he is going to be at such a high level, I think, is a wonderful thing,” he said. “What he is not going to do in terms of federally prosecuting diversity and fair housing and so on I think is just as powerful as what he might do. So it’s about Jeff Sessions setting a new tone in Washington. I think that’s a good thing.”

Spencer’s top priority for the Trump administration is to change the country’s immigration laws to stop not just undocumented immigration but also legal immigration, with the goal of making sure the United States remains a majority-white country. “I think a goal would be net-neutral immigration with a primary emphasis on Europeans who want to immigrate to the country,” he said. Peter Brimelow of the anti-immigrant website VDARE.com later explained that the policy would mean removing immigrants currently in the country and allowing Europeans to take their place. Spencer said he believed passing such a policy through Congress would be easier than the press might think.

When a reporter asked what the movement’s top priority for Trump was, the room began to chant “build the wall.” Spencer agreed that immigration should be Trump’s “primary objective.”

“This is why he was elected,” Spencer said, “because he was the identity president.”

Controversial media personality Tila Tequila, who has identified with Nazis, tweeted from inside the conference.

An estimated 200 to 300 protesters gathered outside the conference, organized by a group called the DC Anti-Fascist Coalition. At around 1 p.m., a conference attendee who exited the conference got into a violent confrontation with protesters.

On Friday night in DC, protesters followed Spencer, and one sprayed him with a foul-smelling liquid as he dined with supporters at a restaurant.

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White Nationalists Celebrate Trump’s Victory and Early Appointments

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Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

by SimonHkx5134 Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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There were 5,850 hate crimes in the US last year—a 7 percent increase over the year before—according to new data released by the FBI last week. The main reason for the increase was a massive 67 percent spike in crimes targeting Muslims.

The numbers landed amid an apparent spike in attacks on ethnic and religious minorities in the wake of Donald Trump’s election as president. This news comes as no surprise to anti-extremism groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Anti-Defamation League, which have documented a rise in hate crimes for more than a year.

But as stunning as this new data is, it’s probably incomplete: Even by estimates from other federal agencies, the FBI’s figures don’t actually count the vast majority of US hate crimes. Here’s a quick guide to what the new numbers mean—and why they don’t tell the whole story.

Which groups are most likely to be the victims of hate crimes?

According to the FBI data, nearly 60 percent of reported hate crimes were motivated by racial bias, with anti-black crimes leading, followed by anti-white crimes and crimes against Hispanics. More than 20 percent of hate crimes were motivated by religious bias. Anti-Semitic crimes were the most common, while crimes against Muslims followed behind. Incredibly, crimes against Muslims spiked 67 percent over 2014. Anti-gay crimes composed about 18 percent of all hate crimes, with gay men being the most likely target, while hate crimes based on gender identity composed less than 2 percent of all crimes. (However, transgender people—especially trans women of color—are victims of violence at much higher rates than other segments of the population.) Intimidation and assault led among hate crimes against people, while vandalism and destruction were the most common crimes against property. Just over a third of reported hate crimes were violent crimes against people.

But that’s not the whole story.

The FBI has collected data on hate crimes since Congress passed the Hate Crime Statistics Act in 1990. The agency traditionally defined hate crimes as those committed because of a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, but the Obama administration has since expanded the definition to include gender and gender identity and mental and physical disabilities.

Yet despite the FBI’s annual tally, it’s still unclear how many hate crimes happen every year. The FBI generally reports between 5,000 and 7,000 hate crimes a year, according to an AP investigation of national hate crime data. But in a 2013 report, the Department of Justice estimated the average annual total count at more like 260,000. That’s more than 44 times more hate crimes than the FBI data suggests. The DOJ’s report was based on anonymous responses to the National Crime Victimization Survey, which the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducts every year.

Comparisons between earlier FBI hate-crime stats and other data sets from the federal government also reveal discrepancies. In 2013, for example, the FBI reported that there were 100 hate crimes on college campuses—but the Department of Education counted 781.

Why is the FBI’s data so incomplete?

The FBI relies on local, county, and state law enforcement agencies to tell it about hate crimes happening in their jurisdictions. But reporting hate crimes to the FBI is voluntary. More than 3,000 of the nation’s nearly 18,500 law enforcement agencies did not provide information to the FBI last year—almost 500 fewer than in 2014.

It’s likely that even the agencies that did participate underreported hate crimes. About 88 percent of the nearly 15,000 departments that participated last year tallied zero hate crimes—including departments in cities with storied histories of racial violence like Tulsa, Oklahoma; Mobile, Alabama; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana—according to an analysis by the Anti-Defamation League. Departments in many sizable cities reported just one, two, or three hate crimes. Participation in the FBI’s program is consistently limited among many departments across Southern states.

But the vast majority of hate crimes don’t get reported to law enforcement in the first place, says Jack Levin, a hate-crimes expert at Northeastern University in Ohio. Victims usually keep quiet.

Why don’t police departments cooperate?

Many police officers don’t understand how hate crimes are defined, or why it’s important to report them, explained Anti-Defamation League’s Allison Padilla-Goodman in a Mother Jones in an interview in May.

Hate crimes against African Americans are particularly underreported in the South, notes Levin. Five state—Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Wyoming—don’t have hate-crime laws on the books at all, and only 23 states and DC require police departments to keep data on hate crimes in their jurisdictions. But even some departments that do track hate crimes—and report them to state officials—don’t ultimately report them to the FBI, sometimes because of the burdensome paperwork involved, says Michael Lieberman, who serves as legal counsel to the national ADL.

In California—which consistently reports more hate crimes than any other state—officers receive instruction on hate crimes in the training academy, and police departments are required by state law to report details on all hate crimes to the state attorney general. Many large departments in California—like in San Francisco and San Jose—also have designated units that investigate hate crimes. But smaller departments—like most around the country—don’t have the resources for that kind of specialization, Lieberman says.

In any case, what drove the increase in hate crimes last year?

It could be a number of things. Retaliatory hate crimes against Muslims in response to devastating terror attacks in France, Brussels, and San Bernadino, California likely played a role, says Mark Potok, an expert on extremism at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He noted the sharp spike in crimes against Muslims that followed 9/11. Pushback against the global refugee crisis—and calls for resettling Arab and Muslim immigrants in the states—may also be at play, Levin said. And the xenophobic rhetoric of Donald Trump—who dominated the news cycle for half the year after declaring his candidacy in June, Potok noted—could also be a factor.

How can we make sure hate crimes don’t continue to rise?

In the wake of the new FBI stats, the ADL has urged more vigorous efforts by law enforcement to collect hate-crime data nationwide. Levin, too, says that now is the time to send a message to would-be hate offenders. “The perpetrator was sending a message when he commits the hate crime,” he said. “We need to send a message back that we as a society will not tolerate this kind of intolerance. That we don’t encourage and support the perpetrator. That we are not hate-filled people.”

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Hate Crimes Against Muslims Spiked 67 Percent Last Year

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Look at All the Climate Change Deniers Vying for Jobs in the Trump Administration

by Donnie6686 Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump is a global warming denier. He wants to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement and repeal the Clean Power Plan—the twin pillars of President Barack Obama’s efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. He’s even promised to revive the coal industry, against all odds.

But Trump won’t be able to do these things all by himself. To fulfill his campaign promise and reverse the steps of his predecessor in the fight against warming, he’s going to need an entire administration of like-minded people. Environmental officials who reject climate science. National security officials who dismiss concerns that climate change will destabilize the world. Diplomats who oppose international climate agreements. Department heads who want to drill, baby, drill.

Here’s a list of Trump appointees and possible appointees (drawn for the New York Times, Politico, E&E, and elsewhere) who deny climate change or who oppose or want to roll back efforts to deal with it. We’ll update the list as the Trump transition continues. Be afraid.

Donald Trump

Position: President

Views on climate change:

We’re going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions including the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the US rule.
We’re going to save the coal industry and other industries threatened by Hillary Clinton’s extremist agenda.
I’m going to ask Trans Canada to renew its permit application for the Keystone Pipeline.
We’re going to lift moratoriums on energy production in federal areas
We’re going to revoke policies that impose unwarranted restrictions on new drilling technologies. These technologies create millions of jobs with a smaller footprint than ever before.
We’re going to cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs. Trump campaign website, accessed 11/16/16

Mike Pence

Position: Vice president

Views on climate change: “Donald Trump and I have a plan to get this economy moving again…by lowering taxes across the board for working families, small businesses and family farms, ending the war on coal that is hurting jobs and hurting this economy even here in Virginia, repealing Obamacare lock, stock, and barrel, and repealing all of the executive orders that Barack Obama has signed that are stifling economic growth in this economy.” Vice Presidential debate, 10/5/16

Reince Priebus

Position: Chief of staff

Views on climate change: “Democrats tell us they understand the world, but then they call climate change, not radical Islamic terrorism, the greatest threat to national security. Look, I think we all care about our planet, but melting icebergs aren’t beheading Christians in the Middle East.” CPAC speech, 2/27/15

Stephen Bannon

Position: Chief strategist and senior counselor

Views on climate change: “Do you agree with the pope and President Obama that climate change is absolutely a path to global suicide, if specific deals are not cut in Paris at the international climate negotiations, versus focusing on radical Islam?” Breitbart News Daily via the Washington Post, 12/1/15

“The pope…has kind of fallen into this hysteria…Here you have the pope saying the world’s near suicide if something doesn’t happen in Paris.” Breitbart News Daily via Media Matters for America, 12/2/15

Myron Ebell

Position: Head of EPA transition team—possible EPA administrator

Views on climate change: Ebell, a high-profile climate skeptic, is the director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a DC think tank that promotes “limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty.” He has accused climate scientists of “manipulating and falsifying the data.” The New York Times describes Ebell as “one of the most vocal opponents” of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)

Position: Attorney general nominee

Views on climate change: “The balloon and satellite data track each other almost exactly, and it shows almost no warming. So what we’re talking about is: The predictions aren’t coming true.” Washington Watch via Right Wing Watch, 11/30/15

Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state

Position: Head of transition team for domestic issues

Views on climate change: “Another false environmentalist narrative is the global warming hoax. A few decades back, environmentalist “scientists” started devising computer models that predicted man-made calamity—Manhattan submerged by rising Atlantic waters—within 10 or 15 years ago. It turns out the models were rigged, the data were falsified and, in fact, there has been no measurable warming for nearly 20 years. Most troubling of all, the lying scientists colluded to ruin the careers of honest scientists who tried to tell the truth.” Washington Times, 4/30/15

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.)

Position: CIA director nominee

Views on climate change: “President Obama has called climate change the biggest national security threat of our lifetime, but he is horribly wrong. His unwillingness to acknowledge the true threat posed by Islamic extremism will get Americans killed. His perverse fixation on achieving his economically harmful environmental agenda instead of defeating the true threats facing the world shows just how out of sync his priorities are with Kansans and the American people.” Pompeo press release, 11/30/15

John Bolton, former UN ambassador

Possible position: Secretary of State

Views on climate change: “Obama can achieve his climate change legacy only through delicate negotiations with Congress. His poor relations with the House and Senate, especially on foreign policy, appear to render success unlikely. Obama may rely on his unilateral authority to join a world climate pact in Paris, but without Congress his most important promises will be empty ones whose fate will be left to his successor.” Los Angeles Times, 12/1/15

Jan Brewer, former governor of Arizona

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “Everybody has an opinion on climate change, you know, and I probably don’t believe that it’s man made. I believe that, you know, that weather and certain elements are controlled maybe by different things.” Think Progress, 12/3/13

Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas)

Possible positions: US Supreme Court justice

Views on climate change: “If you are a…liberal politician who wants government power, if that is your driving urge—government power over the American citizenry—then climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory. Why is that? Because it can never be disproven…The climate is always changing. It has been changing from the beginning of time.” Cruz campaign event via the Washington Post, 2/3/16

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Ret.)

Possible position: National security adviser

Views on climate change: “And here we have the President of the United States up in Canada talking about climate change. I mean, God, we just had the largest attack…on our own soil in Orlando. Why aren’t we talking about that? Who is talking about that? I mean, Fort Hood, Chattanooga, Boston, people forget about 9/11!” Fox News, 6/29/16

Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the house

Possible position: “I want to be the senior planner for the entire federal government, and I want a letter from you that says Newt Gingrich is authorized to go to any program in any department, examine it and report directly to the president.” Hill, 7/20/16

Views on climate change: Gingrich used to be in favor of taking action on climate change, even appearing in an ad on the subject with Nancy Pelosi and voicing support for a cap-and-trade carbon pricing system. He later called his participation in the ad “dumb” and opposed the cap-and-trade bill backed by Obama in 2009. Last year, Politico reported that Gingrich “said it should not be a given for politicians to assume that climate change is man-made. ‘I don’t think it should be a given. The truth is, I think we don’t know. There’s a difference between political science and science,’ he said.”

Rudy Giuliani, former New York City mayor

Possible positions: Secretary of State, secretary of Homeland Security

Views on climate change: “The president’s wrong in linking somehow by fixing climate change if he’s gonna fix it, he’s gonna fix terrorism. That’s absurd. There’s no connection between the two things. Where it’s like two different things. It’s like saying I’m gonna fix terrorism by curing cancer.” Fox News via CNS News, 12/2/15

Gov. Nikki Haley (S.C.)

Possible positions: Secretary of State

Views on climate change: “‘The Clean Power Plan is exactly what we don’t need,’ the governor said after addressing a gathering of the SC Electric Cooperatives at Wild Dunes Resort on the Isle of Palms. ‘This is exactly what hurts us. You can’t mandate utility companies which, in turn, raises the cost of power. That’s what’s going to keep jobs away. That’s what’s going to keep companies away.’ She added that officials in Washington ‘stay out of the way.’…’We need to be able to do our jobs and continue to recruit companies and recruit jobs without additional mandates,’ Haley said.” The Post and Courier, 6/3/14

Harold Hamm, oil and gas executive

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior, secretary of Energy

Views on climate change: “Obama imposed punitive regulations to stop this oil and gas renaissance, and in his administration’s very own words, they want to crucify America’s oil and natural gas producers…President Trump will release America’s pent-up energy potential, get rid of foreign oil, trash punitive regulations, create millions of jobs, and develop our most strategic geopolitical weapon: crude oil…Every time we can’t drill a well in America, terrorism is being funded…Climate change isn’t our biggest problem; it’s Islamic terrorism. Every onerous regulation puts American lives at risk.” Republican National Convention, 7/20/16

Bonus—Views on earthquake science: “Oil tycoon Harold Hamm told a University of Oklahoma dean last year that he wanted certain scientists there dismissed who were studying links between oil and gas activity and the state’s nearly 400-fold increase in earthquakes, according to the dean’s e-mail recounting the conversation. Hamm, the billionaire founder and chief executive officer of Oklahoma City-based Continental Resources, is a major donor to the university, which is the home of the Oklahoma Geological Survey. He has vigorously disputed the notion that he tried to pressure the survey’s scientists. ‘I’m very approachable, and don’t think I’m intimidating,’ Hamm was quoted as saying in an interview with EnergyWire, an industry publication, that was published on May 11. ‘I don’t try to push anybody around.'” Bloomberg, 5/15/15

Jeffrey Holmstead, energy industry lobbyist

Possible position: EPA administrator

Views on climate change: Holmstead, an assistant EPA administrator under President George W. Bush, told a Senate committee in 2015: “Given the implementation schedule that EPA has proposed for the Clean Power Plan, it will be implemented almost entirely by the next administration. And when the next administration takes office in January 2017, it is virtually certain that the litigation over the legality of the CPP will still be going on, so that the new administration will need to decide whether to defend and implement the CPP as finalized under the Obama Administration…For legal, practical, and political reasons, it would be relatively easy for a new administration to modify or simply revoke the CPP altogether and start from scratch with a more legally defensive approach…The process that led to the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act is instructive. It shows what an administration can do—even when both Houses of Congress are controlled by the opposing party—to get legislation through Congress when such legislation is a priority for the President. In my view, it is a shame that the Obama Administration has not made this type of effort when it comes to climate change legislation and has instead pursued an ill-advised and almost certainly illegal regulatory approach.”

Laura Ingraham, radio host

Possible position: Press secretary

Views on climate change: “This entire effort the Paris climate negotiations is about setting up global rules of governance. Rules that will, if instituted—which we know they won’t be—but if ever instituted would mean that we have less control over our own destiny as a country than we do today. Because Congress will have limited ability to change any treaty. Again, I don’t think it’s going to happen. But if these rules should go into place, we should expect the same compliance from countries like China that we get from China in deals like the World Trade Organization and the World Trade Organization Treaty. So, if people want less sovereignty in the United States, less independence, less oversight, our congressional authority to be meaningful, then we should all be excited about what’s going on with 150 leaders in Paris. But this has nothing to do with terrorism. It has everything to do with bringing America’s economy down, hurting the fossil fuel industry, etc., etc.—one of the few sectors that’s actually growing jobs and still paying people decent wages in the United States. So forgive me if I’m not all hot and bothered by the Paris events.” Fox News via Media Matters, 12/1/15

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)

Possible position: Secretary of Homeland Security

Views on climate change: “‘Within the Department of Homeland Security, more money, in fact, millions of dollars, are dedicated to climate change rather than combating what I consider to be one of the biggest threats to the homeland, and that’s the violent extremists radicalizing Islamist terrorists radicalizing over the Internet in the United States of America,’ McCaul said.…That is a very narrow comparison. It concerns only the Homeland Security Department and only programs designed to prevent Islamic extremists’ use of the Internet. Within that limited frame, McCaul’s comparison holds up. However, any complete analysis would show that federal departments and agencies spend significantly more money targeting terrorists than they do targeting climate change.” Politifact, 5/14/15

Patrick Morrisey, West Virginia attorney general

Possible position: EPA administrator

Views on climate change: “Morrisey has become one of the leading Attorneys General in the fight against President Obama’s overreaching, illegal EPA regulations. In February 2016, under Morrisey’s leadership, the Supreme Court halted implementation of Obama’s signature climate change initiative, the Clean Power Plan, in an unprecedented win for AG Morrisey and the 28 other state Attorneys General.” Morrisey campaign website, accessed 11/16/16

Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska

Possible positions: Secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “I want people to be empowered to ask questions about what is being fed them from the scientific community, that something’s not making a whole lot of sense when it comes to inconsistent data that is being produced and being fed, especially to our children, when it comes to global warming or climate change—whatever they’re calling it today…It’s a problem right from the start when you’re led to believe that 97 percent of scientists all agree that there is a consensus on global warming.” Guardian, 4/15/16

Rick Perry, former governor of Texas

Possible positions: Secretary of Energy

Views on climate change: “I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think that there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change…The cost to the country and to the world of implementing these anti-carbon programs is in the billions, if not trillions, of dollars at the end of the day. And I don’t think, from my perspective, that I want America to be engaged in spending that much money on still a scientific theory that has not been proven and, from my perspective, is more and more being put into question.” Perry campaign speech via CBS News, 8/17/11

Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma attorney general

Possible position: EPA administrator, secretary of Interior

Views on climate change: “The EPA does not possess the authority under the Clean Air Act to accomplish what it proposes in the unlawful Clean Power Plan. The EPA is ignoring the authority granted by Congress to states to regulate power plant emissions at their source. The Clean Power Plan is an unlawful attempt to expand federal bureaucrats’ authority over states’ energy economies in order to shutter coal-fired power plants and eventually other sources of fossil-fuel generated electricity.” Pruitt press release, 7/1/15

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Look at All the Climate Change Deniers Vying for Jobs in the Trump Administration

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Trump Names Benghazi Zealot His CIA Director

by VickiHazel Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Friday morning, President-elect Donald Trump named Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kans.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee with a history of hardline positions and controversial statements, to be his CIA chief.

Pompeo, a lawyer and former Army officer, is probably best known to the public for his role on the House Benghazi Committee. He was one of the committee’s harshest and loudest critics of Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration, once claiming that the administration’s response was “worse in some ways” than the Nixon White House’s cooperation with Watergate hearings. While on the committee, Pompeo pushed false theories, including Hillary Clinton’s supposed reliance on longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal for her intelligence. With Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), he issued his own final Benghazi report, which was more critical than the Republican committee’s findings.

Pompeo holds extremely hawkish views on key intelligence and national security issues. He has long fought the Iran nuclear deal and led the Republicans who charged that “side deals” between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency were keeping secret dangers hidden from US officials. (Arms control experts and US officials have said such agreements are standard practice.) On Thursday, he tweeted that he would push to end the deal under Trump.

Pompeo also wants to roll back surveillance reforms, which ended the NSA’s ability to collect phone records, or metadata, in bulk. In an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal in January, he and former Justice Department lawyer David Rivkin Jr. said the reform had “dumbed down” surveillance. “Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database,” Pompeo and Rivkin wrote, arguing for a vastly expanded surveillance tool. Trump supported reinstating bulk metadata collection during the Republican presidential primaries.

Torture techniques may also come back up for debate under Pompeo. Like Trump, he has criticized the ban implemented by the Obama administration on waterboarding and other so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Intelligence professionals mostly welcomed Pompeo’s appointment. John McLaughlin, a former CIA deputy director under George W. Bush, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that “Rep. Pompeo looks like a well-qualified candidate for CIA Director. He is a serious member of the House Intelligence Committee who seems to work hard to understand the issues.” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and another member of the Benghazi inquiry, also praised Pompeo in a statement as “very bright and hard-working.” Schiff added, “While we have had our share of strong differences—principally on the politicization of the tragedy in Benghazi—I know that he is someone who is willing to listen and engage.”

Noting Pompeo’s record of controversial comments, McLaughlin sent a gentle warning to the future CIA head. “Fair enough for a congressman,” McLaughlin said, “but as CIA director, he will have to approach such issues dispassionately, some would say clinically.”

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Trump Names Benghazi Zealot His CIA Director

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

by WilfordLockhart Posted on November 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s transition team announced one phase of the president-elect’s plan to “drain the swamp” of corruption—a prohibition on registered lobbyists serving in his administration and a five-year lobbying ban for Trump officials who return to the private sector. Trump’s plan effectively doubles down on a policy that the Obama administration already has in place—one that many good government groups and lobbyists alike believe may have created a new problem: un-lobbyists—that is, influence-peddlers who avoid registering as lobbyists to skirt the administration’s rules.

Obama, like Trump, campaigned on a platform of aggressively rooting out the influence of lobbyists. After taking office, he put in place several major good-government initiatives, including a ban on lobbyists serving in his administration and a two-year cooling-off period before ex-administration officials could register to lobby. Once Obama’s lobbying rules took effect, there was a sharp decline in the number of registered lobbyists. Industry insiders and watchdog groups that track the influence game noted that the decrease was not due to lobbyists hanging up their spurs as hired guns for corporations and special interests. Rather it appeared that lobbyists were finding creative ways to avoid officially registering as such. There was no less influence-peddling going on, but now there was less disclosure of the lobbying that was taking place.

The problem lies with the definition of who is a lobbyist. The federal government requires anyone who spends more than 20 percent of their time on behalf of a client while making “lobbying contacts”—an elaborate and specifically defined type of contact with certain types of federal officials—to register as a lobbyist and file quarterly paperwork disclosing their clients and the bills or agencies he or she sought to sway. But by avoiding too many official “lobbying contacts” and limiting how much income that kind of work accounts for, lobbyists can shed the scarlet L, describing themselves as government affairs consultants or experts in advocacy and public policy. In 2014, the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics examined the trend of the “un-lobbyist” and found that 45 percent of the lobbyists who had shed their designation in the previous year still worked for the same employer. In many cases, the lobbyists didn’t leave their jobs, CRP found, they just changed their titles.

The Trump plan, which just tacks three years on to the Obama administration’s existing ban, does stop short of the Obama rules in one area. Under Obama’s policy, people who had been registered lobbyists could not work for agencies they had previously lobbied, though he did offer “waivers” to certain officials. According to Trump aides, registered lobbyists will be eligible for administration jobs if they de-register as lobbyists. The Washington Post reports that Josh Pitcock, a close aide to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, took the step on Monday, sending the Senate Clerk’s office notice that he is no longer a lobbyist for the State of Indiana.

In the end, said Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, the Trump plan may only perpetuate the problem of un-lobbyists.

“People are going to react to the Trump thing in the same way,” Painter notes, “by saying, ‘I’ll figure out a way to not be a lobbyist.'”

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Banning Lobbyists Might Sound Like a Good Idea. But Here’s What Trump Is Missing.

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