It’s generally assumed that the last thing the world needs is more kids pursuing a degree in philosophy, sociology, and other fields of study that generate annoying adults and bloggers. But a new study says that if we had fewer scientists and engineers, ISIS would starve.

According to a report by the British Council, The Guardian reports, Jihadist movements like ISIS are feeding off of technically trained men more than their soft, humanities-loving counterparts:

Almost half (48.5%) of jihadis recruited in the Middle East and north Africa had a higher education of some sort, according to a 2007 analysis by Diego Gambetta that is cited in Immunising the Mind, a new paper published by the British Council; of these 44% had degrees in engineering. Among western-recruited jihadis that figure rose to 59%.

A study of terrorists in Tunisia – where an electrical engineer went on a murderous rampage in June – showed similar proportions. And a study of 18 British Muslims implicated in terrorist attacks found that eight had studied engineering or IT, and four more science, pharmacy and maths; only one had studied humanities.

Martin Rose of the British Council blames the “engineering mindset” for why scientists and engineers make for such good ISIS fodder—students with a technical background might tend to see the world as a fundamentally rational machine that can be repaired like any non-abstract mechanism and exists in an array of binary states, like “on or off” or, say, “Halal or Haram.” There’s typically a right answer or more efficient route in the sciences, as opposed to the deliberate uncertainty and endless perspectives of the humanities. And besides, if you’re Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would you rather trust to clean a gun or build a bomb: the mechanical engineer or the poetry scholar? Most of us don’t even want to be in an elevator with an MFA student, let alone trust them with our life on the battlefield. The solution is clear. Per this Guardian post:

Rose suggests that the British Council, the organisation funded by the UK to spread British cultural influence around the world, should involve itself in education reform, to “humanise” the teaching of scientific and technical subjects. A broader-based education would give vulnerable students the intellectual tools to develop an open-minded, interrogatory outlook – and to question authority, whether scientific, political, religious or scientific.

This crippling the Caliphate. So rather than drop bombs across Syria and Iraq, what if we flooded the region with useless students of the liberal arts? Rather than try to infiltrate Raqqa with JSOC operators, why not plant Kenyon graduates? If we deprive the Islamic State of anyone with real savoir faire, they might be forced to recruit from the ranks of our Western society’s literary scene—both freeing us and dooming them.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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Remember Circa, the breathlessly hyped news app that attempted to summarize stories by breaking them down into small, flavorless nuggets of content? The app abruptly stopped publishing in June after finally depleting $5.27 million in venture capital, but today the Wall Street Journal reported that it has finally found a benefactor: the conservative-leaning television news conglomerate Sinclair Broadcast Group, whose venture capital division recently acquired all of Circa’s assets for just $800,000.*

http://tktk.gawker.com/circa-news-app...

Sinclair is most well-known for exploiting its quasi-monopoly of local television affiliates across the United States to produce and disseminate political attack ads targeting Democrats. But the company’s plans for Circa, as described by the VP and COO of Sinclair’s digital division, Rob Weisbord, seem to be a bit more subtle:

Mr. Weisbord said the left-leaning nature of the most popular news sites for young people left an opening in the market. “The key is to be independent and user-generated, because when you look at the Vices and Voxes of the world, they tend to be far-left,” he said. “Our goal is to let the content drive it. It will never be far right like where Breitbart is, because our research shows there is no way to gain a big audience if we do that. But there’s a big need in the center.”

It’s unclear what being “independent” and “user-generated” has to do with counteracting other outlets’ super-liberal ideologies. Then again, if you’re inclined to believe an outlet like Vox—Vox!—is “far-left,” you’re probably not seeking to appeal to young progressive Americans anyway. Weisbord doesn’t see that as an impediment to Circa’s future, however:

“We expect it to be as significant as Vice and Vox and Buzzfeed,” he said.

Best of luck.

* Update, 4:40 p.m.:

Jason Smith, the director of Sinclair Digital Ventures, emailed Gawker after this post went up to clarify that Sinclair Digital Ventures—not Sinclair Broadcasting Group itself—acquired Circa’s assets. (That said, Sinclair Digital Ventures is a division of, and funded exclusively by, Sinclair Broadcasting Group.) We have updated the post accordingly.

Image credit: Facebook

“Everybody is wondering what and where they all came from,” rang out Iris DeMent’s jubilant voice every week during the opening credits of HBO’s second season of The Leftovers. She continued: “Everybody is worrying about where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done / But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me / Think I’ll just let the mystery be.” DeMent’s voice—a happy medium between a screech and a honk—and the words it carried over her bluegrass ditty were inevitably the most joyous part of every episode. Hers was a point of view almost entirely missing from a show obsessed with people’s points of view: blissful willful ignorance.

The Leftovers, which ended its second season last night, is otherwise populated by characters tortured by their endless questioning and that of others, mostly related to the so-called Sudden Departure, an event that occurred three years before the first season’s premiere, when two percent of the world’s population spontaneously vanished. Why did it happen? What was the selection process? Will it happen again? Does this mean the end times are upon them? And why do those left behind keep leaving and hurting each other? The people on the show are searching, unsatisfied, often miserable. Happiness flickers briefly, breaking up the grieving.

Viewers related to the misery of the characters, perhaps too well. The show’s notoriously divisive first season left many grasping at opaque symbols and juxtapositions. Little did they know, they weren’t being called on to solve a mystery (as they took it upon themselves to do with Lost, another show co-created by The Leftovers co-creator Damon Lindelof), they were being asked to empathize with characters who’ll never know what’s really going on. The mysteries—the behavior of some characters, seemingly enchanted phenomena like rogue deer, and whether what we were seeing was actually happening or just a dream—were just as confounding to the characters inhabiting his surreal world as they was to those watching it from the outside. On the Guilty Remnant, a cult of silent, chain-smoking agitators, the show’s police chief protagonist Kevin Garvey, Jr. (Justin Theroux) said to the mayor of his town of Mapleton during the first season premiere, “I don’t know shit, Lucy. Do you? Where do they come from? What do they want? We don’t even know who they are.”

It would take a full season to even start to unpack those questions. In the eighth episode, Patti Levin, the leader of the Mapleton chapter of G.R., broke it down, as much as one can on a show where breaking it down doesn’t necessarily yield absolute clarity, and often comes wrapped in prophecy: “It doesn’t matter what happened,” she said, regarding the Sudden Departure. “But the difference between you and me is that I accept that it did, and while you push it aside, while you ignore it, we strip ourselves of everything that distracts us from it. We strip away the colorful diversions that keep us from remembering. We strip away attachment, fear, and love, and hatred and anger until we are erased. Until we are a blank slate. We are living reminders of what you try so desperately to forget. And we are ready. And we are waiting. Because it’s not gonna be long now.”

This is a show whose very genre classification “always kind of baffled” star Theroux. While the acting was uniformly superb and the writing generally concise and realistic in any given moment (even if the sum of those moments was ultimately less tangible), there were times during the first season when the show wasn’t merely lacking in exposition but seemed to be designed to disorient. The Leftovers’s first season was too respectful of its viewers’ intelligence and its source material, Tom Perrotta’s 2011 novel of the same name. While that book contained plenty of explanation via internal monologue and omniscient narration (“If the G.R. had one essential mission, it was to resist the so-called Return to Normalcy, the day-to-day process of forgetting the Rapture, or, at the very least, of consigning it to the past, treating it as part of the ongoing fabric of human history, rather than the cataclysm that had brought history to an end”), the show fixated on showing and not telling. And through that, unlike the characters it contained, HBO’s The Leftovers seemed to be merely hoping for the best.

One major reason why season two received such a rapturous response from those who stuck around and gave it a shot (each episode snagged about a million fewer viewers than last season’s, which typically did around 1.5 million) is that the show changed tactics from demanding that you empathize with its characters to empathizing with you. It grounded itself in certainty—it did not offer answers regarding the Sudden Departure, but it did move settings to Jarden, Texas, the only town in the world in which there were no departures that’s been rechristened as “Miracle.” No departures is a fact its characters and viewers could cling to. It gave viewers a true mystery, and it solved it. It presented an event—the migration of Kevin, Nora (the astonishing Carrie Coon), Kevin’s daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley), and Kevin and Nora’s adopted daughter Lily, which seemed to be tied to the ensuing disappearance of their next door neighbor Evie (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and two of her friends—and then went back over it, several times in various points of view, deliberately sowing understanding. It sprouted tangents, sometimes lasting for for full episodes, zeroing in on one character (Matt Jamison’s Job-like trial to get back into the exclusive, gated town of Miracle after being cheated out of it was a midseason highlight). It felt truly free, offering a go-for-broke, enlivened way to explain how people cope with the inexplicable. It also was free of the burden of adaptation—the first season ended where Perrotta’s book did.

“One thing that I do feel I’ve learned, and I could be completely wrong about this, but I think this idea that the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen next is not good,” Lindelof said to Hitflix’s Alan Sepinwall in an interview that ran just before Season 2 began airing. “People want to know what’s going to happen next. They like to be surprised, but more than being surprised they really want to have a sense of comfort. They want to know what they’re going to get, you know. You want to know what they’ve signed up for. This idea of unpredictability is not good. And so is there a way that the show can kind of message, ‘Hey, don’t worry, you know. We’re doing this this week, but hopefully this is still the show that you dig.’”

Though these changes made for a much more enjoyable viewing experience, The Leftovers retained the same heart and mind that made this project—from Perrotta’s book through the uneven first season and then through the transcendent second—so special in the first place. Our lives may or may not be guided and graced by the supernatural, but the open curiosity regarding the supernatural and the behavior it yields (for good, and, especially, bad) is undeniable. Religion is a major force in our world. Nonbelievers can avoid God, but not religion. We are affected, sometimes controlled, by other people’s beliefs, and civilization demands those beliefs be at least considered, if not engaged with. In presenting a range of beliefs—the G.R.’s terrorist evangelism, Kevin’s obsession with the voices in his head, the learned pragmatism of former G.R./former psychologist Laurie (Amy Brenneman), the flagrant, sometimes giddy disbelief of Nora—The Leftovers takes an agnostic position and illustrates why it’s the most humane point of view at all. Faith in one’s beliefs necessarily means the rejection of others’; understanding philosophical and theological variety and what triggers each, fosters compassion (even when your conclusion is that the only logical faith is in possibility). The world is cruel, but The Leftovers’s sensitivity for its characters is unyielding. In one of her recaps for the New York Times, Jen Chaney put it very nicely: “The Leftovers may be the only show on TV right now that consistently...invites us to question belief systems while acknowledging their genuine power and beauty at the same time.”

The Leftovers is a pragmatic show about the irrational things people do to cope with the sadness of existence. Lindelof told Variety, “To me, it’s not a Sept. 11 metaphor, it’s a death metaphor.” But Perrotta’s novel makes it clear that it’s more than that even—it’s about the inescapable loss the characterizes life, period. There’s a moment at the end of the book when Kevin, who lost no one from his family in the Sudden Departure, is alone. His wife Laurie left him a while ago to join the G.R., his girlfriend Nora is pulling out, his son Tom is wandering aimlessly having abandoned the messianic leader he latched onto post-Departure (Holy Wayne), his daughter Jill is toying with joining the Guilty Remnant, Jill’s friend/Kevin’s part-time object of desire Aimee has moved out of Kevin’s house, where she was crashing. The departure of Kevin’s loved ones wasn’t sudden, but it was a departure all the same. People will come in and out of your life for as long as you are emotionally available, and sometimes when they leave it will make absolutely no sense. What’s even sadder is that then you have one less person to sort it out with.

The fact of the matter is that every day is one closer to tragedy, on macro and micro levels, whether it’s mass killings or the loss of someone that you love or you’re own death. In Perrotta’s book, when Laurie is still a G.R., this is acknowledged in a section about her understanding of the Sudden Departure and the feeling she has (the knowing she has) that she was left behind, that she didn’t make the cut:

And yet she chose to ignore this knowledge, to banish it to some murky recess of her mind—the basement storage area for things you couldn’t bear to think about—the same place you hid the knowledge that you were going to die, so you could live your life without being depressed every minute of every day.

Through its action and characters’ reactions, The Leftovers excavates that knowledge repeatedly. That is another reason why people don’t like the show, because ignoring the world’s relentless grimness is a lot easier than facing it. The Guilty Remnant may have self-defeating tactics, but more than that, they have a point.

But unlike the G.R., the show, mercifully and realistically, doesn’t deny its viewers or its characters of hope. In the final moments of last night’s season finale (which could be the show’s series finale if HBO doesn’t pick it up for a third season), Kevin returns to the nearly dilapidated $3 million house in Jarden that Nora bought and in which he has lived this season. He at this point has (maybe) died twice and found a way back to the physical world both times. He’s forgiven the man who most recently sent him to that big hotel in the sky, his truth-averse neighbor John Murphy (Kevin Carroll). He has, in fact, resigned himself to letting the mystery be—as John tends to the gunshot wound he put in Kevin in an abandoned hospital after members of the G.R. have infiltrated and rioted in Jarden, an anguished John says, “I don’t understand what’s happening here.” “Me neither,” says Kevin peacefully. “It’s OK.”

He returns to the house and sees his daughter, his ex-wife, his estranged son, his perhaps former girlfriend, their child together, Nora’s devout bother Matt (Christopher Eccleston), and his newly post-comatose wife Mary (Janel Moloney). They’re all waiting for him, just like he saw when he died or dreamed it. Just like he was hoping.

Sometimes people leave you, and sometimes they come back. Allowing for the possibility of the latter is to have hope. Because no one really knows where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done, religion is essentially formalized hope. And sometimes the world calls for hope and sometimes it rewards its possessors. I can’t say with any certainty that “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,” but I know the feeling well.

Uber is now worth more money than General Motors. Will the hundreds of thousands of Americans who drive for Uber ever be able to earn a living wage?

http://gawker.com/boycott-uber-i...

In The American Prospect, Steven Greenhouse takes a long look at Uber’s labor issues. Or, more accurately, its labor issue: the fact that its drivers are treated as independent contractors, rather than as employees. This is the key to Uber’s entire business model, and to its profits. It is also why many of its drivers say they cannot earn a decent living no matter how hard they work. Greenhouse sums it up:

Indeed, with its clout, cachet, and big-name backers, Uber has sought to redefine what an employee is. No way, it says, should its drivers be considered employees, asserting that its relationship with them is attenuated—even though the company hires and fires the drivers, sets their fares, takes a 20 percent commission from fares, gives drivers weekly ratings, and orders them not to ask for tips. For Uber, there are manifold advantages to treating its drivers as independent contractors. Not only does it avoid being covered by minimum wage, overtime, and anti-discrimination laws, but it sidesteps having to make contributions for Social Security, Medicare, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance. It also escapes the employer obligations of the Affordable Care Act. By some estimates, all this cuts Uber’s compensation costs by more than 20 percent per driver.

Uber is the pinnacle of “gig economy” profitability in large part because it has no responsibility for the people that work for it. Uber’s workers in various states are, shall we say, actively challenging this arrangement, with notable success in California, where an Uber driver was declared an employee. For its part, the company is conducting an active lobbying campaign to try to preserve the status of its workers, publicizing the fact that an increasing share of its drivers “have another full- or part-time job on top of their work with Uber.”

Of course, they have to—they can’t earn a living with Uber.

Ideally, America would have high taxes that supported a strong social safety net for everyone, so that the “gig economy” could be a realistic lifestyle, rather than a pipe dream most commonly used for the sake of corporate PR. Until then, we live in a nation in which employers are responsible for a great deal of the benefits necessary for employees to live—health care, social security, and a livable wage. That is where we are. Uber is a company with hundreds of thousands of workers. Unless Uber is prepared to use its lobbying muscle to push through an unprecedented expansion of the social safety net, it will have to sooner or later take responsibility for the unavoidable fact that its workers are humans who have certain needs in order to live. Any multibillion-dollar company that does not provide its workers with what they need to live is at its core a leech on society, because it is society at large that has to pay for the balance of those needs. Meanwhile, Uber executives and investors grow rich on a labor model that asks nothing from them except capital in exchange for great wealth, and asks everything from drivers in exchange for less than a middle class income.

Uber is successful because it is based on a powerfully good idea: unlocking the value of unused assets. You can use your car to make you money. But for many it is a full time job, and to pretend otherwise is to cling tightly to a weird utopian capitalist facade that bears little resemblance to reality.

A business model based on paying workers too little to live—a business model in which a company must fight viciously against workers’ attempts to unionize, because unions are considered an existential threat—is not a real business model at all. It is arbitrage of poor regulation. It is a con job. And it can’t last forever.

Grow up, Uber.

[Photo: Getty]

1. Star Wars starts out in the Wild West, the rough-hewn old frontier, and then it races upwards, soaring and expanding its scope, until at last it becomes World War II. It’s the story of drifters and dreamers, who find their purpose out in the absolute dead middle of nowhere, and end up leading the Revolution against an Empire. You can’t even imagine a more quintessentially American story than the original Star Wars.

George Lucas’ space opera arrived at a time when America was paralysed by doubt. The word “malaise,” which in 2015 sounds like some neurotic hipster affectation, was a defining term for the American psyche. A sitting president had been forced to resign in a dirty, ugly scandal, and meanwhile the United States had been forced to withdraw from Vietnam after a horrible war in which the U.S. seemed morally compromised. “Stagflation” gripped America’s economy, and we seemed to be unable to accomplish anything as a nation.

And to many observers, it seemed as though Star Wars was a pure jolt of American optimism and moral simplicity, that came at just the right time to make us feel like ourselves again. As the Washington Post said in 1983, the original Star Wars “helped close some of the psychological wounds left by the war in Vietnam. Star Wars tapped into inspirational depths that transcend political allegiance. It reflected politically uncomplicated yearnings—to be in the right, to fight on the side of justice against tyranny.”

George Lucas actually set out to create a polemic against American excesses, in which the evil Empire was supposed to be the United States. But Lucas also wanted to copy all the movies he consumed when he was growing up, including Westerns, Flash Gordon serials and heroic World War II films. And in copying films that were essentially propaganda for American military greatness, Lucas managed to distill them all down to the purest expression of our national mythology—which, in turn, helped set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s “morning in America” presidency.

2. In 1975, George Lucas was at a crossroads. He was supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, a gritty reimagining of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness set in the Vietnam War. Lucas had been trying to get Apocalypse Now off the ground for years, while his producing partner Gary Kurtz had been scouting locations. And now, his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola finally had the clout to get Apocalypse Now made, thanks to The Godfather Part 2. But Lucas had also spent the past couple years writing draft after draft of a project called The Star Wars. So he was torn about which movie to do first—and then Coppola told him it was now or never for Apocalypse Now.

As Chris Taylor writes in the book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe:

To Lucas’ friends, this seemed like the smart move. Lucas was, after all, an independent movie guy. It was his turn to make a big statement, something dark and gritty: his Chinatown, his Taxi Driver.

But Lucas decided he couldn’t put Star Wars off, so he let Apocalypse Now go, and Coppola ended up directing it himself. The reason, writes Taylor, was because Lucas wanted to do something for the kids, after he saw how his previous movie, American Graffiti, helped teenagers to straighten themselves out.

http://www.amazon.com/How-Star-Wars-...

In a 1977 Rolling Stone interview, Lucas explains more: “I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had. They don’t have westerns, they don’t have pirate movies, they don’t have that stupid serial fantasy life that we used to believe in. It wasn’t that we really believed in it... but we loved it. There’s nothing but cop movies, and a few films like Planet of the Apes, Ray Harryhausen films, but there isn’t anything that you can really dig your teeth into. I realized a more destructive element in the culture would be a whole generation of kids growing up without that thing.”

Long before Lucas started talking about Joseph Campbell and the Hero With a Thousand Faces, that pseudo-ethnography about myths and fairy tales, he was acknowledging that Star Wars had a huge debt to the films he grew up with, says Kathleen Moran, the Associate Director in the American Studies Department at UC Berkeley.

In fact, Lucas claimed that Star Wars would address the same ideas as his version of Apocalypse Now, just relocated to another galaxy in the distant past. He wanted Star Wars to be a story about an inhuman oppressor being defeated by a native uprising—and in early drafts, the Emperor was based on Richard Nixon, Moran points out.

Star Wars was intended to be “a commentary on Vietnam,” Taylor tells io9. Lucas “was trying to portray the Empire as the U.S. military.” This is much clearer in Return of the Jedi, the third film, where the Viet Cong finally show up “in the shape of the Ewoks,” says Taylor. “That’s absolutely what they were intended to be: the tiny primitive force that brings down a mighty technological empire.”

Lucas didn’t fully succeed in conveying the political themes he wanted Star Wars to express all along, until he made the prequel films years later—and perhaps as a result, those were much less watchable.

But meanwhile, Lucas was lifting from Westerns, pirate movies, classic adventure serials, and World War II dramas like The Dam Busters and Tora! Tora! Tora! As the 1983 Washington Post article says, Lucas’ main contribution in the original Star Wars consists of “rejuvenating Hollywood’s moribund action genres,” including “the swashbuckler, the western, the combat melodrama [and] the science-fiction serial.”

So the story of Star Wars, in Lucas’ mind, was something subversive and hyper-political about the overreaching of American power. But he was also determined to bring back the optimistic, sunny films of his youth—and he was much more successful in copying the unabashedly pro-American, devil-may-care adventures he had loved as a child (even if he claimed he didn’t believe in them) than in sneaking in some kind of anti-authoritarian message. Nobody ever walked out of the original Star Wars saying “Man, fuck America.”

3. In fact, nobody ever goes to a movie and identifies with the villain, except maybe if they’re played by Alan Rickman or Sigourney Weaver. And Star Wars, in particular, does a masterful job of making you identify with Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Luke Skywalker hits the trifecta of American heroes: small-town farm boy, secretly marked for greatness, learns to go into a rough saloon and hold his own. Luke’s yearning to find himself and discover his destiny is the emotional hook of Star Wars, and it ties into many strands of our national mythology about explorers and adventurers and white saviors.

Every red-blooded American dreams of being on the wild frontier, fighting Tuscan Raiders and Jawas for mastery of the land and control over the wayward droids. Or being a heroic drifter like Han Solo, who gives no fucks but has a not-so-secret heart of gold. Or leading the American Revolution against the Redcoats, which is pretty much the role that Princess Leia fits into the most, when she’s not being a reluctant damsel in distress.

By the time you get to the end of the film and there are spaceship dogfights and bombing runs, it’s become fully World War II—which happens to be the last war that America fought where pretty much everybody agreed we were in the right, and we unambiguously won.

Star Wars, the first movie, isn’t just joyfully escapist and thrilling—it’s also triumphalist and full of the promise that war can be fulfilling and worthy. Even if you ignore the fact that it ends with Luke and Han getting medals at a crazy awards ceremony that Taylor, a die-hard Star Wars fan, describes as “fascist.”

Among the moribund genres that Star Wars rescues is the war movie—during the decade prior to the original Star Wars, there had been basically no military action films, despite the Pentagon’s constant willingness to provide expensive troops and machinery to Hollywood for free, says David Sirota, author of Back to Our Future: How The 1980s Explain The World We Live In Now. You have Green Berets in 1968 and Tora! Tora! Tora! in 1970, but that’s basically it. The Vietnam War era was known more for anti-military films than ones which depicted heroic, valiant soldiers.

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Our-Futur...

“Star Wars is clearly about war,” says Sirota, but “because it was set in space and has a science-fiction setting, it was able to tap into those narratives that people had been used to before the Vietnam War—but in a way that didn’t overtly invoke the non-fiction military themes” that people had been reluctant to go to theaters for, immediately after Vietnam.

Of course, there were plenty of actual movies about Vietnam, including Apocalpyse Now, in the decade that followed. But, says Sirota, “Star Wars was a way that Hollywood figured out to tell heroic military stories, but in a way that didn’t strike so close to home, so soon after an actual war.” Star Wars “showed American military heroics in a setting that was safe because it was officially fantasy.”

After this, the Pentagon spigot was turned back on, and Hollywood was able to take advantage of U.S. military assistance in making pro-military movies, like Top Gun.

The genius of Star Wars is not just that it brings war back as a subject for movies—but it allows you to fantasize about being the “good guy” in a winnable war. To some extent, this was a prospect that was foreclosed in real life by the inventions of weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear weapons, that render any victory too messy and costly. Star Wars includes one such weapon, the Death Star, which is the focal point for all of Lucas’ messages about a “technological terror” that he brought over from Apocalypse Now. But in one of the movie’s many moments of wish-fulfillment, the Death Star turns out to have a fatal weakness, and its destruction makes heroic ship-to-ship combat the defining mode of battle in the Star Wars galaxy once again.

4. Most of us science fiction and fantasy nerds speak of 1980s movies with a special reverence. The 80s were the first age of the blockbuster, in which summer belonged to larger-than-life heroes and incredible action. These films had a purity, and an innocence, that felt just as thrilling as their lavish VFX sequences.

When you watch a movie from the 80s today, the pacing feels slower and the effects feel more crude than more recent films. But movies from Ronald Reagan’s presidency still have a lot in common with today’s films, in their focus on thrills, action and spectacle. When you watch a movie from the 1970s, though, it’s very different.

The decade preceding Star Wars is dominated by slower, more meditative science fiction movies. A ton of these films are dystopias, or post-apocalyptic worlds (in the vein of The Road, not Mad Max.) Instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger kicking ass, there’s Charlton Heston gritting his teeth through an endless series of messed-up futures. There’s seldom a happy ending, or an easy fix.

And Star Wars, more than Spielberg’s Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, created a new template for giant blockbuster movies. In these 1980s films, says Sirota, there’s not a lot of nuance. Things tend to be “good versus evil,” “us and them,” and clear moral lines. “You’re either on one side or your on the other,” says Sirota. “This is not The Wire.”

“You have to wonder, without Star Wars reinventing the blockbuster—along with Jaws—would we have had a Rambo?” asks Taylor. “Would we have had all those confident, muscular movies of the 80s?”

“Look at Star Wars—the original movie—and think about it in the context of 1977,” Taylor adds. “It doesn’t look like 1977. It doesn’t look like Jimmy Carter, and ‘malaise,’ and the bad times that America was going through. It looks like the 1980s. It’s optimistic, it’s militaristic. It’s armed to the teeth and naïve as hell.”

The “tentpole” movie would have become a huge phenomenon even if George Lucas had directed Apocalypse Now instead of Star Wars. Advances in technology would have guaranteed more space action, bigger explosions, greater spectacle. But Star Wars found a way to translate the uncomplicated optimism of mid-twentieth-century films to a new idiom—and that helped movies of the 1980s to be much more upbeat, and morally simple.

5. Pop culture shapes politics, as much as the other way around. Our movies, TV shows, games and other media help create our matrix of ideas about how the world works. Our fictional heroes represent our internalized images of the kinds of people we’d want to be in real life. Fictional victories make us believe that we can triumph over real-life problems, however intractable.

Ronald Reagan was running for president just as the marketing campaign for the second Star Wars movie was reaching fever pitch. Star Wars represented not just high-tech space adventure, but nostalgia—the original trilogy isn’t just set in a time “long, long ago,” but feels like a product of an earlier, simpler era. Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign dovetailed perfectly with the sense of nostalgic optimism that Star Wars stood for.

As that 1983 Washington Post article makes clear, Americans were tired of feeling bad about themselves, and sick of defeatism, and Star Wars was a gateway drug to a new triumphalism. We could blow this thing and go home. We could be the good guys, with easily identified bad guys.

Reagan’s policies were explicitly connected to Star Wars on two occasions: Once, when he described the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire,” and once when his missile-defense program was dubbed “Star Wars.” Both of these were more or less accidents, says Taylor. Reagan’s speechwriter has said he didn’t intend “Evil Empire” to be a Star Wars reference, but that speech happened just as the original Star Wars was showing on HBO for the first time, and people made the connection.

And using “Star Wars” to describe Reagan’s SDI idea was actually the Democrats’ idea—something they soon came to regret, because “Star Wars” doesn’t sound silly and dismissive, but rather awesome.

When you look the Empire through the prism of the Cold War, it does start to look like “a caricature of the cartoon of the Soviet Union,” says Sirota. “It’s this highly bureaucratized, un-democratic, soullessly technological, imperial administration. It’s easy to see the Empire as a proxy for that.”

“In the late 1970s, heading into the 1980s, that story of the Rebels against the Empire took on some political overtones,” says Sirota. “The idea of rebelling against this kind of faceless government was a theme in the movie, and depending on your political perspective,” says Sirota, you could view that as the Reagan revolution against Big Government. “I certainly think it tapped into the zeitgeist of that era.”

And Reagan, a former actor, was also keenly aware that this was a new era, in which movies were more immersive and spectacular than before. As Moran points out, Reagan famously said, “It is the motion picture that shows us not only how we look and sound, but more important, how we feel.” In Reagan’s America, we not only identified with Luke Skywalker and his friends, but also saw them as the best representations of who we really were inside.

And the purity of their struggle against evil was the greatest gift that Star Wars gave Ronald Reagan.

Top image: Artwork by Jim Cooke.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, coming in January from Tor Books. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump announced a new policy platform: No more Muslims. The ensuing nonsensical statement is, incredibly, not a joke.

In the statement, which was apparently emailed to reporters, Trump tosses aside “various polling data,” explaining that instinct is telling him what this country needs is a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

(The proposed ban applies to Muslim immigrants and tourists alike, Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski tells the AP.)

What prompted this new, oddly-timed, oddly-worded so-called policy announcement? Only Trump can say. In other news, Ted Cruz beat Trump in a Monmouth University poll of Iowa Republicans today.

Here’s the statement in full:

According to the New York Times, a Trump spokeswoman says the proposal was prompted by “death.”

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security will unveil its newest threat alert system, modified to allow for a new “intermediate terror threat” level. If you’re wondering—who cares?—you’re not alone.

The United States has not used the “color code” system since 2011.

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

It’s only been a few minutes since the Trump campaign called for an open, sweeping policy of institutional bigotry at the federal level, and already his Republican rivals are chiming in.

The strongest condemnation so far comes from Jeb Bush, who called Trump “unhinged” over his plan to bar all Muslims from entering the United States because they hate us so much:

Lindsey Graham came very close to saying the decent, right thing

but then fucked it all up by qualifying it:

But at least he called for his GOP peers to speak out as well:

Chris Christie, during an appearance on the Michael Medved radio show, was asked about Trump’s statement (emphasis added):

CHRIS CHRISTIE: Again, this is the kind of thing that people say when they have no experience and don’t know what they’re talking about. We do not need to endorse that type of activity, nor should we. What we need to do is to increase our intelligence capabilities and activity both around the world and in the homeland. We need to back up our law enforcement officers, who are out there fighting this fight everyday, give them the tools they need. We need to cooperate with peaceful Muslim-Americans, who want to give us intelligence against those who are radicalized. We did this after 9/11. And it was a very impressive approach. I can tell you in New Jersey that we frequently had sources inside mosques in New Jersey that were giving us information that helped us to bring cases and intervene on things that we otherwise wouldn’t have know about. This is just to me someone speaking from no experience.

MEDVED: You’ve also had experience in the court system. Don’t you think it’s likely that would be overturned as a violation of the First Amendment – prohibitions on religious tests?

CHRIS CHRISTIE: There’s no question in my mind, but there are folks in this race who don’t care about what the law says because they’re used to being able to just fire people indiscriminately on television. So, they don’t have to worry about laws say or not say. The fact is this, you can do this if you have a president who’s experienced, who’s prosecuted folks, operated under the law of the Constitution and has made the difficult decisions over the last thirteen years to keep New Jersey safe to help keep our country safe. And you do not need to be banning Muslims from the country. That’s, in my view, that’s a ridiculous position and one that won’t even be productive.

Stephanie Marshall from the Carson campaign provided this soothing, extra-mild rebuke of Trump:

Everyone visiting our country should register and be monitored during their stay as is done in many countries. We do not and would not advocate being selective on one’s religion.

John Kasich comes out swinging:

Ted Cruz says that a ban on Muslims is “not his policy”:

Carly Fiorina, a bad CEO and coward, declined to say bigotry is bad and instead used Trump’s policy proposal as an excuse to take a swat at President Obama:

I’ll be updating this post as comments from more GOP campaigns arrive.

Rand Paul bolsters is record as “guy who is right on the NSA and drones and wrong on literally everything else” with this mush:

Eventually, Marco Rubio weighed in, to say he disagrees with Trump’s proposal.

“Outlandish” is one word for it.

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

Here’s an article that Kristin Cavallari recently shared on her app: “Breastfeeding FAQs: How Much and How Often,” by Elana Pearl Ben-Joseph, MD. It originally appeared on KidsHealth.com, and Kristin found it useful.

In an introduction on her app, she noted: “This article has all the info I was looking for. Hopefully this helps all of you mamas!”

All of you mamas reading Kristin’s app.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

The U.S. Department of Justice unit that investigates civil rights violations by police departments has only about 18 employees who work on such investigations full-time. According to a former head of the unit, a forthcoming probe into the Chicago PD could overwhelm its “ridiculously small” staff. Good luck to them!

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Politicians are generally beholden to police. One need look no further than what the NYPD did to Bill De Blasio nearly a year ago, after he admitted in public that he had told his son to be wary around cops, to see to the lengths police departments are willing to go to exert authority over a city’s elected leadership.

(Or, for those with longer memories, think back to the NYPD riot against David Dinkins, proximately sparked by his proposal to create a body to investigate police corruption, but fueled by the widespread cop belief that New York City’s first—and, to date, last—black mayor wasn’t on “their side.”)

And the police, confident that the general public will always support them over any mere politician, will resort to tactics both immature and inflammatory to ensure that their power within, and over, a community is not weakened. This is why, even when police are at their worst, politicians will always be deferential towards policing and police officers. This includes politicians as high-ranking as Barack Obama, who has been respectful of police at-large in addressing recent officer-involved controversies. It also includes Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s ex-deputy and the current mayor of Chicago.

“One individual needs to be held accountable,” Emanuel said in a conference call in the days before his administration was forced to release video of teenager Laquan McDonald being gunned down by officer Jason Van Dyke, who now faces first-degree murder charges. But Emanuel was careful to keep a distance between the bad apple and the tree. Via the Chicago Tribune:

“Our Police Department and the individuals who make it up are entrusted both to provide safety throughout the community, trust with the residents who make up the community that they’re a part of providing that safety, and also to uphold the law,” the mayor said. “And a lot of our officers, by and large, the men and women that make up the department, do that every day and they do it very well every day.”

One of his officers had murdered a child, but there are some things that a mayor must say, and that all of his police are good except for the ones we know to be bad is one of those things. Emanuel must have realized that there would be a swift social uprising against his police department, but in weighing the tone and content of his public response, Emanuel decided to play it safe. Nobody wants to be the next Bill De Blasio, after all. Or the next Mayor Dinkins, who lost reelection to a man who actively supported that unruly police “demonstration”: Rudy Giuliani.

But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Emmanuel read the situation incorrectly. After expressing confidence in his police department and the individuals within it, he abruptly fired Garry McCarthy, who as police superintendent controlled the force. This morning, the Department of Justice announced it would conduct a civil rights investigation into the practices of the Chicago PD, and this afternoon the city released a video of another man, Ronald Johnson, being killed by a cop in October 2014, just a week before the death of Laquan McDonald.

http://gawker.com/video-shows-ch...

Today, Emanuel held another press conference, and his view of his police force was markedly different.

These statements are about as anti-cop as you’ll ever hear from a sitting politician. It’s eerily like the part in a television show or movie where the naive, idealistic populist politician says the thing they never say in real life—right before he learns the hard way how politics is really played.

But this is Rahm Emanuel. He isn’t idealistic, and he’s no populist. His appeal, such as it is, is precisely the opposite—he plays the inside game and gets, supposedly, results. But as he finds himself being moved by the tide shifting beneath him, it does seem pretty okay to call him naive.

[image via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Fox News contributor and former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters was suspended for two weeks on Monday after calling President Barack Obama “a total pussy.”

http://gawker.com/someone-called...

“This guy is such a total pussy,” Peters said, after Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney asked him for his reaction to the president’s address Sunday night. “It’s stunning.”

Later, Varney reprimanded Peters for having used inappropriate language, but acknowledged that he could feel his feelings. “I can tell you are super angry, and I asked you what your reaction was, but you can’t use language like that on the program,” Varney said.

Elsewhere, the Associated Press reports, Clueless actress and Fox contributor Stacey Dash was also suspended for two weeks, after deeming Obama’s speech an “epic fail.”

“It was like when you have to go to dinner with your parents, but you have a party to go to afterwards, that’s what it felt like,” she said. “I did not feel any better. I didn’t feel any passion from him.”

“I felt like he [couldn’t] give a shit, excuse me, like he [couldn’t] care less. He [couldn’t] care less.”

According to the AP, Fox senior executive vice president of programming Bill Shine said that the language in both cases “was completely inappropriate and unacceptable for our air.” We are left to imagine what Ralph Peters thinks of that.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Investigations into the background of the husband-and-wife pair who attacked an office building in San Bernardino, California, last week found that the couple had been radicalized for a while.

In the wake of the attack, which killed 14 people and wounded 21 more, the Associated Press reports that officials are digging in to the backgrounds of 28-year-old Syeed Farook and his wife, 29-year-old Tashfeen Malik.

Authorities say that the couple had taken target practice at gun ranges in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and that one of those visits occurred just days before the attack.

David Bowdich, chief of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, said on Monday:

“We have learned and believe that both subjects were radicalized and have been for quite some time. The question we’re trying to get at is how did that happen and by whom and where did that happen? And I will tell you right now we don’t know those answers.”

Officials who searched the couple’s home also reported that they found 19 pipes that could be used for bombs, more than previously thought.

A newly-released photo shows the pair as they first set foot together in the U.S., after the Chicago-born Farook brought his wife from Pakistan, where she was born.

The community continues to mourn the victims of the shooting, and held memorial vigils over the weekend.

[Images via AP]

On Monday evening, after proposing a (temporary) ban on Muslims entering the United States, Donald Trump attended the Pearl Harbor Day Rally, at the USS Yorktown, in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. “It takes courage to run for president,” Trump said. “Believe me.”

http://gawker.com/donald-trumps-...

Trump began by citing a new, favorable poll out of Iowa. He did not cite the other new (but less favorable) poll out of Iowa.

On the economy, he said that there was no such word as “trillion” ten years ago. Hmm.

On Iraq, Trump said, “I have a great temperment.” Militarily, the candidate proposed to make the American military so strong that nobody will “mess with us.”

“In many ways, it’s the cheapest thing we can do,” he said.

A protestor interrupted. “Treat her nicely,” Trump said. “That person had a weak voice. Too bad.”

On racial profiling, Trump said, “Give me a break.” He cited a poll from the “very highly respected” Center for Security Policy, progenitors of the “creeping Sharia” theory. (“I know them, actually.”) He warned the crowd about sharia law. “You know what that is,” he suggested.

Most of the media is “disgusting,” Trump said. “Absolute scum. Totally dishonest.”

Then, he brought up the statement released earlier on Monday, which calls for “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

“It’s pretty heavy stuff,” Trump said. “But it’s common sense.”

He read from the statement. The crowd went wild. “We have no choice,” Trump said. “We can’t live like this.”

“It’s gonna get worse and worse.”

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a man whose hair is as wispy as his voice is raspy, nosed out female education activist Malala Yousafzali in an online poll for the best person in the world that really doesn’t mean anything, anyway.

According to TIME on Monday, the U.S. Senator from Vermont won over 10 percent of the votes (it’s not clear who is actually, seriously voting in this thing), absolutely crushing 18-year-old Yousafzali’s 5.2 percent. Pope Francis slumped in at third place with 3.7 percent. Others in the lower echelons included: President Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Colbert and a handful of other two-bit no-names.

But relax, Sen. Sanders, there’s no cause for celebration yet. As TIME itself admits, the results of the online survey are virtually meaningless.

TIME’s editors will choose the Person of the Year, the person TIME believes most influenced the news this year, for better or worse. The choice will be revealed Wednesday morning during NBC’s Today show.

Here’s hoping Malala pulls through with a come-from-behind K.O.

[Image via Getty]

Bakersfield, California news station KGET, known far and wide as a bastion of objective journalism, took the time out on Monday to get a “man on the street” perspective of the vile torrent of racism spewing forth from Donald Trump’s mouth hole.

After the Republican presidential candidate announced a proposed policy wherein he hopes to ban an entire religion from U.S. soil, the NBC News affiliate unwisely tweeted the following:

Wisely and in response to swift backlash, KGET deleted the tweet. Unwisely, it simply re-worded the tweet, and sent it right out again.

The station’s website has a similar poll embedded into the page, too, which looks like this, with results:

KGET has not, however, responded to Donald Trump’s allegations that most of the media are “scum.”

Gawker has reached out to KGET and NBC for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

[Images via KGET]

Poorly-trained circus orangutan Donald Trump was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Tuesday, busily defending his hideous plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States. He shouted hoarsely into thin air for a while before host Joe Scarborough told him to stop talking and cut to a commercial break.

It’s worth pointing out, first of all, that no one, not even Lord of Outer Darkness Dick Cheney, thinks this is a good plan.

Washington Post reporter Jenna Johnson says the Trump campaign is slowly fleshing out the very realistic strategy to allow Muslim world leaders, among others, to enter the country.

Typically, his plan on how this would be executed is very detailed, workable, and doesn’t smack of someone who’s pulling things from deep within his rectum as he goes along:

Trump made a phone appearance this morning on MSNBC, where he assured hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that he’d definitely thought this whole thing out.

“Everybody now agrees with me in one form or another,” Trump asserted, incorrectly, referring to his previous proposals to do things like build a wall between Mexico and the United States and create a registry for Muslim Americans.

In response to a question from Brzezinski about how Muslims around the world could help fight the war on terror, Trump ranted for a while about Paris, Muslims, and “getting our hands around a very difficult situation” before Scarborough cut in.

“You gotta let us ask questions,” he told Trump. “You can’t just talk... You’re just talking. All Muslims—”

“I’m not just talking,” Trump responded. “Joe, I’m not just talking. I’m giving you the facts.”

“Donald, Donald, Donald. You’re not going to keep talking. We will go to break if you keep talking,” Scarborough repeated.

“Go to break, then, Joe,” Trump responded. “All I’m doing is giving you the facts and you don’t wanna hear the facts.”

Scarborough directed the crew to cut to break, and they did. They returned a moment later, where Trump continued insisting for another half hour that his plan isn’t unconstitutional or illegal (it is both).

The response from the media and the public alike has been pretty unified.

Here’s the full interview, if you like to start your quiet weeping early.

Contact the author at anna.merlan@jezebel.com.

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PGP fingerprint: 67B5 5767 9D6F 652E 8EFD 76F5 3CF0 DAF2 79E5 1FB6

Donald Trump wants to lock out all the Muslims, Nevada lawmakers are offering to shoot the Syrian refugees—it’s arguably a real unpopular time to be Muslim outside of the Middle East. Not at all! say the fine folks over at Fox.

“It turns out Muslim hate crimes—not as big an issue as the White House would like you to believe,” Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade proclaimed, brightly, early Tuesday morning. “In 2014, look at how the breakdown goes when it comes it hate crimes. 59 percent of the hate crimes, anti-Semitic. 14 percent anti-Islamic. Important. Look at the difference!”

And in a surprising turn of events, Kilmeade’s guest, John Hajjar—the co-chairman of the American Middle East Coalition for Democracy—agreed with him: The Muslims are just milking it for sympathy.

“You know, they’ve been creating, as I said, this victimhood status for Muslims for, you know, in conjunction with the Council of the American Islamic Relations and other Muslims groups such as Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Circle of North America, to really divert attention from what’s going on,” Hajjar said. “It’s not been happening. And Islamophobia is really nothing but a myth.”

Here’s one thing no one involved in today’s broadcast can deny: Reality is what you make it.

[H/T Media Matters]

Image via AP. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Liberty University’s president this week raised some secular eyebrows when he urged his Christian students to start carrying guns. Now there’s a reasonable explanation: haters “lacking knowledge about the true character of God.”

Liberty is a well-funded Christian school, and its president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has a reputation for being somewhat less loony than his televangelist father, which made his gun remarks all the more newsworthy. (I guess? To me, you Christians are all more or less crazy. All of you. You believe ancient primitive myths are real. They’re not real! It’s very disconcerting.) What Falwell said to the entire student body while urging them to get licensed and carry guns on campus was, “I always thought that if more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walk in and kill.”

If you are the homosexual secular liberal type, you may have two issues with his remarks. First, the fact that a university president is urging more of his students to carry guns on campus, which is flat-out fucking crazy; and second, that a university president urged his students to carry guns on campus so that they may be prepared to “end those Muslims.” Liberty University does not agree that the first object is valid, because they are, in fact, flat-out crazy, but they have issued a statement in regards to the second objection clarifying that Falwell was only talking about the terrorist Negroes, like Nat Turner, who try to kill innocent whites, and not about the many good Negroes.

Excuse me—I mixed up my notes. Forgive me. Liberty clarified in its statement that Falwell was only talking about “the Muslim terrorists who attacked innocents in San Bernardino, California, and Paris, France, and not about “the many good and honorable Muslims who do not come into public spaces armed to kill innocents.”

Even spicier, Liberty published a sort of op-ed by professor Daniel Howell in which he does his level best to rebuke those who have accused Liberty of being flat-out crazy by offering up a justification that is flat-out crazier:

Unbelievers and others lacking knowledge about the true character of God sometimes refer to Christ’s moniker as the Prince of Peace to conclude Christianity must be a wimpy, defenseless teaching. Of course, this is one of many titles for Jesus, another being the Lion of Judah. While Jesus was exceptionally mild and meek at his first coming, we are assured by Scripture that he will not be so at his second coming. He is described in Revelation 19 as the King of kings who leads the armies of heaven on a white horse and utterly destroys his enemies with the word of his mouth (visualized there as a sword).

Thank you, Professor Howell, for offering up your professional opinion that Jesus will return atop a white horse, waving a sword and leading armies of angels. You should be institutionalized, sir. Which I guess you are, at Liberty University. Which wouldn’t bother me so much if you all weren’t talking about guns so much.

Chill.

[Via Inside Higher Ed; Photo via AP]

This morning, Donald Trump made a counterintuitive comparison in order to endear himself to his seething reactionary base: I am like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the famously big-government president who was described as a socialist in his day, he said. To quell his supporters’ fears, he clarified that he wasn’t talking about the good parts of FDR—just the one really, really bad part.

The answer came, improbably enough, after George Stephanopoulos asked Trump how he felt about the increasingly common Hitler comparisons thrown his way after his proposal to ban Muslims from entering America. Trump objected, claiming that he’s less like Hitler than he is like FDR. That’s not necessarily comforting news for America’s xenophobes, so he clarified: not the aggressive government spending to employ millions of people on public works projects FDR; the round up all the Japanese Americans into internment camps FDR. Breathe easy, Trump Nation!

From Trump’s Good Morning America interview:

You’re increasingly being compared to Hitler. Does that give you any pause at all?

No, because what I’m doing is no different than what FDR—FDR’s solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, many years ago—

So you’re for internment camps?

This is a president who is highly respected by all—he did the same thing. If you look at what he was doing, it was far worse. He was talking about the Germans—because we’re at war. We are now at war. We have a president who doesn’t want to say it, but we’re at war.

I’ve gotta press you on that. You’re praising FDR there—I take it you’re praising the setting up of internment camps for Japanese during World War II.

No I’m not, no I’m not. Take a look at presidential proclamations 2525, 2526, and 2527, having to do with alien Germans, alien Italians, alien Japanese. They stripped them of their naturalization proceedings, they went through a whole list of things. They couldn’t go five miles from their homes. They weren’t allowed to use radios, flashlights.

Take a look at what FDR did many years ago, and he’s one of the most highly presidents—I mean, respected by most people. They name highways after him.

Between Trump and Roanoke mayor David Bowers, FDR is awfully popular among close-minded buffoons lately!*

http://gawker.com/virginia-mayor...

Image via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.