Is there room in the labor movement for racist, Trump-supporting cops?
The single most loathsome figure associated with the NYPD is the head of its police union, who staunchly defends bad cops and fights reforms with inflammatory rhetoric. As the nationwide drumbeat of police killings and subsequent protests have grown in the past year or two, so too have calls—both formal and informal—for labor organizations to divorce themselves from unions of police and other law enforcement officers. The AFL-CIO has been asked to kick out the International Union of Police Associations. Last week, an immigrant activist group asked the AFL-CIO to kick out the National Border Patrol Council, a union of U.S. Border Patrol agents, after the union endorsed Donald Trump for president.
So far, the AFL-CIO has demurred. But the impulse to cast the cops out into the wilderness will not die out any time soon, as long as police unions serve as the primary institutions defending the behavior of racist, violent, or corrupt cops. Police unions do the things that unions are supposed to do (negotiate and enforce better pay and working conditions for their members), but some of them, at least, also do the thing that makes many people despise unions (protect bad actors at all costs).
What we have here is really a debate over what the labor movement is. Is the labor movement dedicated solely to the improvement of workers’ paychecks and working conditions, so that its focus is on helping union members and growing the ranks of union membership? Or is the labor movement the vanguard of the revolution, first and foremost a political movement, a group of working class people pushing to change the worst parts of our capitalist system? The AFL-CIO is a major force in electoral politics, thanks to its lobbying, donation, and ability to turn out the vote. But do we want it to be primarily a political organization? Or do we want it to focus solely on union issues and leave the larger social movements to someone else?
The honest answer, for most people, is “I want it to be a powerful political force on my side.” The idea of kicking the cops out of the labor movement has a delicious appeal at a time when police racism is more visible than ever. The idea of kicking the border patrol agents out of the labor movement for endorsing a racist xenophobe whose values would seem to be in direct contradiction to labor would be fun as hell. But such actions would set a dangerous and counterproductive precedent. If you kick out the cops for protecting bad members, you can be sure that a call to kick out teachers unions for the same thing is right around the corner. If you kick out the border patrol agents for endorsing Trump, you can be sure that the AFL-CIO’s internal Bernie vs. Hillary squabble will soon turn into a call to eject those who don’t toe the official endorsement line. Ultimately, kicking out unions that we dislike politically undermines the one thing that gives the labor movement its strength: unity.
You don’t have to like the members of a police union. You don’t have to like the redneck Border Patrol union members who endorsed Donald Trump. All you have to do is recognize that all of us—you, me, the Bernie partisans, the Hillary partisans, the teachers, the restaurant workers, the liberals, the racists, the fucking cops—have one thing in common: we are members of the working class. By standing together as a labor movement, we make the working class stronger. That in turn makes the world a fairer place. That is what class consciousness means. It doesn’t mean you have to like the people you stand with. It just means that you agree to settle your differences outside the bounds of the labor movement, the purpose of which is to support labor. The racist cop and the city worker waving a sign in a protest march against racist cops have a common enemy in economic inequality and unfairness. Whether we like it or not, purposely shrinking the ranks of labor organizations is counterproductive. (Likewise, police unions behaving so outrageously that they get kicked out of labor organizations is stupid.) We can all work together on something we have in common and then tell one another to go to hell when that work is done.
Some of the working class may consist of motherfuckers but that doesn’t mean we should let the rich win the class war.
I recently received a text from my dead brother’s girlfriend. I still think of Dana as Junior’s girlfriend even though it’s been 15 years since he was killed. We’re not close anymore, but her daughter, who was conceived the week before he died, is my niece; we remain connected through the trauma we shared.
I was sitting in my office in Oakland when the text came through. I’m a writer and editor at a publishing company and was distractedly reading a proposal for a self-help book, trying not to think about a man I had freshly broken up with. “I was just thinking about you. You were on my heart,” she said. How nice, I thought, I needed to hear that. And then the next text: “I had a dream about Junior last night. It was so real.”
Immediately I’m taken back to being 16, the age I was when it happened. I know exactly why she’s reaching out to me and no one else despite the fact that we’re not close anymore. Who else would she tell? When he died she clung to me like a barnacle for the first weeks, sometimes even spending the night in my twin bed with me. I could barely sleep over the cries of her high-pitched heaving that she quietly apologized for in the morning. We share survivor’s guilt, and who else would understand that those words are inadequate, that we are not really survivors—that we survived nothing—but me?
My brother was shot in the head and left to bleed on a freeway exit in West Oakland a week after he was released from prison. He was just 19 and had spent the first year of his adult life behind bars. The blood on the sidewalk was still there a few days later when my family and I showed up to commemorate him with markers and spray paints. We wrote private letters and scriptures, we taped photos of him all over the cement wall that he’d fallen before. It didn’t take long for police cars to swarm us as if we were criminals, threatening to arrest us for vandalizing state property. This was a ceremony for our dead, a public grave that no one wanted to see.
A part of me will always exist inside that moment—the anger of it, the numbness of it. His death required great anger and great compassion to hold. So many systems had converged to kill him. Even through my anger at the unfairness of it, the violence of it, I knew in my heart that the black boy who did it was not totally at fault, and I knew that he would be next, and then there would be another and another, and that there would be innumerable dead black boys, and that I would not be the only sister who lost.
This knowing haunted me.
At fault were many moving parts that I would have to contain: it was the boy that pulled the trigger, yes, but it was also the schools that gave up on him, the penal system that imprisoned a child, a brutal masculinity code, the lie that gave him the belief that his blackness and his manhood were to be found on the streets of West Oakland, in the beautiful cars of drug dealers and pimps, at the bottom of a bottle of cognac. His murder remains unsolved. The trauma is also unsolved, but it is alive, its case file expressing itself invisibly, with frequency and normalcy, in the minds and bodies of those left behind.
15 years ago I made an unconscious agreement with myself: nothing would ever matter as much as his death. What I didn’t know then was that agreement included my own life. I didn’t have the luxury anymore to be sad about the trivial things of my teenage life—or my adult life, many years later. Breakup? Who cares. My brother is dead. A fight with a friend? Doesn’t matter. My brother is dead. It’s the nonnegotiable price I’ve had to pay for having been spared: I would pay by not allowing myself to feel anything but that particular sadness for the rest of my life. The agreement was to not be fully alive.
I texted Dana back, eagerly wanting some communication with my brother, even if the contact was through someone else’s dream. “Wow,” I said, believing totally in the authority of her dream. “What happened?” As if he’d been here and I’d missed it.
She proceeded to tell me that her daughter, Jewel, was with her. Jewel begged to visit with her dad. She met him, my brother, for the first time in the dream. They hugged and wouldn’t let each other go.
I hang onto every word, reading the message over and over again, letting the tears stream down my face. I grab a tissue from my bookshelf and am reminded I’m at work. The agreement takes over: nothing matters as much as this. Let them come in.
“Did he speak?” I ask. “He never speaks in my dreams.” I stare at my sacrosanct device, depending completely on the words that will come next.
She tells me that he asked: “Dana, where are you going?” and she responded, “I came to show you your teenage daughter.” Then he held his daughter, my niece.
This is what survivor guilt looks like.
It looks like a grown woman sobbing at her desk, struggling to attach worthiness to her life, a woman indebted to death. It looks like Dana sneaking off to text me in a corner of the IRS building where she works that has a strict no phone policy to text me urgently about the dream of her dead boyfriend, her teenage daughter’s dead father, my dead brother. In some primordial way, without any effort on my part, his death asks, and asks constantly: who are you to grow older year after year? Who are you to want? Who are you to achieve? Who are you to be alive?
I am indebted to him. Because I get to live and he didn’t.
What right do I have to have been feeling sad when my niece never had a father? Dana doesn’t have a partner. I don’t have a brother. It’s too much; all the loss. I forget myself for a moment and am overcome with the ubiquitous nature of this trauma, how it’s already been passed down, how my niece will pass it down, how I will.
I read and reread the texts at my desk believing maybe my brother is in them. I dare someone to come in. Nothing matters as much as this.
The dead haunt us.
I try to make meaning out of things. I try and give things purpose when they may very well be random. I tell myself that maybe my brother is trying to help me put the breakup/failure/loss/rejection/anxiety—whatever it may be—in perspective, reminding me that there are more important things for me to do, helping me see that I am bigger than the thing that worries me. Reminding me that I don’t matter. There is only room in here for one thing to matter. The personal, political thing that allows me to forget myself. It is in this forgetting that the trauma lives.
And then the negotiation with the agreement begins. I reject having to hold all this. I have the urge to be reckless, act out. I feel like I’m 16 again. Back then I took an X-Acto blade to my flesh. What damage can I do? I could drink until I black out, poison myself more subtly through bad relationships. I could do some damage, but when I’m finished, I’ll always remember that I have no right to any of my perceived problems. I don’t have the luxury to feel, to fully occupy my life. I gave that up when he died.
I really want things to matter. I want to matter. I dare someone to open the door to my office and witness the only black woman in the building crying at her desk because her brother was murdered 15 years ago. I want a witness.
I have fought impostor syndrome, feeling like a fraud in my career. This is also survivor guilt. Who am I to have a career? To think I can write a book? For many years I felt I wore the costume of a together person. I was hiding, very close to the surface, an extremely traumatized person. Everyone seemed happier than me and existed in a state of ease. I felt I was lurking in their world—white, middle class, educated, a sense of ease about it all. And I felt my mask always threatened to drip off and reveal the wounded monster that had to negotiate her worthiness daily. I hid with silence: please don’t ask me any real questions about my life. Don’t ask me how my holiday was. Don’t ask me about my family. And please don’t ask me about my book.
Please don’t open the door.
Now I open the door myself. I enjoy the look on peoples’ faces when I tell them what my book is about. With a straight face I say, “A memoir about my coming of age and my brother’s murder—a story about the aftermath and the cost of black death.” I watch their mouths form the word wow and their eyes squint in some combination of sympathy and awe.
I’m sick of hiding the trauma. I’m sick of not living because of survivor guilt. I want to feel everything, all the pain, even petty breakups, all the goodness, too. I want to talk about my brother’s death and the fact that not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. I want to tell people about my pain. I’m sick of hiding. I don’t want to be grateful for my life if it’s an apology. I want to be worthy of a life.
There are so many more teenagers than just my niece who do not have fathers. There are so many more women who don’t have partners, so many more women who don’t have brothers.
I often wonder how Oscar Grant’s, Freddie Gray’s, Eric Garner’s sister, daughter, partner, are doing—all the families. And all the unnamed ones like my brother, who died on the streets, not by police hands, but by the hands of a system that condones and supports black death. To me these deaths are no different. The origins are the same.
The word survivor is inadequate. Being a survivor means living a life informed by trauma. I survived nothing; I live it every day and see it in all things. We need a new word. We are the spared who carry the wounds around like babies we must protect. The wound feels as real as the person we lost. Never forgetting is certainly a gift: I have measureless levels of compassion and empathy. I get it. I’ll never need to be convinced that black lives matter. But these qualities are not valued; my gifts feel useless. Most useless of all is that the guilt threatens to strangle off my right to be a full participant in my own life. I need a new word. One that lets me live more, that unburdens me from the mere existence of the spared—the half-life. I am learning to tell my story. I am learning to take up space, in my career and in my own body. I am learning to feel. I want to be sure that as I honor the dead, I allow life. It is not just the dead boys who matter. All the lives in their wake need to be reminded how much they matter. Perhaps I’ve needed a reminder all these years that my own black life mattered. The agreement is not that we get to live, but that we must live.
The bit took place at the annual Inner Circle Dinner for New York City’s political elite. Responding to a clearly scripted joke from Clinton about his late endorsement, de Blasio responds, “Sorry Hillary, I was running on C.P. time.” Hamilton actor Leslie Odom Jr., who was also apparently part of the sketch, then butts in with“I don’t like jokes like that, Bill.”
Clinton then turns to Leslie and the audience to deliver a relatively flat punchline: “Cautious politician time.” The fact that she and her various aides—not to mention Bill de Blasio himself—all thought, yes, this is a good joke that will land well, is baffling.
On Monday, a state and federal working group led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a $5 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs in connection with practices that contributed to the financial crisis. Of the $5 billion, $670 million will be allocated to New York state.
Goldman will pay a $2.385 billion civil penalty under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) as part of the agreement. It has also agreed to pay $1.8 billion in relief to underwater homeowners and distressed borrowers, and in the form of loan forgiveness and financing for affordable housing. The bank will also pay $875 million to resolve federal and state claims.
“We are pleased to put these legacy matters behind us,” Michael DuVally, a spokesman for the bank, said in a statement provided to Gawker. “Since the financial crisis, we have taken significant steps to strengthen our culture, reinforce our commitment to our clients, and ensure our governance processes are robust.”
The settlement was negotiated through the joint state and federal Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, founded in 2012, after the newly-elected Attorney General Schneiderman refused a settlement deal that would have granted immunity to the five largest mortgage servicing banks, including Bank of America.
As part of the deal announced Monday, Goldman agreed to the release of a “Statement of Facts,” which enumerate the practices and conditions that led, in part, to the financial and housing crisis of 2008. For example:
On April 11, 2006, while Goldman was preparing one of the GSAA offerings backed by loans from the March 30 Countrywide pools for securitization, a Goldman mortgage department manager circulated to a large group of Goldman employees a “very bullish” equity research report regarding Countrywide’s common stock, which recommended the purchase of Countrywide shares and highlighted that Countrywide’s March 2006 loan origination volume had exceeded expectations. Goldman’s head of due diligence, who had just overseen Goldman’s due diligence on six Countrywide pools that closed during a two-day period at the end of March, responded to the research report by saying: “If they only knew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .”
Goldman did not disclose to investors that it had identified certain issues with Countrywide’s origination process.
Monday’s agreement includes no criminal penalties or sanctions. Banks have paid nearly $95 billion as part of settlement agreements at both the state and federal levels since the crash.
Since its founding by a former Ku Klux Klan leader in 1996, Stormfront has been the internet’s number-one watering hole for white nationalists and neo-nazis. Its users’ brand of hate has sunk politicians, inspired documentaries, and even spawned its own media arm, The Daily Stormer. But there’s something you may not know about these ultra-racist, ultra-conservative keyboard warriors: They love to write poetry.
And not just poetry. They have amassed a veritable literary review of short stories, parody lyrics, creative non-fiction, and micro fiction in the voice of the “new, embattled White minority.” All of it goes in Stormfront’s Poetry and Creative Writing section, which has been thriving since the first entry, in September of 2001. Fifteen years is a lot of hate-filled amateur composition to pore through, so we’ve done it for you. Here are some of the highlights. Write what you know, they say. And what Stormfront commenters know is hate. You’ve been warned.
Author’s notes: “This was a short story I wrote about a Swedish girl named Laura, I dont know if she ever existed or ever will, but there are thousands of women just like her who have their honor damaged by these foreign invaders each year, and each year it gets worse and its going to keep getting worse till men are willing to be men and truly make sacrifices for their country, and pray that they will be vindicated in their lifetime as a hero
My heart goes out to all of our Swedish comrades and I pray your Victory Day come swifter than ours.”
Author’s Notes: “I am presenting in installments, a ten percent sample, all I can as yet legally display, of my White Nationalist epic poem Oblivion or the Stars? published on Amazon books. The first fifty-six cantos consists of a poetical history of the West; the last twenty-six Cantos consists of a critique of modernity, covering most of the issues pertinent to the White Nationalist worldview...”
Notes: User spiralsun writes, “Okay, that was very chilling. However, Europe is (thank God finally) on the verge of a nationalist revolution, which surely bodes well for the future of racial awareness. So don’t lose hope.”
Author’s notes: “I’m sure most of you have seen Frozen and heard this song by now. Very good movie, full of beautiful (animated) white people, nary a non-white to be seen. I’m shocked it even got made in this day and age. It’s a film that may wake up many to the simple beauty that we have to lose; the beauty of white women and children, and western civilization.
Anyway here’s my white nationalist rendition of Let it Go.”
Historically, America’s unironic pinney-wearers, people who know all the lyrics to “Sweet Caroline,” and 19 year-olds named Chad have had only the stories their dads told them about Ronald Reagan and Chuck Norris jokes to inspire them each election cycle. But this year, in Donald Trump, lacrosse players and beer-pong champions alike have finally found a candidate to stand up for them, the underdogs.
“There is a sentiment among frat guys, lacrosse players and middle class affluent white kids that they are getting persecuted lately,” David Portnoy, the founder Barstool Sports, tells CBS.
“You tell a joke it gets blown out of proportion. You gotta walk on eggshells. There’s kind of that feeling, and Trump, he tells a joke and doesn’t back down. He says things that would normally been frowned upon. At a school, a kid would get expelled. Not that it’s right or wrong, but he’s sort of defending a lot of the things they’ve been attacked for in the last five years or so.”
These dudes have had enough with all the other candidates with their politically correct statements and refusal to publicly call out girls who are seriously, probably PMS-ing. Trump, on the other hand, seems like someone they could actually roofie a beer with.
“It’s an F-U to society, who is telling us we are a bad guy because we like hooking up with girls on spring break,” Portnoy says. “And they see Trump sticking up for that.”
For Trump, patron saint of college students who skipped the “Understanding Consent” seminar during orientation, represents more than just policy, and not just because he has no real policy—it’s because he’s such an asshole he makes other people feel okay about being assholes too.
“Misogyny was an issue about maybe 60, 80 years ago,” another supporter tells the news outlet, adding, “That’s not an issue today.”
Hillary Clinton’s old car, an ‘86 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera so deeply uncool that neither the White House gardener’s teen daughter nor the Clinton Library were interested in taking it, is officially for sale—not that anyone wants to buy it.
The car, which Hillary apparently drove to the White House after Bill was elected in 1992, currently belongs to the former White House gardener, appropriately named Mike Lawn.
Lawn told the York Daily Recordhe bought the car at auction in 2000 when it had “29,000 and change” miles on the odometer. (It now has about 30,000 miles—but we all make mistakes.)
Lawn told the paper he believes it was the last car Clinton ever drove, since president and First Ladies receive lifelong Secret Service protection, including driving services. Indeed, Clinton herself admitted she hasn’t driven a car since 1996, so Lawn may very well be right that this car was her last.
IMAGE: CLARE BECKER/THE (HANOVER, PA.) EVENING SUN VIA AP
After purchasing the Olds, Lawn ultimately shoved the car in a garage after his then 16-year-old daughter recoiled in horror.
“She said it looked like an old lady’s car,” Lawn told the paper. “She didn’t know why it had cranks in the windows.”
The luxury car, if we define that term loosely enough, was apparently good enough for Chelsea Clinton, who reportedly practiced on it before getting her driver’s license.
But it wasn’t good enough for the Clinton library, which told the Lawn family it was not interested in the car because it hadn’t belonged to a president. Short-sighted? Maybe—or just a great excuse not to have to deal with a 30-year-old General Motors product.
This afternoon, according to the 91-year-old conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, the board of Eagle Forum—including a shadowy faction of anti-Schlafly board members, known around Eagle Forum as the “Gang of 6”—will hold a secretive telephone meeting. Although she will be on the call, Schlafly can’t say for sure what’s on the agenda for the meeting, but the board is not convening to oust her from the organization she founded 44 years ago. She hopes.
Over the last several days, right-wing blogs have reported on growing tension at Eagle Forum, owing in part to the nonagenarian founder’s recent endorsement of Donald Trump for president. “Well, I find that hard to believe,” Schlafly told Gawker by telephone, from her home in Missouri today, when asked about the rumors of a coup.
“Some people are trying to say it’s my Jim Dobson moment,” she continued, a reference to the Focus on the Family founder who dramatically exited that Evangelical group in 2009. “But I don’t have any evidence of that.”
Schlafly founded Eagle Forum in opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972. The amendment, which would have enshrined protections for women’s rights in our nation’s founding document, went against everything Schlafly stood for as a proudly anti-feminist conservative. Schlafly and her allies won—the ERA was not ratified—and the battle solidified her status as a superstar of Republican party’s emergent family-values wing. Eagle Forum became a powerful fighter against marriage equality, abortion, gun control, and tax increases.
Four decades later, Schlafly’s star seems to be fading, even within her own organization. The trouble apparently started in January, when she endorsed Trump, in opposition to a number of high-ranking Eagle Forum members who previously went on the record for Ted Cruz. Schlafly’s decision prompted Cathie Adams, a veteran Eagle Forum member and onetime chair of the Texas GOP, to claim that Trump had capitalized on Schlafly’s old age to earn her support. “At 91, it is just totally unfair to impose upon someone who has such a beautiful legacy,” Adams said to the Dallas Morning News. “I think this was very much a manipulation. When you’re 91 and you’re not out with the grass roots all the time, it is very much taking advantage of someone.”
Schlafly is reluctant to categorize Adams’ remark as a personal insult. “We have quite a number of our members who are for Cruz. There’s no question about that,” she told Gawker. “When they did that, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t criticize them. I didn’t say they couldn’t do it. I said we have free speech, you can do whatever you want.”
But some of Schlafly’s colleagues are considerably more riled up about the affront. Ed Martin, Eagle Forum’s president, wrote in an email to members Saturday that Adams had “disparaged and insulted Phyllis in a publicly quoted interview,” and had “phoned Phyllis to apologize but has not publicly retracted it.”
Martin’s email alleged that Adams is a member of the “Gang of 6.” His email read in part:
On Thursday, we received a tip from a longtime Eagle Forum member in South Carolina that the Con Con people are pursuing a scheme to push Phyllis Schlafly out of Eagle Forum.
Things are happening that are disturbing. In just two days, on this coming Monday afternoon, six directors of Eagle Forum are holding a rogue meeting in violation of the Bylaws unless they are stopped. The rogue group members have a hidden agenda, and most refused to return phone calls personally made to them by Phyllis to ask what their concerns are.
Schlafly herself shared a version of the email to her Facebook page. A header appended to that version alleges that the wayward board members are using the Cruz-Trump split as a ruse to cover their actual motivations for turning against Schlafly. “You can be sure the real objective is to control the Eagle Forum bank accounts and that the Gang of 6 will present a carefully crafted excuse for public consumption,” it reads. “Please pray, call the Gang of 6 to object, and stay tuned.”
According to Martin’s email, Gang of 6 members are guilty of everything from being in the pocket of the Republican National Convention to not returning Phyllis Schlafly’s phone calls. This morning, Schlafly posted a letter to Facebook in which she called for each of the Gang of 6 members to resign from Eagle Forum’s board of directors:
Schlafly posted this letter on her public Facebook page earlier today.
Anne Cori, named above, is a Cruz supporter who leads Eagle Forum’s Missouri chapter. She also happens to be Phyllis Schlafly’s daughter. Schlafly told Gawker that Cori “seems to be in the group that is calling this meeting,” and says she was surprised to learn that her daughter was a member of the Gang of 6. She declined to comment when asked whether political differences had impacted her personal relationship with Cori.
Schlafly objects to her colleagues calling a telephone meeting instead of assembling in person, a practice which she said Eagle Forum has never used before. She acknowledges that many Eagle Forum members were upset when she endorsed Trump, but believes that ulterior motives are at play. As for what those motives might be: “Ask them!” she said. “If you find out, let me know.”
Anne Cori did not respond to a request for comment on this story, nor did any other Gang of 6 member. Eagle Forum’s press office also did not respond to a request for comment.
If Donald Trump seems like the kind of guy who, if he were perhaps a little less wealthy, might put a brick in an iPad box and try to sell it out the back of his car to a guy he found on Craigslist, that’s because he basically is: that scheme shares its general operating principle with the plan he articulated over the weekend for dealing with Iran.
“We’ll sell them missiles that don’t work correctly, right? Let them sue us. Tell them to sue us. Oh, I’m sorry they don’t work. Gee, that’s too bad,” Trump said at a rally in Rochester yesterday. “We’ll take in about $12 billion for missiles and they’ll say these missiles are terrible. And I’ll say, ‘Yup, that was the purpose of it.’”
Selling a faulty product on purpose is crappy foreign policy plan he thinks sounds cool but will ultimately never follow through on. But why not give it a shot? That kind of thing has worked for him his whole life.
In an extraordinary article entitled “The Voyeur’s Motel,” published in the April 11, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Gay Talese told the story of how he became involved with a serial voyeur named Gerald Foos. Foos, in the late 1960s, had purchased the 21-room Manor House Motel in Aurora, Colorado with the express purpose of using it to spy on his guests. He wrote to Talese in 1980, telling him that, for the 15 years preceding, he had taken thorough notes on the sexual and quotidian behavior of each of his guests. Foos wrote that he considered himself to be a modern day Alfred Kinsey, but better, and that his work might be helpful to “people in general and sex researchers in particular.”
Talese visited Foos at his motel after signing a non-disclosure agreement, where, at one point, he ended up in the roof of the motel participating in the voyeurism himself. There, his tie fell through the slats of the faux ventilators that allowed for observation, threatening his own exposure. Years later, Talese obtained Foos’ manuscript, “The Voyeur’s Journal,” and his permission to write about it using his name and identifying details.
While Talese clearly presents Foos’ project as the work of a disturbed mind, it is also clear that he believes that it has some kind of value—to the point that he has reproduced much of his work here, and will do in much greater detail in an upcoming book about the motel owner’s life. Talese has high hopes for the worth of the voyeur’s observations, and notes that his book publisher, Grove Press, actually paid Foos for the use of his manuscript.
In the piece, Talese wrote of his initial hesitation to trust Foos, who had so clearly “violated his customers’ trust and invaded their privacy,” but that he also couldn’t help but feel some sort of kinship with him, since they had both taken to learning about humanity in a similar way.
“As I reread the letter, I reflected that his ‘research’ methods and motives bore some similarity to my own in ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’” Talese wrote, referring to his own book, for which he managed massage parlors and hung out in a nudist commune (all with the participants’ consent). He also thought of the opening line to his book The Kingdom and the Power: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places.”
In looking closely at the story, it’s clear that Talese’s ambitions outweighed the numerous ethical questions the situation presented.
“I was intrigued by the notion of the voyeur, in the course of his trespasses, inadvertently serving as a social historian,” Talese wrote, referencing a book called The Other Victorians by literary critic Steven Marcus, which includes accounts from a 19th-century English man who engaged in a number of sexual and voyeuristic experiences with women of varying social classes, including servants, prostitutes, and a marchioness.
The man had the memoir anonymously published, and it eventually became a hit in Europe and America. Talese wrote that Marcus considered it “a trove of insights into the social history of the period.”
As the anonymous author wrote in his memoir, “Man cannot see too much of human nature.” I hoped that Foos’s manuscript, if I obtained permission to read it, would serve as a kind of sequel to “My Secret Life.”
But what of Foos’ records? Do they really offer the insight into the sexual culture of the 1970s that Foos insists they do and Talese hopes they might?
A handful of actual researchers Jezebel spoke with say no, not in the slightest. The biggest issue, they say, is the lack of consent—an intentional oversight that invalidates the entire undertaking.
“We get informed consent from participants because we need to protect human subjects,” said Dr. Kristen Mark, an assistant professor and Director of the Sexual Health Promotion Lab at the University of Kentucky, and affiliate faculty at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University. “There’s a long history of why we have research ethics and I think that history needs to be respected and we need to uphold consent in research.
“All scientists are trained to be very critical of research methodology and here we have a methodology that really didn’t follow any kind of scientific protocol and therefore that is open to critique,” Mark continued. “There isn’t any scientific integrity there.”
Kristen Jozkowski, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and assistant professor at the University of Arkansas, said Foos isn’t even in “the same ballpark” as traditional sex researchers like Kinsey or Masters and Johnson.
“As a sex researcher, as a consent researcher, as a human rights activist, as a sexual assault activist, whatever hat I’m choosing to wear, I think consent is extremely important,” she said. “If someone is forcing something upon them—like the observations without their knowledge—that’s a violation of your human rights.”
If Foos was going to argue his work was ethnographic research (in other words, the study of human behavior in the environment where those humans live), it would have to take place in the public sphere, or with the express consent of his subjects—both of which were the case for Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
And, whenever anthropologists and behavioral researchers (a title Foos had bestowed upon himself) participate in that sort of research in the U.S., they are required to abide by a set of regulations called “the Common Rule,” or the “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects,” which are structured around three ethical principles that still set the bar for human research. From Fordham University:
Beneficence: To maximize benefits for science, humanity, and research participants and to avoid or minimize risk or harm.
Respect: To protect the autonomy and privacy rights of participants.
Justice: To ensure the fair distribution among persons and groups of the costs and benefits of research.
Committees called Institutional Review Boards exist to make sure that research involving human subjects upholds these principles.
“They read these applications that researchers submit that say, ‘Here’s what I’m going to do; here are the risks involved; here are the potential benefits; here’s why I’m doing this; here’s exactly what’s going to happen,” Jozkowski said. “And the Institutional Review Board makes a decision about whether or not they can proceed with this study. A lot of it has to with informed consent.”
Foos’ solitary project obviously fails to meet any of the above guidelines, but it also fails to qualify as research because of another simple fact: Foos isn’t a researcher, nor is he operating like one.
“One of the requirements [of research] is that it has to be reproducible,” said Dr. Barbra Rothschild, an internist and Columbia University Bioethics faculty member with a research interest in research ethics on human subjects. “One man’s observation of people in their private lives is not a reproducible result.”
Legitimate sex research can consist of a number of self-report tools, like open- and close-ended surveys, daily diaries, interviews, and focus groups that seek to find out what individuals do and think and want. Research can also involve in-laboratory observation, like Masters & Johnson’s work, or embedding in a community in ethnographic research—but even in an embed, the scientist would take advantage of data collection. According to the American Anthropological Association, this could include “unobtrusive direct observation, participant observation, structured and unstructured interviewing, focused discussions with individuals and community members, analysis of texts, and audio-visual records.”
Foos used none of the above methods, as “unobtrusive” and “undisclosed” are not the same thing. The AAA notes, “The process of obtaining informed consent may be continuous and incremental throughout the course of the research, and review of consent obtained may be periodic.”
Foos argued to Talese that because his subjects had no idea they were a part of a study, and because he had purposefully failed to ask them for consent, they were better, more natural subjects and his observations were necessarily better than those obtained in a lab.
“I can appreciate [Foos’] perspective of wanting to observe like that,” Jozkowski said, noting the possibility for error in the scientific method. “[In a study] you’re recalling information... We as researchers are relying on people being honest, being accurate, and that might not always be the case.”
But research methods are constantly evolving in the interest of taking this factor into account. “We’ve figured out ways to ask people about these things, we’ve figured out ways to have them be more honest,” Mark said. “For example, collecting data in an anonymous way, asking questions in a particular way. There’s a lot of research that’s gone into even just how to research these things, and we do have methods that will allow us to get at some of that.
“[Foos] does have a point in the sense that this is observation of sex in a context where it’s not in a lab setting and the individuals don’t know that he’s watching,” Mark continued. “But I don’t think that that scientific discovery outweighs the ethical violations that were made. I don’t think those are pieces of information that we can’t learn in other ways.”
Foos’ observations were written to mimic what might appear in a scientific journal, using quantitative and qualitative data that was either approximated or imagined:
Subject #1: Mr. and Mrs. W of southern Colorado.
Description: Approx. 35 year old male, in Denver on business. 5'10", 180 pounds, white collar, probably college educated. Wife 35 years old, 5'4", 130 lbs, pleasing plump, dark hair, Italian extraction, educated, 37-28-37.
Of that couple’s sexual encounter, he wrote:
The evening passed uneventful until 8:30 p.m. when she finally undressed revealing a beautiful body, slightly plump, but sexually attractive anyway. He appeared disinterested when she laid on the bed beside him, and he began smoking one cigarette after another and watching TV. . . .
Finally after kissing and fondling her, he quickly gained an erection and entered her in the male superior position, with little or no foreplay, and orgasmed in approximately 5 minutes. She had no orgasm and went to the bathroom. . . .
Conclusion: They are not a happy couple. He is too concerned about his position and doesn’t have time for her. He is very ignorant of sexual procedure and foreplay despite his college education. This is a very undistinguished beginning for my observation laboratory . . . .
“There’s just as much bias in his interpretation of that situation as there is in having a participant consent to research, know there being watched, and the bias that might be introduced there. His bias is just as strong in that case,” Mark told Jezebel. “There’s a lot of context involved in a sexual situation that, from a voyeur’s perspective, is not taken into consideration. I don’t think there were scientific gains from watching these people have sex.”
Moreover, Foos would regularly interfere with his guests’ affairs using information he gained via spying. Once, when he couldn’t see a couple having sex, he turned on the headlights of a car in the parking lot to shine into the room; on several other occasions, he threw out illegal drugs in the rooms.
The veneer of objectivity in his journals become all the more far-fetched when, one day, Foos reveals that his meddling might have caused a murder, which he also observed. According to Foos, he flushed the drugs of two guests down a toilet when they were out of the room. When the male guest found them missing, he assumed his female associate was to blame and strangled her on the floor until she stopped moving. Foos, who witnessed the entire exchange, did nothing until he was informed of the murder by a maid. At that point he called the police, but failed to ever acknowledge his eyewitness role.
But Talese wrote that inquiries to the police department could not confirm that such a murder ever happened. Beyond that, Talese wrote that there were other minor factual inconsistencies throughout his manuscript:
Indeed, over the decades since we met, in 1980, I have noticed various inconsistencies in his story: for instance, the first entries in his “Voyeur’s Journal” are dated 1966, but the deed of sale for the Manor House, which I obtained recently from the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s office, shows that he purchased the place in 1969. And there are other dates in his notes and journals that don’t quite scan. I have no doubt that Foos was an epic voyeur, but he could sometimes be an inaccurate and unreliable narrator. I cannot vouch for every detail that he recounts in his manuscript.
Even setting aside Foos’ utter untrustworthiness, which Talese to some extent admits, a new question presents itself: how can we justify Talese’s role in this project as a journalist? Not only did he pay to reproduce unethically obtained observations (Jozkowski, Mark, and Rothschild all vocally cringed at the use of the word “research” in association with Foos), but he also protected someone who had likely broken the law hundreds and hundreds of time. While journalists often allow sources who have broken the law to maintain anonymity, such an allowance is done with the understanding that some sort of greater knowledge is being obtained—such is clearly not the case with Foos and Talese.
Todd Gitlin, a sociologist, writer and chair of Columbia University’s Communications Ph.D. program, doesn’t think that Talese presented Foos as a legitimate scientist.
“I didn’t feel that Talese subscribed to the view that this was actually some kind of legitimate social science research,” Gitlin said in a call with Jezebel. He sees Talese presenting Foos as a man who “has this grandiose idea of himself. This guy is a voyeur and he’s worked out this pseudo-scientific rationale for what he does.”
But where Talese may have gone wrong, in Gitlin’s mind, is in betraying the privacy of the subjects of Foos’ journals. If it were him, he would have redacted any identifying information about the couples and groups involved. For example, Talese recounts one anecdote of a couple and their male companion who worked at a regional vacuum cleaner store. The three checked into a room, engaged in a threesome, and then discussed vacuum cleaner sales. In that case, Gitlin argued, these individuals would be fairly easily identifiable if you lived near Aurora during that time.
In an email to the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi, The New Yorker editor David Remnick defended the article: “While the scene is certainly disturbing (Talese writes that he was ‘shocked, and surprised’ to read the account in the journal), the New Yorker does not believe that Talese or it violated any legal or ethical boundaries in presenting Foos’ account of it to the reader.”
Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, who was also worried by the ethics of the article, reached out to Talese, who reportedly could not spare time to think about these issues at the moment:
[Talese] was writing from Denver; he had just arrived in the city, he said, and was “now worrying about the death threats to the voyeur my writing has just exposed. Many mean-sounding people here in Denver are warning him not to leave his house—and, for three days, he hasn’t. The police had been notified, they are patrolling the area around the clock.” He wrote that he planned to pay Foos a visit this weekend, before adding: “As he felt responsible for the death he did not prevent, I also feel responsible for communicating his very complicated and controversial relationship with his life-long compulsion to invade other people’s privacy. Now, with America a Voyeuristic Nation—so much of it in the name of security (which I explain in the magazine excerpt) it is almost pathetic to witness the petrified voyeur seeking privacy.”
In his article, Talese suggests that Foos understood the inevitability of backlash. Nonetheless, his belief in his “research,” and his desire for this research to be public, won out in the end. At the end of each year of observations, Foos would create an annual report—excerpts of which Talese published in this article (he will likely include more of these reports in his upcoming book). For example, in 1973, Foos found, among other things, that 12 percent of couples observed are “highly sexed,” 62 percent lead “moderately active sexual lives,” 22 percent have low sex drive, and three percent had no sex at all. One of the largest groups of guests that visited his motel, he reported, were “honest but unhappy people.” Conclusions like this could have been drawn through any number of more legitimate ways.
“I truly believe that asking people to participate in research, in the way we understand medical research today in particular, is that people are maybe altruistically... contributing to future knowledge,” Rothschild said. “So it’s a very special thing we ask them to do, to contribute their body to test a drug or even be observed. And so this idea that somehow he knows better, that he can say that people are more natural or that he’s going to get some result, I mean it’s ludicrous, it’s meaningless.
“Who is he to even make the observation or to judge? And why do we need this information anyway? To what good ends is this going to take us? How will this better the human condition?” Rothschild continued. “It betters his condition, I think.”
In aggregate, the New Yorker article is more of a character study of an odd, obsessive man than it is anything else. “Conclusion: I am still unable to determine the function I serve,” Foos wrote in one of his later journal entries. “Apparently, I’m delegated the responsibility of this heavy burden to be placed upon myself—never being able to tell anyone!”
He continues: “The depression builds, but I will continue onward with my research. I’ve pondered on occasion that perhaps I don’t exist, only represent a product of the subjects’ dreams. No one would believe my accomplishments as a voyeur anyway, therefore, the dreamlike manifestation would explain my reality.”
Perhaps Foos himself is surprised by how this ended—with his “research” eventually immortalized in a New Yorker-sanctioned book full of his own findings, and paid for his efforts, too.
Since endorsing Donald Trump in March, Ben Carson has been seemingly unable to give an interview in support of Trump without insulting him, a delightful trend that shows no sign of stopping.
Carson’s latest hilariously rude take comes from an interview he did last week with Kelley and Kafer, a conservative Denver-based talk radio show, where he admitted that under different circumstances he too would be part of the “Never Trump” movement.
Then Carson gave his traditional heavily qualified endorsement, ensuring listeners didn’t make the mistake of thinking he supports Trump in any way. Via BuzzFeed:
“It was pragmatism, recognizing that John Kasich cannot win without a brokered convention — which would guarantee a Democrat win — and recognizing that Ted Cruz can bring conservatives but will have a very difficult time bringing moderates and Democrats,” Carson said on Kelley and Kafer. “I think that will be pretty much a guaranteed loss also. So in terms of who can potentially win, I think that would be Donald Trump. When I look at the consequences of not winning, it’s too horrible to even think about.”
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Amazon just kicked off a Gold Box deal on select Crucial and Lexar “memory” products, which in this case refers to both flash storage solutions and RAM.
Today only, Amazon’s offering solid discounts on a collection of Moen MotionSense kitchen faucets, ranging from $250-$296. That’s still a lot to spend on a faucet, but you’ll save about $60-$70 compared to Home Depot, and MotionSense is absolutely worth it.
Rather than spreading raw chicken germs to your handle when you need to wash your hands, these faucets can turn on with a simple wave of the hand. That’s convenient and sanitary! Just note that this is a Gold Box deal, meaning these prices are only available today, or until sold out.
Uniqlo Arigato Sale - Men | Women. Plus free shipping on all orders.
Uniqlo’s Arigato sale just kicked off its second week, but today only, you can stack free shipping on all orders, with no minimum purchase. The Arigato savings include jeans for $30, sweaters for $15, or dress shirts for $25, but be sure to head over to Uniqlo to see all of the available promotions for men and women.
If you still haven’t picked up a pair of Audio-Technica’s coveted Audio-Technica ATH-M50x headphones, BuyDig will sell you a pair for $110 today, along with a $30 VUDU voucher and a 3-month Rhapsody membership. Note: Use code PROAUDIO at checkout to get the discount.
Your phone might not support it yet, but if you want to be ready for the Quick Charge 3.0 revolution, these are some of the best charger deals we’ve seen yet.
If you’ve already dipped your toes into the Philips Hue ecosystem, and are ready to expand your bulb collection, Amazon will take $10 off A19 or BR30 color bulbs when you buy four today. Just add four of either to your cart, and you’ll see the discount automatically at checkout.
If you still haven’t upgraded to 802.11ac, this highly rated TP-Link Archer C9 router is on sale for $110 at Amazon today. Save for a brief $100 deal during the holiday season last year, that’s the best price they’ve ever listed, and a solid discount compared to its usual $120-$130 range.
Like a WeMo Insight Switch, this Etekcity alternative lets you control virtually any lamp or home appliance via a smartphone app, and will even tell you how much electricity a device is using over time. You won’t be able to control it with IFTTT or an Amazon Echo, but otherwise, this is a very solid deal at $27.
You never want to be in a situation where you need a solar and hand crank-powered weather radio with a flashlight and USB port for charging your phone, but when you can get one for $18, you probably should buy it just in case.
Hopefully you never need it, but if you’re heading out into the woods for a hike or camping trip, this $5 bracelet includes a fire starter, an emergency whistle, and over 10 feet of paracord when unwound.
There’s nothing particularly special about this corkscrew or wine stopper, from a feature perspective. But to get both for $7? That’s a pretty fantastic deal if you don’t already own things like them.
For just $11 today, you can sip your drinks in style with eight stainless steel drinking straws (four straight, four bent). I own the bent set, and use them for everything from Coke Zero to Moscow Mules. And don’t worry, they come with a little tube cleaner to help you wash them. Just add both items to your cart, and use code NBYUDBEU at checkout.
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A new study finds that historically black colleges are charged more money to issue bonds than white schools, even if they are equally strong financially.
Inside Higher Ed reports on a new research paper that examined thousands of bonds issued by colleges and universities, and how much the schools paid to issue those bonds. It found that historically black colleges consistently pay higher costs to borrow money, compared to other schools that have the same credit rating—meaning the difference can only be explained by, uh.... you be the judge. Here’s the abstract:
Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) pay more in underwriting fees to issue tax-exempt bonds, compared to similar, non-HBCU schools. This appears to reflect higher deadweight costs of finding willing buyers: the effect is three times larger in the Deep South, where racial animus has historically been the highest. School attributes or credit quality explain almost none of the effects. For example, identical differences are observed between HBCU and non-HBCU bonds: 1) having AAA credit ratings, and 2) insured by the same company, even prior to the Financial Crisis of 2008. HBCU-issued bonds are also more expensive to trade in the secondary market, and when they do, sit in dealer inventory longer.
My main takeaway from the Age of Swatting was that the art of pranking had gone stale. Teenagers too smart for their own good had essentially uncovered a red button that, when pushed could, without a trace, send a SWAT team to the house of any random person or celebrity. How boring!
But thankfully a new prank trend has emerged to rescue this great nation from unimaginative jokesters. On Friday night, a man called up a Burger King in Coon Rapids, Minn. posing as a firefighter. The man told the manager there that gas levels had reached a point where the restaurant would soon explode. He further instructed them to flee the building and smash the windows open.
As you can see in the video above, they complied. A Coon Rapids police officer told the Minnesota Star Tribunethat the manager was convinced the Burger King was about to blow:
“Officers arrived and found that the manager and employees of the Burger King were smashing out the windows,” Boone said. “The manager explained they’d received a phone call from a male who identified himself as a fireman who said there were dangerous levels of gas in the building and they had to break out all the windows to keep the building from blowing up.”
He added: “The manager was frantic and actually believed the building was going to blow.”
As the Washington Post points out, “getting fast food employees to break their restaurant’s windows by convincing them that the building is about to burst into smithereens” has recently become very popular. Since the beginning of the year, windows have been shattered in Oklahoma and Phoenix and California.
There is a lot to like about this prank. It is creative. The only victim is a guy who owns a fast food restaurant. Though the workers may be stricken with a momentary panic, the end result of the prank may be cathartic. The dudes in Office Space beating the shit out that printer is a memorable scene because every powerless low-level employee has had the urge to heroically destroy business property.
But perhaps the best part is that this prank can’t continue on for much longer. Unlike the police, fast food employees have no social duty to treat every threat as if it’s real. Also, they can just call 911 and quickly find out if the fire department is indeed imploring them to immediately break their restaurant’s windows. The answer, of course, will always be “no.”
One assumes that will start happening if people try and pull this shit for much longer. The prank will have a short lifespan, but it will have burned brightly.
In the wake of appearing on camera to butcher a stale and distinctly unfunny race joke with an extremely high profile candidate for the most important office in the United States of America, mayor Bill de Blasio has been dealt yet another unlucky card today. And it’s only Monday!
In a video uploaded to YouTube on Saturday and first unearthed by the New York Daily News, an NYPD officer can be seen issuing a summons to an anonymous driver while simultaneously lambasting the mayor for the changes he’s made to the status quo.
“Mayor de Blasio wants us to give out summonses, OK? Alright? I don’t know if you voted for him or not, I don’t live in the city, I wouldn’t have voted for him because this is what he wants, he wants us to give out summonses,” the unidentified officer can be heard saying.
De Blasio has made municipal safety one of the core concerns of his term as mayor, calling for increased penalties for haphazard drivers and for staunch renovations of problem intersections. However, at the moment it would seem that the mayor’s fan group is dwindling faster and faster.
Ah, peer pressure. Regardless of the leaps and bounds made in smoking technology that will hopefully one day render cigarettes irrelevant, it’s always going to be cool to convince an impressionable friend to puff on something they shouldn’t in a location where puffing is strictly forbidden.
Dora the Explorer voice actress Fatima Ptacek, 15, appears to be caught in just such a web of mutual adolescent fear mongering. According to the New York Daily News, last winter, Ptacek and a younger friend were caught sampling caramel-flavored vapor water in the bathroom of Avenues: The World School in Chelsea—yes, that is the school’s real name.
While Ptacek claimed she vaped only to impress an older boy and received just a 3-day suspension, her friend was forced to withdraw from the expensive institution altogether. The parents of the younger child are now suing the school, claiming their daughter was was intimidated into experimentation by fraternizing with a celebrity best known for cooing simple directions in Spanish.
On Monday, UC Berkeley graduate students Kathleen Gutierrez and Erin Bennett filed formal complaints with the state of California against the university and professor Blake Wentworth, who they allege has sexually harassed and intimidated them over the course of several months.
The Guardian, which broke the story and has been following it closely since, has detailed a horrifying series of events that concluded with Wentworth returning to campus, apparently without formal consequence.
After Sunday’s article, protests swelled on campus as students grappled with the university’s track record when it comes to disciplining those accused of sexual assault and harassment. According to the same Guardian investigation, in a recent disclosure of documents, UC Berkeley revealed that it had had 19 recent instances of complaints being filed against university employees for violating sexual harassment policies. Repeatedly, lower ranking staff members were disciplined where tenured professors were not.
Wentworth denies the allegations, but other members of the faculty are furious, saying that the university is more interested in protecting its reputation than bringing justice for Gutierrez and Bennett.
Remember Scott Walker? Governor of Wisconsin, former presidential candidate, has a face like a platter of Thanksgiving turkey that’s been left sitting out on the dining room table for a little bit too long? He could use your help.
Even though Walker’s campaign for the presidency only lasted a grand total of 70 days, according to an email he sent to donors on Sunday, the brief endeavor has left him enormously in debt (he’s $1.2 million dollars short, to be exact). The time for soliciting has long since passed, but Walker has a plan to recapture the threadbare grasp he has on the public’s wallets: t-shirts.
Walker’s email says anyone who donates $45 will receive a campaign T-shirt, but size and color requests won’t be honored because of a lack of resources.
Walker says the shirts can be framed or used for “crafty things” like a pillow or bag.
Despite common sense and all reason, I feel enormously compelled to give Scott Walker a hug and a sewing machine right now. Can’t you just picture him, knitting by the fire, boxes and boxes of unwanted henley tees bearing his own face strewn around him like the spoils of a forgotten empire? I can.
Tonight in Albany, Donald Trump ended an hour-and-a-half long rant with one of his most unintelligible, yell-y diatribes yet. It was, in a certain light, beautiful.
Doing his best Howard Dean impression if Howard Dean had been given a whole lot of cocaine and also a thesaurus with just the word “winning” followed by the word “winning” again in progressively larger fonts, Trump said:
You are going to be so proud of your country. Because we’re gonna turn it around, and we’re gonna start winning again! We’re gonna win so much! We’re going to win at every level. We’re going to win economically. We’re going to win with the economy. We’re gonna win with military. We’re gonna win with healthcare and for our veterans. We’re gonna with every single facet.
We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning. And you’ll say, “Please, please. It’s too much winning. We can’t take it anymore. Mr. President, it’s too much.” And I’ll say, “No, it isn’t!”
We have to keep winning We have to win more! We’re gonna win more. We’re gonna win so much. I love you, Albany! Get out and vote. You will be so happy. I love you. Thank you. Thank you!
At which point, Donald Trump waves, and the electric guitars wail.
If you’d like to give yourself a stroke, you can watch Trump’s speech in full below.
