The disturbing truth about phony conservative victimhood

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
December 08, 2022

The friend of a gun violence victim lights candles in front of a portrait during a vigil for the victims of a mass shooting that killed five people at Club Q, an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado

How on earth did Anderson Lee Aldrich have a gun? That's one of the biggest questions lingering in the aftermath of the shooting at Club Q on November 19. On December 6, Aldrich was formally charged on 305 separate criminal counts after a shooting left five people dead and 22 injured, all staff and customers at an establishment that has been characterized as a "sanctuary" for LGBTQ people in the largely conservative community of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Despite conservatives seizing on Aldrich's lawyers saying the defendant is nonbinary in a court filing, the Republican district attorney, Michael Allen, included 48 counts of bias-motivated crimes in the charges.

This was not Aldrich's first brush with the law, though the word "brush" really underplays what allegedly happened in June 2021. Stories have trickled out of Colorado for a couple of weeks now, but on Wednesday the Associated Press released a stunning, in-depth report that should raise the question of why Aldrich had been allowed to own guns.

"You guys die today and I'm taking you with me," they quoted Aldrich as saying. "I'm loaded and ready."

So began a day of terror Aldrich unleashed in June 2021 that, according to sealed law enforcement documents verified by The Associated Press, brought SWAT teams and the bomb squad to a normally quiet Colorado Springs neighborhood, forced the grandparents to flee for their lives and prompted the evacuation of 10 nearby homes to escape a possible bomb blast. It culminated in a standoff that the then-21-year-old livestreamed on Facebook, showing Aldrich in tactical gear inside the mother's home and threatening officers outside — "If they breach, I'm a f----ing blow it to holy hell!" — before finally surrendering.

An extensive search of the home afterward found bomb-making materials, according to the report. Aldrich, who the report says claimed to want to be "the next mass killer," was arrested by the El Paso County Sheriff's office and charged with three felony counts of kidnapping and four other charges. Then, for reasons still unknown, the charges were dropped. According to the AP report, there is no record of law enforcement requesting a court order to seize any guns Aldrich possessed under Colorado's "red flag" law that allows the sheriff's office, among others, to do so in the face of a violent threat, even if there are no criminal charges. While those seizures are temporary, the court can be petitioned to extend them, and such a move could have kept Aldrich on the radar of law enforcement.

"Red flag" laws are, in reality, a very modest gun reform. But the NRA has gone out of its way to paint the laws as a liberal conspiracy against gun rights. When Colorado passed its own version of the law in 2020, El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder tried to make himself a face of this narrative, painting gun owners as the "real" victims. Republicans in El Paso County declared themselves a "Second Amendment Sanctuary" and Elder went on "60 Minutes" to brag about how he would not enforce the provision. He has even threatened to challenge "the constitutionality of this law."

We don't know why the red flag law was not invoked in Aldrich's case. But the habit conservatives have of casting themselves as victims and the actual victimization of LGBTQ people are not unrelated. Those who are so caught up in self-pity over imaginary politicized slights often can't — or won't — see how they are contributing to a climate conducive to actual violence and abuse directed at queer people

That's been most evident in the rise of the despicable "groomer" accusation levied against LGBTQ people and allies. Popular right propagandists like the Libs of TikTok Twitter account and Fox News have equated expression of LGBTQ identities with "grooming" children as if simply being gay and being around kids is the same as manipulating children to make them easier to abuse. False claims that conservatives are trying to "protect" children from "grooming" have been made as grounds for violent protests at drag shows and legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people. Most notable is the "don't say gay" law in Florida, in which vague wording about "instruction" on "sexual orientation or gender identity" scares both teachers and students into staying closeted at school.

In the world of psychology, there's a term for a strategy domestic abusers use against victims: "DARVO," which is short for "Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender." This also describes the rhetorical strategies the right uses when justifying bigoted or dangerous rhetoric or behavior. The "groomer" lie is a classic example. Wallowing in DARVO too long can distort a person's view of reality. It can even recast a person who allegedly claimed to want to be a mass killer as a potential victim of would-be gun grabbers.

On Monday, the Supreme Court bore witness to how bizarre and delusional this brand of conservative self-pity can get. It started with the case itself, 303 Creative v. Elenis, in which a Colorado website designer is challenging the state's anti-discrimination law on the grounds that she might want to tell a gay couple she won't make a wedding website for them. Never mind that no one has actually hired her to do such a thing or complained about her for not doing it. She doesn't even make wedding websites. Such is the level of anti-LGBTQ victim-tripping — they're now invoking imaginary gay couples to argue against in fantasy scenarios. (For more on why this case is so stupid it shouldn't have even gotten to the Supreme Court, read Mark Joseph Stern's story at Slate.)

During arguments, Justice Samuel Alito, always eager to troll, started to spool out hypothetical examples of how anti-discrimination laws could harm people he imagines liberals care about, such as, uh, "Black Santa."

"If there's a Black Santa at the other end of the mall and he doesn't want to have his picture taken with a child who's dressed up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit, that Black Santa has to do that?" Alito asked the Colorado solicitor general.

Any lawyer could tell you the question is painfully stupid. As the Colorado solicitor general reminded Alito, "Ku Klux Klan outfits are not protected characteristics under public accommodation laws" while sexual orientation is. Alito tried to cover up his error with a gross joke about "Black children in Ku Klux Klan outfits," but it was too late. He had gone on record equating gay couples planning a wedding with people in KKK outfits harassing a Black Santa.

Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-LGBTQ group behind this lawsuit, is trying to portray it as a case about harmless protection for "sincerely religious" people. And yet arguments swiftly arrived at a conservative judge equating LGBTQ people simply living their lives with people dressed in white supremacist terrorist group uniforms. Talk about reversing victim and offender.

That's why the outcome of this case could have dangerous ramifications, well beyond the seemingly narrow question of whether creative professionals can decline to do work for same-sex weddings. It feeds into a larger false Republican narrative casting bigotry as victimhood at the hands of a supposed "woke" conspiracy of overbearing LGBTQ people who are somehow harming conservatives by performing in or hosting drag shows, getting married, or just living out of the closet. And that rhetoric in turn helps to fuel a rising tide of actual victimization of LGBTQ people, allies and bystanders.

As Vice reports, armed militias like the Proud Boys or Patriot Front "in at least four states mobilized to shut down and intimidate events involving drag queens over the weekend." In Louisiana, a tipline is open for people to report librarians for having books with LGBTQ characters on the shelves. In California, a gay state senator reported being targeted by a bomb threat by people calling him a "groomer."

There's nothing new about Republicans playing the victim as cover for their own poor behavior, but it's safe to say the tendency has grown worse in the past few years under the leadership of Donald Trump, who is perhaps the whiniest fake victim in the country. We're subject to weekly, often daily, rants from Trump about how he's a victim, often when he's being criticized or is the subject legal inquiries into his various schemes to victimize others, from election officials to the president of Ukraine. In the era of rising hate crimes against LGBTQ people, phony conservative self-pity is more than just gross. It's undermining public safety.

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Editorial: Radicalization for all: German coup plot shows power of online conspiracies

2022/12/09

Police stand outside a residence that they raided on Dec. 7, 2022, in Berlin, Germany.

 - Carsten Koall/Getty Images North America/TNS

A secret group of German ultranationalists being arrested after plotting to overthrow the government, murder the chancellor and install a monarch is a situation you might expect to find in a 19th or 20th century history textbook, not contemporary headlines.

Yet in these strange times we live in, exactly that happened this week as German police arrested 25 people of a roughly 50-member group of fanatics bent on reestablishing a state modeled around the nation’s Second Reich, under Kaiser Wilhelm and Bismarck. Better that than the Third Reich under you know who. All hail the descendant of a former noble family calling himself Prince Heinrich XIII.

There are plenty of crackpot groups out there, but this one set itself apart by having members as prominent as the aristocratic Heinrich and a former German federal legislator, military officers and reservists, and plans already drawn out for the new state they would supposedly create. Most alarming though, were the ideological motivations of some of the adherents; according to prosecutors, in addition to the homegrown Reichsbürger movement, members were driven by COVID conspiracy theories that first took hold in the U.S. and the all-American QAnon conspiracy.

While we often talk about the risk of political violence posed by dangerous disinformation and conspiracy-mongering here, it’s worth remembering that this noxious cultural export, driven largely by U.S.-based social media companies and often trialed on U.S. audiences, is driving a risk of extremist violence everywhere.

QAnon began as a series of obscure postings on the far-right message board 4chan, growing out of earlier Pizzagate theories about a supposed cabal secretly controlling U.S. and global institutions. Now, this one bizarre movement is getting warped into whatever local flavor is most appealing and radicalizing people into violence, highlighting the fact that content moderation and efforts to combat the spread of disinformation online have global implications. The reckless actions of tech titans like new Twitter owner Elon Musk have consequences around the world, and they should have to answer for that.

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© New York Daily News

Editorial: Stonewalling on messy details of 'Fat Leonard' Navy scandal feels like a blatant coverup

2022/12/09

Interpol Venezuela Instagram acc/Getty Images North America/TNS

When law enforcement agencies keep crucial information about high-profile cases from the public, they often say they must do so to as to not interfere with investigations. Sometimes this can be justified on grounds that providing key details could lead to the exposure of confidential informants. But sometimes it just seems like an excuse for bureaucratic torpor. And sometimes it appears the main reason is to keep embarrassing facts under wraps.

Which brings us to a local case that absolutely feels like the latter. Leonard Francis, the CEO of a company that provided services to U.S. Navy vessels in Asian ports, pleaded guilty in 2015 to bribery and fraud charges in an extraordinarily far-reaching scandal in which he gave Navy officials cash and gifts, including the services of prostitutes, in return for lucrative inside information on ship movements and Navy contracts. "Fat Leonard," as he was widely known, then cooperated in a probe that led to convictions of four former Navy officers on conspiracy and bribery charges earlier this year

But in September, he easily escaped from the lavish local mansion where he had been staying since 2017 — on his own dime — instead of jail as part of a medical furlough. He was caught 16 days later in Venezuela, which may balk at extraditing him. Since then, federal officials have refused to explain — either to Congress or the media — the lack of security at the mansion or the many courtesies they provided the organizer of a vast scam targeting U.S. taxpayers. They also won't explain why they think blanket stonewalling is justified — starting with San Diego federal Judge Janis Sammartino, who oversaw Leonard's inexplicably cushy detention and continues to play a key role in the case. A basic question: How does this serve justice in any way?

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The editorial board operates independently from the U-T newsroom but holds itself to similar ethical standards. We base our editorials and endorsements on reporting, interviews and rigorous debate, and strive for accuracy, fairness and civility in our section. Disagree? Let us know.

Dwindling economic opportunities for China’s youth fuels discontent

8 December 2022

Author: Kevin Lin, Asian Labour Review

College students and youth had been key participants in a weekend of protests across China against the country’s draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of November 2022. This is not surprising. While their political demands for freedom and democracy have been extensively analysed, the economic dimensions of the protests are no less important in understanding what fuels their discontent.

The headlines on China’s economic slowdown do not always illustrate the human impact which has been disproportionally borne by the country’s youth. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s youth unemployment rate — those in urban areas looking for employment between ages 16–25 — climbed to 19.9 per cent in July before falling to 18.7 per cent in August 2022. This was against the overall unemployment rate of around 5 per cent. The youth unemployment rate has been hovering at over 10 per cent for the last few years but this recent spike paints a bleak picture.

Grim statistics do not quite capture the visible feelings of anxiety. The impact of China’s zero-COVID policy for the last three years is not only reflected in national GDP, but also in the layoffs, hiring freezes and disappearing job opportunities for those entering the job market. This zero-COVID policy exacerbates a long-term increase in youth unemployment that reflects structural shifts in China’s economy.

Few would have predicted that China would be failing to create enough new jobs for its youth. Having been the workshop of the world and an economic powerhouse for decades, China has generated a massive number of new jobs across sectors from manufacturing and services to high-paying white-collar jobs. The fact that a fifth of young Chinese are now unable to land a job is a significant reversal of a decades-old trend in strong job creation that brought rising social mobility and prosperity.

The last time China had serious unemployment issues was the 1990s, during a particularly painful period of economic reforms. As China’s state enterprises were restructured and privatised, tens of millions of mostly older workers were laid off. This caused social dislocation and massive protests — something any government wishes to avoid. Since then, especially for young workers, the labour market has more often faced shortages than a lack of employment opportunities.

But in recent years, as labour-intensive manufacturing is relocated out of China, and with the government promoting industrial upgrading and automation, the service sector has not sufficiently absorbed workers who have left their manufacturing jobs. Regulatory crackdowns on tech companies have also dampened hiring for university graduates.

The government has recognised this urgency and announced measures at national and local levels to support youth employment. Credit subsidies for unemployed workers, skills training for manufacturing workers and incentives for young people to create their own start-ups can all be somewhat helpful. But how much these measures alone can reverse structural youth unemployment remains unclear.

Youth unemployment can be better understood in relation to a host of job-related issues that constitute a crisis of work. On top of the quantity of jobs, a challenge is also the failed promise of jobs. An expanded conceptualisation of youth employment allows one to see the multifaceted problems facing Chinese youth.

One dimension of this crisis of work is that jobs are often insecure. Some flexibility may be useful, but too much of it produces anxiety. This is the case with jobs created in the service sector and by the burgeoning platform economy as well as increasingly previously highly secure white-collar jobs. More and more workers, especially those with university degrees, opt to compete for civil service jobs. These used to be frowned upon by young people but are now seen as more secure and more attractive.

A second dimension of this crisis is disillusionment. Young people have spoken out about feeling burnout from their work. The issue is not only long working hours, encapsulated in the infamous ‘996’ regime (work from 9am–9pm, six days a week) popularised by tech workers, but one of feeling unable to move socially upwards. Young workers refer to this as ‘involution’ to illustrate the sense of working harder with fewer rewards. More recently, they speak of ‘lying flat’, ‘letting it rot’ and ‘run’ to show how much they are fed up and willing to give up trying.

While China has not seen the same ‘Great Resignation’ phenomenon during the pandemic as Western countries, China’s youth have become less satisfied with just picking any job. They look for work that provides some degree of security, work-life balance, a path for upward social mobility and for many, meaning. Rising youth unemployment may exacerbate this discontent, limiting options and pushing China’s youth into less desirable work.

Recognising various dimensions of youth discontent over work helps reframe the issue not only in terms of policy solutions, but also in terms of sensitivity towards how China’s youth can feel more hopeful. Addressing these issues may start by empowering workers to have a voice in their workplace, increasing job security at a time of intense economic anxiety and tackling economic inequality.

High levels of youth unemployment and underemployment, combined with disaffection with their jobs, is a recipe for despair and disaffection. Without addressing these concerns in the coming years, China will see a generation of lost youth who may look for disruptive ways to voice their despair.

Kevin Lin is Managing Editor of Asian Labour Review. His research is focused on the development of labour movement, migrant worker organising, labour NGOs and civil society in China.

South Korea’s misogyny problem

9 December 2022

Author: Katharine HS Moon, Wellesley College

During the 2022 South Korean presidential race, conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol denied that structural inequality between men and women exists and threatened to abolish the Ministry of Family and Gender Equality. He narrowly won the presidency in March 2022 by catering to young men, who overwhelmingly believe that discrimination against men in South Korea is severe.

Yet Korea ranks low in global indexes of gender equality, such as the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report. Incidents of violence against women, including domestic assault, workplace sexual harassment, rape and murder have become alarmingly frequent. In a 2015 study by the South Korean government, 80 per cent of respondents — the vast majority of whom were women — reported they had been sexually harassed in their workplace. Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 80 per cent of male respondents admitted to violent acts against an intimate partner in a 2017 survey.

Women constitute more than half of South Korea’s reported homicide victims — one of the highest gender ratios in the world. In September 2022, a female employee of the Seoul subway system was beaten to death in a subway station restroom by a male co-worker who had stalked and threatened her for three years. Similar deaths occurred in prior years.  According to the South Korean Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, 90 per cent of the victims of violent crime in 2019 were women, a significant increase from 71 per cent in 2000.

Digital sex crimes have become an epidemic in one of the most wired nations in the world. Men have set up spy cameras in public bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, stores and subways to film women, distributing the videos online without consent. Less than 4 per cent of sex crime prosecutions involved illegal filming in 2008, but the number rose to 20 per cent in 2017.

Thousands of women’s lives have been impacted, but the prosecution of digital sex crimes and the punishment of convicted perpetrators are notoriously low and lenient. The overwhelming male grip on the police and judicial system — where women comprise only 30 per cent of judges and 4 per cent of police — contributes to the problem.

Young, educated and tech-savvy men have been the main drivers of misogyny and hate speech against women online. They blame women and feminism for their economic and social difficulties in a society distressed by high youth unemployment, spiking housing prices and growing economic inequality. Some of these men have formed the base of the alt-right movement in South Korea, brandishing the conservative flag against women, immigrants, sexual minorities and the disabled. These sentiments have been manipulated by conservative politicians into potent public weapons of battle.

Recent surveys reported that 76 per cent of men in their 20s oppose feminism, in contrast to 64 per cent of women in their 20s who support feminism. Unsurprisingly, almost 60 per cent of respondents in their 20s believed gender issues are the most serious source of conflict in South Korea.

Despite the turbulent anti-woman environment, South Korea’s Constitutional Court recognised women’s right to abortion in 2019 and decriminalised abortion in late 2021. This meant that women who had abortions and medical professionals who administered abortions were no longer subject to fines and jail sentences.

When the Court ruled that the 1953 abortion ban violated pregnant women’s right to self-determination, they were freeing women from decades of state control. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the authoritarian state coerced or forced abortion and sterilisation to lower the population rate in the service of economic development. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state had mostly condoned the abortion of thousands of female foetuses by citizens who favoured male sex selection after prenatal sex screening.

Since the early 2000s, the state has been urging and subsidising women to have more children to reverse South Korea’s demographic crisis — the country with the lowest birth rate in the world. Men have blamed the declining birth rate on women and feminism, a sentiment publicly echoed by President Yoon.

Since the mid-2010s, South Korean women and various civic groups have developed an effective reproductive justice platform that specifies the state, not pro-life advocates, as the enemy of abortion rights. They have staged mass protests, lobbied government ministries and political parties, engaged the media, educated the public and filed amicus briefs in support of decriminalising abortion.

But constitutional promises remain impotent when national laws to protect women’s rights are absent or inadequate. The National Assembly failed to create laws that clarify guidelines for lawful medical abortion by the end of 2020, as mandated by the Constitutional Court in its 2019 decision. This has left medical professionals and women seeking abortion in a legal vacuum with no legislation sanctioning abortion to guide the medical community and health insurance system. Aligning laws with the newly earned constitutional right to abortion is an urgent duty the state needs to fulfil.

The anti-stalking law created in October 2021 also needs to be revised to eliminate loopholes that protect the perpetrator rather than the victim and strengthen enforcement to deter and punish the stalking and killing of women. Otherwise, the misogynistic threats to women and the inadequate legal protections of their bodies and rights will continue to be a fundamental weakness in South Korean democracy.

Katharine HS Moon is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Wellesley College. She is the Kim Koo Visiting Professor at Harvard University and was the inaugural holder of the SK-Korea Foundation Chair and Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Predictable as Always, Racists Are Mad About the New ‘The Last of Us’ Posters

Story by Rachel Leishman • Yesterday - 

 The Mary Sue
First of all, people who are racist and sexist but also like The Last of Us are … well … weird. Second, it still isn’t surprising that the sea of “fans” (how are you a fan of something you clearly didn’t understand and learned nothing from?) are being gross about the HBO adaptation and its cast—mainly because it’s not as “white” as they want it to be.

Pedro Pascal carrying Nico Parker in the trailer for 'The Last of Us'

Recently, new posters were released for the HBO series that featured characters like Nico Parker’s Sarah front and center. Their release has already ushered in gross commentary on sites like Reddit.

Mainly, these “fans” are mad that Sarah is not a white girl with short blonde hair in a bad outfit. Any kind of logic will get lost in their absolutely bullsh*t explanations as to why Parker isn’t fit for a role that they haven’t yet seen on screen.

“And then they ask why nobody’s watching. Their focus is not on storytelling,” reads one representative comment, simply because Nico Parker is not a white blonde girl.

Again, I reiterate: The show is not out yet. Their anger isn’t coming from a performance but rather that a young and talented Black actress is taking a role they think belongs to someone else. It’s all a personal bias and hatred that is leading this conversation. If these people actually watched Parker’s work, they’d know that she’s incredible and a perfect choice for Sarah, a character you instantly have to care about because we don’t get much time with her.

What their “upset” boils down to is their own racism and they’re projecting it onto their love of a game that they clearly don’t understand!

You’re just racist!

There is absolutely no reason why people should be upset over Parker’s casting unless it is for a racist reason. That’s the only explanation. Truly. If you’re mad that Nico Parker is Sarah because it’s not what you envisioned, well get over it. There is no reason for you to not like her. You’ve not seen an episode and now, going into the show, whatever criticism you might have is lost because you let your racism lead the charge and take over.

Parker is very talented and her casting was one that I was very excited about. I think she’ll do a great job opposite Pedro Pascal’s Joel (which the racists are also angry about). But it is sad how predictable it is with genre material. The minute that an actor of color is cast in something that might not have been a character of color originally, the racists come out yelling about how “Hollywood” is “ruining” the game they like.

They’re not ruining anything. It’s called an adaptation. Meaning that it will change and sometimes—often—for the better. I think Parker is fantastic in everything she’s done and at the end of the day, a bunch of angry manbabies are logging online and being racist toward an 18-year-old woman.

The reasoning for their racist hatred is also hiding behind an argument that “Ellie reminds Joel of Sarah but this can’t be the case now,” which is a load of bullocks. The idea is that Joel’s need to protect Ellie and bring her to safety is a reminder of where he failed his own daughter. It’s why Joel’s relationship with Ellie takes a while to grow into the father/daughter dynamic we see later in the game and in The Last of Us: Part II.

But Ellie in the game does not look like Sarah. They’re just both white. So Bella Ramsey doesn’t have to look like Nico Parker in order for the dynamic to work. Those insisting otherwise are just being racist and trying to be the spokesperson for character arcs without actually knowing what they’re talking about.

The Last of Us adaptation has shown us nothing but love for the game it is based on and I can’t wait to see what Nico Parker brings to the role. If the racists want to be mad, they can just not watch the show.

(image: HBO)

First Gen Z Congressman-Elect Has DC Apartment Application Rejected

Maxwell Frost said he lost the apartment and the application fee due to his bad credit rating. WHY DO YOU LOSE YOUR FEE?!

Josephine Harvey
Dec 8, 2022, 


Rep.-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), who will be the first Gen Z member of Congress, said Thursday that his application to rent a Washington, D.C., apartment was rejected due to his bad credit score.

“Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee,” Frost tweeted, referencing his work for Uber to make ends meet. “For those asking, I have bad credit cause I ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half. Didn’t make enough money from Uber itself to pay for my living.”

Frost told The Washington Post the building where his application was denied was in the Navy Yard neighborhood, located just over a mile from the U.S. Capitol where he’ll soon work.

The median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., is $2,321, according to Zillow.com.

In an October interview with HuffPost, the young Democrat opened up about the financial struggles he faced as a candidate, including how he ran out of money early in his campaign and resorted to driving for Uber to pay his bills.

“As a young person who just doesn’t have a lot of money, I’ve been living literally paycheck to paycheck this entire year and at times didn’t have money to feed myself,” he said.

Frost said there needs to be more poor and working-class candidates in politics to achieve a better democracy.

Rep.-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), the first Gen Z person elected to Congress, said his application to rent a Washington, D.C., apartment was rejected due to his bad credit score.
THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES

The soon-to-be lawmaker’s struggle to find a home in the nation’s capital is not a new one. In 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who worked as a bartender before her successful campaign for Congress, said she had no cash flow to cover the period between her election and swearing-in.

“I can’t really take a salary,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with The New York Times. “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those things are very real.”

She later noted that it was one of many ways the U.S. electoral system wasn’t designed for working-class leaders.

Frost told the Post he had spoken with Ocasio-Cortez about the housing challenges they faced that many of their colleagues haven’t.

“A lot of the members who come into the Congress don’t have these issues when they move, because they already have money,” Frost told The Washington Post.

Frost also hit out on Twitter at conservatives who were criticizing his dilemma, noting that former President Donald Trump has his own debt issues on a much larger scale. Ocasio-Cortez similarly attracted right-wing derision in 2018 when she spoke about her struggle to afford rent in D.C.

Prior to his campaign, Frost, a survivor of gun violence, worked as an activist and organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union and March for Our Lives. He ran on ending gun violence, protecting U.S. democracy and fighting the climate crisis, defeating Republican Calvin Wimbish and independents Jason Holic and Usha Jain to claim the seat vacated by Rep. Val Demings (D)

Now SHARK WEEK is racist! 

Woke Washington Post claims annual Discovery Channel predator-fest features too many white male experts onscreen

• The Post's article cites researchers who accused the Discovery Channel of featuring too many white men as shark experts

• Specifically, it claims there were more white experts and men named Mike than women featured in the Discovery special over the years

• It also makes the case that the annual Shark Week emphasizes 'negative messages about sharks

By SOPHIE MANN FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

PUBLISHED: 02:27 EST, 9 December 2022 | 

The Washington Post published an article this week that cited research accusing The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week of 'overwhelmingly' featuring white men as shark experts compared to other demographics.

The article claimed that the fan-favorite predator-centric week lacks diversity and over-represents guys named Mike. The study on which the article is based claimed that there have been more shark experts named Mike featured on all Shark Weeks combined than women.

The study was led by Lisa Whitenack, a biology professor, who grew up loving sharks but seeing very few people who looked like her talking about them on TV.

Male researchers inspect a shark during Discovery Channel's beloved annual Shark Week

Mostly male experts inspect a 12-foot Great White shark that washed up on a South African shore in 2019. It had had its liver ripped out by a Killer Whale

Biology professor Lisa Whitenack led a research team that concluded that men and specifically men named Mike are over represented as experts during Shark Wee

She said that because women were underrepresented in shark documentaries, she was unaware that she could become a shark researcher

'Why would I know I could do that?'

'I don't come from a family of scientists. I didn't see very many people that looked like me on television,' she said.

Whitenack used the pandemic as an opportunity to study whether Shark Week was 'feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks - and who studies them.'

The research team watched Shark Week programming dating back to the late 90s and discovered that it 'emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation, and overwhelmingly featured white men as experts - including several with the same name.'

David Shiffman, a conservationist member of the team, said the program, which dates back 34 years, 'featured more White experts and commentators named 'Mike' than women.' 

'When there are hundreds of people of color interested who work in this field, [and] when my field is more than half women, maybe it's not an accident anymore that they're only featuring White men,' he said.

The article's author, Daniel Wu, also cites marine biologist Catherine MacDonald, who previously wrote that women in marine sciences are likely to encounter the field's 'misogynistic' culture. 

She wrote in a 2020 Scientific American piece that ''Shark Week’ further concentrates power (in the form of publicity and media attention) in the hands of white male ‘featured scientists,’ exacerbating academic power imbalances.'

White male expert Dickie Chivell gives a Shark Week presentation during his segment 'Air Jaws' on Discovery Channel

Carlee Bohannon is also featured in the article. She is the co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences and someone actively working to amend the unbalanced demographic trend lines of who is featured in shark programming.

'Diversity in people brings diversity in thought, which ultimately brings innovation,' she said. 'Being able to see someone who looks like you in this field really has an impact.'

In response - direct or indirect - to Discovery's apparent lack of diversity among shark expert voices, National Geographic inked a partnership with Minorities in Shark Sciences that allowed members of the organization to compete in the network's competing SharkFest.

During the 2022 SharkFest, seven scientists of color from the group appeared on the TV event.