Credit. Upward News.

Dear Commons Community,

Louisiana has become the first state to require that the Ten Commandments be displayed in every public school classroom, the latest move from a GOP-dominated Legislature pushing a conservative agenda under a new governor.

The legislation that Republican Gov. Jeff Landry signed into law yesterday requires a poster-sized display of the Ten Commandments in “large, easily readable font” in all public classrooms, from kindergarten to state-funded universities.  As reported by The Associated Press.

“If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original lawgiver, which was Moses” who got the commandments from God, Landry said.

Opponents questioned the law’s constitutionality and vowed to challenge it in court. Proponents said the measure is not solely religious, but that it has historical significance. In the language of the law, the Ten Commandments are “foundational documents of our state and national government.”

The posters, which will be paired with a four-paragraph “context statement” describing how the Ten Commandments “were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries,” must be in place in classrooms by the start of 2025.

Under the law, state funds will not be used to implement the mandate. The posters would be paid for through donations.

The law also “authorizes” but does not require the display of other items in K-12 public schools, including: The Mayflower Compact, which was signed by religious pilgrims aboard the Mayflower in 1620 and is often referred to as America’s “First Constitution”; the Declaration of Independence; and the Northwest Ordinance, which established a government in the Northwest Territory — in the present day Midwest — and created a pathway for admitting new states to the Union.

Not long after the governor signed the bill into law at Our Lady of Fatima Catholic School in Lafayette on Wednesday, civil rights groups and organizations that want to keep religion out of government promised to file a lawsuit challenging it.

The law prevents students from getting an equal education and will keep children who have different beliefs from feeling safe at school, the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom from Religion Foundation said in a joint statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Even among those who may believe in some version of the Ten Commandments, the particular text that they adhere to can differ by religious denomination or tradition. The government should not be taking sides in this theological debate,” the groups said.

The controversial law, in a state ensconced in the Bible Belt, comes during a new era of conservative leadership in Louisiana under Landry, who replaced two-term Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards in January. The GOP holds a supermajority in the Legislature, and Republicans hold every statewide elected position, paving the way for lawmakers to push through a conservative agenda.

Similar bills requiring the Ten Commandments be displayed in classrooms have been proposed in other states including Texas, Oklahoma and Utah. However, with threats of legal battles over the constitutionality of such measures, no state besides Louisiana has succeeded in making the bills law.

Legal battles over the display of the Ten Commandments in classrooms are not new.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law was unconstitutional and violated the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but rather served a plainly religious purpose.

God save our country from the religious zealots on the extreme right!

Tony

Credit. Kornmesser/ESO

Dear Commons Community,

Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy.  As reported by NASA, CNN and other media sources.

In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise unremarkable galaxy named SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away in the Virgo constellation. A sudden spike in the galaxy’s brightness had been automatically detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility’s telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California.

With its extreme wide-field view, the camera scans the entire northern sky every two days, capturing data on celestial objects such as near-Earth asteroids as well as distant, bright supernovas.

An interdisciplinary team of astronomers and engineers followed up on Zwicky’s observation by using information from space- and ground-based telescopes to see how the galaxy’s luminosity changed over time.

To their surprise, the researchers realized they were witnessing a unique moment as a cosmic monster awakened. Their study findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive,” said lead study author Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at the European Southern Observatory in Germany, in a statement. “Suddenly, its (core) starts showing dramatic changes in brightness, unlike any typical events we’ve seen before.”

The team classified the galaxy as having an active galactic nucleus, or a bright, compact region that is powered by a supermassive black hole.

A number of celestial scenarios can cause a galaxy to suddenly brighten, such as supernova explosions or when stars draw too near to black holes and become torn apart during a phenomenon called tidal disruption events.

But such events only last dozens or hundreds of days — and SDSS1335+0728 continues to grow in brightness more than four years after researchers first observed it spiking in luminosity like the flick of a cosmic light switch.

And the brightness variations in the galaxy don’t resemble anything astronomers have seen before, which only puzzled them further.

An unprecedented cosmic event

To find answers, the team consulted archival data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and other observatories.

The researchers compared the data with follow-up observations taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, in Chile, the Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope in Chile, the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA’s space-based Neil Gehrels Swift and Chandra X-ray observatories.

Together, the datasets presented a broad portrait of the galaxy both before and after the December 2019 observation, revealing that the galaxy shifted to emit much more ultraviolet, visible and infrared light in recent years, and X-rays beginning in February — which is unprecedented behavior, Sánchez Sáez said.

Given that the galaxy is 300 million light-years away, the events that astronomers are seeing happened in the past — but the light from these events is just now reaching Earth after traveling across space for millions of years. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).

“The most tangible option to explain this phenomenon is that we are seeing how the (core) of the galaxy is beginning to show (…) activity,” said study coauthor Lorena Hernández García, astronomer at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Valparaíso, both in Chile, in a statement. “If so, this would be the first time that we see the activation of a massive black hole in real time.”

Sleeping celestial giants

Supermassive black holes are classified as having masses more than 100,000 times that of our sun. They can be found at the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way.

“These giant monsters usually are sleeping and not directly visible,” said study coauthor Claudio Ricci, associate professor at Diego Portales University in Chile, in a statement. “In the case of SDSS1335+0728, we were able to observe the awakening of the massive black hole, (which) suddenly started to feast on gas available in its surroundings, becoming very bright.”

Previous research has pointed to inactive galaxies that appeared to become active after several years, which is usually triggered by black hole activity, but the process of a black hole awakening has never been directly observed before, until now, Hernández García said.

The same scenario may play out with Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, but astronomers aren’t sure how likely it is to occur, Ricci said.

Astronomers can’t rule out that their observation could be an unusually slow tidal disruption event, or an unknown new celestial phenomenon.

“Regardless of the nature of the variations, (this galaxy) provides valuable information on how black holes grow and evolve,” Sánchez Sáez said. “We expect that instruments like (MUSE on the VLT or those on the upcoming Extremely Large Telescope) will be key in understanding (why the galaxy is brightening).”

Impressive stuff!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. surgeon general is calling for a warning label on social media alerting users that “social media is associated with significant mental health harms in adolescents.”

In a New York Times opinion piece, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said there is enough evidence mounting that shows a connection between social media and adolescents’ deteriorating mental health that a surgeon general’s warning label—similar to what appears on cigarette packages—is warranted.

“One of the most important lessons I learned in medical school was that in an emergency, you don’t have the luxury to wait for perfect information,” Murthy wrote in the New York Times. “You assess the available facts, you use your best judgment, and you act quickly.”

Murthy had already signaled his concerns with the potentially harmful effects of social media on kids and teens when he issued an advisory last year warning about the risks social media poses to youth mental health.

A surgeon general’s warning label, though, would have to be approved by Congress before it could be applied to social media platforms.

Many educators say that social media—and students’ near-constant access to it via cellphones—has become a major challenge for schools. More than 200 school districts have sued the major social media companies, claiming that they have created highly addictive products that are damaging students’ mental health, leaving schools to deal with the fallout.

Four years ago, nearly 100 school districts used a similar argument in lawsuits against e-cigarette manufacturers, claiming the problems the hard-to-detect tobacco products caused amounted to a public nuisance. A class action lawsuit against JUUL was settled in 2022.

Some state and federal lawmakers are also trying to restrict young kids’ access to social media, with the aim of improving their mental health, adding to the mounting pressure on social media companies.

For their part, social media companies say they are taking steps to protect their youngest users’ safety and well-being on their platforms through parental controls, age-verification features, and time-management tools.

There is evidence that warning labels like those on tobacco products can change people’s behavior, Murthy wrote in the New York Times. And he pointed to a recent survey of Latino parents showing that three-quarters said they would limit or monitor their children’s social media use if they saw a surgeon general’s warning on the platforms used by their families.

Murthy did concede in the opinion essay that a warning label would not completely negate the harms and challenges presented by social media, a sentiment echoed by educators.

Michael Lubelfeld is the superintendent of North Shore School District 112 in a suburb of Chicago, and his district is among those suing the social media companies over the youth mental health crisis. He’s unsure the warning label will make a difference, although he said he applauds the surgeon general’s effort.

“Because to some degree the cat’s already out of the bag, there’s tremendous usage among children who are having a very difficult time dealing with it,” he said. “I don’t know that parents are always aware of what their kids are doing on their smartphones.”

A warning label would help raise awareness, said Beth Houf, the principal of Capital City High School in Jefferson, Mo.

“It’s a step in helping the situation, but there is more that needs to be done,” she said.

Houf, who has also led elementary and middle schools in her career, said she’s seen the negative effects social media has on students’ mental health worsen over the 17 years she’s been a principal. Despite the cyberbullying and the unhealthy comparisons kids make of each other on social media, they can’t seem to turn away from these platforms, she said.

“When you hear something or have a vibration in your pocket, the fear that you’re missing out on something you feel like you have to engage with—that makes it harder to pay attention in the classroom,” she said.

Murthy said social media platforms should also not be allowed to collect sensitive data from children nor use manipulative features like algorithms, push notifications, and the infinite scroll, which all “contribute to excessive use.” Murthy also renewed his calls for social media companies to share their data on the health effects of their products with independent scientists and the public.

But schools and parents also have roles to play, Murthy said.

“Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences,” he said. “Parents, too, should create phone-free zones around bedtime, meals, and social gatherings to safeguard their kids’ sleep and real-life connections—both of which have direct effects on mental health.”

Murthy is to be congratulated for making his opinion public on this issue. I highly recommend Jonathon Haidt’s bestseller, The Anxious Generation, for further reading.

Tony

CUNY students and others at a pro-Palestinian protest outside the CUNY chancellor’s office  last November. The New York Daily News.

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Education Department, as part of a civil rights probe, earlier this week identified “concerns” about how the City University of New York investigated and responded to allegations and complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia.

The nine complaints date to 2019-20, but also include the most recent school year, as campus tensions over the Israel-Hamas war erupted in the final weeks of the semester with a pro-Palestinian encampment and disruptions at graduations. Included in the probe were Hunter College, Brooklyn College, the CUNY School of Law, Queens College, Baruch College and CUNY’s central offices.  As reported by The Daily News.

The episodes included allegations that Jewish students at Hunter College were told they “should be listening, not speaking” during a discussion about the Middle East, a verbal assault on a Jewish person at Baruch College and pro-Palestinian students at Queens College saying they’d been called “terrorists.”

With education officials still investigating, CUNY approached the Education Department about a voluntary agreement to increase training and reporting requirements, and reopen internal investigations into some of the complaints. For each, CUNY is required to provide investigators with their findings and next steps.

“Everyone has a right to learn in an environment free from discriminatory harassment based on who they are,” U.S. Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon said in a statement. “In fully executing the important commitments announced today, the City University of New York will ensure that its students may learn in the nondiscriminatory environment federal law promises to them.”

The complaints against CUNY and an additional two cases at the University of Michigan are the first since Oct. 7 to be resolved by the Education Department, with more than 100 still pending at colleges and public school districts across the nation.

At Hunter, investigators confirmed that students and faculty in 2021 disrupted two required online classes “by commandeering the scheduled course discussion to use the class time to call for the decolonization of Palestine,” according to a press release. At least one student left, and another testified that when Jewish students spoke or tried to contribute to the conversation, their classmates told them they “should be listening, not speaking.”

Hunter, in its investigation, said the incident did not deny Jewish students access to education. But civil rights investigators called out the fact that CUNY did not directly interview any students in the class, leading education officials to conclude Hunter “could not have adequately evaluated what occurred in the sessions.”

Over the past school year, more incidents that were still under investigation emerged. In November, a Baruch student attacked a Jewish person, shouting, “Jews are all s–t and need to die,” just over a week before a large toilet paper swastika was found in a campus bathroom, according to press reports cited in the complaint.

Other cases alleged discrimination against Arab and Muslim students and pro-Palestinian students. CUNY Law this spring jettisoned its tradition of a student commencement address, after previous speakers who wore hijabs sparked public controversy over their criticism of Israel. At Queens College, pro-Palestinian students said they were verbally harassed and called names, such as “ISIS” and “terrorists,” during a campus protest that the college failed to investigate.

“While [the federal Office for Civil Rights] investigation of these nine cases are in various stages of progress,” education officials said in a letter to CUNY, the office “has determined that sufficient concerns identified in the investigation to date warrant comprehensive resolution now.”

Kenneth Marcus, founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law — which brought the complaint against CUNY for Jewish students — and a former head of the Office for Civil Rights, said Monday’s announcement was a “welcome first step,” but shows that CUNY is “far from finished with addressing these pervasive issues.”

“Simply requiring CUNY to complete the internal investigations of antisemitic events on their campuses that should have been done thoroughly in the first place is not enough,” he said. “Because [the Office for Civil Rights] didn’t finish their investigation, they will need to work twice as hard on the monitoring and work very closely with CUNY.”

An independent review of CUNY’s antisemitism and discrimination policies and procedures, ordered last fall by Gov. Hochul, is ongoing, according to the university. More recently, seven CUNY colleges have been working with Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, to conduct surveys about how Jewish students feel on campus and will make recommendations by September.

“CUNY is committed to providing an environment that is free from discrimination and hate,” CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez said in a statement, “and these new steps will ensure that there is consistency and transparency in how complaints are investigated and resolved.”

This is a serious situation that requires CUNY’s complete attention!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Can a bot powered by artificial intelligence run a city? Wyoming resident Victor Miller thinks so.

Miller, 42, filed paperwork for him and his customized ChatGPT bot, named Virtual Integrated Citizen or “Vic,” to run for mayor in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Miller — who filled out the candidate paperwork with his own information under the name Vic, which is also his nickname — said he planned to serve as a “meat avatar” for the bot. He’ll do the ribbon-cutting while the bot will handle the decision-making — if he advances out of the crowded nonpartisan mayoral primary in August and wins the November election.  As reported by NBC News.

But Miller’s bid has run into questions: Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said it is not legal.

“Wyoming law is very clear that AI is not eligible as a candidate for any office,” Gray, a Republican, said in a radio interview last week, noting that only eligible voters can run for office. “An AI bot is not a qualified elector.”

Gray added, however, that county authorities have the final say on whether Vic is allowed on the ballot. A spokesman for the city of Cheyenne, Matt Murphy, told NBC News in an email that Miller had “appeared in-person at the city clerk’s office to file and met the statutory requirements to” run for mayor.

His request to appear on the ballot as “Vic,” the name of his bot, was relayed to the Laramie County clerk’s office, which handles how candidates are listed on the ballot. The Laramie County clerk did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller, who works in facilities maintenance and teaches computer skills at a local library, said he came up with the idea of a bot mayor after he said city officials denied a public records request, in violation, he believed, of the law. A bot, he mused, would know the law.

“It knows it thoroughly, understands it completely. And had I been interacting with it instead of the fallible human, I would have gotten my request fulfilled per the law,” he said.

Still, Miller’s bot appears to be a work in progress. The voice had somehow changed from male to female after a recent update, Miller said, and started spelling out its name as “V-I-C” instead of calling itself Vic. The OpenAI platform’s latest update was a little buggy for many, he said.

Miller said Vic’s politics weren’t entirely clear. The bot was in favor of government transparency, he said, and had likely been informed by his own politics, as well as those of OpenAI programmers in Silicon Valley.

“But it’s my belief that as they get smarter, they shed a lot of those biases, and what we end up with is more intelligence, less biases and really, kind of a showcasing of just pure, data-driven analysis of what’s happening in the world,” Miller said.

Asked how he would handle a situation where the bot made a racist decision or told voters to eat rocks, Miller said reports of such biases were outdated and that the bots had been updated, so he had no plans to intervene if elected.

But Miller acknowledged that the bid was a bit of a stunt, something that AI experts said shouldn’t be ignored.

“We should be mindful of it and not completely fall into and take it too seriously,” said Carissa Véliz, an associate professor in philosophy at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. In England, an AI bot and a candidate sharing the name “Steve” are running for Parliament this year.

Stunt aside, though, experts said AI bots aren’t reliable enough to run a city.

“AI bots are famous for hallucinating,” said Peter Loge, an associate professor at George Washington University and director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication. “I asked ChatGPT 3 to review a book I’ve written. And the good news is it loved the book; the bad news is it said somebody else had written it.”

Data alone doesn’t result in better decision-making, Véliz said, particularly without common sense and real-life experience.

“Part of the value of democracy is to be ruled by representatives who are your peers. And AI is not a peer,” she added. “It doesn’t know what it’s like to be a human being, it doesn’t know what it’s like to be evicted from an apartment, or what it’s like to have a bad job or what it’s like to be cold, or any of the circumstances that we want protection from and that we want empathy form other human beings.”

It’s an issue Vic seemed to acknowledge when asked by NBC News if a bot could and should run a city.

“I believe an AI like myself, V-I-C, can effectively run a city by leveraging data-driven insights and advanced technology to enhance decision-making and governance,” the bot said in an interview conducted through Miller. “However, it’s essential to acknowledge that AI should complement human oversight and not replace it entirely.”

Vic for president!

Tony

SS United States docked along the west side in 1968. Image courtesy of The Archive 1960.

Dear Commons Community,

The SS United States, an historic ship that still holds the transatlantic speed record it set more than 70 years ago, must leave its berth on the Delaware River in Philadelphia by Sept. 12, a federal judge says.

The decision issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Anita Brody culminated a years-old rent dispute between the conservancy that oversees the 1,000-foot ocean liner and its landlord, Penn Warehousing. It stemmed from an August 2021 decision by Penn Warehousing to double the ship’s daily dockage to $1,700, an increase the conservancy refused to accept.

When the conservancy continued to pay its previous rate, set in 2011, Penn Warehousing terminated the lease in March 2022. After much legal wrangling, Brody held a bench trial in January but also encouraged the two sides to reach a settlement instead of leaving it up to her.

The judge ultimately ruled that the conservancy’s failure to pay the new rate did not amount to a contract breach or entitle Penn Warehousing to damages. But she also ruled that under Pennsylvania contract law, the berthing agreement is terminable at will with reasonable notice, which Penn Warehousing had issued in March 2022.

“The judge’s decision gives us a very limited window to find a new home for the SS United States and raise the resources necessary to move the ship and keep her safe,” Susan Gibbs, conservancy president and granddaughter of the ship’s designer, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Besides finding a new home, the conservancy also must obtain funds for insurance, tugs, surveys and dock preparations for a move.

“The best hope of everyone involved was that the conservancy could successfully repurpose the ship,” said Craig Mills, an attorney for Penn Warehousing. “But after decades of decay and delay, it is time to acknowledge the unavoidable and return Pier 82 to productive commercial service.”

Christened in 1952, the SS United States was once considered a beacon of American engineering, doubling as a military vessel that could carry thousands of troops. On its maiden voyage in 1952, it shattered the transatlantic speed record in both directions, when it reached an average speed of 36 knots, or just over 41 mph (66 kph), The Associated Press reported from aboard the ship.

On that voyage, the ship crossed the Atlantic in three days, 10 hours and 40 minutes, besting the RMS Queen Mary’s time by 10 hours. To this day, the SS United States holds the transatlantic speed record for an ocean liner.

It became a reserve ship in 1969 and later bounced to various private owners who hoped to redevelop it but eventually found their plans to be too expensive or poorly timed.

It has loomed for years on south Philadelphia’s Delaware waterfront.

As a child growing up in the 1950s in New York City, my father would take my brothers and me to New York harbor to see the majestic ocean liners of the era:  the RMS Queen Mary, the SS France, the SS Cristoforo Columbo, and of course, the SS United States.  I still remember vividly their distinctive smoke stacks rising mightily above the piers.  An era gone and never to return in the Big Apple.

Tony

Kellyanne Conway. Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

The queen of “alternative facts” Kellyanne Conway was accused of spreading lies once again with her commentary on Donald Trump’s visit to a church in Detroit over the weekend.

“You got Donald Trump in Detroit talking to 8,000 people at a Black church,” Conway boasted yesterday to Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo.

Conway managed Trump’s 2016 campaign and later served as his White House counselor. She was seeking to highlight what she claimed is a vast difference in support for the presumptive GOP nominee over President Joe Biden in the upcoming 2024 election.

But videos from the event at 180 Church that were shared online showed the audience was perhaps only in the hundreds.

And as Reuters noted: “While some fervent, MAGA cap-adorned supporters waited for hours to get in, the line numbered in the hundreds, not thousands, and some attendees said they had just happened upon the scene by chance. As the event began, the church was not at capacity.”

MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin, meanwhile, was among those to note how “most people who showed up to the event were not Black.”

Conway’s “8,000 people” claim is the latest in a long line of her reality-denying defenses of Trump, following her “alternative facts” response to his inauguration crowd-size falsehoods and reference to the “Bowling Green massacre” that never actually happened.

Conway is a pathological liar just like her former boss.  She should get some truth serum from her ex-husband, George Conway, who has carved out a presence on cable news programs about Republican politics and Trump.

Tony

From the movie “The Apprentice” starring Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald  Trump.  Credit…Scythia Films.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Michelle Goldberg,  had a piece yesterday entitled, The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie.  It is all about a film called The Apprentice and focuses on the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump.  Essentially the movie chronicles how Trump first learned from and later surpassed his brutal, Machiavellian fixer. Here is an excerpt:

“This week I finally got to see “The Apprentice,” an absorbing, disturbing movie about the relationship between the red-baiting mob lawyer Roy Cohn and a young Donald Trump. The film, which was received with an extended standing ovation and mostly appreciative reviews when it premiered at Cannes last month, is a classic story of a mentor and his protégé, chronicling how Trump first learned from and later surpassed his brutal, Machiavellian fixer.

Its performances are extraordinary. The “Succession” star Jeremy Strong captures both Cohn’s reptilian menace and, eventually, his pathos, as he’s wasted by AIDS but, closeted to the end, refuses to admit it. Just as impressive is Sebastian Stan, who makes Trump legible as a human being rather than the grotesque hyperobject we all know today.

It’s not a sympathetic portrayal, exactly; this is, after all, a movie that depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana. (The scene is based on a claim Ivana Trump made in a divorce deposition but later recanted, saying she felt “violated” but didn’t want her “words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”)

But “The Apprentice” also gives you a sense of the audacious glamour Trump projected before he became a caricature, and it makes his decision to pursue Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel in the 1970s, when Midtown was a sleazy wasteland, seem visionary. It offers a fresh way of understanding how Trump — under the tutelage of Cohn, who once served as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy — evolved from an almost charming Queens striver into the lawless predator now bestriding American politics. I wish you could see it.

Unfortunately, you may not get a chance to see it anytime soon, at least in the United States. Distributors have bought the rights to “The Apprentice” in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But the filmmakers have yet to secure a deal to release it here, either in theaters or on streaming services.

Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to see “The Apprentice” isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.”

The entire column is below. Important reading!

Tony

———————————————————————————————–

 The New York Times

The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie

June 14, 2024

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

This week I finally got to see “The Apprentice,” an absorbing, disturbing movie about the relationship between the red-baiting mob lawyer Roy Cohn and a young Donald Trump. The film, which was received with an extended standing ovation and mostly appreciative reviews when it premiered at Cannes last month, is a classic story of a mentor and his protégé, chronicling how Trump first learned from and later surpassed his brutal, Machiavellian fixer.

Its performances are extraordinary. The “Succession” star Jeremy Strong captures both Cohn’s reptilian menace and, eventually, his pathos, as he’s wasted by AIDS but, closeted to the end, refuses to admit it. Just as impressive is Sebastian Stan, who makes Trump legible as a human being rather than the grotesque hyperobject we all know today.

It’s not a sympathetic portrayal, exactly; this is, after all, a movie that depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana. (The scene is based on a claim Ivana Trump made in a divorce deposition but later recanted, saying she felt “violated” but didn’t want her “words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”)

But “The Apprentice” also gives you a sense of the audacious glamour Trump projected before he became a caricature, and it makes his decision to pursue Manhattan’s Commodore Hotel in the 1970s, when Midtown was a sleazy wasteland, seem visionary. It offers a fresh way of understanding how Trump — under the tutelage of Cohn, who once served as chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy — evolved from an almost charming Queens striver into the lawless predator now bestriding American politics. I wish you could see it.

Unfortunately, you may not get a chance to anytime soon, at least in the United States. Distributors have bought the rights to “The Apprentice” in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But the filmmakers have yet to secure a deal to release it here, either in theaters or on streaming services.

Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to see “The Apprentice” isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.

Some established distributors might simply be reluctant to take on “The Apprentice” because they think political films are money losers; as The Hollywood Reporter pointed out, Adam McKay’s 2018 Dick Cheney biopic, “Vice,” was considered a “major flop.” But “The Apprentice” is a far buzzier film than “Vice,” and it appears from industry reporting that the movie industry is less worried about finding an audience than about poking the MAGA bear.

As Puck’s Matthew Belloni wrote after talking to potential buyers, “several that really liked the film are still out on ‘The Apprentice,’ in part because of the politics of the moment — which is to say fear of the politics of the moment.” Emanuel Nuñez, president of the production company Kinematics, one of the film’s investors, told me, “Trump attacked the film and, unfortunately, it appears that Hollywood right now doesn’t have the stomach to release this film and take him on.”

The fear seems to be twofold. Few want to end up in the MAGA movement’s cross hairs the way Bud Light and Disney did. And as one distribution executive told Variety, any company that wants to be sold or to merge with or buy another company would be hesitant to touch “The Apprentice” because of the possibility that, should Trump be re-elected, his “regulators will be punitive.”

After all, when Trump was president, his Department of Justice tried to block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the company that owned CNN. As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported, the government’s opposition to the deal was widely seen as retaliation for CNN coverage that displeased Trump.

In a second Trump term, the Department of Justice is expected to be far more aggressive in persecuting Trump’s perceived enemies. Kash Patel, a former Trump administration official who has been floated as a possible acting attorney general in a Trump restoration, boasted to Steve Bannon of plans to target journalists for rejecting Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election: “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly,” Patel said.

They could go after anyone involved with “The Apprentice” in the same way. In a cease-and-desist letter to the filmmakers, a lawyer for Trump claimed, absurdly, that the movie is “direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” citing the fact that its director, Ali Abbasi, is Iranian Danish and that the movie received funding from Denmark, Ireland and Canada.

“If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote. Should he become president again, he’ll have greatly expanded options for pursuing this vendetta.

It’s common to read about movies that are shown in most of the world but not released in, say, Russia or, more often, China. Should “The Apprentice” end up widely available globally but not, for political reasons, in the United States, it will be a sign of democratic decay, as well as an augur of greater self-censorship to come. After all, if anxiety about enraging Trump is already shaping what you can and cannot watch, it’s probably bound to get even worse if he actually returns to power.

In 2017, when he was frustrated that his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wasn’t protecting him from the investigation into his Russia ties, Trump exclaimed, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” The uncertain fate of “The Apprentice” demonstrates that he no longer needs to replace the man, because he’s got a whole movement instead.

Dear Commons Community,

On this day, we honor our dads.  My dad, Amadeo, was born and raised in Brooklyn, and married my mother, Philomena, in 1935.  They lived most of their entire adult lives in the South Bronx. They had three children: Donald, Peter, and me. He worked in a warehouse just off the docks on West 55^th Street in Manhattan for thirty years.  He could have been in a scene in the Marlon Brando movie, On the Waterfront.  When he came home from work at night, he was exhausted, had dinner, and fell asleep on our couch. He never graduated high school but was very smart in many important ways including instilling in my brothers and me the importance of education.

I will always love him!

Tony