Culture

The push to ban gas-powered leaf blowers has gained an unlikely figurehead: Cate Blanchett, the Australian actress. “Leaf blowers need to be eradicated from the face of the Earth,” she said in an interview in March. Her complaints have gone viral on TikTok and other social media platforms. “It’s a metaphor for what’s wrong with us as a species,” Blanchett said. “We blow s--- from one side of our lawn to the other side, and then the wind is just going to blow it back!”

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Her complaints about leaf blowers — equal parts entertaining and earnest — stretch back nearly 20 years, and now the mood has caught up with her. Today, more than 200 local governments in the U.S. have restricted gas-powered lawn equipment or provided incentives to switch to quieter, less-polluting electric tools. The first bans date back to the 1970s, but the trend picked up after the pandemic lockdowns in 2020, when newly homebound workers discovered just how inescapable the whine of their neighbor’s leaf blower can be.

“With every year that passes, more and more communities across the country are taking action to address the shocking amount of pollution and noise from gas lawn equipment,” said Kirsten Schatz, clean air advocate at the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, called CoPIRG.

Gas-powered leaf blowers aren’t just annoying; they’re bad for public health. Closing the windows can’t shut out their low-frequency roar, which can be louder than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit of 55 decibels up to 800 feet away. The unwanted sound can lead to high levels of stress, along with disturbing people’s sleep and potentially damaging hearing over time.

Leaf blowers’ two-stroke engines also churn out a noxious blend of exhaust: fine particulate matter, smog-forming gases, and cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and formaldehyde. By one estimate, running a gas-powered leaf blower for an hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car from Los Angeles to Denver.

And while lawn and garden equipment is only a small slice of global carbon emissions, leaf blowers and other gas-powered tools “pack a big punch for the amount that they create based on the size of their engines,” said Dan Mabe, the founder of the American Green Zone Alliance, a group that works with cities and landscapers to shift to electric equipment. In 2020, fossil-fueled lawn and garden equipment in the U.S. released more than 30 million tons of CO2, more than the emissions of the city of L.A.

Cities and states across the country have taken different approaches to dealing with the problem. California’s law banning the sale of new gas-powered blowers took effect last January, while cities like Portland and Baltimore are phasing out their use. Some places, like Wilmette, Illinois, have enacted seasonal limits, either permanently or until a full ban takes effect. Others, like Colorado, attempt to sweeten the deal of buying electric lawn care equipment, offering a 30 percent discount.

But implementing the bans is proving more challenging than many expected. Many communities are frustrated that the new rules are not being properly enforced, said Jamie Banks, the founder and president of Quiet Communities, a nonprofit working to reduce noise pollution.

Westport, Connecticut, fought for years to get a seasonal restriction on gas-powered blowers, only to find that local officials were not enforcing it, Banks said. Noise complaints are not exactly at the top of police officers’ priority lists, and sometimes ordinances are written in a way that’s hard to carry out — police aren’t usually expected to go around town taking noise readings, for example. Some communities are taking a deliberate approach to the problem: Banks pointed to a group of towns in the greater Chicago area, including Wilmette, that are trying to create consistent policies across the region and working with the local police.

Then there’s the matter that swapping gas blowers for ones powered by electricity isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. While the costs are comparable for homeowners — you can get electric blowers at a big-box store like Home Depot for around $200 or less, cheaper than most gas ones — electric blowers are more expensive for commercial landscapers. They require multiple batteries for workers to get through the day. While a typical professional gas-powered blower runs for $550, a comparable electric one costs $700 and requires thousands of dollars worth of batteries. Landscapers also have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of charging equipment and find ways to charge safely on the go.

Plus, it can be difficult to meet the standards customers expect with electric leaf blowers, which are less powerful than gas ones. “If you have customers that are demanding that you get everything off the ground, and you better do it quickly, and you’d better not charge me too much money, it’s really tough,” Banks said.

Bans have already generated a political backlash in some Republican-led states. Texas and Georgia have passed laws prohibiting local governments from regulating gas-powered leaf blowers. The Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry group, launched a Latino-focused messaging campaign in California that pushes back against laws to electrify vehicles and leaf blowers. But leaf blowers aren’t just a culture-war lightning rod; in some places, they’re leading to personal conflict. In Evanston, Illinois, a suburb north of Chicago, several landscape workers allege they’ve been harassed by people reporting violations of the local ban.

The American Green Zone Alliance noted in a recent statement that “heavy-handed bans on gas-powered leaf blowers can unintentionally create stress and hardship for workers who often labor for low wages, with limited benefits or control over their working conditions.”

Although there remain a lot of details to work out, the organization is still pushing lawn care to go electric. “We are trying to convince our industry, ‘Look, we need to accelerate this,’” Mabe said.

The alliance is advocating for incentives that are sufficient to make the new equipment affordable for landscaping businesses operating on razor-thin margins. (In the end, lower fuel and maintenance costs for electric blowers can save companies money if the equipment is properly cared for, Mabe said.) Seasonal bans on gas-powered leaf blowers may be more feasible in some places than year-round ones, because they leave short windows for using the fossil-fueled devices in the spring and fall to take care of heavy cleanup jobs.

Another solution: Customers could loosen their expectations and accept a scattering of leaves, instead of demanding a perfectly manicured lawn. “Now, if that aesthetic was more relaxed, that could help change things,” Banks said. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to carry so many batteries.” Leaving some leaves on the ground is, at least ecologically speaking, a good thing — decaying leaves fertilize the soil and form a protective layer that provides shelter for snails, bees, and butterflies.

And of course, in many cases, a leaf blower isn’t needed at all: You can do as Blanchett advises and take matters into your own hands with a good-old fashioned rake.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/solutions/gas-powered-leaf-blowers-bans-challenges/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.

For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the “book purge” is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.

It comes after Tennessee’s Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargett, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.

As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”

Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee’s libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state’s website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”

The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett’s instructions “contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law.”

“Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president,” the group continued. “Executive orders are not laws.”

But Crosby and Sims argued: “Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute ‘promoting gender ideology.’ The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals.”

On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an “age appropriateness review” of all books in their children’s section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee’s age appropriateness law or with Trump’s executive order.

As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University’s Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, “is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries.”

Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:

The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.

Earlier this month, the state’s Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements” from Hargett’s office.

It’s unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.

As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding “homosexuality” as a form of “public indecency” resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.

Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system’s board, Hargett’s order is “a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they ‘have to’ comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away.”

This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing “profound concern” over its review mandate.

The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.

“These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state,” the groups said. “Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding.”

“The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution,” they added. “It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle.”

The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library’s own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system.”

“We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians,” the alliance added, “rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”

Margaret Hartmann, senior editor for New York Magazine's Intelligencer section, ponders whether people are strong enough "mentally and physically, to watch what the Trump White House is posting on TikTok?"

The White House TikTok account was launched in August by the Trump administration to communicate its message and appeal to a broader audience, particularly younger voters.

"The first post from the official account (not to be confused with the personal account Donald Trump mostly abandoned after the 2024 campaign) featured the president declaring, “I am your voice!” Hartmann explains.

Several months into the account's existence, Hartmann describes its voice as exuding those "'fellow kids' vibes you’d expect from any septuagenarian official’s social-media account."

"But there’s also some uniquely Trumpian content that’s truly hard to watch," she adds.

Hartmann breaks down this content into sections to make it more digestable.

"I have compiled the worst of the @whitehouse feed. The posts fall into three categories: incompetently executed memes, straight-up-racist videos, and Trump thirst traps. How many can you watch — sound on, start to finish — before you have to tap out? Can you make it through the “sexy” Trump montage set to that Charli XCX “fall in love, again and again” song without pausing as a shudder of disgust rolls through your body? It took me three tries! Good luck!" she writes.

Her first category is "Infuriatingly Incompetent Memes," and includes Trump's taunts of pop culture titan Taylor Swift.

"While Trump once declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!,” he is also desperate for the pop superstar’s approval. So it’s very on-brand for the White House feed to try to get in on the Life of a Showgirl TikTok trend," she writes of Swift's latest record-breaking release, selling a whopping 4.002 million album units in its first week in the United States and much, much more since.

"But while this sound usually accompanies people doing the dance from Swift’s latest video, the White House just posted a series of increasingly weird photos, culminating in the “Fate of America” … which is Trump pretending to work a shift at McDonald’s?" Hartmann notes.

Another of these incompetent memes, Hartmann notes, is one titled "Rare aesthetic: Democrat Shutdown,” which, she says "could have worked, but half the pictures don’t make any sense. Sure, there are a few shots of Trump’s racist posts featuring Hakeem Jeffries in a sombrero, but then we see … Democrats speaking to reporters? Shots of Congress in session? A protester showing their support for federal workers amid Trump’s DOGE cuts?"

Which brings her to her second category titled "Disgustingly Racist," in which "the Wicked references don’t even track here. A snippet of Cynthia Erivo singing “Defying Gravity” plays over footage of ICE arresting people, and the text says, “Ahhh that deportation feeling …” The movie musical contains a whole song about “loathing,” but this account can’t even troll properly," she says.

The third category, "Nauseatingly Romantic," includes the sudden "videos that aimed to highlight the heterosexual passion between the president and the First Lady," in the wake of the emails that showed Trump's ties to deceased convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

These posts, Hartmann says, are "why everyone needs to stop complaining about those Wuthering Heights trailers. No matter how badly Emerald Fennell butchers the Emily Brontë novel, it can’t be as heinously unwatchable as this."

President Barack Obama famously chided Donald Trump in April 2011 during the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. The reality show star had repeatedly and falsely claimed that Obama had not been born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Trump’s demands that Obama release his birth certificate had, in part, made Trump a front-runner among Republican hopefuls for their party’s nomination in the following year’s presidential election.

Obama referred to Trump’s presidential ambitions by joking that, if elected, Trump would bring some changes to the White House.

Obama then called attention to a satirical photo the guests could see of a remodeled White House with the words “Trump” and “The White House” in large purple letters followed by the words “hotel,” “casino” and “golf course.”

Obama’s ridicule of Trump that evening has been credited with inspiring Trump to run for president in 2016.

My book, “The Art of the Political Putdown,” includes Obama’s chiding of Trump at the correspondents’ dinner to demonstrate how politicians use humor to establish superiority over a rival.

Obama’s ridicule humiliated Trump, who temporarily dropped the birther conspiracy before reviving it. But Trump may have gotten the last laugh by using the humiliation of that night, as some think, as motivation in his run for the president in 2016.

There is a further twist to Obama joking about Trump’s renovations to the White House if Trump became president. Trump has fulfilled Obama’s prediction, kind of.

The Trump administration has razed the East Wing, which sits adjacent to the White House, and will replace it with a 90,000-square-foot, gold-encrusted ballroom that appears to reflect the ostentatious tastes of the president.

The US$300 million ballroom will be twice the size of the White House.

It’s expected to be big enough to accommodate nearly a thousand people. Design renderings suggest that the ballroom will resemble the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s private estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“I don’t have any plan to call it after myself,” Trump said recently. “That was fake news. Probably going to call it the presidential ballroom or something like that. We haven’t really thought about a name yet.”

But senior administration officials told ABC News that they were already referring to the structure as “The President Donald J. Trump Ballroom.”

The renovation will have neither a hotel, casino nor golf course, as Obama mentioned in his light-hearted speech at the 2011 correspondents’ dinner.

A video is shown as President Barack Obama speaks about Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington on April 30, 2011. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

Obama pokes fun at Trump

In the months before the 2011 correspondents’ dinner, Trump had repeatedly claimed that Obama had not been born in Hawaii but had instead been born outside the United States, perhaps in his father’s home country of Kenya.

The baseless conspiracy theory became such a distraction that Obama released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011.

Three days later, Obama delivered his speech at the correspondents’ dinner with Trump in the audience, where he said that Trump, having put the birther conspiracy behind him, could move to other conspiracy theories like claims the moon landing was staged, aliens landed in Roswell, New Mexico, or the unsolved murders of rappers Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

“Did we fake the moon landing?” Obama said. “What really happened at Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”

Obama then poked fun at Trump’s reality show, “The Apprentice,” and referred to how Trump, who owned hotels, casinos and golf courses, might renovate the White House.

When Obama was finished, Seth Meyers, the host of the dinner, made additional jokes at Trump’s expense.

“Donald Trump has been saying that he will run for president as a Republican – which is surprising, since I just assumed that he was running as a joke,” Meyers said.

Trump gets the last laugh

The New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik remembered watching Trump as the jokes kept coming at his expense.

“Trump’s humiliation was as absolute, and as visible, as any I have ever seen: his head set in place, like a man on a pillory, he barely moved or altered his expression as wave after wave of laughter struck him,” Gopnik wrote. “There was not a trace of feigning good humor about him.”

Donald Trump and Melania Trump arrive for the White House correspondents’ dinner in Washington on April 30, 2011. AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File

Roger Stone, one of Trump’s top advisers, said Trump decided to run for president after he felt he had been publicly humiliated.

“I think that is the night he resolves to run for president,” Stone said in an interview with the PBS program “Frontline.” “I think that he is kind of motivated by it. ‘Maybe I’ll just run. Maybe I’ll show them all.‘”

Trump, if Stone and other political observers are correct, sought the presidency to avenge that humiliation.

“I thought, ‘Oh, Barack Obama is starting something that I don’t know if he’ll be able to finish,’” said Omarosa Manigault, a former “Apprentice” contestant who became Trump’s director of African American outreach during his first term.

“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump,” she said. “It is everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him – it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

The notoriously thin-skinned Trump did not attend the White House correspondents’ dinner during his first presidency. He also did not attend the dinner during the first year of his second presidency.

Although Trump has never publicly acknowledged the importance of that event in 2011, a number of people have noted how pivotal it was, demonstrating how the putdown can be a powerful weapon in politics – even, perhaps, extending to tearing down the White House’s East Wing.

Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It has been more than 88 years since the world’s most famous female aviator, Amelia Earhart, and her navigator Fred Noonan, disappeared on the second-last leg of their around-the-world flight odyssey.

SFGate columnist Drew Magary tested out Elon Musk's new "Wikipedia clone" known as Grokipedia and says he found it's full of racism, antisemitism and lies.

"There is nothing this man cannot make cheaper, wonkier and 20% more Hitler-y," Magary writes about Musk's latest foray into "his own optimized version of Wikipedia."

Groikpedia's entry on Adolf Hitler, for example, includes a “Debates and Intent on Functionality” section, "which is absent in Wiki’s entry on the man," Magary notes.

“The historiographical debate on the intent and functionality of Nazi racial policies, particularly the Holocaust, centers on whether the systematic extermination of Jews was the fulfillment of Adolf Hitler’s premeditated master plan or the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary quotes Grokipedia, boldfacing the most egregious part.

"You already know about people who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, so kudos to Grokipedia for introducing, 'The Holocaust was real, but also it was just a happy accident!' as a new means of discrediting Jewish history," Magary writes.

While Magary says no one knows who wrote that passage, the entry links to the Associated Press, but sourcing still remains vague.

"Musk’s site uses an ambiguous mix of crowdsourcing and its owner’s proprietary AI software — which he already appended to Twitter/X to predictably virulent results — to compose its more than 850,000 entries. I never would have sorted this without Wikipedia, so thanks, Wiki!" Magary says.

While Wikipedia remains non-profit and written entirely by humans, Musk's version is the antithesis, Magary explains.

"Elon Musk is perhaps, second to Donald Trump, our greatest disseminator of bad faith," he writes, with his priorities remaining clear.

"So it makes sense that he would cobble together a half-assed competitor to Wikipedia that is motivated by profit, and by his own demented worldview. Grokipedia exists strictly as a reactionary product, and that was plainly evident when I took the site for a test drive," Magary says.

The site, he says, is a mess, and an "attempt to rewrite the bulk of history" to suit Musk's "own ends."

"That’s why, when I tried to search for a “Grokipedia” entry on Grokipedia, I found no entry at all," Magary notes, adding that it's "More like WOKE-ipedia. Am I right, fellow plantation owners?! Huh? Anyway, if you think these suggested results make sense, then you’re on more ketamine than Musk himself."

In response to Slavery, Musk's "slurbot is free to denigrate Black and mixed race folks any way it pleases. Or it ignores denigration of those people entirely; there is no Grokipedia entry for the N-word," Magary says.

Musk, he writes, catered the site directly to his audience. "I got the feeling that his pet project tweaked the hot button entries to tilt MAGA, and then just stole content for all of the normal s——," he writes.

"This is the whitewashing machine at work," Magary explains, whose intention is to spread racist lies.

"It has no real purpose other than to strategically plant lies into a reference manual. This renders it not only a malevolent product, but a lousy one. But hey, maybe Elon didn’t mean for his baby to be such a piece of s——. Maybe it was just the unintended outcome of bureaucratic radicalization and wartime improvisation," Magary concludes.

An American Celtic punk band from Quincy, Massachusetts that is explicitly anti-Trump and anti-MAGA is actually winning over President Donald Trump's supporters with their blue collar appraoch to humanity and decency, according to a profile in British newspaper The Telegraph.

Ken Casey, lead singer of Dropkick Murphys explains how he uses "kindness and humour to speak directly and persuasively to a stranger holding opinions with which he profoundly disagrees," The Telegraph reports.

“I come from the mindset that most blue-collar people, regular people, have a lot more in common, regardless of our political divide, than we do with the billionaire class and the sensationalised media that’s trying to divide us here,” Casey says.

“So here we are being divided by what Fox News tells America, or what a billionaire tells us; meanwhile, 12, 13, 14, 15 years ago me and that person that I’m supposed to be mortal enemies with would have got along grand," he adds.

Casey says that despite the vitriol and "vile" rhetoric he hears coming from Trump's most ardent MAGA followers, he still finds a way to connect with some.

“I have found that the Maga movement have created something vile on the far-Right where there is an anger and a lack of empathy that I see in the eyes of some people, where no matter how well I treat them, or how much discourse I try to have, [I’m] met with nothing but anger and hostility. When that’s the case, then everything goes out of the window. But I think it’s important to give humanity and decency a try first," he says.

The band, which has played massive venues including Wembley Stadium in London has gone from what The Telegraph describes as "political with a small p" to a much harder approach.

In their new song "Fiending for the Lies," they sing how “They got blinders on our eyes / They’re distorting our minds / No one seems to recognize we’re living in a world of lies, lies, lies”.

Casey says he is particularly baffled by how Trump managed to convince the working class that he is looking out for them.

"“The right has done a good job of convincing us that if you drive a truck, you must vote for Trump; if you work with your hands, you must vote for Trump,” he tells The Telegraph.

“I’m baffled by how they got a silver spoon frickin’ little b——, who got $400m from his father and who burned workers and fought unions his whole career, and he’s the guy? I get America being tricked by a demagogue, but I thought it would have been Brad Pitt or someone," he says.

Casey's upbringing "in a staunch union household," has shaped his outlook, he explains, with his grandfather trying to organize in the South with the Ku Klux Klan in the background.

"So, you think about the fight and the danger, and the blood sweat and tears that people gave before, and now we’re just going to sit down and let all those rights be taken away from workers? Let alone civil rights – we worked so hard for civil rights and that’s just being cut off at the knees," he says.

The Dropkick Murphys formed in 1996 on a dare, when a co-worker challenged Casey to form a band to open for his own in three weeks, even though Casey did not know how to play an instrument at the time. They first practiced in the basement of a friend's barbershop.

The band has consistently advocated for working-class values, unions, and social justice causes, and their music has often reflected these stances.

The band also operates their own nonprofit charity, the Claddagh Fund, which focuses its work on veterans’ groups and organizations offering help to people dependent on drugs and alcohol, The Telegraph says.

Casey says he wishes he wouldn't have to be a political band, but politics have become their trademark, he explains.

"“I would much rather not have to deal with any of this [political stuff],” Casey admits. “But how can you be a band who started with those principles and then cower at this moment? It would make the last 30 years of trudging around the world all seem like it was a waste of time.”

Casey says he hopes that the "other side" of MAGA remakes itself, too.

“I hope that the way the Republican Party was completely remade by Maga in little more than a decade inspires people [on the other side], too,” Casey says. “People who aren’t coming into this trying to make money off the stock market, and all that, but who are coming into it for the right reasons.”

And while the punk movement, The Telegraph explains, "has lost its political edge since the 1980s, when the Dead Kennedys railed against both the Left and Right – and were hit with obscenity charges for their trouble," Casey says there's a big reason for that.

"“My simple answer is that you could sing about Reagan without an army of Reagan trolls coming at you,” Casey explains. “You could sing about Bush without an army of Bush trolls coming at you – you didn’t have people threatening to come fight you… I honestly think one of the most disappointing things about America is how little of a backbone we’re showing. For a country that thinks it’s pretty tough, it’s not showing up for the fight right now.”

Casey says that he and his bandmates have had plenty of death threats, but he's not afraid.

"That’s just the nature of what they do. They scare people into submission. And they’ve been successful," he says. "There’s a lot of people who don’t want the threat of someone showing up at their house, or boycotting their business, or talking trash about them online. And that’s why a lot of Americans are so quiet. They don’t want the target on them.”

At a recent Florida concert, Casey interacted with an audience member in a MAGA hat.

"“If you’re in a room full of people and you want to know who’s in a cult,” he said, “[it’s the person who’s] been holding up a hat all f—— night.”

Addressing the man directly during the show, Casey said: “Well, first of all, do you support American workers?” he asked. “Of course you do… And you support American businesses, obviously? Okay. Now I don’t know if you guys are aware, because we don’t go around f-----g bragging about it, but Dropkick Murphys always sells proudly made-in-America merchandise only. And here’s the bet I’d like to make. If you lose the bet, we switch shirts, okay? If you win the bet, I give you $100 and [a free] shirt, alright? That’s why I said you can’t lose.”

Casey says while he doesn't "wanna say we’ve gained new fans, but I think we’ve won a lot of fans back. A lot of the feedback is [from people saying] ‘Man, I used to listen to you guys and then I shifted musical tastes or whatever, but your stance has brought me back to you. It’s made me realise how important punk is.’"

“I like that,” he says. “I’d rather have that fan any day than some meathead.”

After failing to use the government’s might to bully Jimmy Kimmel off the air earlier this fall, President Donald Trump is once again threatening to bring the force of law down on comedians for the egregious crime of making fun of him.

This time, his target was NBC late-night host Seth Meyers, whom the president said, in a Truth Social post Saturday, “may be the least talented person to ‘perform’ live in the history of television.”

On Thursday, the comedian hosted a segment mocking Trump’s bizarre distaste for the electromagnetic catapults aboard Navy ships, which the president said he may sign an executive order to replace with older (and less efficient) steam-powered ones.

Trump did not take kindly to Meyers’ barbs: “On and on he went, a truly deranged lunatic. Why does NBC waste its time and money on a guy like this??? - NO TALENT, NO RATINGS, 100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!”

It is, of course, not “illegal” for a late-night comedian, or any other news reporter or commentator, for that matter, to be “anti-Trump.” But it’s not the first time the president has made such a suggestion. Amid the backlash against Kimmel’s firing in September, Trump asserted that networks that give him “bad publicity or press” should have their licenses taken away.

“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me... I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away,” Trump said. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

His FCC director, Brendan Carr, used a similar logic to justify his pressure campaign to get Kimmel booted by ABC, which he said could be punished for airing what he determined was “distorted” content.

Before Kimmel, Carr suggested in April that Comcast may be violating its broadcast licenses after MSNBC declined to air a White House press briefing in which the administration defended its wrongful deportation of Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“You need to understand that he actually believes it is illegal to criticize him,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on social media following Trump’s tirade against Meyers. “Why? Because Trump believes he—not the people—decides the law. This is why we are in the middle of, not on the verge of, a totalitarian takeover.”

In Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1887), an English solicitor (Jonathan Harker) is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Dracula, an aristocrat, in his move to England. When Harker discovers Dracula lying in a coffin after feeding on blood, he understands the threat that Dracula poses to England.

When it came time for John Seybold to place the ring on his bride’s finger, he was given a warning: he must not touch any other part of her body or risk death.

That should have been enough to alert the 71-year-old retired Kansas farmer that things were not as they seemed, but love does weird things to people. He proceeded with the ceremony, held in a darkened séance room, and later sat during a festive wedding dinner next to an empty chair reserved for his spectral bride.

Seybold was in love with “Sarah,” the ghost of a girl he had known in his youth back in Ohio, and he trusted the spirit medium who had summoned her from the great beyond.

The medium, 36-year-old Nellie Moore, had been holding classes in spiritualism in Wichita for the curious and the credulous. She had introduced others to their ethereal soulmates, but being matchmaker to Seybold and his gossamer love had been a singular achievement.

She had enjoyed material benefits from her association with the lonely farmer, who had come to her two years before from Liberal and asked to make contact with his long-dead son. In a darkened room with black curtains and a wardrobe that produced such wonders as spirit photos and floating luminous stars, Moore had done just that.

Or at least Seybold thought she had.

Soon, Moore had a new car and furniture and even deeds to the farms Seybold owned, one near Liberal, a couple of hundred miles away in southwestern Kansas, and another across the state line in Oklahoma.

When it finally dawned on Seybold that he’d been taken for his life savings, he did what many disappointed spouses do: He sued. The case must have been one of the strangest ever to come before a Wichita judge, and it made headlines across the country.

“She was really after his money,” author and historian of the strange Tim Shepard told me. “When it was all over, she got him for $7,500.”

Because I’m a diurnal skeptic when it comes to paranormal activity — my answer changes according to how often things go bump in the night — I asked Shepard for his take on Wichita’s “ghost bride” case.

Shepard is the author of two books of Kansas ghost stories, the most recent of which is “Return to the Prairie: More Tales of History and Hauntings.” He’s working on a forthcoming book about hauntings along Route 66, and as research for that book he drove the length of the mother road in a 1934 Hudson Terraplane. He’s given ghost tours across the state, worked at the Red Rocks State Historic Site at Emporia, and at 52 says he’s considered the grandfather of ghost hunting in Kansas.

“Moore’s tactics were very similar to what most spiritualists were doing in the late 1800s,” Shepard said. “The room she held her séances in was painted black, with black curtains, a large wardrobe, and a couple of chairs. She actually told him not to touch the spirits because if he did both he and she would die. Based on the details he gave of meeting Sarah, there was probably somebody hidden in the cabinet.”

At one séance, Moore was instructed to write a $500 check to an organization for wayward girls. He did so, Shepard said, and an otherworldly hand took the check.

While Seybold’s actions may seem foolish now, he seems to have had a serious interest in spiritualism, a belief system that holds the soul survives death and spirits of the dead can communicate with the living.

It all began with the Fox Sisters in western New York in the 1840s, who claimed they could communicate through raps and knocks with the spirit of a murdered peddler. The sisters were soon demonstrating spirit communication at public events that drew hundreds, dividing the press and the public on whether they were genuinely in touch with the spirit world or youthful hoaxers seeking money and attention.

During and after the Civil War, spiritualism surged in popularity. The bloodiest conflict in American history drove many to the comforting belief that they could communicate with their beloved dead. Even Mary Todd Lincoln held séances at the White House. Years after the war, the last photograph taken of Mrs. Lincoln contributed to another spiritualist-related craze, spirit photography. A photo by Boston photographer William Mumler purports to show the ghost of Abraham Lincoln looking kindly down upon her, hands on her shoulders. But it was a cheap photographic trick relying on a double exposure.

Spiritualism was not just a fad in Victorian American, but a serious societal and political movement. The first woman to run for president was Victoria Woodhull, a trance medium and “free love” radical. Kate Bender, of the murderous Bender Family of Kansas, also claimed to be one. While some mediums were perpetrating hoaxes on their credulous victims, often with the use of mechanical tricks such as the magic slate tablet, there were millions of Americans who embraced spiritualism as proof of life after death.

After the First World War, the movement gained renewed popularity. Its chief proponent was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Despite having created the epitome of the rational detective and being trained as a medical doctor, Doyle was gullible and proclaimed his belief in spirits, including the now-debunked Cottingley Fairies photos.

If Doyle was the champion of mediumship, Harry Houdini was its nemesis. The world-famous magician and escape artist (and friend of Doyle’s) spent much of his career campaigning against charlatanism. He devoted himself to exposing the tricks used by fake mediums. Houdini was an expert in those tricks, because he and his wife Bess had started their careers by using them.

In November 1897, they had appeared at the opera house in Garnett, Kansas, promising to name the killer of a recently murdered local woman. Houdini had already demonstrated an escape from the local jail, according to “The Secret Life of Houdini” by William Kalush and Larry Sloman. Bess had been promoted as a “psychometric clairvoyant” and her séances with Houdini were a hit. But it was all trickery, and in Garnett, according to the authors, Bess feigned a swoon at the climactic moment to avoid actually naming the murderer.

In addition to tricks like the spirit slates, charlatans used rhetorical sleight-of-hand. If a medium failed to materialize a spirit it was because there were unbelievers present. Some, like Nellie Moore, claimed they couldn’t remember anything while under control of spirits. If Seybold’s dead son or the ghost of “Sarah” told the old farmer to do things, such as take $3,000 out of the bank to give to her, she would just have to take other people’s word for it.

“During the wedding ceremony,” Shepard said, “he actually places a diamond ring on the ghost’s finger. And he said it felt solid.” But the old man was so fearful of dying from touching the ghost that he dared not embrace his bride.

Seybold, who had two previous marriages to living women, moved from Liberal to Wichita to be close to his medium and was directed to deed all of his property to her. When the aging farmer said he wanted to consult an attorney, Moore produced the ghost of Samuel B. Amidon, a recently deceased Wichita lawyer. But it seems unlikely the famous jurist would have advised him to trust Moore.

“In the very first séance, Mrs. Moore, in a semi-trance, told the Kansan his son had come to her and was telling her what to say,” reported the San Francisco Examiner in July 1927. He was cautioned that turning on the lights, or otherwise interfering with the spirits, would result in immediate death.

Like many of us, Seybold was susceptible to flattery. He was called “doctor” by those in his medium’s orbit, apparently after healing somebody of a headache, and was told he could quickly become proficient at piano if only he bought one for Moore’s home.

“Here’s a lonely old man,” Shepard said. “He believed he was really in love with a ghost. At trial, he pondered whether he was really married to her or did he need to get a divorce?”

The only time “Sarah” visited him in his bedroom, according to Shepard, Seybold became suspicious. “All he saw of her was her hands,” he said. “But instead of just fading away, she backed out of his room and around the corner. Ghosts don’t do that, do they?”

The case went to trial in November 1927.

Moore claimed that Seybold came to establish a “spiritualistic class room,” but that he soon began claiming healing powers of his own. She admitted she had been the recipient of gifts and loans secured by mortgages, but denied having hoodwinked Seybold. Witnesses testified, however, that Moore had shown them devices used in her séances, including a speaking trumpet with a rubber hose and a star that glowed with luminous paint.

“An Aged Farmer Loses his Battle with the Spooks,” the Wichita Eagle reported Nov. 17. “Superlative advice might come from the trusted sources of the spirit world, but all of Seybold’s business transactions were drawn in black and white.”

The judge, J.E. Alexander, ruled Seybold had no case because he had reached a compromise settlement with Moore before bringing his suit. Any question of spectral evidence was not considered. Even if fraud had been involved in summoning “Sarah,” it was not for the court to decide whether spirit communication was possible or had been practiced by Moore.

While Seybold’s faith in Moore was shattered, he remained an ardent spiritualist. He later married again, this time to a woman named Dollie who was an ordained spiritualist minister.

“He was looking for something,” Shepard said. “I think we all desire to connect with something beyond ourselves.”

In the years he’s been investigating the paranormal, Shepard said, he’s run into only three people he considered true mediums. One of them is a woman in Topeka, and when she does her readings for groups of 30 or 50 people, she doesn’t turn the lights off.

“Real paranormal research isn’t done in the dark,” he said. “They want the lights on. They want to see what’s happening around them. They’re trying to answer the questions we’re still searching for. Where do we go when we die? Is there life after death?”

Shepard said he was both a believer and a skeptic. He says he believes there are spirits out there, but that he doesn’t necessarily believe every story that’s told to him.

But there is still mystery to the “ghost bride” case, he said.

What was Seybold’s son’s name, and how did he die? What was Sarah’s last name? Seybold said he knew her during his youth in Dayton, but there’s no evidence from him of how she crossed over — or whether she existed at all.

We may never know.

Seybold died in 1941, aged 85, of lingering injuries suffered when he was struck by a car a year earlier at Third and Broadway in Wichita. Moore moved to California, where she died in 1974, at San Diego. She was 83.

A century after Seybold attended that first séance in Wichita, it might be easy for us to dismiss him as a fool. Here in the modern and allegedly rational age, we would never fall for such tricks. Right?

But there are people who fall in love with their AI chatbots. This year, a Colorado man “married” his digital companion, with the approval of his real-world wife. And the MIT Technology Review cautions that it’s easy to stumble into an emotional relationship with a digital assistant.

We’re all looking for something, whether it’s “Sarah” or “Siri.”

Perhaps in a hundred years, some cyber columnist will look back and be incredulous that any chatbot could ever fall for an ephemeral something made of meat and bone.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Three frogs, a shark, a unicorn and a Tyrannosaurus rex dance in front of a line of heavily armoured police in riot gear.

A grim-faced President Donald J. Trump looks out at the reader, under the headline “LAW AND ORDER.” Graffiti pictured in the corner of the White House Facebook post reads “Death to ICE.” Beneath that, a photo of protesters, choking on tear gas. And underneath it all, a smaller headline: “President Trump Deploys 2,000 National Guard After ICE Agents Attacked, No Mercy for Lawless Riots and Looters.”

Soon after the NFL’s announcement that Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny would headline the Super Bowl halftime show, conservative media outlets and Trump administration officials went on the attack.

Salon's Amanda Marcotte says that MAGA fury over Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny headlining the Super Bowl and their "fake" alternative to it shows how "pitifully out of touch" they are with pop-culture and that, she says, is a ray of hope for the future.

Turning Point USA, the ultra MAGA far-right organization founded by the late influencer Charlie Kirk, has announced "The All American Halftime Show," something Marcotte notes has neither a lineup nor a location yet.

What it does have, however, she says, is a "groundswell of racist rage," in response to the anti-MAGA reggaeton star.

"Mr. Bunny, whose real name is Benito Martínez Ocasio, raps and sings almost exclusively in Spanish," Marcotte explains. "The delicate snowflakes of the right react to that language, which is spoken at home by over 40 million Americans, like it’s the summer sun swiftly melting them into the whiniest vapor imaginable."

Reaction to the announcement of TPUSA's own halftime show included a "hyperbolic flurry" "from MAGA followers, hoping that hate alone would somehow produce an entertaining alternative to one of the most popular artists in the world," Marcotte says.

Marcotte quotes one such reaction from someone "who presumably voted for a thrice-married adulterer for president," Marcotte snaps.

That reaction: "Finally, a wholesome family halftime show during football. The demonic evilness has to stop and be wholesome and make people smile and feel comfortable watching something."

And while "Anything in English" was the first option in TPUSA's website poll on what genre of music their fans would like to hear at their proposed halftime show, some suggested 90s Christian-leaning rock band Creed, while others, Marcotte says, offered "a murderers’ row of has-beens like Papa Roach, Nickelback, Staind . . ."

"Basically, the same array of CDs you’d find in the floorboards of the least dateable guy you knew in the 1990s," Marcotte quips.

Mocking MAGA who fell for a satirical meme advertising MAGA musicians Kid Rock, Ted Nugent and "A Guest Appearance by Measles," Marcotte says "Not everyone was begging for acts you’d usually expect to headline a cruise ship advertised to people who graduated college when Bill Clinton was president."

"Some people wanted music that's even more unpopular," Marcotte notes, including "worship music."

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) suggested replacing Bad Bunny with 82-year-old country singer Lee Greenwood of "God Bless the U.S.A." fame, Marcotte remarks that "it was pathetic to pretend this is a factual reflection of current American trends in pop music."

MAGA being so out of touch, she writes, "reflects a small ray of hope in our bleak political moment."

"MAGA’s relationship with pop culture only has two forms: Complete cluelessness and/or resentment that most people think their taste stinks. This matters, because it’s been a truism on the far-right for decades now that capturing the culture is the key to obtaining their larger political goals."

The Christian right, she says, "holds that is crucial for conservative Christians to control pop culture." And not just with young people, notes Marcotte.

But MAGA's foray into the late-night comedy audience, "which tends towards the AARP demographic," was another complete failure, she says.

"Hundreds of thousands of dollars were poured into five pilot episodes of 'The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas,' hosted by a far-right author who specializes in faux-history books marketed as Christmas gifts for MAGA grandfathers who will never read them," Marcotte says.

"The show — featuring people who were famous decades ago, like Carrot Top or Danny Bonaduce — was so terrible that even people who thought there could be a market for Christian nationalist “comedy” gave up on financing it."

Another failure, Marcotte says, is "the Daily Wire, a media company founded in part by MAGA wunderkind Ben Shapiro," whose "mistakes began when they started to yearn for a role in pop culture, a space their existing audience doesn’t understand and often actively hates."

Marcotte says that not all conservatives are challenged when it comes to making art, "but MAGA couldn’t be better designed to repel the creative urge."

"Bad Bunny isn’t just alienating to MAGA because he makes Spanish-language music. Reggaeton is the perfect encapsulation of how real artists embrace difference . . . It’s a genre that emerged from people combining hip-hop, dancehall reggae and all manner of Latin American genres, like salsa and merengue. It’s what comes from learning from the past but striving for the future, two modes of thought that MAGA rejects out of hand," she says.

MAGA, instead, she writes, "would rather beg for a halftime program that sounds so boring that even the people clamoring for it now probably won’t watch it when it happens. You can bet that most Americans, meanwhile, will be wiggling their hips to 'Dákiti.'"

Fascism doesn't necessarily come about because of a military coup d'etat like the overthrow of socialist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. In many cases, far-right extremists are — unlike Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet — voted into office.

In Germany, Adolf Hitler's rise came about gradually. The 1972 movie "Cabaret" (directed by Bob Fosse and based on the play) depicts Berlin in 1931, before Hitler toppled the Weimar Republic and made Germany a fascist dictatorship. One thing the film brings out is the fact that in 1931, some Germans were sounding the alarm about the advances Hitler was making — while others were going along to get along.

In a guest op-ed/essay published by the New York Times on October 15, journalist Jonathan Freedland looks back on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and lessons of the German resistance that, he stresses, are still important in 2025.

"As authoritarian rulers gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey, but even in the United States, a question from the 20th Century has resurfaced in the 21st — one that presses on individuals as well as institutions," Freedland explains. "Put simply, who bends the knee to tyranny and who stands up to it? A clue can be found in an extraordinary episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years."

Freedland recalls that in Nazi Germany back in September 1943, a "loose grouping of 10 or so friends and acquaintances drawn from German high society" met for a tea party. Most of them, according to Freedland, "shared willingness to defy Hitler, in ways large and small" — but they "were unaware that one of them was poised to betray all the rest to the Gestapo."

"That act would lead to arrest and jail and, for several of those present that day, death, whether by the guillotine or the hanging rope," Freedland writes. "Its ramifications would eventually reach the apex of the Nazi state. The core mystery that runs through this story is not just the identity of the betrayer, but also, why people of privilege and rank, who could so easily have kept their heads down, risked everything. Had they fallen in line, their fortunes, careers and country estates likely would have remained intact. They could have survived the war unscathed. But they chose another path."

Freedland laments, however, that "most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler," but rather, "largely fell in line behind the Nazis."

"But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women," Freedland writes, "it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president."

Jonathan Freedland's full op-ed/essay for The New York Times is available at this link (subscription required).

Conservatives often mock the physical appearances of liberals and progressives, and vice-versa. While the right stereotypes Millennial left-wing activists as having purple hair and a lot of tattoos, liberals and progressives point to the stereotypical American flag shirts worn by people on the right.

But in an article published by The Guardian on October 15, journalist Einav Rabinovitch Fox describes a trend on the right that is different from stereotypical conservative attire: "fascist" fashion.

"Fascism is back in style," Fox reports. "Forget the old symbols: swastikas, nooses, Confederate flags, skinheads' shaved heads and combat boots. Extremism has a new look, and it is as fashionable as ever. Today's extremist styles are more diverse and more subtle. Beyond t-shirts that advertise blatant racism, polo shirts with coded symbols create a shared in-group identity and signal support of violence to other believers."

Fox adds, "Tradwife-style prairie dresses and beauty regimens promote conservative visions of family. Clothing is a powerful tool to spread fascist ideas to promote authoritarianism and recruit new members to this cause."

According to Fox, the "the far right's weaponization of fashion" has a long history, going back to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 19th Century.

"Fascist movements have long understood the power of aesthetics," Fox explains. "In 1920s Italy, Benito Mussolini harnessed black shirts and the ancient Roman symbol of the fasces — a bundle of sticks with an axe, which stands for power and authority — to build his power and his brand. German clothier Hugo Boss, a card-carrying Nazi, designed the uniforms of the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary and the Hitler Youth. Hate came with a slick, tailored look."

Fox continues, "In the U.S., the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan and burning crosses have long been trademarks of white supremacy. In the 1980s, the original fascists' skinhead successors appropriated and repurposed bomber jackets, shaved heads and combat boots as their distinct form of military-ish chic. Now, welcome to fascist fashion 3.0."

According to University of Georgia professor Monica Sklar, these 2025 fashion express one's sense of identity.

Sklar told The Guardian, "The idea is not being quite a subculture but to be embedded in the power structure. Instead of coding things to move away from the masses, this fashion is coding things to move into the masses."

Read Einav Rabinovitch Fox's full article for The Guardian at this link.

A new album by Woody Guthrie (1912–1967), perhaps the most influential US folk artist, was released late last summer. Woody at Home, Vol. 1 & 2 contains songs – some already known, others previously unreleased – the artist recorded from 1951 to 1952 on a tape recorder he received from his publisher. A version of the famous “This Land Is Your Land” (1940), with new verses, is among the tracks.