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Mass shootings and other atrocities still afflict the country. But before Trump ran for office, that kind of violence usually emerged from the most troubled, most isolated people in society. Many killers found their inspiration online, at the extremesnot from anybody competing seriously for the top jobs in U.S. politics.

Politicians who ran as outsiders took extra care to distance themselves from anyone or anything implicated in violence. Ross Perot had no truck with that kind of extremism when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. He may have held some cranky ideas, but his political behavior was straight-arrow. Anti-Iraq war groups hurled themselves into door-knocking, get-out-the-vote drives, and online fundraising and advertisingnothing like the turbulence of the anti-Vietnam protests of the 1960s.

In 2008, Barack Obama faced intense scrutiny as a presidential candidate over his acquaintance with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who had been leaders of the domestic terrorist group Weather Underground in the 1960s. They had detonated bombs. The Weathermen never succeeded in hurting anyone outside their own organizationthree members of whom were killed by accidentbut that record was due more to good luck than good intentions. At one of the debates between Obama and Hillary Clinton that year, the moderator, George Stephanopoulos, pressed Obama to explain how he could have served for three years with Ayers on the board of an educational foundation and done a campaign event in the Ayers-Dohrn living room. Obama answered,

This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, whos a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. Hes not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis. And the notion that somehow, as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesnt make much sense, George.

Yet that was not enough for some. First Clinton, then the Republican nominee John McCain, questioned Obamas judgment and character. McCains running mate, Sarah Palin, accused Obama of palling around with terrorists. That charge was exaggerated to absurdity. But it was founded on a recognition that palling around with terrorists would be a bad thing for a president to do, if true. (The final word on its untruth was spoken by Ayers himself in 2013. Obamas not a radical. I wish he were, but hes not.)

A dozen years later, Trump draws support not from people with violent pasts, but from people with violent presents. He thanks and praises them. More than any politician since the days of Lester Maddox and Orville Faubus, Trump made violence integral to his political appeal from the beginning to the end of his presidential career. This is truly a change in American lifeand possibly a change that will be hard to undo.

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Its Not Only Trump on Trial - The Atlantic

Fear was the overwhelming emotion Alvin Major felt when, on a chilly November morning in 2012, he went on strike at the Brooklyn KFC where he worked.

Everybody was scared, said Major. He may have been fearful, but what Major didnt know was that he was about to make American history an early leader in a labor movement that some historians now see as the most successful in the US in 50 years.

Major was paid just $7.25 an hour as a cook at KFC, but the consequences of losing his job were dire, as his family was already struggling to make the next months rent. Everybody was scared about going back to work, he said. Nobody visualized what this movement would come to.

The New York strike by hundreds of majority Black and brown New York fast-food workers was, at the time, the largest in US history but it would be dwarfed by what was to come. Two years later, strikes had spread across America, and fast-food workers in 33 countries across six continents had joined a growing global movement for better pay and stronger rights on the job.

In eight years, what became the Fight for $15 movement has grown into an international organization that has successfully fought for a rise in minimum wage in states across the US, redefined the political agenda in the US, and acted as a springboard for other movements, including Black Lives Matter. It now stands perilously close to winning one of the biggest worker-led rights victories in decades.

This Tuesday, fast-food workers will walk out again, hoping to push through a change that will affect tens of millions of American workers.

For Major, now 55, it all began in a hall in Brooklyn, where union and community activists had convened a meeting of fast-food workers to see what pressure they could bring on an industry notorious for its low wages and poor conditions, and a state that had shown those workers little interest.

With a platform to speak, the workers talked about how you had to be on food stamps, get rent assistance, all these kinds of things, and were working for these companies that are making billions, said Major.

At one point, a worker showed the burns on his arm he had suffered at work. In a show of solidarity, workers across the room others rolled up their sleeves to show their scars too. Even when injured on the job, workers said, they were too scared to take time off.

This was not how Major imagined America to be when he moved to the US from Guyana in 2000. In our family, with 14 kids, my dads wife never worked a day. My dad used to work, he took care of us, we had a roof over our head, we went to school, we had meals every day, he had his own transportation.

In America, the greatest, most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, he found [that] you have to work, your wife has to work, when your kids reach an age they have to work and still you could barely make it.

Industry lobbying allied to Republican and until relatively recently Democratic opposition has locked the USs minimum wage at $7.25 since the last raise in 2009. Now a raise to $15 looks set to be included in Joe Bidens $1.9tn Covid relief package although it will still face fierce opposition.

Even Biden, who campaigned on the raise, has expressed doubt about whether it can pass. But more progressive Democrats including longtime champion Senator Bernie Sanders are determined to push it through, and it remains in the House Covid relief bill.

The stakes are huge. The Congressional Budget Office said this week that 27 million Americans would be affected by the increase, and that 900,000 would be lifted out of poverty at a time when low-wage workers and especially people of color have suffered most during the pandemic. The CBO also said the increase would lead to 1.4m job losses and increase the federal budget deficit by $54bn over the next 10 years.

Other economists have disputed the CBOs job-loss predictions the Economic Policy Institute called them wrong, and inappropriately inflated. The long-running debate about the real cost of raising the minimum age will no doubt continue. What is certain is that Biden will face enormous political blowback if his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage falls so early in his presidency a promise that during his campaign he argued was central to his plans to address racial inequality.

That backlash will also cross party lines at least outside Washington. The US may be as politically divided as it has been since the civil war, but polling shows the majority of Americans support increasing the minimum wage no matter their chosen party. In November 60% of voters approved a ballot initiative to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2026 even as they voted to re-elect Donald Trump.

More people voted for that ballot initiative than voted for either presidential candidate in the state. With Florida, seven states plus the District of Columbia have now pledged to increase their minimum wage to $15 or higher, according to the National Employment Law Project (Nelp) and a record 74, cities, counties and states will raise their minimum wages in 2021.

The movement, and this widespread support, has changed the political landscape, pushing Democratic politicians, including Biden, Hillary Clinton and the New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, to back a $15 minimum wage, against their earlier qualms.

Cuomo called a $13 minimum wage a non-starter in February 2015. By July, he was racing California to get it into law.

In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Clinton went from supporting a raise to $12 an hour to $15 as Sanders made ground on the issue. Even Saturday Night Live parodied the pair arguing about who was most for a $15 higher wage.

Big companies including Amazon, Target and Disney have all moved to $15, or pledged to do so. One of Bidens first executive orders called for federal contractors to pay employees a $15 minimum wage. The federal holdout would be the movements biggest win to date, but there is little arguing that they have made significant progress without it not least for Alvin Major, who now has a union job earning over $17 an hour working at JFK airport and who says he is no longer worried about his bills.

For Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), this is the David and Goliath story of our time. She puts the public support down to the pervasiveness of underpaid, low-wage work.

Every family in America knows somebody thats trying to make ends meet through a minimum-wage job. And the pandemic has revealed that essential work in a way that many people hadnt noticed before, and they now understand how grocery store clerks, nursing home workers, janitors, airport workers, security officers, delivery drivers [and] fast-food workers are all people trying to do the very best job they can, and provide for their families.

The SEIU has been a longtime funder and supporter of Fight For $15 and for Henry, the first woman to lead the SEIU, the fight for a higher minimum wage is just the beginning of a greater push for workers rights not least the right to join unions, in a service sector where women and people of color make up a disproportionate number of workers.

Eighty per cent of our economy is driven by consumer spending. Service and care jobs are the dominant sectors in the US economy, and we have to create the ability of those workers to join together in unions in this century, just like auto, rubber and steel were the foundation in the last century, she said.

If the US Congress cant see what the American people are demanding, in terms of Respect us, protect us, pay us, then theyre going to have a political price to pay in 2022, she added. Our nations leaders need to get this done. Congress has used its rules to pass trillions of dollars in tax cuts for billionaires and massive corporations, so now its time for our nations leaders to give tens of millions of essential workers a raise.

Backing Henry will be a younger generation of activists who cut their teeth in the Fight for $15 movement and have used it as a springboard into a political debate that is now centered around racial and economic justice. One of those leaders is Rasheen Aldridge, one of the first to take action when the Fight for $15 spread to St Louis, who was elected to Missouri state assembly last November.

Aldridge was working at a Jimmy Johns restaurant in 2013 when he was approached by a community organizer asking him about his pay and conditions. Aldridge had recently been humiliated by a manager who took pictures of him and a co-worker holding signs they were forced to make, saying they had made sandwiches incorrectly and had been 15 seconds late with a drive-through order. It was so dehumanizing and just a complete embarrassment, said Aldridge.

The organizer talked about the strikes in New York, Chicago and elsewhere, and suggested the same could happen in conservative Missouri.

I thought he was crazy, said Aldridge. But he also thought: I have to do something. The worst thing that can happen is what? I get fired. And, its unfortunate, but I can find another job, another low-wage job, because theres just so many of them unfortunately that exist in our country and our city.

By 2014, Aldridge was a leader in the local minimum wage movement and building a network of contacts. Some of them were working in a nearby McDonalds in Ferguson that was next to the Ferguson Market and Liquor store where Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who had graduated from high school eight days earlier, was shot dead by the police after leaving the store with an allegedly un-bought package of cigarillos.

Aldridge heard the police cars rushing to the scene. The shooting led to months of unrest and, coming after the high-profile killing of other Black people, was a turning point for the Black Lives Matter movement. I remember I was in high school and I was wearing a hoodie and said, Im Trayvon, said Aldridge, referencing the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old shot dead by a neighborhood watch guard in Sanford, Florida.

I think after Ferguson, it really took off in a different way. I think the way we resisted in Ferguson was like no other, said Aldridge. Aldridge became an early BLM organizer in Ferguson. If it wasnt for the Fight for $15, though, Im not sure if I would have went out to Ferguson as quick as I did and would have been out there as long as I did.

For the freshman representative, Fight for $15 and BLM are the same fight.

You cant really talk racial injustice without talking economic injustice, he said. You cant forget that those same black workers still live in the same community that is oppressed, that is over-policed. Those workers were the same workers that also went to the streets of Ferguson, have protested, because they feel like Mike Brown could have been them, regardless if they was working at McDonalds or if they was working at a healthcare facility, said Aldridge. Its all connected.

Hopefully President Biden really follows through and does it, and makes it possible for everyone all across the state, all across this country, to make a livable wage. To not have so much burden on their back, especially in the midst of a pandemic.

For labor historian Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of A History of America in Ten Strikes, the Fight for $15 is one of the most significant victories for workers in 50 years. Although he has caveats.

It has been a huge success in conjunction with other issues in reshaping narratives around economic equality in America, he said. From Occupy Wall Street to the Fight for $15 to the #MeToo movement to BLM, Loomis sees a building movement for greater equality. For the first time in a half-century we are beginning to move in the right direction on this, in a way that, forget about Republicans, did not exist not only under Obama but under Clinton or Carter, said Loomis. This is the farthest left economic platform than anything you have seen since the 60s.

But, as he points out, the $15-an-hour wage Major and others were fighting for in 2012 is worth less than it was back then due to inflation, and will be worth even less in 2025, when a lot of states aim to hit that level. Nor has the campaign managed to establish unions in many fast-food outlets at least not yet. The answer is you just keep pressuring, said Loomis. In other words, dont be satisfied with $15. It is time for 20.

Many workers caught up in the movement are exhausted. While their hard-fought successes have made a big difference, many have been hit hard by the pandemic. Now they are worried that some have made gains, others will be left behind.

Management just has a way of knocking you down, making you feel useless, you are not worth $15

Back in 2010, Adriana Alvarez was earning $8.50 an hour at McDonalds in Chicago. The city voted to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour by July this year and Alvarez is now on $15.15.

Like many restaurant workers, she has seen her hours cut during the pandemic. But she is hopeful about the future. Before Covid-19, when her wages went up, I was able to fill up the fridge a little more, she said. She took her son to Winter Wonderfest, a gigantic annual event where Chicagoans can temporarily forget the citys bitterly cold winter and go ice skating and take carnival rides. It was something I had never been to. He had a blast. Hes scared of heights. He said, mummy, I have to try it. I have to get rid of my fear.

But the journey to her somewhat better life has been hard for Alvarez. Before the Fight for $15, she said managers regularly asked workers to work off the clock to finish jobs they hadnt completed on their shift for no pay. There was more shouting, more hostility. That has stopped now. They know we can show up with 50 people in a store, she laughed.

Along the way, she has met senators, she has a picture with Sanders, been on a call with Biden, welcomed the pope to the US and met workers from different industries, from teachers to airport and healthcare workers, who are also fighting for a better deal. She too has been surprised that the fight has been so successful. When people first started telling her they wanted $15 an hour, she said she told them they were crazy.

Management just has a way of knocking you down, making you feel useless, you are not worth $15, she said.

Now, hopefully, she said finally these politicians are doing what they should be doing. Last time it [the minimum wage] was raised was 2009. Its about time. Everything else has been going up. People have to work two or three jobs just to get by.

Does she feel like part of history?

Hopefully it makes history, said Alvarez. But I dont think Im part of history. Im tired, Im tired of being mistreated, of being underpaid and overworked. We want that $15 and a union. I guess you dont think about the whole history part until after its been done.

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'Hopefully it makes history': Fight for $15 closes in on mighty win for US workers - The Guardian

The people Weiss wrote about targeted both Clintons, but there was always a special venom reserved for Hillary, seen as a feminist succubus out to annihilate traditional family relations. An attendee at the 1996 Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, Its well-established that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does. Running for Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trumps secretary of the interior, described her as the Antichrist. (He later said he was joking.) Trump himself called Clinton the Devil.

For Clinton, these supernatural smears are part of an old story. This is rooted in ancient scapegoating of women, of doing everything to undermine women in the public arena, women with their own voices, women who speak up against power and the patriarchy, she said. This is a Salem Witch Trials line of argument against independent, outspoken, pushy women. And it began to metastasize around me. In this sense, Frazzledrip is just a particularly disgusting version of misogynist hatred shes always contended with.

Nor is the claim that shes a murderer new; its been an article of faith on the right ever since the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, an aide to Bill Clinton and a close friend of Hillarys. Recently I spoke to Preston Crow, who, when he was a graduate student in 1994, created one of the first anti-Clinton websites, where he posted about things like the Clinton body count. (He has since become a Democrat, and he voted for Hillary in 2016.) Once you start following the conspiracy theories, its fairly similar, he told me. QAnon took it several steps farther.

Greene now claims that she no longer believes in QAnon. In a speech on Thursday, before the House voted to strip her of her committee assignments, she blamed her claims that leading Democrats deserve to die for their role in a diabolic pedophile ring on her inability to trust the mainstream media. I was allowed to believe things that werent true, she said.

To my surprise, Clinton thought Greenes passive account of her own radicalization wasnt entirely absurd. We are facing a mass addiction with the effective purveying of disinformation on social media, Clinton said. I dont have one iota of sympathy for someone like her, but the algorithms, we are now understanding more than ever we could have, truly are addictive. And whatever it is in our brains for people who go down those rabbit holes, and begin to inhabit this alternative reality, they are, in effect, made to believe.

Clinton now thinks that the creation and promotion of this alternative reality, enabled and incentivized by the tech platforms, is, as she put it, the primary event of our time. Nothing about QAnon or Marjorie Taylor Greene is entirely new. Social media has just taken the dysfunction that was already in our politics, and rendered it uglier than anyone ever imagined.

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Opinion | QAnon Believers Are Obsessed With Hillary Clinton. She Has Thoughts. - The New York Times

It was utterly shocking to read the headlines: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clintons new production company HiddenLight has acquired the rights to Gayle Tzemach Lemmons forthcoming book Daughters of Kobani, a nonfiction work about female Kurdish fighters written by a white American woman.

During the Clinton administration, the U.S. sent Turkey weapons that it used with U.S. knowledge to slaughter tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy their villages. Where was Ms. Clinton all these years? Will her movie shed light on how America has treated Kurds? Will she stay loyal to Kurdish feminism, which is far removed from Corporate Feminism? Will she include Kurdish writers, actors and filmmakers or will she exclude Kurdish women from a TV drama about Kurdish women?

As the author of the recently published Daughters of Smoke and Fire, which weaves fifty years of modern Kurdish history, and the first Kurdish woman to publish a novel in English, I carry the heavy burden of both representation and education. Ever since my debut novel was released in May, I have heard from numerous audience readers and interviewers that the only thing readers really know about Kurds is that Americans have betrayed you.

Stateless Kurds have been overlooked in the mainstream media, except for when represented as victims of the Iraqi dictators genocide in the 90s and as girls with guns in the past few years, the all-female militia defeating one of the most vicious forces of our time, the Islamic State group (also known ISIS or ISIL). Its true that America has backstabbed the Kurds repeatedly over the past century, most recently in Oct. 2019 when former president Trump ordered American troops to withdraw from Rojava, the Kurdish region of northern Syria, and leave Kurds at the mercy of Turkey. Trump did this after Kurds globally hailed as the most effective ground forces against ISIS sacrificed over 11,000 lives to fight ISIS.

In 2007, the U.S. allowed Turkey to carry out a heavy bombing campaign against Iraqi Kurds. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger first armed the Kurds to rise against Saddam Hussein and then let 40,000 of them die as he made a deal with the Shah of Iran and withdrew his support. The Treaty of Lausanne, which the U.S. supported in 1923, denied Kurds a country what the 1920 Treaty of Svres had promised. The treaty subjected us to a century of unimaginable suffering at the hands of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, from gassing and genocide to mass incarcerations, systemic suppressions and cultural genocide.

When speaking to readers about the Kurds, I have to explain too much: why were no longer on the map, why our voices are mutilated, why our women have to fight in the 21st century and dont get a chance to allow their creativity to flourish. My book is dedicated to Kurdish women for everything we have been fighting national chauvinism of the states ruling us, male chauvinism, war, poverty, displacement and more.

Yes, America has betrayed the Kurds eight times, but theres much more to us than that. We are masters of rising from our ashes. We know how to be resilient, and a world ravaged by a pandemic has much to learn from us. Read our stories not only the ones written about us, but also, and more importantly, those written by us.

Thats not to say I dont value allies. If someone with a large platform tells our stories with enough sensitivity and responsibility, public awareness may reduce the number of attacks on us. They can do a lot of good for Kurds, for minorities, for humanity. But please dont talk about minorities as if we arent here; as if we can only be talked about, never talked to; as if movies made by us are not as valuable as those made about us; as if we can only be third person, and never first person.

Ava Homa is an activist, a journalist and the critically acclaimed author of Daughters of Smoke and Fire (HarperCollins, 2020).

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Will Hillary Clinton tell the whole truth in her TV drama about Kurds? - Toronto Star

Americas latest first lady is breaking with tradition as the first presidential spouse to keep her job while in the White House.

Jill Biden, who has a doctorate in education, is an English professor at a community college near Washington.

I think in particular, the fact that she is in a profession that is seen as a helping profession, that is seen as not innately a controversial profession, that she will be more accepted by the American people in continuing her professional life, says Katherine Jellison, a professor of history at Ohio University. Also, shes in a traditionally female profession teaching.

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The role of first lady is not a job that is applied for,and there is no salary. While therearentany specific job requirements, Americans often expect first ladies to be warm, motherly figures.

Americans see presidents as father figures and family members. That makes firstladiesmaternal figures and kind of the mothers of our country, says presidential historian Barbara Perry. Or if they're younger, like a Jacqueline Kennedy who was only 31 when she became first lady... then they see her as an older sister or a glamorous aunt.

Setting a standard

Eleanor Roosevelt was scorned by some for being an activist first lady who pushed for universal civil rights and social programs.

She was more liberal than her husband and constantly pushing on civil rights, generally, women's rights, labor rights, says Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia's Miller Center. She was always pressing for the social programs that she wanted and was much reviled because of that.

While many criticized Roosevelts political activities, she nonetheless set a standard for future first spouses.

When we had a couple of lower-profile first ladies immediately following Mrs. Roosevelt, I think a lot of Americans said to themselves, Well this isn't right. We want someone who's more in the public eye, someone who has at least a major project that they are advocating for, Jellison says.

First ladys role

When Jacqueline Kennedy moved into the White House in 1961, she was dismayed to find it furnished with few historical artifacts. Strongly feeling the executive mansion should reflect the artistic history of the country, Kennedy spearheaded a restoration of the White House and had a hand in preserving the neighborhood around it.

Ever since she embraced historic preservation in the 1960s, every first lady has adopted at least one public service project.

Lady Bird Johnson was an environmentalist who pushed for the preservation of wildflowers and other native plants. Nancy Reagan encouraged children toJust Say Notodrugs. Barbara Bush championed literacy for children and adults, while Michelle Obama promoted healthy eating by planting a White House vegetable garden.

Things that are related to women children, health literacy, drugs, gardening, historical preservation those are the things that Americans are comfortable with their first lady doing, says Perry. The American people have a limited role they want the first lady to play, and if she steps outside that role, they turn on her.

Hillary Clinton learned that firsthand in 1993 after President Bill Clinton appointed her to lead his task force on national health care reform. It was an unprecedented policy role for a first lady. But fierce public backlash, some of it personally directed at Clinton, herself, helped doom the plan, which never even got a floor vote in Congress.

We saw where that got her much hatred, people turned on her, it didn't pass, Perry says. And then, she had to go back to more soft-power approaches to being first lady.

Behind the scenes

While first ladies are often seen as motherly symbols of American womanhood, history shows these women can have considerable behind-the-scenes influence.

Melania Trump had a top national security adviser fired in her husband's administration because she didn't like the way her staff was treated on a foreign trip by this adviser. So, they can also determine who's around the president, says presidential historian Kate Andersen Brower, author of First Women. Nancy Reagan was really the human resources department for her husband. She decided who would be in and who was out.

And the same year she tried to push health care reform through Congress, Clinton made a quiet suggestion to her husband.

She's one of the reasons why Ruth Bader Ginsburg was on the Supreme Court, Andersen Brower says. She told her husband that she thought she would make an excellent Supreme Court justice.

Its an example of soft power and how private conversations between spouses can have a huge impact on the country.

These women are really strong. I think that they're constantly underestimated, and I think that's partially because women in our society are often underestimated, says Andersen Brower. I hope and I think that we are moving in the right direction having Jill Biden as a working woman who can be both things at the same time. She can be a wife, a supporting actor, but also a strong woman.

While Biden is redefining her current role, the biggest shake-up could come once a woman is elected president, Jellison says, and a man takes up the role of first spouse.

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Behind the Scenes, America's First Ladies Exert Powerful Influence - Voice of America