Rita Wilson has been releasing music for a while, but this is the first song of hers that we’ve shared. And the best she’s released!
Where’s My Country Song? is country-ish. But it mostly reminds us of the singer-songwriter vibe of Perezcious fave Beth Nielsen Chapman.
So beautiful!
Check it out above!
Then CLICK HERE to listen to more music from Rita Wilson!
The post Listen To This: Our First Rodeo! appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JAn update in the disappearance case of Jashyah Moore…
The mother of the 14-year-old girl who went missing from her home in New Jersey nearly a month ago was arrested for alleged child endangerment just one day after the teenager was found safe in New York City.
As we previously reported, the young girl had vanished while making a trip out for some groceries at Poppie’s Deli Store in East Orange, New Jersey on October 14. That day, Jashyah somehow lost the EBT card she used to pay for her items and her mom Jamie Moore told her to retrace her steps to find it. But when her daughter didn’t return after an hour, she went searching for Jashyah and eventually reported the teen missing to authorities:
“Nothing would keep her away from me. Nothing would keep her away from her little brother. And she’s such a smart girl. She would not stay out overnight. She would not want me to worry.”
Related: Chris Daughtry’s 25-Year-Old Daughter Hannah Found Dead In Her Nashville Home
The mom also insisted that her daughter was taken and slammed the police for not issuing an Amber Alert when she disappeared, ABC 7 New York reported:
“My daughter did not run away. An Amber Alert, right away, they should have put it in, but because it didn’t fit the criteria — what the hell is the criteria? For us to never see her again?”
But it turns out there was more to the story behind Jashyah’s disappearance…
Thankfully, the child was found safe in NYC on Thursday after a passerby recognized her and called the police — but authorities revealed at a press conference that she had actually run away from home and cut her hair to avoid detection. According to CNN, she stayed at several locations in New Jersey before residing at a shelter in Brooklyn, New York. Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens said at the time:
“The young lady appears to have run away, and she did not want to make herself known to anyone. She seemed to be more so at ease where she was.”
Hours after the press conference Friday, Jamie was then arrested and charged with two counts of second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, which includes allegations of physical abuse and neglect, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office told People. Before Jashyah went missing, Stephens told NBC News that the child protection agency did not have an open case against the family.
Now, Jamie is currently being held at the Essex County Correctional Facility. Jashyah and her 3-year-old brother also have been removed from her custody. No other details have been released about the new investigation at this time.
We’re keeping Jashyah and her brother in our thoughts and hope that they are now somewhere safe.
[Image via Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, East Orange City Hall/Facebook]
The post Mother Of Missing NJ Teen Jashyah Moore Arrested For Child Endangerment Just One Day After Her Daughter Was Found Safe appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JKim Kardashian got jokes when it comes to her three divorces!
While celebrating the upcoming nuptials of Simon Huck and his fiancé Phil Riportella Friday night, the 41-year-old Keeping Up With the Kardashians alum hopped on the mic for some impromptu words about marriage, noting that she may not have been the best person to dish out this kind of advice. In an Instagram Story video posted by guest and journalist Derek Blasberg, Kimmy Kakes can be seen grinning while wearing a royal blue gown and large, sparkling earrings with her hair slicked back in an up do. So chic!
While the audience applauds her, she turns to look back at Huck, who is clapping and laughing. And once the cheering clams down, the reality star joked at her own expense:
“I was a little bit confused because I haven’t really figured out this marriage thing myself, so I don’t know what kind of advice … I’m gonna give to you guys tonight.”
Related: Kanye West Has THOUGHTS On Kim Kardashian’s Law Career Dreams, Says ‘She’s Gonna Fail’
LOLz!!! We can see that her rumored beau Pete Davidson is rubbing off on her! Ch-ch-check out the brief video (below):
As you know, Kim first got hitched to Damon Thomas when she was just 19 years old. She then infamously married Kris Humphries in 2011 — but the pair broke up just 72 days after their wedding. Most recently, the KKW Beauty founder filed for divorce from Kanye West, with whom she shares North, Saint, Chicago, and Psalm. Even though they’ve called it quits, she has remained supportive of the 44-year-old rapper — even calling him “the greatest rapper of all time” on Saturday Night Live and appearing in a wedding dress at his Donda listening party. However, she also couldn’t resist poking fun about her ongoing split from Ye during her hosting debut, saying:
“I mean, I married the best rapper of all time. Not only that, he’s the richest Black man in America, a talented, legit genius, who gave me four incredible kids. So when I divorced him, you have to know it came down to just one thing: his personality.”
And he apparently did not take the dig well, clapping back on the Drinking Champs podcast recently:
“SNL making my wife say ‘I divorced him’ on TV because they just wanted to get that bar off and I never have seen the papers. We’re not even divorced. So how we — because [it’s] no joke to me, my kids want their parents to stay together. I want their parents — I want us to be together.”
Wonder what Kanye will have to say about her latest quip?! Reactions to her joke, Perezcious readers? Let us know in the comments (below)!
[Image via Kim Kardashian/Instagram, Ivan Nikolov/WENN, Will Alexander/WENN, WENN]
The post Kim Kardashian Pokes Fun At Her Three Divorces, Says She ‘Hasn’t Figured Out This Marriage Thing’ Yet appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JMy podcast cohost does not like Pim! Do U have a better nickname for Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson? This and much more on our latest podcast! CLICK HERE to watch this episode of The Perez Hilton Podcast with Chris Booker!
Or CLICK HERE to listen to the audio version!
Pim may not be forever, but hopefully My True 10 is! Get our new CBD gummies at MyTrue10.com
The post Pim Is Over Already? Pete Davidson & Kim Kardashian! | Perez Hilton appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JTaylor Lautner is getting hitched!
The Twilight alum announced the happy news on Instagram with a series of photos from when he popped the question to his longtime girlfriend and now fiancée Tay Dome. And based on the photos, it looks like he pulled out all the stops to make this proposal extra special! In the first picture, Lautner and Dome are surrounded by bouquets of roses and dozens of dimly lit candles as he knelt on one knee in front of a fireplace, and she put her hands over her mouth. The other picture captured an intimate moment between them of her wrapping her hands around the actor’s face. The backdrop also included a red light sign reading “Lautner” — soon to be Tay’s last name if they go the traditional route. (*cue the jokes about their names*)
In the caption of the snapshots, he wrote:
“11.11.2021. And just like that, all of my wishes came true.”
Related: You’ll Never Guess Who Kim Kardashian Brought As Her Date To Paris Hilton’s Wedding!
Sorry, BRB, literally swooning! Meanwhile, Dome also posted the image of her kneeling to embrace him, saying:
“my absolute best friend. I CANNOT WAIT TO SPEND FOREVER WITH YOU.”
Ch-ch-check out the romantic proposal photos (below):
So cute!!!
Naturally, the couple’s friends and family members expressed their excitement over the engagement in the comments section, with Mean Girls star Jonathan Bennett writing:
“Congratulations!!!!!!!! Welcome to the club!”
His sister Makena Lautner Moore added:
“y’all are a MATCH made in heaven…MY HEART HAS NEVER BEEN MORE FULL.”
Nikki Reed also congratulated her Twilight co-star on the milestone, commenting:
“Oh my goodness! This makes me want to cry! Wow!! Congrats to you both !!!!!!”
Related: Kristen Stewart Is Engaged To Dylan Meyer!
Patrick Schwarzenegger then offered up his services for the big day:
“I’M SO HAPPY FOR YOU! LOVE YOU. And yes I’ll be the flower boy.”
LOLz!!!
In case you didn’t know, the pair have been together since 2018 after first sparking rumors that they were an item after attending a wedding. They then confirmed the news shortly afterward, with Taylor posting a photo of himself kissing Tay as they rocked matching Halloween costumes.
Since then, they haven’t shied away from posting about their relationship on social media. The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl star celebrated the registered nurse’s birthday in March, penning a heartwarming post that read:
“Happy Birthday to this human from another planet. You are the most amazing soul I’ve ever had the honor of knowing. I strive to be more like you every day. This is going to be your best year yet and I can’t wait to experience it with you. Love, boy Tay.”
Congratulations on the engagement, Taylor and Tay!!!
[Image via Taylor Lautner/Instagram]
The post Taylor Lautner Is Engaged To Longtime Girlfriend Tay Dome! appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JJenelle Evans has not been having a good week.
One could argue that she hasn't been having a good decade, but let's just focus on what's happening right now, OK?
If you've been keeping up with Teen Mom 2's biggest mess, then you know that she got very, very upset yesterday after receiving some bad news about her latest business venture.
She'd been working for a while on a "clothing line," or really just some private label clothing that some company agreed to let her slap her name on, and next week she was all set to reveal the line.
Unfortunately for her, the company she was working with figured out that she's not, you know, a good person, and they canceled her line.
She announced all of this in a very dramatic TikTok video -- she explained the situation in her caption, and then the video was just her crying and looking at the camera.
The thing is that no one really feels all that sorry for her because these are consequences of her own actions.
Jenelle has been saying and doing truly terrible things for years and years now, and it makes total sense that most businesses wouldn't want to be associated with her after learning about those things.
Still, she seems to be having quite the pity party for herself, and part of that was reacting to a post shared by The Neighborhood Talk, a celebrity news Instagram.
The headline to their post read "Teen Mom Jenelle Evans Cries Her Lil Eyes Out After Her Clothing Line Was Canceled for Coming for LeBron James Over His Kyle Rittenhouse Comments," which was objectively hilarious.
But it also introduces a new level to Jenelle's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
OK, so you're probably familiar with the story of Kyle Rittenhouse, the guy who is currently on trial for shooting three people (and killing two of them) during a Black Lives Matter protest last summer in Wisconsin.
His trial has been a huge story this week, and many of those stories were about how much he cried in court.
LeBron James, like many others, commented on Rittenhouse's tears on Twitter, writing "What tears????? I didn't see one. That boy ate some lemon heads before walking into court."
He added some laughing emojis to cap off his joke, and Jenelle found the whole thing very offensive.
"My kids watched Space Jam and looked up to you," she admonished. "Now I know what type of person you are. #truth, oh and Mr. Jordan's version was WAY better lol."
She also added "Next time there's grown adults making fun of your kids ... don't try and defend them when you act the same way."
This take is dumb for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Kyle Rittenhouse is 18 years old, not a minor, and although he was 17 last year when he murdered two people, it's not like he's some innocent kid that's being made fun of for no reason.
It's also worth mentioning that David Eason made fun of Kaiser, her own child, to his face when he and Jenelle first started dating and she went on to marry him, so she doesn't exactly have room to talk on the subject.
Tons of people were calling her out for these comments, which seems to be why this page assumed they were the reason why her clothing line was canceled.
But as Jenelle explained in some videos she shared on her own Instagram today, there's more to the story.
"Y'all wanna try to cancel me for an opinion I have about somebody, just because he's your favorite basketball player," she began.
"I can give a sh-t less about basketball. I can give a sh-t less about who your favorite basketball player is. The fact that a grown adult is making fun of a minors is f-cked up. But yeah, carry on, carry on with your day."
Again, Rittenhouse is not a minor and also he killed two people, but for some reason, Jenelle seems positive that the real issue here is bullying.
In another video, she continued ranting, saying "And for you to make fun of me crying and then LeBron makes fun of him crying just goes to show that y'all don't give a sh-t about mental health awareness at all. And it's sick."
"And the whole world needs to f-cking understand exactly how to deal with mental illnesses, and making fun of them is the number one thing not to f-cking do."
Quick note: crying is not indicative of mental illness. Everyone cries. It's healthy to cry. You can't do horrible things and then be absolved of those things just because you cry about it.
In yet another video, she insisted that she never gave her opinion on Rittenhouse -- although if your instinct is to defend him against some harmless comments about his crying, that does say something -- and that her sole issue was with Lebron being "immature to minors."'
"I don't like that behavior, and I don't want my kids seeing that behavior or looking up to someone with that behavior," she said, once again forgetting about the kind of person she married.
Going back to the clothing line, she wanted to make it clear that her tweets to LeBron weren't the reason that it fell through.
She said that the line was canceled "because of my past, because I have people sending articles about my past. It has nothing to do with LeBron James, let me tell you."
With her customary smug smile, she asked "Do you think for a second the clothing line cares about basketball? No. Let me just inform you, they don't care about basketball. They probably don't even know who LeBron James is, honestly."
Could you even imagine being this delusional?
After making all of those videos, she made one final text post:
"My mental health is number 1," the post read. "Honestly I'm so depressed I need time away from social media. Pray for me. Thanks."
She deleted the videos, then made her accounts private.
This is probably the first smart thing she's said in all of this -- time away from social media would almost certainly do her some good, and of course it's important to take care of your mental health.
But besides that, it's just sort of difficult to feel sorry for Jenelle because again, all of the bad things that are happening now are just the consequences of her own actions.
And it's also difficult to hear her get up on that high horse about mental health awareness considering the completely reprehensible things she's said and done to other people, and especially what she's willingly exposed her children to.
Do you think she can ever come back from this?
https://ift.tt/eA8V8JA small Kurdish boy is sitting on the ground in a damp Polish forest, a few miles from the eastern border with Belarus. The air is heavy with cold and fog. The boy is crying.
Around the boy, sitting in a circle, are his parents, uncles, and cousins, all from the same village near Dohuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan. There are 16 of them, among them seven children, including a four-month-old infant and an elderly woman who can scarcely walk. They don’t speak Polish, or English. One of the boy’s relatives, a man named Anwar, speaks Arabic. Through a translator, Anwar says that the family has been in this forest, moving back and forth between Poland and Belarus, for two weeks. They have eaten nothing for the previous two days.
Surrounding the boy and his family is another circle, this one containing people with cameras. The people holding the cameras are Polish, Swedish, Slovene, German, Japanese, American. I am one of them. We were all given this precise location on Tuesday by Grupa Granica, a Polish volunteer organization created in the past couple of months to help migrants; its name simply means “Border Group.” The group’s spokesperson sent out text messages with the GPS coordinates of this family because they wanted as many journalists as possible to record the moment when Anwar asks the Polish border guards for asylum. He will hold up a sign, in English. The translator, Jakub Sypiański, also a member of Grupa Granica, will translate his request into Polish as well. Sypiański explains that if media are present, it will be more difficult for Polish border guards to ignore the request and to force Anwar, the boy, and the rest of the family back into the forest, back toward the border, as they have forced other, similar families back toward the border over the past several weeks. Sypiański tells me later that he has personally seen families ask for asylum, only to be taken back to the border immediately afterward.
The scene has a false kind of familiarity because we in the West have all seen this combination of players—migrants, journalists, humanitarian volunteers—in photographs or on television before. But the sequence of events that brought this particular small boy to this particular forest is very strange, when you think about it. So many tragedies were required to create the conditions for it, including wars in Iraq and Syria, the rise of Islamic extremism, and the failure of democracy in Belarus. Stranger still is that fact that this boy’s fate has been determined, and will go on being determined, by the political calculations of two people whom he will never meet, and whose names he surely does not know. One of them is Alexander Lukashenko, the dictator of Belarus. The other is Jarosław Kaczyński, the chairman of the Polish ruling party, the country’s de facto leader, the man who tells the Polish president and prime minister what to do.
Lukashenko’s brutality is far greater. Belarus’s dictator remains in power in his country only thanks to the violence he has used to suppress the large, sophisticated, and articulate democratic opposition. More than 800 political prisoners now sit in his jails. Many have been beaten or tortured. Thousands have moved abroad. The European Union and the United States have sanctioned him for these crimes, and now he is seeking revenge, not just against particular democracies but against democratic values more broadly, the values that he wants to defeat at home as well as abroad: respect for human rights, the rule of law, impartial justice.
Lukashenko seeks not only to show his contempt for these things but to destroy the international institutions that maintain them. Last May, he used his country’s air-traffic controllers to hijack an Irish commercial airplane and force it to land, in order to arrest a dissident onboard. And last summer, he launched a program of state-sponsored human trafficking designed not only to deceive people in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere about the ease with which they can get into the European Union via his capital, Minsk, but also to take their money along the way.
[Graeme Wood: The Ryanair hijacking pierced the delusion of flight]
To get to the Polish border, for example, Anwar said that his family traveled by bus from Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Istanbul in Turkey. There they would have purchased visas for Belarus and airline tickets to Minsk. Though Anwar did not say what he paid, others have been charged fees that represent, in that region, a small fortune. A recent documentary short, Visa to Nowhere, put together by Outriders, a Polish journalists’ collective, contains an interview with a Syrian who was living in a refugee camp in Lebanon but planning to travel to Europe via Belarus. He had paid $6,000—money collected from his extended family in Lebanon and Europe—for the travel package, and he was convinced it was worth it. He had been messaging people who had made the trip on Facebook, and they made it sound easy: “They suffered for some days, then they made it through Poland.” That seemed a small price to pay for what he wanted: “a dignified life.” Outriders also taped a travel agent in Beirut, who told them that a visa alone would cost $1,300—money that, presumably, goes to the Belarusian government.
Once they arrive in Minsk, the migrants stay in hotels, which they also pay for, though sometimes they sleep at the airport. Videos posted on social media have shown them clustered in large groups in central Minsk, and there are stories of them buying up rubber boots and winter clothes. What happens next is murky. Some pay to be taken to the border—Anwar said the cost was $300 for each car full of people—but others report having been escorted by uniformed men, probably border guards. When they arrive at the border fence, they are told to cross it—illegally. Trucks transport them along the border, and the Belarusian border guards help them to find deserted areas where crossing is easy. Anwar said that border guards used wire cutters to cut the border fence and allow his family to pass through. Others have been given wire cutters and told to do it themselves.
At that point, they have no other choice. They are not allowed to go to the formal border checkpoints to ask for asylum, though some ask to do so. They are not allowed to return to Minsk, even if they beg to be allowed to return home. The Belarusian border guards point guns in their faces, beat them and tell them they have no option. And so they start walking westward.
This human-trafficking project began last summer, initially on Belarus’s border with Lithuania, which, like Poland, is a member of the EU. The number of migrants at first was small. But as it grew, the Belarusian border guards began driving people to the Latvian border, and to the Polish border too. Now, with thousands of people arriving in Minsk from the Middle East each week, the situation is changing again. On Monday, the Belarusian border guards gathered hundreds of migrants together and orchestrated a mass assault on the border near the Polish town of Kuźnica. Last night, Belarusian border guards gave the migrants cans of tear gas to use against Polish border guards; they also turned on strobes and lasers so that the Poles couldn’t see what was happening. So far, the Polish police and soldiers who are now massed along the border have held the line. But hundreds of people remain camped along the border, waiting for—something.
Lukashenko’s tactics are diabolically cynical: weaponize human desperation, lure people into making a risky and dangerous journey, take their money, force them to break the law. On the Polish side, Kaczyński’s tactics are cynical too, but differently so. Like Lukashenko, the leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party also wants to remain in power. But because his country is still, for the moment, a democracy, he needs popular support. (Here I should state for the record that I am married to an opposition politician in Poland.)
One of the ways Kaczyński has built popular support in the past is through the use of fearful, anxious, and xenophobic rhetoric. At the time of the previous European migrant crisis in 2015, Kaczyński warned that refugees from Syria were carrying “parasites and protozoa”; he said they would use churches as “toilets.” This time around, the Polish interior minister and the Polish defense minister actually appeared together on the main evening news, on the taxpayer-funded state television channel, and solemnly played a clip from a film showing a man having sex with a horse. This, viewers were told, was a video found on a telephone in the forest, and it showed one of the migrants camped on the border. In reality, the clip came from a piece of bestiality pornography made in the 1970s and widely available on the internet. But the message was clear: These people are animals.
In this very narrow sense, the migration crisis is useful to Kaczyński. COVID-19 rates are rising again, inflation is very high, corruption is rampant, but now he can change the subject: Poland has been invaded by sick, diseased Muslims, and only I can fix it. In August, the government announced a policy of “pushback”: Anyone found illegally in Poland would be sent back to the border. In early September, the Polish government declared a state of emergency in the border areas, set up checkpoints, and prohibited journalists and humanitarian organizations from entering the locked-down area. In October, Kaczyński called for a “radical strengthening of the army” too.
Anne Applebaum: The disturbing new hybrid of democracy and autocracy
At the same time, Kaczyński has refused, on principle, to accept any help from the European Union, presumably because that would rob him of the only-I-can-fix-it narrative. But the EU has learned a lot since 2015. The EU’s border service, Frontex, is actually headquartered in Warsaw, and could offer assistance to Polish border guards. A spokesperson for the EU home-affairs commissioner told me that the resources of the European Asylum Support Office and other sources of emergency funding could be made available to the Polish government too. Lithuania and Latvia have taken advantage of these offers, but the Polish government wanted none of them. Nor has Polish diplomacy made any effort to galvanize a unified, international response: sanctions against Lukashenko, for example, or an EU-sponsored mass-information campaign across the Middle East. Instead, Polish party leaders carry on a petty war of words with the EU and barely speak to the Biden administration at all.
In domestic political terms, this might prove a success: The militarized rhetoric of war, invasion, and struggle, now used constantly on state television, seems to be helping to shore up the ruling party’s slipping poll numbers. But on the ground, this policy has created moral, humanitarian, and legal chaos. In reality, migrants who are “pushed back” to the Belarus border do not cross it, return to Minsk, and fly home. They can’t. Instead, they try repeatedly—eight, 10, 20 times—to cross the border. The Polish border guards periodically announce how many people they have stopped but really, these are the same people getting caught over and over again. Some run out of food: People from the Middle East are hardly in a position to live off the land in a Central European forest by hunting wild boar. Grupa Granica has collected reports of at least 13 deaths. On the Belarusian side there could be many more.
But the incompetence is just as bad as the chaos. Even on its own terms, “pushback” has failed disastrously. Lukashenko has not been deterred. On the contrary, Poland’s hybrid-war rhetoric seems to have encouraged him to find new ways to troll Polish border guards and pile in more Belarusian troops, as if this really were a war and they really were needed. Besides, Poland has a long border with Belarus, the resources of the Polish army and police are finite, and the migrants have a huge incentive to find a way into the EU: They are afraid they might die otherwise. A Warsaw taxi driver told me that he had already been asked if he wanted to get into the lucrative business of ferrying people across Poland, from the Belarusian border to the German border. He told me that he said no, but others have clearly made a different decision. Police in Germany report that more than 9,000 people have now entered that country after traveling from Poland via Belarus, almost all in the past two months. Some of those who do get through boast of their luck on social media, which encourages more to come.
A different kind of chaos has descended on the people who live in the border areas, both inside the strefa—the locked-down zone, which extends a couple of miles inside the country from its frontier with Belarus—and along its edges. This is a famously quiet, famously beautiful part of Poland. Białowieża, a national park along the border, contains the last remaining primeval forest in Europe, as well as the largest remaining herd of European bison. The region normally attracts bird-watchers, photographers, and artists, which is part of what makes the situation so jarring. Katarzyna Wappa, who lives in the famously charming town of Hajnówka, just outside Białowieża, now has to cross checkpoints and show ID in order to visit her grandmother. “Białowieża has more soldiers than inhabitants,” she told me. “All of the Białowieża hotels are full of soldiers, the stadium is now a tent city housing soldiers.”
But the armored cars rumbling past wooden houses offer nothing to local residents, nothing to help them cope with the surreal situation they find themselves in. The Polish government’s official policy is that no one gets through, so nothing has to be done. In fact, almost everyone in the area has encountered starving, disoriented people from all kinds of places—Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon—struggling across their fields and gardens, hiding behind trees. Sometimes they have become too weak to walk, or are too frightened to ask for help. How are they supposed to react? Wappa told me that she simply finds it impossible to do nothing: “If I know that someone is dying outside my fence, outside my garden, my town … I have no option. I can’t allow someone to die of hunger, thirst, or cold right next to me.” Besides, she said, “it’s not normal that saving someone’s life might be a crime.”
She is one of many local people who have organized makeshift warehouses, stockpiling food, water bottles, winter clothes, and cellphone batteries in spare rooms and garages. They have also improvised, together with Grupa Granica and volunteers from the rest of Poland, a miraculously efficient patrol system. Their phone numbers circulate on Arabic social media; groups of migrants pass them back and forth. When people become desperate, they call. Volunteers respond by carrying blankets, shoes, and thermoses filled with soup into the forest.
Some more experienced organizations, including the Polish Red Cross and a popular national charity, the Great Orchestra of Christmas Charity (known by the Polish acronym WOŚP), have created more formal systems to collect donations from around the country. The WOŚP warehouse that I visited was indeed filled with foil blankets, water bottles, and other supplies. This weekend a larger, more experienced medical-emergency NGO has announced that it will come to the border and help too. Still, the state is absent, international organizations are absent, and until now it’s mostly been amateurs trekking into the forests to help, mostly amateurs who are facing impossible medical, moral, and legal choices. Do they call for an ambulance when someone who is clearly ill begs them not to, because they fear being captured by the border guards? Do they bring food and water to a family of migrants camped in the forest—and then just go home and leave them there?
[Anne Applebaum: The French intellectual who refuses to look away]
Polish government policy has also created an information vacuum that volunteers have also been forced to fill. Grupa Granica now organizes press conferences and keeps in touch with dozens of international journalists. Yet it too is staffed by people who have never done anything like this before. Iwo Łoś, the organization’s press spokesperson, is a doctoral candidate in sociology who has postponed everything, including the submission of his thesis, to do what has suddenly become a full-time job. Sypiański, the translator, is also close to getting his doctorate in medieval history—he is an expert on relations between the Arab world and Byzantium—but has spent the past month at the border instead. Theoretically the border guards also have a spokesperson. But after our encounter with the Kurds in the forest, my Polish colleague texted her to ask what had happened to the family. We never received a response.
None of which is to say that this crisis has some easy, obvious alternative solution, because it does not. Neither Poland nor the rest of the EU can open its borders to the millions of people who would like to go there. Neither Warsaw nor Brussels should give in to blackmail from Minsk. The Polish government has every right to defend its borders, especially since the status of the people who have managed to cross them is murky. They have indeed broken the law and destroyed the fence. Although some would have a genuine case, many do not qualify for political asylum. They want to go to Germany because they have family there, because they think they can get jobs there, because the prospect of another decade in a refugee camp in Lebanon or Turkey is so grim. In any case, asylum is something you are meant to request when you reach the first country where you are safe. Some say they should have asked in Minsk, though that’s difficult to do when you are immediately bused to the border. Americans will recognize all of these dilemmas from their own border with Mexico.
But it is precisely because Lukashenko is a cynical autocrat who is using human beings as weapons, and precisely because his scheme is designed to undermine democratic values, that the Polish government’s response has been so disastrous. The democratic world can and should come up with a response to this kind of provocation based on respect for the rule of law, transparency, and human decency. To send people back, repeatedly, into a dangerous situation, knowing they might die, is immoral, in addition to being a violation of international law. To pretend that this is only a hybrid war, and not simultaneously a humanitarian crisis, is to misunderstand profoundly what is happening on the ground.
[Read: The West is failing Belarus]
Part of the answer, as I’ve said, could lie in a consolidated international response of a kind that the Poles should have called for months ago. Already, pressure from the EU seems to have persuaded Iraqi Airways to stop flights from Baghdad to Minsk, and Turkish Airlines says it won’t sell any more one-way tickets from the Middle East to Minsk either. But the strange fact that the Polish border remained for so long open to trade with Belarus also requires some examination. Why aren’t sanctions higher, stiffer, faster? Why has it taken the EU so long to impose more of them?
An even more important part of the answer might lie in speeding up and expanding the legal processing of migrants. In fact, many of the people who make it to Germany will have their cases examined, will be found not to merit asylum, and will then be sent back. This procedure will take a couple of months, which sounds like a lot unless you remember that similar procedures on the U.S.-Mexico border can take several years. What if an emergency system were created to make that process happen even faster? Those people who genuinely qualify for refugee status or deserve some kind of special consideration can then stay, while the rest would be sent home. The sight of large airplanes carrying people back to Erbil from Warsaw might finally persuadepersuade others not to come. David Miliband, the CEO of the International Rescue Committee, an organization that provides long-term aid to refugees around the world, told me that “the speed of processing is vital, so that those with the appropriate claims are quickly accepted, but those who do not qualify are just as quickly sent back.” In the meantime, no one would die in the forest.
There isn’t much time. If the situation does not change quickly, we may soon witness tragedy on a much broader scale. Video clips circulating online already seem to show Belarusian soldiers shooting in the air near the border. What if they start shooting straight across it? Russian troops appear to be exercising alongside Belarusian troops near the Lithuanian border. What if they swoop down to Krynki or Białowieża to defend their Belarusian allies? Even if a direct confrontation is avoided, a sharp change in the weather could create a different kind of crisis. Snow can fall in Poland in late November and December. Last year it did. If that happens, hundreds and possibly thousands of people are going to freeze to death.
But I began with a single Kurdish boy for a reason, so let me end with him too. For the truth is that that almost everyone with an interest in perpetuating this crisis, or in taking advantage of this crisis, or in profiting politically from this crisis doesn’t want you to see him. They want you to see masses, migrants,, or Muslims robbed of humanity and lacking faces and names. They want you to see “waves” of people, “hordes” of people, anonymous migrants who have allowed themselves to become bullets in a hybrid war. But a mass tragedy is really just a set of individual tragedies. Remember that when you see one starting to unfold.
Does anyone still remember the Chicago Seven?
They were a disparate group of radicals—some who knew each other, some who didn’t—who went to the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968 to spark trouble. Trouble did indeed erupt, although maybe not the exact trouble they had wanted. They were indicted and prosecuted. And then things went terribly wrong for the government.
The prosecution thought it was running a trial, a legal proceeding governed by rules. The defendants decided that they would instead mount a new kind of media spectacle intended to show total contempt for the rules, and to propagandize the viewing public into sharing their contempt. The prosecution was doing law; the defense countered with politics.
The indictment of Steve Bannon for contempt of Congress is the opening bell of a similar kind of fight over law, justice, and authority. The attack of January 6, 2021, to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power struck nearer the heart of American democracy than the disorder in the streets of Chicago had. In 1968, the worst of the violence was mostly initiated by police; in 2021, it was initiated by the pro–Donald Trump mob forcing a police officer to shoot to defend the officeholders it was his duty to protect. But though the details of the riots were different, there is a striking parallel between the gleeful contempt for legal authority of the far-left defendants of long ago and the pro-Trump authoritarian nationalists of today. Congress wants to hear from pro-Trump partisans about their advance knowledge, if any, of the January 6 attempt to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. At former President Trump’s direction, those partisans have adopted a no-cooperation strategy, pleading that the defeated ex-president should permanently enjoy the legal privileges of his former office.
That’s not a very smart legal strategy. But it’s not meant as a legal strategy. It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.
The Trump partisans start with huge advantages that the Chicago Seven lacked: They have a large and growing segment of the voting public in their corner, and they are backed by this country’s most powerful media institutions, including the para-media of Facebook and other social platforms.
Thanks to that advantage, the Trump partisans don’t need to convince much of anybody of much of anything. It won’t bother the Trump partisans that their excuses are a mess of contradictions. They say that nothing happened, and that it was totally justified; that Trump did nothing, and that Trump was totally entitled to do it. Their argument doesn’t have to make sense, because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society. That’s the game, and that’s how Bannon & Co. will play the game.
[David Frum: The real lesson of my debate with Steve Bannon]
Permission seeking and permission granting were exactly how January 6 happened in the first place. Trump supporters were gradually radicalized through a series of escalating claims:
Trump didn’t really lose.
The majority in a state legislature has the right to reverse that state’s election results if it does not agree with them.
The vice president can initiate that reversal process if he wants to.
If the vice president balks, kidnapping him and putting a gun to his head until he changes his mind is legitimate.
If the plot fails, any attempt to hold the would-be kidnappers to account is unjust political persecution.
Now, in 2021–22, the project is to repeat that kind of kaleidoscope shift of denial and justification. Like the Chicago Seven, Bannon understands the political power of ridicule and contempt. He’s not coming to trial to play by somebody else’s rules. If he does eventually testify about the events of January 6, he won’t play by the rules then, either.
Bannon and Trump’s strategy of distraction and denial won’t necessarily succeed. Most people recognize reality. But to prevent the strategy from working, it’s important to anticipate it and be ready for it.
The most important basis of national self-defense is to always keep in mind the limits of criminal prosecution to deal with political wrongdoing. Many things are wrong without being illegal—and certainly without being provably criminal. The criminal law rightly demands overwhelming evidence. Convicting people unable to recognize they were doing wrong can be very difficult.
The Robert Mueller investigation into Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election should’ve made particularly clear the inadequacy of the criminal process in a political context. The country needed to know from Mueller whether Donald Trump—as a businessman, candidate for office, and president—had improper connections to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mueller instead went looking for proof of a criminal conspiracy within the technical legal definition. But a businessman hoping for a giant payday from shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. A businessman lying on camera about his dealings with the shady characters around a foreign dictator is not a prosecutable crime. Being tipped off that the foreign dictator has potentially damaging information about a political opponent is not a prosecutable crime. Appealing on television to that dictator to hurry up and release that information is not a prosecutable crime. Once the statute of limitations has lapsed, even money laundering ceases to be a prosecutable crime.
Through all the long months of the Mueller investigation, people who followed the Trump-Russia story were led to hope that the thing would end with Trump doing a perp walk. Excited anti-Trump media sometimes inflated Americans’ expectations about what federal prosecutors could or would do. They sometimes overhyped rumors into reports. In doing so, they redirected attention from the need for coalition-building and vote-winning to a messianic hope: “Mueller is coming.” Only Mueller was not coming, because Mueller and the Trump Department of Justice had defined his job in a way that forbade him from looking at the stuff that mattered most: intelligence risks rather than criminal charges, and the financial transactions that cast light on the story, even if they did not break the law.
[Read: When the MAGA bubble burst]
Here we are again. Trump’s consigliere Michael Cohen testified a long time ago that Trump does not leave a paper trail. He does not speak direct orders. He signals what he wants, and then leaves it to his underlings to figure out for themselves how to please him. Trump likely followed those lifetime habits in the weeks leading to January 6.
The struggle between supporters of constitutionality and legality, on the one side, and Trump and his faction, on the other, is always an asymmetrical fight, as it was between the law and the Chicago Seven in 1968. Those trying to protect Trump from accountability for January 6 know what they are trying to accomplish, and have built a large constituency in the country that supports them. The fight to uphold law cannot be won by law itself, because the value of law in the face of violence is the very thing that’s being contested. The fight ahead is an inescapably political fight, to be won by whichever side can assemble the larger and more mobilized coalition. The Trump side is very clear-eyed about that truth. The defenders of U.S. legality and democracy against Trump need to be equally aware.
[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Dakota Johnson spoke out for the first time about the negative experiences her grandmother Tippi Hedren had while starring in some of Alfred Hitchcock’s most acclaimed films.
In case you didn’t know, the 91-year-old is most known for her lead roles in the director’s 1963 horror classic The Birds and 1964 psychological thriller Marnie. But behind the scenes of the movies, Hedren claimed she was facing horrific abuse at the hands of Hitchcock. According to People, the actress alleged that he sexually assaulted her on multiple occasions in her 2016 memoir, saying the filmmaker would often have his driver drive past her home at the time and once asked her to “touch him” while filming The Birds. Hedren also said Hitchcok tried kissing her in the back of a limo, writing:
“It was an awful, awful moment.”
Things only became worse when working on Marnie, as he stopped by her dress room at one point and “put his hands on me.” She recalled:
“It was sexual, it was perverse.”
However, when Hedren eventually spoke out about it, she became a pariah in Hollywood while Hitchcock’s career skyrocketed. Disgusting…
During a live taping of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, as reported by People, Johnson discussed the trauma her grandmother endured and the insight she learned from her about working in Hollywood. Despite her struggles throughout her career, The Fifty Shades of Grey alum said Hedren was always “encouraging” of her acting aspirations, explaining:
“She’s always been really honest and firm about standing up for yourself. That’s what she did. [Alfred] Hitchcock ruined her career because she didn’t want to sleep with him, and he terrorized her. He was never held accountable.”
Johnson then teared up as she continued recounting how Hedren’s experiences impacted her view of the industry, saying:
“It’s completely unacceptable for people in a position of power to wield that power over someone in a weaker position, no matter the industry. It’s hard to talk about because she’s my grandmother. You don’t want to imagine somebody taking advantage of your grandmother.”
Nevertheless, The Social Network star said Hedren encouraged her and her mother, Melanie Griffith, to always stand up for themselves:
“I think the thing that she’s been so amazing for me and with my mother is just like, no you do not put up with that s**t from anybody. She would say it in a far more eloquent way. She’s such a glamorous movie star, still.”
We can only imagine how hard it was for Dakota to speak out about a difficult time in her grandmother’s life…
If you or someone you know has been sexually assault, please reach out to the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or visit rainn.org.
[Image via FayesVision/WENN]
The post Dakota Johnson Says Director Alfred Hitchcock 'Terrorized’ Her Grandmother Tippi Hedren & ‘Ruined Her Career' appeared first on Perez Hilton.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J
