Is There A Worse Political Reporter Than Sydney Ember Anywhere? Spoiler: No

Actual enemy of the people

Every now and then, I mention that this Belway reporter or that Beltway reporter is really nothing but a piece of runny dog shit. Sydney Ember is one of those and when I started writing about what a worthless scumbag she was I thought she was a he. It's hard to get away with calling a woman a worthless scumbag-- even if she obviously is one-- but no one objects much when it's a male. Now that I know Sydney is a woman, I have to think of new ways to describe her worthlessness. Katie Halper did a good job of describing one of the NY Times most anti-progressive fake reporters in a new piece for FAIR, Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources. Halper's piece is basically about a prejudiced journalist passing off her opinions as news. "NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights," wrote Halper. "Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders-- which may be why the paper has her cover him."

Journalist Skip Kaltenheuser wondered how, "with such a stacked deck against him, Bernie has the ability to keep punching. What has happened to The Times' editors that they accept this sort of propaganda rot off the editorial pages? I can’t imagine it doesn’t infuriate those Times reporters who still care about their integrity. Katie Halper’s article on Ember ought to be on the shelf next to Thomas Frank’s Swat Team."

"Ember," wrote Halper, "is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike."

The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up:  It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article]  should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.

Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the biggest global investment management corporation, and the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)

Bechek and Ember

Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started covering politics in May 2018, and immediately got the enviable assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Ember has a multi-prong approach to undermining Sanders: She went to great lengths to avoid calling him the frontrunner until he was “no longer” one;  she attributes his political positions to attention-getting, self-serving ulterior motives; frames even his victories and the popularity of his ideas as weaknesses; cherry-picks polls; presents opinions as facts (claiming he’s “outflanked on the left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Beto O’Rourke”); and creates false equivalency between Sanders and Donald Trump.

But for the sake of time and length, this piece focuses on her selection and misrepresentation of sources, which have already drawn scrutiny. Brad Johnson, a political analyst with a background in climate science pointed out that Ember quoted a source without mentioning that she’s a corporate lobbyist; journalist Zaid Jilani noted that Ember failed to disclose that another source was a senior advisor for a Hillary Clinton Super PAC. Education scholar Diane Ravitch devoted a blog post to the reporter’s “shameful” reporting on Sanders’ education policy, questioning the authority of her sources.

Ember’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective. Moreover, many of these “experts” are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.

Consider Ember’s March 1 article, which opened with the kind of unflattering headline her stories often bear: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for 2020, but His Desire for Control Remains.” (Headlines, of course, are chosen by editors, not reporters, but in these stories they reflect the slant of the text.) The piece ended on a typically ominous note: “Even if Mr. Sanders does talk more about himself, his competition presents a new set of challenges that his own biography may only compound,” Ember wrote. She brings in an expert to prove her point: “‘At the end of the day, he is still an old white man,’ said Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist.”

Sefl is hardly a disinterested authority; she’s a paid political consultant and media specialist who worked as a surrogate and senior advisor for Hillary Clinton. Other outlets mention Sefl’s experience working for Clinton when they cite her, including the New York Times, which has identified her as someone “supporting Mrs. Clinton,” someone who “worked for Mrs. Clinton,” and a “Democratic consultant and Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.”

A New York Times story (10/22/07) on the 2008 Clinton campaign’s relationship with the right-wing Drudge Report identified Sefl as someone “who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge-- and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.” The paper also noted that her “fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.” Sefl admitted in an interview (Chicago, 7/13/15):

My solo consultancy doesn’t have a name, quite purposely so. I do often collaborate with other consultants, including Republicans—within reason—when the work warrants it.

Reporter Zaid Jilani caught Ember’s omission, tweeting that she didn’t “note [Sefl] was senior adviser to Ready for Hillary Super PAC or that she was a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.” The piece has since been updated-- without notice-- to describe Sefl as “a veteran Democratic strategist and formerly a senior adviser to the Super PAC Ready for Hillary.”

Sefl’s choice of phrase, “an old white man,” is surely a crude description for someone who, as he has explained, has a strong Jewish identity, shaped in part by his father’s side of the family having been “wiped out” in the Holocaust, and growing up a working-class Jew in Brooklyn. If successful, Sanders would be the first Jewish president of the United States. But Sefl’s dismissive description is consistent with the way Clinton campaign loyalists and much of corporate media continue to weaponize identity politics against Sanders, erasing not only his Jewish identifty, but also his anti-racist record and his supporters of color.

Ember’s February 17 article, “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?,” published two days before Sanders announced his candidacy, predicted that “his weak track record with black voters-- a vital base in the Democratic Party-- could be a potential threat to his candidacy.” Echoing the conventional wisdom of the 2016 campaign, the piece made no mention of the CNN poll issued two months earlier that found Sanders had a higher approval rating with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate.

Ember’s March 29 article, “Bernie Sanders Says ‘No’ to Incrementalism, Highlighting Divide Among Democrats,” started with a neutral enough headline, but ended with a harsh critique by a fierce Sanders opponent, whose politics the reporter misrepresents:

“The path to the White House and to majorities has to be in a pragmatic, progressive area,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If you go too far left, Donald Trump gets re-elected and Republicans control both houses of Congress.”

“Our heads are in the clouds, but our feet are also on the ground at the same time,” he added. He cited his group’s universal healthcare plan, which he said was “just as ambitious” as Mr. Sanders’ proposed “Medicare for all.” There was, however, a key difference.

“It just doesn’t blow up the system,” Mr. Kessler said. “It builds on the existing system.”

But Third Way is a fiscally conservative, not a “center left,” think tank. Given the state of public opinion, a group that pushes to cut Social Security and Medicare, and calls raising taxes on billionaires “soaking the rich,” is to the right of centrist. In 2013, of 29 trustees on Third Way’s board, 20 were investment bankers, three were CEOs and two were corporate lawyers.

Third Way’s “about” section reads, “Our work is grounded in the mainstream American values of opportunity, freedom and security.” They continue, “But we identify as center-left, because we see that space in US politics as offering the only real path for advancing those ideals in the century ahead.” For Third Way, identifying as “center-left” is lip service, a strategic necessity in a nation that has moved to the left and whose demographics promise a more diverse and left electorate to come.

Ember chooses the label that Third Way uses for itself, because if she accurately identified its corporatist mission and positions, she could not use one of its leaders as an objective authority on the efficacy of Bernie Sanders’ proposal of free healthcare for all. It would be obvious that Third Way’s healthcare plan was in no way as ambitious as Sanders’, and that it was using the term “universal” to undermine single payer.

Reflecting its function as a corporate advocate for moving the Democratic Party to the right, Third Way has consistently disparaged Sanders and progressive politics in general. In a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed (12/2/13), Kessler (and Third Way co-founder and president Jon Cowan) declared that “economic populism is dead,” urging Democrats not to follow Elizabeth Warren and Bill deBlasio “over the populist cliff.” Kessler singled out Sanders in a USA Today op-ed (12/15/17), declaring, “Take It From Voters, Democrats Don’t Want a Bernie Sanders.”

In October 2018, Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennet (who can be seen in this video (below) refusing to disclose how much money his think tank gets from Wall Street) disqualified Sanders as a presidential candidate: “The exception is Sen. Sanders. We’re open to everybody except for him.” That would seem to make the organization an odd source to go to to evaluate Sanders’ policy proposals.



But Ember turned to Kessler again in her April 27 article, “Bernie Sanders Opens Space for Debate on Voting Rights for Incarcerated People,” to comment on Sanders’ call to enfranchise the incarcerated:

“There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. Mr. Sanders’ remarks, he added, “seemed like a bit of a stumble.”

The comment seemed like a bit of a stumble for Kessler, into an area where he has no evident expertise, and, interestingly, where Third Way hardly wades.

Ember’s May 17 article, “Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington,” presented as problematic and incriminating the senator’s support of Nicaraguan Sandinistas and his opposition to the CIA-backed Contra rebels trying to overthrow them-- whose systematic pattern of gross human rights violations in the 1980s included death squad assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation and torture. In a subsequent interview, Ember’s first and apparently most pressing question to Sanders was whether he had heard an anti-American chant at a rally he and approximately 499,999 other people attended. Her second question was whether he would have stayed at the event if he had heard it.

While NBC’s Meet the Press (5/19/19) and New York’s Jonathan Chait (5/27/19) accepted and amplified Ember’s framing, other journalists and historians familiar with Latin American history condemned the piece as context-lacking  “neo-McCarthyite,” “‘anti-American’ baiting,” “only slightly more subtle than Fox News.” Calling the piece “fundamentally ahistorical” “bothsidesism,” the Long Version’s Jonathan Katz (5/20/19) wrote that Ember doesn’t “have much experience covering foreign affairs in general or Latin America in particular. It shows.” Journalist Ryan Cooper (The Week, 5/29/19) quipped, “Americans should be very concerned about Bernie Sanders’ record of opposing mass murder.”

For this article on Sanders’ foreign policy past, Ember thought it would be appropriate to get a quote from a significant player in the Iran/Contra scandal:

Otto J. Reich, a former special envoy for Latin America who helped oversee Nicaragua policy for the Reagan administration, said that by the middle of the 1980s a politician like Mr. Sanders “should have known better” than to fawn over Mr. Ortega.

Reagan’s “Nicaragua policy” involved illegally funding the terrorist Contras in an effort to overthrow the elected Sandinista government. And he oversaw it as director of the now defunct State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, working with CIA propaganda experts and Army psy-ops specialists, leaking hoaxes, spreading rumors, smearing, and pressuring and threatening reporters,  in order to whitewash the Contras and demonize the Sandinistas.

Reich’s office was condemned by the U.S. Comptroller General, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Iran/Contra Committee and a House Foreign Affairs committee for conducting “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” including psychological operations (psy-ops) “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”



Ember, though, offers Reich as an expert witness on Sanders’ Cold War activities:

“He has, by virtue of these travels and associations, joined up with some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” Mr. Reich said of Mr. Sanders, alluding to his visit to Nicaragua and subsequent trips to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Speaking of travels and associations, as well as Cuba, Ember fails to mention that Reich has worked as a lobbyist for Bacardi-Martini and Lockheed Martin, and tried to get an anti-Castro terrorist a US visa. As historian Greg Grandin told me in an interview (Katie Halper Show, 6/4/19):

The Office of Public Diplomacy was one of the most corrupting and degrading instruments of democracy you can imagine…. It was a destabilization  and disinformation campaign.

“People like Sydney Ember,” he noted, are “the product of that reeducation.”

Back to domestic issues, Ember ended her May 23 article, “Sanders’ Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation,” on a predictably down note:

But while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr. Loadholt said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s expansive rural areas, where charter schools are rare. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.”

Ember describes Jarrod Loadholt as “a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in South Carolina.” This obfuscating description was one of the many things that led Diane Ravitch to write her blog post, “The New York Times vs. Senator Bernie Sanders. ” I’ll let Ravitch explain:

The real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the writers quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education activists in South Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod Loadholt…. I googled. He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, DC, who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be consumer finance. Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’ factual statement that the Waltons, the DeVos family and hedge fund managers are behind the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made his statement in South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South Carolina has dreadful education policy. When did Loadholt work on it and with what results? To the naked eye, he was called upon as a Beltway insider to cut Bernie Sanders down with a false statement. Shameful.

In fact, there are no traces of Loadholt having worked on any education policy. When I tweeted out Ravitch’s piece, he responded, “Lol. I guess if you’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, you could at no point in your life worked on ed policy in SC.” When I asked him if he had worked on education policy, he replied, “My quote speaks for itself. And it’s like a month old.” Loadholt has also tweeted that Sanders is “like a rash.”

Loadholt does have experience as a lobbyist and currently works at Pine Street Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients include Anheuser-Busch and the National Bankers Association (NBA). It was in his capacity as an NBA lobbyist that Loadholt defended a sweeping rollback of Dodd/Frank banking regulations.  Dubbed the Bank Lobbyist Act by critics, which included the NAACP, the bill made it easier for banks to discriminate against communities of color. Loadholt, however, dismissed the concerns: “[Black] banks don’t have the luxury of waiting on a perfect bill…. If we thought the [bill] did substantial damage to African-Americans, we would not support it.”

Then there’s the June 12 article, originally headlined “Sanders Delivers Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy” and later renamed “Bernie Sanders Calls His Brand of Socialism a Pathway to Beating Trump,” where Ember quoted as an authority Mary Anne Marsh, whom she described as “a Democratic strategist in Boston who worked for Senators Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.” Marsh did not mince words in her assessment of Sanders’ politics, policies and electability:

Most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism and his economic policies. Ultimately, Bernie Sanders giving this speech will appeal to his base and no one else, and it gives fodder to Trump and the Republicans.

But the woman linking Sanders’ socialist rhetoric to a Trump victory is not just a Democratic strategist. When reporters at places like the Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Yahoo! Business and Jewish News Services quote her, they cite her as a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying and public relations firm. Dewey Square’s corporate clients have included Allegiance Healthcare Corporation, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, Collegiate Funding Services, Countrywide Mortgage, DuPont, General Motors Corporation, Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, Purdue Pharma, Starbucks, United Health Group. The US Chamber of Commerce hired the firm to fight for caps on damages that can be paid in lawsuits; the National Restaurant Association paid them to fight against a law that made it easier for unions to organize workers; and Fix the Debt to push its austerity astroturf campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

When Dewey Square was caught (CJR, 2/24/09) tricking senior citizens into signing letters to the editor on behalf of its client Medicare Advantage, Marsh tried to blame the hapless victims who had been lured to events with door prizes and free food and were unaware of what they were signing, positing, “The time that elapsed between the meetings when the seniors saw the letters and the letters’ arrival at the newspaper may have clouded some memories.”

Her career as a lobbyist for many of the industries that would be most impacted by Sanders’ proposals might explain Marsh’s obvious animus against the candidate, as displayed in the May 20 edition of her weekly Fox News column, “Bernie Sanders’ Incredible Shrinking Candidacy-- Why He Won’t Be Dem Nominee.” One of Sanders’ apparent insurmountable weaknesses, she wrote, is that people “remember Sanders didn’t support Clinton in the general election against Trump.” People with better memories recall that Sanders was one of the most energetic surrogates for Clinton on the campaign trail, campaigning constantly for her in battleground states (New Yorker, 11/4/16).

Marsh is right when she says that “most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism,” which is why he’s seen as a unique threat to those who promote rapacious profiteering in the areas of finance, health care, education and the military. Third Way made that clear, once again, at a conference they held last week, where its co-founder Matt Bennett singled out Sanders’ vision from his opponents’: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative…. The other is a socialist narrative,” notably omitting the “Democratic” descriptor for the latter.

By presenting her sources as objective authorities, instead of paid lobbyists and austerity ideologues, Ember both conceals and advances their agenda, undermining the integrity of the Fourth Estate, our democracy, and one of the most popular politicians.

New York Times Clears National Security Stories with the Government Before Publication. Source: New York Times

New York Times response to Donald Trump's attack on the Times story revealing recent U.S. cyber-attacks against Russia

by Thomas Neuburger

The New York Times has just admitted that it clears national security stories with the government before it publishes them. We've already known this occurred some of the time — see "How the NY Times & U.S. Government Worked Together to Suppress James Risen’s Post-9/11 Reporting." It now looks like it occurs most of the time, if not all of the time.

The source for the revelation, at least in the current instance, is the New York Times.

This find is courtesy of Ben Norton, writing at Grayzone:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”

In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”

The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.

“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”

“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.

The reason always given for the government suppressing a national security story is, of course, that lives will be put in danger, even when they won't. The following is Risen, as reported by Norton, talking about this arrangement between Times editors and the government, an arrangement he once went along with, but then grew to distrust:

Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” ... There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”

“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported [sic] said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.

“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”

Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”

This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.

This practice applied not only after 9/11 and the Iraq War, but long afterward as well:

In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”

The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.

In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.

Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”

“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”

I've written before that the U.S. is one of the most heavily propagandized nations in the world, most recently here ("ICE is Paying Millions to Spy on People’s Communications"). This propaganda takes many forms, from the soft propaganda of military intervention into movie content (see this criticism of the film Pitch Perfect 3, "I Paid To See A Movie About Singing. I Got Ninety Minutes Of Pentagon Propaganda.") to the hard propaganda of former generals, admirals and security officials masquerading as "independent analysts" on news programs where they usually advocate for unpopular government policies, like war (see Lee Fang's "Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits?" and "Pentagon military analyst program" at SourceWatch).

We now know, if there was any doubt, that those heroes of the #Resistance at the New York Times, by their own admission, have been fully folded into the government's media "information" project. Good to know.

Ignoring the Elected President

Side note: It's understandable, in a way, that in the current panicky environment, administration employees are treating the president, their boss, as someone to withhold information from, as they did in the case of the U.S. military's cyber-intrusion into the Russian power grid. Again, according to the New York Times (emphasis added):

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials[.]

Is this a precedent, though, we want to cheer or set? The act of cementing in place an American Praetorian Guard with a publicly sanctioned veto over decisions of an elected head of state, once done, won't be undone easily.

Is this what we want our next constitution to become, a state in which it's OK for elected officials to be publicly frustrated by their unelected subordinates? One must consider the future before radically altering the present.

I've said this before, but consider: If a President Bernie Sanders wanted better relations with Russia and North Korea, and went about it in a smart, safe way; wanted to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. by smartly but radically renegotiating our billionaire- and corporate-friendly trade deals; wanted to radically reduce spending on the national security apparatus, on our endless wars, and spend instead on government-provided services like Medicare for All (which, by the way, would devastate several powerful, well-funded industries and bipartisan donor constituencies) ... and for good measure, started jailing bankers again...

...if a President Sanders attempted to do all that, what would be the response of the national security apparatus, guardians of the status quo? Whom would they serve, the billionaire owners of the established, corrupt-but-lucrative bipartisan state, or the Sanders-led revolutionary FDR-style government they're constitutionally sworn to defend?

How much would be kept from him by "his" administration? How many who work for him would openly block his agenda, using the security state's propaganda resources (such as the New York Times) to defend their actions?

How much of the future are we willing to sacrifice in order to fix the present? After all, if Establishment leaders really want to be rid of President Trump, there's a fully constitutional method for doing it — impeachment. Instead they seem to be choosing these anti-constitutional methods.

This is a plan that will backfire. Once a nation opens the door to rule by its security elite, as the U.S. has increasingly done, the guardians and beneficiaries of that door almost never let it be closed.

Word to the wise.
 

Pushing Back Against The Times' Understanding Of Normalizing Nazis 101

-by Valley Girl

I’ve been following the fall-out from the New York Times article A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland. (By the way, early versions have the title as "The Neo-Nazi Next Door." I’ve read everything I could find. Two articles particularly struck me, out of the many I’ve read.

One is from Damon Young titled A Line-by-Line Response to the New York Times’ Response to the Backlash It Received for Publishing a Nazi Puff Piece. In addition to writing for The Root, Damon Young is also a columnist for GQ. The response Damon Young gives is to this defense by the NY Times: Readers Accuse Us of Normalizing a Nazi Sympathizer; We Respond. In the following, I’ve added who said what, because the original formatting in the article challenged my copy and paste abilities. Damon:

On Nov. 25, the New York Times published “A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland”-- a piece about the wedding registry, eating habits and eyebrow maintenance of an Ohio man who also happens to be a Nazi. This profile bothered quite a few people, who were somewhat annoyed that the country’s biggest and most important newspaper would give a white nationalist a Better Homes and Gardens cover spread.

The Times was kind enough to respond to that response. And I felt it was only right to top off the response lasagna by giving a response to that response, which is underneath the Times’ response to the response.

Response response response response response response response.

The Times explained:

A profile in The Times of Tony Hovater, a white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer in Ohio, elicited a huge amount of feedback this weekend, most of it sharply critical. Here’s how the piece came about, why we wrote it and why we think it was important to do so.

This should be fun.

NYT: The genesis of the story was the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August, the terrifying Ku Klux Klan-like images of young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and the subsequent violence that included the killing of a woman, Heather D. Heyer.

Damon: Those images were truly terrible, and the murder of Heather D. Heyer was horrifying. As was the response from the president of the United States of America about what happened in Charlottesville.

Fortunately, we have institutions like the New York Times that we can depend on to bring us the truth during these dark hours and to ensure that white supremacists and Nazis are thought of and treated the same way you might treat a roach scurrying across a kitchen counter.

NYT: Who were those people?

Damon: Um, wait. You literally just answered that question in your last paragraph. Those people are white supremacists. And just to reiterate that point, you refer to them as "young white men carrying tiki torches and shouting 'Jews will not replace us.'" What the hell is happening here? Did you have a stroke between the writing of these sentences?

NYT: We assigned Richard Fausset, one of our smartest thinkers and best writers, to profile one of the far-right foot soldiers at the rally. We ended up settling on Mr. Hovater, who, it turned out, was a few years older than another Ohio man, James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with murder after the authorities said he drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing Ms. Heyer.

Damon: But why, though? You could have assigned an intern for this task. Shit, you could have assigned me. I would have just emailed Hovater.

"Yo, dude. You still on that Nazi shit?"

If he replied "Yes," I would have written the story on the spot. And it would have been called, "“Tony Hovater Is Still on That Nazi Shit and There’s Really Nothing Else to See Here." And the entire text of the story would have been "Nazis gonna Nazi."

NYT: Our reporter went to Ohio to spend time with Mr. Hovater and submitted several drafts and updates in between assignments that included Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and the Roy Moore campaign in Alabama. The story finally ran online Saturday.

Damon: It’s great that Richard Fausset has other responsibilities at The Times other than existing as the Ohio-Nazi Whisperer. I’d imagine the Ohio-Nazi-whispering beat to be quite dry.

NYT: Whatever our goal, a lot of readers found the story offensive, with many seizing on the idea we were normalizing neo-Nazi views and behavior. "How to normalize Nazis 101!" one reader wrote on Twitter. "I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article," wrote another. "Attempting to 'normalize' white supremacist groups-- should Never have been printed!"

Damon: If the goal of devoting thousands of words to a fucking Nazi in Ohio wasn’t disgusting, then what was it? Seriously. What was the fucking point of this? We already know that Nazis exist in America. And we already know that some of them shop at Target. So, again, what was your goal?

NYT: Our reporter and his editors agonized over the tone and content of the article. The point of the story was not to normalize anything but to describe the degree to which hate and extremism have become far more normal in American life than many of us want to think.

Damon: I, for one, am sorry that your reporter and his editors agonized over doing the fucking jobs that they are paid to do. That reporters and editors would be expected to report and edit and vet is truly a travesty, and I’m sure the family of Heather Heyer would agree. I will organize a candlelight vigil for your newsroom this evening.

NYT: We described Mr. Hovater as a bigot, a Nazi sympathizer who posted images on Facebook of a Nazi-like America full of happy white people and swastikas everywhere. We understand that some readers wanted more pushback, and we hear that loud and clear.

Damon: Yes. It would have been nice, if the New York Times decided to run a profile on a Nazi, for said profile to have provided more pushback. Because if there’s one thing we know about Nazis, they can always use more pushback. There’s never a point, in regard to Nazis and pushback, where you might step back and say, "You know, I think this Nazi pushback is overkill now." Because there is no overkill with Nazi pushback. Just underkill. And by "underkill" I mean "a profile in the New York Times."

NYT: Some readers also criticized the article for including a link to a webpage that sells swastika armbands. This was intended to show the darker reality beyond the anodyne language of the website. But we saw the criticism, agreed and removed the link.

Damon: Wait, y’all did what? Y’all gave the Nazis a branding platform? What the fuck is wrong with y’all?

NYT: Some readers did see value in the piece. Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: "People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that."

Damon: Yeah, some people saw the value in the piece. And some people put lettuce in the microwave. What’s your point?

NYT: But far more were outraged by the article. "You know who had nice manners?" Bess Kalb, a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live, said on Twitter. "The Nazi who shaved my uncle Willie’s head before escorting him into a cement chamber where he locked eyes with children as their lungs filled with poison and they suffocated to death in agony. Too much? Exactly. That’s how you write about Nazis."

Damon: Bess Kalb has a point.

NYT: Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. "Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?" asked Karen Attiah, an editor at the Washington Post. "Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC are coping?"

Damon: Of course, profiles on the people directly harmed by this hate speech and violence would be much more compelling. But that would require whiteness—white maleness, specifically—to be uncentered. And uncentering whiteness is harder than eating just one Lay’s potato chip, apparently.

NYT: We regret the degree to which the piece offended so many readers. We recognize that people can disagree on how best to tell a disagreeable story. What we think is indisputable, though, is the need to shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life and the people who inhabit them. That’s what the story, however imperfectly, tried to do.

Damon: There’s a difference between shedding light and handing someone the spotlight. I agree that light is necessary to expose and, if required, shame. But y’all basically gave him and the thousands like him the light and the mic. Instead of truly depicting him for who he is, you let him take a selfie. And it’s not wrong to believe that "No country for Nazi selfies" should be an editorial edict at the New York Times.

NYT: As always, we want to continue hearing from our readers. Please share your thoughts in the comments. We will be reading them.

Damon: Wait, you’re going to do more work? Shit. Do I have to organize another vigil?

The second article that particularly struck me was What the New York Times’ Nazi Story Left Out-- The history of America has been written by normal white racists living in normal towns, by Jamelle Bouie.

The conceit of "A Voice of Hate in America’s Heartland," the New York Times’ profile of Tony Hovater-- a neo-Nazi who helped start the Traditionalist Worker Party, a white nationalist group-- is that there’s something incongruent in Hovater’s ordinary Midwestern life and his virulently racist and anti-Semitic beliefs. "Why did this man-- intelligent, socially adroit and raised middle class amid the relatively well-integrated environments of United States military bases-- gravitate toward the furthest extremes of American political discourse?" asks the writer, Richard Fausset, in a subsequent piece explaining the editorial decisions behind the story and reflecting on his conversations with Hovater.

Hovater’s extremism may demand some additional explanation, but there’s nothing novel about virulent white racism existing in banal environments. That, in fact, is what it means to live in a society structured by racism and racist attitudes. The sensational nature of Hovater’s identification with Nazi Germany obscures the ordinariness of his racism. White supremacy is a hegemonic ideology in the United States. It exists everywhere, in varying forms, ranging from passive beliefs in black racial inferiority to the extremist ideology we see in groups like the League of the South.

A look back to the past is instructive. In 1921, one of the deadliest anti-black riots in American history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A mob of white men, eager for retribution after the alleged assault of a young white woman, descended on the city’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, dubbed the "Black Wall Street" by admirers. Armed with pistols, rifles, and a machine gun-- as well as a plane equipped with rudimentary bombs--this makeshift army burned Greenwood to the ground, killing hundreds in the process. We don't know who gave order to the mob, organizing and amplifying its lethality, but we can identify the men who participated.

Virulent racism doesn’t just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence. [sidebar]

They weren’t, as white Tulsans would later learn, the working-class men drawn to the city’s oil wealth and frontier atmosphere. No, they were Tulsa’s white elite--its respectable middle class. "Photographs of the tragedy also showed that many in the white mob drove the most expensive cars and dressed in clothes beyond the means of the average roughneck," notes Tim Madigan in The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. They were recognizable. Ordinary.

The same was true of the anti-black mob that destroyed parts of Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1919. It was true of the one that lynched Rob Edwards in Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1911, and later drove the blacks of Forsyth out of the county. From the Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction South to the White Citizens Councils of the Jim Crow South, ordinary men and women have always been enforcers for the racial order.

Likewise, those seemingly ordinary environments are themselves part of the story of American racism. As James Loewen describes in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, the human landscape of the Midwest was shaped by rigid segregation. "Beginning in about 1890 and continuing until 1968, white Americans established thousands of towns across the United States for whites only. Many towns drove out their black populations, then posted sundown signs. Other towns passed ordinances barring African Americans after dark or prohibiting them from owning or renting property; still others established such policies by informal means, harassing and even killing those who violated the rule." Hovater's home, Huber Heights, Ohio, was one of those places. Virulent racism doesn't just exist in seemingly banal environments; virulent racism has shaped their very existence.

If the focus on Hovater's mundane life paints an inaccurate picture of racist ideology as abnormal, then the larger decision to profile a neo-Nazi further obscures the forces driving our politics at this moment. Even with their greater visibility in public life, extremist racists like Hovater remain fringe figures who can make a splash in the media—and provoke violence—but do little else.

By contrast, more "moderate" forms of white racism-- the everyday, ordinary varieties that rarely elicit protest outside of public forums-- are politically powerful. They are what had a profound influence on the 2016 election, what President Trump stokes and feeds on when he tweets against black athletes and celebrities, and what shape some of the limits of the possible in our politics. Someone like Hovater might have a relatively high profile, but what's fueling the return of explicit racism to our politics is something appropriately banal and, yes, ordinary.

And, if anyone is interested in what has happened to Tony Hovater... well, he, his wife, and his brother-law have lost their jobs at the 451 Grill. One writer says that a reference to the "Haystack hamburger" in the original article allowed people to figure out that he worked at the 451 Grill. Well I couldn’t find that reference in the article. But, however it was discovered, the 451 Grill responded in part:

A November 25th New York Times article featured one of our employees. In the article, the employee shared his political views, specifically those of being a white nationalist. The article went on, illustrating some very disturbing images and thoughts from this individual. The 571 Grill and Draft House does not share any of these views with this person, nor was the owner aware of them prior to the publishing of this article.

Since the release of this article, we have been swamped with phone calls and social media messages that are threatening and intimidating to both us and our employees. These hateful and disturbing messages are truly saddening to those of us who just want to serve delicious food and cold beers.

Due to these very disturbing threats, the employee who was featured in the article suggested that we release him from employment. We have done so and have also released his wife and her brother who also worked for us. We felt it necessary to fully sever the relationship with them in hopes to protect our 20 other employees from the verbal and social media threats being made from individuals all over the country, and as far as Australia. We neither encourage nor support any forms of hate within our establishment.

Oh, yeah, and someone published Hovater’s home address, and as a result he’s been forced (decided) to leave the rental house, to move to an undisclosed location.

"Hovater tells The Post he's moving because he can no longer afford the rent and because of safety concerns. 'It's not for the best to stay in a place that is now public information,' he said. 'We live alone. No one else is there to watch the house while I'm away.'"

Two more points-- the first: Richard Fausset kinda sorta defended himself (poor me) in an article at the NY Times titled I Interviewed a White Nationalist and Fascist. What Was I Left With? You can read the whole thing it you want. But below, I’ll give some choice parts, along with my responses.

Fausset: There is a hole at the heart of my story about Tony Hovater, the white nationalist and Nazi sympathizer.

VG: No shit.

Fausset: And yet what, of any of this, explained Mr. Hovater’s radical turn? What prompted him to take his ideas beyond his living room, beyond the chat rooms, and on to Charlottesville, where he marched in August alongside allies like the neo-Confederate League of the South and the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement, which bills itself as "America’s Premier White Civil Rights Organization?" Where was his Rosebud?

VG: Where was his Rosebud? WTF. Rosebud? That ends a paragraph, and no further reference to Rosebud is given. I assume he was referring to the movie Citizen Kane, in a hoity toity way. Unless, and my thoughts did go there, he was asking if Hovater had failed to sexually satisfy his wife, by failing to find her rosebud?

Fausett: On the phone, Mr. Hovater responded to my question by rattling off names of libertarian academics, making references to sci-fi movies and describing, yet again, his frustration with what he described as the plodding and unjust nature of American democracy. As he did so, I was thinking about an album I grew up with by the Minutemen, the Southern California punk group, and its brilliantly koanic title: What Makes a Man Start Fires?



VG: WOW! How cool Fausset claims to be (or so he thinks) by mentioning the influence a Southern California [virulently anti-fascist] punk band had on him. The Minutemen or aka the Missingmen, as I learned when I went to Youtube to listen to this band’s music. I could barely understand a word of the album he references. Green Day they are not [Ed- D. Boon and Mike Watt were a major influence on early Green Day].

VG: And Fausset closes his agonizing "mea culpa" by asking again "What Makes a Man Start Fires?" Gosh, it’s a toss-up as to whether he was taking about Hovater, or referring to himself, given all the fall out from his horrible NY Times article.

Now, on to the second point: how does a reporter report on and interview neo-Nazi white supremacists? Here’s how it’s done: From a Vice broadcast-- Charlottesville: Race and Terror-- VICE News Tonight (HBO).

Trump Gets So Upset When He's Exposed As The Kleptomaniac He's Been All His Life

Saturday, Trumpanzee woke up, chopped up and then snorted a couple of Adderalls and started with the morning ritual-- his nasty, childish, mastabatory tweeting. One claimed that the NYTimes is fake news and that it had apologized to His Trumpiness. The fake news-- or in the Regime's own terms, #AltFacts-- is that it ever apologized to him for anything. Interestingly, the latest poll from PPP asked people who had more credibility, The Times or the Trumpanzee. 51% of people chose The Times; 42% chose the orange-hued orangutang. In fact, among self-identified "moderates," that number is 61% for The Times and just 30% for Trumpy-the-Clown.

Some people assumed-- inaccurately-- that it was The Times editorial against his endangered Department of Education nominee, the ultra-odious Betsy DeVos, that got him going about The Times again. The editors urged a decent Republican in the Senate-- I don't know what they've been smoking-- to join Susan Collins (R-ME) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and every single Democrat-- to deny DeVos confirmation Monday. They just need one more. But that's a hopeless task. Once electorally vulnerable Dean Heller (R-NV) said he was voting for DeVos, the battle was, in effect, over. There are no other decent Republicans in the Senate, despite what The Times editors may wish. "The extra Republican vote," they fantasized, "could come from one of several independent-minded senators; one candidate is Lamar Alexander, an expert on public schools who actually owes the country a good turn because of his failure as chairman of the committee vetting Ms. DeVos to question her closely and to give more time to her critics. There are few more telling examples of Mr. Trump’s disdain for the federal government’s critical role in lifting up America’s schoolchildren than his choice of Ms. DeVos. She has spent years funneling her inherited fortune into a campaign to replace the nation’s traditional public schools with federally funded charter schools, regardless of the latter’s performance, and supporting vouchers, which help families send children to private or parochial schools and drain funds from public schools that need more, not less, support. Mr. Alexander didn’t give senators much time to question Ms. DeVos, but it was sufficient to reveal her near-total unfamiliarity with public education law, standards and even problems. A conservative ideologue, she fell back on most policy questions to an assertion that states should make their own rules, even on settled matters of federal law, like access for handicapped children."

Betsy DeVos’s nomination is not about making public education more effective, or helping publicly schooled children succeed; it’s about blowing up the system without a clue as to what comes next. Mr. Alexander was secretary of education himself, from 1991 to 1993, and he ran for president twice, speaking out against the influence of money in politics. And while he went way easy on Ms. DeVos in the hearings, he surely knows better than to place her in a job of such importance to the country’s future.

The editors then landed some gratuitous slaps at Scott Pruitt, Tom Price and Steven Mnuchin, Trumpanzee’s picks to head the EPA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Treasury. But Trump is primarily concerned with Trump, not Betsy DeVos or anyone else. Sure, he wants to "win," but, again, that's about him, not them.

No, what got him into a foul mood yesterday was a report by Susanne Craig and Eric Lipton calling him out on his lies about separating himself from his businesses. His attorneys and advisors have urged him to take at least the appearance of ethics seriously. He has consistently refused to do any such thing. And now, as they reported yesterday, "records have emerged that show just how closely tied" the most corrupt and crooked, self-serving monstrosity ever installed in the White House "remains to the empire he built."

While the president says he has walked away from the day-to-day operations of his business, two people close to him are the named trustees and have broad legal authority over his assets: his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen H. Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. Mr. Trump, who will receive reports on any profit, or loss, on his company as a whole, can revoke their authority at any time.

What’s more, the purpose of the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust is to hold assets for the “exclusive benefit” of the president. This trust remains under Mr. Trump’s Social Security number, at least as far as federal taxes are concerned.

Since his election, there have been widespread calls for Mr. Trump to sell his assets and put the proceeds in a blind trust. He has resisted those calls, stressing that the president has no legal obligation to do so.

While the trust structure, outlined in documents made public through a Freedom of Information Act request by ProPublica, may give the president the appearance of distance from his business, it drew sharp criticism from experts in government ethics.

“I don’t see how this in the slightest bit avoids a conflict of interest,” said Frederick J. Tansill, a trust and estates lawyer from Virginia who examined the documents at the request of the New York Times. “First it is revocable at any time, and it is his son and his chief financial officer who are running it.”

...The most immediate test of Mr. Trump’s legal moves to separate himself from his company, the Trump Organization, pertains to the ownership of the new Trump International Hotel in the Old Post Office Building in Washington.

The trust documents, which were prepared last month, argue that “all beneficial ownership in the licensee previously held by Donald J. Trump, personally, now is held derivatively and beneficially by The Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust,” which is legal language intended to suggest that Mr. Trump no longer has a personal tie to the hotel lease.

A provision in the 2013 lease for the building, held by Mr. Trump and his three oldest children, appears to prohibit a federally elected official, including the president, from benefiting from it.

But lawyers who specialize in federal contracts say the trust arrangement simply creates an additional legal step between Mr. Trump and the hotel-- meaning he will still profit from it.

Robert H. Sitkoff, a professor at Harvard Law School, said the new details in the trust documents were unlikely to resolve the apparent legal problems with the Old Post Office site.

“Formally he is no longer the owner, but functionally he still is,” he said.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, the ranking member on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform who has called for a congressional investigation into the lease, said he remained unsatisfied that Mr. Trump had addressed his conflicts. “This is smoke and mirrors,” he said of the new documents.

Food Watch: An interesting exchange between the NYT critic and a Bay Area restaurateur

LocoL creators Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi [click to enlarge]

by Ken

I don't know quite what to make of this story, but I know there's something interesting about it, something worth thinking about a little, and so I'm just going to dish the story out in its three steps and leave it to you to make of it what you will.

It's certainly possible that Tasting Table and TT correspondent Alison Spiegel have it right. They clearly know what they think about the story, as we know right away from the head on Alison's January 4 TT post: "Roy Choi Had the Perfect Response to NYT's Zero-Star Review" and the ensuing blurb "This is the kind of dialogue that makes restaurants better." And, as we'll see, Alison's conclusion carries this theme through.

Before we get to that, though, let's retrace the story.


THE BEGINNING: THE ORIGINAL STORY

Note that there are lots of links onsite.

The LocoL Revolution
Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson debut LocoL, fast food with a mission



What started as a talk at the MAD Symposium in Copenhagen two years ago has finally become a reality. Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson's team started flipping $4 burgers, filling $6 noodle bowls and serving $1 aguas frescas yesterday at their first location of LocoL in the Watts neighborhood of L.A.

Yes, this is fast food. It's a term Choi proudly claims. "This isn't fast casual . . . . This is fast food: $1 items, $2 items, $3 items." Nothing on the menu tops $6.

The restaurant—the first of many, the team hopes—is meant to be a vehicle for change: both for fast food and for neighborhoods, providing a healthier alternative to the processed food that's usually available for under $5 to underserved neighborhoods and jobs for members of the community.

The staff at the Watts shop is all local, and the hope is that much of the customer base will be, too. "Watts is one of the most powerful neighborhoods in L.A. They extended themselves to us and offered us love and kindness. In this mission to feed our neighborhoods in this country especially in our inner cities, Watts is the most powerful in that context," Choi explains. Helping it blend into the neighborhood, "our dining room has no windows or doors. We want to bring outdoor and indoor together," Choi says. The block seating can also be moved around and double as a playground, the chef adds.

When he and Patterson set out to create the concept, they knew it wouldn't work without an affordable price point. With that in mind, "We just [had] to start cooking; we [had] to start thinking about how we can combine the flavors and spread products," Choi says. Their savior is grain, which makes up a large part of many of the menu's items, even if that isn't immediately apparent to diners. That includes the shop's burgs, which are 70 percent meat and stretched with 30 percent grain. "It has sprouting quinoa, tofu, fermented barley and all of these other flavors to bring salt and umami . . . like kombu, fish sauce and salt," Choi says. Those burgers come on a roll developed by Tartine's Chad Robertson, who, along with René Redzepi, is on LocoL's informal advisory board.

Most of the menu will look familiar to anyone who has walked into a fast-food restaurant in the last 20 years, perhaps with the exception of "the Foldie," which Choi and Patterson developed together. "It's its own thing . . . . If a taco, quesadilla, pupusa and tamale had sex and had a child, that's what a Foldie is." It can be loaded with fillings like beans and rice or carnitas for $2.

The plans for LocoL's expansion are ambitious: Shops in Oakland, the Tenderloin, East Oakland and another in Watts are all in the works for 2016. "This is like the Apple I computer; it's like the Wright brothers' plane; it's like the fucking Ford automobile," Choi says. If the project takes off as expected (1,500 people showed up on opening day), the team is eyeing Newark, New Jersey, South Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta and Ferguson, Missouri.

PETE WELLS VISITS THE OAKLAND LocoL

And writes a January 3 review that begins:

[Onsite there's a 10-photo slide show. -- Ed.]

OAKLAND, Calif. — The chefs Daniel Patterson and Roy Choi are trying to do so many things with their insurgent fast-food chain, Locol, that it almost has to fall short somewhere. What I didn’t expect before I ate at the branch here was that the big problem would turn out to be the food.

Mr. Choi, who made his name selling Korean tacos from trucks that prowled Los Angeles, and Mr. Patterson, who has gently pushed California cuisine forward at his restaurant Coi in San Francisco, set themselves an ambitious project. To start, they intend to build a network of small restaurants that people in some of the country’s poorest, most neglected urban neighborhoods can afford. Beyond that, though, the chefs hope that their example of progressive labor practices, interior design attuned to the pulse of the city and cooking that shows responsibility for the health of both customers and the environment will spark a reformation of the fast-food industry. . . .

There's a lot more, about both the concept of LocoL, the setting of the Oakland location that Sam visited, and what he found there. By all means read it for yourself onsite. He has some good things to say, like about the egg sandwich, especially the roll it's served on:

Made from a recipe devised with the help of Chad Robertson, the bread wizard behind Tartine Bakery and Cafe in San Francisco, the roll was the farthest thing imaginable from the squishy insubstantiality of most fast-food buns. Said to be rich in nutrients, and undeniably excellent, the roll represents the potential upside of the Locol experiment.

But then it's on to "the downside," which is "represent[ed]" by the fried chicken. "The most successful thing about Locol," Sam says, "is the feeling inside the restaurant." He likes the whimsical as well as street-smart decor, and says, "I don’t know of any other fast-food chain that has put street culture at the heart of its locations in this way." He notes: "The people working at Locol are engaged, and seem glad to be there. If Locol can create environments like this across the country, it would be a major achievement."

"But first," he goes on:

Mr. Patterson and Mr. Choi have to figure out the menu. I understand why they want to take on fast food, but in the neighborhoods they hope to reach it’s one of the few kinds of food available. Why offer less satisfying versions of what’s already there, when they could be selling great versions of something new?

The neighborhoods Locol is targeting have serious nutritional problems, from hunger to obesity, but the solution isn’t to charge people for stuff that tastes like hospital food.

Working through the menu, Pete writes, he has to remind himself that "it is run by two chefs who are famous for cooking food that people really, really want to eat." And he concludes:

Mr. Patterson and Mr. Choi seem to have thought about the social dimensions of fast food so much that they now see their target audience as problems to be solved, not customers to be pleased. The most nutritious burger on earth won’t help you if you don’t want to eat it.

NEXT, ROY CHOI RESPONDS ON INSTAGRAM

Zero stars. I know many of you want me to respond or snap back at him but the situation to me is much more than that. I welcome Pete's review. It tells me a lot more about the path. I don't know Pete but he is now inextricably linked to LocoL forever. So I'll share with you what I wrote to a friend and our team. We got that PMA: "The truth is that LocoL has hit a nerve. Doesn't mean all people love it, some hate it. But no one is indifferent by it. That's the spirit of LocoL. It has nothing to do with my ego. It's something bigger than all of us. Pete Wells is a component to its DNA. His criticisms are a reflection of us and the nerve that LocoL touches. And our imperfections. Also the nerve of challenging the binary structure of privileged thought patterns and how life is not just about what's a success or failure, but some things are real struggles and growth journeys. We all know the food is not as bad as he states. Is it perfect? NO. But it's not as bad as he writes. And all minorities aren't criminals either. And all hoods aren't filled with dangerous people either. But the pen has created a lot of destruction over the course of history and continues to.. He didn't need to go there but he did. That's why he's a part of LocoL. The power of this change and this nerve that it hits. It compelled him to write something he knows would hurt a community that is already born from a lot of pain and struggle.. Crazy, right? But I see it as a piece to this whole puzzle." #LocoL #Watts #Oakland

FINALLY, TASTING TABLE HAS ITS SAY

Again, there are lots of links onsite.

When Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson debuted LocoL, a revolutionary fast-food chain with a social mission, it seemed they could do no wrong. With locations in Oakland and L.A., as well as a food truck, the beloved chefs were riding high. LocoL serves healthy alternatives at low prices to underserved neighborhoods. The mayor of Los Angeles even attended the opening of the first location last year.

Leave it to New York Times dining critic Pete Wells, who spares no one (as you might recall from last year's damning review of New York's Per Se), to bring the LocoL chefs back down to earth with a no-star review published yesterday.

The short story is that Wells doesn't like the food. Of a bowl of chili, Wells writes, "This was less like chili than like a slightly spicier version of the meat sauce my corner pizzeria pours over penne. Supermarkets sell canned chilis that are seasoned more persuasively." Though he applauds LocoL for its ambiance, the food—which at one point he likens to hospital fare— needs serious work, he says.

So was Wells feeling restless since his last feather-ruffling review? Or is LocoL too good to be true? Choi could have picked a fight if he wanted to but instead addressed the review via Instagram at face value, humbly responding:

[See Roy's Instagram response above. -- Ed.]

"His criticisms are a reflection of us and the nerve that LocoL touches. And our imperfections," he says. Though Choi defends his food, as any chef would, he invites Wells's attention, saying that the critic is now a part of LocoL, and that's just the point. "The power of this change and this nerve that it hits. It compelled him to write something he knows would hurt a community that is already born from a lot of pain and struggle. Crazy, right? I see it as a piece to this whole puzzle."

This is the kind of criticism and response that makes restaurants better. And these days, instead of baseless claims and defensiveness, couldn't we all use a little constructive dialogue?

Again, this may be exactly right. Of course I haven't eaten any of the food in question, so I hesitate to offer definitive-sounding statements. Still, I think we can all agree that "a little constructive dialogue" would be welcome in our era of start-screeching-and-don't-stop-till-your-throat-gives-out. And I think both Pete and Roy were sincerely trying to do as much. It's possible to wonder, though, whether Pete isn't being a teensy bit high-handed in presuming to tell chefs Choi and Patterson what sort of restaurant they should be opening in that Oakland neighborhood. And I'm not sure I'm absolutely clear what Roy is contributing beyond not "snap[ping] back" at Pete.

Still and all, food for thought, no, these pieces to the whole puzzle (as Roy puts it)?

#