The News Caravan

Tag: surreal

  • Bans, bigots and surreal sci-fi love triangles: Harry Belafonte’s staggering screen career

    Bans, bigots and surreal sci-fi love triangles: Harry Belafonte’s staggering screen career

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    In the middle of the 20th century, Harry Belafonte was at the dizzying high point of his stunning multi-hyphenate celebrity: this handsome, athletic, Caribbean-American star with a gorgeous calypso singing voice was at the top of his game in music, movies and politics. He was the million-selling artist whose easy and sensuous musical stylings and lighter-skinned image made him acceptable to white audiences. But this didn’t stop him having a fierce screen presence and an even fiercer commitment to civil rights. He was the friend and comrade of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr – and his crossover success, incidentally, never stopped him being subject to the ugliest kind of bigotry from racists who saw his fame as a kind of infiltration. His legendary Banana Boat Song with its keening and much-spoofed call-and-response chorus “Day – O!” is actually about the brutal night shift loading bananas on to ships, part of an exploitative trade with its roots in empire.

    His friend and rival Sidney Poitier (there is room for debate in exactly how friendly their rivalry really was) may have outpaced him in the contest to become Hollywood’s first black American star, being perhaps able to project gravitas more naturally and reassuringly. But Belafonte, for all his emollient proto-pop performances on vinyl, was arguably more naturally passionate. Crucially, his great movie breakthrough was with an all-black cast (though with the white director Otto Preminger) in Carmen Jones. In this 1954 film, Belafonte built on the screen chemistry he had had with the sensational star Dorothy Dandridge in their previous film together, Bright Road (a high school movie with Belafonte as the school’s headteacher, anticipating Poitier’s Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, With Love).

    Three years later, in Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun – adapted from the novel by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn – Belafonte sang the catchy, dreamy title song but had a spikier dramatic role as the up-and-coming trade unionist in the fictional West Indian island, confronting the white colonial ruling class. Again, Belafonte was cast with the much-loved Dandridge but his implied dangerous liaison is with a white woman, played by Joan Fontaine, connected with the family that runs the plantation. This was the sexual suggestion that had the film pulled from most movie theatres in the US south.

    Screen chemistry … Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones.
    Screen chemistry … Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones. Photograph: 20th Century Fox/Kobal/Shutterstock

    Coming at the end of the 1950s, Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow was that rarest of things: a noir starring a black man. Belafonte was Ingram, the club singer with crippling debts who is inveigled into helping rob a bank, alongside a hardbitten professional criminal and racist, the role taken by veteran player Robert Ryan. It was a pairing to savour, Belafonte participating in the white/black crime duo that Hollywood often found expedient when it came to accommodating a black character in a contemporary US context. Belafonte’s casting as a singer in the story has a potency and style.

    But perhaps Belafonte’s strangest but most distinctive role came in the 1959 post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy The World, The Flesh and The Devil in which he is Burton, the mining engineer trapped miles below the surface of the earth after a calamitous cave-in. But he has escaped the effects of an atomic catastrophe and when he finally scrambles to the surface, Burton finds that he is apparently the only human left alive – except for one white woman and one white man, with whom he finally has a surreal but gripping contest for the woman’s affections.

    And so Belafonte finds himself in a rather daring political what-if movie: an apocalypse is the only way to make acceptable the idea of interracial love, and yet even here racism and white male paranoia rears its head. Making this the scenario for sexual rivalry is somehow inspired although the resolution is a little tame. In some ways, the futurist movie anticipated his role opposite John Travolta in the race-reverse fantasy White Man’s Burden from Japanese film-maker Desmond Nakano, in which Belafonte is the plutocrat with a privileged position in an anti-white world and Travolta is the white factory worker who gets in trouble through accidentally seeing the boss’s wife in a state of undress – a bizarre but shrewd satirical touch.

    Race-reverse fantasy … with John Travolta in White Man’s Burden.
    Race-reverse fantasy … with John Travolta in White Man’s Burden. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images

    Yet for all this, Belafonte arguably found true freedom as a black artist in the movies when it came to having a black director – and this came with Poitier himself who directed himself and Belafonte in the neglected (and now rediscovered) 1972 classic Buck and the Preacher, the pair giving great performances to match Butch and Sundance. Belafonte’s was probably the performance of his career as the itinerant opportunist chancer and thief, nicknamed The Preacher, who makes common cause with Poitier’s more upstanding frontiersman to defeat a murderous white posse.

    This film, and the subsequent action comedy Uptown Saturday Night, again directed by Poitier with Belafonte as the scrappy hoodlum and gangster, gave Belafonte his stake in the blaxploitation revolution and showed what a tough, black comic player he could be. His capacity for menace was exploited by Robert Altman in his 90s jazz age confection Kansas City in which he was excellent as the mobster and gambling kingpin who is about to execute an underling (played by Dermot Mulroney) for betraying him and for having the bad taste to wear blackface as a disguise.

    All this, and later cameos such as his appearance in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman add up to an amazing movie career, though perhaps one in which he never quite achieved a single breakout starring role to match his music profile or his importance as a political campaigner. But he amassed a living legend status: the fighter, the tough guy and the romantic hero.

    ‘I did all that I could’: A look back at the life and career of Harry Belafonte – video

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    #Bans #bigots #surreal #scifi #love #triangles #Harry #Belafontes #staggering #screen #career
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • The Surreal Post-Trump Embrace of Mark Milley

    The Surreal Post-Trump Embrace of Mark Milley

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    “Every single one of us in this country, the United States of America, has freedom of speech. We’ve got freedom of the press. We’ve got freedom of religion. We are free to assemble. We are free to protest against our government and redress any grievances,” Milley said, to cheers. “We in uniform are willing to die — to give our lives, our limbs, our eyesight, to ensure that that Constitution lives for the next generation.”

    Photos snapped. Applause rang. Selfies were taken.

    Milley had come to the soiree, according to his affable spokesman, Col. Dave Butler, because he was invited and saw an opportunity.

    “I was invited to it and I heard it was a celebration of the First Amendment. In a non-D.C. political way, I thought he would really enjoy talking to a bunch of reporters about the constitution and the First Amendment, and he did,” Butler told me. “The reporters and the journalists that are part of democracy, as he says, could use hearing from the chairman of the joint chiefs just what we think of them.”

    By now, though, there’s not a lot of doubt about that, or of the converse.

    Like Anthony Fauci, another unelected public sector lifer who became a bete noire of the far right, Milley has become a cause celebre in Washington, an icon of guardrail-respecting professionalism — and a presence around town. A few nights after the party at the French residence, I saw him posing for other pictures at the white-tie Gridiron dinner, an annual to-do for a rather more venerable class of media bigwigs. Scan POLITICO’s Playbook newsletter and you’ll find mention of him at shindigs like a New Year’s Day brunch at the home of the philanthropist Adrienne Arsht.

    Where people outside the Pentagon ecosystem might not have been able to pick Milley’s immediate predecessors out of a lineup, Milley is the most famous Joint Chiefs chair since Colin Powell — and without an actual ongoing war to boost his profile. Like the politically savvy Powell, of course, he’s helped himself, especially when it comes to cultivating the folks who shape reputations. Reporters on the national security beat say he’s a blunt, intellectual and remarkably available source, particularly off the record. Veterans of the beat described Pentagon run-ins that turned into long, candid conversations.

    Beyond the Pentagon media, he’s also been a ubiquitous presence in books about the late days of the Trump administration, where his perspective on the dramatic events (if not his direct quotes) have been exhaustively presented, right down to the resignation letters he drafted but never sent. Bestsellers by the likes of Bob Woodward as well as Susan Glasser (former editor of POLITICO) and Peter Baker depicted Milley as one of the responsible figures seeking to avert disasters as Donald Trump sought to hold office after losing an election — a time when many insiders feared the defeated commander-in-chief would launch wag-the-dog foreign operations or try to pull the military into his domestic schemes. Like a good Washington operator, his story got out with just enough plausible deniability.

    But if Milley’s efforts to protect the military from political chaos are about a deep desire to preserve the pre-Trump, constitutional version of normal, the profile he cuts in Washington is a daily reminder of how far we are from that normal.

    At a time of peace, it’s not normal for the senior general in the U.S. military to be famous. In a country where all military officers take an oath to the Constitution, it’s not normal for a general to come across as transgressive for praising that Constitution’s most famous amendment. And while the hero’s welcome accorded Milley in some circles isn’t especially common, the feelings about Milley at the opposite end of the spectrum are even more notable: It’s profoundly abnormal, in the annals of the modern American military, for a sitting general to attract the kind of partisan vitriol that Milley does.

    Scan far-right Twitter and you’ll find doctored images of Milley as a Chinese military official or a bleached-haired pride parade participant. The bill of complaints ranges from leaking about Trump’s end-stage behavior to supporting a “woke” military, but the criticism is remarkably personal. Republican Rep. Paul Gosar called him a “traitor.”

    “We get a lot of flak on social media, we get a lot of hate mail in the blogosphere. Although a lot are ad hominem attacks, they’re also attacks against the military,” says Butler. “People threaten his family, his family reads this stuff. On a personal side, it hurts too.”

    And in the logic of 21st century America, the spectacle of MAGA types excoriating Milley only strengthens his appeal among MAGA’s enemies.

    It’s almost hard to remember that Milley’s path to his current Beltway-star status began with an event that had almost the precise opposite political valence: His participation in Trump’s infamous march across Lafayette Square during the 2020 protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. The spectacle of the nation’s top general, clad in battle fatigues, taking part in a political show of force, was one of the most disastrous photo-ops in military history. At the time, it was Democrats and establishmentarians who screamed that the event had politicized the military — and pointed their fingers at Milley.

    Almost immediately, Milley acknowledged that the critics were right. In a speech a few days later at the National Defense University, he declared unequivocally that, “I should not have been there.” He said the event created the impression that the military was involved in politics, something anathema to the American tradition. “It was a mistake that I have learned from, and I sincerely hope we all can learn from it,” he said. The address, in fact, went a lot further than a simple apology, as Milley discussed his own anger about Floyd’s killing, and ranged into America’s ugly racial history — including the military’s ongoing failures at promoting Black officers. “We all need to do better,” he said.

    In a way, the subsequent two and a half years can be viewed as extensions of that speech. To critics, it’s a case of a general going outside his lane and trying to address political questions. But to admirers, it’s about being vocal in reassuring Americans that their military — and its top general — are not going to be used as political instruments.

    For Milley, it was actually a familiar theme. His public reverence for the Constitution predates the crisis of 2020. His official portrait from his time as the Army Chief of Staff even shows him holding a copy of the document. But after Lafayette Square, the subject acquired a new political charge for reasons beyond his control.

    “I think he’s done remarkably well,” says Duke University’s Peter Feaver, who studies civil-military relations and is close to the general, a former student. “He’s had an extraordinarily difficult set of challenges to navigate, and some of them are unprecedented in modern times.” Feaver rates Milley’s actions in 2020 as exemplary, and says the only legitimate criticism might be that we know about those actions at all, an indication that Milley either blabbed or allowed others to do so. But he says even that reflects deep-seated institutionalism. “I suspect there’s a bit of, ‘This was so crazy, the historical record needs to know this.’ So that the next person who’s facing similar challenges will not be taken by surprise.”

    At any rate, it worked — perhaps better than intended, because in some circles Milley has gone from being in a hole to being on a pedestal.

    Which is its own sort of problem. In America in 2023, even spreading the gospel of a non-politicized military is itself a political act, guaranteeing that Milley would make enemies.

    Still, there’s a case that at least some of those enemies didn’t need to be antagonized — and were a function of communications missteps. Take Milley’s famous answer to a hearing question about antiracism at a 2021 hearing where he appeared alongside Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. After a hostile question about critical race theory, Milley took the mic and delivered a stirring, rather beautiful soliloquy about racism. The response went viral, appropriately so. Yet if the goal is keeping the military out of politics, it might have been better, for a uniformed officer, to clam up and let the political appointee answer the obviously political question.

    Kori Schake, another former Pentagon official now with the American Enterprise Institute — and also someone who says Milley should be graded, like an Olympic diver, based on an extreme degree of difficulty — says the problem is that Milley, whom she calls well-intended, is not always such a savvy political operator after all.

    “I worry that the way he’s done the job — not excusing himself from the Lafayette Square parade, volunteering his view on critical race theory when he wasn’t asked, which means now everybody else can be asked — opens other military leaders up to having to take a position on those issues,” Schake told me. “And positioning himself as somebody helping to land the plane safely, where the military’s role in disputed American elections is appropriately no role. … He’s made some choices that are institutionally not good for the role of the chairman or future chairmen’s relationship with their political superiors.”

    Schake, who once worked for Powell, says that one takeaway from that earlier general’s public status was that, “every president has tried conscientiously to pick a chairman who was not like Colin Powell.” In that sense, she says, the blunders represent something good: “We should actually not want a military of adroit politicians. We should actually prefer the problems of a military that’s clumsy in navigating politics.”

    Milley, of course, will be out of the Pentagon picture later this year: He’s due by law to retire by October, and the search for a successor is on. To some extent, the political charge around his office will leave with him, given that much of it — pro and con — is so very personal. But Feaver says the baggage means that the appointment will wind up being one of the most consequential of the Biden administration.

    “It should be kind of a head-nod moment where Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee and Democrats on the Armed Services Committee nod their heads and say, yeah, yeah, that’s right,” Feaver says. “Rather than. ‘I’m going to pick the person most closely aligned with my policies,’ or some other kind of criteria that’s separate from just picking the military professional best prepared for this particular role. … If he missteps and picks someone that can be politicized from the get-go, if we get into a cycle, it’s a cycle that’s very hard to break.”

    As for Milley, retirement could prove lucrative. Butler, his spokesman, says he won’t be writing a tell-all. But a book agent I spoke to, who has done a number of big Washington deals, tells me the general could get up to $1.5 million for a candid memoir — the kind of dollar figure that can change someone’s mind. The only catch: The biggest payday will come if he can spill some beans that weren’t already spilled in those Milley-centric histories of Trump’s final days.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • ‘A surreal experience’: Former Biden ‘disinfo’ chief details harassment

    ‘A surreal experience’: Former Biden ‘disinfo’ chief details harassment

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    screenshot 9

    “It was a surreal experience to be forced to confront this guy,” Jankowicz told POLITICO in an interview. In one video, she says, the man said her newborn should be put in “baby jail.”

    Now, it looks like Jankowicz will be back in the spotlight. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) plans to make Jankowicz a star witness before his new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government, which Republicans say will investigate alleged abuses of federal authority. On Monday, Jordan issued a subpoena compelling Jankowicz to sit for a deposition and Jankowicz says she will abide by it.

    Jankowicz says her story shows what can happen to any private citizen or government official who gets cast as a villain in a far-right conspiracy plot. “I didn’t intend for my entire career to be lit on fire before my eyes by taking this job,” she said.

    The now-defunct initiative that Jankowicz briefly headed was aimed at developing government-wide recommendations to stop the flow of disinformation sponsored by China, Russia and violent domestic extremists. Jankowicz, who managed programs on Russia and Belarus for the National Democratic Institute and has advised the Ukrainian government, was chosen for her expertise in online disinformation, according to the Department of Homeland Security, under which she served.

    Jordan says she has refused several requests to testify voluntarily. Jankowicz and her attorney say that’s because the assumption behind his demand — that she was tasked to police speech — is false. In his subpoena letter, Jordan said she is “uniquely situated” to provide relevant information about the board.

    Jankowicz, who is a new mother, says she plans to file a lawsuit against Fox News and launched a crowdsourcing campaign to support her legal fees.

    “Fox News irrevocably changed my life when they force fed lies about me to tens of millions of their viewers,” she says in a video accompanying her GoFundMe. “In addition to the deferral of my dream of serving my country, I’ve lost something irreplaceable: peace with my son during his first year in the world,” she says in the video.

    Fox News did not respond to multiple emails to company spokespersons seeking comment.

    On Fox shows including those hosted by Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, she’s been called a “conspiracy theorist,” a “useful idiot,” and “insane.”

    When she was eight-months pregnant, said Jankowicz, strangers online were calling her a Nazi and ugly and said she should die.

    Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) decried her “history of spreading disinformation.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly said the board was akin to the “Communist ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark) even said she “appears to be mentally unstable.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said she felt sorry her child has to “have that kind of mother.”

    For a time, she says, her blood pressure spiked. She wore a hat, sunglasses and a mask to prenatal doctor appointments, hired a private security consultant to monitor the situation and relied on yoga and meditation to calm her nerves. A few weeks before her due date, the consultant advised her and her husband to leave the house for safety reasons, which they ultimately deemed not practical.

    Republicans objected, from the start, to the premise of the board and the idea that the government should play any role in defining disinformation, according to a spokesman for Jordan.

    “The very idea of ‘disinformation’ involves policing speech. Period,” he said.

    A number of GOP lawmakers likened it to an Orwellian plot and took aim at Jankowicz for statements she made on social media prior to her government appointment — mostly expressing doubt about the origins of Hunter Biden’s laptop, but also about coronavirus disinformation and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

    Regarding the blowback Jankowicz encountered, the Jordan aide said she agreed to serve as the board’s public face, and should thus be held accountable in public.

    “She’s the top person and a public figure. Any assertion otherwise is ridiculous,” he said. Jordan “has only ever referred to her or wrote to her in her official capacity,” he said.

    Jankowicz counters that Jordan has “repeatedly referenced my statements as a private citizen.”

    Taking credit

    When she stepped down in May, Sen. Josh Hawley, (R-Mo.), took credit.

    Hawley was among the loudest critics claiming the board was “policing Americans’ speech.” He also called Jankowicz a “human geyser of misinformation,” citing tweets about Hunter Biden’s laptop in which she suggested it could be part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

    “Only when a patriotic whistleblower came forward with documents did we learn the truth,” he tweeted about board-related paperwork that he says shows the administration’s plan for the board was more extensive than publicly revealed.

    Jankowicz, however, says the documents — which Hawley and other congressional Republicans have had since last June — contradict many of the claims he, Hannity, Carlson, Jordan and numerous other figures made in public and on Fox’s airwaves about the board’s mission.

    “It’s hard for boring truths to outpace inflammatory lies,” said Jankowicz. “They’re saying the opposite of what’s on paper. Everything is disproven by documents they have in their possession. They’re just assuming nobody is going to read them.”

    A response from DHS to a letter Hawley sent in late April seeking answers states the board “is an internal working group that does not have operational capacity.”

    Both Jordan and Hawley have zeroed in on an April 28, 2022 draft talking points memo for a meeting with Twitter executives that Jankowicz says never came to pass. It proposed Twitter become involved in “analytic exchanges” with DHS and that the board would serve as a “coordinating mechanism” for outreach to industry, civil society and international partners. Hawley’s office expressed alarm about plans for a similar meeting with Facebook’s Meta.

    “Those are remarkably outward facing activities for a supposedly internal working group that lacks operational capacity,” said the Jordan spokesman.

    Yet the “analytic exchanges,” says Jankowicz, refer to a pre-existing DHS initiative titled “Public-Private Analytic Exchange Program” that spans a number of industries and aims to help government analysts working on, for instance, threats to supply chains and ransomware.

    Further, the next sentence says the board’s initial work would center on “domestic violent extremism” and “irregular migration,” and said Twitter should be “thanked” for its engagement with an existing cybersecurity agency created under President Donald Trump. During the 2020 election, it ran a “Rumor Control” website that sought to “prebunk” incorrect claims with factual information, reads page 3 of a Sept. 13, 2021 memorandum.

    The materials, spanning between September of 2021 to January of 2022, also stipulate the need for protocols to “protect privacy, civil rights and civil liberties.” Its mission would be information sharing and prescriptive in nature. The department “should not attempt to be an all-purpose arbiter of truth in the public arena” but focus on disinformation “impacting DHS core missions,” it continues.

    “It’s been extremely frustrating that these documents haven’t been covered at all,” said Jankowicz.

    In an email response, Hawley’s office said emails he obtained show Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas misled him about when the board first began meeting. The emails Hawley cited as proof pertain to preparatory meetings of lower level “steering group” aides — not the board itself.

    Hawley also seized on an email that a DHS cyber security official sent Jankowicz and others regarding an opinion piece that ran in the Washington Post arguing that tech companies should block a Kremlin propaganda symbol. Hawley said the information behind the op-ed was funded by a “liberal dark money group.”

    In a statement, Hawley spokeswoman Abigail Marone said: “Conducting rigorous government oversight and holding Biden Administration officials accountable is what Missourians expect Josh to do. And it’s great news for the American people that Biden’s Disinformation Board was dissolved because of it.”

    Marone also cited language from the board’s charter stating that board members would “ensure that their respective components implement, execute and follow board decisions.”

    Fox Fixture

    Meanwhile, on Fox News, Jankowicz became such a fixture that, when DHS paused the board, Jordan thanked anchor Sean Hannity for “the work you’ve done in helping get rid of this governance board.”

    During this year and last, she’s been featured in more than 250 broadcast segments on Fox, whose hosts and guests have repeated false “assertions of fact” about her more than 400 times, she alleges. Hannity called her “one of the biggest perpetrators and purveyors of disinformation in the entire country.”

    Convinced the firestorm would not end unless she stepped down, Jankowicz said she chose to exit the department. “It just felt like they completely rolled over to Republican lies,” she said of the Biden administration.

    ”What has been shocking is the extent to which it [the harassment] has continued,” said Jankowicz, citing at least two incidents of men snapping photos of her and posting them to social media.

    She blames the continued focus of Fox News primetime anchors and their guests.

    Jankowicz “will come after you,” Jordan said on Hannity’s show, alleging “the left” wants to make people who disagree with them “not allowed to talk.” He retweeted a (now-deleted) video taken out of context claiming she wanted to edit tweets. Numerous Fox segments featured a Tik Tok video she’d made more than a year before in which she did a parody of a “Mary Poppins” song.

    Jankowicz, who has been involved in community theater most of her life, said it was “openly campy” and one of several educational spots on disinformation she did on the platform.

    Hunter Biden and the Dossier

    Republicans also criticized statements Jankowicz had made prior to taking her position about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Jankowicz holds that “the [Steele] Dossier was real and the Hunter [Biden] laptop story was false,” Jordan said on Fox last April.

    She did repeatedly express skepticism about the laptop’s origins, which she says was because it was Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who handed it to authorities. More than 50 former senior intelligence officials also called it “deeply suspicious” at the time, and Jankowicz says there is no record of her declaring the laptop itself wasn’t real.

    One tweet went viral without the context that it was her live tweeting an Oct. 20 presidential debate in which she paraphrased Biden referencing that same letter. Another cited an intelligence report concluding that the Kremlin “used proxies” to push unsubstantiated claims about Biden, which she called “a clear nod to the alleged Hunter laptop.”

    POLITICO itself has not authenticated all the Hunter Biden hard drive files cited in media reports, but POLITICO reporter Ben Schreckinger confirmed the authenticity of some emails on the drive in a 2021 book.

    Jankowicz says she never assessed the veracity of a now-infamous dossier compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele that made explosive claims linking Trump to the Kremlin. Rather, she praised its author in an unrelated matter and debated its origins in a couple of tweets. In 2019, a special counsel investigation concluded that it could not determine a criminal conspiracy between Moscow and the Trump campaign.

    She also supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, praised efforts to crack down on coronavirus misinformation and expressed concern over Elon Musk’s plans to buy Twitter.

    Personal Toll

    Perhaps ironically, in April of 2022 amid the fury, a book Jankowicz had in the works was published. Its title: “How to Be a Woman Online” and survive threats and harassment. It was based on her knowledge of how Russian disinformation is often presented through a gendered lens.

    Since then, she says, she’s received tens of thousands of harassing online posts and hundreds of violent threats. One anonymous poster – who called her a “Tranny Jew” on April 28 – said: “I can’t wait for the open violence phase of this war to kick off.”

    As the taunts peaked last spring, she says she pleaded with her superiors to allow her to speak to the media to “defend myself.” Fox shows were showing her picture and talking about her being pregnant so she could be easily identified, she said.

    “It was about my life, it was about threats to my family and it was clear the administration was mostly concerned about how to put the fire out and not how to protect me,” she said.

    When she finally was notified that DHS would pause the board, she was offered an opportunity to remain in the department but felt she had no choice but to leave. “I said ‘I’m not going to stay if I can’t speak to media,’” she said. Jankowicz also questioned the commitment to the project because they’d “abandoned” it so quickly.

    Further, because she’d “become toxic,” Jankowicz said “It just didn’t seem worth it.”

    DHS cited instances in which both Mayorkas and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki defended Jankowicz’ work. Mayorkas has told the Washington Post that the agency “could have done a better job of communicating what it [the board] is and what it isn’t.”

    The board’s “purpose was grossly and intentionally mischaracterized,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement to POLITICO, and Jankowicz “was subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats.”

    About two weeks later, she gave birth to her first child.

    The attacks kept coming. Jankowicz recalled that it was during a middle-of-the-night bottle feeding when her husband informed her that Hawley had begun touting the documents he’d obtained from a whistleblower and Freedom of Information Act request. Two months after her resignation, Jankowicz sent a letter to Hawley and Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, citing ongoing “aggressive, sexualized, vulgar and threatening messages” she was receiving online, on the phone and even at home.

    Hawley reacted to her plea to “stop amplifying these lies” by tweeting that Jankowicz should testify under oath. By that time, he had been in possession of the board’s internal documents for a number of weeks, having received them in June, she said.

    Today, Jankowicz continues to juggle diaper changes, pumping breast milk and other aspects of life as a new mother with consultations with her four sets of attorneys — to address her protective order; to respond to Jordan’s probe; for a “frivolous” lawsuit alleging she is censoring someone; and a tax adviser for her GoFundMe.

    When she sues Fox, that will require a fifth lawyer, she says.



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    #surreal #experience #Biden #disinfo #chief #details #harassment
    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )