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By Suzanne Nossel, Executive Director, PEN America
The cancellation of Ann Coulter’s planned speech at the University of California, Berkeley, leaves everyone a loser. Coulter lost the opportunity to expound her views. The conservative organizations who invited her failed in what were presumably twin objectives: to amplify Coulter’s opinions and to test their progressive antagonists’ free speech bona fides. Those who protested her visit may consider her no-show a victory, but will find the triumph pyrrhic; accused of shutting down speech, they played right into the Coulter contingent’s hands. Besides, the speech silenced next time may be their own. The marauders who threatened violence may also count a win, but the affirmation of their tortured, barbaric logic will only fan the authoritarianism and hatreds they purport to assail. The university, caught between menacing plotters and event organizers who insisted on having it their way regardless of security concerns, suffered a bitter blow to its historic legacy as a breeding ground for free speech.
The pitched tenor and occasionally violent nature of current battles over free speech on campus are a reflection of this polarized moment in American politics. Having grown up with expanding LGBT rights, America’s first African American president, and a vocal immigrants’ rights movement, left-leaning students are on the leading edge of the plate tectonics that are remaking American society and values in ways that may better reflect and address what some have called “majority minority” America; a population in which no one racial group claims the majority. While precepts including racial and gender justice are championed, other liberal values— including free speech—sometimes get short-shrift in these circles. These students and their allies are meeting determined resistance from those—including some conservative classmates—who fear that treasured facets of our country and culture are at risk due to rapid demographic and social change. Neither side has a monopoly on either truth or tall talk.
The American university, which has a dual mission to offer an equal education in an inclusive setting to an increasingly diverse student body and to uphold stringent protections for academic freedom and free speech, is being torn apart by the tensions between these two roles. But the university’s dual responsibilities— as guardian of a campus that is truly open to both all students and to all ideas—can and must be reconciled. Berkeley has a duty to ensure that all students, and particularly those who are most vulnerable, are kept physically safe, free from discrimination, and psychologically supported to a point where they can learn and thrive. It must also uphold the university’s role as a forum where all viewpoints are allowed to be heard, even those that may be offensive or even hurtful to others.
In the Berkeley case, the weight of the blame belongs with those groups that seriously and credibly threatened violence if Coulter spoke. To threaten violence is a crime; such speech is not protected. No protected speech, no matter how offensive, can justify resort to violence. To accept the idea that a planned speech that had not yet taken place could constitute a valid provocation to violence would allow our government to constrain all manner of speech—a power that our constitution and courts have repeatedly rejected. No reputable group that aligns with either progressive or conservative values, both of which embrace the protection of free speech, can condone or tolerate allies willing to resort to violence. That racial minorities, immigrants, women, and LGBT individuals are disproportionately victimized by violence is not a truth that can in any way legitimize violence in the name of protecting those groups from noxious speech. While diverse student bodies may think that closing off offensive speech helps to make for a more hospitable environment, they run the risk that while universities admit students from an ever-expanding range of backgrounds, the education they receive once inside the gates grows narrower and narrower.
But the Berkeley situation has more blame to go around. A critical decision must be drawn between the decision to invite a speaker to campus and the decision to disinvite. At Berkeley, as at many schools, decisions to invite are decentralized: any accredited student organization is ordinarily free to invite whom they like and book a room to host them. This is as it should be: students should have the chance to shape the intellectual discourse that surrounds them, even if it means they will sometimes give a platform to viewpoints that deeply offend other students or run counter to the university’s values. This isn’t to deny the role of discretion and discernment in conferring invitations: student groups, academic departments, and university officials should all exercise their best judgment in asking whether the guests they are thinking of inviting have valuable and distinctive ideas, perspectives, and expertise to offer the campus community. It’s not wrong to ask whether certain guests will cause genuine hurt to fellow students and it’s commendable to take those feelings into consideration before invitations are made. But ultimately the decisions, appropriately, rest with the many duly constituted campus bodies who extend the invitations in the first place.
While campuses are right to allow invitations to be issued liberally, disinvitations should happen very sparingly. Although disinvitations prompted by the anticipated content of a campus speech may be legal and constitutional, they are still wrong in principle, for the same reason that prior restraint—the suppression of material before it is aired or published—and other forms of pre-publication censorship rejected by US courts and inimical to a free society. Such disinvitations privilege one set of views over others, constrict the autonomy of students and deprive audiences of the opportunity to hear out viewpoints before a speaker can even open her mouth. If a guest has been invited through established procedures that apply equally to all campus groups, then for university officials to disinvite the guest is to discard those neutral procedures in favor of the subjective preferences of those who object to the speech. Instead of calling for invitations to be rescinded or speeches to be canceled, students who object to a speaker’s ideas should protest vociferously (but non-violently), hold counter-programming, offer rebuttals; in short, make their views known in any way short of preventing the rejected speech from being voiced or heard.
When credible threats of violence emerged in response to Ann Coulter’s planned speech, the best approach would have been for university officials, speech organizers, Coulter, and the leaders of credible non-violent protest groups to open dialogue about how to collectively reject thuggery, enable the speech to proceed, and let peaceful protesters have their say. Instead, the terms for the speech were litigated through the media, with dates, times, and restrictions being mooted and rejected by parties that may have been more interested in a public relations and legal battle than in actually getting Coulter to campus. Some of the university’s conditions—for example requiring that the speech happen in daylight hours— seem well warranted. But Berkeley fell short in explaining why other constraints it imposed, including requiring that the speech be held after the end of classes, were narrowly drawn to meet safety concerns without dampening Coulter’s ability to be heard.
Upholding free speech isn’t always easy; it can require creativity, flexibility, and compromise across groups with very different views. While bellicose debates over the merits of a particular speaker or her antagonists may make good fodder for cable television, genuine defenders of free speech should focus on the serious barriers to an open campus—including socio-economic, racial, gender, and political divisions, as well as entrenched intolerance for opposing viewpoints— and set about to help address them. The values of diversity and inclusion on the one hand, and of free speech and academic freedom on the other, are collectively sacrosanct. Making them fit together is an exercise in problem-solving, not grandstanding.
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When you are sick, very sick, you wait for medicine to work its magic. But if the disease is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), you have to wait for the medicine to be invented.
The bad news is that so little funding is going into solving the ME problem, commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that those sick today may be sick for the rest of their lives. They are living a life that is a nearly intolerable to themselves and a massive burden to their loved ones, spouses, parents and caregivers.
What is known is that ME is a disease of the immune system. It is vicious and debilitating, leaving the patient confined to a marginal life, a parallel and unequal existence.
Most infections are of healthy people who are struck down often, but not always, after exercise. The first symptoms can be flu-like: The sufferers feel a few days in bed will do the trick. But having ME is a life sentence. There also have been group infections, known as “clusters,” where hundreds have been stricken.
If you have ME, the least exertion can force you to spend days in bed, exhausted, hurting in myriad ways from headaches to what one woman described as “feeling like your bones are exploding.”
In severe cases, the patient cannot tolerate light or sound. A young man, newly married, and felled unaccountably, had to live in a closet for an extended period before he could handle light and sound. Symptoms vary but most of the time a victim feels, as one told me, “like you are a car that has run out of gas and your tank cannot be filled up again.” A teenager told me that if she is to go out with friends, she has to weigh that against days of bed rest, in a complete state of collapse.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) ― the principal researcher into ME and dozens of other perplexing diseases ― has historically given ME a pittance. In the last three years funding has been held to $5 million a year, although the Obama administration had promised more. To put this in perspective, the trade association of the pharmaceutical industry calculates that it costs $1.2 billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. Sadly that industry has not shown interest in ME, so the research is mostly funded by NIH and private groups and individuals.
The news that the Trump administration is thinking of cutting the total NIH budget by $5 billion has caused a palpable anxiety to grip the ME community. The disease is cruel enough, does it need to be compounded by the government?
That is why those who could manage it and members of their families were enthusiastic supporters of the March for Science. They were out there with a sense of being at the barricades as the barbarians massed on the other side.
The United States has led the world for years in scientific discovery and implementation. It is deeply disturbing to think that the country would draw back from it. But the administration’s ambivalence is clear. The Department of Energy with 17 national laboratories, every one the envy of the world, is headed by Rick Perry.
When he ran for president, he did so on a plank that included closing the department. The Environmental Protection Agency, with a history of struggling to get the regulatory science right, is headed by Scott Pruitt. As attorney general of Oklahoma, he sought to hobble the agency with lawsuits.
So across science, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the research service of the Department of Agriculture, there is fear among scientists; fear for their jobs, fear for science and fear for America.
In the sick rooms of the 1 million or so ME sufferers, despondency has reached new depths. You will not be cured if no one cares enough to look for a cure. Can you double down on despair?
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Tradition dictates that a president’s 100th day in office is supposed to touch off a period of evaluation and reflection. Now, it’s President Donald Trump’s turn to face this landmark moment.
Let’s be honest, these “100 days” judgments can seem awfully premature. Big legislative projects can take significant amounts of time ― the implementation of those policies even longer. And the truly defining moments of a presidency could occur at any moment. There’s a sense that the “First 100 Days” rubric has become more of a media trope ― and you can tell by the way occupants of the Trump White House have responded with waves of contradictory P.R. that on some level, they agree.
Something about this 100-day marker has got Trump shook, desperate to get something major in just under the wire. Perhaps any honest accounting of how things have gone for the young administration is enough to cause consternation.
But there’s a lesson for Trump’s critics and opponents in the first 100 days of his presidency as well. That lesson: There are likely to be several hundred more days of the Trump presidency.
The reason I bring this up is that there is a popular sentiment out there among Trump’s most ardent critics that I encounter on a semi-regular basis, in travels through social media and in real life, that holds that some quick solution to the Trump problem is imminent. A shoe drops, and it’s lights out for Donald ― or at least it’s the prelude to yet another shoe making its descent.
When will the Trump presidency end? How will it happen? These are questions that have been put to me. In all likelihood, it ends with another election. If it happens prematurely, though, it will be the result of something bad, and that trauma will likely beget further trauma.
Presidencies that end abruptly, by definition, don’t end cleanly. We don’t press reset, get a new slate, and walk away clean. After the ignominious end of Richard Nixon’s administration, his successor, President Gerald Ford, tried to make a swift pivot, kicking off his tenure with a ritual incantation: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” But if you trace our history since the end of the Vietnam War and the Nixon presidency, it looks as if that period of unease never really did end. In the decades since, we’ve been more defined by our crises of faith than we have been by our accomplishments, and trust in important institutions has eroded.
Perhaps the toughest thing to grapple with right now is the realization that the presidency of Donald Trump is not actually some freak, black-swan event that rose from the ether to shock our system unexpectedly. Rather, it is the natural consequence of decades of choices that we made together.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Trump is a man more sinned against than sinning. Given his unruly nature, manic ego, and history of corruption, this should be a period of high anxiety in its own right. By my reckoning, there is a better-than-average likelihood that Trump will become involved in some serious wrongdoing ― in fact, he might be ensnared in such iniquity at this very moment.
This is not, by any means, a call to give up on pursuing truth and justice, inquiry and investigation, wherever evidence may lead. It’s merely a reminder that the solution to this particular moment probably does not lie over the next horizon. It’s also an admonition to remember that should Trump be removed from office, it will likely be due to some sort of traumatizing event. So, if you’re sitting at home, fingers crossed in the hope that this is all to end some time in the near future, think about what you’re wishing for, when you wish for a quick fix.
One-hundred days into his presidency, Trump’s impeachment is already branded merchandise. And The Case For Impeachment is already the title of a book, by American University history professor Allan J. Lichtman. You may remember Lichtman ― he was one of the few people during the 2016 election cycle to predict that Trump was destined to prevail, using what he describes as “the same proven method that had led [him] to forecast accurately the outcomes of eight previous elections.” This time out, even Lichtman was surprised that he’d nailed the outcome yet again.
Trump took notice. After the election, he sent along a brief note of congratulations: “Professor ― Congrats ― good call.” “What Trump overlooked,” writes Lichtman, “was my next ‘big prediction’: that, after winning the presidency, he would be impeached.” It’s worth pointing out that Lichtman hasn’t based this prediction on some proven statistical model ― he admits he’s making gut predictions based on Trump’s behavior and history, along with the historical record of past capsized presidencies. Sometimes, we go too far when historians try to be pundit stars.
But if you’re looking to Lichtman’s text to provide the thing the title of his book immediately implies ― a straightforward, prêt-à-porter legal case against Trump’s continued presidency that can be filed and argued ― you’re going to go home wanting. Lichtman ably explains the impeachment mechanism, describes past presidencies that have fomented crises, and even outlines ways in which “impeachment traps” can be laid. But much of the body of his book simply rehashes things that we already know about Trump: his shady business deals, his various scams, his conflicts of interests, his deceptions, and his shabby treatment of women.
Lichtman is correct to note that the misdeeds of yesteryear can become relevant to impeachment proceedings. In a technical sense, they can even serve to animate an impeachment. But it’s hard to believe that any of Trump’s past transgressions, having been digested fully by the public in the years that have just passed, are going to inspire Congress to act on his removal at some point in the future.
Nevertheless, there are some areas, capably identified by Lichtman, where Trump could potentially lose his grip on his office. One has to do with his varied business holdings, a ripe ground for all sorts of corruption. His stateside assets raise considerable concerns about conflicts of interest, and the possibility that he’ll be guided more by what’s best for his bottom line than he is about the concerns of the American people.
Abroad, his international holdings raise the concern that he’ll be susceptible to foreign favor-trading, and give special treatment to foreign actors who agree to plump his bank account. Just this week, it was reported that the State Department was promoting Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort ― a move that brought the immediate scorn of ethics watchdogs for the potential violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. (The State Department subsequently deleted these promotions.)
These are the sorts of entanglements that the nation’s founders specifically sought to avoid, and which could be grounds for impeachment. But while there is an emoluments-related lawsuit currently snaking its way through the legal system, you have to remember that the most effective defender of the public interest, where conflicts of interest are concerned, is Congress, and the Republicans who control both houses have elected to turn a blind eye to the problem.
Should Democrats, at some point, retake the majority in one or both houses of Congress, oversight could accelerate considerably. But either way, we are not looking at something that’s going to get Trump tossed from office any time soon. And while the Trump administration has brought a lot of attention ― and even some public affection ― to the Office of Government Ethics, this agency is not out there setting impeachment traps. If the OGE gets its way, Trump’s critics won’t even be able to make a case based on his business holdings, because he will be in compliance with OGE advice.
The other area on which Trump is vulnerable is the ongoing investigation into possible Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the extent to which Trump and his coterie were knit up in that alleged plot. This particular case has all the high-tension trimmings, complete with the frisson of treason. But again, nothing has reached the point where anyone is moments away from being clapped in irons. This matter will also take time to resolve. And while new speculation into the matter seems to be generated on an hourly basis, depending on who you follow on Twitter, these sorts of cases can be hard to make when they seem makeable.
In the end, this whole tawdry affair could end with no one being able to prove a case against Trump and his associates. It could even potentially end with their exoneration. These are outcomes for which you should intellectually and emotionally be prepared to accept. Hopefully, the outcome is the result of a thorough and professional inquiry in which we can have faith, whatever it is.
Besides, do you really want the White House to have been compromised by the Russian state? Would you prefer that massive graft takes root at the executive level? Don’t forget that while any of these things might shorten Trump’s tenure, they’re still not good outcomes for the rest of us.
And what about the other kinds of things that might suddenly end a presidency? Most of them involve an event that causes widespread damage, misery, or injury. We should be clear-eyed about this. If you’re rooting for a quick end to Trump’s presidential tenure, remember: You’re also rooting for something that will likely bring widespread anguish to your fellow Americans.
There has to be a morning after. If Trump is taken down by intelligence community findings, corruption, or some destructive event, we’ll still have to deal with the aftermath. In that sense, impeachment is not necessarily a “peaceful remedy” at all. It would be yet another crisis of faith in fractious times, sowing tension and division, difficult to unwind.
We ought to pursue the truth, serve just ends, and punish wrongdoers, but we shouldn’t be up at night, hoping for wrong to be done, just because it will facilitate the electoral outcomes we prefer.
So it’s telling that in the penultimate chapter of The Case For Impeachment, Lichtman opts out of shaking the pom-poms for impeachment. Instead, he addresses Trump directly, urging him to simply change his ways, by following “a blueprint for surviving as president.” Lichtman advises Trump to divest his assets, become more forward-thinking on policy, achieve a greater level of grace and generosity in his temperament, suspend his autocratic approach, and stop lying his way out of problems.
Here’s Lichtman’s final admonition to Trump:
I have one word for you in conclusion, Mr. President, and that word is legacy. It’s easy to get swept up in the adulation and enthusiasm of the crowd. But you can’t build a legacy on rallies and tweets. You need solid accomplishments that make America great and safe and that will secure your re-election in 2020.
Above all, you can’t afford to ensnare yourself in on impeachment investigation, like the one that consumed the last two years of Clinton’s presidency. The bar is, frankly, set so low for you that even the small changes I’ve suggested here would sufficiently disarm your critics and clear the path to a successful presidency. You can do this.
Too much to ask for? Maybe. Probably. But it’s a pretty optimistic moment to come at the end of a book titled “The Case For Impeachment.” And it shows that Lichtman isn’t actually rooting for a presidency-ending trauma, despite the litany of Trump past misdeeds he catalogues in the preceding chapters. This isn’t really a case for impeachment ― it’s the case for Trump to do enough of the necessary self-reflection to have an effective, respectable, and responsible presidency. That’s something that still might be achieved if Trump took stock of his errors and made the most of this moment.
And there is a lesson here for Trump’s critics and opponents as well. This is time for some fearless inventory-taking, for the generation of bold ideas, and for keeping all of your fellow citizens foremost in your thoughts. To say nothing of some relentless campaigning and organizing. This is also a legacy moment for this cohort, a time to do some work.
I’ve read a lot of party “autopsies,” in which a party that loses an election attempts to assess what went wrong. In all honestly, they never really boil down to real change. Instead, they become a call to do the same old things, just with better marketing. Democrats in particular have repeatedly gone to the “but our opponents are crazy” well, only to face the law of diminishing returns head-on. Everybody is looking for shortcuts instead of doing honest evaluation, and the shortcuts don’t lead anywhere.
Should Trump’s term be shortened by wrongdoing, let it be the result of justice being served as clearly and as honestly as possible. In the meantime, everyone would be well-advised to spend a lot less time and labor crossing their fingers in the hopes of a quick fix. Quick fixes don’t exist.
In fact, it can be argued that it was the search for this quick fix that led us to this point in the first place. The real “100 days” lesson for those who hope to one day supplant Trump, is that the first political party or movement that courageously takes stock in itself, generates new ideas, and eschews the temptation of the easy answer is likely to be the next one that builds something that endures. And should Trump’s time in office end in infamy, they’ll be in a better position to help the country heal. That’s what it takes to end a nightmare, if not a presidency.
~~~~~
Jason Linkins edits “Eat The Press” for The Huffington Post and co-hosts the HuffPost Politics podcast “So, That Happened.” Subscribe here, and listen to the latest episode below.
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The Green Berets were, in their own words, “America’s response to the most catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. soil ever.” Sent to Afghanistan in the wake of Sept. 11, the Army Special Forces crew is now the subject of a documentary called “Legion of Brothers.” The Huffington Post has the exclusive trailer.
Dispatched on top-secret anti-Taliban missions, the Green Berets recount their harrowing mission. “We’re just trying to live,” one says, reflecting on the intensity.
Despite tactical errors and the lingering stresses of warfare, the soldiers’ early initiatives were successful enough to convince them Islamic terrorism was being curtailed for good. Sixteen year later, we see the toll the war in Afghanistan took on these men’s lives. Director Greg Barker, who has experience with the subject via his 2014 doc “Manhunt: The Inside Story of the Hunt for Bin Laden,” presents “Legion of Brothers” as a nonpartisan story about the human toils of combat.
“Brothers” open in select theaters May 19 and premieres on VOD platforms June 26. Watch the trailer above.
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Jennifer Lopez wasn’t the only star to turn heads with a barely there look on the Billboard Latin Music Awards’ red carpet Thursday night.
The fashion was all about showing off a little skin, as stars wore some breathtaking gowns that accentuated their curves. The men of the night didn’t hold back either, with many replacing the classic black suit with more colorful alternatives.
Nicky Jam was the big winner of the ceremony, which was held at the Ritz Carlton in Miami Beach, as he took home six awards. Lopez also debuted her new Spanish single “Mírate” from her upcoming Spanish-language album, produced by her ex-husband Marc Anthony.
Check out a recap of the night in the videoabove and more fashion from the red carpet below:
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Sylvia Green didn’t care about the money. She just wanted to work for Ellen DeGeneres.
It was 1996 and Green had left a high-powered job in public relations to pursue a career in television writing. She’d found some work helping out with shows like “The Nanny” and “Mad About You.” But when she was offered the chance to join “Ellen” as a writer’s assistant in 1996, she couldn’t resist.
“Ellen,” the sitcom, was at the time just a moderately successful TV show about a somewhat awkward 30-something bookstore owner. But Ellen, the woman, was America’s sweetheart. Green’s bosses offered her a raise so she’d stay at her current job, but she turned it down. She had already sacrificed a lot to pursue her dream of writing for television. In “Ellen,” Green thought she might have found what she was looking for.
She took the job.
A few days after she started, one of the producers’ assistants pulled her into a room, closed the door, and told her a secret: A month earlier, during lunch at her home in Los Angeles, DeGeneres had revealed to the show’s writers and producers something that would change not only her life, but all of theirs, too. DeGeneres wanted to come out on the show.
No TV character even remotely as famous as Ellen Morgan, DeGeneres’ character on the show, had ever announced they were gay on primetime television before, and prejudice against the LGBTQ community was still rampant. That year, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Americans did not believe same-sex marriage should be legal — a clear sign that even a widely loved woman couldn’t come out on primetime television without risks.
Jonathan Stark, a writer on “Ellen,” initially wasn’t sure he wanted to go through with the plan. Vance DeGeneres, Ellen’s brother, who was also an occasional writer on the show, feared for his sister’s welfare. Dava Savel, a co-executive producer, said she knew the show would never be the same.
“She was the girl next door,” Savel said. “Everyone loved her, and we were basically shooting it in the foot and hoping it didn’t bleed out.”
Privately, ABC had many of the same fears, and executives said they would not officially approve the episode until they had seen a fully formed script, Green remembered.
But Disney, which had acquired ABC in 1995, loved the idea, and pushed ABC to make it happen. By 1996, Disney’s corporate culture had already become much more LGBTQ-friendly than ABC’s. The company had multiple gay executives. It hosted “gay days at the park,” said Pete Aronson, then an executive vice president at Disney. Dean Valentine, then the president of Walt Disney Television, told DeGeneres that he wanted her team to take the idea as far as they could, and really challenge people.
“She was so grateful that Disney was understanding,” said Savel, who remembers tears rolling down DeGeneres’ face after Disney told her they supported her decision. “She just felt like such a huge weight had been lifted off of her.”
DeGeneres and everyone else knew the show “desperately needed a point of view,” she later admitted during an interview with Time. With three seasons behind them, the writers were having trouble creating storylines around Ellen Morgan. The character wasn’t particularly passionate about her career, nor was she much interested in dating men ― two plotline staples of the sitcom genre.
The conundrum became such an issue that someone ― either Disney CEO Michael Eisner, or “Ellen” co-producer Mark Driscoll, depending on who you ask ― now-famously joked that Ellen should get a puppy. It would lead to DeGeneres’ coming-out episode being titled “The Puppy Episode,” a code name for what people internally knew would be something much bigger.
Inevitably, DeGeneres’ plan to come out leaked to the press, provoking swift and intense public fascination. The tabloids couldn’t get enough. Patrick Bristow, who played Ellen’s friend Peter Barnes on the show, said strangers grabbed him at supermarkets and inside casinos, begging him for information.
Publicly, DeGeneres had fun with the interest. When Rosie O’Donnell, then the host of “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” asked DeGeneres about the rumors surrounding the show, DeGeneres joked that she don’t know how it got out that Ellen Morgan is, in fact, “Lebanese.”
But the lead-up to the airing of “The Puppy Episode” also revealed an uglier side of the country. Strangers called director Gil Junger at home and told him he was going to hell. The studio received piles of hate mail condemning its decision.
“It was horrible. It was just horrible,” Savel said.
The studio tried to hide the hate mail from DeGeneres, according to Tracy Newman, who co-wrote the first part of the episode. But it couldn’t hide everything, like the death threats people taped to the front door of her home, or the Southern Baptists who protested.
The situation only intensified in the days leading up to “The Puppy Episode,” when a page walked up to Vic Kaplan, one of the show’s executive producers, and told him he had a call. The Burbank Police Department was on the line. Someone had made a bomb threat.
“I want you to get the audience and get Ellen out,” Kaplan remembers the voice on the other end of the line telling him. For all the hate and anger that had been directed their way, the cast and crew were still surprised that anyone would make such a threat.
“It was scary. It was really scary,” said Jack Plotnick, who played a character named Barrett on the show.
Outside in the parking lot, waiting for the authorities to give the clear, Plotnick found himself standing next to Laura Dern, the straight woman who had come aboard to play DeGeneres’ romantic interest in the episode. Suddenly, Plotnick, an openly gay men, felt overwhelmed with emotion.
“It was incredible to have all these straight allies who thought that this was worth risking their careers, worth risking their lives,” he said. “It wasn’t like Laura was like, ‘Oh shit, why am I standing here in a parking lot that could explode?’ She was completely invested in what this show could mean and how it could help people.”
The studio ramped up security. Bomb-sniffing dogs swept the stage before rehearsal and tapings, said Clea Lewis, who played Ellen’s chipper friend Audrey Penney. When Green ordered a cake for Oprah Winfrey (who guest-starred as Ellen Morgan’s therapist in the episode) to hand to DeGeneres at the end of taping, security reamed her out for not notifying them about the delivery beforehand.
But when the taping finally began, and DeGeneres finally walked out on stage, all the stress and hate slipped away for a moment. Gil Junger had the actors go through the scene a few times without the key words, Lewis said. Then, on stage at what was supposed to be an airport gate, DeGeneres accidentally leaned over a microphone and told the world, “I’m gay.”
The cast, crew and audience erupted into an applause. They cheered and they cried. “We love you! Thank you!” they shouted for minutes. “It was just totally overwhelming,” said Lewis. At the end of shooting, Oprah brought out Green’s cake. “Good for You, You’re Gay,” it said — a line Oprah had delivered during the episode.
DeGeneres officially she announced she was gay in a Time magazine cover story on April 14. But that didn’t stop more than 40 million people from watching “The Puppy Episode” when it aired on April 30, 1997 — 20 years ago this Sunday. On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a young woman named Sarah Kate Ellis, then just 25, gathered with a handful of friends to watch at a friend’s apartment where there was a big-screen TV.
Ellis had recently come out to her friends as gay. But she hadn’t come out to her family on Staten Island, or at Condé Nast, where she worked at House & Garden magazine.
“We knew it was a watershed moment,” Ellis said. “We understood that someone like Ellen, who was America’s sweetheart at that moment in time, who was funny and endearing and charming and brilliant, but also happened to be gay, would swing a lot of doors open.”
“I was really excited,” she said. But, she added, “I was nervous too, because I wasn’t sure how this was going to play out.”
“The Puppy Episode” won an Emmy for outstanding writing in a comedy series. But after the buzz over the awards and the ratings died down, it created pain for many of those involved.
Chrysler said it didn’t want to advertise on the show, and many other regular advertisers, including J.C. Penney and the Coca-Cola Company, opted out during “The Puppy Episode,” too. ABC started to add a parental advisory warning before each episode.
Laura Dern, who played Ellen Morgan’s romantic interest on the show and declined to comment for this piece, later revealed she wasn’t able to get work for over a year afterward. DeGeneres’ real-life partner suffered, too. “It hurt Anne Heche’s career,” Junger said. “Suddenly, she wasn’t the leading woman anymore.”
But DeGeneres, perhaps, got hit the hardest. One year after “The Puppy Episode,” ABC canceled “Ellen” amid low ratings, whispers internally and bellowing externally that the show had become unfunny and, in Bristow’s words, “a little bit message-y.”
The network’s decision left DeGeneres depressed and struggling to find work. Tabloids seemed to photograph and follow every aspect of her relationship with Anne Heche, which eventually crumbled under the pressure of the public eye. “Everyone was watching us like we were the only lesbians on the planet,” DeGeneres said later.
She was left alone to pick up the pieces.
“I lost my entire career, and I lost everything for three years,” she told W magazine. “I was so angry, I was just so angry. I really worked my way up to a show, a sitcom that was mine that was successful, that was on for five years. I did what was right: I came out, which was good for me, and ultimately it was the only thing I could do. And then I got punished for it.”
“The Puppy Episode” hurt DeGeneres, but it didn’t destroy her. Six years later, in 2003, she would remake herself as a talk-show host on “Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” She would go on to film thousands of episodes of the show, interviewing the most famous of actors, the most precocious of children and the most viral of internet stars.
In the interview chair, she started to look not only comfortable again, but happy. Last November at the White House, former President Barack Obama gave DeGeneres the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He praised her for showing the country, back in 1997, that “somebody so full of kindness and light, somebody we liked so much” could be gay. But he also admitted that he had forgotten how much she suffered as a result.
“What an incredible burden that was to bear,” he said.
DeGeneres did not return multiple requests for comment for this piece.
In 1997, the symbolic significance of DeGeneres’ decision to come out was already clear. But today, it’s the tangible effects of her sacrifice that stand out most.
“[Ellen’s] bravery changed lives,” Laura Dern said earlier this year.
People come up to Junger, the episode’s director, with tears in their eyes to tell him DeGeneres saved their siblings. Mark Driscoll’s kids tell him the episode helped their counselors and teachers come out as well.
Sarah Kate Ellis, who had watched the episode with her friends on the Upper East Side, eventually came out to her parents. When she did, her dad asked, “Are you gay, like Ellen?”
She told him she was. Today, she is the president and CEO of GLAAD, one of the nation’s leading LGBTQ advocacy organizations.
“That night, that time, she saved so many lives,” Ellis said. “I know it, because people have told me they were considering killing themselves, and then they saw that and it gave them hope.”
The episode gave Sylvia Green hope, too. In the lead-up to the episode, Green read an article in The New York Times that called the idea of a woman only realizing she was gay at the age of 35 “bordering on unbelievable.”
But Green, who was 35 herself, didn’t think so. As the “Ellen” cast and crew were filming “The Puppy Episode,” she had met a woman she was interested in, and realized that she herself was gay, too.
“I completely understood,” she said. “Because that was true for me.”
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WASHINGTON ― Lorella Praeli, formerly an undocumented activist, has experience in putting political pressure on the White House.
She fought former President Barack Obama over high deportations during his first term and lobbied Congress on immigration reform. If 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had won, she may have worked on the inside, after serving as the candidate’s the national director of Latino outreach.
Instead, President Donald Trump is in the White House and she’s going back to activism ― now with a new job as director of immigration policy and campaigns at the American Civil Liberties Union, starting Monday.
“I refuse to look at the next four years and say the only thing we will do is defend,” she told HuffPost, ahead of her job announcement. “It also has to be how do we defend and expand and advance the rights of the community.”
The ACLU is ramping up its on-the-ground advocacy in response to Trump, along with its litigation efforts over some of his highest-profile executive orders on immigration ― those to block refugees and nationals of certain Muslim-majority countries from the U.S.
Praeli will work on policy and advocacy, both nationally and in states and localities, where parallel fights are playing out over immigration, such as an anti-“sanctuary city” bill that passed in the Texas House of Representatives on Thursday.
She vowed to look for ways that advocates can not just defend against deportation efforts but also enact pro-immigrant policies where they can, such as laws that allow undocumented immigrants to get driver’s licenses and in-state tuition. On the defense, she said the ACLU would do a lot of work on immigration enforcement, including agents going into courthouses and schools.
You can talk about what undocumented people are going through or you can say ‘I know this is what’s happening because I myself was undocumented.’
Lorella Praeli
Praeli offers an important perspective as a former undocumented immigrant herself. She moved to the U.S. with her family without authorization when she was 10 years old, making her one of the so-called Dreamers that came to the country as a child. She was undocumented up until 2012, when she married and received a green card. Praeli became a citizen in 2015 and voted in her first presidential election in 2016.
“Being able to bring that experience into the room is incomparable,” she said. “You can talk about what undocumented people are going through or you can say ‘I know this is what’s happening because I myself was undocumented.’”
Praeli worked for United We Dream, a nationwide network of undocumented youth-led organization, as an advocacy and policy director until 2015, when she left to join the Clinton campaign.
Her history with immigration advocacy groups around the country and reputation in the advocacy community as a Dreamer was important in making the hire, said ACLU National Political Director Faiz Shakir.
What we’re building toward is being able to tell Trump not just ‘See you in court’ but also ‘see you in the streets,” he said.
Praeli, who spoke at the Democratic National Convention that nominated Clinton, said her November loss was “devastating” and unexpected. But she did expect what happened next: A Trump crackdown on undocumented immigrants that he promised during the campaign but some people thought he wouldn’t follow through on.
Still, it’s caused many people to engage in advocacy for the first time, which Praeli said she hopes to tap into in her new role.
“I was devastated by the outcome of the election,” she said. “But I’ve also known that our country would rise to the moment.”
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