Why Isn't It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?

By Michelle Goldberg, Slate

04 September 16

A vicious misogynist and workplace predator is working with the Republican presidential nominee. This is not normal.

n a new New York magazine story, the invaluable Gabriel Sherman gives us fresh details of the depravity of ex-Fox News head Roger Ailes. Sherman quotes a former television producer who says Ailes told her, “If you want to make it in New York City in the TV business, you’re going to have to fuck me, and you’re going to do that with anyone I tell you to.” He reports that Ailes’ longtime executive assistant, Judy Laterza, recruited comely young women for her boss, including an intern who later told the Washington Post that Ailes had propositioned her: “If you sleep with me, you could be a model or a newscaster.” Sherman quotes Karem Alsina, a former Fox makeup artist, describing female anchors coming to see her before private meetings with Ailes: “They would say, ‘I’m going to see Roger, gotta look beautiful!’” One of these anchors, said Alsina, “came back down after a meeting, and the makeup on her nose and chin was gone.”

Sherman has reported even more disturbing stories about Ailes in the past. In July, he gave us the story of Laurie Luhn, Fox’s former director of booking, who claims that Ailes sexually extorted and psychologically tortured her for more than two decades. Among other things, he insisted she perform an erotic dance while he made a video, which, Ailes said, he was going to keep in a safe-deposit box “just so we understand each other.” For his latest piece, Sherman reports that he interviewed 18 women “who shared accounts of Ailes’s offering them job opportunities if they would agree to perform sexual favors for him and for his friends.” In some cases, writes Sherman, Ailes “threatened to release tapes of the encounters to prevent the women from reporting him.” Sherman also reports that Gretchen Carlson, who is suing Ailes for sexual harassment, secretly recorded his overtures.

There is abundant evidence, then, that Ailes is a vicious misogynist and a workplace predator. So why isn’t it a bigger deal that he’s advising the Republican presidential nominee?

To some extent we all know the answer. Donald Trump is a maelstrom. There is so much chaos around him, and so many startling violations of so many political norms, and no one has the bandwidth to process it all. On Thursday, half his Hispanic advisers quit in the wake of his demagogic Phoenix immigration speech. On Twitter, he’s feuding with both Mexico’s president and Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, whom he called “crazy and very dumb.” As Paul Waldman points out in the Washington Post, there’s been a notable lack of press attention to the illegal contribution Trump’s foundation made to the PAC of Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, at a time when Bondi was receiving complaints from Floridians who said they’d been cheated by Trump University.

If the Clinton Foundation were accused of doing anything this outrageous, it would be front-page news. The difference in how the two candidates are covered stems, in part, from a long-standing mainstream media tendency to view everything about Bill and Hillary Clinton in the most invidious possible light. But it’s also a result of the fact that Trump is consistently able to bury his old misdeeds with new misdeeds, until all the outrages start to blur together. This week, Mother Jones published an exposé of Trump Model Management’s violation of immigration law and exploitative labor practices. There was enough there to eat up an ordinary news cycle. Instead, the story was just a blip.

Still, in a better world, journalists would ask Trump why Ailes, who was too toxic to remain at Fox, is involved with his campaign. According to the New York Times, Ailes is advising Trump on the fall presidential debates. On Twitter, Sherman posted a blurry CNN screengrab showing Ailes getting out of Trump’s plane in Phoenix this week. He may not be on Trump’s payroll, but he’s part of his inner circle.

So far, Trump has defended Ailes and cast aspersions on the women accusing him. “I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them, and even recently,” Trump said in July. “And when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying these horrible things about him.”

It’s no surprise, of course, that Trump doesn’t take sexual harassment seriously. His own misogyny is extremely well-documented. His first wife, Ivana Trump, accused him of rape in a sworn deposition, saying that he’d assaulted her in a rage after a plastic surgeon she’d recommended botched his scalp surgery. (She’s since said she didn’t mean “rape” in a “literal or criminal sense,” but she’s never recanted her description of what happened.) Trump’s new campaign CEO, Steve Bannon, has been charged with domestic violence and accused of sexual harassment. In such company, Ailes doesn’t really stand out. That doesn’t mean we should treat his presence in a presidential campaign as normal.

Trump should be asked about Ailes every day as long as they’re working together, even informally. He should be asked not just why he’s associating with Ailes, but whether Ailes is being left alone with any of the women on his campaign. Keeping Ailes around, after all, is not just immoral; he is a one-man hostile work environment. Perhaps the involvement of a disgraced sexual sadist is low on the list of things that are wrong with the Trump campaign. That’s not a reason to ignore it.

Racists Are Smearing Chobani Yogurt for Hiring Muslim Refugees

By James Kirchick, The Daily Beast

04 September 16

amdi Ulukaya is the model American immigrant success story.

In 2005, the Turkish-born Kurdish entrepreneur purchased a defunct Kraft foods plant in upstate New York with an $800,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. In just a few years, his Chobani yogurt went from selling a few containers at a Long Island kosher grocery to being the No. 1 selling yogurt brand in the country with annual revenue topping $1.5 billion. In addition to employing more than 2,000 people directly—all of whom earn above minimum wage and enjoy generous benefits—the company purchases 4 million pounds of milk from American farmers every day.

Ulukaya dotes on his employees like a parent. “To me, there are two kinds of people in this world,” he told The New York Times. “The people who work at Chobani and the people who don’t.” Earlier this year, he gave shares amounting to 10 percent of Chobani to his workers; a rare move for a CEO to make after the value of his highly profitable company has been established. Chobani is also a corporate sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Team. Not bad for a Turkish guy selling Greek yogurt—that in itself a subtle rebuke to centuries of enmity between the two countries.

In addition to earning a raft of honorary Ph.Ds., Ulukaya has been named a World Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young, is the recipient of the United Nations Global Leadership Award, and has committed himself to Warren Buffett’s “Giving Pledge,” promising to donate at least half of his wealth to charity. To that end, Ulukaya founded an organization called Tent, which assists refugees in achieving new lives. Ulukaya, who grew up in a town near the Syrian border, says he was inspired in his activism by the plight of the some 2 million Syrians now living in Turkish refugee camps.

And that’s where the nativist forces supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign enter the picture. In 2012, Chobani opened the world’s biggest yogurt plant, in Twin Falls, Idaho. In addition to being one of the country’s largest milk-producing states, Idaho also happens to be one of the five highest refugee-absorbing states per capita, due to its low cost of living and 3.9 percent unemployment rate. About 30 percent of Chobani’s Twin Falls work force is composed of refugees, a hiring practice that originated with the company’s first factory in upstate New York, where many members of the community had been resettled from places like Vietnam, Burma, and Nepal. Ulukaya has written of the “growing need for the private sector to step up and help use its innovation, voice, and resources to address the global forced migration crisis,” and hiring refugees to work in Chobani’s factories has been his way of putting his money where his mouth is.

For his humanitarianism and thinking outside the traditional corporate box, Ulukaya now stands at the center of a vicious smear campaign. Earlier this year, in a piece originally headlined “American Yogurt Tycoon Vows to Choke U.S. With Muslims,” a writer for the far-right conspiracy-mongering website World Net Daily falsely claimed that refugees were being sent to Twin Falls specifically for the purpose of working at the Chobani plant and that Ulukaya was “call[ing] on [the] biggest American companies to join [an] Islamic surge.” (That line was later removed from the piece, as was the headline, since changed to the slightly less inflammatory “U.S. Yogurt Billionaire Asks Businesses to Hire More Foreign Refugees.”) The allegations have since migrated to the similarly paranoid precincts of Breitbart.com, the “alt-right” repository of white nationalism and xenophobia whose former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, recently merged seamlessly into the Trump campaign as its CEO. At Breitbart, the story of Chobani’s refugee employees has taken on new life as the centerpiece of a broader intrigue. For the past month, Breitbart reporter Lee Stranahan has been filing dispatch after dispatch from the Idaho town alleging a nexus of disease, rape, and jihad—all with Chobani and Ulukaya at its center.

In breathless tones, Stranahan, who according to his Twitter bio recently relocated to Twin Falls, attacks Ulukaya as a “globalist corporatist,” two epithets that, in the newfangled dialect of Breitbartian-Trumpian nationalism, signify one’s dubious, non-American loyalties. According to Stranahan, refugee resettlement in Twin Falls is “a situation connected to the drive for cheap labor by the local food processing industry that Chobani is a major part of.”

Another author writing at Breitbart claims that Idaho has “been a popular destination for refugees in recent years… in large part due to Ulukaya’s efforts to import refugees to work in his yogurt factory” and that Ulukaya is “a figure of controversy for his decision to fill his yogurt plants with foreign refugees rather than unemployed Americans. (Eds: An earlier version of this article incorrectly credited those quotes to Stranahan.)

But Idaho’s status as a destination for refugees dates back to the arrival of Vietnamese boat people in the late 1970s, long before the Chobani plant broke ground in 2011. Since then, the state has welcomed about 30,000 refugees from more than 50 countries. Falsely accusing Chobani and its CEO of “importing” foreign labor conflates a long-standing federal refugee resettlement program with the relatively recent hiring decisions of a private company.

This isn’t Breitbart’s only conflation with respect to the yogurt plant. Another story, under the non sequitur headline “TB spiked 500 percent in Twin Falls during 2012, as Chobani Yogurt Opened Plant,” insinuates that the company is somehow responsible for a tuberculosis epidemic in the Idaho hamlet. Never mind that the increase in TB cases exclusively ascribed to Twin Falls actually occurred across an eight-county public health district; there exists no evidence that any of the TB cases in Twin Falls were Chobani employees, or even refugees, for that matter. Furthermore, the “500 percent” “spike” consists of an increase from one case in 2011 to six in 2012, back down to a single case last year.

The most sensational component of Breitbart’s “special report” concerns an inappropriate sexual encounter, misleadingly labeled a “gang rape,” involving three refugee minors and a 5-year-old Twin Falls girl in June. Local anti-Muslim activists seized upon the incident, which is under investigation by authorities, and launched a campaign to discredit the entire refugee resettlement program, which Stranahan ominously labels “Idaho’s Globalist Devil’s Bargain.” Last month, a white nationalist organization called the American Freedom Party issued robocalls across Idaho informing listeners that the “nonwhite invasion of their state and all white areas constitutes white genocide.” (This is the same racist outfit that endorsed Trump, calling him the “Great White Hope,” and paid for robocalls on his behalf in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses.)

In a piece headlined “Twin Falls Refugee Rape Special Report: Why are the Refugees Moving In?” Stranahan writes that the use of refugee labor by Chobani and other food companies in southern Idaho has led to unspecified “civic consequences,” the insinuation being that these businesses are somehow responsible for the June incident and that the entire refugee resettlement program should be scrapped on account of the behavior of three refugee children.

Given how much Trump and Breitbart bemoan the loss of manufacturing to overseas competition and extol America’s rural values, one might have expected the populist website to applaud Chobani’s employing thousands of Americans in well-paid jobs and support for the country’s agricultural sector. “This has been a shot in the arm,” the head of a Twin Falls paving company said back in 2011, when Chobani broke ground on its plant.

“The kind of success that Chobani is experiencing in the Magic Valley is setting a great example of regional collaboration between employers and community leaders throughout Idaho,” Republican Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter enthused earlier this year, after the company announced a $100 million expansion to build a global research and development center in Twin Falls. “And it has economic development leaders all over America standing up and taking notice of what Idaho has to offer.”

Ultimately, however, the unfounded and hysterical attacks on Chobani, its employees, and its visionary founder are a perfect distillation of Breitbart and the presidential campaign onto which it has so shamelessly hitched itself. A toxic mix of lies, innuendo, xenophobia, and resentment, these screeds exemplify a zero-sum worldview in which gains made by the foreign-born must, somehow, come at the expense of “real” Americans, who, by the way, don’t need your stinking, healthy, low-sugar, gluten-free, kosher, halal, foreign yogurt.

Hamdi Ulukaya’s business ethics—fair, compassionate, cosmopolitan—are a direct repudiation of Donald Trump’s cutthroat, selfish, racist greed. And perhaps that’s what grates Breitbart most about this green card-holding, tax-paying Turkish immigrant and the business he built from scratch. For at its heart, the Trump phenomenon is a revolt of the thuggishly second-rate, a collection of mediocrities and opportunists for whom dragging down their betters provides a fillip to wallowing alone in self-pity.