Happy Pride Month! I have briefly paused my efforts to buy every possible gay nerd tank top, to bring you this list of lovely links.

Sometimes I look back on my Harvard undergraduate career as a conservative journalist and wonder what would have happened if I’d remained on the Federalist Society fast track to networking success. Since I’ve never sexually harassed anyone, I probably wouldn’t qualify for the Supreme Court. However, I might be a stealth political kingmaker like Kelly Monroe Kullberg, author of the Christian intellectual apologetics anthology Finding God at Harvard–and, apparently, the woman behind a slew of pro-Trump “Astroturf” groups that spread hateful anti-Muslim fake news on social media. Alex Kasprak at the scam-busting site Snopes.com conducted this in-depth investigation, published last month: “Disguising Hate: How Radical Evangelicals Spread Anti-Islamic Vitriol on Facebook”:

A coordinated network of evangelical Christian Facebook pages publishing overtly Islamophobic, conspiratorial content paints extreme, divisive right-wing rhetoric as having broad American support but is actually tied to one individual, a Snopes investigation reveals.

These pages claim that Islam is “not a religion,” that Muslims are violent and duplicitous, and that Islamic refugee resettlement is “cultural destruction and subjugation.” Just hours after the April 2019 Notre Dame spire collapse in a catastrophic fire, this network went into overdrive sowing doubt about the possible role Muslims had in its collapse. Multiple pages within this network have stated that their purpose is “message boosting & targeting.” Ten of the pages within the network explicitly support U.S. President Donald Trump in their titles and belong to an umbrella organization that “[speaks] up for a Trump-Pence agenda.” A post shared on several of those pages implores readers to “like our page and let’s roll 2020!

These pages, however, are steeped in fantastical notions of “globalist” conspiracies linking Islam, Socialism, and multi-billionaire philanthropist and Democratic Party supporter George Soros to the decline of Western civilization. Some of these pages also claim that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre in the U.S., for instance, are on a Soros-funded “Leftist-Islamist payroll.”

…Though the actual authorship of the posts within these pages is opaque, their titles imply diverse representation from a broad swath of American demographic groups, including “Jews & Christians for America” and “Blacks for Trump.” In reality, however, the pages in this network are all connected to evangelical activist Kelly Monroe Kullberg…[who] is neither black nor Jewish…

…This network, and others that employ similar tactics, can affect online discourse in several ways. First, the network serves to influence public opinion by presenting the views of a small group of activists as representative of a much broader swath of the American populace. Second, such a strategy in this case amplifies and offers a veil of legitimacy to hatred and conspiracy theories. Third, in spite of these strategies awash in misinformation, the pages within the network have attracted the financial backing of well-heeled political donors who exploit these pages and groups to disguise the origin of political Facebook ads.

Fun (or not-so-fun) fact, Kelly was one of my main sources for a 1992 Harvard Salient cover story called “The Witches Are Hunting”, describing anti-Christian bias at Harvard Divinity School. (The other source was Rich Tafel, later president of the gay conservative PAC known as Log Cabin Republicans.) With my usual penchant for flamboyant self-destruction, I declared my major in the Religion Department a couple months after ripping them a new asshole in the aforementioned conservative biweekly. And now I am a practicing witch…the gods laugh.

Republicans have perfected the one-two punch of exploiting American workers: first, hollow out their manufacturing base with predatory corporate takeovers, then channel their dispossessed rage into electing far-right demagogues. That’s the takeaway from this 2012 Rolling Stone profile, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital”, which remains timely as an exposé of how private equity firms are strip-mining our economy.

A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent…

…Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company’s management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.

But here’s the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it’s the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.

Now your troubled firm – let’s say you make tricycles in Alabama – has been taken over by a bunch of slick Wall Street dudes who kicked in as little as five percent as a down payment. So in addition to whatever problems you had before, Tricycle Inc. now owes Goldman or Citigroup $350 million. With all that new debt service to pay, the company’s bottom line is suddenly untenable: You almost have to start firing people immediately just to get your costs down to a manageable level.

“That interest,” says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, “just sucks the profit out of the company.”

Fortunately, the geniuses at Bain who now run the place are there to help tell you whom to fire. And for the service it performs cutting your company’s costs to help you pay off the massive debt that it, Bain, saddled your company with in the first place, Bain naturally charges a management fee, typically millions of dollars a year. So Tricycle Inc. now has two gigantic new burdens it never had before Bain Capital stepped into the picture: tens of millions in annual debt service, and millions more in “management fees.” Since the initial acquisition of Tricycle Inc. was probably greased by promising the company’s upper management lucrative bonuses, all that pain inevitably comes out of just one place: the benefits and payroll of the hourly workforce.

Once all that debt is added, one of two things can happen. The company can fire workers and slash benefits to pay off all its new obligations to Goldman Sachs and Bain, leaving it ripe to be resold by Bain at a huge profit. Or it can go bankrupt – this happens after about seven percent of all private equity buyouts – leaving behind one or more shuttered factory towns. Either way, Bain wins. By power-sucking cash value from even the most rapidly dying firms, private equity raiders like Bain almost always get their cash out before a target goes belly up.

Let’s wrap up with two stories about people who are trying to fix this trash fire of a planet–literally. This week’s Springwise trend-spotter newsletter profiles Europe’s first garbage-collection race, held on May 30 in Marseille. Participants included Olympic swimming champion Coralie Balmy and other world-class athletes. The Mediterranean Sea is among the world’s most polluted bodies of water.

Merging elements of a race and a treasure hunt, 20 teams, made up of two swimmers and two kayakers, aimed to collect 8 km of waste from the sea.

Le Grand Défi, or The Grand Challenge, was co-organised by the French environmental protection brand Sauvage, Palana Environmentand the Amos Sport Business School. It was inspired by Emmanuel Laurin and his film The Great Saphire, which featured Laurin’s 120-km swim between Toulon and Marseille, where he collected more than 100 kg of waste.

Found via the ex-evangelical blog Love Joy Feminism, this story by Karina Bland in the Arizona Republic newspaper profiles her state’s chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse International, a volunteer organization that helps kids recover from trauma. The bikers, who are vetted and trained for these sensitive situations, become big buddies for children who need to feel protected and strong again:

[A] biker’s power and intimidating image can even the playing field for a little kid who has been hurt. If the man who hurt this little girl calls or drives by, or even if she is just scared, another nightmare, the bikers will ride over and stand guard all night.

If she is afraid to go to school, they will take her and watch until she’s safely inside.

And if she has to testify against her abuser in court, they will go, too, walking with her to the witness stand and taking over the first row of seats. Pipes will tell her, “Look at us, not him.” And when she’s done, they will circle her again and walk her out.