title: Queen Latifah

text: Queen Latifah became the first female hip-hop recording artist to get nominated for an Oscar. In 2003, Queen Latifah was awarded Artist of the Year by Harvard Foundation. In 2006, Latifah became the first hip-hop artist to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and was also inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2011. In her music career, Queen Latifah has sold nearly 2 million albums in the US. "The Root" ranked her at number 35 on "The Root" 100 list. In 2017, American Black Film Festival honored Latifah with the Entertainment Icon award. In 2018, she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degree by the Rutgers University. In 2019, Harvard University awarded the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal to Queen Latifah for cultural contributions.


title: Queen Latifah

text: She is a recipient of a Grammy Award from six nominations, a Golden Globe Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards from five nominations, two NAACP Image Awards from thirteen nominations, one Primetime Emmy Award from three nominations, and an Academy Award nomination. In 2021, she received the BET Lifetime Achievement Award.


title: Queen Latifah

text: Latifah, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu joined to create and own the rights to the Sugar Water Festival Tour, LLC. All three singers toured together while inviting music duo Floetry in 2005 and singer Kelis in 2006 as opening acts. Comedian/actress Mo'Nique served as host for the 2006 Sugar Water Tour.


title: Candace Owens

text: Candace Amber Owens Farmer ( Owens; born April 29, 1989) is an American conservative author, talk show host, political commentator, and activist. Initially critical of United States President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, Owens has been recognized in part for her pro-Trump activism as a black woman, in addition to her criticism of Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Party. On several occasions she has claimed that the effects of white supremacy and nationalism are exaggerated, especially when compared to other issues facing Black Americans. She worked for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA between 2017 and 2019 as its communications director. In 2021, she joined "The Daily Wire", where she hosts "Candace", a political talk show.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has promoted conspiracy theories, mostly through her social media profiles and television & media appearances. She has expressed anti-lockdown views and anti-vaccination opinions during the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Candace Owens

text: With her siblings, Owens was raised in Stamford, Connecticut, by her grandparents from around the age of 11 or 12, after her parents divorced. She is the third of four children. She said her paternal grandfather Robert Owens, a Black American, was born in North Carolina. Owens is also of Caribbean American heritage through her grandmother who is originally from Saint Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. She is a graduate of Stamford High School.


title: Candace Owens

text: In 2007, while a 17-year-old senior in high school, Owens received three racist death threat voicemail messages, totaling two minutes, from a group of white male classmates. Joshua Starr, the city's superintendent of schools, listened to the voicemail messages and said that they were "horrendous". Owens's family sued the Stamford Board of Education in federal court, alleging that the city did not protect her rights, resulting in a $37,500 settlement in January 2008. She has a TEDx talk on the subject.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens pursued an undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Rhode Island. She dropped out after her junior year because of an issue with her student loan.


title: Candace Owens

text: In 2012, Owens took a job as an administrative assistant for a private equity firm in Manhattan, New York, later moving up to become its vice president of administration.


title: Candace Owens

text: In 2015, Owens was CEO of Degree180, a marketing agency that offered consultation, production, and planning services. The website included a blog, written by Owens, which frequently posted anti-conservative and anti-Trump content, including mockery of his penis size. In a 2015 column that Owens wrote for the site, she criticized conservative Republicans, writing about the "bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party," adding, "The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY."


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens launched SocialAutopsy.com in 2016, a website she said would expose bullies on the Internet by tracking their digital footprint. The site would have solicited users to take screenshots of offensive posts and send them to the website, where they would be categorized by the user's name. She used crowdfunding on Kickstarter for the website.


title: Candace Owens

text: The proposal was immediately controversial, drawing criticism that Owens was de-anonymizing (doxing) Internet users and violating their privacy. According to "The Daily Dot", "People from all sides of the anti-harassment debate were quick to criticize the database, calling it a public shaming list that would encourage doxing and retaliatory harassment." Both conservatives and progressives involved condemned the website.


title: Candace Owens

text: In response, people began posting Owens's private details online. With scant evidence, Owens blamed the doxing on progressives. After this, she earned the support of conservatives involved in the Gamergate harassment campaign, including right-wing political commentators and Trump supporters Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich. Subsequently, Owens became a conservative, saying in 2017, "I became a conservative overnight ... I realized that liberals were actually the racists. Liberals were actually the trolls ... Social Autopsy is why I'm conservative".


title: Candace Owens

text: By late 2017, Owens had started producing pro-Trump commentary and criticizing notions of structural racism, systemic inequality, and identity politicsall positions she herself had been publishing two years earlier. In 2017, she began posting politically themed videos to YouTube. In September 2017, she launched Red Pill Black, a website and YouTube channel that promotes black conservatism in the United States.


title: Candace Owens

text: On November 21, 2017, at the MAGA Rally and Expo in Rockford, Illinois, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk announced that Owens had been hired as the organization's director of urban engagement. Turning Point's hiring of Owens occurred in the wake of allegations of racism at Turning Point. In May 2019, Owens announced her departure as communications director for the organization.


title: Candace Owens

text: In April 2018, Kanye West tweeted "I love the way Candace Owens thinks." The tweet was met with derision on the part of many of West's fans. In May 2018, President Donald Trump said that Owens "is having a big impact on politics in our country. She represents an ever-expanding group of very smart 'thinkers', and it is wonderful to watch and hear the dialogue going on... so good for our Country!" She registered as a Republican in 2018, after the hearings following Brett Kavanaugh's nomination as a Supreme Court judge. She objected to what she termed the "social lynching" of Kavanaugh, on the grounds that to "believe women" was the reason "our ancestors got lynched", as she told a journalist from "Philadelphia" magazine. "No evidence, but believe all women".


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has appeared on fringe conspiracy websites, such as InfoWars. In 2018, she was a guest host on Fox News, and began to distance herself from the far-right conspiracy websites, although she refused to criticize InfoWars or its hosts.


title: Candace Owens

text: In May 2018, Owens suggested that "something bio-chemically happens" to women who do not marry or have children, and she linked to the Twitter handles of Sarah Silverman, Chelsea Handler, and Kathy Griffin, saying that they were "evidentiary support" of this theory. Silverman responded: "It seems to me that by tweeting this, you would like to maybe make us feel badly. I'd say this is evidenced by ur effort to use our twitter handles so we would see. My heart breaks for you, Candy. I hope you find happiness in whatever form that takes." Owens responded, accusing Silverman of supporting terrorists and crime gangs.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens hosted "The Candace Owens Show" on PragerU's YouTube channel. She left PragerU in 2020 to host "Candace", a show on "The Daily Wire".


title: Candace Owens

text: In April 2020, Owens announced her intention to either run for office in the U.S. Senate or to be a governor, and that she would only run against an incumbent Democrat, not a Republican. She did not reveal which specific office she would run for, or in which election cycle.


title: Candace Owens

text: During "The Daily Wire"'s coverage of the 2020 U.S. Election, Owens announced she would be joining "The Daily Wire" and would be hosting her own show. Owens later said in a tweet, "The rumors are true. I'm moving to Nashville and joining "the Daily Wire"!! This was a tough secret to keep. I couldn't be more excited!!" Her podcast "Candace" premiered on the platform on March 19, 2021. Its episodes are filmed in front of a live studio audience and air weekly. Notable guests include former United States president Donald Trump, UFC president Dana White, and U.S. Representative Jim Jordan.


title: Candace Owens

text: Blexit, a term originally coined by Me'Lea Connelly, is a portmanteau of "Black" and "exit" which mimics Brexit, the word used to describe the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union. The original Blexit movement was started in 2016 by Connelly with the goal of achieving Black economic independence by encouraging Black Americans to leave the traditional financial systems that have historically disadvantaged the Black community. In late 2018, Owens launched a different Blexit foundation, which featured a social media campaign to encourage African Americans (plus Latinos and other minorities) to abandon the Democratic Party and register as Republicans with the promise of freedom. At the time, 8% of Black Americans identified as Republicans.


title: Candace Owens

text: At the launch in October 2018, Owens said that her "dear friend and fellow superhero Kanye West" designed merchandise for the movement, but the following day, West denied being the designer and disavowed the effort, saying "I never wanted any association with Blexit" and "I've been used to spread messages I don't believe in"; however, after an apology West is still putting his support behind Owens. In 2021, with dwindling donations, Owens was paid $250,000 for her foundation work.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens said she had no interest in politics whatsoever before 2015, but previously identified as liberal. In 2017, she began describing herself as a conservative Trump supporter. Owens has since characterized Trump as the "savior" of Western civilization. She has argued that Trump has neither engaged in rhetoric that is harmful to African Americans, nor proposed policies that would harm African Americans. She said in October 2018 that she had never voted and had only recently become a registered Republican.


title: Candace Owens

text: "The Guardian" has described Owens as "ultra-conservative", and "New York" magazine and the "Columbia Journalism Review" have described her as "right-wing". "The Daily Beast" has called her views "far-right" and the "Pacific Standard" called her a member of the "alt-right", although she has rejected both terms. She was influenced by the works of Ann Coulter, Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Carson, and Thomas Sowell.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has said: "The left hates America, and Trump loves it." She has said that the left is "destroying everything through this cultural Marxist ideology."


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens is known for her criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement and has described Black Lives Matter protesters as "a bunch of whiny toddlers, pretending to be oppressed for attention". Owens has argued that African Americans have a victim mentality, often referring to the Democratic Party as a "plantation". She has argued that the American Left likes "black people to be government-dependent" and that black people have been brainwashed to vote for Democrats. She has argued that police violence against black people is not about racism, and referred to police killings of black people as a trivial matter to African Americans. She has characterized abortion as a tool for the "extermination" of black babies.


title: Candace Owens

text: She has said, "Black Americans are doing worse off economically today than we were doing in the 1950s under Jim Crow", adding that this is because "we've only been voting for one party since then." She has attributed economic improvements for African Americans, such as a low unemployment rate, to Trump's presidency.


title: Candace Owens

text: When asked if it was problematic that white supremacist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), support Trump, Owens answered that Antifa was more prevalent than the KKK. Owens has said that the media cover the KKK during Trump's presidency to hurt him. In a 2019 hearing on hate crimes, Owens referred to the KKK as a "Democrat terrorist organization". After the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Owens said that concern over rising white nationalism was "stupid". She has also called it "just election rhetoric" and "based on the hierarchy of what's impacting minority Americans, if I had to make a list of 100 things, white nationalism would not make the list." In 2018, Owens dismissed reports of a resurgence in hate crimes, saying "All of the violence this year primarily happened because of people on the left."


title: Candace Owens

text: During her April 2019 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on the rise of hate crimes and white supremacists in the United States, Owens made the claim that the Southern strategy employed by the Republican Party to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans was a "myth" that "never happened". This was disputed by several historians who said that the existence of the Southern strategy was well documented in contemporaneous sources dating back to the Civil Rights era, with historian Kevin M. Kruse, who writes about modern conservatism, calling Owens's statement "utter nonsense".


title: Candace Owens

text: In June 2019, Owens said that African Americans had it better in the first 100 years after the abolition of slavery than they have since and that socialism was at fault.


title: Candace Owens

text: On October 3, 2022, during Yeezy SZN 9 fashion show in Paris, Owens posed for a photo with Kanye West wearing a matching shirt with the "WHITE LIVES MATTER" slogan. During Paris Fashion Week, West entered negotiations with Owens' husband, the CEO of social networking service Parler, to purchase the website.


title: Candace Owens

text: After West posted tweets declaring he would "go Death Con 3 on Jewish people"; Owens defended West, stating that "if you are an honest person, you did not find this tweet antisemitic". Owens further accused the Anti-Defamation League of instigating antisemitism following the organization's criticism of West and Kyrie Irving. Owens' comments were made before West praised Adolf Hitler in an Infowars interview. After the interview, Parler announced that West has canceled his plans to buy the website. The Zionist Organization of America condemned Owens' defense of West, calling on her to "retract her offensive, dangerous statements."


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens is critical of feminism. Owens described the #MeToo movement, an international movement against sexual harassment and assault, as "stupid" and said that she "hated" it. Owens wrote that the movement was premised on the idea that "women are stupid, weak & inconsequential".


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens supports same-sex marriage. On July 28, 2017, Owens stated she was in favor of banning transgender individuals who are undergoing sex reassignment surgery from serving in the United States military, but said that she did not oppose fully transitioned transgender individuals serving in the military. In April 2022, she called The Walt Disney Company "child groomers and pedophiles" and called for the boycott of the company, after Disney announced its opposition to Florida's "Parental Rights in Education Act", commonly referenced as the "Don't Say Gay" legislation.


title: Candace Owens

text: In May 2022, she falsely claimed on Twitter that the gunman, involved in the Robb Elementary School shooting, could be transgender and baselessly said that he was "cross-dressing". According to Owens, this was evidence that "there were plenty of signs that he was mentally disturbed".


title: Candace Owens

text: In June 2022, Owens described Drag Queen Story Hour as "child abuse", arguing that parents who take their children to a drag queen story hour "are underqualified to have children" and "should have their children taken away from them."


title: Candace Owens

text: In December 2022, Owens argued that society would benefit by discriminating more against transgender and non-binary individuals.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens opposes welfare programs, saying that they are a Democratic Party tool to keep black Americans dependent upon the government.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens is a proponent of the Mexico–United States barrier, and believes undocumented immigrants to the United States should be immediately deported.


title: Candace Owens

text: In 2018, Owens warned that "Europe will fall and become a Muslim-majority continent by 2050. There has never been a Muslim-majority country where sharia law was not implemented." She suggested that the United States would then be "forced to save" the British.


title: Candace Owens

text: After Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump refused to concede, Owens promoted Trump's claims of mass fraud, saying, "the American election was clearly rigged."


title: Candace Owens

text: She has claimed that global warming is not "real", while in 2021 promoted paid ads on Facebook, calling the US government "modern doomsayers" who have been wrongly predicting climate crises for decades.


title: Candace Owens

text: In August 2018, Owens had a dispute with Sam Lucas, cousin of Mollie Tibbetts, who had been murdered by Cristhian Bahena Rivera, a 24-year-old Mexican illegal immigrant. Tibbetts's cousin said that Owens had exploited Tibbetts's death for "political propaganda". Owens responded by describing Lucas's criticism as a "strange" attack on Trump supporters. Later that month, the University of Iowa's chapter of Turning Point USA criticized Owens for "public harassment" towards a member of Tibbetts's family, and the executive board members of the chapter all resigned in protest.


title: Candace Owens

text: In October 2018, during the mail bombing attempts targeting prominent Democrats, Owens took to Twitter to promote the conspiracy theory that the mailings were sent by leftists. After authorities on October 26 arrested a 56-year-old suspect who was a registered Republican and Trump supporter, Owens deleted her tweet without explanation.


title: Candace Owens

text: At the launch of the British offshoot Turning Point UK in December 2018, Owens made comments about Adolf Hitler. She was responding to an audience member who asked for a "long-term prognosis" about the terms "globalism" and "nationalism", Owens said:


title: Candace Owens

text: I actually don't have any problems at all with the word "nationalism". I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don't want. Whenever we say "nationalism" the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, [Hitler] was a national socialist, but if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay, fine. The problem is that he wanted—he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German. Everybody to look a different way. That's not, to me, that's not nationalism.


title: Candace Owens

text: Following heavy criticism for her comments, Owens clarified them on Twitter and in a Judiciary Committee hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives in February 2019. Owens said that "[Hitler] was a homicidal, psychopathic, maniac that killed his own people" and "[Hitler was not a nationalist, [he] murdered his own people; a nationalist would not kill their own people". She said that the point of her comments was to say that there is "no excuse or defense ever for ... everything that [Hitler] did". She also said that her comments were about Hitler's crimes against Jews.


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens's comments about Hitler were played in April 2019 by Representative Ted Lieu during testimony in front of the House Judiciary Committee about the issue of increasing hate crimes and white supremacy in America. Lieu said that he did not know Owens and was just going to let her own words characterize her, before playing the audio clip. Owens responded that Lieu had deliberately omitted an interviewer's question that provided critical context to her words, with the intent of misrepresenting them as an endorsement of Hitler, to smear her reputation. She concluded this testimony by stating her opinion Lieu was "assuming that black people will not pursue the full two hour clip" and that the full clip had been "purposefully extracted" in order to "create a different narrative."


title: Candace Owens

text: Donald Trump Jr. praised Owens on Twitter for "[calling] out the Dems on their purposeful manipulation of facts for their narrative".


title: Candace Owens

text: The terrorist who committed the Christchurch mosque shootings produced a manifesto in which he wrote that Owens had "influenced him above all". According to journalist Robert Evans, it was "possible, even likely" that the terrorist was a fan of Owens, considering her rhetoric against Muslim immigrants, but in context his references to her may have been an example of "shitposting" intended to provoke political conflict. For instance, the line "Though I will have to disavow some of [Owens's] beliefs, the extreme actions she calls for are too much, even for my tastes" was assessed by "The Root" as trolling.


title: Candace Owens

text: Hours after the shootings, Owens posted a tweet in reaction to allegations that she inspired the mass murder, saying that she never created any content espousing her views on the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution or Islam. However, her tweet was criticized as "glib" when it was reported that she actually had posted tweets about the 2nd Amendment and Islam. She later made formal statements rejecting any connection to the terrorist.


title: Candace Owens

text: In June 2020, Owens claimed that George Soros paid people to protest the murder of George Floyd. Shortly afterwards, she argued that George Floyd "was not a good person. I don't care who wants to spin that." She said, "The fact that he has been held up as a martyr sickens me." Then-President Trump retweeted Owens's remarks about Floyd. In a Facebook video that garnered nearly 100 million views, Owens called Floyd a "horrible human being", citing his criminal record, and called racial biases among police a "fake narrative."


title: Candace Owens

text: On April 20, 2021, Owens claimed that the guilty verdict given to former police officer Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd was influenced by "mob justice" supposedly being pushed by the mainstream media and the Democrats.


title: Candace Owens

text: In April 2020, Owens said that COVID-19 deaths were overcounted; health experts said that it was more likely that COVID-19 deaths were undercounted.


title: Candace Owens

text: Regarding a COVID-19 vaccine, she said in June 2020 that "under no circumstances will I be getting any #coronavirus vaccine that becomes available. Ever. No matter what." She also referred to Bill Gates as a "vaccine-criminal", and said that he and the World Health Organization (WHO) used "African & Indian tribal children to experiment w/ non-FDA approved drug vaccines."


title: Candace Owens

text: On August 8, 2021, Owens said in a Facebook post that "I still have not received the COVID-19 vaccine and have not demanded that any of my employees get it either. I am proud that I committed myself to standing firm against the bribery, media propaganda, coercion, celebrity-peer pressure campaign, plus censorship." and that "It is isn't easy to swim against such a polluted current but here I am. I trust my gut much more than trust Dr. Fauci." Also in August, Owens claimed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) proposed "putting high risk people into camps to 'shield' low risk people from them".


title: Candace Owens

text: In 2021, Owens attracted media attention when she stated that the United States should "invade Australia", saying that Australia had turned into a tyrannical Nazi-style "police state" due to its public health precautions against COVID-19, even though Australia's COVID-19 measures had overwhelming support among the Australian public. Owens said that the comments were made "in jest" and that they had been misinterpreted by the media.


title: Candace Owens

text: In April 2022, in response to the CDC's mask mandate for public transit and airplanes being overturned, Owens said that "I'm not going to cheer until these people are behind bars for what they have done for the dignity of human beings, forcing them to sit behind masks that we know do not work to stop the spread of the virus."


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has been accused of promoting vaccine misinformation. In a December 2021 interview she asked Donald Trump about vaccine mandates, and he explained that he shared her views on mandates, but added that "the vaccine is one of the greatest achievements of mankind": "The ones that get very sick and go to the hospital are the ones that don't take the vaccine. But it's still their choice. And if you take the vaccine, you're protected. Look, the results of the vaccine are very good, and if you do get it, it's a very minor form. People aren't dying when they take the vaccine."<ref name="Stracqualursi_Wright_12/24/2021"></ref><ref name="Oshin_12/23/2021"></ref>


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has been involved in a high-profile feud with rapper Cardi B since August 2020. The feud began when Owens retweeted a clip of herself on "The Ben Shapiro Show" in which she criticized Cardi B's interview with then presidential candidate Joe Biden. Cardi B responded and they engaged in a highly publicized feud, with Owens insulting Cardi B's grammar and intelligence, while Cardi B insulted Owens' political stance.


title: Candace Owens

text: The feud resurfaced in March 2021 when Owens appeared on Fox News to critique Cardi B's performance of "WAP" at the Grammy Awards. Cardi B responded and they engaged in a debate, which ended with Owens threatening to sue after Cardi B made false and defamatory accusations about Owens' husband and brother. Cardi B threatened to countersue for defamation, due to Owens claiming the accusations were false. Cardi B eventually deleted the accusations.


title: Candace Owens

text: During an Instagram livestream on June 22, 2021, Owens made accusations about former Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik, accusing her of money laundering, tax fraud, illegal drug use, and misusing campaign funds. Owens also said that Klacik is a "madame" who recruits strippers for a strip club owned by her husband. Owens said she found out about this after talking with a woman who claimed to have worked as a stripper at Klacik's strip club.


title: Candace Owens

text: Klacik denied the allegations and repeatedly asked for Owens to take down the video, which she refused to do. In July, Klacik filed a lawsuit against Owens seeking $20 million for defamation and claiming that the allegations have resulted in Klacik losing political support from donors, being removed from public events, a book deal cancellation, and harassment of Klacik and her family. In a statement, Jacob S. Frenkel, Klacik's attorney, said: "The defendant chose to use her huge social media platform to attack a respected Baltimore political figure" and that "We are using the proper forum — the power of the courts — to respond." The suit was dismissed with prejudice in December 2022.


title: Candace Owens

text: In February 2022, Owens tweeted that "Now for some light-hearted fun. What's the one 'conspiracy theory' that no matter what anyone says you believe is true. Mine is that the moon landing in 1969 was completely faked. Just nothing about it makes sense. Especially NASA 'accidentally erasing' the original footage."


title: Candace Owens

text: Owens has promoted Russian propaganda, including the false claim that Russia created Ukraine. Her views have been promoted by the Russian embassy, after she tweeted that "Russian lives matter" while also disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement.


title: Candace Owens

text: In March 2022, Owens claimed that Ukraine "wasn't a thing until 1989" and that it is "stupid" to suggest that Russian president Vladimir Putin is carrying out a genocide in Ukraine. In response, American journalist and historian Anne Applebaum called Owens "the face of pure ignorance" and added that "This is what happens when you know no history."


title: Candace Owens

text: In April 2022, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Florida against the LGBcoin cryptocurrency company, Owens, stock car racing driver Brandon Brown, and NASCAR alleging that the defendants made false or misleading statements about the LGBcoin and that the founders of the company had engaged in a pump and dump scheme.


title: Candace Owens

text: In early 2019, three weeks after they met, Owens became engaged to George Farmer, an Englishman and former chairman of Turning Point UK. Farmer is also the CEO of social networking website Parler. On August 31, 2019, she and Farmer married at the Trump Winery in Charlottesville, Virginia. Owens gave birth to a boy in January 2021. She gave birth to their second child, a daughter, in July 2022.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Justin Paul Theroux (; born August 10, 1971) is an American actor and filmmaker. He gained recognition for his work with director David Lynch in the mystery film "Mulholland Drive" (2001) and the thriller film "Inland Empire" (2006). He also appeared in films such as "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion" (1997), "American Psycho" (2000), "" (2003), "Strangers with Candy" (2005), "Miami Vice" (2006), "Wanderlust" (2012), "The Girl on the Train" (2016), "The Spy Who Dumped Me" (2018), "On the Basis of Sex" (2018), and "Lady and the Tramp" (2019).


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux was a screenwriter for films such as the action comedy "Tropic Thunder" (2008), the superhero film "Iron Man 2" (2010), and the musical comedy drama "Rock of Ages" (2012). He made his directorial debut with the romantic comedy film "Dedication" (2007).


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux starred as Kevin Garvey in the HBO mystery drama series "The Leftovers" (2014–2017), for which he received widespread praise and was nominated for the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actor in a Drama Series. He also starred as Dr. James Mantleray in the Netflix comedy drama miniseries "Maniac" (2018). In 2021, he portrayed Allie Fox in the Apple TV+ adaptation of "The Mosquito Coast", based on the novel by his uncle Paul Theroux.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux was born on August 10, 1971, in Washington, D.C. His mother, Phyllis Grissim Theroux, is an essayist and author, and his father, Eugene Albert Theroux (born 1938), is a lawyer at Baker & McKenzie in Washington. Theroux is the nephew of the travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux, novelist and poet Alexander Theroux, author Peter Theroux, and novelist and educator Joseph Theroux; he is the cousin of British journalists and documentary filmmakers Louis and Marcel Theroux. His father is of half French-Canadian and half Italian descent. Through his mother, Theroux is a great-great-grandson of financier, banker and railroad magnate H. B. Hollins, and of music critic and author Gustav Kobbé.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux attended Lafayette Elementary School, Annunciation School, and the Field School. He first started acting while in high school at the Buxton School, in Williamstown, Massachusetts.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux made his film debut in 1996 in Mary Harron's "I Shot Andy Warhol". Since then he has performed both on Broadway, starring in "Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme"; in numerous off-Broadway productions; and in comedy films such as "", "The Baxter", "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion", "Broken Hearts Club", and "Zoolander".


title: Justin Theroux

text: He has also performed in more serious films such as "American Psycho." He appeared in the film versions of the cult television shows "Strangers With Candy" and Michael Mann's "Miami Vice". He starred in David Lynch's films "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire". Also in 2001 Theroux starred in The District Tv series along Craig T. Nelson


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2003, he was featured in a music video for the British band Muse for their song "Hysteria". Theroux also has appeared on television, having starred in "The District" and appeared on episodes of shows such as "Alias", "Ally McBeal", "Sex and the City" (in which he guest starred in two episodes as different characters), and "Six Feet Under" (in which he played a recurring character in the third and fourth seasons).


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2006, he directed his first film, "Dedication", which premiered at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. A fan of the band Deerhoof, Theroux chose them to score "Dedication". Theroux also had roles in two other films at the festival, "Broken English" and "The Ten", in which he played Jesus Christ alongside Gretchen Mol. Theroux co-wrote the Ben Stiller film "Tropic Thunder", and also appeared in the behind-the-scenes mockumentary "Tropic Thunder: Rain of Madness".


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2008, Theroux played John Hancock in the HBO miniseries "John Adams". In 2009, Theroux made up part of the voice cast for "". He also played Justin in "Parks and Recreation". Theroux wrote the screenplay for the 2010 film "Iron Man 2". Following Theroux's work on "Tropic Thunder", actor Robert Downey Jr. recommended Theroux as a screenwriter to the film's director, Jon Favreau.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux returned to acting in the film "Your Highness" (2011), as Leezar, an evil wizard who kidnaps a princess. He starred in the 2012 comedy "Wanderlust", playing the leader of a hippie commune. By August 2012, Theroux was hired to direct and rewrite the script for the comedy film "Swear to God".


title: Justin Theroux

text: In June 2013, Theroux was cast as the lead character in HBO's TV pilot "The Leftovers", which HBO ordered as a 10-episode season in September 2013. The series, which premiered June 29, 2014, is based on a book of the same name by Tom Perrotta, which follows a group of people left behind in the suburban community of Mapleton after mysterious disappearances worldwide. Theroux received widespread critical acclaim for his performance throughout the three seasons.


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2018, Theroux played savant neurochemist James Mantleray in the 2018 Netflix comedy drama miniseries "Maniac" opposite Emma Stone and Jonah Hill.


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2019, Theroux produced the ABC television event Live in Front of a Studio Audience alongside Norman Lear, Jimmy Kimmel and Will Ferrell. Theroux received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live) for producing the event. He also voiced Tramp in the Disney+ live-action film "Lady and the Tramp", a remake of the 1955 film with the same name.


title: Justin Theroux

text: In 2021, Theroux portrayed brilliant inventor and stubborn idealist Allie Fox in the Apple TV+ television series "The Mosquito Coast", a television adaptation from the 1981 novel of the same name written by Paul Theroux, Justin Theroux's uncle. Theroux also served as executive producer for the series.


title: Justin Theroux

text: Theroux was in a relationship with stylist and costume designer Heidi Bivens from 1997 until 2011. Theroux began dating actress Jennifer Aniston in 2011, after working with her on the film "Wanderlust". They became engaged in August 2012, and got married on August 5, 2015. On February 15, 2018, Theroux and Aniston announced they had separated at the end of 2017.


title: Animal Farm

text: Animal Farm is a beast fable, in the form of satirical allegorical novella, by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. It tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before, under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon.


title: Animal Farm

text: According to Orwell, "Animal Farm" reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the May Days conflicts between the POUM and Stalinist forces during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described "Animal Farm" as a satirical tale against Stalin (""""), and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946), wrote that "Animal Farm" was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".


title: Animal Farm

text: The original title was "Animal Farm: A Fairy Story", but US publishers dropped the subtitle when it was published in 1946, and only one of the translations during Orwell's lifetime, the Telugu version, kept it. Other titular variations include subtitles like "A Satire" and "A Contemporary Satire". Orwell suggested the title ' for the French translation, which abbreviates to URSA, the Latin word for "bear", a symbol of Russia. It also played on the French name of the Soviet Union, '.


title: Animal Farm

text: Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated. The manuscript was initially rejected by a number of British and American publishers, including one of Orwell's own, Victor Gollancz, which delayed its publication. It became a great commercial success when it did appear partly because international relations were transformed as the wartime alliance gave way to the Cold War.


title: Animal Farm

text: "Time" magazine chose the book as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005); it also featured at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels, and number 46 on the BBC's The Big Read poll. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is included in the Great Books of the Western World selection.


title: Animal Farm

text: The poorly run Manor Farm near Willingdon, England, is ripened for rebellion from its animal populace by neglect at the hands of the irresponsible and alcoholic farmer, Mr. Jones. One night, the exalted boar, Old Major, holds a conference, at which he calls for the overthrow of humans and teaches the animals a revolutionary song called "Beasts of England". When Old Major dies, two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, assume command and stage a revolt, driving Mr. Jones off the farm and renaming the property "Animal Farm". They adopt the Seven Commandments of Animalism, the most important of which is, "All animals are equal". The decree is painted in large letters on one side of the barn. Snowball teaches the animals to read and write, while Napoleon educates young puppies on the principles of Animalism. To commemorate the start of Animal Farm, Snowball raises a green flag with a white hoof and horn. Food is plentiful, and the farm runs smoothly. The pigs elevate themselves to positions of leadership and set aside special food items, ostensibly for their personal health. Following an unsuccessful attempt by Mr. Jones and his associates to retake the farm (later dubbed the "Battle of the Cowshed"), Snowball announces his plans to modernise the farm by building a windmill. Napoleon disputes this idea, and matters come to a head, which culminate in Napoleon's dogs chasing Snowball away and Napoleon effectively declaring himself supreme commander.


title: Animal Farm

text: Napoleon enacts changes to the governance structure of the farm, replacing meetings with a committee of pigs who will run the farm. Through a young porker named Squealer, Napoleon claims credit for the windmill idea, claiming that Snowball was only trying to win animals to his side. The animals work harder with the promise of easier lives with the windmill. When the animals find the windmill collapsed after a violent storm, Napoleon and Squealer persuade the animals that Snowball is trying to sabotage their project, and begin to purge the farm of animals accused by Napoleon of consorting with his old rival. When some animals recall the Battle of the Cowshed, Napoleon (who was nowhere to be found during the battle) gradually smears Snowball to the point of saying he is a collaborator of Mr. Jones, even dismissing the fact that Snowball was given an award of courage while falsely representing himself as the main hero of the battle. "Beasts of England" is replaced with "Animal Farm", while an anthem glorifying Napoleon, who is presumably adopting the lifestyle of a man ("Comrade Napoleon"), is composed and sung. Napoleon then conducts a second purge, during which many animals who are alleged to be helping Snowball in plots are executed by Napoleon's dogs, which troubles the rest of the animals. Despite their hardships, the animals are easily placated by Napoleon's retort that they are better off than they were under Mr. Jones, as well as by the sheep's continual bleating of "four legs good, two legs bad".


title: Animal Farm

text: Mr. Frederick, a neighbouring farmer, attacks the farm, using blasting powder to blow up the restored windmill. Although the animals win the battle, they do so at great cost, as many, including Boxer the workhorse, are wounded. Although he recovers from this, Boxer eventually collapses while working on the windmill (being almost 12 years old at that point). He is taken away in a knacker's van and a donkey called Benjamin alerts the animals of this, but Squealer quickly waves off their alarm by persuading the animals that the van had been purchased from the knacker by an animal hospital and that the previous owner's signboard had not been repainted. Squealer subsequently reports Boxer's death and honours him with a festival the following day. (However, Napoleon had in fact engineered the sale of Boxer to the knacker, allowing him and his inner circle to acquire money to buy whisky for themselves.)


title: Animal Farm

text: Years pass, the windmill is rebuilt and another windmill is constructed, which makes the farm a good amount of income. However, the ideals that Snowball discussed, including stalls with electric lighting, heating, and running water, are forgotten, with Napoleon advocating that the happiest animals live simple lives. Snowball has been forgotten, alongside Boxer, with "the exception of the few who knew him". Many of the animals who participated in the rebellion are dead or old. Mr. Jones is also dead we learn, having "died in an inebriates' home in another part of the country". The pigs start to resemble humans, as they walk upright, carry whips, drink alcohol, and wear clothes. The Seven Commandments are abridged to just one phrase: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others". The maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad" is similarly changed to "Four legs good, two legs better". Other changes include the Hoof and Horn flag being replaced with a plain green banner and Old Major's skull, which was previously put on display, being reburied.


title: Animal Farm

text: Napoleon holds a dinner party for the pigs and local farmers, with whom he celebrates a new alliance. He abolishes the practice of the revolutionary traditions and restores the name "The Manor Farm". The men and pigs start playing cards, flattering and praising each other while cheating at the game. Both Napoleon and Mr. Pilkington, one of the farmers, play the Ace of Spades at the same time and both sides begin fighting loudly over who cheated first. When the animals outside look at the pigs and men, they can no longer distinguish between the two.


title: Animal Farm

text: George Orwell's "Animal Farm" is an example of a political satire and an allegory that was intended to have a "wider application", according to Orwell himself, in terms of its relevance. Stylistically, the work shares many similarities with some of Orwell's other works, most notably "Nineteen Eighty-Four", as both have been considered works of Swiftian satire. Furthermore, these two prominent works seem to suggest Orwell's bleak view of the future for humanity; he seems to stress the potential/current threat of dystopias similar to those in "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four". In these kinds of works, Orwell distinctly references the disarray and traumatic conditions of Europe following the Second World War. Orwell's style and writing philosophy as a whole were very concerned with the pursuit of truth in writing.


title: Animal Farm

text: Orwell was committed to communicating in a way that was straightforward, given the way that he felt words were commonly used in politics to deceive and confuse. For this reason, he is careful, in "Animal Farm", to make sure the narrator speaks in an unbiased and uncomplicated fashion. The difference is seen in the way that the animals speak and interact, as the generally moral animals seem to speak their minds clearly, while the wicked animals on the farm, such as Napoleon, twist language in such a way that it meets their own insidious desires. This style reflects Orwell's close proximation to the issues facing Europe at the time and his determination to comment critically on Stalin's Soviet Russia.


title: Animal Farm

text: George Orwell wrote the manuscript between November 1943 and February 1944 after his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in "Homage to Catalonia" (1938). In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of "Animal Farm", he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries". This motivated Orwell to expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals. "Homage to Catalonia" sold poorly; after seeing Arthur Koestler's best-selling, "Darkness at Noon", about the Moscow Trials, Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism.


title: Animal Farm

text: Immediately prior to writing the book, Orwell had quit the BBC. He was also upset about a booklet for propagandists the Ministry of Information had put out. The booklet included instructions on how to quell ideological fears of the Soviet Union, such as directions to claim that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination.


title: Animal Farm

text: In 1944, the manuscript was almost lost when a German V-1 flying bomb destroyed his London home. Orwell spent hours sifting through the rubble to find the pages intact.


title: Animal Farm

text: Orwell initially encountered difficulty getting the manuscript published, largely due to fears that the book might upset the alliance between Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. Four publishers refused to publish "Animal Farm", yet one had initially accepted the work, but declined it after consulting the Ministry of Information. Eventually, Secker and Warburg published the first edition in 1945.


title: Animal Farm

text: During the Second World War, it became clear to Orwell that anti-Soviet literature was not something which most major publishing houses would touch – including his regular publisher Gollancz. He also submitted the manuscript to Faber and Faber, where the poet T. S. Eliot (who was a director of the firm) rejected it; Eliot wrote back to Orwell praising the book's "good writing" and "fundamental integrity", but declared that they would only accept it for publication if they had some sympathy for the viewpoint "which I take to be generally Trotskyite". Eliot said he found the view "not convincing", and contended that the pigs were made out to be the best to run the farm; he posited that someone might argue "what was needed ... was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs". Orwell let André Deutsch, who was working for Nicholson & Watson in 1944, read the typescript, and Deutsch was convinced that Nicholson & Watson would want to publish it; however, they did not, and "lectured Orwell on what they perceived to be errors in "Animal Farm"". In his "London Letter" on 17 April 1944 for "Partisan Review", Orwell wrote that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed. Anti-Russian books do appear, but mostly from Catholic publishing firms and always from a religious or frankly reactionary angle".


title: Animal Farm

text: The publisher Jonathan Cape, who had initially accepted "Animal Farm", subsequently rejected the book after an official at the British Ministry of Information warned him off – although the civil servant who it is assumed gave the order was later found to be a Soviet spy. Writing to Leonard Moore, a partner in the literary agency of Christy & Moore, publisher Jonathan Cape explained that the decision had been taken on the advice of a senior official in the Ministry of Information. Such flagrant anti-Soviet bias was unacceptable, and the choice of pigs as the dominant class was thought to be especially offensive. It may reasonably be assumed that the "important official" was a man named Peter Smollett, who was later unmasked as a Soviet agent. Orwell was suspicious of Smollett/Smolka, and he would be one of the names Orwell included in his list of Crypto-Communists and Fellow-Travellers sent to the Information Research Department in 1949. The publisher wrote to Orwell, saying:


title: Animal Farm

text: Frederic Warburg also faced pressures against publication, even from people in his own office and from his wife Pamela, who felt that it was not the moment for ingratitude towards Stalin and the Red Army, which had played a major part in defeating Adolf Hitler. A Russian translation was printed in the paper "Posev", and in giving permission for a Russian translation of "Animal Farm", Orwell refused in advance all royalties. A translation in Ukrainian, which was produced in Germany, was confiscated in large part by the American wartime authorities and handed over to the Soviet repatriation commission.


title: Animal Farm

text: In October 1945, Orwell wrote to Frederic Warburg expressing interest in pursuing the possibility that the political cartoonist David Low might illustrate "Animal Farm". Low had written a letter saying that he had had "a good time with "Animal Farm" – an excellent bit of satire – it would illustrate perfectly". Nothing came of this, and a trial issue produced by Secker & Warburg in 1956 illustrated by John Driver was abandoned, but the Folio Society published an edition in 1984 illustrated by Quentin Blake and an edition illustrated by the cartoonist Ralph Steadman was published by Secker & Warburg in 1995 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first edition of "Animal Farm".


title: Animal Farm

text: Orwell originally wrote a preface complaining about British self-censorship and how the British people were suppressing criticism of the USSR, their World War II ally:


title: Animal Farm

text: Although the first edition allowed space for the preface, it was not included, and as of June 2009 most editions of the book have not included it.


title: Animal Farm

text: Secker and Warburg published the first edition of "Animal Farm" in 1945 without an introduction. However, the publisher had provided space for a preface in the author's proof composited from the manuscript. For reasons unknown, no preface was supplied, and the page numbers had to be renumbered at the last minute.


title: Animal Farm

text: In 1972, Ian Angus found the original typescript titled "The Freedom of the Press", and Bernard Crick published it, together with his own introduction, in "The Times Literary Supplement" on 15 September 1972 as "How the essay came to be written". Orwell's essay criticised British self-censorship by the press, specifically the suppression of unflattering descriptions of Stalin and the Soviet government. The same essay also appeared in the Italian 1976 edition of "Animal Farm" with another introduction by Crick, claiming to be the first edition with the preface. Other publishers were still declining to publish it.


title: Animal Farm

text: Contemporary reviews of the work were not universally positive. Writing in the American "New Republic" magazine, George Soule expressed his disappointment in the book, writing that it "puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly". Soule believed that the animals were not consistent enough with their real-world inspirations, and said, "It seems to me that the failure of this book (commercially it is already assured of tremendous success) arises from the fact that the satire deals not with something the author has experienced, but rather with stereotyped ideas about a country which he probably does not know very well".


title: Animal Farm

text: "The Guardian" on 24 August 1945 called "Animal Farm" "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in "Tribune" on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in "Tribune" at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years time perhaps, "Animal Farm" may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point". "Animal Farm" has been subject to much comment in the decades since these early remarks.


title: Animal Farm

text: The CIA, from 1952 to 1957 in Operation Aedinosaur, sent millions of balloons carrying copies of the novel into Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, whose air forces tried to shoot the balloons down.


title: Animal Farm

text: "Time" magazine chose "Animal Farm" as one of the 100 best English-language novels (1923 to 2005); it also featured at number 31 on the Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels. It won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996 and is included in the Great Books of the Western World selection.


title: Animal Farm

text: Popular reading in schools, "Animal Farm" was ranked the UK's favourite book from school in a 2016 poll.


title: Animal Farm

text: "Animal Farm" has also faced an array of challenges in school settings around the US. The following are examples of this controversy that has existed around Orwell's work:


title: Animal Farm

text: "Animal Farm" has also faced similar forms of resistance in other countries. The ALA also mentions the way that the book was prevented from being featured at the International Book Fair in Moscow, Russia, in 1977 and banned from schools in the United Arab Emirates for references to practices or actions that defy Arab or Islamic beliefs, such as pigs or alcohol.


title: Animal Farm

text: In the same manner, "Animal Farm" has also faced relatively recent issues in China. In 2018, the government made the decision to censor all online posts about or referring to "Animal Farm". However the book itself, as of 2019, remains sold in stores. Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom of "The Atlantic" stated in 2019 that the book is widely available in Mainland China for several reasons: censors believe the general public is unlikely to read a highbrow book, because the elites who do read books feel connected to the ruling party anyway, and because the Communist Party sees being too aggressive in blocking cultural products as a liability. The authors stated "It was – and remains – as easy to buy "1984" and "Animal Farm" in Shenzhen or Shanghai as it is in London or Los Angeles".


title: Animal Farm

text: An enhanced version of the book, launched in India in 2017, was widely praised for capturing the author's intent, by republishing the proposed preface of the First Edition and the preface he wrote for the Ukrainian edition.


title: Animal Farm

text: The pigs Snowball, Napoleon, and Squealer adapt Old Major's ideas into "a complete system of thought", which they formally name Animalism, an allegoric reference to Communism, not to be confused with the philosophy Animalism. Soon after, Napoleon and Squealer partake in activities associated with the humans (drinking alcohol, sleeping in beds, trading), which were explicitly prohibited by the Seven Commandments. Squealer is employed to alter the Seven Commandments to account for this humanisation, an allusion to the Soviet government's revising of history in order to exercise control of the people's beliefs about themselves and their society.


title: Animal Farm

text: These commandments are also distilled into the maxim "Four legs good, two legs bad!" which is primarily used by the sheep on the farm, often to disrupt discussions and disagreements between animals on the nature of Animalism.


title: Animal Farm

text: Later, Napoleon and his pigs secretly revise some commandments to clear themselves of accusations of law-breaking. The changed commandments are as follows, with the changes bolded:


title: Animal Farm

text: Eventually, these are replaced with the maxims, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others", and "Four legs good, two legs better" as the pigs become more anthropomorphic. This is an ironic twist to the original purpose of the Seven Commandments, which were supposed to keep order within Animal Farm by uniting the animals together against the humans and preventing animals from following the humans' evil habits. Through the revision of the commandments, Orwell demonstrates how simply political dogma can be turned into malleable propaganda.


title: Animal Farm

text: Orwell biographer Jeffrey Meyers has written, "virtually every detail has political significance in this allegory". Orwell himself wrote in 1946, "Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution ... [and] "that kind" of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters [–] revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert". In a preface for a 1947 Ukrainian edition, he stated, "for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement. On my return from Spain [in 1937] I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages".


title: Animal Farm

text: The revolt of the animals against Farmer Jones is Orwell's analogy with the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The "Battle of the Cowshed" has been said to represent the allied invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918, and the defeat of the White Russians in the Russian Civil War. The pigs' rise to preeminence mirrors the rise of a Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR, just as Napoleon's emergence as the farm's sole leader reflects Stalin's emergence. The pigs' appropriation of milk and apples for their own use, "the turning point of the story" as Orwell termed it in a letter to Dwight Macdonald, stands as an analogy for the crushing of the left-wing 1921 Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks, and the difficult efforts of the animals to build the windmill suggest the various Five Year Plans. The puppies controlled by Napoleon parallel the nurture of the secret police in the Stalinist structure, and the pigs' treatment of the other animals on the farm recalls the internal terror faced by the populace in the 1930s. In chapter seven, when the animals confess their non-existent crimes and are killed, Orwell directly alludes to the purges, confessions and show trials of the late 1930s. These contributed to Orwell's conviction that the Bolshevik revolution had been corrupted and the Soviet system become rotten.


title: Animal Farm

text: Peter Edgerly Firchow and Peter Davison contend that the "Battle of the Windmill", specifically referencing the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow, represents World War II. During the battle, Orwell first wrote, "All the animals, including Napoleon" took cover. Orwell had the publisher alter this to "All the animals except Napoleon" in recognition of Stalin's decision to remain in Moscow during the German advance. Orwell requested the change after he met Józef Czapski in Paris in March 1945. Czapski, a survivor of the Katyn Massacre and an opponent of the Soviet regime, told Orwell, as Orwell wrote to Arthur Koestler, that it had been "the character [and] greatness of Stalin" that saved Russia from the German invasion.


title: Animal Farm

text: Other connections that writers have suggested illustrate Orwell's telescoping of Russian history from 1917 to 1943 include the wave of rebelliousness that ran through the countryside after the Rebellion, which stands for the abortive revolutions in Hungary and in Germany (Ch. IV); the conflict between Napoleon and Snowball (Ch. V), parallelling "the two rival and quasi-Messianic beliefs that seemed pitted against one another: Trotskyism, with its faith in the revolutionary vocation of the proletariat of the West; and Stalinism with its glorification of Russia's socialist destiny"; Napoleon's dealings with Whymper and the Willingdon markets (Ch. VI), paralleling the Treaty of Rapallo; and Frederick's forged bank notes, parallelling the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939, after which Frederick attacks Animal Farm without warning and destroys the windmill.


title: Animal Farm

text: The book's close, with the pigs and men in a kind of rapprochement, reflected Orwell's view of the 1943 Tehran Conference that seemed to display the establishment of "the best possible relations between the USSR and the West" – but in reality were destined, as Orwell presciently predicted, to continue to unravel. The disagreement between the allies and the start of the Cold War is suggested when Napoleon and Pilkington, both suspicious, each "played an ace of spades simultaneously".


title: Animal Farm

text: Similarly, the music in the novel, starting with "Beasts of England" and the later anthems, parallels "The Internationale" and its adoption and repudiation by the Soviet authorities as the anthem of the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s.


title: Animal Farm

text: In 2021, during pandemic restrictions, the National Youth Theatre toured a stage version of "Animal Farm;" this run included outdoor performances on a farm at Soulton Hall.


title: Animal Farm

text: A solo version, adapted and performed by Guy Masterson, premiered at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh in January 1995 and has toured worldwide since.


title: Animal Farm

text: A theatrical version, with music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, was staged at the National Theatre London on 25 April 1984, directed by Peter Hall. It toured nine cities in 1985.


title: Animal Farm

text: A new adaptation written and directed by Robert Icke, designed by Bunny Christie with puppetry designed and directed by Toby Olié opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in January 2022 before touring the UK.


title: Animal Farm

text: "Animal Farm" has been adapted to film twice. Both differ from the novel and have been accused of taking significant liberties, including sanitising some aspects.


title: Animal Farm

text: A BBC radio version, produced by Rayner Heppenstall, was broadcast in January 1947. Orwell listened to the production at his home in Canonbury Square, London, with Hugh Gordon Porteous, amongst others. Orwell later wrote to Heppenstall that Porteous, "who had not read the book, grasped what was happening after a few minutes".


title: Animal Farm

text: A further radio production, again using Orwell's own dramatisation of the book, was broadcast in January 2013 on BBC Radio 4. Tamsin Greig narrated, and the cast included Nicky Henson as Napoleon, Toby Jones as the propagandist Squealer, and Ralph Ineson as Boxer.


title: Animal Farm

text: In 1950, Norman Pett and his writing partner Don Freeman were secretly hired by the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret wing of the British Foreign Office, to adapt "Animal Farm" into a comic strip. This comic was not published in the UK but ran in Brazilian and Burmese newspapers.


title: World population

text: In demographics, the world population is the total number of humans currently living. It was estimated by the United Nations to have exceeded 8 billion in November 2022. It took over 200,000 years of human prehistory and history for the human population to reach one billion and only 219 years more to reach 8 billion.


title: World population

text: The human population experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000. The highest global population growth rates, with increases of over 1.8% per year, occurred between 1955 and 1975, peaking at 2.1% between 1965 and 1970. The growth rate declined to 1.1% between 2015 and 2020 and is projected to decline further in the 21st century. The global population is still increasing, but there is significant uncertainty about its long-term trajectory due to changing fertility and mortality rates. The UN Department of Economics and Social Affairs projects between 9 and 10 billion people by 2050 and gives an 80% confidence interval of 10–12 billion by the end of the 21st century, with a growth rate by then of zero. Other demographers predict that the human population will begin to decline in the second half of the 21st century.


title: World population

text: The total number of births globally is currently (2015–2020) 140 million/year, which is projected to peak during the period 2040–2045 at 141 million/year and then decline slowly to 126 million/year by 2100. The total number of deaths is currently 57 million/year and is projected to grow steadily to 121 million/year by 2100.


title: World population

text: Estimates of world population by their nature are an aspect of modernity, possible only since the Age of Discovery. Early estimates for the population of the world date to the 17th century: William Petty, in 1682, estimated the world population at 320 million (current estimates ranging close to twice this number); by the late 18th century, estimates ranged close to one billion (consistent with current estimates). More refined estimates, broken down by continents, were published in the first half of the 19th century, at 600 million to 1 billion in the early 1800s and 800 million to 1 billion in the 1840s.


title: World population

text: It is difficult for estimates to be better than rough approximations, as even current population estimates are fraught with uncertainties from 3% to 5%.


title: World population

text: Estimates of the population of the world at the time agriculture emerged in around 10,000 BC have ranged between 1 million and 15 million. Even earlier, genetic evidence suggests humans may have gone through a population bottleneck of between 1,000 and 10,000 people about 70,000 BC, according to the now largely discredited Toba catastrophe theory. By contrast, it is estimated that around 50–60 million people lived in the combined eastern and western Roman Empire in the 4th century AD.


title: World population

text: The Plague of Justinian caused Europe's population to drop by around 50% between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. The population of Europe was more than 70 million in 1340. From 1340 to 1400, the world's population fell from an estimated 443 million to 350–375 million, with the Indian subcontinent suffering the most tremendous loss and Europe suffering the Black Death pandemic; it took 200 years for European population figures to recover. The population of China decreased from 123 million in 1200 to 65 million in 1393, presumably from a combination of Mongol invasions, famine, and plague.


title: World population

text: Starting in AD 2, the Han dynasty of ancient China kept consistent family registers to properly assess the poll taxes and labor service duties of each household. In that year, the population of Western Han was recorded as 57,671,400 individuals in 12,366,470 households, decreasing to 47,566,772 individuals in 9,348,227 households by AD 146, towards the end of the Han dynasty. From 200 to 400, the world population fell from an estimated 257 million to 206 million, with China suffering the greatest loss. At the founding of the Ming dynasty in 1368, China's population was reported to be close to 60 million; toward the end of the dynasty in 1644, it may have approached 150 million. England's population reached an estimated 5.6 million in 1650, up from an estimated 2.6 million in 1500. New crops that were brought to Asia and Europe from the Americas by Portuguese and Spanish colonists in the 16th century are believed to have contributed to population growth. Since their introduction to Africa by Portuguese traders in the 16th century, maize and cassava have similarly replaced traditional African crops as the most important staple food crops grown on the continent.


title: World population

text: The pre-Columbian population of the Americas is uncertain; historian David Henige called it "the most unanswerable question in the world." By the end of the 20th century, scholarly consensus favored an estimate of roughly 55 million people, but numbers from various sources have ranged from 10 million to 100 million. Encounters between European explorers and populations in the rest of the world often introduced local epidemics of extraordinary virulence. According to the most extreme scholarly claims, as many as 90% of the Native American population of the New World died of Old World diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza. Over the centuries, the Europeans had developed high degrees of immunity to these diseases, while the indigenous peoples had no such immunity.


title: World population

text: During the European Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the life expectancy of children increased dramatically. The percentage of the children born in London who died before the age of five decreased from 74.5% in 1730–1749 to 31.8% in 1810–1829. Between 1700 and 1900, Europe's population increased from about 100 million to over 400 million. Altogether, the areas populated by people of European descent comprised 36% of the world's population in 1900.


title: World population

text: Population growth in the Western world became more rapid after the introduction of vaccination and other improvements in medicine and sanitation. Improved material conditions led to the population of Britain increasing from 10 million to 40 million in the 19th century. The population of the United Kingdom reached 60 million in 2006. The United States saw its population grow from around 5.3 million in 1800 to 106 million in 1920, exceeding 307 million in 2010.


title: World population

text: The first half of the 20th century in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union was marked by a succession of major wars, famines and other disasters which caused large-scale population losses (approximately 60 million excess deaths). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia's population declined significantly – from 150 million in 1991 to 143 million in 2012 – but by 2013 this decline appeared to have halted.


title: World population

text: Many countries in the developing world have experienced extremely rapid population growth since the early 20th century, due to economic development and improvements in public health. China's population rose from approximately 430 million in 1850 to 580 million in 1953, and now stands at over 1.3 billion. The population of the Indian subcontinent, which was about 125 million in 1750, increased to 389 million in 1941; today, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are collectively home to about billion people. Java, an island in Indonesia, had about 5 million inhabitants in 1815; it had a population of over 139 million in 2020. In just one hundred years, the population of Brazil decupled (x10), from about 17 million in 1900, or about 1% of the world population in that year, to about 176 million in 2000, or almost 3% of the global population in the very early 21st century. Mexico's population grew from 13.6 million in 1900 to about 112 million in 2010. Between the 1920s and 2000s, Kenya's population grew from 2.9 million to 37 million.


title: World population

text: The UN estimated that the world population reached one billion for the first time in 1804. It was another 123 years before it reached two billion in 1927, but it took only 33 years to reach three billion in 1960. Thereafter, it took 14 years for the global population to reach four billion in 1974, 13 years to reach five billion in 1987, 12 years to reach six billion in 1999 and, according to the United States Census Bureau, 13 years to reach seven billion in March 2012. The United Nations, however, estimated that the world population reached seven billion in October 2011.


title: World population

text: According to the UN, the global population reached eight billion in November 2022, but because the growth rate is slowing, it will take another 15 years to reach around 9 billion by 2037 and 20 years to reach 10 billion by 2057. Alternative scenarios for 2050 range from a low of 7.4 billion to a high of more than 10.6 billion. Projected figures vary depending on underlying statistical assumptions and the variables used in projection calculations, especially the fertility and mortality variables. Long-range predictions to 2150 range from a population decline to 3.2 billion in the "low scenario", to "high scenarios" of 24.8 billion. One extreme scenario predicted a massive increase to 256 billion by 2150, assuming the global fertility rate remained at its 1995 level of 3.04 children per woman; however, by 2010 the global fertility rate had declined to 2.52.


title: World population

text: There is no estimation for the exact day or month the world's population surpassed one or two billion. The points at which it reached three and four billion were not officially noted, but the International Database of the United States Census Bureau placed them in July 1959 and April 1974 respectively. The United Nations did determine, and commemorate, the "Day of 5 Billion" on 11 July 1987, and the "Day of 6 Billion" on 12 October 1999. The Population Division of the United Nations declared the "Day of Seven Billion" to be 31 October 2011. The United Nations marked the birth of the eight billionth person on 15 November 2022.


title: World population

text: As of 2012, the global sex ratio is approximately 1.01 males to 1 female. Approximately 26.3% of the global population is aged under 15, while 65.9% is aged 15–64 and 7.9% is aged 65 or over. The median age of the world's population is estimated to be 31 years in 2020, and is expected to rise to 37.9 years by 2050.


title: World population

text: According to the World Health Organization, the global average life expectancy is 73.3 years as of 2020, with women living an average of 75.9 years and men approximately 70.8 years. In 2010, the global fertility rate was estimated at 2.44 children per woman. In June 2012, British researchers calculated the total weight of Earth's human population as approximately , with the average person weighing around .


title: World population

text: The IMF estimated nominal 2021 gross world product at US$94.94 trillion, giving an annual global per capita figure of around US$12,290. Around 9.3% of the world population live in extreme poverty, subsisting on less than US$1.9 per day; around 8.9% are malnourished. 87% of the world's over-15s are considered literate. As of April 2022, there were about 5 billion global Internet users, constituting 63% of the world population.


title: World population

text: The Han Chinese are the world's largest single ethnic group, constituting over 19% of the global population in 2011. The world's most-spoken languages are English (1.132B), Mandarin Chinese (1.117B), Hindi (615M), Spanish (534M) and French (280M). More than three billion people speak an Indo-European language, which is the largest language family by number of speakers. Standard Arabic is a language with no native speakers, but the total number of speakers is estimated at 274 million people.


title: World population

text: The largest religious categories in the world as of 2020 are estimated as follows: Christianity (31%), Islam (25%), Unaffiliated (16%) and Hinduism (15%).


title: World population

text: Six of the Earth's seven continents are permanently inhabited on a large scale. Asia is the most populous continent, with its 4.64 billion inhabitants accounting for 60% of the world population. The world's two most populated countries, China and India, together constitute about 36% of the world's population. Africa is the second most populated continent, with around 1.34 billion people, or 17% of the world's population. Europe's 747 million people make up 10% of the world's population as of 2020, while the Latin American and Caribbean regions are home to around 653 million (8%). Northern America, primarily consisting of the United States and Canada, has a population of around 368 million (5%), and Oceania, the least populated region, has about 42 million inhabitants (0.5%). Antarctica only has a very small, fluctuating population of about 1200 people based mainly in polar science stations.


title: World population

text: Approximately 4.49 billion people live in these ten countries, representing around 56% of the world's population as of July 2022.


title: World population

text: The tables below list the world's most densely populated countries, both in absolute terms and in comparison to their total populations, as of November 2022. All areas and populations are from The World Factbook, unless otherwise noted.


title: World population

text: Population size fluctuates at differing rates in differing regions. Nonetheless, population growth has been the long-standing trend on all inhabited continents, as well as in most individual states. During the 20th century, the global population saw its greatest increase in known history, rising from about 1.6 billion in 1900 to over 6 billion in 2000 as the whole world entered the early phases of what has come to be called the "demographic transition". Some of the key factors contributing to this increase included the lessening of the mortality rate in many countries by improved sanitation and medical advances, and a massive increase in agricultural productivity attributed to the Green Revolution. By 2000, there were approximately ten times as many people on Earth as there had been in 1700.


title: World population

text: However, this rapid growth did not last. During the period 2000–2005, the United Nations estimates that the world's population was growing at an annual rate of 1.3% (equivalent to around 80 million people), down from a peak of 2.1% during the period 1965–1970. Globally, although the population growth rate has been steadily declining from its peak in 1968, growth still remains high in Sub-Saharan Africa.


title: World population

text: In fact, during the 2010s, Japan and some countries in Europe began to reduce in population, due to sub-replacement fertility rates.


title: World population

text: In 2019, the United Nations reported that the rate of population growth continues to decline due to the ongoing global demographic transition. If this trend continues, the rate of growth may diminish to zero by 2100, concurrent with a world population plateau of 10.9 billion. However, this is only one of many estimates published by the UN; in 2009, UN population projections for 2050 ranged between around 8 billion and 10.5 billion. An alternative scenario is given by the statistician Jorgen Randers, who argues that traditional projections insufficiently take into account the downward impact of global urbanization on fertility. Randers' "most likely scenario" reveals a peak in the world population in the early 2040s at about 8.1 billion people, followed by decline. Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington professor of statistics and of sociology, states that "there's a 70 percent probability the world population will not stabilize this century. Population, which had sort of fallen off the world's agenda, remains a very important issue."


title: World population

text: The table below shows historical and predicted regional population figures in millions. The availability of historical population figures varies by region.


title: World population

text: The following table gives estimates, in millions, of population in the past. The data for 1750 to 1900 are from the UN report "The World at Six Billion" whereas the data from 1950 to 2015 are from a UN data sheet.


title: World population

text: Long-term global population growth is difficult to predict. The United Nations and the US Census Bureau both give different estimates – according to the UN, the world population reached seven billion in late 2011, while the USCB asserted that this occurred in March 2012. Since 1951 the UN has issued multiple projections of future world population, based on different assumptions. From 2000 to 2005, the UN consistently revised these projections downward, until the 2006 revision, issued on 14 March 2007, revised the 2050 mid-range estimate upwards by 273 million.


title: World population

text: Complicating the UN's and others’ attempts to project future populations is the fact that average global birth rates, as well as mortality rates, are declining rapidly, as the nations of the world progress through the stages of the demographic transition, but both vary greatly between developed countries (where birth rates and mortality rates are often low) and developing countries (where birth and mortality rates typically remain high). Different ethnicities also display varying birth rates. Both of these can change rapidly due to disease epidemics, wars and other mass catastrophes, or advances in medicine and public health.


title: World population

text: The UN's first report in 1951 showed that during the period 1950–55 the crude birth rate was 36.9/1,000 population and the crude death rate was 19.1/1,000.  By the period 2015–20 both numbers had dropped significantly to 18.5/1,000 for the crude birth rate and 7.5/1,000 for the crude death rate.  UN projections for 2100 show a further decline in the crude birth rate to 11.6/1,000 and an increase in the crude death rate to 11.2/1,000.


title: World population

text: The total number of births globally is currently (2015–20) 140 million/year, is projected to peak during the period 2040–45 at 141 million/year and thereafter decline slowly to 126 million/year by 2100. The total number of deaths is currently 57 million/year and is projected to grow steadily to 121 million/year by 2100.


title: World population

text: 2012 United Nations projections show a continued increase in population in the near future with a steady decline in population growth rate; the global population is expected to reach between 8.3 and 10.9 billion by 2050. 2003 UN Population Division population projections for the year 2150 range between 3.2 and 24.8 billion. One of many independent mathematical models supports the lower estimate, while a 2014 estimate forecasts between 9.3 and 12.6 billion in 2100, and continued growth thereafter. The 2019 Revision of the UN estimates gives the "medium variant" population as; nearly 8.6 billion in 2030, about 9.7 billion in 2050 and about 10.9 billion in 2100. In December 2019, the German Foundation for World Population projected that the global population will reach 8 billion by 2023 as it increases by 156 every minute. In a modeled future projection by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion people and decline to 8.79 billion in 2100. Some analysts have questioned the sustainability of further world population growth, highlighting the growing pressures on the environment, global food supplies, and energy resources.


title: World population

text: In 1975, Sebastian von Hoerner proposed a formula for population growth which represented hyperbolic growth with an infinite population in 2025. The hyperbolic growth of the world population observed until the 1970s was later correlated to a non-linear second-order positive feedback between demographic growth and technological development. This feedback can be described as follows: technological advance → increase in the carrying capacity of land for people → demographic growth → more people → more potential inventors → acceleration of technological advance → accelerating growth of the carrying capacity → faster population growth → accelerating growth of the number of potential inventors → faster technological advance → hence, the faster growth of the Earth's carrying capacity for people, and so on. The transition from hyperbolic growth to slower rates of growth is related to the demographic transition.


title: World population

text: According to the Russian demographer Sergey Kapitsa, the world population grew between 67,000 BC and 1965 according to the following formula:


title: World population

text: According to linear interpolation and extrapolation of UNDESA population estimates, the world population has doubled, or will double, in the years listed in the tables below (with two different starting points). During the 2nd millennium, each doubling took roughly half as long as the previous doubling, fitting the hyperbolic growth model mentioned above. However, after 2024, it is unlikely that there will be another doubling of the global population in the 21st century.


title: World population

text: The total number of humans who have ever lived is estimated to be approximately 100 billion. Such estimates can only be rough approximations, as even modern population estimates are subject to uncertainty of around 3% to 5%. Kapitsa (1996) cites estimates ranging between 80 and 150 billion. The PRB puts the figure at 117 billion as of 2020, estimating that the current world population is 6.7% of all the humans who have ever lived. Haub (1995) prepared another figure, updated in 2002 and 2011; the 2011 figure was approximately 107 billion. Haub characterized this figure as an estimate that required "selecting population sizes for different points from antiquity to the present and applying assumed birth rates to each period".


title: World population

text: Robust population data only exist for the last two or three centuries. Until the late 18th century, few governments had ever performed an accurate census. In many early attempts, such as in Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire, the focus was on counting merely a subset of the population for purposes of taxation or military service. Thus, there is a significant margin of error when estimating ancient global populations.


title: World population

text: Pre-modern infant mortality rates are another critical factor for such an estimate; these rates are very difficult to estimate for ancient times due to a lack of accurate records. Haub (1995) estimates that around 40% of those who have ever lived did not survive beyond their first birthday. Haub also stated that "life expectancy at birth probably averaged only about ten years for most of human history", which is not to be mistaken for the life expectancy after reaching adulthood. The latter equally depended on period, location and social standing, but calculations identify averages from roughly 30 years upward.


title: John Gotti

text: John Joseph Gotti Jr. (, ; October 27, 1940 – June 10, 2002) was an American gangster and boss of the Gambino crime family in New York City. He ordered and helped to orchestrate the murder of Gambino boss Paul Castellano in December 1985 and took over the family shortly thereafter, becoming boss of what was described as America's most powerful crime syndicate.


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti and his brothers grew up in poverty and turned to a life of crime at an early age. Gotti quickly became one of the crime family's biggest earners and a protégé of Aniello Dellacroce, the Gambino family underboss, operating out of the neighborhood of Ozone Park in Queens. Following the FBI's indictment of members of Gotti's crew for selling narcotics, Gotti began to fear that he and his brother would be killed by Castellano for dealing drugs. As this fear continued to grow, and amidst growing dissent over the leadership of the crime family, Gotti organized the murder of Castellano.


title: John Gotti

text: At his peak, Gotti was one of the most powerful and dangerous crime bosses in the United States. During his era, he became widely known for his outspoken personality and flamboyant style, which gained him favor with some of the general public. While his peers generally avoided attracting attention, especially from the media, Gotti became known as "The Dapper Don", for his expensive clothes and personality in front of news cameras. He was later given the nickname "The Teflon Don" after three high-profile trials in the 1980s resulted in his acquittal, though it was later revealed that the trials had been tainted by jury tampering, juror misconduct and witness intimidation. Law enforcement authorities continued gathering evidence against Gotti, who reportedly earned between $5–20 million per year as Gambino boss.


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti's underboss, Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, aided the FBI in convicting Gotti; in 1991, Gravano agreed to turn state's evidence and testify against Gotti after hearing the boss make disparaging remarks about him on a wiretap that implicated them both in several murders. In 1992, Gotti was convicted of five murders, conspiracy to commit murder, racketeering, obstruction of justice, tax evasion, illegal gambling, extortion, and loansharking. He received life in prison without parole and was transferred to United States Penitentiary, Marion. Gotti died of throat cancer on June 10, 2002, at the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. According to Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, the former underboss of the Lucchese crime family, "what John Gotti did was the beginning of the end of "Cosa Nostra"".


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti was born in the Bronx borough of New York City, on October 27, 1940. He was the fifth of the 13 children (two had died at birth) of John Joseph Gotti Sr. and Philomena "Fannie" DeCarlo. His parents were born in New York City, but it is presumed that his grandparents were from San Giuseppe Vesuviano, in the province of Naples, Italy, because his parents were married and lived there for some time. Gotti was one of five brothers who became made men in the Gambino crime family: Eugene "Gene" Gotti was initiated before John due to the latter's incarceration, Peter Gotti was initiated under John's leadership in 1988, and Richard V. Gotti was identified as a "caporegime" (made member who heads a "crew" of soldiers and has major social status) by 2002. The fifth, Vincent, was initiated in 2002.


title: John Gotti

text: By the age of 12, the Gottis settled in East New York, Brooklyn, where he grew up in poverty alongside his brothers. His father worked irregularly as a day laborer. As an adult, Gotti came to resent his father for being unable to provide for his family. In school, he had a history of truancy and bullying other students, and ultimately dropped out of Franklin K. Lane High School at the age of 16.


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti was involved in street gangs associated with New York City "mafiosi" from the age of 12. When he was 14, he was attempting to steal a cement mixer from a construction site when it fell, crushing his toes; this injury left him with a permanent limp. After leaving school, he devoted himself to working with the Mafia-associated Fulton-Rockaway Boys gang, where he met and befriended fellow future Gambino mobsters Angelo Ruggiero and Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson.


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti met his future wife, Victoria DiGiorgio, who was of half-Italian and half-Russian descent, at a bar in 1958. The couple were married on March 6, 1962. According to FBI documents, DiGiorgio was married previously and had one child by the previous marriage. They had five children: Angela, Victoria, John Jr., Frank (d. 1980) and Peter. Gotti attempted to work legitimately in 1962 as a presser in a coat factory and as an assistant truck driver. However, he could not stay crime-free and, by 1966, had been jailed twice.


title: John Gotti

text: As early as his teens, Gotti was running errands for Carmine Fatico, a "capo" in the Gambino family, then known as the Anastasia family under the leadership of boss Albert Anastasia. Gotti carried out truck hijackings at Idlewild Airport (subsequently renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport) together with his brother Gene and friend Ruggiero. During this time, Gotti befriended fellow mob hijacker and future Bonanno family boss Joseph Massino, and he was given the nicknames "Black John" and "Crazy Horse". It was around this time that Gotti met his mentor and Gambino underboss Aniello "Neil" Dellacroce.


title: John Gotti

text: In February 1968, United Airlines employees identified Gotti as the man who had signed for stolen merchandise; the FBI arrested him for that hijacking soon after. Gotti was arrested a third time for hijacking while out on bail two months later, this time for stealing a load of cigarettes worth $50,000 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Later that year, Gotti pleaded guilty to the Northwest Airlines hijacking and was sentenced to three years at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary.


title: John Gotti

text: Gotti and Ruggiero were paroled in 1972 and returned to their old crew at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club, still working under Fatico. Gotti was transferred to management of the Bergin crew's illegal gambling, where he proved himself to be an effective enforcer. Fatico was indicted on loansharking charges in 1972. As a condition of his release, he could not associate with known felons. Gotti was not yet a made man in the Mafia due to the membership books' having been closed since 1957 due to the Apalachin meeting, but Fatico named him acting "capo" of the Bergin crew soon after he was paroled. In this new role, Gotti frequently traveled to Dellacroce's headquarters at the Ravenite Social Club to brief the underboss on the crew's activities. Dellacroce had already taken a liking to Gotti, and the two became even closer during this time. The two were very similar—both had strong violent streaks, cursed a lot, and were heavy gamblers.


title: John Gotti

text: After Emanuel Gambino, nephew to boss Carlo Gambino, was kidnapped and murdered in 1973, Gotti was assigned to the hit team alongside Ruggiero and Ralph Galione to search for the main suspect, gangster James McBratney. The team botched their attempt to abduct McBratney at a Staten Island bar when they attempted to arrest him while posing as detectives, and Galione shot McBratney dead when his accomplices managed to restrain him. Gotti was identified by eyewitnesses and by a police insider, and was arrested for the killing in June 1974. He was able to strike a plea bargain, however, with the help of attorney Roy Cohn, and was sentenced to four years in prison for attempted manslaughter for his part in the hit.


title: John Gotti

text: After Gotti's death, he was also identified by Massino as the killer of Vito Borelli, a Gambino associate killed in 1975 for insulting then-acting boss Paul Castellano.


title: John Gotti

text: Remo Franceschini, a member of the NYPD from 1957 to 1991 who specialized in organized crime; when asked in 1993 why he knew at an early stage that Gotti would become a major figure in the Mafia, said: "He was charismatic and a leader. He wasn't a womanizer. He spent all his time with his men. He also had a very sharp mind and total recall. And he exuded toughness. There were few men who would go against him".


title: John Gotti

text: On October 15, 1976, Carlo Gambino died at home of natural causes. Against expectations, he had appointed Castellano to succeed him over his underboss Dellacroce. Gambino appeared to believe that his crime family would benefit from Castellano's focus on white-collar businesses. Dellacroce, at the time, was imprisoned for tax evasion and was unable to contest Castellano's succession. Castellano's succession was confirmed at a meeting on November 24, with Dellacroce present. Castellano arranged for Dellacroce to remain as underboss while directly running traditional Cosa Nostra activities such as extortion, robbery, and loansharking. While Dellacroce accepted Castellano's succession, the deal effectively split the Gambino family into two rival factions.