Paulo Guedes é um Roberto Campos com menos livros lidos e mais fanatismo pelo cada-um-por-si na economia e na vida social. O economista e diplomata Campos ganhou dos detratores a alcunha brejeira de Bob Fields, tamanho o fetiche pelo capital estrangeiro e a devoção pelos Estados Unidos.
De 1964 a 1967, o seminarista que desistira do sacerdócio foi o primeiro ministro do Planejamento da ditadura. Era tão brilhante que não se converter à sua lábia hipnotizante constituía exercício intelectual desafiador. No alvorecer da década de 1980, o cardeal brasileiro do liberalismo foi esfaqueado na barriga – pela amante, e não por um abilolado. Morreu em 2001.
Embora ministro do marechal Castello Branco, cujo governo cassou mandatos de parlamentares e fechou o Congresso, Campos não pronunciava intimidações vulgares como “prensa neles!”, truculência com que Guedes pretendeu peitar senadores e deputados para votar logo as mudanças na Previdência. A jornalista Cristiana Lobo contou que até a semana passada o futuro ministro da Economia ignorava que o Orçamento de 2019 será elaborado em 2018.
Numa reportagem da revista piauí de setembro, o banqueiro bem-sucedido – Bob Fields malogrou como dono de banco – se referira a Jair Bolsonaro como indivíduo pertencente a uma fauna indeterminada. A repórter Malu Gaspar narrou: “Guedes fez uma pausa e prosseguiu, parafraseando as críticas ao seu candidato: ‘Ah, mas ele xinga isso, xinga aquilo… Amansa o cara!’ Pergunto se é possível amansar Bolsonaro. ‘Acho que sim, já é outro animal’.”
Se um animal está amansado, o outro escoiceia. Guedes já especulava sobre ser ministro e, surpresa, deixar de ser: “Quer saber de uma coisa? Se não der para fazer o negócio bem feito, que valha a pena, para que eu vou [para o governo]? Ficar escutando essas merdas que estão falando?” A repórter enticou: “Então posso escrever que você desistiu?” O Paulo “posto Ipiranga” Guedes riu com ironia: “Esse é o sonho de todo mundo, todo mundo quer foder o Bolsonaro. Mas esse prazer eu não dou. Só depois que ele for eleito”.
Traulitadas
O capitão se elegeu, indicou Sérgio Moro para o Ministério da Justiça, e na primeira entrevista coletiva após o anúncio o juiz tagarelou sobre sua eventual partida. Declarou, acerca de divergências vindouras: “A decisão final é dele [Bolsonaro]. Aí eu vou tomar a minha decisão se, para mim, vamos dizer assim, continuo ou não continuo”.
Moro não tratou Bolsonaro como um cavalão, chucro ou domado, mas pareceu inverter a hierarquia de presidente e ministro. Em meio a mesuras, chancelou o eleito, como se fosse necessário: “Pessoalmente, me pareceu ser uma pessoa muito sensata”. O costumeiro é o chefe referendar o chefiado, não o contrário. No domingo, o juiz falou à entrevistadora Poliana Abritta sobre possíveis desinteligências: “Se tudo der errado, eu deixo daí também o cargo”.
Na prosaica transição em que antes da posse os dois superministros miram as portas de entrada e de saída, o vice de Bolsonaro desdenha em público do deputado que o presidente eleito escolheu para comandar a Casa Civil. O general Antônio Hamilton Mourão desclassificou o iminente ministro Onyx Lorenzoni, relataram as repórteres Juliana Dal Piva e Daniela Pinheiro: “Era um parlamentar apagado. Esse é um cargo com outro perfil”.
Se Guedes cair, quem o presidente convocaria para seu lugar? Mourão já nomeou o substituto: “Eu assumo”.Guedes já havia desferido uma traulitada em Lorenzoni, fazendo pouco caso dele: “É um político falando de coisa de economia. É a mesma coisa que eu sair falando coisa de política. Não dá certo, né?” Se Guedes cair, quem o presidente convocaria para seu lugar? Mourão já nomeou o substituto: “Eu assumo”. Ao ouvir que “no Brasil os vices costumam virar presidentes”, o general não retrucou com um espirituoso “vira essa boca pra lá” ou um cerimonial “dessa vez será diferente”. “Ele fechou a cara e desconversou”, leu-se na revista Época.
Em contraste com a limitada deferência por Bolsonaro, expressa por Guedes, Moro e Mourão, o servilismo de burocratas excede. A repórter Mônica Bergamo revelou que os organizadores do ato do Congresso pelos 30 anos da Constituição mudaram o nome artístico do tenor Jean William. Na hora de cantar o hino nacional, apresentaram-no como Jean Silva. Temiam que Bolsonaro, presente, se melindrasse com a identidade similar à de Jean Wyllys, deputado que em 2016 lhe cuspiu na cara.
Em Brasília, o capitão se sentiu mais à vontade do que na Barra da Tijuca para se conceder um intervalo na encenação que protagoniza como político anti-establishment. O repórter Guilherme Amado informou que Bolsonaro não se constrangeu diante do totem do poder, José Sarney. Diante do ex-presidente, empertigou-se, prestou continência e reverenciou: “Meu comandante!”
The post Bolsonaro encabeçará um governo em que ministros falam em pedir demissão antes mesmo de assumir appeared first on The Intercept.
É meio da tarde numa oficina de costura. Os funcionários, todos homens, vestem uniformes alaranjados, ostentam tatuagens amadoras visíveis nas mãos, braços e, às vezes, no pescoço e operam máquinas de corte, ferramentas e tesouras afiadas. O ambiente, tranquilo e cordial, nos faz esquecer de onde estamos: uma prisão no maior complexo penitenciário do Paraná, em Piraquara, região metropolitana de Curitiba.
A meu lado, caminham a advogada Isabel Kugler Mendes, 82 anos, presidente do Conselho da Comunidade de Curitiba, entidade que presta assistência aos presos em dez penitenciárias e 13 carceragens de delegacias da região, um assessor dela e um agente penitenciário que não carrega arma ou mesmo um cacetete e que volta e meia conversa com algum detento. Nenhum de nós sente medo – a sensação é a de estarmos em uma indústria qualquer.
“É assim que todo presídio deveria ser no Brasil, segundo a Lei de Execução Penal“, me explica a “doutora Isabel”, como é conhecida pelos detentos. “Mas, de fato, só esse cumpre integralmente o que manda a legislação.” Estamos na Unidade de Progressão da Penitenciária Central do Estado, onde 240 presos passam o dia fora de suas celas trabalhando e estudando.
É um espaço enorme, composto por duas galerias de celas, sete salas de trabalho, dez salas de aula, biblioteca, pátio com quadra de esportes, área de visitas e uma horta de produtos orgânicos. Oito agentes se revezam, por turno, para vigiar tudo – ou um a cada 30 detentos. Nenhum anda armado. Desde que a unidade foi inaugurada, em março passado, jamais houve qualquer incidente. Não à toa, ela é conhecida informalmente como “prisão modelo”, um oásis no inferno que é o sistema carcerário brasileiro em que mais de 726 mil presos dividem 358 mil vagas.
Na “prisão modelo”, o trabalho é compulsório e remunerado: R$ 715, 20% dos quais são depositados numa poupança que o preso só poderá mover em liberdade – o restante é entregue à família.
Mais de 21 mil pessoas vivem em regime fechado no Paraná. Para entrar no regime de progressão de pena em uma das 200 Unidades de Progressão do estado, que leva os condenados ao semi-aberto e ao aberto, é preciso cumprir alguns requisitos: não pode ter cometido crime hediondo nem falta disciplinar recente durante a pena. A progressão de pena também é vedada a integrantes de facções criminosas – o Primeiro Comando da Capital, o PCC, domina os presídios paranaenses.
Os detentos das Unidades de Progressão, no entanto, não têm moleza. “Ele acorda às 6 horas da manhã, toma uma ducha gelada, trabalha o dia inteiro, em seguida tem aulas e só volta para a cela às 9 da noite. No regime fechado, o cara passa 22 horas por dia na cela, joga baralho a noite toda, acorda a hora que quer”, compara Eduardo Lino Bueno Fagundes Júnior, juiz da primeira vara de execução penal de Curitiba e coordenador do Grupo de Monitoramento e Fiscalização do Sistema Carcerário do Paraná, o GMF, criado por ordem do Conselho Nacional de Justiça como tentativa de melhorar as condições em que vivem detentos no país. A “prisão modelo” é uma das iniciativas do grupo.
‘No regime fechado, o cara passa 22 horas por dia na cela, joga baralho a noite toda, acorda a hora que quer.’“Vai para a unidade quem está mais perto da progressão para o regime semi-aberto ou aberto, porque esses são os que têm menos vontade de criar problemas. E ali ele tem direito a tudo que a Lei de Execução Penal determina”, explica o desembargador Ruy Muggiati, supervisor do GMF, um homem de fala gentil e tranquila que destoa da prepotência habitual às instâncias superiores do Poder Judiciário.
Na “prisão modelo”, o trabalho é compulsório e remunerado: três quartos de salário-mínimo, ou R$ 715, 20% dos quais são depositados numa poupança que o detento só poderá movimentar quando receber a liberdade definitiva – o restante é entregue à família. Estudo e trabalho também reduzem a pena restante: a cada três dias de batente, um é abatido do tempo que falta cumprir atrás das grades; 12 horas de aulas abatem mais um dia de pena.
O resultado: a reincidência criminal dos presos que passaram pela Unidade de Progressão é de 10% – apenas um a cada dez volta a cometer crimes. Para efeitos de comparação, a média nacional, segundo informaram a Primeira Vara de Execução Penal de Curitiba e o Departamento Penitenciário do Paraná, é de 70%. Em tempos em que o presidente eleito é autor de frases como “presídio cheio é problema de quem cometeu crime“, como disse Jair Bolsonaro em junho, a unidade parece nadar contra a corrente.
Percorrer as instalações da “prisão modelo” não é muito diferente de andar por uma escola pública. O prédio é antigo e precário, mas limpo e bem cuidado, assim como as celas.
A Unidade de Progressão funciona no mais antigo dos prédios da Penitenciária Central do Estado, finalizada na década de 1950. As galerias que hoje abrigam os detentos do “presídio modelo” foram destruídas por sucessivas rebeliões ocorridas nas últimas duas décadas.
Eu cobri uma das maiores delas, em 2001, que marcou a chegada do PCC ao Paraná e deixou um saldo de quatro mortos – três presos e um agente penitenciário. Ao final dos quase seis dias de motim, jornalistas foram autorizados a entrar no pátio na unidade – condição imposta por José Márcio Felício, o Geleião, e César Augusto Roriz Silva, o Cesinha, fundadores e então comandantes do PCC, para garantir que ele e outros rebelados não seriam executados antes da transferência para São Paulo.
O olfato é o primeiro sentido a acusar a entrada numa prisão – o cheiro costuma ser uma mistura do mofo natural a lugares aonde o sol nunca chega com o odor azedo de material orgânico apodrecendo.Em seguida, a polícia permitiu que visitássemos as galerias onde a rebelião havia começado. O olfato é o primeiro sentido a acusar a entrada numa prisão – o cheiro, inesquecível, era uma mistura do mofo natural a lugares aonde o sol nunca chega com o odor azedo de material orgânico apodrecendo. Gatos circulavam livremente e aos montes: os presos os mantinham para tentar dar cabo dos ratos que infestavam o lugar. Os pátios para onde davam as janelas gradeadas das celas estavam cobertos por uma pilha de lixo acumulada pelos detentos.
Quase duas décadas depois, foi a ausência do “cheiro de cadeia” o que mais impressionou quando entramos exatamente nas mesmas galerias, agora ocupadas pela Unidade de Progressão. O trabalho de limpeza e reconstrução do local foi feito pelos próprios detentos que agora cumprem suas penas ali, me contou um agente que pediu para não ser identificado – o motivo ficará claro adiante. “Tinha uma pilha de lixo e destroços de mais de um metro de altura no pátio”, ele relata.
Percorrer as instalações da “prisão modelo” não é muito diferente de andar por uma escola pública. O prédio é antigo e precário, mas limpo e bem cuidado, assim como as celas. Os muros estão pintados e alguns têm desenhos. Nalguns cantos, há vasos de flores. No centro do pátio, o galpão de alvenaria em que os detentos recebem as visitas semanais está cercado por cortinas de plástico transparente – imprescindíveis para dar conta do vento gelado que sopra da vizinha Serra do Mar nos meses de inverno. Compradas pelo Conselho da Comunidade, elas parecem recém-instaladas, mas estão ali há mais de um ano. Não exibem um rasgo sequer.
Foto: Divulgação
“Estar aqui abre uma opção”, me conta Eduardo, um jovem de 24 anos que está preso pela terceira vez, sempre por assalto e porte ilegal de arma e que preferiu me dizer apenas o seu primeiro nome. Na Unidade de Progressão, ele trabalha aplicando decalques em canecas e pratos para uma das maiores indústrias de cerâmica do país e estuda para completar o ensino fundamental – “faltam só três disciplinas”.
Nascido no interior do Paraná, Eduardo não passou do sexto ano quando tinha idade escolar – como ele, 36% da população carcerária brasileira não completou o ensino fundamental. Em Curitiba, onde cresceu, penou para arrumar trabalho. “Sempre diziam que me faltava experiência – tenho duas anotações na carteira de trabalho, as duas provisórias. Daí meio que não tem escolha [a não ser ir para o crime], né?”
Agora, ele espera que as coisas sejam diferentes. “Estou aprendendo uma profissão”, diz, sobre a experiência como auxiliar na linha de montagem de objetos de cerâmica. “É importante, porque tenho mais uma boca para alimentar quando sair”, conta, se referindo ao filho de dois anos.
Detentos como Eduardo são a maioria dos que estão no sistema penitenciário brasileiro, afirma o psicólogo Ulisses Schlosser, pesquisador de uma rede de universidades chamada Alternative Perspectives and Global Concerns (Perspectivas Alternativas e Preocupações Globais, em português).
“Em geral, o crime é um episódio único na vida de uma pessoa. Quando se avalia os presos, a maioria não é de pessoas ameaçadoras, perigosas. Claro que existe uma minoria presa que é preocupante, formada por criminosos que não sabemos como tratar. Mas, pelas minhas pesquisas, eles giram em torno de 20% das pessoas presas”, afirma Schlosser.
‘A sociedade brasileira deseja ver mais gente presa. Mas precisamos é criar horror à prisão.’Os números do pesquisador foram apurados a partir de entrevistas realizadas com detentos de uma penitenciária estadual em Foz do Iguaçu, no oeste do Paraná.
“Existe um descontrole na entrada do sistema penitenciário. Prendemos demais”, concorda o juiz Eduardo Lino Bueno Fagundes Júnior. “O sistema penitenciário passou a fazer parte do ciclo da violência e fornece recrutamento para as organizações criminosas. O Estado está gastando muito dinheiro para o sistema funcionar desse modo”, faz coro o desembargador Ruy Muggiati.
“Temos 726 mil pessoas encarceradas no Brasil, com a projeção de ultrapassar a casa de 1 milhão nos próximos anos. Isso tem um custo elevado para a sociedade”, diz o coronel Élio de Oliveira Manuel, policial militar há 35 anos e, há seis meses, secretário especial da Administração Penitenciária do Paraná.
Mesmo ele, forjado na doutrina militar, não acredita que ir jogando gente na cadeia seja uma boa ideia. “Por experiência, eu diria que uns 40% das pessoas que estão presas têm envolvimento com facções criminosas e não teriam interesse num projeto de ressocialização. Mas 60% teriam”, estima Manuel. Uma projeção mais conservadora que a do psicólogo Schlosser.
“Certa vez um rapaz me contou que era viciado em drogas, mas jamais seria capaz de roubar ou matar. Mas, para sustentar o vício, virou olheiro do tráfico. E pegou três penas de traficante, cada uma de 17 anos. Estamos empurrando pessoas como essa para o crime organizado”, lamenta o juiz Lino.
“Quando chega numa penitenciária superlotada, até para arrumar lugar para dormir o preso precisa pagar. Para receber visitas, também – em geral os parentes vivem longe. É aí que entram as facções, que resolvem o problema do detento. Em troca disso, eles criam dívidas, viram soldados dos grupos”, ele prossegue. “Na Unidade de Progressão, é o Estado que providencia tudo isso, como sempre deveria ser.”
“A sociedade brasileira deseja ver mais gente presa. Mas precisamos é criar horror à prisão. Para isso, histórias de gente que se suicida na prisão, ou que entra lá e vira um verdadeiro criminoso precisam vir a público”, concorda Schlosser.
Há as oficinas em que os presos produzem uniformes para uma empresa de segurança, embalagens para pães de forma, decoração para produtos cerâmicos e hortaliças orgânicas certificadas – que, em breve, serão processadas e embaladas ali mesmo.
Foto: Divulgação
A justiça paranaense recebe, toda semana, cerca de 20 pedidos de famílias querendo transferir seus familiares presos para a Unidade de Progressão.
As vagas, porém, dependem não só de espaço nas celas, como também da existência de trabalho para todos os detentos. Hoje, há 17 canteiros de trabalhos do próprio sistema penitenciário, em que os internos fazem serviços como lavanderia, manutenção dos prédios e fabricação das próprias roupas. Além deles, há as oficinas que produzem uniformes para uma empresa de segurança, embalagens para pães de forma, decoração para produtos cerâmicos e hortaliças orgânicas certificadas – que, em breve, serão processadas e embaladas ali mesmo.
Também é preciso vencer as resistências naturais dos agentes penitenciários, há décadas habituados a uma relação de apreensão mútua com os presos. “A primeira dificuldade foi escolher os agentes para trabalhar na Unidade de Progressão. Alguns vieram meio na marra”, confessa Muggiati.
“No começo, eu ficava com medo de ver esses caras andando de lá pra cá com ferramentas afiadas, pás e enxadas, na mão”, diz um dos agentes que atua na prisão modelo. Ao contrário de unidades de regime fechado tradicionais, em que o preso passa 22 horas do dia na cela e, sempre que sai, é algemado, ali os internos circulam livremente, não raro com suas ferramentas de trabalho na mão. “Mas, depois que me acostumei, isso aqui virou o melhor lugar do mundo pra trabalhar”, prossegue o agente, pedindo sigilo – o motivo é a resistência que ainda existe na categoria em relação ao projeto. “A maioria acha que isso aqui não tem como dar certo, até torce pra dar errado, porque acha que preso tem que ser tratado é na porrada”, conta outro deles.
‘Habitualmente, se um cara pega na tua mão, é pra tentar te matar. Aqui, é comum o preso vir aqui na minha sala, antes de ser solto, e trocar um aperto de mão, agradecer pela convivência.’“Logo que comecei a trabalhar no sistema penitenciário, vi um preso morto pelos colegas. Fiquei um mês sem dormir. Com o tempo, passei a achar isso natural. Mas não é”, lembra Tayrone Cláudio da Silva, há 11 anos agente e atualmente diretor da Unidade de Progressão.
“O nosso padrão é trabalhar com o preso em regime fechado, em que o sujeito fica 22 horas por dia na cela. Nós também precisamos nos adaptar a conviver com os detentos soltos, circulando. Nas outras unidades, você está sempre esperando pelo pior. Habitualmente, se um cara pega na tua mão, é pra tentar te matar. Aqui, é comum o preso vir aqui na minha sala, antes de ser solto, e trocar um aperto de mão, agradecer pela convivência”, prossegue.
“Os agentes compraram o projeto. Criou-se um círculo virtuoso; todo mundo quer ajudar, contribuir, os presos são solidários entre eles. As tensões caíram muito. Um agente, com mais de 60 anos de idade, me chamou num canto e me disse: ‘Nunca fui tão feliz na minha vida'”, sorri Muggiati.
“A estrutura desse prédio é tão precária que, se o preso chutar uma grade, ela cai”, exagera Silva, o diretor. “Eles não fogem porque valorizam o que têm aqui. A disciplina é consequência do interesse deles em manter a possibilidade de trabalhar e estudar”, afirma. “A gente fala aqui pros caras que eles estão presos pela consciência deles. E é verdade”, concorda um agente.
Com Bolsonaro, futuro é incertoNomeado ministro da Justiça e Segurança Pública por Bolsonaro, o juiz federal Sergio Moro falou por quase duas horas a jornalistas sobre seus planos. Defendeu penas mais duras para crimes graves e o que chama de “grande corrupção”, além de endurecimento da progressão de regime – e mesmo o fim dela para detentos ligados a organizações criminosas.
Quase todas as pessoas com quem conversei para esta reportagem – as entrevistas foram feitas antes da nomeação de Moro – procuraram afastar a ideia de que a eleição do ultradireitista Bolsonaro possa significar a morte prematura de experiências como a da Unidade de Progressão.
“Quero acreditar que o projeto não corre risco, porque o resultado concreto é muito forte. Basta que as pessoas vejam, não é preciso argumentar”, afirma o desembargador Muggiati. Uma segunda unidade do tipo, feminina, de dimensões semelhantes, foi inaugurada há menos de um mês em Foz do Iguaçu.
A exceção é Isabel, que dedicou boa parte de sua vida aos direitos dos presos e conhece como poucos o funcionamento do sistema penitenciário. “Tenho muito medo que isso aqui acabe [com a eleição de Bolsonaro]. Ele já falou em acabar com a progressão de regime. Que estímulo o preso teria para estudar e trabalhar sem a remissão da pena e a progressão de regime? Sem eles, as prisões viram barris de pólvora”, ela prevê.
The post Prisão em que detentos trabalham, estudam e são bem tratados faz reincidência criminal cair a 10% appeared first on The Intercept.
A U.S. district court in Montana last week ordered a halt to all work on the Keystone XL pipeline, the fossil fuel project that inspired a revival of direct action protest tactics across the U.S.
The decision came at the end of an election week in which Democrats took control of the U.S. House of Representatives, promising in the short term to hold climate hearings and in the long term to work toward a “Green New Deal.” Meanwhile, pipeline opponents made electoral gains of their own in local races in South Dakota and Nebraska. But the unwieldy scale of the climate crisis hung heavily over the election results and the limited possibilities they opened up for legislative action. The Keystone XL ruling represented a concrete blow to the fossil fuel industry driving the crisis.
The effort to stop the pipeline has become a touchstone for the U.S. environmental movement, with the fate of the project carrying considerable symbolic and material weight. The trailblazing climate scientist James Hansen famously called the potential completion of the project and the full exploitation of the tar sands “game over for the climate.”
TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline would pump 830,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada, to a transfer point in Nebraska. Increasing pipeline capacity, which decreases transportation costs, is key to assuring that the oil, which is expensive to produce, remains commercially viable. When the State Department originally studied the project in 2014, crude oil sold for nearly $100 per barrel; today it sells for around $60. The sludgy tar sands oil is a high carbon-emitting variety that has proven difficult to clean up when it spills into waterways.
The court decision declared illegal one of Donald Trump’s first executive orders, issued days after his inauguration as a signal to fossil fuel opponents and the oil industry that America was moving full speed ahead on oil and gas extraction. Trump’s order reopened and fast-tracked the permit process for KXL, which the Obama administration had denied and ended more than a year before. Barack Obama had argued that the pipeline would undermine the U.S.’s international leadership in addressing the climate crisis.
In his decision, Judge Brian Morris, who was appointed by Obama, emphasized that Trump “simply discarded prior factual findings related to climate change to support its course reversal.” He added, “An agency cannot simply disregard contrary or inconvenient factual determinations that it made in the past.”
In response, Trump told reporters, “It was a political decision made by a judge. I think it’s a disgrace.” He speculated that the case would go to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “We’re slowly putting new judges in the 9th Circuit,” he said.
“It’s these moments that fuel and give fire to our resiliency,” said Jade Begay, a spokesperson for the Indigenous Environmental Network, one of the parties to the lawsuit. “We are buying time, but we need to remain strategic and diligent about moving this forward.”
Photo: Evan Vucci/AP
Last week’s court decision requires the Trump administration to perform a new supplemental environmental impact study that takes into account oil prices that have fallen dramatically, updated information about the potential impact of oil spills, and the cumulative greenhouse gas impacts of KXL in combination with another tar sands pipeline, the Alberta Clipper. The study will also have to explain why Trump’s rapid change of course was reasonable and will have to include the results of a new survey of cultural resources potentially located throughout more than 1,000 acres of land.
According to the Indigenous Environmental Network, the survey of cultural resources could be the most time-consuming aspect of the judge’s order, especially if it is done with significant consultation with tribal nations. How many culturally significant sites might be located within the un-surveyed area is unclear. “There are sites out there that we haven’t told people about, because people like to go in and steal stuff and sell it on the black market,” said Joye Braun, a pipeline opponent and member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe in South Dakota. And Indigenous leaders may be hesitant to offer information for the purpose of helping a pipeline company they oppose figure out its least controversial pathway, especially considering that such information hasn’t always prevented companies from bulldozing on through anyway.
Pipeline opponents’ most immediate concern is that the administration will simply hire an archeological surveyor to do a slapdash job that overlooks key sites. “It’s never super-straightforward, especially with this administration. One of the things we’re concerned about is we’ve seen Trump’s administration fast-track these processes,” said Begay.
Also unclear is how a second lawsuit might impact the steps the administration is required to take. The Rosebud Sioux tribe in South Dakota and the Fort Belknap Indian Community in Montana filed a similar suit targeting the Trump administration’s executive order for allegedly failing to fulfill trust obligations to the tribes to appropriately address the impact on tribes’ hunting and fishing rights, as well as to assess the risk to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe’s drinking water system — the pipeline would cross two of its sources.
The ideal outcome of the judgement, said Dallas Goldtooth, another Indigenous Environmental Network spokesperson, is that “investors of KXL really see that this project is too much of a risk and start backing out.”
Another best-case scenario, said Jan Kleeb, one of the founders of the anti-KXL movement in Nebraska, “is that this buys us enough time to get a Democratic president elected.”
Pipeline Fighters Win ElectionsIndividuals from all sorts of progressive grassroots movements made unprecedented efforts to win elected office this year, and pipeline fighters were no exception. On all levels of government, the anti-pipeline movement sought to influence decision-making on the Keystone XL project.
“I really do think that that unlikely alliance is a clear playbook for how we can also transform electoral politics.”One of the most high-profile wins for progressives was that of Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York. In 2016, Ocasio-Cortez visited the massive anti-Dakota Access pipeline camps near the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, which were started by veterans of the Keystone XL fight, and called her time there “one of the formative experiences that inspired the effort to renew Congress.”
South Dakota, one of three states through which KXL passes, saw numerous anti-pipeline organizers run for local office, and some won. Julian Bear Runner, a 33-year-old who was arrested at Standing Rock, was elected president of Pine Ridge reservation’s Oglala Sioux Tribe. A state Senate seat was won by Red Dawn Foster, the sister of Red Fawn Fallis, the Dakota Access Pipeline opponent who received the most serious prison sentence among those charged during the fight, after a gun Fallis had been carrying fired when police tackled her.
In Nebraska, home to another arm of the Keystone XL pipeline resistance, Democrats gained three seats in the state legislature, which could boost an effort to pass eminent domain laws meant to complicate plans to plow through the land of property of owners who don’t want a pipeline.
But pipeline opponents lost a fight for a spot on the state’s Public Service Commission. Last year, the PSC denied TransCanada a key permit for its preferred pipeline path, instead offering a permit for an alternate route. Pipeline opponents are appealing the commission’s decision to the state Supreme Court, arguing the new route requires a new application. If an anti-pipeline PSC member had been elected, opponents would have been better positioned to push for a project denial in the event of a favorable judgement.
Kleeb, who is also chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, interprets the PSC loss, and other progressive and Democrat election losses, as a call to better engage rural voters, something that will be essential in the 2020 presidential race. She said that politicians should look to the grassroots as an example of how to do that.
“There’s no question that under Trump, it’s much easier to see pipelines and other risky fossil fuel projects getting approved, but there’s not a single pipeline project that I’m aware of that, when proposed, is not met with fierce local resistance that is a combination of the landowners, the tribal nations, and the environmentalists,” Kleeb said. “I really do think that that unlikely alliance is a clear playbook for how we can also transform electoral politics.”
Photo: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters
On the ground in South Dakota, a state that has long been a center of radical political movements led by Indigenous people, some of Keystone XL’s fiercest opponents are keeping an eye on the company’s movements.
Among their biggest concerns is that TransCanada will continue with pre-construction of the pipeline, which Kleeb said the lawsuit should prevent.
“We are asking people to monitor the line, especially in Montana and here in South Dakota,” said Braun. That’s easier said than done, considering that the pipeline passes through remote areas. Braun said South Dakotans have observed roads being built into pipeline storage sites and potential man camp sites being protected by armed guards. She said at least one person she’s worked with was followed by what she believed to be a pipeline security vehicle for dozens of miles.
The pipeline will skirt the corner of the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, where Braun lives. Until the end of the summer, she helped run a small Keystone XL resistance camp that was set up almost as soon as the Standing Rock protests subsided. “We asked people to go home and get ready,” Braun said. “It’s up to every individual to decide what they want to do and how far they’re willing to go, hopefully legally.”
The post Pipeline Opponents Make Gains in Midterms as Federal Judge Halts Keystone XL Pipeline appeared first on The Intercept.
On Tuesday morning, the President of the United States encouraged Americans to study opinion polls in France, apparently unaware of a recent survey there showing that 8 of 10 French citizens consider him to be a dangerous, incompetent racist.
According to the polling, conducted last week for Le Figaro, a conservative newspaper, just 20 percent of French citizens call Donald Trump competent, while 84 percent agree that he is “racist” and 83 percent say he is “dangerous.” His overall approval rating comes in at 10 percent.
Trump accidentally called attention to his vast unpopularity in France after enduring a weekend of harsh criticism for his conduct during a visit to Paris to mark the anniversary of the end of the First World War — specifically his decision to skip a ceremony honoring Americans who were killed in the conflict because it was raining.
By the time Trump had returned to Washington, even the French military had joined in, with a mocking reference to his aversion to rain on its official Twitter account.
#MondayMotivation Il y a de la pluie, mais c'est pas grave ? On reste motivé ? pic.twitter.com/29hOJ9ITF0
— Armée de Terre (@armeedeterre) November 12, 2018
When he finally responded on Tuesday — the sort of delayed reaction the French call “l’esprit d’escalier,” when you come up with what seems like the perfect retort but only when it is too late to deliver it in person — Trump could think of no better comeback than to lash out at his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, by pointing to his low approval rating among French voters.
Macron apparently earned Trump’s ire by using his speech to dozens of world leaders on Armistice Day to warn of the dangers of a resurgent nationalism across the globe.
“The old demons are rising again, ready to complete their task of chaos and of death,” Macron said on Sunday, a year and a half after he defeated the French nationalist Marine Le Pen for the presidency.
On Sunday, French president Emmanuel Macron condemned nationalism while Trump, a self-declared nationalist, was right next to him pic.twitter.com/c6WYFs8avL
— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) November 12, 2018
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” Macron said later in the speech, in remarks that were widely interpreted as a critique of Trump’s strident nationalism and “America First” slogan. “In saying ‘Our interests first, whatever happens to the others,’ you erase the most precious thing a nation can have, that which makes it live, that which causes it to be great and that which is most important — its moral values,” Macron said as Trump grimaced.
Trump's face after Macron's speech on nationalism vs patriotism is ? pic.twitter.com/JtxVUUKnWg
— Gissur Simonarson (@GissiSim) November 11, 2018
Having essentially subtweeted Trump to his face, Macron ensured that the American president would get the message by posting an English translation of the comments on his favorite communications platform, Twitter.
Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism. By putting our own interests first, with no regard for others, we erase the very thing that a nation holds dearest, and the thing that keeps it alive: its moral values. https://t.co/w9AltyvMDw
— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) November 11, 2018
The French president’s frank words seemed to echo his offer, after Trump withdrew from the global climate accord negotiated in Paris last year, to subsidize American climate scientists trying to “Make Our Planet Great Again.”
When Trump finally responded, he claimed that Macron — by criticizing the nationalist ideology that tore Europe apart twice in the past century — “was just trying to get onto another subject,” to deflect attention from his “very low approval rating in France” of 26 percent. “By the way, there is no country more Nationalist than France, very proud people — and rightfully so!” Trump added.
The President of the United States concluded his Twitter rant by unleashing the caps lock and suggesting that he would like to see the pro-European Macron ultimately toppled by Le Pen’s nationalists.
……MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018
Macron’s office refused to comment, but France’s ambassador in Washington, Gérard Araud, noted on Twitter that another insulting tweet posted by Trump, in which he claimed that the French president wanted a European army to defend the continent “against the U.S.” was completely false.
For the sake of truth, Pres.@EmmanuelMacron didn’t say that EU needed an army “against the US”. It was an erroneous press report.
— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) November 13, 2018
The French embassy also noted that it took part in the Veterans Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday — an event that Trump also skipped.
Yesterday we participated in a ceremony at @ArlingtonNatl to honor the sacrifices of soldiers during #WWI by laying a wreath on the tomb of the #UnknownSoldier. #VeteransDay pic.twitter.com/ZQPbZwMSf6
— French Embassy U.S. (@franceintheus) November 12, 2018
The post Trump Points to Polls in France, Where 80 Percent Say He’s a Dangerous, Incompetent Racist appeared first on The Intercept.
The world’s most ambitious “smart city,” known as Quayside, in Toronto, has faced fierce public criticism since last fall, when the plans to build a neighborhood “from the internet up” were first revealed. Quayside represents a joint effort by the Canadian government agency Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., to develop 12 acres of the valuable waterfront just southeast of downtown Toronto.
In keeping with the utopian rhetoric that fuels the development of so much digital infrastructure, Sidewalk Labs has pitched Quayside as the solution to everything from traffic congestion and rising housing prices to environmental pollution. The proposal for Quayside includes a centralized identity management system, through which “each resident accesses public services” such as library cards and health care. An applicant for a position at Sidewalk Labs in Toronto was shocked when he was asked in an interview to imagine how, in a smart city, “voting might be different in the future.”
Other, comparatively quaint plans include driverless cars, “mixed-use” spaces that change according to the market’s demands, heated streets, and “sensor-enabled waste separation.” The eventual aim of Sidewalk Labs’s estimated billion-dollar investment is to bring these innovations to scale — first to more than 800 acres on the city’s eastern waterfront, and then to the world at large. “The genesis of the thinking for Sidewalk Labs came from Google’s founders getting excited thinking of ‘all the things you could do if someone would just give us a city and put us in charge,’” explained Eric Schmidt, Google’s former executive chair, when Quayside was first announced.
From the start, activists, technology researchers, and some government officials have been skeptical about the idea of putting Google, or one of its sister companies, in charge of a city. Their suspicions about turning part of Toronto into a corporate test bed were triggered, at first, by the company’s history of unethical corporate practices and surreptitious data collection. They have since been borne out by Quayside’s secret and undemocratic development process, which has been plagued by a lack of public input — what one critic has called “a colonizing experiment in surveillance capitalism attempting to bulldoze important urban, civic and political issues.” In recent months, a series of prominent resignations from advisory board members, along with organized resistance from concerned residents, have added to the growing public backlash against the project.
A few weeks ago, Ann Cavoukian, one of Canada’s leading privacy experts and Ontario’s former privacy commissioner, became the latest stakeholder to resign from the project. Cavoukian was brought on by Sidewalk Toronto (as the collaboration between Waterfront Toronto and Google-sibling Sidewalk Labs is known) as a consultant to help institute a proactive, “privacy by design” framework. She was initially told that all data collected from residents would be deleted and rendered unidentifiable. Cavoukian learned last month, however, that third parties would be able to access identifiable information gathered at Quayside. “I imagined us creating a Smart City of Privacy, as opposed to a Smart City of Surveillance,” Cavoukian wrote in her resignation letter. Her concerns echoed those of residents who have long pointed to the privacy implications of handing over streets to the world’s most profitable data hoover.
In response to questions from The Intercept about Cavoukian’s resignation, a spokesperson for Sidewalk Labs said, “Sidewalk Labs has committed to implement, as a company, the principles of Privacy by Design. Though that question is settled, the question of whether other companies involved in the Quayside project would be required to do so is unlikely to be worked out soon, and may be out of Sidewalk Labs’ hands.”
Now, in an effort to get ahead of Quayside’s development before it’s too late, a coalition of experts and residents have launched a Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum. The group represents the latest and largest effort by Torontonians to start having the kinds of public conversations, teach-ins, and debates that should have “taken place last year, when this project was first announced,” according to Bianca Wylie, co-founder of Tech Reset Canada and one of the lead organizers of the opposition to Sidewalk Toronto. “The process Sidewalk Toronto has started has been so anti-democratic that the only way to participate is to be proactive in framing the topic,” Wylie continued.
Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum is taking the lead in the local fight against the commodification of its city’s data. The group’s struggle is one that urban residents around the world have been watching closely. Even those who never set foot in Canada may soon be subject to the products, norms, and techniques produced by Sidewalk Toronto, simply by virtue of using Google’s earth-spanning services. “This isn’t just about data being sold,” Wylie said. “It’s also about how is this data being used with other kinds of data in other products. You can move a lot of information around within Alphabet without having to sell it, and we need to talk about that.” The outcome of Toronto’s ability to reign in the Google affiliate, in other words, has ramifications not just for Canadians, but also for the future of who controls our civic life.
Conceptual image of Sidewalk Toronto.
Image: Sidewalk Toronto
Sidewalk Toronto’s ongoing controversies may serve as the latest warning sign for cities who are considering signing over public spaces to major tech companies. Cavoukian’s decision to quit represents only the most recent resignation in a series of departures that Wylie has referred to as an “ongoing bulldozing of stakeholders.” In addition to Cavoukian, a Waterfront Toronto board member and two Waterfront Toronto digital advisers have also resigned in the last five months. Three more digital advisers have also threatened to resign unless major changes are made to the project’s planning process.
In anticipation of the negative press, Sidewalk Labs has allocated $11 million of its initial $50 million budget to “communications/engagement/and public relations.” This includes a strategy of building influencers “to ensure support for the Master Innovation and Development Plan among key constituents in Toronto.” Last week, iPolitics reported that Sidewalk Labs has begun lobbying at least 19 federal departments, including the prime minister’s office, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, and the Treasury Board, among others. The meetings all took place days after the resignation of Cavoukian, the former Ontario privacy commissioner.
But so far, the project has been losing allies more quickly than it’s been making them. When Saadia Muzaffar, a prominent technologist and the founder of TechGirls Canada, resigned from Waterfront Toronto’s Digital Strategy Advisory Panel in October, it was due in part to the partnership’s “blatant disregard for resident concerns about data and digital infrastructure.” In her viral letter of resignation, Muzaffar criticized Sidewalk Toronto’s dishonest negotiations process: “There is nothing innovative about city-building that disenfranchises its residents in insidious ways and robs valuable earnings out of public budgets, or commits scarce public funds to the ongoing maintenance of technology that city leadership has not even declared a need for.”
If Google’s other global projects are any indication, Sidewalk Lab’s venture in Canada may hew closely to the Silicon Valley model of offering free services in exchange for the right to virtually limitless data collection. Sidewalk Labs-associated LinkNYC and InLinkUK kiosks have already been installed in New York and London. The kiosks — which include three cameras, 30 sensors, and Bluetooth beacons — aggregate anonymized data for advertising purposes in exchange for providing passersby with free Wi-Fi services.
Given that there is no genuine way to opt out of public space, Torontonians have been asking questions about what meaningful consent would look like. In the case of Quayside, the terms of any agreement wouldn’t just cover Wi-Fi but could also extend to basic government services. Julie Di Lorenzo, a real estate developer who left Waterfront’s board in July, explained to the AP that questions she had asked about residents who might not consent to share data had gone unanswered. She wanted to know if those who didn’t opt-in to the city would be told that they couldn’t live there. “It’s one thing to willingly install Alexa in your home,” wrote Toronto journalist Brian Barth. “It’s another when publicly owned infrastructure — streets, bridges, parks and plazas — is Alexa, so to speak.”
Adding to these concerns is the fact that Sidewalk Labs has asked potential local consultants to hand over all of their intellectual property, according to a recent Globe and Mail investigation. As Jim Balsillie, the former CEO of Blackberry, recently pointed out in an op-ed, Waterfront Toronto has left the ownership of intellectual property and data unresolved in its latest agreement; this means that it would default to Sidewalk Labs, giving the company a gross market advantage. Indeed, in an announcement last year, Schmidt went as far as to thank Canadian taxpayers for creating some of Alphabet’s key artificial intelligence technology, the intellectual property of which the company now owns. Balsillie noted that what happens in Toronto will “have profound and permanent impacts on the digital rights and prosperity of all Canadians because IP [intellectual property] and data — our century’s most valuable extractive resources — spread seamlessly.” This is why current and former stakeholders in Waterfront Toronto have called for the public to receive financial benefits from the project, emphasizing that Canada’s largest city should not simply be seen as a U.S. company’s urban laboratory.
The Sidewalk Labs spokesperson said that the company’s “relationship with its contractors does not impact its agreements with Waterfront Toronto in any way, including its commitment to the process laid out in the PDA, which says that in the future Waterfront Toronto may have rights to certain Sidewalk Labs IP. Of course, if Sidewalk Labs does not own the IP created by the planning process, it would not have the power to share or convey that IP to Waterfront Toronto or anyone else.”
Yet until recently, Sidewalk Labs refused to say who will own data produced by Quayside’s visitors, workers, and residents in what it calls “the most measurable community in the world.” Nor had the company clarified, despite facing pointed questions at public town hall-style meetings, whether or how the information streaming in from sensors in park benches, traffic lights, and dumpsters would be monetized. (The writer Evgeny Morozov has summed up Google’s strategy as “Now everything is permitted – unless somebody complains.”)
In an apparent response to the mounting public pressure against the project, Sidewalk Labs recently released its first proposal for the digital governance of its collected data. Most significant among these plans was the suggestion that all data be placed in a “civic data trust.” On the company’s blog, Alyssa Harvey Dawson, Sidewalk Labs’ Head of Data Governance, explained that with the proposed creation of a civic data trust, no one would have the “right to own information collected from Quayside’s physical environment — including Sidewalk Labs.” This would represent, she wrote, “a new standard for responsible data use that protects personal privacy and the public interest while enabling companies, researchers, innovators, governments, and civic organizations to improve urban life using urban data.”
According to experts who have been following the project closely, the details of how this trust might be implemented are vague and at times contradictory. On one hand, the proposal states that Sidewalk Labs would get no preferential access to any data that is collected. On the other, as Sean McDonald points out, “the proposed trust would grant licenses to collect and use data — and the more sensitive the data, the more proprietary it would be.” There is also the question of just how anonymous certain data would be, and whether such anonymity would be reversible when it came to sharing information with law enforcement. Some residents are opposed to Sidewalk Labs having any involvement with this data proposal. “It is as if Uber were to propose regulations on ride-sharing, or Airbnb were to tell city council how to govern short-term rentals. By definition, there is a conflict of interest,” writes Nabeel Ahmed, a smart city expert and member of the Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum.
Part of the mission of the new Toronto Open Smart Cities Forum is to shift the public conversation away from debating the latest minutiae of the company’s proposed terms and toward a broader consideration of whether the project should move forward under any terms at all. This conversation, Wylie emphasizes, should be taking place between residents and the government; Sidewalk Labs should not be the only voice setting the terms and advancing the agenda. “We need to state clearly and unambiguously that this infrastructure is public,” Wylie said. “You can say in March, ‘This data isn’t being collected,’ but then in July, it’s updated to do something else. This infrastructure creates plausible surveillance so long as you always keep the door open to what’s possible.”
The post Google’s “Smart City of Surveillance” Faces New Resistance in Toronto appeared first on The Intercept.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., holds a news conference following the 2018 midterm elections at the U.S. Capitol Building on Nov. 7, 2018.
Photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
She just doesn’t get it.
“We will strive for bipartisanship, with fairness on all sides,” announced Nancy Pelosi on the night of November 6. “We must try” to find “common ground” with President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, she told a rally in Washington, D.C. as victory after victory in the midterms confirmed a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, adding: “ We’ll have a bipartisan marketplace of ideas that makes our democracy strong.”
My heart sank as I listened to her speak. Did she really believe this platitudinous nonsense? And if so, where has she been the past two years? In a coma?
In fact, forget the past 24 months in which an unhinged president praised Nazis, banned Muslims, caged kids, and obstructed justice. Consider only the events of the past seven days, since Pelosi made her pious pledge.
The morning after the midterms, Trump fired his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and appointed a political crony, Matthew Whitaker, as the new “acting” attorney general — a move described by former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo as “unconstitutional.”
Trump denounced CNN journalist Jim Acosta as an “enemy” of the people and then stripped him of his White House press pass. “Out of line” and “unacceptable” was the response from White House Correspondents’ Association.
He insulted three black female reporters, dismissing questions from CNN’s Abby Phillip and “PBS NewsHour’s” Yamiche Alcindor as “stupid” and “racist,” while calling American Urban Radio Networks’ April Ryan a “loser”.
He promised to adopt a “warlike posture” if House Democrats dared to open investigations into his financial and political dealings, and vowed to use the Republican majority in the Senate to go after them in response.
He threatened to cut federal funding to California over “poor” forest management in the midst of the deadliest fires in the state’s history. (Firefighters on the ground say the fires have “nothing to do with forest management.”)
He took to Twitter to make unfounded claims of “fraud,” “electoral corruption,” and “massively infected” ballots in the election recounts in Florida and Arizona, in a brazen and partisan attempt to secure victory for Republican candidates in both states. “In a month of harrowing news,” noted Cornell University political scientist Tom Pepinsky, an expert on authoritarian politics, “this development is still almost incalculably bad for American democracy.”
All the while, Congressional Republicans stayed silent. With the exception of the retiring Jeff Flake, not a word of criticism, or dissent, from any of them.
Yet this is the far-right president and party that Pelosi wants to do deals with. This is the motley collection of racists and misogynists, of con artists and conspiracy theorists, that she plans to negotiate “bipartisan” agreements with. She wants to lead a “unifying” Congress, she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo last Thursday, and hopes that Trump will show a new “level of maturity” going forward.
Who is she kidding?
Maybe herself. In September 2017, Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader who also prefers rolling over to resisting, went to the White House to try and persuade Trump to extend protections for young undocumented immigrants. An excited Pelosi and Schumer called it a “very productive” dinner meeting with the president on the subject of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” they said, after tucking into Chinese food in the Blue Room of the White House.
Guess what happened next? The following morning, Trump threw Pelosi and Schumer under the bus. “No deal was made last night on DACA,” the president tweeted. “Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent.”
Yet here we are, more than a year later, with Pelosi telling The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere last week that Trump might “support bipartisan legislation, whether it’s comprehensive immigration reform, whether it’s Dreamers, whether it’s gun safety.”
Come on, Nancy! Whatever happened to “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me”?
To quote liberal megadonor Tom Steyer, Trump and the Republicans are not in the “range of reason” on most policy issues and have “shifted the conversation to places that are so crazy that there’s really no other side to the conversation.”
Has Pelosi really not been paying attention as the GOP, led by Trump, has mounted an assault on everything from voting rights to racial equality to planet Earth itself? And if she has, why then the continuing obsession with “bipartisanship”? “Politics is not a parlor game where good manners always win out,” wrote left-wing activist and co-founder of Data for Progress, Sean McElwee, in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. “It involves questions of power and privilege, which cannot be solved merely with bipartisan brunches.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not denying that Pelosi was an effective speaker the first time around. Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the Recovery Act, the Lily Ledbetter Act … all passed on her watch. Few question her ability to count votes — or the lack of a viable challenger from within the Democratic Party. But the job of speaker in the 116th Congress, which will convene in January, can’t only be about passing laws; it has to also be about holding this lawless president to account. Impeachment, therefore, must be on the table — but Pelosi has taken it off the table by naively insisting that it can only be done “in a bipartisan way.”
Let’s be clear: American democracy is in crisis. America’s minorities are, literally, under fire. If the dishonest, racist, corrupt, anti-democratic Donald Trump isn’t worthy of impeachment, then who is? Pelosi should take a pause from her ongoing media tour and listen to the recent discussion that my colleague Jeremy Scahill hosted on his podcast, Intercepted, with NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of “Fascist Modernities” and an expert on Benito Mussolini, and Yale University philosopher Jason Stanley, author of “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.”
“I think right now, we are heading towards, more and more, a one-party state,” Stanley said, explaining Trump’s use of “classic fascist tactics.” Ben-Ghiat said she believed that “we are heading toward … a militarized authoritarian surveillance state,” and “we’re in the middle of a battle for the survival of democracy.”
Got that? A battle for the survival of democracy. Yet the leader of the Democrats in the House wants to talk infrastructure spending and prescription drugs. Her counterpart in the Senate is busy making noise about the size of seats on airplanes. They both seem unable to rise to the occasion; unwilling to recognize the existential danger that Trump poses to the republic.
“We have an obligation to try and find common ground” with the president, Pelosi told CNN last week. Not true. She and her party have an obligation, above all else, to defeat fascism — and you can’t defeat fascism by meeting it in the middle. The correct response to a white nationalist in the White House isn’t to offer him a vague deal on “infrastructure.” It’s to fight and, yes, to resist him at every turn; to loudly and relentlessly call out his rhetoric and behavior as abnormal and un-American.
The next two years will be a battle for the heart, soul, and future of U.S. democracy; it will be a nonstop, 24/7 struggle against incipient fascism and unabashed white nationalism. The president who wants his base to believe that constitutionally mandated recounts are illegitimate, who deploys thousands of troops to the border during an election campaign to stop an “invasion” from a migrant caravan 700 miles away, and who thinks Democrats are “evil” and “crazy” won’t go quietly into the night.
Forget bipartisanship and compromise. There is too much at stake for an out-of-touch and self-defeating kumbaya politics. The job of soon-to-be-Speaker Pelosi is not to negotiate with Trump and the far-right Republicans — only to defeat them.
The post Nancy Pelosi Wants to Find “Common Ground” With Donald Trump. But Her Job Right Now Is to Fight Fascism. appeared first on The Intercept.
So much attention in the midterm elections this year has focused on the gubernatorial race in Georgia between Republican Brian Kemp and Democrat Stacey Abrams that the race for secretary of state, the office Kemp is vacating, has gone largely ignored.
It’s arguably the more important race, since this is the office that will control the state’s voter registration database and any purges made to the voter roll going forward. Equally important, it’s the office that will be responsible for programming all of the state’s currently paperless voting machines that can’t be audited, though Georgia will be looking to replace these machines with an undetermined model next year. Both of these factors could make Georgia a hotbed for voter suppression tactics and vote-counting integrity in the 2020 presidential elections, experts said.
“We’ve said all along for the last two years that this is probably the most important office we would be electing in 2018 because of the broad scope of oversight and duties that the secretary of state has in Georgia,” said Sara Henderson, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, a nonprofit, nonpartisan voting advocacy group. “There’s a lot of talk within the national media that in Georgia, the counties control their own elections. But nothing could be further from the truth. That’s how we’re set up regarding our election laws, but that is not in effect how it operates here. The secretary of state absolutely 100 percent impacts how and what the counties do.”
Georgia is one of only a few states that uses a single model of voting machines statewide — in this case, paperless direct-recording electronic machines made by the now-defunct Diebold Election Systems — and also uses a centralized model for programming those machines before each election. Instead of letting county elections offices or an independent third party program them, Kemp’s office controls this task — a job it only assumed last year in a controversial move that occurred in the middle of Kemp’s heated campaign for governor.
Kemp has so far narrowly escaped a runoff in his gubernatorial race with Abrams, after barely amassing the 50 percent of votes needed for victory (he had 50.2 percent at last count, about 59,000 more votes than Abrams; a federal judge on Monday ordered election results not be certified for several more days, responding to one of several challenges seeking time to resolve questions over the number of absentee and provisional ballots being counted). But this isn’t the case for the two candidates now vying for Kemp’s former job. The tight race for secretary of state between Republican Brad Raffensperger, a state representative and businessman, and former Democratic Rep. John Barrow, who served in the House for a decade, will go into a runoff on December 4. The tally in their race as of Friday gave Raffensperger the lead with 49.2 percent of votes to Barrow’s 48.6 percent, a difference of 24,210 votes. The candidates now face challenges with getting voters to turn up for the runoff, as such races traditionally produce lower voter turnout than regular elections.
Who wins the secretary of state’s race will determine in part whether Kemp’s controversial handling of voter purges continues.
Photo: Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP
Kemp and his office have been accused of voter suppression through aggressive purges of the state’s voter roll. Last year, his office purged some 668,000 voters who Kemp’s staff said had died, moved, or been inactive in casting ballots for six years or more. But a recent investigation has called into question whether 340,000 voters who had been removed for allegedly moving out of state actually moved. Kemp also attempted to block the registration of 53,000 new voters this year by determining that signatures and other information on their applications weren’t an “exact match” with secondary documents on file for the voters; a lawsuit and court ruling, however, intervened to stop him.
The issue of purging inactive voters came up during the secretary of state’s race. Raffensperger said in a debate that he supports purging inactive registered voters whose only lapse is not voting in past elections, while Barrow opposes such purges.
But purging voters wasn’t the only control Kemp wielded over the midterms. As chief election official in the state, he had certain authority over election procedures and recounts, including of his own gubernatorial race. Kemp came under fire by former President Jimmy Carter and others for refusing to recuse himself from overseeing an election in which he was also a candidate for office. Carter has served as an election monitor for years in dozens of other countries. “This runs counter to the most fundamental principle of democratic elections that the electoral process be managed by an independent and impartial election authority,” Carter wrote in a letter to Kemp before the election. Kemp only resigned from his secretary of state position last Thursday, after securing the lead in his gubernatorial race.
“It’s unquestionably improper for the secretary of state to control the programming and management of the voting machines that will decide his election contest [or his replacement],” said Susan Greenhalgh, policy director at the National Election Defense Coalition, a voter integrity group. “But in Georgia, it’s much worse because there is no paper ballot, no physical evidence that provides a permanent record of voter intent that can be used to confirm the correctness of the election outcome. Voters just have to trust the secretary of state.”
“In Georgia, there is no physical evidence that provides a permanent record of voter intent.”Georgia’s current governor, Nathan Deal, appointed attorney Robyn Crittenden as interim secretary of state until the runoff for the office in December. Crittenden, an African-American who headed the state’s Department of Human Services, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she intends “to take on this role in the same way I have approached my previous work in state government with a focus on transparency and service to the people of Georgia. Georgians can rest assured that I’m going to give this job my all, and that we’re going to follow the law.”
Common Cause’s Henderson called the appointment of a neutral party as interim secretary of state a good move and said her group feels “more confident about the runoff than we did about Election Day and early voting when Kemp was overseeing that process.”
During his tenure as secretary of state, Kemp didn’t just control the programming of all machines in the state; he also vigorously fought with election integrity activists who filed a lawsuit last year seeking to rid the state of its paperless voting machines on grounds that the machines aren’t secure and can’t be audited to verify that the software hasn’t been manipulated by malicious code. Georgia has been using its paperless machines since 2002, with Kemp and Republican secretaries of states that preceded him defying numerous calls over the years to replace the machines with systems that can be audited; they resisted these calls even as other states around the country, like California, Florida and Ohio, passed laws requiring their counties to switch to machines that produce a paper trail or use voter-marked paper ballots that can be audited.
Georgia isn’t the only state where the secretary of state oversees elections; that person is also chief election official in many states. But elsewhere, these offices serve a broad oversight function that doesn’t involve direct involvement in the administration of elections. Instead, local election officials in most states choose the machines they use, which generally results in a patchwork of voting machines around the state, and program those machines either through in-house staff, the voting machine vendor, or a third-party contractor. Georgia not only uses a single model of voting machine statewide, but also programs those machines from the secretary of state’s office.
Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images
This wasn’t always the case. In 2002, when the state first purchased its paperless voting machines, the programming and testing of the machines was contracted out to the Center for Election Systems at Kennesaw State University. But a story I wrote for Politico last year revealed that security problems at the center allowed a researcher to download registration records for the state’s 6.7 million voters, as well as software files for the state’s electronic poll books — used by poll workers to verify that people are registered before they can cast a ballot — and many other files. An investigation by KSU revealed that the center had a number of security lapses that had existed for years, which raised the possibility that attackers could have altered voter records or votes in previous elections without the center knowing during that time.
After the story published, Kemp’s office canceled its contract with the center. A spokesperson for Kemp said at the time that the office was considering farming out the programming of voting machines to academics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which has a highly respected institute for information security. But Kemp ultimately decided to program the voting machines in-house, hiring Michael Barnes, director of the now-defunct Center for Election Systems, to do the work, even though the center’s poor security practices had occurred during Barnes’s management of the operation.
At least two other states, Louisiana and Maryland, also program their statewide machines centrally before each election. But of these two, only Louisiana does the programming out of the secretary of state’s office. Louisiana uses paperless voting machines statewide like Georgia, but a different model. The secretary of state’s staff loads election software onto USB sticks that are driven to each of the state’s 64 parish warehouses and loaded onto machines, according to a spokesperson. In the case of Maryland, which uses a uniform model of optical-scan systems with paper ballots statewide, the state’s Board of Elections, an agency separate from the secretary of state’s office, programs the machines and delivers the election database to counties on DVDs, or via a closed network using a VPN, before elections.
A handful of other states also use a single system statewide. Delaware uses paperless direct-recording electronic machines; Oklahoma uses a single brand of paperless direct-recording electronic machines and optical-scan machines statewide; and Colorado, Oregon, and Washington state use mail-in ballots exclusively and scan them optically. Colorado election officials program their machines themselves, however. The Intercept was unable to reach election officials in Oklahoma, Oregon, and Washington on Monday — due to Veterans Day — to determine if they program the machines centrally at the state level or individually at the county level.
Georgia lawmakers plan to look at legislation to replace the current statewide voting machines with new systems that use paper and can be audited. A Georgia commission will likely decide between optical-scan machines that use voter-marked paper ballots or ballot-marking devices that use a touchscreen machine to mark ballots that are then printed out for voters to examine before they’re inserted into an optical reader that records and tallies the votes.
Both Barrow and Raffensperger have said they support switching to machines that use paper ballots, but Barrow has said he prefers voter-marked paper ballots, while Raffensperger has said he prefers ballot-marking devices. In both cases, the paper ballot serves as an auditing record that can be used to compare against the digital tallies tabulated by the software on the optical scanner. But election integrity activists say that some ballot-marking systems are problematic if they print a barcode on the ballot. With these systems, although the voter is able to see their selections printed on the ballot, the ballot reader uses the barcode to record and tally votes. A hacker could subvert the software on the ballot-marking device to print one thing in the human-readable portion of the ballot that the voter sees, while printing something else in the barcode that the machine reads and records. If Georgia doesn’t conduct manual audits of the paper ballots, no one would know if the barcodes were manipulated, which would essentially put Georgia in the same situation it’s in today with elections that aren’t verified.
It’s not clear how long it will take Georgia to decide on new systems and get them in place, though it won’t be soon enough for the secretary of state’s runoff in December. Election integrity activists fought to get a court to decertify Georgia’s paperless systems and force counties to use paper ballots for the midterms. Although U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg agreed with the plaintiffs that the secretary of state’s office had failed to adequately secure the systems, she felt it would create too much of a burden on election officials to switch the entire state to paper so soon before the election.
Barrow said during a debate with Raffensperger this year that if elected, he would do what Kemp has resisted and decertify the state’s current paperless machines, forcing counties to switch to paper ballots until lawmakers choose replacement machines.
Henderson says the outcome of this election will have a huge impact on how future elections in the state are run.
“We have a lot to do to undo what Brian Kemp did during his nearly eight years in office as secretary of state,” she told The Intercept. “I think the world is really waking up to what a serious situation we have in Georgia regarding voter suppression.”
The post One Little-Watched Race Has Huge Implications for Election Hacking and Voter Suppression in Georgia appeared first on The Intercept.
Protesters with the environmental group Sunrise marched on Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s office on Tuesday. The group, made up of young people pushing for urgent action on climate change, planned to send a clear message to party leadership just one week after Democrats regained control of the House.
But this was no ordinary protest for the Sunrise activists, who typically stand on the opposite side of politicians. This time, they were joined by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is just weeks away from being sworn into office.
Rep.-elect Rashida Tlaib of Michigan joined the protesters in a rally at the Spirit of Justice Park near the Capitol on Tuesday morning, but she did not continue on to Pelosi’s office. “This is the most American thing you can do,” Tlaib said of the protest. Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib also attended an event with the Sunrise activists on Monday night.
“I’m gonna take the table,” says @Ocasio2018, “because we are busting down the doors.” pic.twitter.com/tQ8IebKtBb
— Sunrise Movement ? (@sunrisemvmt) November 13, 2018
Members of the progressive political group Justice Democrats also joined the protest, which was attended by more than 150 people. “Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party leadership must get serious about the climate and our economy,” said the group’s communications director, Waleed Shahid, in a statement. “Anything less is tantamount to denying the reality of climate change. The hopeful part is that we’re ushering in a new generation of leaders into the Democratic Party who understand the urgency and will help build a movement to create the political will for bold action.”
A recent United Nations report found that catastrophic effects of climate change, some of which are already upon us, could become widespread as early as 2040. To stave off the crisis, the globe’s economy would have to be put on the equivalent of a war footing, scientists involved with the study concluded.
The protesters, including Ocasio-Cortez, are calling on Pelosi to create and give teeth to a new select committee on climate change.
The proposed committee, called the Select Committee for a Green New Deal, would be similar to something Pelosi established as House speaker in 2007, but with more authority. Back then, Pelosi created the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, and assigned her ally, then-Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who has a strong environmental record, to chair it. The committee held dozens of hearings over the course of four years, until the tea party-led Congress, which took over in 2010, mothballed it. (The Republicans also got rid of the renewable plates and utensils Pelosi had introduced and replaced them with Styrofoam.)
The problem with that committee, Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise activists argue, was that it wasn’t funded well enough and didn’t have the true ability to write legislation. In 2009, Pelosi pushed through cap-and-trade legislation, meant to reduce emissions. But even that package moved largely through the Energy and Commerce Committee — not the select committee Pelosi had created. Markey, who chaired a subcommittee under Energy and Commerce, played a lead role in pushing through the bill, which became known as the Waxman-Markey bill, but it never came to a floor vote in the Senate. Some activists argued that it wasn’t robust enough to meet the threat of climate change, while defenders argued it was the best the chamber could do — and, as it turned out, it was far better than the Senate could do.
Sunrise activists outside of Pelosi’s office in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 13, 2018.
Photo: Briahna Gray/The Intercept
Since then, the global climate situation has only deteriorated, with once-in-a-century storms taking place with harrowing frequency, and drought conditions sparking war and mass migration. Dozens of people have died in still-raging fires in California that are the deadliest in the state’s modern history, and hundreds more are missing. “Resting on our laurels won’t bring back the 42 lives lost,” said Sunrise activist Varshini Prakash, referring to the deaths in California.
The proposed committee would, among other things, establish a 10-year plan to transition the U.S. economy to become carbon neutral, according to draft legislation that the activists presented to Pelosi’s office. The activists are also pushing Democratic leaders to reject campaign contributions from fossil fuel industry groups. “We need every person who is going to claim the mantle of Democratic leadership to take the no fossil fuel money pledge,” Prakash said at the sit-in outside Pelosi’s office.
Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to join the protesters and march on her own House leader sets a tone of urgency and combativeness that is rare on Capitol Hill. Walking into the Cannon House Office Building, she told The Intercept something new had to be tried. “The way things are done has not been getting results. We have to try new methods,” she said.
Pelosi may need Ocasio-Cortez’s support to win a second shot at the speakership. The California Democrat can only lose roughly 20 votes on the House floor, and already at least 10 Democrats, largely moderates and conservatives, have said they will not back her. Pelosi has expressed “100 percent” confidence that she’ll be elected speaker.
Pelosi has long been proud of her climate record, and she’s taken political risks in her attempts to tackle climate change. When she pushed for a vote on the cap-and-trade bill in 2009, for example, she did so despite warnings that it could cost her the House and was also unlikely to pass the Senate.
Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, responded to the protest by saying that Pelosi is already on board with the proposals of the New Green Deal and the strengthening of the committee. When she addressed the protesters, Ocasio-Cortez said that the objective of the protest was to support Pelosi’s quest to tackle climate change. In an interview with The Intercept, she said that what Hammil said “is absolutely true, and so what we’re really doing is we’re trying to galvanize that into a priority.”
“There are so many different progressive issues that are important and climate change and addressing renewable energy always gets to the bottom of the barrel,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “That can gets kicked from session to session and so what this just needs to do is create a momentum and an energy to make sure that that it becomes a priority for leadership.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s break with decorum could, paradoxically, open up space for her to ultimately support Pelosi on the House floor. After her primary victory, Ocasio-Cortez called for “new leadership” in the House and floated the possibility of Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., running for the job. If Ocasio-Cortez can extract concessions by publicly demonstrating against Pelosi, the incoming representative’s supporters may be more forgiving of a final vote in Pelosi’s favor.
Lee, a close ally of Pelosi, is running for Democratic caucus chair, the leadership post being vacated by Rep. Joe Crowley, the New York Democrat whom Ocasio-Cortez defeated in a primary election.
Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez have had an uneasy public relationship. Pelosi was quick to dismiss the implications of Ocasio-Cortez’s June upset over Crowley, who’d been in office for 14 years. “They made a choice in one district,” she said of the voters who propelled Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, to victory. “So, let’s not get yourself carried away as an expert on demographics and the rest of that. … We have an array of genders, generations, geography and … opinion, in our caucus, and we’re very proud of that.”
Ocasio-Cortez later disputed the conclusion. “It’s not just one district,” she said.
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book, We’ve Got People: Resistance and Rebellion, From Jim Crow to Donald Trump. Sign up here to get an email when it is published.
Update: November 13, 2018, 11:00 a.m.
This piece has been updated to include quotes from Sunrise activist Varshini Prakash, and will continue to be updated as the story develops.
The post Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Joins Environmental Activists in Protest at Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Office appeared first on The Intercept.
Election analysts have zeroed in on Donald Trump’s weakness in well-educated suburban districts to explain the outcome of the 2018 midterms, in which Democrats won back more than 30 House seats. But the biggest losses of the night for Republicans, in terms of raw vote share, actually happened in rural districts, long presumed to be GOP territory.
Based on data compiled by the Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, the top House vote swing from Hillary Clinton’s vote share in 2016 was in West Virginia’s 3rd District, where Democrat and newly christened presidential candidate Richard Ojeda improved on Clinton’s performance by 36.5 percentage points. Among non-incumbents, the second-largest swing was Talley Sergent, another West Virginia candidate, who improved Clinton’s numbers in the 2nd District by 25.3 points. The No. 3 non-incumbent vote swing came from J.D. Scholten, the Democratic candidate for Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, who came within 3 points of Rep. Steve King, a 23.7-point swing over Clinton’s race against Trump.
Those margins are far bigger than the gap that successful Democratic candidates had to bridge: The biggest House vote swing from a Democratic challenger who actually flipped a district was 15.9 points, by Congressperson-elect Anthony Brindisi in New York’s 22nd District.
Scholten, like anyone who would run in Iowa’s 4th, got a tailwind by mere virtue of the fact that he was opposing King, a white nationalist who squandered his support from business interests and the national GOP in the race’s final days, after a series of racist statements and endorsements. But all but one of King’s eight previous opponents lost by 22 points or more. What did Scholten, a 38-year-old former minor league baseball player, do differently?
“A lot of it was just understanding and knowing the district and being relatable,” Scholten said. His persistence was palpable. Scholten toured all 39 counties in the district multiple times in a Winnebago vehicle nicknamed “Sioux City Sue.” He slept in Walmart parking lots along the way. He drew hundreds of voters to town halls in deep-red areas and wasn’t afraid to talk to anyone. “Some of it is just knowing where to go,” Scholten said. “A lot of these small towns, they don’t have a coffee shop. If you hang out at the gas station, you’ll find people coming in for their coffee and you’ll have good conversations.”
The outreach paid off. In a district tailor-made for a Republican, Scholten came out 18 points ahead of Fred Hubbell, the Democrat at the top of the ticket who lost his race for governor. There are 120,023 registered Democrats in the entire district; Scholten earned 146,698 votes.
Scholten dramatically improved on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 margins, even in areas that are normally rural strongholds. In Clay County, Clinton earned 26.3 percent of the vote; Scholten got 45.6 percent. In Emmet County, Clinton got 28.8 percent; Scholten, 46.8 percent. In Dickinson County, Clinton got 29.8 percent, Scholten, 44.8 percent. And in Woodbury County, which includes Scholten’s hometown of Sioux City, he won with 53.2 percent, easily outpacing Clinton’s 37.5 percent. It was the first time King ever lost the county, according to local election data.
King’s ultimate success largely came down to his performance in two counties in the far northwest corner of the state: Sioux and Lyon counties. In the 19,700 votes cast in those two counties alone, King picked up 9,500 votes more than Scholten. King only won the race by about 10,500 votes.
Lyon County’s turnout increased from the last midterm election, in 2014, by 16 percent; Sioux County’s increased by 8.7 percent. Scholten wondered whether the final surge of attention — triggered by a poll showing a 1-point race and renewed questions about King’s anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting — was a double-edged sword. Scholten raised well over $1 million in the last week, enough to run two-minute ads and increase name recognition. But it also activated King’s base in the northwest corner. “Republicans showed up there,” Scholten said. “Insiders in Iowa were like, ‘Did that last little bump hurt you?’”
Scholten was one of a handful of progressive populists who campaigned hard in rural districts that were written off by national Democrats. He had harsh words for the party’s rural outreach across the country; he considers it inattentive to the lived experience of those struggling with depopulation, lack of opportunity, and despair. “It’s getting harder and harder to live in rural America, and definitely rural Iowa,” he said. His advice to party leaders is to show up and listen to people’s concerns in order to demystify the image of Democrats that rural Americans get from Fox News without much pushback.
Photo: KC McGinnis/The New York Times via Redux
The heart of Scholten’s message was not King’s racism, but his ineffectiveness at proposing anything to lift rural America out of its struggles. Scholten ran on expanding Social Security, raising the minimum wage, increasing entrepreneurship in small towns, and transforming the farm economy.
Contrary to the argument that Trump’s trade wars helped Democrats win back the House, Scholten said his gains had little to do with the Trump administration’s tariffs, which have begun to hit agricultural products — particularly soybeans, a major crop in northwest Iowa. “Tariffs come and go. Farmers are used to the up and down,” Scholten said. “The thing really scaring farmers is market consolidation; that’s the thing that penetrated.”
Indeed, Scholten ran strongly on the idea that seed, livestock, and banking monopolies are punishing rural America. He supported a moratorium on food retail and agriculture mergers, and criticized King for doing nothing in the face of industry concentration. “I had a bunch of people come up and tell me people outside the district were messaging them and saying, ‘This guy gets it,’” Scholten said.
Scholten is now actively looking for work, after leaving his job as a paralegal to run for Congress. In an election night statement to supporters, Scholten reminded them that his political heroes, ’70s-era Iowa Rep. Berkley Bedell and former Sen. Tom Harkin, both lost their first congressional races. “Let’s just say that this isn’t the last you’ve heard of J.D. Scholten,” he wrote.
In our interview, Scholten wasn’t ready to announce a rematch. “I still have a lot of fire left in my belly,” he said. “I don’t know if me being the candidate is answer. But I plan to keep fighting.” In addition to a potential rematch with King, Scholten was mentioned by the website Iowa Starting Line as a possible candidate to take on Joni Ernst for U.S. Senate in 2020.
His strong performance, as in other parts of the country where Democrats ran well but didn’t succeed, built political infrastructure for future fights. Even a place with a rich political culture like Iowa has more apathetic pockets, and Scholten feels he really turned some of that around.
“Sioux City is not a political place. It’s not Des Moines,” he said. “Even Republican candidates don’t come here that often. But the last week, I was at the gym, and a young Latino guy comes up to me for a selfie. He said, ‘I registered because of you. I made sure my girlfriend voted, too.’ When I heard that, I knew we had done something here.”
Correction: November 13, 2018, 9:12 p.m.
A previous version of this story said that all of King’s previous opponents lost by 22 points or more. One opponent, Christie Vilsack in 2012, lost by 8 points.
The post White Nationalist Steve King May Have Won, but Iowa Race Shows Republicans Are Losing Ground in Rural Areas appeared first on The Intercept.
I imagine this will be the last installment in the “weather flying with Marine One” series. Two previous entries here and here. (On the other hand, who knows that the incoming email inbox will hold.)
A person who has worked at the company that makes the current Marine One helicopter, aka VH-1, has this to say:
On your recent piece addressing the ability of the Presidential VH-1 to fly in bad weather. I would like to add some observations that my experience of nearly 10 years at Sikorsky Aircraft (the maker of the helicopter in question) allows me to contribute.
I was [a high-level official involved in] many “systems” for Sikorsky aircraft. I can’t say for certain (I lacked the necessary clearance for such information) which block upgrades the VH-1 received over the years, but what I can say is that aircraft from the VH-1 squadron were a constant presence at the Stratford factory for maintenance and system upgrades.
Generally speaking modern Sikorsky aircraft (which no doubt would includes the VH-1) will integrate:
RIPS – Rotor Icing Protection System, which is a system of heating elements and conductive wire brushes which warms the rotating blades and prevents freezing; TAWS – Terrain Avoidance Warning System, which as you might guess is an integrated radar system which warns of terrain variations; RIG approach - Rig approach landing systems, which are autonomous landing systems for dangerous landings primarily on oil rigs that obviously could be used in other types of dangerous landings; and Windshield Wipers; in case anyone doubted it, yes helicopter pilots have wipers at their disposable for visibility.In short, when I read that the aircraft could not fly in the wet, fall weather in France, I was stunned.
No one would buy a medium lift helicopter for tens of millions of dollars if it could not be flown in inclement weather. In fact, one of Sikorsky's best medium lift class markets is the oil rigs in the North Sea, which is among the most inhospitable operating environments on earth and requires rotor-wing aircraft that can fly in all types of weather.
More than most, Mr Trump, who has flown Sikorsky aircraft for years, should know his press office is uttering easily disprovable falsehoods in suggesting the aircraft was the cause of his absence from Armistice Day ceremonies.
While it was professional of you to withhold conjecture on the real cause, my suspicion was bruised feelings and the apprehension of appearing marginalized was at the core of the decision.
Take Two: It was never going to be any of the other more than 230 cities across the U.S. that bid for a chance to host Amazon’s so-called HQ2, now officially planting its flag just outside New York and D.C., Annie Lowrey argues. (Opening big offices in New York and D.C. makes sense from the company’s perspective. What inequalities will it widen in these cities?) And Derek Thompson calls for a policy fix to the HQ2 pageantry of the past year: “Why the hell are U.S. cities spending tens of billions of dollars to steal jobs from one another in the first place?”
In and Out: The U.S. House of Representatives is increasingly seen as an unfriendly place with few paths toward leadership for rising Democratic talent, while House Republicans don’t have the same problem. The dominance of a longtime Democratic figure has something to do with it. And in a continuation of his post-midterms purge, President Donald Trump is now reportedly considering firing his secretary of homeland security and his chief of staff—but how axing certain staff would help him achieve his various policy proclamations is unclear. (Also brewing: CNN is suing the White House.)
City on Fire: As the death toll in California’s wildfires continue to rise, the fires remain far from contained. This year alone, the federal government will spend more than $2.25 billion fighting such fires (and even more billions trying to manage them). Here’s why they’re essentially impossible to control. And there are other vulnerable populations not directly in a wildfire’s path who still grapple with the fires’ severe side effects.
Snapshot
“These should be boom times for sex,” writes Kate Julian. Yet in a time of fading taboos around sexual activity, proliferating hookup apps, and better birth-control options for women, American young adults are having less sex and teenagers are starting their sex lives later. These trend lines seem, on their face, to have positive consequences—lower teen pregnancy rates, for instance—but there could be gloomier forces at play. (Mendelsund / Munday)Evening ReadMichelle Obama’s new memoir is a glimpse into moments of fear and frustration throughout her husband’s presidency that drifted below her preternatural calm. Hannah Giorgis writes:
The memoir goes on to detail the wave of virulent criticism that met Michelle Obama following Barack Obama’s clinching of Iowa. The former first lady zeroes in on the responses to a comment she made during two February 2008 speeches in Wisconsin. “What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something: For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she said then. “And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”
Her remark about feeling pride in her country’s citizenry was, perhaps unsurprisingly, taken out of context and circulated heavily.
What else does the former first lady reveal in Becoming?
What Do You Know … About Family?1. A swell of children’s books with politically progressive messages are entering the bedtime-stories market, including a better-selling parody of this Regnery Publishing title.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. The median age of first marriage for women in the U.S. has risen to this age, up from 20–22 for much of the 20th century.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. The woman behind this 1963 seminal feminist text later said that the book helped spark a feminist movement that was misguidedly devoted to fighting “for equality in terms of male power.”
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President / 27 / The Feminine Mystique
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares their top stories:
For towns and cities in Mexico, the problem of how to manage Central American migrants didn’t just materialize as an election issue, nor did it disappear after the midterms. Recently, the “caravan” arrived in Mexico City—where a new constitution ensures the protection of migrants, regardless of legal status.
A real-estate agency has made a modern redlining map of Cleveland, but while it’s been controversial online, in a time of rising home prices, some say it might have the unintended effect of keeping housing affordable.
“Before I moved here, I honestly didn’t think my life would have anything other than being a homeless drug addict.” A tiny-home community in Austin is tackling housing insecurity with lots of neighbors—operating on the principle that “housing will never cure homelessness, but community will.”
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As the red sun hung in the smoke-filled air outside, as the exhaust from the Camp Fire swept over the Bay Area, I was inside, looking at my phone, like everyone else. I was dying to go running, but the air quality index numbers, and my own eyes and lungs, told me that I shouldn’t. So I was scrolling Instagram when it served me an ad for Vent Performance Filtration Breathing Trainer, from the company Training Mask—tagline: “Breathe Free, Breathe Strong.”
The mask looks like a cross between an S&M accessory and military kit, technical meets Mortal Kombat. The ad for it explicitly linked the wildfires with working out; It could save my lungs from the global warming-induced, record-setting California fire season—and in “performance filtration mode,” it could train my respiratory muscles at the same time. It’s personal environmental gear with a fitspo bonus, the perfect gadget for the climate hellscape.
A screenshot from the Facebook version of the Training Mask California fire advertisement (Facebook)Because scientists and insurance companies agree: The fires have been historically bad, but it’s gonna get worse. Even before the Camp Fire became the most destructive wildfire fire in California history, gutting more than 7,000 structures so far, my colleague Rob Meyer reported on the recent catastrophic fire seasons.“The worst wildfires—and the hottest summers, and the worst floods—are yet to come. And the only technologically proven way to keep them at bay is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions,” Meyer wrote.
Climate change has been described as “a classic collective action problem in response to overexploitation of a global commons” — the commons, in this case, being the atmosphere’s capacity to buffer the huge amounts of carbon dioxide that human beings are sending into the sky. The world’s nations have struggled to agree on how to fairly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, coming up with agreements that don’t match the scale of the problem.
At the same time, climate change has often been framed as a global problem, one that can only be solved by global action. The charismatic mascot of climate change is the polar bear, an animal that the vast majority of residents of earth will never encounter. Individual people experience the effects of climate change within their local communities. “Climate and its changes might not only be observed in relation to landscape but also felt, sensed, apprehended emotionally, passing noticed and unnoticed as part of the fabric of everyday life in which acceptance, denial, resignation and action co-exist,” wrote geographers Catherine Brace and Hilary Geoghegan of the University of Exeter.
Anthropologists have begun to study how climate change weaves into the “fabric of everyday life” in different places. In Jinja, Uganda, a town experiencing environmental and economic decline, shifting weather patterns were seen as another sign that “everything is becoming worse.” A multinational set of students in Melbourne adopted a variety of strategies for staying cool in the city’s extreme heat. People living in smaller islands in Micronesia can draw on centuries-old links with larger islands to escape rising seas. In Guyana, local and expert knowledge clashed and hybridized in the creation of a protective mangrove forest, a climate variation on a international development pattern.
Here in California, in the wealthy tech-heavy region of the Bay, the fires offer a glimpse of an emerging form of disaster capitalism. Climate adaptation could look like a million individual products, each precisely targeted on social media to the intersection of a consumer culture and a catastrophe. As the environment weirds, people can reinterpret the problem as a personal, consumer one: “What do I need to survive the biosphere today?”
For the wildfire smoke, there’s the panoply of masks, from the Training Mask tapering down to simple paper masks, which don’t work, but make you feel like you’re doing something. There are air purifiers for clearing the particulate matter that leaks into the house. There is already a private network of air sensors run by the company Purple: “A proven air quality monitoring solution for home enthusiasts and air quality professionals alike.” Home enthusiasts.
There is evidence that CO2-enriched air reduces human cognitive functioning. So we have personal CO2 scrubbers that could be marketed to the entrepreneur looking to get an edge, or that student trying to ace the ACT.
For the floods, there's a personal inflatable life vest and raft combination. It was designed for offshore workers, but could easily be sold as a solution for areas new way to make oneself resilient to flooding.
Cobham SystemsFor the coming devastating heat, one could adapt Embr, a “personal thermostat” designed to help menopausal women.
This all sounds absurd of course, until you’re staring at a combo crossfit-wildfire ad on Instagram. The world of gadgets, the supply chains that brought us fidget spinners and hoverboards, will adapt, produce, and market for the coming climate catastrophes. The world isn’t going to grind to a halt. It will just become hard in new ways. Companies, then, will try to soften the edges of even the worst scenarios. There is a blog called The Prepper Gourmet, after all.
None of this will save the planet. But for most people—from Micronesia to San Francisco—they’re just trying to get through the day, adapting to climate change’s effects with whatever is to hand, or browsable by thumb.
On the long list of things that New York City desperately needs—money for the subway, for affordable housing, for schools and public hospitals and universal pre-K—more high-paying, high-skilled jobs is not at the top of the list. It could be argued, in fact, that many of New York’s ills are caused by the explosion of high-paying jobs in a city where the construction of affordable housing and transit improvements has not kept up pace.
Yet New York and hundreds of other cities spent the past year trying to convince Amazon to bring 50,000 jobs to the city, a process that was rewarded on Tuesday when Amazon formally announced that it would set up new offices in Queens and in and the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia.
That New York and Arlington were so heavily courting Amazon is not surprising: It is a trillion-dollar public company, and it is constantly creating new divisions and products that change the way we live and work. The company has vowed to bring at least 25,000 jobs in each city, as well as $5 billion in investment, and tax revenue and redevelopment plans that will create more jobs. “This is a giant step on our path to building an economy in New York City that leaves no one behind,” New York’s Mayor Bill De Blasio said in a statement.
But Amazon is also bringing thousands of high-paying workers to two markets where the competition to find affordable housing is already fierce, and it is introducing yet more bodies into cities where transit is crumbling, but people are forced to live further and further from the city center due to rising housing prices.
For decades, economists have said that locating innovative companies in cities helps raise wages and the quality of life for everyone. But that’s no longer the case in all places. In cities with inflexible housing markets, a 2017 paper from the London School of Economics found, the addition of tech jobs in fact reduces real wages, since rents and other costs go up significantly. “While the paychecks in the pockets of barbers and phlebotomists in tech agglomerations might be larger as a consequence, housing and other rising costs might make these workers considerable worse off,” the paper concluded. Another paper that studied the trickle-down effects of high-wage jobs in housing markets put it more succinctly: “In tight housing markets, the poor do worse when the rich get richer.”
"Arlington already has an affordable housing crisis due to gentrification and rising rents, which HQ2 will surely exacerbate,” said Alex Howe, of Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America Northern Virginia Branch, in a statement Tuesday.
If nothing else, Amazon’s HQ2 decisions may accelerate America’s great divergence, where highly educated urbanites are doing better and better, and everyone else is doing worse. Amazon has jobs outside of cities too, of course, but those are often low-paying and grueling jobs that don’t have much room for upward mobility. “If you project forward to the dismal geography of a future in which Amazon utterly dominates, you have a handful of places that are doing well, where there are high-paid tech jobs,” Stacy Mitchell, the co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, told me. “Then you have a bunch of cities and neighborhoods, that if they’re lucky, will maybe they get some warehouse jobs at $15 an hour and nothing else.”
[Read: Amazon Was Never Going To Chose Detroit]
Seattle and San Francisco may be an omen. Rents in King County, where Seattle is located, have grown 65 percent since 2009, and the city is spending more and more money on programs to combat homelessness. Housing prices have risen significantly in recent years, pricing out the many people whose wages remained stagnant over that time. In Seattle, luxury apartments built for tech workers sit empty, while lower-income workers still search for affordable housing further and further away. (When Seattle’s council passed a head tax on big companies to raise money for affordable housing, Amazon joined with the local Chamber of Commerce to get the council to reverse its vote.)
In San Francisco, the average rent for a one-bedroom is now $3,300, up 22 percent from 2011. Low-income people and people of color are being pushed farther and farther away from the city center—tales of hours-long commutes one-way are not uncommon—and often work in contract jobs with little job security and no benefits. A year ago, I visited Merced, CA, an inland city two and a half hours from San Francisco, and encountered people who had left the Bay Area, even though they had to take lower-paying jobs in Merced, because they could no longer afford to live in the city. “High-skill workers are still moving to places that offer them high incomes, but now, low-skill workers are moving away from places where average wages are high,” I wrote, at the time.
New York’s housing market is already tight. The share of housing units available to low-income households fell 12.9 percent between 2006 and 2016, according to a 2017 report from NYU’s Furman Center. The city said in September that it has lost more than 400,000 affordable housing units since 2005. Meanwhile, the population of the DC metro area has increased seven percent since 2010, but the number of housing units has grown only three percent, according to the Urban Institute. There are signs that this is changing the dynamics of who lives in the region: the number of renters with incomes between $100,000 and $149,000 has grown 58 percent between 2000 and 2018, according to the study, far outpacing growth in renters with incomes of $50,000 to $74,999, which grew just eight percent.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the presence of new tech jobs in New York and Arlington will create the same problems that tech job growth created in Seattle and San Francisco. “Things like a major relocation or HQ expansion should be a very positive thing—but it takes a lot of intentionality to make sure that’s the case,” said John Lettieri, the president of the Economic Innovation Group, which researches what makes cities and regions successful.
Officials in New York and Arlington say that they have a plan for the influx of new residents. When New York mayor Bill De Blasio was asked by reporters at a press conference how he was going to make sure that New York didn’t follow other cities’ paths to unaffordability, he dismissed the question. Seattle and San Francisco “are totally different places than this,” he said. New York is planning to add hundreds of thousands of housing units over the next few decades, and the growing tax base from Amazon will afford it more money to invest in housing and transit, he said. Arlington County and the city of Alexandria promised an investment of $570 million in transportation projects to help accommodate the growth that Amazon would bring. The state of Virginia also said it would invest $195 million in infrastructure for the neighborhood. Arlington projected that around 2,000 affordable housing units would be created in the area in the next decade.
But even if Arlington and New York are able to create some affordable housing, it takes years to build new housing units, and it’s unlikely that the cities will be able to create enough units for next year, when Amazon says it will begin hiring. It takes longer to get approval to build new housing units in cities like Washington and New York, and no part of the Amazon plans mention how the cities plan to speed up this process.
There are, of course, many other problems with Amazon’s HQ2 bid. There’s the time wasted by cities and state legislatures preparing extremely detailed pitches at Amazon’s request—which took more time than most economic development proposals, Sam Bailey, the vice president of economic development at the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation, told me last week. There’s the unprecedented cache of confidential information cities gave to Amazon about development and infrastructure plans that it hasn’t given to anyone else, even the public. There’s the fact that Amazon may have known from the start that it would have to place its new offices in superstar cities like New York and Washington DC where highly educated people live.
But the most striking thing to remember is that Amazon is big enough to change the fabric of the regions where it locates. And like it does everywhere else, it will make big winners out of some people, while making life more challenging for everyone else.
Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) and Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)
Today in 5 LinesPresident Donald Trump is reportedly considering replacements for several senior-level administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Chief of Staff John Kelly. One name being floated as Kelly’s replacement is Nick Ayers, Vice President Mike Pence’s current chief of staff.
CNN filed a lawsuit against Trump and several White House aides, after the administration suspended CNN journalist Jim Acosta’s press pass last week.
Trump named Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, to fill the seat vacated by Brett Kavanaugh on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Hate crimes in America increased by 17 percent last year, even while overall violent crime fell very slightly, according to newly released data from the FBI.
At least 44 people are dead, and more than 200 people are still missing, as the Camp Fire—now the most destructive fire in California history—continues to blaze through the northern part of the state.
Today on The AtlanticThis Is a Problem: President Trump appointed Matthew Whitaker to replace former Attorney General Jeff Sessions last week. The move is unconstitutional, argues former deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo.
‘A New Kind of Centrism’: Even though they had some high-profile losses, progressives still see last week’s midterms as a victory for progressive thinking. (Elaine Godfrey)
Young and Blue: The House of Representatives is an “unfriendly environment for rising talent,” reports Elaina Plott. Why is it so hard for young Democrats to get leadership roles there?
Doomed Policies: President Trump reportedly plans to fire Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen for weak enforcement of his immigration policies. But Nielsen isn’t the reason why they’re failing, writes David A. Graham.
Becoming Michelle Obama: The former first lady’s new memoir is a strikingly intimate look at life as a political spouse. (Hannah Giorgis)
Snapshot
Georgia state Senator Nikema Williams (D) is arrested by capitol police during a protest over election ballot counts in the rotunda of the state capitol building in Atlanta. Dozens filled the rotunda in the center of the Capitol's second floor Tuesday just as the House was scheduled to convene for a special session. (John Bazemore / AP)What We’re ReadingOops: A poorly designed ballot might have swayed the midterm elections in Florida. Here’s how. (Dana Chisnell and Whitney Quesenbery, The Washington Post)
Bigger Than They Thought: With all the votes counted, the Democrats had a larger win this year than Republicans did in 2010. (Matthew Yglesias, Vox)
A New American Revolution: Revolutions have always shaped American society, starting in 1776. In 2018, the left has tried to stage a new revolution—one modern America doesn’t need, argues Victor Davis Hanson. (The National Review)
VisualizedMapping Fire: California’s wildfires are still raging. Keep track of them. (Lauren Tierney, Laris Karklis, and Tim Meko, The Washington Post)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
Unable to resolve matters behind closed doors, CNN and its chief White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, filed suit in D.C. district court on Tuesday to reinstate Acosta’s permanent credentials to cover the White House.
Acosta and CNN claim that the White House’s revocation of his press credentials after a heated presidential press conference Wednesday violates Acosta’s First Amendment right of freedom of the press and his Fifth Amendment right to due process. The plaintiffs also allege that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act by acting “arbitrarily, capriciously, and otherwise not in accordance with law.”
[Read: 10 Most Dumbfounding Moments From Trump’s Press Conference]
The suit names a myriad of administration officials as defendants in the suit—President Donald Trump, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Deputy Chief of Staff Bill Shine, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, the U.S. Secret Service, and Randolph Alles, the director of the Secret Service.
CNN has also requested an immediate restraining order and injunction, which would allow Acosta to get his credentials back without having to wait for the case to be resolved.
“The White House punished Mr. Acosta and CNN for the contents of their reporting,” Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., one of CNN and Acosta’s lawyers, said in a statement. “The law is clear that this violates the First Amendment and Due Process Clause of the Constitution. The arbitrary revocation of Mr. Acosta’s press credentials is causing irreparable injury each and every day because it is stopping him from reporting on news from the White House. That is why we are seeking emergency relief and asking that his credentials be restored immediately.”
The complaint cites two landmark Supreme Court cases—New York Times v. Sullivan and Hustler Magazine v. Falwell—before bringing into focus a key lower-court decision that stands as near-direct precedent for Acosta’s case: Sherrill v. Knight. The 1977 Sherrill case, as detailed in The Atlantic on Friday, calls for an explanation and opportunity for rebuttal if White House credentials are revoked. The CNN filing cites the following from Sherrill:
That is why the D.C. Circuit has been clear that “the protection afforded news gathering under the first amendment guarantee of freedom of the press requires that . . . access [to White House press facilities] not be denied arbitrarily or for less than compelling reasons.”... And “notice . . . of the factual bases for denial [of access to White House press facilities] with an opportunity to rebut is a minimum prerequisite for ensuring that the denial is . . . [not] based on arbitrary or less than compelling reasons.”
[Read: Legal Precedent That Could Protect Acosta’s Credentials]
The difference between Sherrill, a case brought on by The Nation’s Robert Sherrill after his press credentials were twice denied in 1966 and 1972 without explanation, and the Acosta case is slight, but important: Sherrill never had his credentials revoked; he was denied from the start.
Press advocates expressed optimism and said they thought CNN had a very strong case against the White House.
“I don't think CNN’s lawsuit goes out on any limbs. The basic principle is well established,” Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in an interview. “The DC Circuit case was decided on 40 years ago and all the case law since has reinforced the soundness of the Sherrill ruling, so I think the legal argument is very strong. The facts are always messier and maybe the administration will introduce new facts that complicate the case further, but based on the public record, CNN's assertion that [the revocation is] viewpoint-based is very strong.”
[Read: Why Trump Is Blaming the Media Down the Homestretch]
Michele Kimball, media law professor at George Washington University said that an explanation for revoking Acosta’s access is required—whether it’s from the White House proper or the Secret Service.
“What's most important in all of this is a clarification by the administration about why the credentials were revoked,” Kimball said in an email. “Other journalists need to know what can get them pulled. The chilling effect on speech is especially intense when you have no idea what will trigger having your credentials taken.”
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) filed an amicus brief Tuesday with support from Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
“Trump's revocation of Acosta's credentials is, simply put, out of line,” Bruce Brown, executive director of RCFP said on a conference call. “It's decidedly out of step with the traditions of freedom of speech and of the press, enshrined in our constitution, at the heart of our democracy and long respected by presidential administrations of both parties even in moments of great tension between the president and the press.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders released a statement that called the CNN lawsuit “more grandstanding” and said that the White House will “vigorously defend” against it. “The White House cannot run an orderly and fair press conference when a reporter acts this way, which is neither appropriate nor professional,” Sanders wrote. “The First Amendment is not served when a single reporter, of more than 150 present, attempts to monopolize the floor. If there is no check on this type of behavior it impedes the ability of the President, the White House staff, and members of the media to conduct business.”
The Trump White House pivoted from its earlier accusations that Acosta assaulted a White House intern when the intern tried to grab his microphone, a false claim further complicated by the fact that Sanders shared a doctored video from Infowars to support her claim on Twitter last week.
“The initial justification given, that Acosta made physical contact with the young intern, has been proven to be unjustified as we have seen by watching the video countless times and through eyewitness reports from people who were seated right next to Acosta when the incident took place,” Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, said in an email Tuesday. “The White House has to be held accountable to facts and to process. It’s time they learn to respect both.”
Joshua Geltzer, executive director of Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, acknowledged there’s a legitimate argument in favor of decorum in White House press events, but this was not the issue at hand here.
“The [RCFP] brief recognizes that there is a certain prerogative on the part of the White House to ensure security and even, in some reasonable way, ensure decorum in part to allow news gathering to occur, to allow questions to be asked and answered, to allow different voices to have that opportunity so that they can ask questions on behalf of both of their readers and viewers and followers,” Geltzer said on the conference call. “But one only needs to look at the video here to see that this was nothing wildly out of bounds, this was nothing out of character for the setting.”
Jaffer agreed that the issue of decorum is relevant, but falls short in this case given the how the incident played out.
“If the White House came up with a viewpoint-neutral set of rules (for example, no reporter can go on for more than 3 minutes)... that kind of viewpoint-neutral rule would be easier to defend,” Jaffer said. "Given the context of this revocation, given that it's obvious from the video that the president was provoked by Acosta's questions, I think it'll be difficult for the administration to maintain that the revocation was anything but viewpoint-based.”
“The arguments about respect and decorum are pretty rich coming from folks who turn the Oval Office over to The Kanye West Show,” Brown added.
CNN is seeking an immediate restraining order to reinstate Acosta’s credentials, a decision that could be decided in court this week. CNN claims to have done due diligence this weekend—the likely reason this suit did not come sooner. According to the lawsuit, CNN chief executive Jeff Zucker wrote to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly requesting that Acosta’s credentials be reinstated. “Defendants have not reinstated Acosta’s press credentials or returned his hard pass and have informed CNN and Acosta they do not intend to do so,” the suit states.
Acosta applied for a temporary day pass on Friday, the complaint states. He was denied. He requested to cover the president’s trip to France this weekend. He was denied access, but traveled anyway. With both sides in their corners, prepared to fight, what happens next could be an important decision in the protection of reporters’ rights—or a ruling that could further chill Washington reporting.
Last night I posted an item about weather conditions this past weekend in Paris, when Donald Trump joined other world leaders there, and on how rain and clouds affected helicopters, including Marine One.
(For the record, like “Air Force One,” “Marine One” isn’t a fixed name for any particular aircraft. Whatever Air Force airplane is carrying a sitting U.S. president is, at that moment, known by the call sign Air Force One. Similarly, whatever Marine Corps helicopter carries a president is Marine One.
(Air Force One famously has had one more takeoff than landing in its history. On his final trip away from Washington in 1974, Richard Nixon departed while still president, in a plane whose call sign on takeoff was Air Force One. He had already signed his resignation papers, which went into effect while he was airborne. At the appointed time, after Gerald Ford was sworn in, the pilot of Air Force One radioed Air Traffic Control and requested that the call sign be changed to SAM 26000 — Special Air Mission — which was its ID for the rest of the flight.)
My point in that post was explicitly not to second-guess military pilots or dispatchers who might have advised against Trump’s helicoptering to the commemoration site in the clouds and rain of that day. That’s their call, and they are paid (among other things) for their judgment. Rather I was addressing two points:
First, that an initial line in some news accounts --that helicopters “can’t fly” in the rain—was just not true. Whether a president should prudently fly by helicopter during marginal weather conditions is of course a different question.
Second, I wanted to emphasize that White House plans for foreign travel always allow for the possibility of bad weather or other surprises. Thus any White House staff I’m aware of, including the one on which I worked long ago during the Carter administration, would have set up redundant contingency plans for getting a president where he needed to be. (After all, the other foreign leaders all managed to get to the site.) Part of the advance work for the trip would necessarily include thinking through how the president would reach his destinations, if the weather turned bad. I’ve been part of these meetings myself.
Now, reader responses, starting with one from a currently active Army helicopter pilot:
I am a UH-60 Pilot-in-Command in the United States Army, currently attending [an advanced training course].
In reference to your article linked below, I can see your logic and your point in this argument that WX conditions were permissive to IMC Flight and possibly VMC flight.
The issue I have is that I, as an FAA rated instrument pilot, flying within the Army's endless rules, probably would have declined to fly VFR during this flight, and therefore would have to fly IFR which, obviously complicates air traffic, and provides higher layers of logistics and coordination to get POTUS from an instrument rated airfield (certified for the President to land at) to the event ceremony.
I wouldn't argue that METARs are pretty accurate, but flying in Central America for fifteen months and [the mountain West] for the same, I've found BR and -RA can result in periods of zero visibility and to conduct the emergency procedure of Inadvertent IMC would be 100% not okay with POTUS or any VIP on board. Europe also is notorious for rotational aviation units to basically be grounded during NOV - MAR (which frustrates all the coordination for cross country clearances, airport logistics, etc.) mainly due to the fact that military helicopter pilots fly VFR.
I have no reason to defend this White House, and my voting record will show an entirely different political inclination than those currently in charge, but just wanted to ensure that we're giving the military pilots a fair shake, especially with a risk profile that one would have to take with VIPs. With all these variables not even including icing, I can really see why it would would be possible not to accept the risk of a VFR or even an IFR flight.
And similarly from another aviation-experienced reader:
I think Trump deserves every criticism and satire that has been heaped upon him — and more — for missing the ceremony. He could have gotten there somehow, if he really wanted to.
That being said, let me also observe (as a fellow pilot, and a CFI [Certified Flight Instructor]) that whenever a US president flies, especially overseas, I'm guessing there are additional airborne security measures in place (AWACS, fighter escort). Perhaps that was a factor.
Thanks to the readers for these points. Just to make it triply-clear: this is not at all about whatever judgment call the Marine One pilots, or other aviation authorities, might have made. As the saying goes, “It’s better to be on the ground wishing you were in the air, than the other way around.” When working for a president these officials have unique burdens and responsibilities.
But once more time, the point is: White House staffs anticipate these complications, and they make multiple fallback plans precisely because of the “what if?” possibilities.
Now, several responses in a different vein. First, from a reader on the West Coast:
I too was wondering about the mystery.
Then, I believe that my mother solved it. She said -- "Donald Trump did not attend the ceremony in the rain, because his hair would have fallen apart, and he would have looked terrible."
This explanation sounded ridiculous at first blush. But actually, when you think it through - it sounds plausible. I think this is likely the correct explanation of why he missed the event, and it has nothing to do with flying conditions.
His hair and image are the most important things to him, and a horrible photo of Donald Trump in the rain does far more damage to him than missing an event, with an excuse.
Similarly:
I almost feel bad for the guy. I imagine that his makeup (and as twitter noted on your feed, the hair) would look ridiculous in the rain. The president passionately does not want to look ridiculous. And the narrative that he was too preening to stand in the rain would be unacceptable.
The side by side comparisons to Obama, vigorous and impervious to rain would have been unbearable.
It's a terrible state of affairs. Not to engage in whataboutism, but I wonder if a female president would have more easily been afforded a hat?
And:
I think we’re looking for answers for Trump’s no-show in all the wrong places, places that might seem reasonable or logical.
The vanity-focussed explanation is likely the best one; Trump was afraid of what would happen to his hair in the rain and the wind. It’s both reasonable and logical, considering his obsession with his ‘do’.
Imagine the photo ops? His ego would never have survived.
Maybe we’ll eventually know who made what decisions this past weekend. For now, thanks to the readers for weighing in.
Seven years ago, Park Williams took an hour-long drive with a couple friends to see a wildfire. He remembers it now as a revelation.
At the time, Williams was researching the scraggly pine forests that dot the southwestern United States. He worked at a national laboratory that overlooks more than a million acres of protected desert forest. On June 26, 2011, the wind knocked down an aspen somewhere in that national forest, toppling it into a power line and igniting a small flame. The landscape was parched, the winds were unruly, and soon that flame had become the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history.
Williams couldn’t go to work—his lab had been evacuated—so he and his friends drove around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blaze. Eventually they came to a spot just below the mountains. He remembers the air outside the car reeking like an ancient brick fireplace. The fire stood a mile off. “It looked like a skyline of buildings,” he told me. “You could see it in the mountains above you.”
It was not like a bonfire or even a house fire. It was a wall of flame, probably 100 feet high.
The vision made him realize it is impossible to fight wildfires. It also changed his life. Williams had never seriously studied wildfires before he saw the Las Conchas Fire in New Mexico. He is now a professor at Columbia, and one of the world’s leading experts on how climate change has intensified the problem of wildfire.
“The fire, to me—it’s like an ocean,” he said. “It’s so strong that we don’t really stand a chance of doing much to it. When it’s that big, and there are helicopters dropping water and retardant on it, they’re doing nothing. When you see firefighters spraying hoses at it, [the fire] is so hot that they can’t even be close enough to be within hose-shot.”
California is struggling with some of the worst blazes in its history. On Monday, authorities announced that the so-called Camp Fire in Northern California has killed 42 people, making it the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in state history. It broke a record set in 1933, when a brush fire in Los Angeles killed 29 people. The Camp Fire’s death toll is expected to rise.
[Read: The worst is yet to come for California’s wildfires]
The Camp Fire has burned 125,000 acres and it is 25 percent contained. Most of that growth came on its first day, when it devoured more than 70,000 acres (or 109 square miles) in 24 hours. At that rate, the fire consumed a football field of forest every second. “The numbers these fires are capable of posting are mind-boggling,” Williams said.
Fires in the United States are getting larger, and the country is rapidly losing the ability to deal with them. During President Reagan’s first term, the federal government spent a couple hundred thousand dollars per year fighting fires, according to Williams. This year, it plans to spend $2.25 billion just battling fires; its full budget for managing them can exceed $5 billion. Yet forest-fire damage has ballooned nonetheless. Since the early 1980s, the land area burned by wildfires every year has increased by 1,000 percent.
“Fires are outrunning us. We’re trying harder than ever to put them out, and they’re continuing to win, more and more, every year,” Williams said. “And it really isn’t for lack of effort. Even when we know it’s been stupid policy to fight every single fire, we’re still trying as hard as we can to do that.”
It’s a message he wishes he could drill into the head of every American. As the California fires have dominated the news, he’s been asked by friends and journalists why we can’t just fix wildfires, why we can’t just put them out. We have solved all sorts of complex environmental engineering problems. Why not wildfire?
The question illustrates “the root problem that got us into this mess,” he told me. “We think that we as humans should be able to dominate this phenomenon of wildfire. And in reality, we can’t. Even though we can put a person on the moon, and even though we can create this global computer network, we can’t. This is a natural phenomenon that is similar to the ocean in that it is really big, that it is much larger than us when it really gets going.”
In some ways, he said, a wildfire is similar to a combustion-powered hurricane. Fires put out tons of hot air at their center, which tries violently to rise. This rising air creates a vacuum at the core of fires, creating a fast-moving conveyor belt of cooler air flowing into the fire from all directions. A large fire can pull in so much air, at such high speeds, that its ability to do so is hindered by the Earth’s rotation. In the Northern Hemisphere, a large wildfire’s smoke column will begin to spin counterclockwise, just as happens to hurricanes.
Sometimes, that channel of upward-flowing air can collapse in one small spot. Then the hot air in the atmosphere plummets through the weak point. “You get a very fast wind moving down toward the ground, and when it hits the ground, it spreads like jelly slopping across the floor,” he said. “It can also send white-hot air out in front of the flame, incinerating the landscape before the actual flame has arrived. It can cause forests to spontaneously combust without coming into contact with a flame.”
When this upward-moving air pattern stays strong, it creates other kinds of problems. It can loft burning wood high into the atmosphere, carrying it many miles away from the center of the fire. When this debris finally lands, it can start new fires. In 2011, Williams lived dozens of miles from the edge of the blaze, yet he remembers semi-burned sticks falling like drizzle in his backyard. “These were twigs that you hold in your hand and say, ‘Wow, this actually weighs something. This made it 35 miles in the air.’”
[Read: Why the wildfires of 2018 have been so ferocious]
“When the fires are really moving like that, it’s because the meteorological conditions are allowing that to happen,” he said. He estimated that these California fires would not be fully contained until the winter rains arrive.
So how should Americans react to the power of forest fires? By respecting them, he said—and understanding that we are in a new era of great fires. “The continuing increase in fire is an inevitability in the western United States. It is an inevitability that this trend is going to continue,” he told me. “If the public understood that, then they would become more tolerant of managerial tactics that are currently seen as too risky or heartless.”
Many forest managers know that a certain tract of woodland is due for a catastrophic wildfire in the next decade, but feel they have no political ability to do a controlled burn there—lest it get out of control. If the public understood that huge swaths of Western forest will soon burn, they may be more willing to allow controlled burns when the meteorological conditions are right.
“Today, it’s completely impossible to say that ‘We need to have a 100,000 acre fire in that forest.’ Any politician or fire manager who brought that up? It would be a death wish for their career,” he said.
The Atlantic’s October issue examined the current democratic crisis—in America, and in the world.
October’s special edition asks whether democracy is dying. Reading of the challenges we face, it is hard not to feel a sense of despair. However, I would like to offer some hope from a part of the world where democracy is far from a given: the countries of the former Soviet Union. Yes, this is a region where numerous autocracies are doing their best to both crush civil society at home and destabilize democratic institutions abroad. However, it is also a region where many have not given up on the ideal of living in a free society and are risking their all to achieve it. What strikes me is that no matter how tarnished democracy’s reputation may be, its fundamental promises of freedom, dignity, and accountability remain an ideal for many. Take Armenia’s surprise velvet revolution in defiance of its cynical kleptocracy this year. Armenia is stuck in a frozen conflict, has few friendly neighbors, and is reliant on the whims of Russia for its security. Yet its citizens risked a bloody crackdown, Russia’s wrath, and a reignition of war in taking to the streets and peacefully protesting for the removal of its corrupt leaders. Questioning the health of democracy in the West is good and necessary, but let’s not be trapped by doom, gloom, and introspection. As long as people continue to stand up for democracy, it will always have a chance.
Rostislav Valvoda
Executive Director, Prague Civil Society Centre
Prague, Czech Republic
The October issue of The Atlantic is a literary and civic tour de force. Nowhere have I read—in one succinct and powerful publication—a better explanation of and warning about the ills besetting American democracy. This issue is a call to arms for all who care about America and its problems and possibilities—past, present, and future.
Missing, however, from your pick of pitfalls was any in-depth discussion of Russian and other foreign manipulation of our political and electoral processes, as well as the relationship between Presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump—potentially the most deadly threat to democracy and world order the United States has faced in modern times.
Charles W. Kozlosky
Old Bennington, Vt.
The Atlantic edition on dying democracy was a disappointment, at least as far as the American experience is concerned. In the first place, the premise of the issue was wrong. Donald Trump’s election and the current GOP dominance in Washington are largely the result of the undemocratic elements in American government. The American people rejected Trump, who was elected president only because the Framers did not trust the presidency to a national election. He won fair and square by the rules, but the Electoral College is not a democratic institution. Similarly, GOP control of Congress is largely the result of the Framers’ acceptance of equal state representation in the Senate, as well as gerrymandering in the House of Representatives. Maybe we should try democracy rather than bemoan its failure.
Bruce Ledewitz
Pittsburgh, Pa.
I don’t think our democracy is at risk. President Trump has done one positive thing: He’s motivated many people to get active for the first time.
Paul Feiner
Greenburgh, N.Y.
What a pity that our schools no longer have civics classes, where this issue of The Atlantic could be required reading. But that, of course, is a huge part of the problem, isn’t it?
Judith Barnard
Chicago, Ill.
America’s Founders designed a government that would be insulated from the heat of popular sentiment, Jeffrey Rosen noted in October. But they didn’t anticipate the unbridled passions of the digital age.
Rosen writes about James Madison’s views on factions and fear of majority rule in the context of the chaotic, passion-infused politics of today—as if our current racial, gender, and economic inequalities were not influenced by the fact that the country was, in many ways, founded by an aristocratic class seeking to protect its property and slaves.
Our current political climate does not show the decline of Madison’s reasoned world; it shows the limits of what Madison sought to create.
Charles Ryan
State College, Pa.
As Americans’ participation in institutions such as neighborhood associations and labor unions has dwindled, so has public faith in democracy. To restore it, Yoni Appelbaum wrote in October, we must return democratic practices to everyday life.
Yoni Appelbaum convincingly argues that declining membership in democratic civil institutions is a root cause of the governmental and social dysfunction we’re seeing today. In laying out his argument, he mentions a poll in which a quarter of American Millennials said that democracy was a “bad” or “very bad” way to run a country, and that they thought it “unimportant” to choose leaders in free and fair elections, an oft-cited statistic. I’ve never counted myself as a thoroughbred Millennial (I was born in 1982), but I do slide in before the cutoff for the generation as it is commonly defined. I also still believe that democracy is the best form of government, so I hope it’s not too presumptuous of me to speak here on Millennials’ behalf.
The above statistic sounds horrifying. Yet if one simply puts oneself in the shoes of a Millennial, this sentiment doesn’t seem so unimaginable. Take someone born in 1990, for example. We’ll call her Suzy. Suzy’s earliest meaningful memory of a presidential election is of one decided by the Supreme Court in a 5–4 ruling. Four of the justices who confer victory on the Republican were appointed by Ronald Reagan. The fifth was appointed by George H. W. Bush. That’s okay, though, because it’s democracy. The following year she witnesses the 9/11 attacks, and looks on as George W. Bush pushes America into the longest war in its history (which is later determined to have been founded on a lie). But this, too, is essential to protect our democracy.
As Suzy enters college, in 2008, she is most likely heartened by the election of Barack Obama, who is the candidate of overwhelming preference among her cohort. All right, democracy! Unfortunately, he’s inaugurated to face the worst economic recession in 70 years, and soon thereafter is stymied in every possible way by juvenile and petulant Republicans in the House, who regularly threaten to shut down the federal government unless their legislative demands are met.
Suzy eventually graduates, probably crippled by student debt of an unprecedented magnitude. The things that she cares about have largely gone unaddressed: debt, climate change and environmental degradation, monstrously disproportionate distribution of wealth and opportunity. To add insult to injury, in 2016 she watches as Republicans steal a Supreme Court nomination in a borderline criminal act of insurgency.
Finally, she sees the ascension to the presidency of a man carried to victory by people whose votes seem to matter significantly more than her own. How else can she explain this result in the face of his nearly 3-million-vote deficit?
No one Suzy’s age is in Congress. No one her age sits on the bench of the Supreme Court. And certainly no one her age has ever held the presidency. She has simply borne witness to her venerated elders as they exemplify the virtues of democracy in action. In this light, is it any wonder that Suzy questions the competency of our institutions, regardless of whether or not she was class treasurer?
Matthew Riotto
Knoxville, Tenn.
— Barack Obama
on Facebook
Yoni Appelbaum powerfully describes democracy as a habit that must be learned anew in each generation. Unmentioned, however, is a vital place where teaching this habit has recently broken down: America’s colleges and universities.
Over recent generations, higher education’s once-shared commitment to serving democracy has given way to new priorities: research, global prestige, economic development, and student self-actualization. None is ignoble. But they have displaced a fundamental commitment to the “liberal arts” in the term’s classical sense—meaning preparation for citizens to conduct public affairs in a free society. Democracy has become just another topic to study agnostically.
As the son and grandson of college presidents, and now one myself, I’ve had unique generational perspective on this shift. But the American residential-college experience remains a formidable democratic training ground. College campuses are among the few places left where Americans can’t hide online and must learn to get along face-to-face.
Now we must revive the focus on democracy more broadly, especially in the classroom. The public university I lead has a new core curriculum that explicitly cultivates the habits of mind for democracy—critical thinking on civic issues, information literacy, teamwork. An effort like this across higher education would rebuild broken public trust and the understanding of higher education’s purpose. It would also serve America in this hour of need.
W. Taylor Reveley IV
President, Longwood University
Farmville, Va.
“Influencers” are people who have established credibility in a specific realm or industry, and who leverage a social-media following to exert influence and, usually, make money. Scroll through many of their Instagram feeds, and you’ll begin to notice something: The photos all look vaguely the same. Maybe every image seems washed in pink, or the blues are all the same, or every image is just the right amount of faded. That’s not an accident, or an example of photographic mastery; it’s a preset.
Presets are custom filters applied using Adobe Lightroom, a photo-editing tool. Influencers run all their photos through a specific preset in order to cultivate a specific aesthetic and make their feed look cohesive. Influencers have relied on Lightroom for years, but it wasn’t until June of this year that Adobe finally introduced the ability to create and share presets entirely on mobile, and a preset boom was born.
Maddy Corbin, who lives in Indianapolis and has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, spent months in Lightroom, “playing around, figuring out what kind of aesthetic I had and what colors best represented my brand,” she said. She eventually landed on a pastel-pink look that her peers were happy to pay for. Now her followers share their own photos, washed in Corbin’s exact shade of pink, using Corbin’s preset under the hashtag #MADDYCORBINPRESETS. The tagged photos all look like an extension of Corbin’s feed.
Now, Corbin isn’t just selling sonic facial brushes and cold-pressed body wash on Instagram—she’s selling the aesthetic that makes selling all that other stuff easy. Her preset packages go for between $25 and $200, and once a preset is created and uploaded to an marketplace such as FilterGrade, it can generate ongoing income with little to no additional work. This passive income can be a lifeline for influencers as they negotiate more lucrative brand deals that don’t always pay out immediately.
To use a preset, customers buy it from an online store, a download link is sent to their email, and they open the file, copy it into Lightroom, and voilà. They now have the custom filter that their favorite Instagram star applies to her own photos.
But while presets may seem easy to produce and sell online, there’s a lot more to the process than just creating a filter and slapping it on your Instagram story. One big bottleneck, according to Mike Moloney, a co-founder of FilterGrade: Setting up an e-commerce site. “You have to build it, market it, then sell it, and also maintain support,” he said. FilterGrade streamlines that process by acting as the middleman between Instagram stars and consumers, intercepting customer-service queries and taking 30 percent of the profit from sales.
[Read: Posting Instagram sponsored content is the new summer job]
Business is good. Presets are “about the people selling the filters rather than the filters themselves,” Moloney said. “People used to buy and use filters on their photos just because they looked cool. Now they buy filters because someone they like made them.”
When everyone is using the same presets on Instagram and everyone’s photos start looking identical 👀
— Carly A. Heitlinger (@carly) February 11, 2018Like wearing a top from your favorite YouTuber’s custom T-shirt line, using a preset can help you feel like you’re living your idol’s lifestyle. Your photos inherently look more like theirs, and it makes you feel like you’re part of a larger fan group. Fans who use influencer presets will often hashtag their photos with the influencer’s name.
“Presets are a really great way to connect personally with people on Instagram, especially younger girls who are interested in the industry,” Corbin said. Most influencers just starting out are still honing in on their own aesthetic; cribbing the style of a popular influencer by using his presets is an easy way to get started.
Hashtags also serve as quality control. As the market for presets expands, low-quality options abound. By perusing a hashtag, customers can see exactly how well a social media star’s presets work on regular photos, without additional editing. Rachelle Swannie, who has nearly 80,000 followers on Instagram and sells packs of two presets for $25, said she regularly checks her preset hashtag to see how people are using her filters and how their photos are turning out.
I’m over leaking celeb nudes. Let’s leak Instagram influencer filter presets
— gobble gobble bitches (@thesouthernlass) August 10, 2018Victoria Yore, a travel influencer with 67,000 Instagram followers, said working with her partner, Terrence Drysdale, a professional photographer, was key. “There are a lot of not-so-great presets out there. The person who shares a before and after may have also done a lot of editing on their photo,” she said. “We wanted to give an honest preset. We tried it on every photo out there so it would work for the maximum amount of people.”
Different types of influencers also want different types of presets. A moody influencer in Portland, Oregon, who posts cabin porn will want a different aesthetic than a Dallas fashion vlogger. Alina Dinah, a San Jose, California, lifestyle influencer, recently launched a preset called Pure that brightens the pic but doesn’t alter the colors in the photo—an oft-requested feature. “I had a lot of followers who worked with or were running brand accounts,” she said. “They wanted to use a preset, but were afraid it would change the color of the product.”
Free Instagram Presets to Make Modifying Pictures a Breeze https://t.co/SmuTJBNL0N pic.twitter.com/vJ2vmeo3SW
— punga007 (@punga127) November 6, 2018Some influencers have become more famous for their presets than for the content on their feeds. Jessica Turnquist, who has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram, began creating presets over the summer, and it quickly morphed into a job. “I do this full-time, and I’ve made enough where I can stay home full-time with my kids and be able to do what I need to do,” said Turnquist.
[Read: Why are more women than men on Instagram?]
She currently offers 18 different preset packs and is constantly updating her website with new options. Several reality stars and high-profile influencers say they rely on Turnquist’s filters to keep their feeds looking fresh. She said it all comes down to anticipating the Instagram community’s needs. “I have a summer preset,” she said. “People are going to want a Thanksgiving one, a Christmas one ... With the holidays coming up, I figured people are indoors, so I made a brighter preset that goes better with indoor photos too.”
To every travel influencer on Instagram:
👏🏻please👏🏻stop👏🏻peddling👏🏻your👏🏻goddamn👏🏻lightroom👏🏻 presets 👏🏻
Dinah also put her career as a lifestyle influencer on pause in order to prioritize selling presets via a website and a dedicated Instagram account. “It’s all Instagrammers who ask for these,” she said. Several influencers saw their following spike after beginning to use her presets. One began gaining 5,000 followers a month after revamping her aesthetic. Like Turnquist, Dinah said keeping on top of trends within the Instagram-influencer community is critical to her business. She solicits feedback via Instagram Stories and runs polls to see what her followers want.
Influencers say it can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to create a preset, depending on how complicated it is. Some influencers who work closely with photographers ask them to create a preset similar to the ones used on their feed, then sell it to their followers and split the profit.
As Instagram becomes more and more people’s default public face on the internet, even non-influencers are recognizing the importance of presets. Caroline Patterson, a senior at the University of Delaware, began selling presets under the Instagram handle @presetsbycal after noticing her favorite YouTubers selling them. Patterson said that for members of her cohort, having a well-thought-out public Instagram presence is key. “Instagram is the most used, most important social media that currently exists,” she said.
“If you want to market yourself and your own personal platform is falling through the cracks,” Patterson said, “that could be your downfall.”
PARIS—Three years ago, on November 13, 2015, terrorists claiming allegiance to the Islamic State opened fire in coordinated attacks across Paris, killing 130 people and wounding 494 others at the Bataclan concert hall and nearby cafés. Earlier that evening, two suicide bombers had blown themselves up outside the Stade de France, Paris’s main sports arena, where 80,000 people, including then-President François Hollande and one of his sons, were watching a soccer match. The November 13 attacks were the crescendo of a year that began with the slaughter of 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and four more at a kosher supermarket, a year whose aftershocks reverberated well into the summer of 2016, when another terrorist drove a truck into crowds celebrating Bastille Day in Nice, killing 86 and wounding hundreds of others.
Judicial investigations into the November 13 attacks are still ongoing today. Several alleged attackers are in pretrial detention in France and Belgium. At least five others alleged to have been involved remain at large, with warrants out for their arrests, and about a dozen other terrorists died in the attacks. The French state has paid some €300 million to victims and their families, according to a recent report in Le Monde.
I think back on that Friday evening in November—I was having dinner at the home of friends—and vividly remember the feeling of learning about the attacks through Twitter and television. A feeling first of panic and breathlessness, followed by a kind of calm, even numbness. A feeling of fear mixed with anger and confusion. A feeling of resignation mixed with a desire for immediate action, of wanting to do something. A feeling of wanting to understand what was going on, to figure it out.
[Read: A terrorist’s brother—and France—on trial]
But how to figure it out? How to make sense of history when it’s happening? In the past three years, a range of books and at least one documentary film have made significant attempts at reconstructing what happened that day. Some books make an important contribution by exploring the backgrounds of some of the attackers and mapping out terrorist networks in France. Others probe why these attacks might have occurred, and why some young Muslim men (or converts) choose to become jihadists. But these books only tell certain parts of the story. They offer important information for the historical record, but too often read more like police reports, indictments, or academic studies than like textured works of literature.
November 13: Attack on Paris, the three-part Netflix documentary which appeared earlier this year, captures the immediacy, confusion, and adrenaline of the night of November 13, drawing on amateur footage from that night and testimony from survivors, rescue workers, and officials, including Hollande. The film is an important and moving historical document. The owner of La Bonne Bière, where the attackers opened fire, speaks painfully in it of how his wife was among the people shot and killed at the sidewalk café. Survivors of the Bataclan talk of how they climbed through a false ceiling to hide from the terrorists. The former president recalls having to determine whether to evacuate the stadium, ultimately choosing not to, and telling his son who was sitting in the stands to stay put just like everyone else. Others describe how they were taken hostage and feared they would die. One recalls a smell that was “a mix of iron, blood, and gunpowder.” Another breaks down in tears at the recollection of the high mound of dead bodies in the pit of the concert hall, where more than 80 people were killed.
The November 13 terrorists took aim at people of all races and religions. And the attacks were seen as targeting everything Paris stands for and holds most dearly: its mixing of cultures, its cafés, its hedonism, its good life. No one was spared. The attackers “hit the thing that makes Paris great: A sense of freedom, of appreciating others. Our taste for life took a hit,” Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, says in the documentary.
That day marked a shift in attitudes about earlier attacks in France, which were not seen as targeting society at large, even if today, in hindsight, they are identified as harbingers. When a terrorist opened fire outside a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, killing a rabbi and three children, this was seen by some of the bien pensant of France as “only” targeting Jews. (Although during a nine-day shooting spree, the same terrorist also killed several French paratroopers of North African origin.) At the time, Jewish community leaders complained that French authorities hadn’t taken the threat of anti-Semitic violence seriously enough. When terrorists opened fire on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher kosher supermarket in January 2015, those attacks were seen as similarly narrow in scope: aimed again at Jews, and now also at free speech. But the November 13 attacks made clear to much of French society that everyone was a potential target.
Several recent books have tried to grapple with the years leading up to the attacks, and the struggles—if not failures—of the French authorities to grasp the magnitude of the jihadist threat. In Terror in France: The Rise of Jihad in the West, which appeared in English last year, Gilles Kepel, one of France’s most prominent scholars of Islam, makes a case for how Salafist jihadism, a religious ideology, took root in France through charismatic imams, who then proselytized through the internet.
[Read: France’s Jews Look to Pittsburgh “Across a Narrow Bridge”]
The role of French security services in tracking down jihadists in Syria (with the help of the United States), and the inner workings of ISIS’s own security apparatus—which had the idea of striking France—are the focus of Les Espions de la Terreur (The Spies of Terror). It’s a vivid, fast-paced new book by Matthieu Suc, an investigative journalist at the website Mediapart, that appeared this month in French. Through portraits of some of France’s most notorious recent jihadists, the book provides yet more evidence of how France, more than any other country in Europe, is grappling with homegrown terrorists.
This is also a theme in The Returned, by the extremely well-sourced journalist David Thomson, which traces the lives of several French jihadists who went to fight for the Islamic State in Syria and then attempted to come back. (It appeared in English earlier this year and in French in 2016.) Thomson writes darkly of how in 2013 and 2014, few people in France believed him when he said French jihadists in Syria were plotting attacks on French soil, as a French jihadist unit in Aleppo had told him in 2013. He writes that the same Aleppo unit he had communicated with in 2014, and which had said it was planning unspecified attacks in France, was later found responsible for the November 13 attacks.
These works of reportage and intellectual history are important for the historical record and for advancing our understanding of terrorism in France. They are not works of cultural remembrance and are not intended to be. They have information, but not always heart. And that is why of all these books that touch on the attacks of 2015, the one that is most affecting—for the beauty of its prose, the complexity of its emotions, its sense of irony and humor and pain, its ability to exist in the moment and to transcend it as a universal testimony—is Le Lambeau.
It’s an extraordinary memoir by Philippe Lançon, a cultural critic, writer, and journalist whose jaw was blown apart in the attack on Charlie Hebdo when a terrorist barged in on an editorial meeting and opened fire, killing 12 people and injuring 11 others. A best seller in France since it debuted earlier this year, Le Lambeau recently won the Prix Femina, one of France’s highest literary awards, and will appear in English next year.
Lançon writes of his months in Paris’s Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital, his slow recovery, and his pain eased by morphine and Bach, offering an account interspersed with memories of his life, his childhood, his family, his first marriage, his days reporting in Cuba and Africa and the Middle East, textured with references to the literature and music and culture that has shaped him—jazz and Baudelaire and Kafka. Through his flashbacks, he reclaims his life.
The book’s title can be literally translated as “tatters.” It’s a line from a play by Jean Racine, but it can also refer to a shred of flesh. Lançon introduces the concept at a moment when doctors decide to graft a piece of skin from his leg onto his face to help reconstruct it, one of no fewer than 17 surgeries he has undergone since the attack. He captures the morning of the attacks at Charlie Hebdo in excruciating, poetic detail from memory, and later from reading the police report, where he discovers, among other things, that one of his colleagues, a graphic artist, died with his pen still in his hand, “like a resident of Pompeii blocked in lava, before he even knew that the eruption had taken place.” He recalls the screams of his colleagues, shouts of Allahu akbar, the dry sound of bullets.
For much of his hospital stay, Lançon is unable to speak, and with three unbandaged fingers he communicates by writing on a slate. One day, the nurses attending to him are doing a crossword puzzle. “Madame Bovary in four letters” is one clue. They’re stumped. Lançon takes his slate and writes, simply, “Emma.” This is one of countless passages in the book that moved me: Here was someone in great pain, the target of an attack with geopolitical importance, trying to maintain his humanity through his intense personal culture. This is why Le Lambeau stands out amid all the other accounts of the attacks—for Lançon’s lovely prose and the subtleties of his mind.
At one point, Lançon starts to read the papers and comes upon references to the Kouachi brothers, who carried out the attack on Charlie Hebdo; he is struck by the sheer quantity of nonsense and “the capacity of the contemporary world to yammer on with explanations and commentary of absolutely no significance.” He refers to the attackers as “the Brothers K.,” as in the Dostoevsky novel. “The brouhaha around the Brothers K. was a Dostoevsky epidemic,” he writes. “Everyone imagined himself to be the epileptic novelist, everyone wanted to understand and reckon with the acts of the two men in custody.” There has been a lot of journalism, as well there should be. But Le Lambeau is literature, and as such it goes far deeper. It is not an overtly political book, but it is a beautiful and subtle defense of everything the terrorists attacked.
Reading Le Lambeau, I understood how the terrorist attacks had affected me. After the initial fear wore off, rather than making me want to leave—the perennial prerogative of the expat, the voluntary immigrant—they had in fact made me feel closer to France, more admiring of its culture, more sympathetic to its flaws and weaknesses. Above all, the attacks made me realize that I actually lived in Paris, that the flat gray November sky was my sky, too, and it would be wise to start to look around. When, in the aftermath of the attacks, signs cropped up across the city with the centuries-old Latin motto of Paris, Fluctuat nec mergitur (“She is tempest-tossed but does not sink”), it resonated. And still does.
Some people have their mother’s eyes. And some, it turns out, grow up to have their mother’s romantic history.
People whose mothers have been married multiple times or have lived with multiple romantic partners are more likely to do so themselves, according to a new study published Tuesday in the journal PLoSOne. The longer people are exposed to their mother’s cohabitation, the more sexual partners they tend to have.
The authors looked at data from surveys of thousands of Americans followed for 24 years. Data on the fathers’ marriages wasn’t available.
The study authors write that, rather than economics or socialization, the most likely explanation was genetic. That is, some people have personality traits that make them better or worse at maintaining relationships. They might be depressed, have trust issues, or not regulate their emotions well. They then pass those traits on to their children, who go on to have similarly short-lived relationships.
Past research has already suggested that personality traits we inherit can influence our romantic relationships. People who are more depressed, for example, have been shown to have less stable relationships, while those who are more extroverted and agreeable tend to be more sought-after spouses.
[Read: Marriage proposals are stupid].
“It could be that mothers who have more partners don’t have great relationship skills, or don’t deal with conflict well, or have mental-health problems, each of which can undermine relationships and lead to instability,” Claire Kamp Dush, the lead author of the study and an associate professor of human sciences at Ohio State University, said in a statement. “Whatever the exact mechanisms, they may pass these characteristics on to their children, making their children’s relationships less stable.”
Of course, some mothers with multiple partners are perfectly well adjusted and happy. They simply like having lots of different partners and have no desire to marry. Still, past studies have shown that children of divorce are also more likely to get divorced themselves, in part because they tend to enter into marriage with lower levels of commitment. This new study—and others like it—suggests we mimic other elements of our parents’ romantic lives, beyond divorce.
“It’s not just divorce now,” Kamp Dush said. “Many children are seeing their parents divorce, start new cohabiting relationships, and having those end as well.”
On the plus side, if you do find your serious relationships ending, having your mother’s eyes might help you when you try to find a new one.
National Geographic magazine’s annual photo contest is still open for entries for just a couple more days, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 15. The grand-prize winner this year will receive $5,000—all winners will be announced in December. The folks at National Geographic were once again kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far and share them here with you. Captions are written by the individual photographers and lightly edited for content.
President Donald Trump appointed Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general last week, despite the fact that he cannot legally hold the office. While the president could fix his mistake with any lesser official and in any normal time, the attorney general is no lesser official and this is no normal time. Whitaker takes office during a time of extreme constitutional conflict involving investigations of the president, claims of abuse of law-enforcement and national-security powers, and combat between the executive and legislative branches. In order to prevent a breakdown of federal law enforcement, the White House should hurry to select a permanent attorney general before any more damage is done.
Trump named Whitaker to replace Jeff Sessions, who resigned at the request of the White House the day after the November midterm elections. In an example of the small-ball politics at work, Whitaker reportedly came to the attention of the White House because of his publicly expressed criticism of the special-counsel investigation into collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Before joining the Justice Department as Sessions’s chief of staff, Whitaker had urged that the inquiry’s scope be limited, saying that otherwise it could start to look like a “political fishing expedition.” After FBI agents raided the home of the Trump campaign’s former chair, Paul Manafort, Whitaker tweeted: “Do we want our Gov’t to ‘intimidate’ us?” and linked to a Fox News story that said the raid was “designed to intimidate.”
Trump, however, has declared that he barely knows Whitaker and has not discussed Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation with him. If so, the White House may have appointed Whitaker in a too-clever-by-half effort to limit the probe led by Mueller. When a senior government official resigns, dies, or cannot do his or her job, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows the president to appoint another official of the same federal agency “to perform the functions and duties of the vacant office temporarily in an acting capacity.” Whitaker’s appointment clearly meets the terms of the congressional statute.
[Paul Rosenzweig: It wouldn’t be easy for Whitaker to shut down the Trump investigations.]
But Whitaker’s appointment must still conform to a higher law: the Constitution. As the Supreme Court observed as recently as this year, Article II provides the exclusive method for the appointment of “Officers of the United States.” The president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the Supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” The appointments clause further allows that “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.”
The Constitution, therefore, recognizes only two types of federal officers. First, there are what the Supreme Court has come to recognize as “principal” officers, who require presidential appointment with Senate advice and consent. Second, there are “inferior” officers, posts for which Congress can choose to allow appointment by the president, courts, or even Cabinet members alone. As the nation’s top lawyer, the attorney general heads one of the four “great” departments of government, along with State, Defense, and Treasury, and the office has existed since the first Washington administration. The attorney general is clearly a principal officer of the government; if he or she is not, it is difficult to imagine what other officer is—the Supreme Court said as much in Morrison v. Olson, the 1988 case upholding the constitutionality of the independent counsel as an inferior officer because she reported to the attorney general as the principal officer.
Whitaker’s appointment violates the appointments clause’s clear text because he serves as attorney general, even if in an acting capacity, but never underwent Senate advice and consent. His defenders might consider the appointments clause to be an antiquated, ceremonial, or obsolete process that could not possibly support the massive number of officials in today’s administrative state. It might need to give way to the practical demands of staffing a modern executive branch with hundreds of thousands of officers and employees, more than a dozen major agencies, and hundreds of commissions, boards, and other odds and ends, with officers who might resign, die, or go AWOL without time to proceed through the 18th century’s idea of a human-resources manual. Defenders might rely on an 1898 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Eaton, which allowed for the temporary appointment of a vice-consul in Thailand “for a limited time, and under special and temporary conditions,” namely, the illness of the consul and the vast distance between the U.S. and Thailand. This is basically the approach of a 2003 Justice Department opinion approving the elevation of an assistant Office of Management and Budget director to acting director, and the likely reasoning of the White House in appointing Whitaker.
[Benjamin Wittes: It’s probably too late to stop Mueller.]
Elevating practical needs over constitutional meaning, however, is not an attitude usually adopted by conservatives. They generally believe that the original understanding of the Constitution held by those who ratified it should govern—Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court’s most committed originalist, set out precisely the reasoning of this article in a concurring opinion in last year’s National Labor Relations Board v. SW General, which struck down the recess appointment of an NLRB officer. Nor is it the view of the Supreme Court, which has continued to demand that all federal officers meet the appointments clause’s requirements. It is difficult to see John Roberts’s Court finding that the acting attorney general, responsible for all federal law enforcement in the nation, amounts to the same sort of officer as a vice-consul struggling in the hinterlands of Thailand before the days of air flight and instantaneous communications.
Nor was flexibility in appointments the view of those who wrote and approved the Constitution. Their views seem to find special relevance in today’s troubled times. The joint process for approving principal officers “would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity,” Alexander Hamilton explained in “Federalist No. 76.” The Senate’s approval serves as an important weapon in the unending struggle between the president and Congress, from which liberty results. “A man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests,” Hamilton wrote.
To prevent the president from using appointments to advance his private interests, just as Trump critics today charge, the Constitution prohibits filling the position of attorney general with a series of officials who never received Senate consent. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, Solicitor General Noel Francisco, the several assistant attorneys general, even any of the 93 U.S. attorneys in the nation’s major cities could all temporarily fill in for Sessions, as they received senatorial advice and consent. Whitaker, and any other Justice Department official or employee, cannot.
[Read: Democrats quickly confront the limits of their power to stop Trump.]
Our Founders were practical, too. They understood that “it might be necessary for the public service to fill [vacancies] without delay” when nine months could run between congressional sessions. So there is an exception to the appointments clause: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” Article II’s text allows unilateral executive appointments only when a vacancy occurs between the first and second years of a Congress, or between an election and a new Congress. If Trump wants to appoint Whitaker as attorney general, he could just wait for the recess between the Congress just ending and the one just elected, which will fill its seats in January 2019.
All of this matters, of course, because of the ongoing probe by Mueller, who reports to the attorney general. Because Sessions was recused (as a former foreign-policy adviser to the Trump campaign, he could have been a witness to any alleged conspiracy), Mueller has reported instead to Rosenstein, who serves as acting attorney general for that purpose—and who would continue to serve as Mueller’s direct supervisor should Whitaker’s appointment fail. The White House may have thought it had cleverly figured out a way to curtail the investigation by appointing Whitaker, but it has instead virtually assured that Mueller will complete his job in his own good time. With questions surrounding the ethics and now the legality of his appointment, Whitaker will have little political capital to expend in defending any limits on Mueller. And even if Whitaker displays terrible judgment and makes the fateful choice to cut off the probe, Mueller now has the grounds to refuse to obey the orders of an unconstitutional attorney general. Trump’s clever maneuvering has provided Mueller all the space he needs to finish his investigation and even hand over his files and concluding report to a Congress eager to launch impeachment proceedings.
Trump critics should not find joy in such a result. While a constitutionally handicapped attorney general remains in office, it is not only the special-counsel investigation that he cannot supervise. Every action of the Justice Department might fall before challenges to Whitaker’s appointment. That could render vulnerable not just the high matters of state, such as the investigation into the Trump campaign, but the regular enforcement of federal law by FBI agents and prosecutors across the nation, every day. Liberals no less than conservatives should oppose a hiatus in the execution of federal law. The only way to cure it is for the president to quickly nominate an attorney general from the deep pool of qualified candidates and for the Senate to speedily confirm him or her so that our officials can get back to the business of carrying out the nation’s laws.
Michelle Robinson didn’t shy away from her background in her application essay for Princeton University. The Chicago native wrote about the lack of college degrees in her family, and her father’s struggle with multiple sclerosis. While she was in the top 10 percent of her high-school class, a member of the National Honor Society, and the class treasurer—not to mention that her older brother was already enrolled there—she was far from a shoo-in at the Ivy League university. Less than 8 percent of the undergraduate students at Princeton were black, and it wasn’t exactly known as a mecca for low-income students. But her essay worked, and in the fall of 1981, she left Chicago for Princeton, New Jersey.
Of course, Robinson would go on to marry Barack Obama and serve as the first lady for eight years. In Becoming, her newly released memoir, she reflects on her experiences in high school and college. Just as her college essay embraced her background, so too does Becoming. And beyond revealing her own story, Michelle Obama’s tales of applying to and enrolling in Princeton are emblematic of an all-too-common narrative for low-income and minority students, particularly those at elite institutions.
[Read: The uncommon, requisite resolve of Michelle Obama]
Obama arrived on campus earlier than most other students. She had been identified as a good candidate for a three-week orientation program “meant to close a ‘preparation gap’” for certain incoming freshmen—specifically, low-income and minority students. But there are some things even a head start can’t prepare students for. “Princeton was extremely white and very male. There was no avoiding the facts,” she writes. “If during the orientation program we’d begun to feel some ownership of the space, we were now a glaring anomaly—poppy seeds in a bowl of rice.”
That is a shared sentiment among students of color on selective college campuses today. In 2015, Tavaris Sanders, a black student at Connecticut College, put the sentiment bluntly: “I’m always segregated in classes. I’m like the only black male in there, always, usually, most of the time,” he wrote. “I don’t belong here at all.”
[Read: The missing black students at elite American universities]
But there are often places of refuge for minority students, and Obama found hers at Princeton’s so-called Third World Center. As she writes, it “quickly became a kind of home base for me. It hosted parties and co-op meals. There were volunteer tutors to help with homework and spaces just to hang out.”
There she found students like herself, who had arrived on campus unaware of their disadvantages relative to their classmates. They weren’t afforded the privilege of SAT prep or AP classes in high school. They hadn’t attended boarding school, and so often weren’t as comfortable with being away from home. “It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you’d never played anything but an instrument with broken keys,” she writes. So, to adapt and overcome, she leaned on a community that was experiencing the same struggles she was.
The administrators, though, probably weren’t too fond of this setup, she says—with the majority of the minority students hanging out with one another. The university was after campus diversity—the compelling governmental interest that had been outlined in a Supreme Court decision just a few years earlier. As Obama puts it, “The ideal would be to achieve something resembling what’s often shown on college brochures—smiling students working and socializing in neat, ethnically blended groups.”
But the dynamics on campus never quite resembled the glossy brochure images. “Even today,” Obama writes, “with white students continuing to outnumber students of color on college campuses, the burden of assimilation is put largely on the shoulders of minority students.” And in her experience, she writes, “it’s a lot to ask.”
For black students such as Obama, affirmative action was a constant elephant in the room, she writes. Though they knew they were qualified, “you could almost read the scrutiny in the gaze of certain students and even professors,” she writes. And the practice of affirmative action recently received a renewed wave of scrutiny as Harvard University, where Obama’s daughter Malia is now a sophomore, is being sued for allegedly discriminating against Asian American applicants.
More than three decades later, with her own undergraduate years firmly in the past, Michelle Obama’s struggles as a black student at Princeton are eerily similar to the experiences of students today. Nestled within Becoming is a long-held truth about American higher education: Supporting students—particularly low-income and minority students—once they’re on campus matters at least as much as getting them there in the first place.
President Donald Trump’s postelection purge is poised to continue apace. First, the frequent Trump target Attorney General Jeff Sessions was unceremoniously ejected from office. Now, according to The Washington Post, the frequent Trump target Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, is likely to be fired in the next few weeks.
“The president has grumbled for months about what he views as Nielsen’s lackluster performance on immigration enforcement and is believed to be looking for a replacement who will implement his policy ideas with more alacrity,” the Post reports, noting that Trump canceled a visit to troops on the Mexican border with Nielsen this week. (Of course, Trump’s decisions over the past few days show that it doesn’t take much to get him to cancel a visit to the military.)
There’s been no shortage of leaks about Trump’s displeasure with Nielsen. The president, as Lindsey Graham likes to repeat, deserves to have Cabinet members in whom he has faith. And whereas Sessions’s ouster raised concerns among people who thought it was a way to topple Special Counsel Robert Mueller, hardly anyone will mourn Nielsen’s demise. But if Trump thinks replacing her will fix his immigration policy, he has a rude surprise coming.
[Read: The Trump administration’s shifting story on family separations]
That’s because the problem isn’t Nielsen’s ability to execute on Trump’s immigration policies. The problem is the immigration policies themselves. For the most part, they are impractical, ineffective, or illegal, and they are designed to solve phantom problems.
Consider Trump’s recent panic over the caravan of immigrants slowly wending its way northward through Mexico. First, the group is far away from the United States—still roughly 1,500 miles from the consensus destination of Tijuana. Second, it is numerically small compared with the overall picture of illegal immigration. (Border Patrol apprehended a little more than 300,000 people at the border in 2017; the caravan is estimated to be in the single-digit thousands.) Third, despite Trump’s fearmongering, illegal immigration continues to decline.
But there is illegal immigration, even if the scale is not commensurate to Trump’s rhetoric. The problem there is that the policies Trump wants aren’t effective or practicable. There’s the border wall, which experts say is unlikely to stop immigration, and which in any case would take years and billions of dollars to construct—billions of dollars that Congress refuses to appropriate, a barrier that’s out of Nielsen’s control.
In the absence of the wall, and as part of his preelection immigration-messaging push, Trump ordered at least 5,200 soldiers to the border in October—roughly the same number as U.S. service members in Iraq—and has said that number could reach 15,000. But it’s unclear what their purpose is. They can’t apprehend border crossers, so their role is in support and administration. Moreover, the caravan is still hundreds of miles away. So as Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Helene Cooper report, the deployed troops are sitting around in brutal heat, eating MREs, without much to do, and it’s costing taxpayers millions of dollars.
Trump has also announced plans to drastically curtail asylum applications at the border. But no matter how draconian the administration’s policies are, they don’t deter all the immigrants headed northward. Members of the caravan aren’t unaware of Trump’s views, but they’re desperate enough to try to reach the U.S. anyway. Nielsen doesn’t have control over the “push” factors that drive immigrants from their homes, especially those from the Northern Triangle.
Besides, as Dara Lind reports, it’s unclear whether the new asylum restrictions are legal. If they fail to stand up in court, they’d join a string of previous Trump immigration policies struck down by judges. The Supreme Court finally approved a much-reduced version of Trump’s Muslim travel ban after lower courts rejected earlier, more sweeping versions. The administration’s decision to separate children from their parents at the border also drew a flurry of litigation, though political pressure forced the White House to withdraw the policy before any court could. When the administration then announced it would attempt to incarcerate children in violation of an existing court agreement, a judge slapped the move down. Once again, there’s nothing Nielsen can do about any of this.
[Read: There is no easy way for Trump to stop the latest caravan.]
Trump has pushed Nielsen to do more. For example, he’s toyed with the idea of closing the border altogether, which might or might not be illegal but would in any case be a logistical and practical nightmare. Explaining this sort of thing to the president only makes him dislike and distrust Nielsen more.
At the root of the conflict between Nielsen and Trump is the president’s general distrust of her as not a member of his ideological team. She is an immigration hard-liner, but she previously worked in the George W. Bush administration, a red flag for Trump.
Trump’s aides can generally be divided into two factions: true believers and managers. The first group are Trump backers, while the others are technocrats focused on running government departments. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is a true believer; his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, was pushed out because he was a manager. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is a manager. Sessions began as a true believer who proved too much of a manager for Trump’s tastes for refusing to railroad the Russia probe.
Nielsen, with her Bush pedigree and her comparatively cautious approach to implementation, is theoretically a manager, though the debacle of the child-separation policy shows that she hasn’t been an especially effective administrator. Nielsen stood at the White House lectern and tried to claim there was “not a policy” of family separation when not only was it manifestly clear that there was, but other administration members had said there was. It seems likely that if Trump fires Nielsen, he will try to replace her with more of a true believer.
Whereas some Trump critics who disliked Sessions were worried that Trump was firing him just to get to Mueller, there’s no reason to expect such a groundswell of support for Nielsen. Her hard-line policies are detested by progressive immigration watchers, but she hasn’t been effective enough to win over Trump loyalists. The only person who seems to be standing up for her is White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who preceded her at the Department of Homeland Security and then helped install her as secretary.
Yet Kelly’s own position is tenuous, so that may not help Nielsen. ABC News reported Tuesday that Trump is close to axing Kelly. Rumors of Kelly’s demise have circulated for more than a year now; Tillerson hung on well after he was seen as a lame duck, too, so it’s possible Nielsen might survive simply due to Trump’s hatred of actually firing anyone. If so, immigration policy will keep limping along.
Or else Trump will follow through and get rid of Nielsen, replacing her with a true believer. And if he does? A new secretary is likely to be just as hamstrung by the impracticalities and illegalities of Trump’s policy ideas as his predecessor has been.
Clothing brands have been smuggling spandex onto the legs of unsuspecting men.
“I definitely didn’t explicitly understand what I was buying,” Austin Ray, a 36-year-old writer in Atlanta, told me. What he was buying were Gap Soft Wear Jeans in Straight Fit with GapFlex, which is a nine-word phrase to describe a two-word trend: stretch jeans. “Apparently I didn’t think too hard about what those words meant,” he said.
My friend David Covucci, a 34-year-old Brooklyn editor, also didn’t understand exactly what he was getting into when he picked a pair of Banana Republic Rapid Movement Denim jeans off a clearance rack, but the pants immediately felt different to him. “I knew something was up, but I didn’t Google until I got home,” he said.
If you wear women’s clothing, it might come as a surprise that a little bit of stretch is a relatively new concept for most men. Stretchy jeans have been common in women’s fashion for at least 20 years, but they’ve only found traction in the men’s mass market in the past five. Now nearly every major menswear brand offers at least one stretch option, and many go beyond the product’s tight-fit reputation with looser cuts.
To sell these jeans to men, though, brands face a conundrum common in the fashion and personal-care industries: How do you convince guys to buy something they believe is for women? In the case of stretch denim, brands have found success by obfuscating what their product actually is, allowing them to recast stretch pants as a tool of masculinity. Whether it’s GapFlex, Rapid Movement Denim, Wrangler’s Advanced Comfort, or just not mentioning the new fabrication at all, the theory seems to be that what men don’t know about their jeans can’t hurt them. Intentionally or not, these branding decisions have helped change the modern idea of what it means to look like a man.
Denim is traditionally 100 percent cotton, but mixing in 1 or 2 percent elastane (the generic name for Lycra or spandex) fibers gives jeans a softer feel and helps ease the adversarial relationship between the durable, rugged textile and tender bits of the human body. This particular fabrication is the relatively new result of advances in textile production, and it found its first home on the consumer market in the mid-2000s, when women’s fashion shifted its focus to skinny jeans and away from a more relaxed, boot-cut look. Women embraced the change quickly. You could be trendy and also be sitting down. It was a revelation.
Men, who saw fashion bend toward slim fits for them soon after it did for women, have been considerably more resistant to the change, which is what has prompted the euphemistic trickery from brands. For something as innocuous as slightly less restrictive pants, stretch jeans have caused a lot of hand-wringing among men’s-fashion types over the past couple of years. Much of it is bound up in what constitutes an appropriate performance of manhood, and whether suffering for fashion, something long considered a feminine burden, is something masculinity requires.
[Read: How cycling clothes opened doors for women]
In opposition to stretch jeans stood the popularity of selvedge denim, an old-fashioned manufacturing method whose stiff, rough product found an ardent following among menswear enthusiasts online that hit a fever pitch a few years ago—long after women had largely embraced the ability to painlessly sit down. According to Matt Sebra, the style director of GQ magazine, the popularity of selvedge required men to buy into an overtly masochistic idea of what it means to be authentic and masculine. “You get this stiff-ass pair of jeans and people would tell you, ‘Oh, wear them every day for six months and don’t wash them,’” Sebra says. “The first two weeks, you’d need the jaws of life to get out of them, and you were just sweaty and scratched up.”
Nancy Deihl, a professor of fashion history at New York University, echoed Sebra’s feeling that the slow embrace of elastane among men was at least in part the result of how it violated the belief that masculinity requires testing and achievement. “Stretch jeans go against ideas of male authenticity—the Marlboro Man image that jeans are supposed to have,” she says.
So, the thinking went, what if the jeans were no longer stretch—what if they were centered around the practical advantages of having a full range of motion?
There are two main ways that clothing companies have chosen to rebrand sitting comfortably as an activity for men. The first is recoding stretch denim as an aid in athletic performance, even though modern fashion jeans aren’t intended to be worn for anything resembling exercise. It’s difficult to parse what kind of rapid motion Banana Republic expects its customers to undertake in Rapid Movement denim, for example, but evoking ideas of athleticism is a common tactic for brands trying to make a case to men for a historically feminine product, according to Ben Barry, the chair of the Ryerson School of Fashion. Invoking athleticism also helps conjure the comfort and ease of athleisure, which is used in other parts of men’s fashion—dress shoes with flexible, cushioned soles, for example—to promise buyers a more casual experience in disguise.
Nathaniel Freeman, Banana Republic’s head of men’s denim, told me the name sprang out of fit testing for the line, during which “a team member put the garment on and started doing lunges down the hall, telling everyone how comfortable and flexible they were.” (Other stretch-jean makers wouldn’t comment on their gendered brand strategies.) It was smart of Banana Republic to go with that impulse, according to Barry. “Associating stretch denim with sports lets men know it allows high performance, that it’s a fabric that’s staked in athletic wear, that it’s purely about durability and breathability,” he says. That gives wearers some distance from the show-off nature of women’s skinny jeans. “Of course it’s not about showing off or revealing the body, which would be associated with femininity,” Barry says.
Sebra agrees that drawing an association between sleeker silhouettes and sports helps men get over the trepidation they might have about displaying their bodies. “The idea of men’s bodies being shown off or illustrated through their clothes is a concept that’s relatively new to a lot of men because there are still so many hang-ups about the male form,” he says. In that sense, athletically euphemized stretch jeans might even be a bit of a gateway drug—the thing that helps men interested in fashion get over the hump and get comfortable with clothes that actually fit.
[Read: A brief history of unisex fashion]
As Barry points out, though, there’s nothing inherent in slim jeans that’s masculine or feminine. “Fashion upholds gender binaries by associating silhouettes, fabrics, and colors with masculinity or femininity. The ways in which fashion has gendered styles as masculine and feminine shift across history and geography, or even among simultaneous subcultures,” he says. Take, for example, revolution-era France or the United States during the 1970s: Men in tights and ultra-tight pants, respectively, were the aesthetic norm.
So in trying to reimagine stretch denim as athletic, brands take part in a long tradition of shifting what we expect masculinity and femininity to look like. Those boundaries are always in flux, even if the concepts feel fairly static to the casual observer. Think about how quickly the personal-grooming standards denoted by the term metrosexual became commonplace among straight men, and how antiquated that term already feels just 15 years later. Sometimes people are ready for a change and they just need to find a way to talk about it.
The other idea that marketers have invoked to bring men over to the dark side of stretch pants is comfort, which appeals to a slightly less active, slightly less aesthetically concerned conception of modern masculinity. For men who wish they could wear their sweatpants to the office, both traditional brands and upstarts like the Kickstarter darling Alday are here to give them the opportunity. In doing that, they indulge the masculine belief that men should think about how they look as little as possible. There’s clearly a market for such a product: Alday’s Kickstarter sought to raise $15,000, but it ended up with more than $67,000 in support from backers who want to try a denim product that’s knitted like pajamas.
For plenty of men, that’s an intriguing proposition. Once they experience the difference between stretch and conventional denim, there’s no going back. Ray was delighted to find out that his jeans were more forgiving, even if he hadn’t expected it when he bought them online. “I remember I walked into the living room and was basically yelling at my wife about how much I loved them,” he says. “She confirmed to me they looked like regular jeans, and I was good with that.”
Covucci, on the other hand, had a moment of trepidation. “I wondered, ‘Did I buy jeggings? Am I a stretch-jeans guy?’” he says. It turns out he is. “They’re more comfortable, and it’s 2018. I’m a man on the go.”
One of the great ironies of the 2018 midterm elections is that the Democratic Party’s emergent stars—Representatives Kyrsten Sinema and Beto O’Rourke—likely would have remained nameless had they tabled their Senate bids in favor of another term in the House.
This isn’t only because Senate candidates can attract a brighter spotlight than they would as one of hundreds in the lower chamber. It’s because the House Democratic caucus is increasingly viewed as an unfriendly environment for rising talent. Against a nearly two-decade-old leadership structure and term-limitless committee assignments, more and more members have begun to eye the Senate or state office as the antidote to their long-shot prospects of scaling ranks in the House.
That reality has been brought into relief in recent days, as House Democrats scramble to prepare for internal leadership elections later this month. A handful of members are attempting to deny Nancy Pelosi the votes she needs to be speaker, arguing that yet another term of septuagenarian reign—presumably with Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn at the top, as well—would ignore the desire for change voiced by voters earlier this month.
The problem, of course, is that Pelosi’s detractors have failed to put forth a viable alternative. But they argue that this, too, is an indictment of current leadership: It’s not so much that the caucus lacks a solid bench, their thinking goes, but more that its most talented members have been given little opportunity to flex their muscles. “The notion that there’s no one more experienced than Nancy Pelosi is a self-fulfilling prophecy because you can’t have experience if you can’t gain experience,” one senior Democratic aide, who requested anonymity for fear of backlash, told me. “Our best members will keep leaving when they continue to see there’s no movement at the top.”
It’s an odd quandary for the party that consistently dominates the Millennial vote and whose last successful presidential nominee campaigned on a message of hope and change. But if current dynamics stand, Democrats can likely expect yet another Pelosi-led term. This, even as a raft of young lawmakers, many of whom explicitly pledged to oppose Pelosi in their campaigns, makes it way to Washington. It’s an indication that while Democrats may not have a young-voter deficit, when it comes to leadership, they certainly have a young-member one. And party veterans worry that because of this, especially ahead of 2020, they are hamstringing a crucial incubator of future leaders.
“The fact that Paul Ryan was a vice-presidential candidate just because he was [House] budget chairman is pretty impressive,” former Representative Patrick Murphy, a 35-year-old who left the House to challenge Senator Marco Rubio in 2016, told me. “We’re not giving those opportunities to our members … I think it’s led to a lot of bigger problems in the party.”
Members and aides frustrated with leadership point to competitive races down the ballot as evidence of the strength of their bench. Running for Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair, for example, are Representatives Cheri Bustos of Illinois, Suzan DelBene and Denny Heck of Washington, and Sean Patrick Maloney of New York (though Maloney, oddly, hasn’t paid a dollar of his $125,000 in DCCC dues, according to records shared with The Atlantic). Except for Heck, who is 66, all members are in their 50s. Bustos and Maloney both represent pro–Donald Trump districts, and Bustos is the first woman her district has sent to Congress. The race is shaping up to be exactly the kind of contentious election leadership is hoping to avoid, but one Pelosi naysayers say is necessary in achieving a stronger caucus.
And then there’s Hakeem Jeffries running for caucus chair. Alongside Bustos, the New York member chaired the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee ahead of the midterm elections. At 48 years old, Jeffries was considered a potent challenger to Pelosi for the speaker’s gavel. Had he won, he would have been the House’s first black speaker. According to multiple sources, his candidacy has sparked some ire among women in the Congressional Black Caucus, who had hoped to see one of their own, Representative Barbara Lee of California, run the caucus. Still, Jeffries is largely seen as a shoo-in, especially as whispers of a future speakership abound.
In other words, Democrats believe their caucus has no shortage of talent. At the same time, however, up-and-comers like Bustos and Jeffries are battling, put simply, for some of the least influential positions in the House. Pelosi’s critics believe that’s by design. “If you’re a new member, those positions can seem like an exciting prospect, but you quickly realize what their limitations are and how hard it is to rise up from them,” the senior Democratic aide said. “So you find yourself in these made-up positions that don’t pass the smell test as real leadership opportunities, and then you wake up one day and you’re Joe Crowley, sitting in the caucus-chair position for so long and then realizing it’s too late.”
Equally frustrating for the Democrats I spoke to is that this is not at all the case for House Republicans. Unlike Democrats, for example, Republicans term-limit their committee chairmen, making it possible for young and talented members to take over powerful committees early in their tenure. As Murphy, the former representative, pointed out, Paul Ryan is a good case study in the benefits of this policy: Ryan was only 41 when he took over the Budget Committee, a position that allowed him to build a national profile and attract attention from party leaders. Less than five years later, he gaveled in as speaker of the House.
“The Republican rules when it comes to term limits for chairmen is just how we view leadership,” National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) Spokesman Matt Gorman told me. “It encourages younger members to step up so we don’t see the stagnation we’ve seen on the other side.”
There’s also broader institutional support for young members. Like Ryan, 53-year-old House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—likely to be the GOP’s minority leader in the new term—was identified early on by the NRCC as a potential leader. Then–Majority Leader John Boehner appointed him as a freshman in 2006 to the powerful Steering Committee; two years later, he was named chief deputy minority whip.
Put another way, the likely leaders of the GOP in the 116th Congress—McCarthy and the likely minority whip, Steve Scalise—were freshmen when Pelosi was previously speaker.
“The Dems talk a big game about Millennials, but then send them to the back of the line when they get elected to Congress,” said Fritz Brogan, a chair of Maverick PAC, a group that aims to elect young Republicans to Congress.
Yet for every Democrat opposed to current leadership, there’s another one—or two, or even three—content to maintain the status quo. Pelosi’s detractors are pushing for a rules change that would require a speaker candidate to win 218 votes, rather than a simple majority of the caucus, to move to a floor-wide vote. But on Monday afternoon, a group of 14 Pelosi allies circulated a letter expressing their opposition to such a change. Those members argued that changing the rules would “empower a small minority of Members to override how we use our Caucus to select Democratic leaders in the House.”
“It would thus invite small groups of Members to form in order to extract this or that concession—a committee or subcommittee chairmanship, a party office, or a legislative commitment—as the price for not holding up the entire process of legislative governance,” they wrote.
Other pro-Pelosi members have stepped forward in recent days to reiterate their support for the California Democrat. In his own “Dear Colleague” letter on Monday, Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the Oversight Committee ranking member, stressed to colleagues that opposing Pelosi would simply bolster Republican efforts to “vilify our leader.”
“Some have suggested that Nancy Pelosi has been our leader for too long,” Cummings wrote. “But most House Democrats have never served in the majority, and only a handful have ever chaired a full committee. At this moment, we need her experience and effectiveness more than ever.”
As the debate over Pelosi’s future continues, some young members are choosing to focus on paths forward that don’t necessarily include leadership. Institutional support is nice, 38-year-old Arizona Representative Ruben Gallego told me. But ultimately it’s up to members to carve out a name for themselves—a task even more crucial when leadership stays static.
“You don’t need leadership to help you get a position or gain prominence within the caucus,” Gallego told me. “If you’re aggressive enough with fund-raising, with your social-media presence, and going on cable news … leadership becomes more and more irrelevant.”
All the same, he said, no one is entitled to a top position in the caucus. Pelosi et al., he said, “lose nothing by coming to talk to us about what they actually want to accomplish.”
“They can’t just expect a vote because they’ve been doing this forever.”
The life of a political spouse is a grueling parade of thankless labor. There are endless speeches, luncheons, galas, campaign events, and fund-raisers. Amid the flurry, though, one constant emerges: the complete surrendering of one’s private life. To assume such a role is to become a public accessory in the eyes of a constituency, a variable to be calculated and then scrutinized.
In her new memoir, the hyper-surveyed former first lady Michelle Obama takes great care to enumerate the roles she spent her life preparing for: dutiful daughter. Star high-school student. Dedicated Princeton undergraduate. Studious Harvard Law attendee. Diligent lawyer. Loving wife and mother. Never did first lady—or even political spouse, that more nebulous category—enter her aspirational lexicon.
The book, aptly titled Becoming, offers a sometimes surprisingly intimate look at the life of the former first lady, born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson. Beginning with her childhood years and ending with reflections on the current administration, Becoming covers Obama’s transformation from a young overachiever on the South Side of Chicago to one of the most formidable political figures in recent history.
Obama writes with a refreshing candor, as though her keen awareness of her celebrity is matched only by her eagerness to shed the exhausting veneer that helped enable her husband’s political rise. “My husband is making his own adjustments to life after the White House, catching his own breath,” she writes at the end of the preface. “And here I am, in this new place, with a lot I want to say.”
Michelle Obama challenged the archetype of the political spouse in spectacular fashion. The accomplished career woman and mother was reluctant to assume the spotlight—“I had to take off my wife hat and put on my citizen hat,” she recently told Oprah of the decision to support her husband’s campaign—but outspoken and captivating once she did. “I talked about everything—about my brother and the values we were raised with, about this hotshot lawyer I met at work, the guy who’d stolen my heart with his groundedness and his vision for the world,” she writes of the speeches she made during the early parts of her husband’s campaign. She attracted large crowds of supporters. And, of course, there was that small, complicating detail: Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, girl of the South Side, is black.
Her specific burden was such: A black woman campaigning alongside the first black man to secure a major-party nomination for the presidency, she was unwavering in her support—and in her countenance—partly because she had no choice. Barack Obama had to work twice as hard, as the adage goes, and so, too, did Michelle. Where success had once been a quantifiable entity for the high-achieving Michelle Robinson, Michelle Obama had to repeatedly recalibrate her affect to satisfy an electorate whose ideas about black women remain shaped by white supremacy. She had to be articulate but not intimidating, classy but not uppity, warm but not loose, sentimental but not hot-blooded. “I was getting worn out, not physically, but emotionally. The punches hurt, even if I understood that they had little to do with who I really was as a person,” she writes. “It was as if there was some cartoon version of me out there wreaking havoc, a woman I kept hearing about but didn’t know—a too-tall, too-forceful, ready-to-emasculate Godzilla of a political wife named Michelle Obama.”
Becoming is at its most striking when it offers readers a glimpse at the preternaturally composed former first lady’s moments of fear and frustration. In one passage, about the rise of public attention after the Iowa caucus preceding the 2008 election, she contrasts Barack’s thick-skinned optimism with her own tendency toward self-doubt in the face of external criticism:
We are built differently, my husband and I, which is why one of us chose politics and the other did not. He was aware of the rumors and misperceptions that got pumped like toxic vapor into the campaign, but rarely did any of it bother him … He’s just not someone who’s easily rattled or thrown off course by anything as abstract as doubt or hurt.
I, on the other hand, was still learning about public life. I considered myself a confident, successful woman, but I was also the same kid who used to tell people she planned to be a pediatrician and devoted herself to setting perfect attendance at school … Over time, I’d gotten better about not measuring my self-worth strictly in terms of standard, by-the-book achievement, but I did tend to believe that if I worked diligently and honestly, I’d avoid the bullies and always be seen as myself.
This belief, though, was about to come undone.
It’s a notable reflection on her own shifting interiority. The memoir goes on to detail the wave of virulent criticism that met Michelle Obama following Barack Obama’s clinching of Iowa. The former first lady zeroes in on the responses to a comment she made during two February 2008 speeches in Wisconsin. “What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something: For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,” she said then. “And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I’ve seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it’s made me proud.”
Her remark about feeling pride in her country’s citizenry was, perhaps unsurprisingly, taken out of context and circulated heavily. She was accused of being un-American, of attacking the country, and of being unpatriotic. She was deemed, in a word, unfit. A “pernicious seed had been planted,” she writes, “a perception of me as disgruntled and vaguely hostile, lacking some expected level of grace.”
This specific manufactured controversy served as a clear microcosm of the public’s suspicion of the half-Kenyan senator with the funny name and his strident African American wife, whom some accused of overshadowing him. These charges predated the birther movement, but their subtext was clear. Where Barack Obama had to contend primarily with anti-blackness and xenophobia, Michelle Obama bore the added weight of racialized sexism. “Somehow I’ve been caricatured as this emasculating wife,” she told Newsweek that same February. “Barack and I laugh about that. It’s just sort of, like, do you think anyone could emasculate Barack Obama? Really now.”
It was a deft understatement of the charge’s impact, but the idea that black women with thoughts and feelings of their own somehow dilute their husbands’ masculinity is a widely propagated, pernicious myth. Becoming addresses the suffocating trope of the angry black woman early in the text. “Since stepping reluctantly into public life, I’ve been held up as the most powerful woman in the world and taken down as an ‘angry black woman,’” Obama writes in the book’s preface. “I’ve wanted to ask my detractors which part of that phrase matters to them most—is it ‘angry’ or ‘black’ or ‘woman’?”
These are, of course, concerns that no first lady before Obama had to contend with. No other first lady, or wife of a presidential candidate, has been called “an ape in heels” or parodied as an Afro-rocking terrorist complete with a machine gun. Even so, white political wives, among them Heidi Cruz and even the one-time Barack Obama opponent Hillary Clinton, have admitted that the unyielding rigors of the post can sometimes outweigh the benefits—no matter how deeply a wife believes in her husband’s political vision. Remaining composed in the heat of a standard campaign cycle is never a small feat.
But navigating the jagged terrain of American politics with the added threat of American racism hanging over your family is a punishingly Herculean task. It requires an uncommon resolve. It’s not surprising that Michelle Obama would have felt overwhelmed by the unrelenting negativity hurled at her and her daughters during her husband’s campaigns and presidency. What is startling about Becoming, however, is her willingness to admit to—and detail—these moments of doubt, of fear, of anxiety. After more than a decade of scrutiny, Michelle Obama is now inviting a close read of her life.
It’s worth noting, of course, that perceptions of Obama eventually shifted. By the end of her husband’s tenure as president, the first lady would be hailed as a political darling, as “the closer” on Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Obama would be asked repeatedly to run for office herself and likened to the world’s best living performer. “Let’s face it,” Barack Obama said in a video message played at the rapper Jay-Z’s induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, in June 2017. “We both have wives who are significantly more popular than we are.”
Like much of the couple’s banter, the former president’s joking address to the Brooklyn rapper was a nod to Michelle Obama’s conspicuous excellence. In the time since the two have left Pennsylvania Avenue, the former first lady has given a spate of commencement speeches, spoken regularly on panels and at conferences, and commented on the current administration’s efforts to roll back the health initiatives she launched while her husband was in office. She had not, however, condemned the current administration wholeheartedly prior to Becoming’s release. Her rebukes of Donald Trump’s agenda begin with his suggestion that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, which Michelle Obama says in the book put her family at risk.
But it’s her recounting of the inauguration that reveals the most about the former first lady’s relationship to the new president—and to the bloc of voters who elected him because of how openly he spewed propaganda that questioned the Obamas’ Americanness and humanity. “Someone from Barack’s administration might have said that the optics there were bad—that what the public saw didn’t reflect the president’s reality or ideals. But in this case, maybe it did,” she writes of seeing the overwhelmingly white crowd at Trump’s inauguration. “Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment: I stopped even trying to smile.”
Refusing to smile is a small protest. It is not, in the broader context of American history, the most grandiose rebellion. So much of Michelle Obama’s subversion of the role handed to her exists in a similar space: that of symbolism. To many black women in America, her ascension to the post signified something—even if that something wasn’t always clear or widely agreed upon. Her celebrity, nearly Oprahesque in its inspirational bent, came to exist beyond the universe of her husband’s political decisions.
Becoming is still a political memoir; it functions partly to solidify Barack Obama’s legacy as a complex and multilayered milestone for the country. The book makes the case for the Obama family as definitively American, for Michelle Obama’s concerns as worries that derive from the universal anxieties of marriage and motherhood. Still, Becoming is satisfying for the quiet moments in which Mrs. Obama, the woman who supported a black man named Barack all the way to the presidency, gets to let down her hair and breathe as Michelle LaVaughn Robinson, girl of the South Side.
Two days after yet another mass shooting, President Donald Trump on Friday issued a proclamation addressing mass migration. “The continuing and threatening mass migration of aliens with no basis for admission into the United States through our southern border,” he wrote, “has precipitated a crisis and undermines the integrity of our borders. I therefore must take immediate action to protect the national interest.”
The mass shooting, like most mass shootings, was committed by an American citizen, a white male. There’s not much detailed information about who is part of the so-called caravan on the way to the southern border. But it seems the migrants hail mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, where femicide rates are the highest in the world and government protection is nonexistent. Chances are, they resemble my clients at the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program. People like Maria, who was kidnapped by her abuser, an auxiliary for the Honduran authorities, at a young age and subjected to years of rape. And like Jennifer, who was forced to flee El Salvador after gang members threatened to kill her and her family because they had encouraged youths to join the Evangelical Church instead of the gangs. (I’ve used pseudonyms to protect my clients’ anonymity.)
Our clients sit in our office for hours at a time and share horrific stories of the violence they suffered in their home countries, and of the children, parents, and siblings they were forced to leave behind. Despite everything they have lived through, they bring tremendous warmth and generosity. They also bring their tremendous faith in America, a country that they believe can and should offer them protection.
[Read: Today’s migrant flow is different.]
Trump’s proclamation and new interim regulations fly in the face of that belief. The administration plans to restrict asylum only to those who present themselves at ports of entry; people entering the country via the southern border in any other way would be limited to much more circumscribed forms of relief that would not include reuniting with their family members, obtaining a green card, or a path to citizenship. The administration also plans to enter into an agreement with Mexico to force asylum seekers traveling through that country to claim protection there instead of in the United States.
At first blush, these rules may not seem extreme. But the “ports of entry” restriction ignores the fact that Customs and Border Protection routinely turns away people even after they have asked to apply for asylum. As one woman told the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, “I told [the CBP official] that I wasn’t from here, that I was from Honduras, and that I wanted asylum. He told me that there was no longer asylum for Hondurans … I started to explain why I couldn’t return and what I was fleeing from, but he interrupted me and said that everyone comes with the same story, that he couldn’t help me.”
The administration’s Mexico agreement, moreover, is not a viable solution. The asylum system in Mexico is still nascent; the Mexican Commission for Refugee Assistance, for example, employs fewer than 60 adjudication officers, and they are severely overworked. Asylum grant rates are notoriously low, especially for children, and many applicants are summarily returned to their home countries without being properly screened for protection.
[Matt Gallagher: How to salvage Congress]
Even as the Trump administration’s proposals tarnish America’s reputation as a country welcoming to “huddled masses,” they directly contravene the spirit and letter of the Refugee Act of 1980, in which Congress “declare[d] that it is the historic policy of the United States to respond to the urgent needs of persons subject to persecution in their homelands.” The statute specifically provides that people can apply for asylum if they are “physically present” in the U.S., “whether or not [they arrived] at a designated port of arrival … irrespective of [their] status.”
And while the administration contends that people arriving from Central America “appear to have no lawful basis for admission into our country,” asylum law does not require any such thing. (Here the administration seems to be conflating asylum-seeking and unlawful entry.)
The president is also flouting global norms. As the U.S. Supreme Court itself has recognized, “[O]ne of Congress’ primary purposes [with the 1980 Refugee Act] was to bring United States refugee law into conformance with the 1967 United Nations Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, to which the United States acceded in 1968.”
What could justify the administration’s decision to, in effect, unilaterally rewrite asylum law?
The president’s lawyers are mainly invoking Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which gives the executive broad authority to suspend or restrict “the entry of any aliens or any class of aliens” if their entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” (They invoked the same section in defense of the travel ban.)
But the administration has provided no basis for the assertion that keeping asylum seekers out is in the national interest. At least, no official basis. On social media and on television, President Trump and members of his administration have suggested that the Central American migrants headed to the border are violent criminals and that the “caravan” has been infiltrated by Middle Eastern terrorists.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s caravan hysteria led to this.]
The Trump administration makes asylum seem like an immigration-law loophole. In truth, it’s not at all easy to obtain. Under the expedited removal process, in place since 1996, individuals arriving in the country without proper documentation or with fraudulent documents can be returned immediately to their countries of origin, without court hearings, unless they can establish a “credible” fear of persecution or torture. In general, asylum applicants must prove that they have suffered or have reason to fear serious harm on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group, and that their home country cannot or will not offer them protection. In 2016, the grant rate for asylum cases in immigration court was about 43 percent.
Moreover, the asylum system already has built-in safeguards to—how shall I put this?—protect the national interest. People who have provided material support to terrorism, who have been convicted of serious crimes in the U.S., or who have committed serious nonpolitical crimes outside the U.S., as well as people who have persecuted others or have residency in a third country, are all barred from asylum. Recent decisions by the Board of Immigration Appeals have defined these categories broadly; for example, one applicant who was forced to cook and clean for a guerrilla group against her will in 1990 was barred from asylum this summer.
Indeed, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom found in a recent report that the current system is already too rigid, too impersonal, and too quick to deny claims. If the administration wants to make the system stronger, it should focus on hiring more asylum officers and immigration judges to tackle the backlog.
The administration’s bluster about chaos and confusion at the border and the threats posed by asylum seekers is just that—bluster. An overly deferential judiciary might buy its arguments, but a fair one could not.
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