Apparently fueled by anti-Semitism and the bogus narrative that outside forces are scheming to exterminate the white race, Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish congregants as they gathered inside their Pittsburgh synagogue, federal prosecutors allege. But despite long-running international efforts to debunk the idea of a “white genocide,” Facebook was still selling advertisers the ability to market to those with an interest in that myth just days after the bloodshed.
Earlier this week, The Intercept was able to select “white genocide conspiracy theory” as a pre-defined “detailed targeting” criterion on the social network to promote two articles to an interest group that Facebook pegged at 168,000 users large and defined as “people who have expressed an interest or like pages related to White genocide conspiracy theory.” The paid promotion was approved by Facebook’s advertising wing. After we contacted the company for comment, Facebook promptly deleted the targeting category, apologized, and said it should have never existed in the first place.
Our reporting technique was the same as one used by the investigative news outlet ProPublica to report, just over one year ago, that in addition to soccer dads and Ariana Grande fans, “the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of ‘Jew hater,’ ‘How to burn jews,’ or, ‘History of “why jews ruin the world.”’” The report exposed how little Facebook was doing to vet marketers, who pay the company to leverage personal information and inclinations in order to gain users’ attention — and who provide the foundation for its entire business model. At the time, ProPublica noted that Facebook “said it would explore ways to fix the problem, such as limiting the number of categories available or scrutinizing them before they are displayed to buyers.” Rob Leathern, a Facebook product manager, assured the public, “We know we have more work to do, so we’re also building new guardrails in our product and review processes to prevent other issues like this from happening in the future.”
Leathern’s “new guardrails” don’t seem to have prevented Facebook from manually approving our ad buy the same day it was submitted, despite its explicit labeling as “White Supremacy – Test.”
From the outside, it’s impossible to tell exactly how Facebook decides who among its 2 billion users might fit into the “white genocide” interest group or any other cohort available for “detailed targeting.” The company’s own documentation is very light on details, saying only that these groups are based on indicators like “Pages [users] engage with” or “Activities people engage in on and off Facebook related to things like their device usage, purchase behaviors or intents and travel preferences.” It remains entirely possible that some people lumped into the “white genocide conspiracy theory” fandom are not, in fact, true believers, but may have interacted with content critical of this myth, such as a news report, a fact check, or academic research on the topic.
But there are some clues as to who exactly is counted among the 168,000. After selecting “white genocide conspiracy theory” as an ad target, Facebook provided “suggestions” of other, similar criteria, including interest in the far-right-wing news outlets RedState and the Daily Caller — the latter of which, co-founded by right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, has repeatedly been criticized for cozy connections to white nationalists and those sympathetic to them. Other suggested ad targets included mentions of South Africa; a common trope among advocates of the “white genocide” myth is the so-called plight of white South African farmers, who they falsely claim are being systematically murdered and pushed off their land. The South African hoax is often used as a cautionary tale for American racists — like, by all evidence, Robert Bowers, the Pittsburgh shooter — who fear a similar fate is in store for them, whether from an imagined global Jewish conspiracy or a migrant “caravan.” But the “white genocide” myth appears to have a global appeal, as well: About 157,000 of the accounts with the interest are outside of the U.S., concentrated in Africa and Asia, although it’s not clear how many of these might be bots.
A simple search of Facebook pages also makes plain that there are tens of thousands of users with a very earnest interest in “white genocide,” shown through the long list of groups with names like “Stop White South African Genocide,” “White Genocide Watch,” and “The last days of the white man.” Images with captions like “Don’t Be A Race Traitor” and “STOP WHITE GENOCIDE IN SOUTH AFRICA” are freely shared in such groups, providing a natural target for anyone who might want to pay to promote deliberately divisive and incendiary hate-based content.
A day after Facebook confirmed The Intercept’s “white genocide” ad buy, the company deleted the category and canceled the ads. Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne provided The Intercept with the following statement, similar to the one he gave ProPublica over a year ago: “This targeting option has been removed, and we’ve taken down these ads. It’s against our advertising principles and never should have been in our system to begin with. We deeply apologize for this error.” Osborne added that the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category had been “generated through a mix of automated and human reviews, but any newly added interests are ultimately approved by people. We are ultimately responsible for the segments we make available in our systems.” Osborne also confirmed that the ad category had been used by marketers, but cited only “reasonable” ad buys targeting “white genocide” enthusiasts, such as news coverage.
Facebook draws a distinction between the hate-based categories ProPublica discovered, which were based on terms users entered into their own profiles, versus the “white genocide conspiracy theory” category, which Facebook itself created via algorithm. The company says that it’s taken steps to make sure the former is no longer possible, although this clearly did nothing to deter the latter. Interestingly, Facebook said that technically the white genocide ad buy didn’t violate its ad policies, because it was based on a category Facebook itself created. However, this doesn’t square with the automated email The Intercept received a day after the ad buy was approved, informing us that “We have reviewed some of your ads more closely and have determined they don’t comply with our Advertising Policies.”
Still, the company conceded that such ad buys should have never been possible in the first place. Vice News and Business Insider also bought Facebook ads this week to make a different point about a related problem: that Facebook does not properly verify the identities of people who take out political ads. It’s unclear whether the “guardrails” Leathern spoke of a year ago will simply take more time to construct, or whether Facebook’s heavy reliance on algorithmic judgment simply careened through them.
The post Facebook Allowed Advertisers to Target Users Interested in “White Genocide” — Even in Wake of Pittsburgh Massacre appeared first on The Intercept.
Arrests of immigrants at or near New York City courthouses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have spiked dramatically in recent months, according to a leading advocacy organization tracking the practice.
While these highly controversial operations have drawn outrage from defense attorneys, who argue that turning courthouses into hunting grounds for arrests perverts and undermines the role of the court as a place to seek justice, the arrests themselves are rarely seen by the outside world.
That changed on Thursday, when a bystander outside the Queens County Criminal Court filmed a crew of plainclothes ICE officers, in coordination with New York state court officers, dragging a man into an unmarked vehicle as he attempted to enter the court.
#ICEinCourtAlert: Yesterday, three plain-clothes ICE agents violently arrested a man before his court appearance in Queens, with three NY State court officers present, as the man pleaded "Why are you doing this?!" ICE never identified themselves. IDP obtained video. pic.twitter.com/3PRMrsuJYj
— Immigrant Defense Project (@ImmDefense) November 2, 2018
“Why are you doing this to me?” the man yelled, as roughly a half-dozen officers took him into custody.
“Who is this?” a woman off camera asked.
“They’re ICE,” someone replied.
With his hands cuffed behind his back, the man was pushed into a white Dodge.
“Why you do this to me? Why?” the man asked again, before being taken away.
Joshua Epstein, supervising immigration attorney at Queens Law Associates, confirmed that the man was a client of his organization. Though the public defender organization declined to provide the man’s name for privacy reasons, Epstein told The Intercept that they had confirmed that his arrest was carried out by ICE. The man was appearing in court for a misdemeanor, he said, and he was on a path toward a noncriminal disposition. ICE did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday’s arrest.
“This one example is just one of many where someone was just trying to access his due process rights in criminal court and wasn’t able to,” Epstein said. Had the man appeared in court, he likely would have been able to settle his case without producing a criminal record, Epstein explained, but now that he is in immigration custody, the situation becomes far more complicated. “One of the problems now, when someone is in ICE detention, is that we have to request writs for the people to produce the client in criminal court on their next court date, which may or may not happen.”
Once in immigration detention, Epstein went on to say, clients are effectively cut off from meaningful programs that they would otherwise have access to before pleading to a noncriminal violation. “When you’re in detention, you can’t access those programs, so your plea offers get much worse,” Epstein said, adding that if an individual is in immigration detention, an open criminal case also makes “meaningful deportation relief” all but impossible to obtain.
Since President Donald Trump’s first week in office, in which he signed an executive order effectively making every undocumented immigrant in the country a priority for deportation, immigration advocates in New York City have seen a marked increase in arrests in and around courthouses. With New York’s status as a “sanctuary city,” ICE cannot trawl through local jails in order to locate deportable immigrants, and the agency has argued that courthouse arrests have become more necessary. Those arrests have skyrocketed in recent weeks, according to the Immigrant Defense Project, a legal advocacy organization that has long tracked the agency’s tactics. That work has included the documentation of a 1,200 percent increase in courthouse arrests from 2016 to 2017, and an interactive project mapping ICE raids across New York City.
“We’ve gotten 23 reports of ICE operations over the last month, which is more than double the previous month,” said Lee Wang, a senior staff attorney at IDP who tracks courthouse arrests. The influx of new reports from lawyers and legal organizations has been overwhelming, Wang said, with calls coming in almost daily. “Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen a pretty alarming escalation in ICE operations, both in terms of the number of arrests that they’re making around courts in New York City, and throughout the state really, but also just in their tactics,” Wang said. “They’re getting much more aggressive. I think this video speaks for itself — there are six people who are holding somebody down, but in the past couple months, we’ve heard reports of ICE following people into bathrooms, following their family members, eavesdropping on attorneys, and getting very physical and basically engaging in assaults on attorneys and family members.”
“I think that the longer that this goes unchecked, the more that ICE thinks that they have carte blanche to do what they want in the courts,” she added. Epstein said the heightened intensity of ICE’s operations tracks with what his organization has been seeing in Queens. “The last two weeks have just been awful,” he said, adding that his organization has seen ICE operations in courts happening on a nearly daily basis.
Both Wang and Epstein noted that it is all but impossible to predict who precisely ICE will target, though Epstein said the “vast majority” of clients targeted appear to be individuals whose personal data has been logged by the Department of Homeland Security or one of its component agencies. As The Intercept reported in April, something as simple as having fingerprints taken during an encounter with the New York City Police Department appears to be sufficient for routing an individual’s personal identifying information to ICE.
According to Wang, the lack of predictability makes the job of defense attorneys all the more difficult. “They are just as likely to go after an undocumented person who has no prior criminal history who’s there on a trespass charge, as they are to go after a longtime lawful permanent resident with felony charges,” she said. “There’s really no rhyme or reason to who they’re targeting. Particularly in a very, very immigrant-heavy borough like Queens, what that means on a daily basis for defenders is they have dozens of clients who could be at risk.”
Echoing a concern felt by New York defense attorneys since courthouse arrests became a prevalent Trump-era strategy, Wang said the active participation of New York state court officers in Thursday’s arrest was particularly alarming. “Federal law does not require or compel state court officers to assist in these arrests. Period. There is no provision of federal law that requires them to do this. And so why are court officers proactively assisting?” she said. IDP is currently pushing a piece of model legislation, known as the New York Protect Our Courts Act, aimed at placing “significant restrictions on civil arrests of those attending court.”
“I think it would fix a lot of problems,” Wang said. “We’re hopeful.” Until that time comes, ICE is likely to continue arresting people at courts. In Epstein’s words, “it’s just like this crazy, rogue security force — no warrants, no meaningful identification, no probable cause for warrants, completely unmarked cars, just sort of snatching people.”
The post ICE Arrests at New York City Courthouses Are Increasing — This Video Captures One appeared first on The Intercept.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump frequently pledged to “dismantle” the Dodd-Frank financial reforms passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. On Wednesday, with the Federal Reserve’s release of a proposal to roll back capital and liquidity requirements, he caught his big whale.
Those requirements, imposed by the Dodd-Frank Act, were put in place to ensure that critical financial institutions could weather economic storms. The liquidity ratio was only finalized in September 2014. And yet, just four years later, on October 31, the Federal Reserve announced proposed changes that would reduce liquidity requirements by almost a third for banks such as Capital One and Charles Schwab with assets of $250 billion to $700 billion. Smaller banks would have even fewer restrictions.
In the lone dissent on the Fed’s four-member board, Lael Brainard said she could not support the proposal, which, among other things, would “weaken the buffers that are core to the resilience of our system.”
The proposal was one of a series of dramatic changes pushed forward by the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed in May with bipartisan support. That bill also weakened the Volcker Rule, implemented in 2015 to limit banks’ ability to make speculative proprietary investments — another centerpiece of Dodd-Frank designed to rein in potentially fatal risk-taking by big banks.
The bill exempted smaller banks from compliance with Volcker. The same month it passed, the Fed proposed sweeping changes to further weaken Volcker, shifting the burden of proof on compliance on each trade from the banks to oversight agencies.
Thanks, but We Want MoreBoth Fed proposals — on liquidity and Volcker — were promoted as an effort to reduce compliance costs. Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Fed, said of the Volcker proposal that it simply offered “a more streamlined set of requirements” for banks. Both proposals were widely seen as a victory for Wall Street. “Big Banks to Get a Break From Limits on Risky Trading,” read one New York Times headline about the Volcker proposal. Sen. Elizabeth Warren described it as a favor from Wall Street’s “banker buddies turned regulators.”
Public comments on the liquidity rule have just opened, but comments on the Fed’s Volcker Rule reform closed on October 17. A look through those public comments shows that the banks weren’t sounding as happy as might be expected, given that the country’s largest banks have lobbied for Volcker reform. (The comments are now in the hands of the five regulatory agencies involved in the rule: the Federal Reserve Board, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.)
A review of the comments shows the banks commending the Fed for relaxing the rules. But it also shows many bankers carping that regulators were enlarging the universe of securities that would be considered when determining if they were in compliance; establishing new demands that bank CEOs attest each year that they have the proper rules in place; and, all in all, asking for changes that would risk increasing industry oversight costs.
Thanks for the concessions, they said in so many words. But we want more.
The Volcker Rule, as it stands, makes a distinction between the trading a bank does on behalf of customers, which is allowed, and the trading it does for its own gain, which is not. The rule limits the ability of banks to invest in so-called covered funds, unless it’s done to hedge their positions or on behalf of customers. The idea is that American taxpayers should not be on the hook for blunders that banks make in their own risky trading.
The Volcker Rule would make a financial crisis much less likely, according to Marcus Stanley, policy director at Americans for Financial Reform. But even the current muscular rule hasn’t yet been aggressively enforced. In the three years since Volcker took effect, only Deutsche Bank has been penalized for a violation, and that was a case in which the bank self-reported that its compliance program was inadequate — not one in which regulators took the initiative.
Now the rule itself stands to be weakened. Kara Stein, a Democratic SEC commissioner, said in a statement that the proposed rewrite “cleverly and carefully euthanizes” Volcker. The proposal appears to be aimed at “making it easier for banks to take on greater leverage and risk,” she said, and relies on “a ‘just trust me’ paradigm.”
The Fed proposal released in May offers new compliance exemptions that include trades that are made in error. Bartlett Naylor, financial policy advocate at Public Citizen, reminded regulators in his letter that it was trades by Nick Leeson in Barings Bank’s “Error Account 88888” — created by Leeson specifically to hide losses — that “collapsed the bank” in 1995.
The May proposal additionally would let some banks off the hook from performing analyses to prove that the activity in their accounts was hedging, not proprietary trading.
Just Trust UsThroughout the decadelong brawl over Dodd-Frank and the Volcker Rule, banking industry supporters have argued that the reforms would damage market liquidity, bank earnings, job growth, and the economy. That same refrain was visible throughout the comment letters.
The Center for American Entrepreneurship claimed in its letter to regulators that the Volcker Rule already has been “undermining economic growth.” The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA, Wall Street’s lobbying arm, wrote that the rule has contributed to a “chilling effect on financial intermediation, negatively impacting liquidity and imposing significant compliance costs.”
Yet the SEC concluded in a study released just last year that the agency could find no empirical evidence to support the theory that liquidity had declined in the wake of the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. It also pointed out that the issuing of market securities had not declined and that the private market issuance of debt and equity had increased substantially.
The Volcker Alliance, a nonpartisan public policy organization, echoed these findings in its comment letter, reminding regulators that the United States is in its second longest expansion in recorded history, bank profits are soaring, trading volume is near an all-time high, and unemployment is at its lowest in nearly 50 years. “There is no apparent justification for this proposal,” they wrote.
But a record expansion is apparently not enough for Wall Street. Among the items bankers disliked in the May proposal, a new so-called accounting prong sparked repeated complaints. That addition would help determine whether certain trades would count as short-term, causing them to be prohibited under the rule. The Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, whose members include 36 leaders from the finance, investment, business, law, accounting, and academic communities, said that transactions “that are clearly not short-term trades” will be swept into the definition of proprietary trading under the proposal. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness wrote that the accounting prong “should be eliminated in its entirety.”
Among other requirements, the accounting prong adds a new test to determine whether trades are speculative that focuses on accounting standards. If a trading desk has less than $25 million in gross trading losses and gains over a 90-day period, regulators would simply assume that it is in compliance. Despite all the complaints, that’s a proposal with a huge hole, wrote Elise Bean, a former staffer for Sen. Carl Levin who led a Senate subcommittee on investigations into the financial crisis. A bank looking to get around that regulation could simply “establish a network of trading desks, each designed to fall below the $25 million threshold.”
Just days after the public comment deadline, Wall Street combatants began to meet with regulators in an attempt to influence the inevitable revisions to come. On October 22, four officials from SIFMA met with Elad L. Roisman, a Republican SEC commissioner, and four of his lawyers.
In private meetings with regulators in the months ahead, lobbyists are sure to be pushing to make the Fed’s proposal ever more industry friendly, including cutting back on reporting requirements and delegating banks to regulate themselves. Those approaches intentionally blind regulators from doing their jobs, wrote Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of the nonprofit financial reform group Better Markets. “With billions of dollars on the line, it is simply wrong to go back to a ‘trust us’ model of regulation, where regulators defer to the financial industry to police itself,” he said. “Everyone knows how spectacularly unsuccessful that was before the catastrophic crash of 2008.”
This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute, where Susan Antilla is a reporting fellow.
The post Wall Street Moves to Gut Post-Crisis Financial Rules appeared first on The Intercept.
At a rally held on the same day as the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Rep. Pete Olson, the Republican in Texas’s 22nd District, claimed that billionaire George Soros was funding his Democratic opponent Sri Preston Kulkarni.
The comment came days after Soros had a pipe bomb mailed to him, and a Donald Trump supporter, Cesar Sayoc, was arrested in connection with the crime. Soros has long been a proxy for anti-Semitic rage, which was expressed in its most deadly fashion in U.S. history that Saturday morning.
Olson had previously called Kulkarni an “Indo-American carpetbagger.” (Kulkarni is, in fact, descended from Sam Houston, the founder of Texas.)
Olson has repeatedly expressed alarm at the fundraising ability of his opponent, who has collected a tremendous amount of small donations. Olson sees a conspiracy behind the grassroots mobilization against him. “I’ve been out-raised by double. Most incumbents have been out-raised by a double,” Olson said to a crowd in the district. “Now where’s that money coming from? Texas? George Soros! California! Massachusetts! Chicago! They think they can buy Texas and make us blue.”
Soros is not a donor to Kulkarni’s campaign. A large amount of the $1.2 million Kulkarni has raised comes from Americans of Indian descent living in Texas. Kulkarni’s novel strategy, detailed previously by The Intercept, has been to activate Asian-American communities that traditionally haven’t been targeted in politics, which could pay off in a rapidly changing district in the Houston suburbs.
Kulkarni takes no corporate PAC money, but has received support from the Hindu American PAC, the Indian American Impact Fund, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and the PACs for Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Reps. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Grace Meng, D-N.Y. A $500 donation from the Drug Policy Reform Fund could be mistaken for the Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, but it has no relation and in fact is a tiny PAC with one donor that has made a grand total of two donations this election cycle.
Meanwhile, we know who funds Pete Olson: His campaign has raised nearly two-thirds of its money this cycle from corporate PACs. That includes Koch Industries, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, General Dynamics, Celanese Corporation, Dow Chemical, BNSF Railway, United Airlines, Delta Airlines, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Experian, UPS, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Comerica, Archer Daniels Midland, Genentech, Molina Healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, Novo Nordisk, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, AbbVie, Amerisource Bergen, DaVita, Aetna, Anthem, Cigna, UnitedHealth, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, BP, KBR, Halliburton, Valero, Occidental Petroleum, Hess, Marathon Oil, Phillips 66, Union Pacific, Centerpoint Energy, Chesapeake Energy, Dominion Energy, Duke Energy, Exelon, Linde North America, PG&E, Sempra Energy, TransCanada, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Cisco, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, Charter Communications, 21st Century Fox, Disney, Viacom, Comcast/NBCUniversal, CSX, BASF, the National Association of Home Builders, the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association, the American Bankers Association, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, the National Rifle Association, the National Association of Realtors, and the law/lobbyist firms Holland & Knight, Hogan Lovells, Glover Park Group, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, and McGuire Woods, which represent dozens of other corporations.
That is a partial list.
Olson has made dark suggestions about the source of Kulkarni’s campaign cash before, at a meet-and-greet for constituents in August. Seeming to not understand anything about ActBlue, the fundraising tool for Democratic candidates, Olson marvels in another video obtained by The Intercept that “somehow the other side has arranged for people to send money to this group in Massachusetts, to send it all across the country.” He further intimates that Kulkarni’s money must be “coming from overseas” or some other illegal means.
.@RepPeteOlson calls out "Indo-American carpetbagger" (AKA @SriPKulkarni) and his ~*mysterious support*~ from @actblue #ownthelibs https://t.co/maOcX7vggR via @ddayen @theintercept pic.twitter.com/qtX54b5Bka
— Akela Lacy (@akela_lacy) November 2, 2018
But the reference to Soros, on the day of the largest incident of anti-Semitic violence in American history, and days after Soros himself was targeted, fits with a disturbing pattern of incitement in the run-up to the election.
“We’ve seen all too recently that this kind of rhetoric can end in tragedy,” said Kulkarni in a statement. “These types of accusations are not only false but dangerous. We need leaders who know that their words matter, and will use them to bring us together rather than tear us apart.”
Olson’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
The post On Day of Synagogue Massacre, GOP Rep. Pete Olson Blasts Opponent for Nonexistent George Soros Money appeared first on The Intercept.
Dora Marisol López helped put the woman’s husband in jail years ago.
“He would leave work to go stay in the street in front of her house. She would go to the market, and he’d go along behind her,” López recounted. “She went to the kids’ school and he’d be right behind her. At night, he’d climb up on the roof of the house and shine a light into her bedroom to see if she was sleeping with someone.”
The woman had come to López, a litigator for the Guatemalan public prosecutor, with gouges on her hands where her husband had driven a pen beneath her skin. He told her that if she denounced him to the authorities, he’d kill her. But she did it anyway, and the prosecutor’s office brought charges. He was sentenced to 12 years.
This past July, eight years into her husband’s punishment, the woman got a worrisome visit from his brother. The sentence had been commuted, she learned, and he would be released that very weekend. The brother had a message: “It didn’t matter to him if he spent the rest of his life in jail, when he got out, he would kill her.”
The woman called López in a panic. López, a graying, middle-aged woman who has been handling cases of violence against women for years, said she remembered her story clear as day; she’d felt great affection for the woman, and her predicament had affected López deeply. She counseled the woman to leave the city immediately and go into hiding. In the meantime, López went to the office in charge of reducing sentences and tried to argue against the commutation, but did not prevail.
“I know if she didn’t leave the capital this weekend, he would get out of jail and kill her, and this case would become a femicide like so many others,” López said. The woman wanted to apply for asylum in the United States – but her chances of even getting in front of a judge have decreased significantly under policies instigated by the Trump administration.
Over the past few weeks, leading up to the midterm elections, President Donald Trump has stoked animus against immigrants from Central America by spreading falsehoods about refugee caravans currently making their way north through Mexico. He has ordered thousands of troops to the southwestern border, promised to hold asylum-seeking families in tent cities, and floated an executive order that would limit Central Americans’ ability to request asylum. But the administration has already taken steps that have drastically impacted the prospects of one group in particular: Central American women fleeing domestic violence.
Guatemala has one of the highest rates of deadly violence against women, or femicide, in the world — 7,357 violent deaths tallied between 2008 and 2017 by the nonprofit Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres (Guatemalan Women’s Group, or GGM.) An unknown but certainly large number of those crimes, both physical and sexual, begin in the home, as domestic violence at the hands of husbands, partners, or relatives. The particular combination of factors that contribute to violence against women in Guatemala — a patriarchal culture, devastating poverty, racism against Indigenous Maya, and a society strained by the legacy of armed conflict and now riven with violence from gangs and drug traffickers — has been recognized internationally, including in the United States.
In 2014, a landmark decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which has jurisdiction over all U.S. immigration courts, established that “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship” qualified as a particular social group that could be singled out for persecution. The board underlined that the Guatemalan state was incapable of providing protection and could even be complicit in the violence against them. That decision, building off others that recognized violence against women as grounds for asylum, set a far-reaching precedent that has been especially important for women from Central America.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, however, aimed to change all that. In June, using a rarely exercised power of his office, Sessions personally intervened to overturn an asylum decision concerning a woman from El Salvador. He used the opportunity to issue a sweeping statement about the nature of domestic abuse, calling it a private crime, and saying that “generally, claims by aliens pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence perpetrated by nongovernmental actors will not qualify for asylum.” The decision also argued against the idea that widespread violence against women in Central America meant that local governments were unwilling or unable to take on the problem, “any more than the persistence of domestic violence in the United States means that our government is unwilling or unable to protect victims of domestic violence.”
Photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
Sessions’s decision led to new guidelines for officers who conduct “credible fear interviews,” an initial step in a petition for asylum at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The new guidance follows Sessions in saying that gang and domestic violence cases likely won’t qualify, and also tells officers to factor in whether someone crossed illegally, and if they could’ve found refuge within their home country or another country besides the United States.
In August, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, filed suit, saying that the new guidelines were causing people with legitimate asylum claims to be rejected, thus putting their lives in danger. The attorneys general of 19 states joined the suit, with the attorney general for Washington, D.C. writing that the “cruel policy arbitrarily closes our borders to refugees who seek asylum due to legitimate fears of violence in their home countries,” and added that it “ignores decades of state, federal, and international law.”
Guatemala has one of the highest rates of deadly violence against women in the world.A decision in the suit is expected soon. In the meantime, lawyers and advocacy groups are pushing forward with domestic violence asylum claims and urging refugees not to give up hope: They say that Sessions’s word is not, in fact, law.
Sessions’s ruling “tries to bully decision-makers to deny these cases,” said Karen Musalo, a professor at UC Hastings and director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. “The attorney general with this decision doesn’t rip out stem and root the viability of these cases. But he’s trying to signal that these cases are no longer viable, and some asylum officers doing credible fear interviews, and some judges reviewing cases — they are going to take the path of least resistance and dismiss.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for USCIS said, “We are unable to comment on matters involving pending litigation.”
The government does not release statistics that break out the reasons why asylum-seekers are approved or denied, so it’s not possible to know precisely how many women have been granted asylum on the grounds of domestic violence before or after the 2014 decision, and it will be hard to know how many are turned away because of the new guidance.
But recent statistics show that the number of asylum cases approved overall has dropped sharply this year. Advocates say that there has been a visible narrowing of opportunity at the credible fear stage, where migrants rarely have the assistance of a lawyer who prepares them to make a nuanced argument for why they need protection. Groups working in border detention centers say that, anecdotally, they’ve seen an increase in denials of credible fear from domestic violence cases since June.
Robert Painter, with the Texas legal services organization American Gateways, said that his organization is seeing cases in which officials are interpreting the guidelines simplistically: “Other components — political opinion, ethnicity — those tend to get overlooked by the asylum officer or the judges. If they hear the words ‘domestic violence,’ their knee-jerk reaction is to think, ‘This isn’t a good claim.’”
Relatives mourn the corpse of Gabriela Ordonez, 15, on Nov. 24, 2014. She was shot by alleged gang members in the outskirts of Guatemala City, Guatemala, on the eve of the celebration of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
Photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
In Guatemala, the administration’s attempts to close avenues for asylum have reverberated deeply. Multiple women’s rights advocates interviewed in early August said outright that there was now no asylum for domestic violence in the United States. Despite that common belief — which attorneys in the U.S. say is incorrect — lawyers, shelter directors, and others argued forcefully that Sessions’s decision rested on fundamental misunderstandings of how violence against women functions in Guatemala.
In his argument, Sessions made a glancing, dismissive reference to a “broad charge that Guatemala has a ‘culture of machismo and family violence,’” which he said was “based on an unsourced partial quotation from a news article eight years earlier.” But most everyone agrees that the situation for women in Guatemala is dire and not improving.
“If they hear the words ‘domestic violence,’ their knee-jerk reaction is to think, ‘This isn’t a good claim.’”In 2016, eight years after Guatemala recognized femicide and other forms of violence against women as a specific crime, the government said it had received over 456,000 reports since 2008, with 65,543 made in 2016 alone. In 2017, according to the Grupo Guatemalteco de Mujeres’s count, 732 women died violent deaths; every recent year has seen a similar figure.
The roots of Guatemala’s patriarchy run deep, said Gabriela Monroy, a psychologist who works at Casa Alianza, a home for abused girls in Guatemala City. “The man is the master, the head, the boss of the family and the home. And this is so deep in our culture that it justifies that the man has physical and sexual access to his wife, his daughters,” she said. She connected this to the legacy of colonialism and to Guatemala’s decades of armed conflict, when many men were forced to watch their wives and relatives raped, abused, and killed by those in power: “There was also the use of female bodies to cause damage to men.”
Poverty exacerbates the situation, making it difficult for women to leave their abusers: “How are you going to report the man who is keeping the household afloat? If you say something, your five siblings or your five kids are going to be left without any economic protection,” Monroy said.
Photo: Saul Hernandez/Reuters
“We’re at the lowest levels in terms of education, health, and employment,” said Carolina Escobar, Casa Alianza’s director. One child had come to the shelter after her father sold her into marriage with an older man “in exchange for a double-liter of soda and some sandwich bread.”
“The parents couldn’t feed the rest of their kids,” Escobar said. “It’s horrible what I’m saying, but it’s a real case, even if it seems so surreal.”
Indigenous women especially struggle to access justice and face additional discrimination. The lead plaintiff in the ACLU’s case, a Mayan woman going by the pseudonym of Grace, was raped and beaten continuously for 20 years by her non-Indigenous husband, who “frequently disparaged her and mocked her for being indigenous and unable to read and write,” the ACLU said. In rural areas, there are few outposts of the public prosecutor, few specialized judges, and little police presence. “There’s discrimination against women wearing Indigenous clothing, and they often aren’t bilingual, and the judicial system is all in Spanish,” said Hilda Morales Trujillo, a pioneering women’s rights lawyer and activist.
The entire country has suffered from an increase in drug trafficking and the spread of gangs. When a woman’s abuser is connected with organized crime, the situation can be extremely dangerous not just for the woman, but also for those who try to help her, said Norma Cruz, director of the Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivors’ Foundation), a shelter and legal services provider in Guatemala City.
A police officer stands next to a poster during a march to mark International Women’s Day in Guatemala City, Guatemala, on March 8, 2018.
Photo: :Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
As for whether the Guatemalan state is capable of handling the problem, most agree that police protection is inadequate, justice is excruciatingly slow, and impunity is the norm — for femicides, it’s estimated to be 98 percent. Even if authorities aren’t actively complicit in the crime — which is sometimes the case — they often display the same prejudices that generated the violence in the first place.
Morales Trujillo said that women are often discouraged from coming forward with their denunciations as often by officials they encounter as by their families and communities; they’re told that they’ll be shunned or suffer more if they denounce their husbands, that they will lose their family’s breadwinner, that their children will grow up without a father. She has also seen judges perpetuate the antiquated stereotype that a woman who has been abused must have provoked it.
That’s despite the fact that in 2008, Guatemala passed path-breaking legislation, the Law Against Femicide and Other Violence Against Women, which recognized new categories of violence specifically directed at women, opened new angles for prosecution of those crimes, and the possibility of reparations for victims. It also created a network of specialized prosecutors and judges who were sensitized to deal with them. It was hailed as a major turning point. But the law hasn’t been sufficient, advocates say.
“The patriarchal interests, the macho interests, those classist, racist interests — they’re taking the teeth out of that law,” said Giovanna Lemus, director of a government-funded network of women’s centers and shelters run by GGM. As of August, the shelters had received no money in 2018. In a recent report, GGM laid out various ways in which the law’s impact has been weakened by lack of funds, contradictory legal developments, and bureaucratic slow-walking.
Many of the programs set in motion by the law are no match for the burden of caseloads. For instance, there is a specialized team from the public prosecutor that works with Indigenous women, offering translation and culturally sensitive services, but their reach is limited. “There are backlogs everywhere because there’s too much need and too little capacity,” said Escobar. (The U.S. government is a major donor to initiatives attempting to strengthen Guatemala’s judicial systems, and Trump’s threat to cut off aid over Guatemala’s handling of the refugee caravan could make things worse.)
Many of the advocates blamed the current president, a comedian-turned-politician named Jimmy Morales, for steps backward on women’s rights. They were especially distressed by Morales’s silence and inaction in the case of 41 girls who died in a fire at a government-run shelter in March 2017. After the fire, stories of abuse and human trafficking in the shelter surfaced. (A former Guatemalan foreign minister made headlines this summer saying he knew of several women who’d accused the president of sexual abuse, but to date, no victims have come forward. Morales has denied any wrongdoing, dismissing the allegations as rumors and lies.)
“With this government, we’re losing the advances we’d made because we have a government that’s indifferent toward policies protecting women, to laws for women and children,” said Cruz.
To compare the United States’ handling of domestic violence and Guatemala’s, as Sessions did in his decision, was “crock,” said Musalo, of UC Hastings. “To argue that even in the U.S. we don’t have a perfect system for protecting women, it’s so not comparable that you can’t even wrap your mind around it.”
Near-total impunity combined with the lack of funding and political will for women’s rights also makes it difficult for advocates to accept the idea, implicit in Sessions’s decision, that women could simply move within Guatemala. Aside from the limitations imposed by poverty and lack of resources, Guatemala is a small country, and it’s not so easy to disappear.
Authorities can be bribed for information or paid to track a woman down, said Lemus, mentioning the long history of Guatemala’s shady, deadly intelligence apparatus. Narcos can pay others to do their dirty work. “When the abusers have more resources, they do more,” she said. After helping women from rich and powerful families, Lemus said her group ended up under surveillance, with cars circling their offices and sex workers placed outside to watch the door. They’d even had their phones tapped.
Photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images
“When the women want to leave, they believe that the only way to get away from the violence is to get out of the country. And I believe them. Justice is very slow. They can’t stay shut up in a shelter the whole time,” said Cruz. In extreme cases, her foundation finds places where women can stay for up to 15 days completely isolated, without a phone and without leaving the premises, to hide from their abuser. Sometimes the women aren’t even told exactly where they are. But that solution isn’t permanent, and prolonged protection also puts shelter staff in danger. The network of shelters in Guatemala is small and insufficient to the number of women needing help.
The guidelines also tell USCIS officers to consider which other countries asylum-seekers passed through before reaching the United States. The Trump administration has been pressuring Mexico to accept the status of being a “safe third country” to which the U.S. could send asylum-seekers. In Mexico, on top of well-documented threats to migrants and the fact that in many states they’d remain within easy access of their abusers, women have fewer economic opportunities and encounter less robust immigrant communities to welcome them than in the United States, said Cruz.
The idea that the U.S. has a moral burden to take in more Central American refugees was a common refrain among Guatemalan advocates. After supporting a 1954 coup against Guatemala’s left-leaning president, the U.S. funded and supported the genocidal regimes of Guatemalan military leaders during the civil conflict that lasted 36 years, until 1996, killing over 200,000 people, many of them Maya.
“There is a chain that has not been broken with the armed conflict,” said Morales Trujillo. “The violence was organized with the support of the United States. … There is a responsibility from a political point of view because of their interference in Guatemalan affairs. But also from the point of view of humanity. When someone comes knocking at your door, and they have no alternative, the door has to open.”
Reporting for this story was supported with a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.
The post Trump Administration’s Limits on Asylum for Domestic Violence Put Guatemalan Women in Peril appeared first on The Intercept.
Florida-based Geo Group is the second-largest private prison company. Its operations across the United States and in several foreign countries netted $2.26 billion in revenue in 2017.
But its operations in the state where it is headquartered are threatened by the campaign of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum.
Gillum has stated clearly that he is opposed to the prison industry. Over the summer, he pledged not to take any money from private prison corporations and vowed to eliminate them from the state of Florida. “I believe private prisons ought to be illegal in the state of Florida. They should not exist,” he said.
On the other side of the aisle, Geo Group has given heavily to Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis’s campaign. Filings show that the company gave $50,000 to DeSantis’s committee Friends of DeSantis on March 26, 2017.
On August 15, the company gave another $50,000 to the campaign. Its CEO and founder, George C. Zoley, gave $50,000 on the same date. On October 3, Zoley gave another $50,000 to the committee, as well as a separate $3,400 donation.
Geo Group money is also finding other ways into the campaign. For instance, it has received a total of $150,000 over three October donations from the group Jobs for Florida. Geo Group has given $25,000 to Jobs for Florida this year.
The company is also active in the attorney general’s race, giving $45,000 between two October donations to Republican candidate Ashley Moody’s independent political committee. Jobs for Florida has given the same amount. Ron Book, a GEO Group lobbyist notorious for successfully pushing for the implementation of draconian restrictions on sex offenders across the state, gave $2,000 as well.
To be clear, the vast majority of Florida prisoners are in state-run prisons, not the private sector. The Sentencing Project notes that in 2016, around 12 percent of Florida’s prisoners were in privately run facilities. That’s for now, however. There was a 211 percent increase in that population between the years 2000 and 2016.
The post Private Prisons Fight for Their Lives in Florida Against Andrew Gillum appeared first on The Intercept.
Harvard vs.: Harvard defended itself in court for the past three weeks over allegations that it applies unfair admissions standards to Asian applicants (the lawsuit was brought by a coalition of Asian American students, cobbled together by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum). It’s unclear if the lawsuit will lead to changes in Harvard’s admissions process. But if the case goes to the Supreme Court, the real outcome to watch is the future of race-conscious admissions.
Health Issues: What do voters really, really care about? Health care—
“everywhere and nowhere, a strange kind of omnipresent sleeper issue,” writes Annie Lowrey. Democrats are in a position to run on health care rather than gloss over relevant policy. “To black women in Georgia, the stakes of the debate over health-care access are no less than life or death,” writes Vann R. Newkirk II, reporting from Savannah.
Apology: Every week, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions in the Dear Therapist column. But this week, in a special installment, she addresses a question not from one reader, but from various men who have asked her both in her inbox and in her own therapy practice: Is it possible to apologize for a sexual assault? And if so, how? Plus: what happened when one woman reached out to the man she said raped her in college.
Snapshot
Pumpkins on the porch of a house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the city mourns the 11 people who were killed in Saturday’s mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. See the most striking images from this past week here. (Photo by Gene J. Puskar / AP)Evening ReadVeronique Greenwood’s grandfather was an eminent nuclear physicist, whose career was derailed by what seemed to be a crackpot theory. After his death, she came into possession of his papers, and began to peel back this enduring family mystery:
One rainy day this past March, deep in the thicket of papers and lost myself, I called my father. Trained as a scientist, he had always been fascinated by Francis’s obsession, which Francis had continued to talk about his whole life. Francis was not fired in the end. But my grandparents did eventually retire early. They moved onto their boat and spent many years sailing across the world. But on their ultimate return to the United States, Francis submitted his papers several more times and engaged in ever-more-tangled correspondence, which I now had spread across the floor of my home.
My father described a picture he’d seen long ago. “It was a painting of this immensely complicated structure made up of linear pieces. It climbs, and it climbs, and it climbs, and above it is this perfect sphere floating in space. And when I saw that … I looked at that painting and I thought, I know exactly what that is: You can’t get there from here!” he said. There is a gap between what you can prove with the tools available to you and what you believe to be true. Mathematicians spend decades constructing proofs for intuitions they had years earlier. Artists struggle to capture an inspiration on canvas. Scientists follow hunches, writers follow stories, all of us stumble forward on a tightrope of our own making without any guarantee that it will bear us. The painting is by Paul Klee; it is called Limits of Understanding.
What Do You Know … About Culture?The new biopic Bohemian Rhapsody sweeps through the life of Queen’s lead singer, Freddie Mercury, who died in __________ due to AIDS-related bronchopneumonia.Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. The comedian Louis C.K. returned to this mainstay comedy venue this past week with a new set, after admitting to sexual misbehavior toward multiple women last November.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. This small, beloved art-movie streaming service—a combination of the Criterion Collection and the Turner Classic Movies archive—is shutting down this month.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: 1991 / Comedy Cellar / Filmstruck
Poem of the WeekHere’s a portion of “Something Left Undone” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from our November 1863 issue:
By the cares of yesterday
Each to-day is heavier made,
Till at length it is, or seems,
Greater than our strength can bear, —
As the burden of our dreams,
Passing on us everywhere
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
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MIAMI—The rally began with a rabbi, priest and imam joining together to pray for the victims of last week’s shootings and the targets of the mail bombs. Then each, in turn, ended their prayers with the words, “to bring it home.”
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez knew who was best suited for that: “Bring in the closer,” he said as the rally began.
After everyone looking for votes in a 50-mile radius had spoken here on Friday afternoon, Barack Obama walked out on stage, joked for a moment about good weather and Cuban sandwiches, and delivered a roaring final argument for Democrats heading into the weekend before the midterms: He spoke of “hope over hate” and advised those in attendance to “cut through noise” and “block out the lies.”
When Republicans say they will protect pre-existing conditions, a signature provision of the Affordable Care Act, Obama said they have “some kind of gall, some kind of chutzpah.”
“It’s a lie,” he said. “They’re lying to you.”
Democrats will have a dozen or more candidates running for president by the end of the year. But they still clearly want Obama to lead them. Enthusiasm for the 44th president hasn’t been this high since 2008, and his style is evident in the party’s breakout candidates of 2018: Andrew Gillum here in Florida, Beto O’Rourke in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia, all running optimistic campaigns rooted in broadening their electorates.
[Read: Barack Obama Reflects on Leaving the Presidency]
There isn’t another Democratic leader who comes close—virtually no candidate asked for Hillary Clinton to appear on the trail, despite the non-stop interviews she’s been doing to stay part of the conversation.
So, for Obama, it’s about making sure Democrats win, but also a final attempt to protect a legacy Donald Trump has relentlessly attacked—and to convince the country that the future lies in his hopeful multiculturalism rather than the current president’s dark nativism.
Obama dismissed what’s been coming out of Trump. He rebuked Trump for “taking our brave troops away from their families for a political stunt at the border.” And he said that “a president doesn’t get to decide on his own who’s an American and who’s not. That’s not how the Constitution works.”
The irony is that Democrats are more eager to have Obama out on the trail than they ever were when he actually was president.
“The question is,” wondered one person who worked on Obama’s campaign plans and acknowledged his poor track record getting anyone but himself elected, “will it translate?”
On Friday in Miami, at least, it translated: Obama connected the 2018 election to the one that made him president 10 years ago, predicting a Democratic resurgence answering years of Republican entrenchment. But he warned against complacency, reminding Democrats of the scare tactics Republicans had used to such devastating midterm effect in 2010 with the “death panels” and in 2014 with the “Ebola scare.”
That, Obama said, is what Democrats need to be worried about in these final days of the campaign, as President Donald Trump has piled a conveniently timed announcement about reimplementing Iran sanctions, on top of a video of an immigrant cop killer, on top of promises to revoke birthright citizenship, on top of warnings that a distant migrant caravan is a terrorist invasion, on top of claims that Democrats were the only ones standing in the way of a middle class tax cut that he lied about producing before the election.
“Too often we fall for it. Too often we fall for the distraction,” he said, comparing Democrats to Charlie Brown, every time going in to kick the football Republicans throw up right before the election and never talk about again, as happened with death panels, Ebola and Hillary Clinton’s emails.
It’s like listening to a scam artist pretending to sell a security system, Obama said, while his partner goes around the back and steals what’s in the house.
“Don’t be Charlie Brown,” Obama said. “While you’re distracted, they’re also robbing you blind.”
Back when Bill Clinton delivered the speech at the 2012 Democratic convention that helped stabilize Obama’s re-election campaign and earned him the grateful “explainer in chief” nickname, Obama aides fantasized about a day when their guy would be the loved one, the one so much in demand. They didn’t expect that day to arrive so soon.
All year long as Obama’s popularity has continued to rise, they’ve been scrambling to build a political machine unlike anything any ex-president has built before, with a smaller staff and an approach that’s defined by his positive, principled message, not opposition to Trump.
[Read: Where is Barack Obama?]
His machine has produced 300 endorsements for candidates running for everything from Senate races to state legislative seats in two mass email press releases. The candidates, in turn, have used them fundraise and organize.
There have also been videos, robocalls, radio spots and targeted digital ads that have enabled campaigns to show off Obama’s support to committed Democrats, without catching the attention of most Republicans online.
They’re tracking the stats, with his video on NowThis having generated 33 million views, and his get-out-the-vote video on attn: hitting 16 million. Close to 700,000 who watched then followed instructions and proceeded to Vote.org for voting information.
Then there’s the travel, which he has done in bursts since he unleashed his anti-Trump argument in September, and which aides have for the most part left to the strategists in Washington running House, Senate and gubernatorial campaigns to rank by priority.
[Read: Barack Obama Makes the Case Against Trump]
At times, it has seemed almost haphazard. Obama’s trip to Indiana coming up on Sunday left a lot of people scratching their heads when it was announced, but the request came from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer calling Obama directly last week and telling him that he could make the difference in Joe Donnelly being re-elected to the Senate, and that the city of Gary, hugging the Chicago suburbs, is where he could really goose the voter turnout.
Obama and Trump, meanwhile, are chasing each other’s tails around the country even through the last days. Trump was just in Florida on Wednesday and will be back on Saturday. Obama flew on Friday from his rally in Miami to Atlanta for Stacey Abrams’ gubernatorial campaign in Georgia. Trump will be in Macon on Sunday afternoon. The day after Obama is in Gary, Trump will make his second to last stop on Monday the night before the election 130 miles east, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“It’s not by design, but by necessity—the states are what they are,” said one person who’s worked on Obama’s planning.
At every rally, the excitement to see him is intense. So is the resentment his supporters still feel.
“Is Donald Trump an American? Someone check his birth certificate,” said Donna Shalala, the former Clinton Health and Human Services secretary running for a House seat that’s been tighter than Democrats had expected, when she was speaking before Obama.
“No!” the crowd called back to her.
“He sure doesn’t act like one,” she said. “Let’s send him back to Mar-a-Lago on Tuesday.”
But even without him there, candidates are doing what they can to talk about Obama, whether it was Elizabeth Warren on Thursday in Ohio gushing about how cool it was to get the phone call from him as president asking her to come help form the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or Wisconsin lieutenant governor candidate Mandela Barnes, who said Tuesday at an event in Madison that he felt comfortable calling Republicans liars because the former president had.
“Normally we wouldn’t talk about it in as plain terms, but Barack Obama gave us the green light,” Barnes said. “They are lying."
Friday in Miami, Perez used the comparison between Obama and Trump to rile up the crowd.
“He has nothing in common with our current president,” Perez said. “But I’ll tell you something—in two years, they will have something in common: they’ll both be ex-presidents.”
Obama, meanwhile, ended on a familiar note.
Elect Democrats, he said, and it’ll be about health care and stopping climate change and the rest of the agenda. “Change starts to happen. Hopes starts to happen,” he said, “it enters into each of us.
Stacey Abrams, a candidate for governor in Georgia, has put forward a plan to help solve one of the most pressing problems for women, particularly black women like herself, in the state—infant and maternal mortality. The Atlantic staff writer Vann R. Newkirk II puts the crisis in context: “If black Georgia were a separate country, it would be one of the riskiest places in the entire Western Hemisphere for new mothers and for infants.” He spoke with Abrams and other black women in the state about the maternal-health crisis and how to fix it.
In the aftermath of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the Atlantic staff writer Emma Green talked with teachers at Jewish schools who are grappling with the realization that some people hate them and their students for their religion. But a local Jewish school isn’t interested in sending a message of fear to its students, she writes, and the students are helping Jewish community members figure how to recover and move forward from the incident.
Although many kids’ apps may seem innocuous, filled with bright colors and loud noises, they actually contain loads of advertising targeted at children ages 5 and under, writes the Atlantic staff writer Joe Pinsker. Researchers characterized the methods that advertisers and app makers use to influence young children as “manipulative and disruptive,” with one scholar even calling the practices “abominable.”
In Case You Missed ItHalloween came and went in a flash, but to sum up our coverage:
The Atlantic senior editor Julie Beck wrote about the decline of door-to-door trick-or-treating and the alternatives that families are seeking out instead.
There are certain scary stories that stick in children’s brains until adulthood, and R.L. Stine’s are particularly creepy, the Atlantic website editor Adrienne LaFrance writes.
Despite years of warnings from college administrators and public-service announcements alike, America can’t seem to kick its racist costume habit, says the Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris.
Dear TherapistEvery Monday, the psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb answers readers’ questions about life’s trials and tribulations, big or small, in The Atlantic’s “Dear Therapist” column.
This week, however, was a little different. She answered a question that multiple men have asked in her inbox and in her own therapy practice: Is it possible to apologize for a sexual assault? And if so, how?
Lori’s response is simultaneously complex and simple: Prioritize the other person’s emotions and needs. Understand if they don’t want to speak to you or if they express anger. Don’t ask for forgiveness or absolution—you’re not doing this for your benefit. Take ownership of what you’ve done.
Whatever you choose to do—and whatever she decides to do with it, even if she does come to a place of forgiveness—you’re still going to have to find a way to come to terms with what you did. … What you need to consider is: What would help you give yourself permission to forgive yourself while also taking full responsibility for what you did? Forgiveness generally comes in stages and while you can’t force it, you can encourage it along, reflecting on all this by yourself or perhaps talking it over with a therapist or trusted friend. In that process, you should remember that punishing yourself isn’t productive—it doesn’t change what happened, or help the person you assaulted.
Lori also responded to a question about whether or not to invite an estranged sibling to Thanksgiving dinner. Her advice: Try to have a conversation with your brother to see if you can mend ties before excluding him.
Of course, you can simply not invite him to this year’s Thanksgiving and write him out of your life, which could ultimately be what happens anyway. Doing so now might provide immediate relief, but if you take a risk and open yourself up to hearing him out, you may discover the richness and healing that come from a long-overdue reconciliation.
Send Lori your questions at dear.therapist@theatlantic.com.
Written by Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal) and Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)
Today in 5 LinesThe Trump administration announced that the United States will reinstate sanctions on Iran that had previously been lifted under the Obama administration. Eight countries will receive temporary waivers allowing them to keep importing some oil from Iran. Following the announcement, Trump tweeted an image of himself overlaid with text saying, “Sanctions are Coming.”
A federal judge denied a Justice Department request to halt proceedings in a case accusing Trump of violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution.
In a reversal from his comments Thursday, Trump said that U.S. troops will not shoot at migrants heading to the southern border if they throw rocks.
The FBI confirmed that another suspicious package was sent to major Democratic donor Tom Steyer.
The U.S. economy added 250,000 jobs in October, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent, a near 50-year low.
Today on The AtlanticMothers for Medicaid: In Georgia, where the mortality rate for black mothers and babies is one of the highest in the country, gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is promising to expand Medicaid. Her embrace of the issue could make the difference in the governor's race. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
What Voters Want: Health care is the single most important issue in the midterm elections, writes Annie Lowrey.
How the Midterms Could Change North Carolina: The state’s Republican-controlled legislature is trying to change the constitution. Their amendments could block Democrats from power for years. (David A. Graham)
A Ripple Effect: After the Pittsburgh shooting, Jewish communities in small towns across America are thinking about how to counteract anti-Semitism with few resources—and few people. (Gabby Deutch)
Snapshot
Democratic Representative Jacky Rosen of Nevada visits the Expertise Cosmetology Institute during an event for her Senate campaign in Las Vegas. Rosen is facing Republican incumbent Dean Heller. (John Locher / AP)What We’re ReadingDereliction of Duty: The Little Rock Police Department hired an officer who told them he’d once attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Then he fatally shot a black teenager. It’s part of “cascading institutional failure” within the department, reports Radley Balko. (The Washington Post)
Stamp, Out: You don’t need a stamp to mail in your absentee ballot. Why does everyone seem to think you do? (Susie Armitage, ProPublica)
An Endless War: Earlier this week, the Trump administration called for a ceasefire in Yemen’s civil war. It’s too little and much too late, argues Jonah Shepp. (New York)
The ‘Culture Wars’ Go Wide: Serious policy decisions are being dictated by “petty” partisan arguments, writes Michael Grunwald. Here's why that's a problem. (Politico)
A Voter’s Guide: Unsure of what you actually need when you show up to vote in your state? Emma Sarappo has you covered. (Pacific Standard)
VisualizedCheers to the Governor: This election cycle has a number of high-profile gubernatorial races. See which are likely to go Republican and which are likely to go Democratic. (FiveThirtyEight)
As polling stations in Brazil closed last Sunday following the country’s presidential election, many Brazilian women started replacing their social-media profile photos with a simple black square. Some included the word luto, which is Portuguese for “mourning”: Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right former military officer who made virulent attacks against blacks, minorities, and women, would be their next president.
Bolsonaro, who has five children, has said that his only daughter was born due to his wife’s “weakness.” He has said that women should be paid lower salaries because they get pregnant, and should stop “whining” about femicide. In widely circulated remarks that led to charges against him in the Supreme Court, he said that he wouldn’t rape a congresswoman because she was “ugly.”
The word luto, however, also translate as “I fight.” And that is what women who oppose Bolsonaro have decided to do. “There is no time for lamenting,” said Ludmilla Teixeira, a 36-year-old who works in advertising and founded Women Against Bolsonaro, a Facebook group with 3.8 million members. “We will fight back.”
[Read: A Brazilian far-right populist and the women who like him]
In Brazil, Latin America’s largest democracy, women represent 52.5 percent of the electorate. But while it has already had a female president, it remains a deeply patriarchal country. Women were given the right to vote in 1932, a lot later than in much of the rest of the world, and feminist movements were restricted from organizing during the country’s military dictatorship. Today, just 15 percent of federal and state legislators are women—an all-time high.
Brazil is also one of the most violent countries in the world for women, with nearly 4,500 deaths and more than 60,000 rapes this past year alone, according to the Brazilian Forum for Public Security, a nonprofit group. (The numbers could be higher still: These were only the ones reported.)
But there have been signs of change. In 2015, before the #MeToo movement began, women in Brazil took to social media after male viewers of a popular cooking show tweeted overtly sexual remarks to a 12-year-old girl contestant. “If she consents, is it pedophilia?” one asked, while another compared her to a character in a pornographic film. (The tweets were later deleted.)
In response, the feminist NGO Olga created a campaign with the hashtag #primeiroassedio, or #firstharassment, for women to share their experiences of being harassed. More than 82,000 posts using the hashtag have been shared overall; at least 3,111 included unique stories of harassment, according to Olga. The campaign was so successful that UNICEF used the hashtag to boost its own campaign against gender-based violence.
In 2015, Brazil also passed a law that included femicide, or the gender-motivated killing of women, in the penal code as a heinous crime, with tougher penalties for the offenders. This came nine years after the implementation of landmark legislation on domestic violence. Both laws were acclaimed by the United Nations.
But Bolsonaro’s campaign, and his eventual victory, showed how far the country has yet to go when it comes to basic universal human rights.
In late 2015, the then-leader of the evangelical bloc and speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha (now serving a 15-year sentence in prison for graft), led impeachment proceedings against Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president; she was removed from office a year later. One of the congressmen who voted to oust her was Bolsonaro. He dedicated his vote to Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the head of the military dictatorship’s torture unit. Rousseff was among those tortured.
[Read: The rise of the Brazilian evangelicals]
Last March, Marielle Franco, a member of Rio de Janeiro’s city council, was murdered. She was one of Brazil’s few black female politicians, and an outspoken human-rights advocate against paramilitary gangs that control poor areas of Rio. Her case remains unsolved, and Bolsonaro was the only candidate to remain silent during the campaign.
Bolsonaro also opposes the anti-femicide law. In an interview on International Women’s Day last year, he said that Brazilian women should “stop whining; stop with this story of femicide,” and proposed to arm them, though specialists warn that most cases of violence against women are committed by intimate partners or close acquaintances.
Many of the president-elect’s views reflect those of his support base—what Brazilians call the “BBB bloc”: do boi, da Bíblia e da bala, or “beef, Bible, and bullets,” a reference to rural voters, evangelical Christians, and pro-gun groups. Powerful business groups also voiced support for Bolsonaro.
Brazil’s evangelicals, in particular, have grown into a major political force. A third of Brazilians now identify as evangelicals, as do a fifth of members of the House of Representatives. Many of them oppose gay rights and abortion. (In Brazil, one woman dies every two days of complications from illegal abortions, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health.)
“All the candidates were talking to women voters, aside from Bolsonaro—except for his macho, if not misogynist, comments,” said Manoela Miklos, a feminist activist and writer who was part of the earliest women’s groups that began to coalesce around an anti-Bolsonaro platform. “One comment always emerged: ‘Any candidate would be better than him.’”
As Bolsonaro rose, many women who opposed him were galvanized to act.
The first Women United Against Bolsonaro Facebook group, created in August by Ludmilla Teixeira, drew almost 4 million members in three weeks. “They were students, engineers, housewives, young and old; some activists, others ... long silenced by patriarchy who felt free to have a voice and speak out against threats to their basic rights for the first time,” Ludmilla told me. Soon social-media posts proliferated with the hashtag #EleNao, or #NotHim.
In late September, a week before the first round of the elections, Women United Against Bolsonaro called for street protests. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out in cities across the country. It was reportedly the largest women-led march in Brazil’s history.
The organizers of the march also took pains to ensure that it did not endorse any candidate. It was a strictly anti-Bolsonaro march. “We are very sorry,” Miklos told politicians eager to address the protestors. “We cannot allow this to become any party’s rally.”
The backlash from the pro-Bolsonaro crowd was fierce. The Women Against Bolsonaro Facebook page was hacked and its administrators received death threats. Well-known Brazilian artists who voiced support for #EleNao were attacked online: Marília Mendonça, the popular 22-year-old gospel and country-music singer, removed a video supporting the campaign after her mother received death threats on Instagram.
Bolsonaro supporters soon organized marches of their own. In one, they chanted and danced to a song whose lyrics compared feminists and left-wing women to dogs. The song went viral; among those who shared it was Bolsonaro’s son Flávio, also a congressman.
Online, Bolsonaro supporters spread manipulated images of the women’s march, seemingly in an attempt to demoralize them. A popular one purported to feature two naked women simulating Bolsonaro being hanged (in reality, a picture of two feminist activists in Ukraine); another showed a woman, dressed as the Virgin Mary, simulating an abortion in a church (in reality, an actress in an unrelated protest in Argentina).
The president-elect’s campaign also began pushing the debate to traditional family-values issues such as abortion and LGBT rights. Soon after the women’s march, two prominent Christian leaders, Edir Macedo and José Wellington, publicly declared their support for Bolsonaro.
In a highly patriarchal country, the campaign to demonize the women’s movement succeeded: Bolsonaro’s victory was pushed by men. Had only men voted in the election, he would have avoided a runoff and won office outright. Among women, however, his rate of rejection was twice that of Fernando Haddad, his main opponent. It was even higher among poor women, mostly blacks. In all, he won 46 percent of valid votes cast (many were spoiled or intentionally left blank) in the first round, and 55 percent of valid ballots in the runoff. Exit polls indicate that nearly 60 percent of young women voted for Haddad in the second round.
Following Bolsonaro’s election, activists are now plotting how best to build a strong, suprapartisan opposition.“We always thought of these groups as a way to mobilize, to resist, and to discuss alternatives to confront what was to come,” said Miklos, who now administers two women’s groups on Facebook, with 50,000 and 500,000 members. Since Monday, members of these groups have begun collecting signatures in protest of new pro-gun regulations under consideration by Congress, as well as a government plan to impose conservative and religious-based restrictions on school curricula.
“Politics is not an instant, but a process,” Eliane Brum, a columnist for El País, told me. “Women may have low representation in politics in Brazil, but organized the greatest political act of 2018 elections. This is extremely powerful.” Efforts to promote universal rights here “will continue, and will influence Brazil far beyond these elections.”
Teixeira said that she and other women have also been discussing how to move beyond the digital space. Ideas range from establishing an NGO to creating an all-women political party. “Women realized they are stronger together,” she told me. “Bolsonaro won, but he won’t govern without resistance.”
A gull swims through a flooded Venetian piazza, a different bird lands on a head in Zimbabwe, Halloween and Dia de los Muertos celebrations, political rallies in the U.S. and Brazil, mourning in Pittsburgh, the Red Sox bring the World Series trophy home, Central American migrants continue their trip north through Mexico, a giant military exercise in Norway, and much more
BOSTON—There was a fog over the John Joseph Moakley Courthouse in mid-October. Harvard was headed to court to defend its admissions policies; a coalition of Asian American students, cobbled together by the conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, was there to challenge them. The group, Students for Fair Admissions, alleged that Harvard had discriminated against them. But there was a broader question: Could the case be the first nail in the coffin of the use of race in college admissions?
As the trial wore on, the surge of people in the entrance to Judge Allison Burroughs’s courtroom turned to a slow trickle. Passionate arguments for diversity gave way to murky debates over the validity of regression models. John Hughes, a lawyer for SFFA, tried to clear the muck in his closing arguments. “All of the claims are important,” he told Burroughs. But SFFA wanted to focus on one: that Asian American students face intentional discrimination in Harvard’s admissions process. SFFA’s argument hinged on the personal rating, one of the metrics the university uses to measure applicants, which the group argues is how Harvard adds a plus factor to students of certain racial backgrounds. The personal rating, Harvard says, is generated using a bevy of information, including teacher and counselor recommendations as well as alumni interviews. “You see the substantial preferences for African Americans and Hispanics in the personal score,” Hughes told the court.
[Read: Harvard’s impossible personality test]
The main question is: If race is a plus for some students, is it also a minus for others? The plaintiffs argue that there is a racial penalty for Asian students. And they allege that implicit bias on the part of Harvard’s admissions officers when reviewing applications is the reason for that supposed minus. “Evidence of bias and stereotyping can suffice to show intentional discrimination,” Hughes said.
Over the course of the trial, SFFA ran both a legal and a public-relations campaign. They leaned on several thorny issues that often frustrate the public: Harvard’s legacy-admissions process, preferences for children of donors, and the advantage that recruited athletes get. But none of that mattered on Friday. The personal ratings, and the alleged use of race in them, was the focus.
In its closing statement, Harvard offered a defense of its process, and a defense of Supreme Court precedent. “SFFA began its opening statement by contending that ‘the wolf of racial bias is at Harvard's door,’”Bill Lee, the lead attorney for Harvard, said. “That wolf is not intentional discrimination,” he continued. “That wolf comes in the form of SFFA ... It is those who would turn back the clock,” and eliminate the “not only sanctioned” but “lauded” consideration of race in individual student applications. “The goal of SFFA,” Lee proclaimed, “is to eliminate all race in admissions.”
[Read: The Harvard case is about the future of affirmative action]
The university has recently added instructions to its Reading Procedures—which teach admissions officers how to review applications—on how race should be used in the process, which is to say, not at all in the personal rating. SFFA charges that the change is evidence that Harvard recognized built-in discrimination against Asian American applicants. Still, the outlines of Harvard’s defense were perhaps laid bare most clearly by Drew Gilpin Faust, the institution’s former president. “There is no place for discrimination of any kind at Harvard,” she said.
The Supreme Court has four decades of precedent on the use of race in admissions. In 1978, in the case of Allan Bakke, a white student who alleged that UC Davis discriminated against him by denying his admission to the medical school, the court agreed that race could be considered as one of many factors in the admissions process. Diversity, Justice Lewis Powell argued, constituted a compelling government interest, and diverse student bodies improved higher education for all students. But this trial strikes at the heart of Justice Powell’s decision. How much diversity is necessary, and is the use of race necessary to achieve that goal?
Right now, only one person can answer that question: Judge Burroughs, who will issue judgement on the case. (This was a bench trial, meaning there was no jury.) She is under no obligation to issue an immediate decision. But when her decision does come down, it could have major implications for the colleges that use race when considering applicants. Yes, there are four decades of precedent, but the Supreme Court looks very different than it did in the time of Bakke, or even Fisher v. the University of Texas, another major affirmative-action case from 2016. And the majority of the court now appears more skeptical of policies based on race.
The vast majority of colleges do not need to use race in admissions, because they tend to be more open-enrollment institutions. It is primarily the most selective institutions, which carry with them name recognition and powerful alumni networks, that use the practice to diversify their campuses. And several states have banned the practice of considering race in admissions—such as Michigan, where the state’s flagship university has never recovered its black enrollment since the change.
There are a lot of arguments explaining how and why Asian Americans could be discriminated against in the admissions process. There could be discrimination in who receives recruiting mailers. There could be bias in admissions officers’ interpretation of the kinds of occupations Asian American students hope to have. And there could be personality bias in the personal rating. It’s unclear which, if any, of those arguments will stick and potentially force changes to Harvard’s admissions process. If Harvard loses the case, it may not appeal the decision—but if Students for Fair Admissions does, it is almost certain to.
It could be months before we have a decision in this case, and it could be years before it reaches the Supreme Court. It may never appear before the high court, but the high-powered, Supreme Court–tested lawyers in the courtroom arguing the case seem convinced that it will. And if it goes the distance, the future of race-conscious admissions could be very much at risk.
Here’s an amazing political statistic: In 2016, the Affordable Care Act came up in just 10 percent of pro-Democrat campaign advertisements and 16 percent of pro-Republican ones. This year, it came up in more than half of Democratic ads and nearly a third of those for Republicans.
Those numbers, which come from the Wesleyan Media Project, help demonstrate the way the law’s politics have gone topsy-turvy and its political sway has grown since President Donald Trump came into office. After 2016, Republicans found themselves in the position of fighting against a law that suddenly went from being unpopular to being popular. And Democrats found themselves in the position of fighting to defend its good parts rather than having to explain away its bad ones. For the first time in nearly a decade, they’re running on health care rather than away from it.
[Read: The midterms could permanently change North Carolina politics]
Health care has become the single most important policy topic in the midterm elections—everywhere and nowhere, a strange kind of omnipresent sleeper issue. It’s not grabbing many national headlines, compared with the migrant caravan or the Supreme Court fight or violence directed against minority groups or the trade war, but it’s motivating voters in race after race after race. New polling from the Public Religion Research Institute shows that Americans point to the cost of health care more than any other issue when asked what is most important to them this election cycle. “It’s official: The 2018 midterms are about health care,” Wesleyan argued.
With good reason. There’s policy at stake. Ballot initiatives in three very red states—Utah, Nebraska, and Idaho—are seeking to expand Medicaid coverage to more than 300,000 people. “What we’re seeing is that health care doesn’t have to be partisan,” said Jonathan Schleifer, the executive director of the Fairness Project, an advocacy group that has supported the initiatives. “The Medicaid expansion has enormous bipartisan appeal because it’s the compassionate thing to do and the fiscally responsible thing to do.” In Washington, Republicans continue to stand queasily behind their own vaporware-type plans to repeal the ACA and replace it with something smaller and worse, while at the same time chipping away at coverage through regulatory provisions and the courts.
The status quo remains fraught, too. Though the rate of American adults without insurance has dropped from 18.2 percent when the ACA passed to 10.3 percent as of 2016, nearly 30 million mostly lower-income people still lack coverage, putting their health at risk and leaving them vulnerable to bankruptcy as a result of a car accident or sudden illness. Moreover, the cost of coverage and care remains a heavy burden for millions of families, with the growth of out-of-pocket costs continuing to outstrip the growth in wages. “The debate is about this amorphous thing called ‘health care,’” said Drew Altman, the president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. “The big crisis in health care now is a crisis of out-of-pocket costs for people who are sick.”
[Read: What happens if Trump wins his bet on racial demagoguery?]
For Democrats, the pitch to those voters is straightforward: We are the party that will shore up the Affordable Care Act, maintain protections for preexisting conditions, and work to make coverage universal and affordable. For the first time in years, the party is defending a popular law rather than an unpopular one—and is doing so vocally, playing on voters’ very real fears that Republicans will take away their coverage. In Missouri, Senator Claire McCaskill is on a “Your Health Care, Your Vote” tour. In West Virginia, Senator Joe Manchin is pressing on health care, too, cutting an ad in which he blasts the lawsuit that would take away coverage for preexisting conditions with a shotgun.
For Republicans, the law’s sudden popularity—and their continual efforts to reduce coverage and increase costs—have made their campaign pitch a little harder. With no real health plan to run on, many have alighted on the bizarre argument that they would protect individuals with preexisting conditions. “The president’s health-care plan,” Sarah Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters last month, “covers preexisting conditions.” (That health plan does not exist in any real form.) Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, and California Representative Dana Rohrabacher, among others, have gotten caught on both sides of the issue.
[Jemele Hill: Beto O’Rourke grabbed a political third rail—and electrified his campaign ]
A more coherent if more fanciful Republican argument goes after Medicare for All, the Democrats’ long-term promise of providing universal public coverage. “They want to raid Medicare to pay for socialism,” Trump said at a rally in Indiana in August. Florida Governor Rick Scott, among other conservatives, has picked up the attack line. (So has the program’s federal administrator, Seema Verma, tweeting this week, “Medicare for All isn’t a joke. It’s a multi-trillion dollar drain on the American economy that will bankrupt future generations.”) But Democrats would need control of the House, Senate, and White House to turn that campaign slogan into policy reality—and at the same time, Republican leaders in Congress are promising to take another run at shrinking Medicaid and gutting Medicare.
With Trump in the White House and voters focused on the health-policy details, Democrats are running for something popular and against something unpopular. Republicans have no popular plan of their own, their proposals on the issue are unpopular, and they are grasping for something to run against. And Americans are voting.
In every story, something has to happen somewhere. And that somewhere—a place, landscape, world—is crucial to the stories we’re showcasing this week.
In Lauren Groff’s short-story collection, Florida, condos and drugstores clash against snakes, alligators, sinkholes, and inclement weather to create a sense of existential anxiety. Sam Anderson’s Boom Town lasers in on Oklahoma City, often considered part of “flyover country,” and reveals the exciting “Plains epic” that is its history. The writings of Frederick Law Olmsted, the mastermind behind New York City’s Central Park, demonstrate the importance of public spaces, and their impact on people. In her graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This, the artist Kristen Radtke moves from place to place, only to find inexplicable comfort in “abandoned towns, crumbling monuments, and cities destroyed by natural disasters or economic downturn.”
Each week in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas, and ask you for recommendations of what our list left out. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
What We’re Reading
“Florida, in Florida, is more than a state. It’s a state of mind. It’s an encumbrance, drowning bodies in humidity. It’s a violent partner, constantly erupting. It’s ‘a damp, dense tangle. An Eden of dangerous things.’”
📚 FLORIDA, by Lauren Groff
Before You Can Write a Good Plot, You Need to Write a Good Place
“The best writers provide a sense of events unfolding in this specific place, a place that informs and feeds the characters and events. What comes first: the place or the story? The story or the place? With great fiction, it can be impossible to distinguish.”
📚 THE COLD SONG, by Linn Ullmann
📚 “FACE,” by Alice Munro
Boom Town Explodes the Notion of ‘Flyover’ Territory
“From a distance, Oklahoma City looked like almost nothing … Up close, it turned out to be about almost everything.”
📚 BOOM TOWN, by Sam Anderson
A Graphic-Novel Memoir That Tangles With the Puzzle of Existence
“We all do it … Fantasize disaster.”
📚 IMAGINE WANTING ONLY THIS, by Kristen Radtke
“Through industrial agricultural practices, resource extraction, and atmospheric monkeying, we have landscaped the entire world to suit our needs.”
📚 WRITINGS ON LANDSCAPE, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY, by Frederick Law Olmsted
You RecommendDidn’t read enough scary stories on Halloween this week? When we asked you to recommend your favorite horror stories, many of you suggested works by Stephen King. But one in particular, ’Salem’s Lot, thoroughly spooked a reader from Boise, Idaho: “The evil in this book is almost viscerally banal at times, which is so much worse [than] hacking gore,” Loretta C. wrote. “This book scared the bejeebies out of me … I slept with the lights on for almost 6 months; I wore a cross around my neck for over a year.”
For reader Keryl Brown Ahmed, “Husband Stitch,” a short story from Carmen Maria Machado’s collection Her Body and Other Parties, is “particularly haunting because it primarily examines the entitlement men feel over women’s bodies, and how often, sometimes unintentionally, women cede to this feeling of entitlement and ownership.”
What’s a book centered on a specific place or location that you think everyone should read? Tweet at us with the hashtag #TheAtlanticBooksBriefing, or fill out the form here.
This week’s newsletter is written by J. Clara Chan. The book on her bedside table right now is Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists, by Marina Warner.
Comments, questions, typos? Email jchan@theatlantic.com.
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Nobody floats quite like Nao. The British singer-songwriter, née Neo Jessica Joshua, first found her voice in East London, where she spent her childhood collecting a diverse tapestry of musical influences: U.K. garage and grime, jazz, gospel, and funk. Now, the former backing vocalist weaves these sundries into wings.
On her second studio album, Saturn, Nao guides listeners through a galactic journey. It’s a lush, ambitious record that pulses with the singer’s need for movement. On the titular track, a gorgeous duet with the Ghanaian British soul singer Kwabs, Nao likens her love to a cosmic rite of passage: “You leave and return,” she sings in dulcet tones. “You’re just like Saturn to me.” Where her prior records have conjured an atmospheric soundscape shaped almost entirely by the singer’s vocals, Saturn shows off her nimble lyricism, too.
In astrological parlance, the Saturn return is the window of time when the slow-moving planet comes back to the place it occupied at the time of one’s birth. Generally, this astral revolution takes a little more than 29 years to complete, and the years between 27 and 30 constitute a period of intense growth and strained attempts at self-possession. It’s fitting, then, that Saturn finds the post-20s Nao evolved, the insecurities of the prior decade having shuffled off to create space for a more fully realized self—and more complex music.
On songs like “Gabriel” and “If You Ever,” Nao is inviting and self-assured. She sings the kind of woozy romantic bops that beg for dancing under summer skies. “If you ever change your mind,” she asks on the latter, “would you fly with me?” Her voice vibrates with anticipation and nervousness, the cumulative effect something of a flutter. In its intimate explication of the personal, Saturn is heavenly.
Saturn’s most traditionally R&B single, “Make It Out Alive,” features the Inglewood-bred Top Dawg Entertainment signee SiR. After his verse, the two sing the chorus together, their voices reassuring even as their mutual destruction is all but guaranteed:
Fall too deep, too deep to get outta here
Too deep, too deep to get outta here
House burnt down, burnt down to the fucking ground
I don't even care now if I make it out
Can't get out my head, it's the atmosphere
Colors change, blue grass like the Lumineers
I'm too deep, too deep to get outta here
Too deep, too deep to get outta here
Want to influence Tuesday’s midterm election but keep your identity a secret from voters? No problem. Here’s how you do it:
Step 1. Pick a super PAC name, treasurer, and bank account.
Step 2. File a short form with the Federal Election Commission.
Step 3. Wait until October 18 to begin spending your money. That way, you won’t have to report your donors until an entire month after Election Day.
This is happening now. And Democrats are leading the way despite decrying political efforts funded by “dark money”—cash that can’t be traced to its ultimate source.
A Center for Public Integrity analysis of federal campaign records indicates that three super PACs that have formed since October 18 have reported spending a combined $1.4 million across three hotly contested U.S. Senate races and one U.S. House race. Super PACs may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates, but they can’t contribute money to candidates’ campaigns directly.
[Read: Twilight of the super PAC]
As of Thursday night, these three groups are among 44 political action committees that have formed since October 18.
These groups must by law disclose their donors. But this election cycle, the final pre–Election Day deadline for PACs and super PACs to reveal their donors came and went on October 25—a deadline covering financial activity from October 1 to October 17. Any group that formed after October 17 isn’t subject to this deadline and must first report the identities of its contributors, and the amounts they contributed, on December 6, per federal regulations.
Most notable among these just-formed groups is Texas Forever, a super PAC bashing Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. To date, Texas Forever has spent more than $1.29 million on anti-Cruz TV ads just in the past two weeks.
Who gave that money to Texas Forever is a mystery, and will remain so until December 6. Cruz is battling Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke in a race that a Wednesday poll from the University of Texas at Tyler indicates is very close and that the Cook Political Report has declared a “toss-up.”
“BBQ. Football … There’s a lot in Texas you shouldn’t mess with. Your health care is one of them. But Ted Cruz did,” the ad’s voice-over says.
The treasurer of the Texas Forever super PAC is the Democratic Texas political consultant Christopher Lippincott, who from 2006 to 2011 served as the director of media relations for the Texas Department of Transportation.
[Read: Beto O’Rourke’s huge Facebook bet]
Lippincott acknowledged an interview request from the Center for Public Integrity, but did not respond to several follow-up attempts. In a recent interview with the Dallas Morning News, he declined to reveal the group’s donors but nevertheless called Cruz out for benefiting from conservative political groups’ secretive money: “Ted Cruz is a phony politician propped up by millions of out-of-state dark dollars who has spent the past six years doing favors for his special-interest donors.”
Catherine Frazier, a Cruz-campaign spokeswoman, said that Lippincott’s claim was “an awfully hypocritical charge given that Beto O’Rourke is being propped up by this very super PAC and has taken money for his campaign bundled by multiple PACs.”
[Read: Ted Cruz’s basketball charm offensive]
Although little is known about Texas Forever, it hired a media-buying firm, Waterfront Strategies, that has ties to the national Democratic machinery. O’Rourke has routinely boasted of not accepting corporate-PAC or special-interest money.
But because Texas Forever is a super PAC, and therefore not controlled by the O’Rourke campaign, it can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money as it sees fit—to benefit O’Rourke or any other political candidate. O’Rourke has also financially benefited from the efforts of JStreetPAC, a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” political committee that’s served as a “conduit” and directed individuals’ contributions to O’Rourke’s campaign, as the Associated Press has reported.
“We’re not interested in the help of any super PACs or special-interest groups and don’t want their involvement in this race, which is why our grassroots campaign has accepted exactly zero dollars from PACs in this election,” Chris Evans, the O’Rourke-campaign communications director, told the Center for Public Integrity.
But Democrats of late have not hesitated to use untraceable money as part of their efforts.
A prime example, from late this past year, is the super PAC Highway 31.
Highway 31 spent millions in Alabama’s special U.S. Senate race without disclosing its donors—which turned out to be the Democrat-aligned super PACs Senate Majority PAC and Priorities USA Action, as well as the League of Conservation Voters—until after the election.
In Montana this month, a super PAC named Forward Montana has spent about $9,900 on mailers, printouts, and digital ads supporting Democratic Senator Jon Tester and the Democrat Kathleen Williams, a water-conservation expert running for Montana’s U.S. House seat. Forward Montana reported receiving no donations as of October 17, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Forward Montana’s website says that University of Montana students founded the group in 2004, with its “first fights … focusing on recycling, renewable energy, sexual assault and tenant rights.” It boasts being the largest youth civic-engagement organization in Montana, with staff in Billings, Bozeman, and Missoula.
Forward Montana registered a super-PAC arm on October 19 of this year. On Thursday, the super PAC filed paperwork with the FEC, changing itself into a traditional PAC, which is subject to fundraising limits but may donate money directly to candidates.
Forward Montana members did not return the Center for Public Integrity’s requests for comment.
David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, which advocates against campaign-finance regulations, said that it’s “ironic” that liberals are engaging in such activity.
“If [Democrats] think disclosure is such a good idea, then why aren’t they doing it?” Keating mused.
Federal statutes governing campaign-finance disclosure were written in the 1970s and need updating to address the loophole allowing some super PACs and other political committees to hide their donors until after Election Day, said Brett Kappel, an election-law attorney and partner at the law firm Akerman LLP.
Republican groups are also using this donor-disclosure loophole to keep their funders a secret for now.
Take Restore Our Healthcare, a super Pac based in Scottsdale, Arizona. It formed on Halloween, the same day it reported spending almost $46,250 on radio and digital ads, as well as an “air banner” supporting Republican Representative Martha McSally, who is running for Arizona’s U.S. Senate seat.
Restore Our Healthcare’s treasurer is Randy Pullen, the former chair of the Arizona Republican Party and former treasurer of the Republican National Committee.
The amount of PAC and super PAC money flowing through this legal loophole is significantly more now than in previous election cycles.
At least 28 pop-up PACs formed in the final days of the 2016 presidential election. Together, they spent $220,000 in money whose donors weren’t disclosed until after the election, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis.
The largest-spending pop-up PAC in that cycle, Truth PAC, dropped $92,000 on anti–Donald Trump ads. One ad overlaid Russian nesting dolls on the faces of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. At least 27 pop-up PACs materialized in the final days of the 2014 election, spending relatively little.
PACs and super PACs that formed earlier in the year but waited until late October to actually spend money in elections are also allowed to hide their donors until after Tuesday’s midterm election.
The super PAC American Potential Fund—based in Alexandria, Virginia, and created October 3—waited until after October 17 to spend $186,000 on digital ads opposing incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida in his U.S. Senate race against Republican Governor Rick Scott.
Throughout the 2017–2018 election cycle, political groups, especially on the Democratic side, have been creatively filing their registration and campaign-finance-disclosure paperwork with federal regulators, allowing them to temporarily delay revealing who funds them.
In all, 63 committees this cycle together spent more than $22 million on politicking before they were required to reveal who was bankrolling their activities, according to a ProPublica and Politico analysis of Federal Election Commission filings from the beginning of 2017 through October 17, 2018. This is in addition to the PACs and super PACs that have formed since October 17.
Not all PACs and super PACs that pop up days before Election Day are doing so with the intention of hiding their donors until after the 2018 midterms are complete.
At least six such groups told the Center for Public Integrity that they don’t plan on spending money until the 2020 election—or that they were unaware they could keep their donors a secret until December.
Kelly Werder, a hospitality-law professor and administrator at Florida Gulf Coast University, formed a new political action committee, called the 5050 by 2020 Committee, on October 23.
“We’re just some pretty frustrated women in a post-[Brett] Kavanaugh world, and that’s pretty much it,” Werder said.
Werder shared her “very exciting donor list, including me, friends from college, and my mom!” with the Center for Public Integrity. She collected about $500, as well as spending almost $300 herself on a post-office box, web hosting, and graphics.
The group is mostly boosting social-media posts and hopes to start a podcast on female politicians. It has endorsed female candidates from both parties.
Matthew Resh, the treasurer of a new Houston-based super PAC called the Center for Real News, said he hasn’t received any money yet.
And Ryan Alsayegh of the Philadelphia-based PAC Second Generation, which formed October 24, said it has no donors and doesn’t plan to fund-raise until 2019. The group wants to encourage immigrant communities to be politically engaged.
But by law, if someone wants to form a super PAC and spend unlimited amounts of “dark money” between now and Election Day 2018, they have four days left to do so.
Few Americans are aware of the fact that the first printing of the Declaration of Independence contained a copy error. As a result, many subsequent republications of the text display the typo. In a new video filmed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Danielle Allen, a political theorist and professor at Harvard University, explains why this seemingly innocuous oversight can have grave consequences. Interpreting this sentence correctly, Allen argues, is crucial to understanding how the powers of government are organized—and, consequentially, how to be an effective civic agent.
On Wednesday afternoon, in the ramp-up to the midterm election, the president of the United States posted a video to his Twitter feed: a political attack ad focused on Luis Bracamontes, the “illegal immigrant,” as the ad calls him, who was convicted of murdering two deputies in Sacramento, California, in 2014. “Democrats let him into our country,” the ad’s text reads—the line is false—while footage of Bracamontes plays in the background. As the convict sits in a courtroom, laughing, apparently admitting to murdering the two cops and vowing to “kill more,” crashing drumbeats heighten the tension that spreads over the sound-bitten story. The ad’s video then cuts away from a single person to a crowd of them, traveling to a time in the unspecified present, to footage of people—members, by implication, of the caravan that the president has been keeping in the forefront of the American consciousness—who yell, who run, who push through gates, doing nothing wrong save for endorsing the president’s preferred characterization of those he insists on seeing as other: as a threat. As an invasion. As an infestation.
It is painfully clear what Donald Trump, under the auspices of the American presidency, was doing with the ad. He was attempting, in the heady handful of days before the crucial midterm elections, to question the motives of an entire population of people: the dirty politics of the swift boat, expanded into a swift fleet. Here, in a 53-second, Twitter-aired ad spot that has, as of this writing, garnered 5.1 million views, is a culmination of the promise Trump tacitly made when, in 2015, announcing the commencement of a presidential candidacy that had already been fueled by racist lies, he descended the escalator at his gilded tower and accused Mexicans writ large of being rapists and criminals. Not just racism, but swaggering racism. Racism that has been assured that it can voice itself, in the marbled atrium and out in the open, and face few meaningful consequences save for a victory in a presidential election.
Those responsible for the now-infamous exploitation of William Horton in the 1980s were ashamed of themselves enough to distance themselves from that ad, both at the time and later on. Trump’s invocation of Luis Bracamontes, however—a Wag the Dog–level distraction, waged not through fake war but through fake news—professes no such shame. It is, instead, blatant and gleeful and practically giddy. “The hoods are off,” my colleague Matt Thompson put it last year. The hatred has metastasized. Wag the Dog whistle.
None of it—the racism itself, the crudely manufactured attempt at a last-minute October surprise—comes as a shock. What is notable about the Bracamontes ad, though, is its treatment of racism as a useful spectacle. The spot is in one way a dog whistle operating with the subtlety of a cowbell; it is also a nearly guaranteed way, in these heady days before the midterms, to hijack the American media’s attention. It is a thing—an outrageous thing, a hateful thing—that would, via the forces of its own awfulness, compel everyone to look at it. And thus to look away from other things.
Look away, the ad cajoled, drumbeat by drumbeat, from the horrors of Pittsburgh, from the worst episode of anti-Semitic violence in the nation’s history. Look away from the fact that Trump’s hateful rhetoric against immigrants helped to fuel the murders. Look away from the series of pipe bombs that had been sent the week before to members of the American government and the American media. Look away from the voter suppression. Look away from the fact that the White House’s effort to frame the group of migrants making their way north through Mexico as an “invasion” has been acknowledged, even on Fox News, as an absurdist lie. Look away from the migrant children still locked up in cages. Look away from the murdered journalist. Look away from the wind-ravaged island, and from the other ones. Look away from the poisoned water. Look away from the rising seas, the seething storms, the menacingly heating air. Look away from the apathy. Look away from the empathy. Look away. Look away. Look away.
* * *
Distraction has been a common word, within the political media, over the past days. So has misdirection. What their popularity suggests, to some extent, is the failure of the Trump administration’s efforts to distract and misdirect and otherwise mislead: The journalists, the words make clear, are onto him. But the reality-TV president is well aware of the Streisand effect; he understands how readily he can hack the workings of the American press when he, as president, chooses to distract and detract and lie.
A growing body of literature suggests how little difference there can be, in the end, between journalists’ intentional corrections of Trump’s untruths and their unintentional amplifications of them: The logic of “Don’t think of an elephant” has its analogue in the national mind. And so a discussion on CNN, searingly criticizing the bad faith and blatant racism of the Bracamontes ad, can register among the public, effectively, as simply another discussion of the Bracamontes ad. Oxygen is oxygen. Air is air. As CNN’s Kate Bolduan put it on Thursday, “Sources are telling CNN that the point of this video … is to change the conversation, to change the argument on immigration from family unification to invasion.” The panel that the network had convened for the occasion went on to conduct an impassioned discussion not of immigration or family reunification, but of the Bracamontes video.
Americans typically think of attention as a relatively straightforward proposition: a thing people have, and a thing people give. The attention economy. Attention as currency. Attention as something that is, figuratively and sometimes literally, paid. The slights and sleights of Donald Trump, however, make clear the limitations of those frameworks: There is more to attention as Americans tend to give it and receive it and exploit it in 2018. Yes, attention is capital. But it is also something deeper than that. It is also a moral good. It is a force that, summoned or squandered, has the power to bend the arc of human lives.
[Read: Are we having too much fun?]
“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James observed, more than a century before a constantly chirping bird would come to serve as a metaphor for the way many Americans consume their information. He was making an existential point—you are, in many ways, the soft sum of your inputs—but he was also making a moral one: We have a choice in the daily decision of what to see, what to read, what to learn, what to know, whom to listen to, what to attend to. They are choices that also render, attention being a limited thing, in the negative: Each book read is another book not read. Each story heard is another story not heard. This is true for the individual mind; it is also, in its way, true for the national. The zero-sum nature of attention is the fundamental fact of journalists’ editorial decisions, and of audiences’ consumption decisions, and of the algorithms that define news feeds that define, in turn, the experience—the term was James’s long before it was Mark Zuckerberg’s—of the user.
And the individual choices—news consumer by news consumer, editor by editor, news feed by news feed—amplify. They become the terms by which some events are elevated and others are ignored, by which some people are seen and others are left in obscurity, by which some emerging truths are brought into sharp focus and others are allowed to recess. What we care about, as a we: This is determined, minute by minute and day by day and week by week, by a series of decisions that are profoundly ethical in nature. Attention has always had a moral valence, one deeply connected to the evils of apathy; the matter is heightened now, though, as people are exposed to one another in ways that were never possible before.
There was a time, not too long ago, when media theorists worried about “information overload”: the notion that the proliferation of news and facts, especially as occasioned by the rise of the commercial internet, might impede people’s ability to make everyday decisions. Those anxieties now seem quaint, replaced as they have been by more targeted fears about information silos and filter bubbles and fake news—but, still, the dangers of overload remain.
One of the problems facing the current moment, the economist Tyler Cowen argues, is not merely the proliferation of news that is fake, but also the proliferation of news that is true: Everyday consumers simply have too much information to make reasonable sense of, Cowen suggests. And the too-muchness is its own kind of problem, because it allows for a very particular kind of mass cynicism: Consumers, now with a glut of information at their disposal—even the true information!—can cherry-pick their realities. And the sources who provide the fruits in question—journalists, academics, experts of all sorts—are also subject to the forces of informational glut. Via social media and cable news and other platforms of constant exposure, those people are revealed in multidimensional ways that they never would have been before. “It’s not quite that you have discovered that the emperor has no clothes,” Cowen writes. “But perhaps you have noticed that he (or she) is missing a few critical garments.” His column is titled “How Real News Is Worse Than Fake News,” and it makes an extremely convincing argument.
What the column is also talking about, however, is attention: the way the modern media consumer is made to pay attention to elements of information-generation that were, in an earlier age, largely kept from view. One of the massive cultural shifts that has taken place in America over the past decade is a broad movement away from a news economy driven by scarcity—the space in a newspaper, or a magazine, or a broadcast—and toward one driven by abundance: the 24-hour news cycle, the proliferation of news sources, the limitlessness of the digital page.
Which is also to say that “attention,” in today’s media ecosystem, means something slightly but meaningfully different from what it meant under the previous regime. News consumption demands not just consumption itself, but also selection among so many, many choices: CNN or MSNBC or Fox or PBS or Showtime or Netflix or The New York Times or The Washington Post or NPR or The Atlantic or Vice or The Gateway Pundit or Facebook or Twitter or your favorite blog or really any blog or multiple other options—ongoing, demanding, incessant, proliferating—competing for your precious time and, with it, your precious attention.
The anxieties accompanying this paradox of informational choice might help explain why, recently, “mindfulness” has arisen as a cultural preoccupation. And why, among the memes that have gained traction of late, the one that made jokes about the affordances of the expanding brain—the mind that is uniquely capable of transcending its own gray limitations to espouse a shimmeringly holistic view of the universe itself—caught on. Intelligence is a relative thing, in the sense that what it means to be smart in the America of 2018 is quite different from what it means to be smart in the America of 1918, or 1818; brilliance in 2018, the galaxy brain suggests, involves the ability to overcome the limitations of one’s own meager mind. It is to achieve the kind of holistic understanding embodied by Google, climate scientists, Janet from The Good Place, and pretty much no one else. Beings uniquely able to see things whole, and to see them true.
A holistic intelligence is at play when American journalists, rather than simply informing the public that Donald Trump has issued a pre-midterms campaign ad, report on it as part of a broader project of mass distraction. At play as well, however, is a reminder of how ill-equipped American media systems are to report on a president who, as information overload incarnate, has so effectively weaponized preoccupation.
In his sweeping book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, the legal scholar Tim Wu offers a history of the ways that attention has been summoned in America from the 19th century to today. He talks about the industrialized media systems—the newspaper, the radio, the television, the news feed—that have proven lucrative for those who have controlled them precisely because they have found canny ways to convert human attention into financial capital. Wu offers, as a shorthand for those systems, a useful, summative term: attention harvesting. The phrase is intentionally ominous. Attention, after all, is not only uniquely intimate, but also profoundly manipulable. To be a part of the media ecosystem of the present moment, teeming with news that is false and news that is true and news that is wanting above all to be looked at, is to live in a constant state of dazzlement. It is to be often plagued by the form of fleeting blindness that comes when you look too close at something too bright—when, for a moment, all that is visible, within your addled eyes, is the floating of fictive stars.
[ Read: The Image in the age of pseudo-reality ]
The Attention Merchants was published on October 18, 2016, which is to say it was released roughly a week after the content of Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood tapes was reported by The Washington Post; roughly a week before James Comey would disclose that the FBI was reviewing emails that had been stored on Hillary Clinton’s private server when she had been secretary of state; and roughly three weeks before Trump, who began his campaign with a declaration of division, would win the presidency of the United States in spite of it all. The book was released roughly three months before Trump would take the oath of office and use the attention convened upon him to spread lies and fears about “American carnage.” It was released in the period before the news cycle would become so chaotic, and its attendants so addled, that people would regularly make jokes about what a long year today has been. It would take only a little while longer for those jokes to stop being funny.
The word distraction comes to the English almost directly from the Latin: distrahĕre, “to pull asunder.” Lurking in that history is the recognition that the state of distraction is not merely annoying or inconvenient; it can be destructive and dangerous. To live in the present American moment is not merely to inhale, constantly, an air of etherized cruelty, or to have one’s very experience—what I agree to attend to—denuded and deluded in the unending demands of the attention harvest. It is also never to be quite sure what is being overlooked, as the president race-baits and cable news bites, as breaking news competes for attention with ongoing emergencies, as Americans lose our ability to tell not only truth from fiction, but also truths of momentary significance from truths of existential urgency. Flint. Yutu. Climate change. Disenfranchisement. Worsening inequality. Systemic injustice. So many more. What will happen if we fail to pay them the attention they are due? Where does the distraction end and the destruction begin?
In the 19th century, geologists hypothesized that some of Earth’s most dramatic landforms emerged because the planet had shriveled over time, like a juicy grape becoming a raisin. As the Earth contracted, they thought, the ground buckled in on itself, producing towering mountains, steep cliffs, and deep ocean basins.
The theory worked only if they assumed that Earth was covered in a homogenous shell of rocky crust, which, it turned out some years later, wasn’t the case. In the mid-20th century, as theories about colliding plate tectonics took hold, the raisin hypothesis was abandoned.
But it was still a good theory, and it happens to apply to another planet: Mercury.
Mercury, tiny but mighty, the smallest planet in the solar system, is circumscribed to a scorched existence close to the sun. Where Earth has tectonic plates, Mercury has a thin, single crust enveloping its molten-iron core. Mercury is also way more metal than rock; its liquid core comprises more than 60 percent of its volume, compared with our planet’s 15 percent.
“It’s basically a big ball of metal surrounded by a little bit of rock,” says Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist who studies Mercury at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Humanity got its first good look at Mercury in the 1970s, when Mariner 10, a NASA spacecraft, embarked on a tour of the solar system’s innermost planets. The mission revealed that Mercury produced a magnetic field, an invisible bubble that protects the surface from the worst of the sun’s radiation. Magnetic fields are generated from within, by a planet’s liquid-metal core, still hot from its creation several billion years ago.
[Read: Mercury is the Inspectah Deck of planets]
Mariner also photographed chains of cliffs and ridges, some as tall as Washington State’s Mount St. Helens, stretching for hundreds of miles. The landforms, known as scarps, fascinated scientists. They set about explaining the scarps’ origins, and quickly ruled out several explanations. Mercury bears the marks of volcanism—long channels carved into the rock by flowing lava—but activity ceased a few billion years ago. It also exhibits signs of an ancient bombardment by objects of various sizes, but such onslaughts produce craters, not mountains.
Scientists examined what they knew about planet formation. The iron cores of all the rocky planets in our solar system, including Earth, are still cooling down from their fiery births 4.5 billion years ago. As liquid iron turns solid, it contracts, creating space for the crust above to contract, too. The ground cracks and thrusts upward, redrawing the landscape. If the planet was covered in a uniform crust, like a lid, the effects of this contraction should remain visible. The scarps, scientists predicted, must be a result of this phenomenon.
With this hypothesis in hand, scientists used Mariner images to calculate the length and height of the scarps. They used the measurements to estimate how much Mercury had shrunk in its lifetime.
But they couldn’t be entirely sure of even their best estimates. Mariner had approached Mercury only three times before zooming back out into space, and the encounters had allowed the spacecraft to photograph just 45 percent of the planet’s surface. To test their predictions, scientists needed a spacecraft to visit the planet and stay for a while.
That spacecraft, named MESSENGER, arrived in 2011. The mission provided global views of Mercury for the first time. “I was like a kid on Christmas morning every single day for three years because there’s always something new to see and always something surprising,” recalls Chabot, who worked on the mission’s imaging system.
The photographs showed that Mercury had undoubtedly shrunk. Thousands of scarps snaked along its surface. Scientists studied about 6,000 of the structures and calculated that the planet’s radius of 2,440 kilometers (1,516 miles) has shrunk between 14 kilometers and 20 kilometers (8.6 miles and 12.4 miles) since its creation.
Scientists have detected such scarps on other worlds in the solar system, like the moon and Mars. But the signs of shrinking are more prominent on Mercury, says Paul Byrne, a planetary geologist at North Carolina State University who led the MESSENGER study.
“I don’t know if Mercury has contracted more than the other worlds,” Byrne says. “I think it’s safe to say that the effects of global contraction have been most pronounced on Mercury.”
[Read: Why is NASA neglecting Venus?]
MESSENGER eventually went the way of several other spacecraft in NASA history: It was sent crashing into Mercury’s surface. But a replacement is on its way.
Last month, the European Space Agency and JAXA, Japan’s space agency, launched the BepiColombo mission. BepiColombo is a two-for-one deal; when the mission’s spacecraft arrive in seven years, they will split into two orbiters. Like Mariner and MESSENGER before it, BepiColombo should provide even more views of the Mercurian surface.
Byrne says that he doesn’t expect his estimates of the rate of shrinking to change drastically. The contraction of Mercury occurs on tremendous timescales, so it’s unlikely that much would change in a matter of years.
Still, some questions remain about the incredible shrinking planet. Specifically: Is it still shrinking? And if it is, when will it stop?
Solving this mystery would require yet another mission to Mercury, but this time to land on the surface, where temperatures can reach a toasty 430 degrees Celsius (800 degrees Fahrenheit). The spacecraft would need to come equipped with seismometers to listen for Mercury-quakes, and scientists would need to wait a very, very long time for the payoff.
“The only way that we would know for sure that it’s not [contracting] is if we had seismic instruments on the surface that were able to listen for thousands of years and not detect earthquakes that we could attribute to the planet creaking and cooling,” Byrne says. “I don’t think there’s any measure we could make that would reliably tell us for sure the process has ended.”
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The upcoming midterms mark the first nationwide referendum on the Trump presidency and the GOP-led Congress. Coming amid a shocking spree of political violence and an ugly showdown over voting rights, Tuesday’s election will have massive ramifications. What conclusions can we draw from the vote?
Links
- “The Jews of Pittsburgh Bury Their Dead” (Emma Green, October 30, 2018)
- “Trump Shut Programs to Counter Violent Extremism” (Peter Beinart, October 29, 2018)
- “Trump’s Caravan Hysteria Led to This” (Adam Serwer, October 28, 2018)
- “A Broken Jewish Community” (Emma Green, October 28, 2018)
- “Voter Suppression Is the New Old Normal” (Vann R. Newkirk II, October 24, 2018)
- “The 2018 Midterms Are All About Trump” (Ronald Brownstein, October 18, 2018)
CAIRO—Bishop Epiphanius was found lying in a pool of his own blood, his brain spilling out of his crushed skull. The 64-year-old Coptic abbot was discovered near his cell at the Monastery of St. Macarius, in the desert northwest of Cairo, just before dawn on a July morning. He had been on his way to prayers, but before he could perform that final act of devotion, he was murdered—apparently by his own disciples. He was beaten three times on the head with a metal object, possibly a pipe, according to the general prosecutor’s investigation files I obtained.
The ongoing inquiry has captured the imagination of ordinary Egyptians, who are clamoring for answers about who’s behind this real-life murder mystery. They are intensely interested not only because the murder took place in a monastery, but because the death of Epiphanius, a learned man with a wispy white beard and a serene smile, represents a new challenge for an already beleaguered Christian community.
Copts, a religious minority in Egypt numbering at least 10 million, make up around one-tenth of the country’s population, though reliable figures are hard to find. Adhering to a form of Christianity that began with Saint Mark in the first century, Copts have suffered centuries of religious persecution, including at the hands of militant groups such as Islamic State. Most recently, reports have emerged that at least seven Copts were killed when gunmen opened fire on their bus Friday. In the case of the monastery, however, the violence appears to have come from within.
[Read: Why do Coptic Christians keep getting attacked?]
Two suspects—Wael Saad Tawadros, 34, and Faltaous al-Maqari, 33—were quickly identified by investigators. Wael, who went by the name Isaiah until the Church defrocked him in August, is now in prison. He confessed to the murder under interrogation, but later retracted the confession, saying it was given under duress. Faltaous attempted to take his own life in the days after the bishop’s murder, and he remains in a Cairo hospital, battered and bruised.
A third monk, Zenon al-Maqari, 43, who was due to testify about his alleged involvement in the crime, has also been found dead. An autopsy report detected signs of insecticide poisoning; his death was seen as a suicide attempt.
In the case files, prosecutors say—based on Wael’s now-retracted confession—that the suspects had planned for Faltaous to serve as Wael’s lookout. They met on the morning of the murder, waited for the bishop to head to the dawn mass, pounced on him, and then fled the crime scene to their respective cells.
When I sought out Wael’s family in a cramped tailor’s shop in Abu Tij, a small commercial hub a few hours’ drive south of Cairo, I found his brother Hany Tawadros working amid the monotonous beat of an ornate Singer sewing machine. In his first interview with the media, Hany insisted that his younger brother was innocent and said problems with the investigation have convinced his family that Wael was framed.
“It is like they arranged all the evidence together and tailored a galabeya (tunic) out of it that fit him perfectly so he can appear as the culprit,” Hany told me. He slammed the clergy for the way they had cooperated with the authorities and defrocked Wael, which he said cemented the perception that Wael was the murderer. “You can see that the Church worked hand in hand with the authorities to frame him. The monastery’s old guard pretty much said, ‘Let’s focus our energy on the monk who had many issues with the leadership,’ so he became their sacrificial lamb.”
Wael and the abbot had been locked in a fierce theological dispute, according to Wael’s family and lawyer as well as Church officials commenting in local media. The dispute revolved around two men who followed diverging schools of thought that have defined the Church.
One was advocated by Matta al-Maskin, a charismatic figure in the Church who, until his death in 2006, had advocated a more inward-looking monasticism and a return to an era of worship unencumbered by the distractions of modernity. The other was led by Pope Shenouda III, the late spiritual leader who wielded great influence over Egyptian Christians. He had been al-Maskin’s disciple, but embarked on making the Church visible in public life until he died in 2012.
Both were in the same monastery during the 1950s. Both were intellectual powerhouses, known as much for their voluminous patristic writings as for the rhetorical barbs they threw at one another. And both attracted hundreds of thousands of Coptic admirers to their respective camps.
“Al-Maskin believed that the Church is a spiritual institution with no political interest and therefore clergy should not participate in political conflict,” explained Elizabeth Monier, an expert on Coptic affairs at Cambridge University. “Shenouda, an active Christian figure in the public space, had a different understanding.”
Bishop Epiphanius was an ardent follower of al-Maskin. Wael, meanwhile, was ordained by Pope Shenouda. Following Shenouda’s death, the discord within the monastery’s leadership grew. Wael became more vocal about the monastery’s administration of financial and spiritual matters under Epiphanius’s direction, according to Church figures who documented the acrimony in memorandums published on the Church’s official Facebook page.
The infighting came to a head this February. Epiphanius and the Holy Synod, the Church’s organizational body, asked the pope for Wael to be defrocked—the most severe penalty for a disgraced monk—for his failure to obey the monastery’s rules. A group of 52 monks signed a petition, a copy of which I examined when Wael’s family showed it to me, urging the Coptic pontiff, Pope Tawadros II (no relation to Wael), to keep him on pending good behavior. The Holy Synod defrocked Wael anyway, a few days after the murder of Epiphanius.
The discord that had built up over many decades will likely rear its head again, because the Church is unwilling to be transparent about its deep-seated political problems, according to Ishak Ibrahim, a leading expert on religious affairs with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. “We are going to see a repeat of a similar incident in the near future if these endemic issues are not swiftly dealt with,” he said.
[Read: The Americanization of the ancient Coptic faith]
Wael’s family alleges the interrogation techniques used on him effectively forced him to confess to the crime. Based on a conversation they had with Wael during a prison visit, they claim that Pope Tawadros II’s personal aide was present during the interrogations, oversaw physical and psychological torture there, and repeatedly called the police’s lead interrogator to ask if Wael had confessed to the murder. They say Wael was beaten by security personnel and interrogated for over 22 hours straight, before being forcibly disappeared for four days. Enforced disappearances are not uncommon in Egypt, according to Amnesty International. These allegations were listed in a memorandum drawn up by Wael’s previous lawyer, who pointed me to a copy. He has asked Egypt’s attorney general to fully investigate the claims, but there have not yet been reports to suggest that is being done. The pope’s personal aide, as well as the Church spokesman Boulos Halim, did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
During a different prison visit with Wael in early September, the family managed to see him for just under an hour. It was a painful sight for Saad Tawadros, Wael’s father, who wept as he spoke to me in the family tailor shop. “He told me when we saw him in the prison waiting room, ‘I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t do this.’ He repeated it insistently,” the elderly man said. On November 1, at the most recent hearing in the ongoing trial, Wael once again maintained his innocence.
As for Faltaous, the monk who is still hospitalized following his suicide attempt, his lawyer Michel Halim said he is convinced Faltaous will walk free at some point. Faltaous did not appear to have any ideological disagreement with the bishop and had, in fact, written at least one religious book for which Epiphanius wrote the foreword.
A monk at St. Macarius, who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, told me in a phone call from the monastery that he had personally witnessed arguments between Wael and the bishop. He added that things have settled down somewhat in the monastery, but that bitterness persists between al-Maskin’s and Shenouda’s followers.
Pope Tawadros II, who presents himself as a theological centrist rather than advocating for either school of thought, has reacted to the crisis by banning monks from using social media and from leaving their monasteries without permission. The pontiff also visited St. Macarius monastery, where he affirmed that Egyptian Christian monks must preserve their ascetic traditions.
“The pope aimed to deescalate the situation by halting the debates in media and prevent high-profile confrontations. However, this has generated frustration at the popular level,” said Monier, the Cambridge professor. “He strives to introduce himself in a neutral position, with every caution taken to avoid any further friction among Church authorities.” But, she added, “he has not been successful in this.”
In the opening scene of Blade Runner 2049, a flying craft navigates California over an endless expanse of solar farms and tessellated plastic fields on its way to a desolate farmstead. Watching it, I was struck by the dazzling futuristic spectacle, but also surprised to see the countryside at all in a science-fiction film.
Often in speculative fiction, the future belongs to the city alone. Rural areas are conspicuously ignored, as if urbanization will expand inexorably. When the countryside does appear, it mostly offers stark contrast to the technologically advanced metropolis. A lost arcadia, rural life falls into desolate ruin, populated only by scavengers and exiles.
We have had a century, at least, of visions of future cities. They come now as greenwashing corporate sales pitches and escapist fantasies. Shorn of its radical edge, cyberpunk has largely become a form of retro-futurist nostalgia. Even when civilization is obliterated in fiction, the stories offer reassuringly simple tales of adversity and heroism, in contrast to the intractable problems of the present. With notable exceptions (Afrofuturism is one), the countryside upon which all cities are reliant is largely disregarded.
What would it be like to take a flight like the one from Blade Runner, beyond the city limits, above the rural landscapes of the Earth today? Developments in motion—including climate change, technological innovations, and their side effects—already point the way to plausible outcomes. Those near futures show that the city’s fate is intimately tied to rural areas, and urbanites scorn or ignore country life to their peril.
Leaving the city behind, initially the Earth looks the same as it has for some time: terraced farms like contour lines on topographic maps, the arterial systems of rivers. Go high enough, and the view would be sublime. The sun would still glitter, even on disaster zones like the flooded areas of Cambodia and Vietnam, East Africa, the Ganges Delta. Life still goes on, fleets of boats and floating villages amidst the wreckage of washed-away infrastructure and destroyed crops. It would look almost peaceful from afar.
But not on the ground. Conflicting populations already struggle against the seasonal chaos of floods and droughts. The large industrial centers that power fossil-fuel pollution are at risk—the Pearl River Delta is one—but disproportionate consequences are poised to fall upon areas that did little to contribute (a 2015 Oxfam report showed that the richest 10 percent were responsible for 50 percent of global emissions). The nations least equipped to face the storm will face it first.
Signs of environmental decay are evident even from the skies. The Great Barrier Reef has been bleached to death and, despite concerted efforts at revival, it will soon look like a petrified, skeletal mass off the Australian coast. Colossal hulks of glacial ice are dissipating in the Alps, the Himalayas, and the Rockies. What is for now called the Dead Sea is becoming a desert; eventually, it could sprout strange statues of salt.
Rusted ships line the ground in Uzbekistan, where the Aral Sea once flowed. The area is being redeveloped into a seabed forest to combat climate change in the region. (Anadolu Agency / Getty)Despite grave warnings (almost 15,000 dead in France in 2003 and 56,000 dead in Russia in 2010), many societies are woefully unprepared for the heat waves and wildfires that will continue to blight them with increasing frequency. Australia, for example, long resisted links between climate change and the calamities visited upon the country long after its Angry Summer of 2013. India had been a heat-death forerunner, with much of its population having no access to adequate shelter or air conditioning as the country boiled, resulting in thousands of deaths.
As temperatures rise in countries of temperature complacency, infrastructure will begin to deteriorate. Electricity demands will cause brownouts, extinguishing the lights and the sight of eclipsed cities from the air. But it will also bring fans to a halt. The very young, the infirm, and the very old will die first, as they did in the European heat waves. In a rural setting, the story told from above will be one of absences: herds of animals missing from traditional migration routes and villages lying eerily still and silent.
A glare of bright light catches the pilot’s eye. In an effort to harness the forces we’ve unleashed upon ourselves and the environment, humanity has devised new means of sustainable power, although they are not yet in widespread use. On solar thermal farms such as those in California’s Mojave Desert, circles of heliostat mirrors direct and concentrate the sun’s glare to a single point, a sort of incandescent Eye of Sauron at the top of a power tower. The tower heats molten salt to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is then used to create steam and generate electricity. Rings of panels cascade like ripples across the landscape, covering flatland and hills alike. Each can power hundreds of thousands of homes and save equal tons of carbon emissions. Unfortunately, birds (referred to as “streamers”) have a tendency to fly into the beams and catch fire, though acoustic lighthouses could soon be installed to reduce avian fatalities.
Our flying craft follows the solar roads and railways out to the edge of the desert, only to find that it is growing. Alongside the circles and rectangles of blue solar panels, mistaken by pilots and birds as mirages of water, other geometric shapes are visible. Shaped and colored like the sweep of old radar screens, pivot irrigation circles are arranged in bright-green rows and columns against the desert’s burning sands. They tap deep into ancient aquifers beneath the surface, underground oases used to make the desert bloom, helping to sustain the skyscrapers of the planned wonder-city of Neom in Saudi Arabia.
The blue circles are pivot irrigation systems near the city of As Sulayyil, Saudi Arabia. A central well dispenses water for farming in arid areas. (NASA / JPL / UCSD / JSC)With up to 30 percent of land at risk of aridification, as a Nature Climate Change study warned in January, vast environmental engineering projects will be required to halt the encroaching deserts. Beijing has long been afflicted, not just with smog, but with devastating sandstorms, too. These gigantic clouds of dust blow in from Mongolia, swallowing buildings and streets. A similar plague struck Sydney in 2009—the opaque orange and yellow light it brought inspired the color palette of Blade Runner 2049. In both cases, the storms damaged property, paralyzed services, and had a ruinous impact on the population’s health. And in India, the dust waves were so destructive, they left bodies in their wake.
[Read: No ecosystem on Earth is safe from climate change]
China has long been working on a solution. Passing over the Great Wall of China, you would arrive at the so-called Great Green Wall of China, or the Three-North Shelter Forest Program. With the Gobi Desert consuming an alarming amount of grassland (well over 1,000 square miles annually), the Chinese government initiated a forestation plan in 1978 meant to last almost a century. Woods and vegetation have been planted as a bulwark to keep the wasteland at bay, to bind the soil and act as a windbreak while hosting an abundance of wildlife. Rows of trees were projected to extend for miles in the plans, and even the dunes were shown bound with grids of desert-hardened greenery.
Other nations have followed suit. A Great Green Wall of the Sahara has been conceived, to extend from Djibouti to Senegal. The project aspires to become “the largest living structure on the planet.” In Pakistan, the successful Billion Tree Tsunami program was expanded to 10 billion trees to protect against deluge and desertification while absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen. Deforestation continued elsewhere—legally and illegally, but always in the interest of commerce under the guise of national sovereignty and economic liberalization. National parks in Southeast Asia and the Americas might soon be given over for timber, mining, and the production of rubber, palm oil, and soybeans.
They wouldn’t be alone. The former site of the Aral Sea, between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was catastrophically allowed to dry up in the communist Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. There, what was once a seabed is newly covered in 4 million hectares of freshly planted Saxaul trees, surrounding the remains of a ship graveyard with rusting landlocked boats.
With the world’s population on track to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, agriculture is already under extreme pressure. Those stresses are exacerbated by climate change. Attempts to double food production over the next half century are visible today from the air. The enormous tapestry of plastic greenhouses in Almería, which appeared at the beginning of Blade Runner 2049, might soon be found in numerous locations, such as Russia, stretching out to the horizon, visible from orbit.
Intensive farming is becoming imperative: Get more from less through hydroponics, LED lights, and biodomes. Multistory vertical farms stand like blind sentinels in the landscape, filled with rotating shelves of produce growing all year round and protected from pests and pesticides. While this is ideal for leafy greens, the staple foods that support the global population—rice, wheat, potatoes, and so on—have long remained resistant to growing indoors. Insects as an industrially produced source of protein also remain a hard sell. Smart cities cannot exist without smart agriculture, but shifting sufficient attention away from urban attractions of the future could take years. Life will become more precarious in the meantime.
The Khi Solar One power tower thermal power plant, in the Northern Cape of South Africa (Planet Labs (CC-BY-SA))For all the startling advances in technology, humanity remains bound to basic but unsated needs—shelter, food, and most pressing of all, water. If warnings like Cape Town’s risk of running dry in 2018 are ignored, other cities will follow—Sao Paulo, Cairo, Bangalore. Advances in desalination might not keep pace with demand or keep costs low. Violence will likely ensue, as will political upheaval.
As you soar over the Tibetan Plateau, the cloud-seeding chambers that the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is constructing would come into view. Each one would appear marked by a trail of clouds creeping over the land for miles, sown with silver iodide to encourage rainfall. Rumors of weather being used as a future armament have arisen, presumably intended to engineer droughts or deluge against enemy territories and populations.
Drought and food shortages played a significant role in fostering the Arab Spring, Syria’s civil war, and the Central American migrant caravan. But these are just the beginning. As rural areas deplete further, cities will buckle under the pressure. Extremist groups and opportunist politicians will take full advantage (as predicted by the German think tank Adelphi in a 2018 study, “Insurgency, Terrorism and Organised Crime in a Warming Climate”). In the future, flying over these conflict areas could become too dangerous, but signs of strife’s consequences would be visible in the beleaguered refugee camps and the border-security infrastructure projects designed not to alleviate misery but to keep its victims at bay.
[Read: A world-class airport for the end of the world]
Heading along the coastline, the aircraft would pass over decaying fishing fleets near oxygen-depleted “dead zones” of water (partly due to fertilizer runoff causing algae blooms). Turning toward the sea, you might see other imprints of progress—tidal-stream generators and barrages to capture energy, bobbing wave-power buoys, and algae farms, which could offset proteins currently ingested through animal flesh. Further out, racing above the waves, you might find quixotic wind farms in rows.
Soon, ships may dump iron directly into the sea in the hopes of reviving phytoplankton, fish stocks, and the capture of carbon dioxide. The oceanic vortices filled with plastics will still be here, even if vessels and nets, and then robotic devices, try to tame them. Much of the waste has already sunk into the depths of the sea, depositing microplastics into the food chain.
The development of greenhouses in Almería (Andalusia, Spain), where much of Europe’s produce is grown under plastic shades, from 1984 (left) to (2017) right (© Google)Skimming over the black-sand beaches of Iceland, you would catch sight of the birch forests cut down by the Vikings a thousand years ago but gradually regaining a foothold on the island. Signs would be less encouraging farther north, with a sea-ice-free Arctic every summer. A plan by Arizona State University to increase the layers during winter by pumping water onto the existing ice might remain on the drawing board. Exploration for oil and other minerals will not. Autonomous cargo ships, without a human on board, pass silently by one another, Frankenstein-like, borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
No city is an autarky. For their survival, they rely on the countrysides they conveniently ignore. Humanity has long pushed unsavory essentials outside city boundaries—tanners, abattoirs, garbage dumps, and graveyards, for example. But the relationship between the city and the country is symbiotic. Just as the urban nervous system extends over countries in terms of communications and transport, the rural reaches into the urban, bringing electricity, harvests, and fresh water, and taking away waste. For decades, ignoring the destruction of the environment was possible because it took place far from metropolitan centers. A major Living Planet Index study by the World Wildlife Fund highlights the devastation wrought on animals, many of which humans depend on for survival. We no longer have the luxury of turning a blind eye.
With climate change, humans are beginning to appreciate that cities are not separate from the environment. They are environments. We should also recognize that the rural is, at least in part, man-made. Cities approaching the changes already in motion with a sense of the Earth as a biological network, rather than adopting psychological siege positions, will be essential for survival. Technology and engineering will need to be deployed in what is currently regarded as wilderness. In turn, what seems rural will have to be deployed in cities: rooftop and vertical gardens, wetland buffer zones, greenery as a sponge for rising waters, and towers that channel polluted air into greenhouses, like the prototype in Xian.
Life will likely continue, and people will adapt, regardless of how catastrophic the conditions become. Sites of utopia and dystopia will scatter the globe. Some will even benefit short term. Proclaiming that “technology will save us” fails to acknowledge that technology got us to this catastrophe in the first place (contaminated Superfund sites were once a symbol of progress, too). For the foreseeable future, the dream of terraforming other planets is nothing but an unhinged aristocratic escape plan.
By that same token, doomsaying won’t help, nor will renouncing technology. Large-scale projects such as iron fertilization, albedo manipulation, and carbon capture may very well be necessary. Given the memory of the Aral Sea, such steps should be taken with caution. Even so, it may be too late for symbolic gestures. “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will,” the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci once wrote from his prison cell. Humans find themselves in such a state today, with no other choice but to navigate between delusion and despair. The film is already rolling, and we’re inescapably in it.
The aesthetic of Boy Erased is aggressively drab, and deliberately so. Joel Edgerton’s new film takes place in a world drained of passion and life: a gay “conversion therapy” program that emphasizes negativity and forced reserve. But that intentionality doesn’t make the movie any less exhausting a viewing experience. Based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 memoir, Boy Erased is a methodical work that tries to account for the horrors of religious conversion camps as soberly as possible—but unfortunately to the point where soberness edges into blandness.
The names in Conley’s memoir have been changed, though this is an otherwise straightforward adaptation by Edgerton, who wrote and directed, and who plays the supporting role of Victor Sykes, the program’s head therapist. Set in the early 2000s, the movie follows Jared Eamons (Lucas Hedges), the son of Baptist pastor Marshall (Russell Crowe) and Nancy (Nicole Kidman), as he enrolls in a two-week intensive program designed to purge him of homosexual impulses. At age 19, he’s been cruelly outed to his parents while still reckoning with his sexuality; his father sends him to Sykes’s camp partly to preserve the family’s reputation at church.
Edgerton’s directorial debut, 2015’s The Gift, was a welcome surprise from the Australian actor, a nasty little thriller that boasted searing performances from stars Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall (and an unfortunately gross ending). Boy Erased is a more mature work, but as a result, it’s restrained almost to a fault. Edgerton never lets the film burrow into Jared’s personhood. Hedges plays the teen as a quiet and confused boy, still roiled by his conservative upbringing and only somewhat willing to admit his own burgeoning desires.
The incident that lands him in the camp is not a romantic one—indeed, the only thing close to same-sex romance shown on-screen is a mild flirtation with a boy named Xavier (Théodore Pellerin). But Jared also forms an intense friendship with a college athlete, Henry (Joe Alwyn). Their relationship, told in flashbacks, ends in a chilling scene, where Henry rapes Jared and then outs him to Jared’s parents rather than tell the truth about what happened. As Edgerton delves into the camp’s workings, he’s also unpacking Jared’s relationship with his sexuality, which has been damaged by his parents’ closed-mindedness and by his traumatic experience in college.
The camp itself is tedious, an overlit series of offices and a sparsely decorated auditorium. The participants dress in khakis and white button-downs, and every conversation is had in clipped, neutral tones. Sykes presents his program as joyous and freeing, but it’s in fact driven by pessimism—the camp’s goal is to get Jared, and others, to shift the blame for their sexuality onto their parents, their upbringing, or some long-lasting problem in their families. Channeling the culpability elsewhere is a facile solution for a nonproblem, and even the deeply conflicted Jared quickly realizes it, but his immediate assuredness of that fact largely strips the film of pathos.
Boy Erased has to confront the same dramatic inertness that plagued The Miseducation of Cameron Post, another (better) movie about conversion therapy. Both stories are fully aware of the pointlessness of the task at hand but are still focused on nonrebellious characters coming to slow, calm revelations about their own sexuality. Like Cameron Post, Boy Erased populates its supporting cast with characters going through more intense or hostile struggles. But where Desiree Akhavan’s film was lush and sensuous, Boy Erased is cold and brittle, a circular story of repression that drags along until Jared is bold enough to finally break free.
[Read: ‘The Miseducation of Cameron Post’ is a graceful coming-of-age tale]
Hedges gives such a locked-away performance that it’s hard to evaluate his work, but the adults around him are portrayed masterfully. Kidman is the heart of the film, mirroring her role in 2016’s Lion as a mother who can barely find the language to comfort her son. Crowe plays Jared’s father as a puffed-up, ineffectual man who views himself as a fountain of moral certitude. His is a piece of acting that feels impressively honest—not lacking in sensitivity but unsparing when it comes to Marshall’s flaws. In fact, all the movie’s villains, Sykes included, are given a frightening kind of humanity; it’s the heroes who are more thinly drawn.
Perhaps Edgerton was more drawn to the darkness of Conley’s tale. Though this is a true story, it’s mostly lacking in inspirational notes, refusing to give in to a simplistic narrative of good triumphing over evil. But that makes for a punishing watch as one waits for Jared to accept who he is. The end of Boy Erased is never really in doubt, and when it arrives, it’s handled with the same dreariness as everything else. As much as this film strives to avoid soaring clichés, it also fails to leave a lasting impression.
The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg promoted two editors to the top of the magazine’s masthead: naming longtime deputy editor Don Peck as the top print editor, and Denise Wills, currently features editor, stepping into the role of deputy editor for the magazine. The promotions are effective immediately.
In a memo to The Atlantic’s staff, Goldberg writes: “I am confident that Don and Denise will be conscientious stewards of The Atlantic, which is one of American journalism’s greatest treasures. I am also confident that they will engage in a process of continuous creation, innovation, and useful provocation. The magazine is the historical and spiritual core of our great journalism institution, and its health and vitality are of paramount importance to us all.”
Peck first joined The Atlantic in 2001 as a researcher and later a junior editor. As the magazine’s deputy editor since 2013 and most recently as acting editor, Peck has shepherded scores of features and cover stories at The Atlantic, notably this year’s “The 9.9% is The New Aristocracy,” as well as “The Mind of Donald Trump,” “The End of Men,” “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” and the most-read Atlantic story of all time, “What ISIS Really Wants.” Peck succeeds Scott Stossel, who has moved into a role as national editor for the magazine—where he will continue to edit, recruit writers to The Atlantic, and return to writing himself.
As features editor for the past year, Wills launched and led a cross-platform initiative to boost some of The Atlantic’s most ambitious digital-only pieces of journalism. She joined The Atlantic four years ago from Politico magazine and before that was an editor at Washingtonian. Last year, two stories she edited—Caitlin Flanagan’s “Death at a Penn State Fraternity,” and the late Alex Tizon’s memoir of his family secret, “My Family’s Slave”—became National Magazine Award finalists, and Tizon’s piece took the award.
This fall, The Atlantic has published a string of highly-influential cover stories: “How ICE Went Rogue,” investigating America’s immigration crisis; a special issue, “Is Democracy Dying?,” probing the crisis of the American system of government and whether it’s possible to repair the damage; and “Alexa, How Will You Change Us?,” examining the way smart speakers are revolutionizing human habits.
Editor’s Note: This special installment of Dear Therapist diverges from the normal format, in that the question addressed does not come from an individual reader. Rather, it’s one that various men have asked our columnist Lori Gottlieb, in her inbox and in her own therapy practice: Is it possible to apologize for a sexual assault? And if so, how?
Dear Men Who Have Asked,
There are so many reasons that men might be reluctant to come forward and ask this question, much less to reflect on what they’ve done, so I admire the courage it takes to do so. I worry, too, that some people will take issue with this question and attack those who ask it, and I would hate for that to happen because your intentions are good, and attacking people who come forward shuts down the very conversations that #MeToo has worked so hard to start.
While there’s no one way to handle this—your options range from a genuine, heartfelt apology to the woman you assaulted to attempts at making things right for women more broadly—I can help you think through what might be the best way to take responsibility for a sexual assault committed in the past.
Some of you have said that you’d like to tell the woman you assaulted that you’re remorseful and that you’ve changed as a person. So first, let’s separate what you’re seeking for yourself from what this woman might herself be seeking. You’re essentially asking two questions—one about you, and one about her. The question related to you is about forgiveness: You’re seeking something from her so that you feel less pain (shame, horror, anxiety about whether she’ll come forward). The question related to her is what you can do so that she feels less pain.
I’d suggest that you get clear about your motivations so that if you do approach her, it’s to help her and not yourself. Your needs are important, too, but as I’ll get to in a moment, those needs are for you to work through without bringing her into it. Right now, the focus should be solely on her.
First, you’ll want to consider what it might be like for her to hear from you. She might find it upsetting to be contacted by the person who assaulted her, and you’ll need to honor and respect whatever her reaction is—refusing to speak with you, not responding to a letter you send, expressing anger, etc. On the other hand, she might welcome an apology because it validates her experience and makes her feel less dehumanized, which is a common reaction to being sexually assaulted—she’s finally being acknowledged as a human being with feelings: I’m not crazy. My memories are real. I’m not the only one who witnessed my assault. I felt utterly invisible then but I’m not invisible now. He couldn’t see my pain then, but he sees it now.
When planning what you’ll say, think about how to phrase your apology so that she knows you aren’t asking anything from her—forgiveness, reassurance, absolution, a clean slate. After all, if this is being done for your benefit, it might feel like just another violation.
With that in mind, it will be important to take full ownership for what you’ve done by steering clear of apologies that don’t feel like apologies. One example is saying you’re sorry for the assault, and then minimizing it by offering what sound like excuses rather than explanations. I did this horrible thing to you, but the culture at the time made it seem normal and I was a dumb teenager who didn’t know any better. The genuine apology is simply, “I did this horrible thing to you, and I’m so, so sorry.” Likewise, don’t dilute your apology by explaining how proud you are of who you’ve become—that may be little solace if while you were experiencing great growth, she had been sitting with what you did to her all this time. Another non-apology apology might sound like this: I’m sorry for assaulting you. I too know how it feels to be powerless, given my experience during such and such, and while what I did was worse, I can empathize with you. In fact, you don’t know how another person feels, and making the apology about your experience rather than hers will leave her feeling diminished and invisible all over again.
In your apology, you could also ask if there’s anything she thinks you can do at this point that would help her. Maybe she needs to hear something specific from you that she’s wanted to hear for years. Maybe she’d like you to hear about the depth of the pain you inflicted and how it has affected her life—without you becoming defensive, but simply listening and taking it in.
Whatever you choose to do—and whatever she decides to do with it, even if she does come to a place of forgiveness—you’re still going to have to find a way to come to terms with what you did. Some of you have asked if there’s room both in these conversations and in the greater #MeToo discussion for forgiveness, and there is—but that’s primarily a conversation you need to have with yourself. Your feelings matter too, but they’re your responsibility, not hers.
What you need to consider is: What would help you give yourself permission to forgive yourself while also taking full responsibility for what you did? Forgiveness generally comes in stages and while you can’t force it, you can encourage it along, reflecting on all this by yourself or perhaps talking it over with a therapist or trusted friend. In that process, you should remember that punishing yourself isn’t productive—it doesn’t change what happened, or help the person you assaulted.
Instead, forgiving yourself might help you come to a greater understanding of yourself in a way that allows you to contribute something positive to the world. This might be reflected in your personal relationships with women, or in your contribution to the greater #MeToo movement. Maybe you’ll decide to help raise awareness by actively changing the culture of your campus or workplace, standing up for women who are being harassed, or donating to causes that support victims of sexual assault.
There are as many ways to approach this situation as there are possible outcomes, but the fact that you’re having this reckoning and want to do something about your past actions is hopeful for you and for women who have been assaulted. It’s precisely these kinds of reckonings that lead to societal change and healing for all involved.
Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
SAVANNAH, Ga.—On the campaign trail in Georgia, the phrase sweat equity has acquired new meaning. Down below the gnat line, a month into autumn, organizers in this city swarm around a stage on a sweltering 90-degree Tuesday night. Stacey Abrams’s bus tour, wending its way through hundreds of miles of Georgia towns, has finally made it to Savannah State University, where a crowd of supporters sits and stands, packed in and drenched. The crowd is remarkably diverse, but it’s the crew of elderly black women in the front that draws the eye. For anyone sitting beside them, it’s hard to tell whether this is a rally or a revival—whether the tension building in the audience is plain old anticipation or something more spiritual.
When Abrams finally made it to the stage, the crowd erupted. She glistened, reflecting the shining, sweating brown faces seated nearest to the stage, and she extolled, praising the virtues of elbow grease in getting unlikely voters to the polls. And when it was time to bring her message home, she returned to the single policy that has defined the Georgia governor’s race—and the one that resonates most with the women at the front of the crowd. Her closing argument was all about Medicaid expansion, which Georgia hasn’t adopted, and what it would mean for the lives of people of color and the poor in the state.
“Our opponents want to put a Band-Aid on a gaping wound,” Abrams told the crowd. “They want to take from Peter and give to Paul, and tell Paulette she might find something somewhere else.
“But I understand that Medicaid expansion is about more than our physical health and more than our economic health,” Abrams said. She detailed how expansion, a provision in the 2010 Affordable Care Act, provides federal funding for states to extend their own programs to cover poor and low-income adults. There’s “$3 billion to which we are entitled every single year,” Abrams continued. “That’s real money, those are real lives, and this is a real opportunity for change in the state of Georgia.”
Money, lives, and change. Those three words could roughly summarize any political race, but seem especially important in the state today. The issues facing much of the Georgia electorate are fairly simple: The state is the fifth-poorest in the nation. Its median wages and minimum wages are both below the national average. Across all races, the poor are underserved, often lack insurance, and face remarkably high rates of mortality and morbidity from preventable diseases. The state has huge swaths of rural land whose communities often lack basic services. Outside the urban oasis of the Atlanta metropolitan area, Georgia faces as many challenges to the health and welfare of its citizens as any state in the country. The most important policy issues in the governor’s race boil down to each candidate’s ability to fill those gaps.
But there’s a special dimension in Georgia that could very well mean the difference next week. The state is in the grip of a crisis, one that affects, in particular, the lives of black women like Abrams and like those who form the foundation of her coalition and organizing base. Across the country, black women’s health—particularly the fate of mothers and their newborns—is in peril, and mortality rates have spiked. Nowhere is this truer than in Georgia: The issue has been front and center in mobilizing black women, and it’s central to the policy platform of the candidate seeking to be the first black woman governor in U.S. history. To black women in Georgia, the stakes of the debate over health-care access are no less than life or death.
Perhaps no one is more aware of those stakes than Joy Baker. Baker is an ob-gyn in Thomaston, a little more than an hour south of Atlanta. Thomaston is the picture of a small southern town. It has a Main Street and a Church Street. The town was built around a mill that’s long gone, but it’s still a hub for basic services for people living in the deeply rural surrounding areas. For hundreds of poor, rural women, Baker’s practice in the Upson Regional Medical Center is the sole lifeline. Half of the rural areas in Georgia don’t have any doctors’ offices, hospitals, or clinics where women can seek obstetric care. That means Baker is responsible not just for the care of people in and around Thomaston, but also for women from an average of 40 miles away.
“Twenty-five percent of my patient population lives below the poverty line, on less than $17,000 per year,” Baker told me. Her patients are disproportionately African American. The vast majority of them are on Medicaid, which by federal mandate covers pregnancy and perinatal services for women under or near the poverty line. They often have to rely on booking Medicaid vans three days in advance to get to doctor visits because they can’t afford gas or don’t have cars. “Some of my patients can’t even afford a prescription at Walmart for $4,” Baker says.
Baker told me that at least 60 percent of her patients qualify as having “high-risk” pregnancies, often because of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other comorbidities common among poor and rural populations. For most of those women, the nine-plus months of pre- and postnatal care they are guaranteed under federal law are the only regular primary and preventive care they’ll receive in a given year.
[Read: How women’s ‘health-care gaslighting’ went mainstream]
“I see an average of 30 to 40 patients per day in my clinic,” Baker says. “That’s way more than I’d like to be seeing, but I have to be able to accommodate.” Her average week includes two 24-hour shifts in a row, during which she alternates between working in the maternity ward, in the emergency room, and in the operating rooms of her hospital, as well as in her clinic across the street. For her and the one other doctor in her practice, it’s a Herculean task just to provide an adequate standard of care—often squeezed into 10-minute visits.
Baker’s patients often have chronic conditions that her office can address only while they’re there for pregnancy-related care. That includes the mental-health problems that have come to characterize rural American life. Most often, the mental-health dangers associated with pregnancy and childbirth involve postpartum depression, but Baker sees women who are already depressed, suffering from undiagnosed disorders, or having suicidal ideations before and during pregnancy. She’s also obtained a special license to treat opioid addiction among women who want to rehabilitate themselves during pregnancy. “We don’t have any mental-health services and supports,” Baker told me.
Her office tries to confront those challenges head on, counseling patients and finding psychiatric services for them. And Baker utilizes group prenatal care—an attempt to alleviate patients’ potential isolation and to provide women with support networks that can help their pregnancy outcomes.
But there are mounting structural issues that even Baker’s ingenuity and willpower can’t fix. Dozens of labor-and-delivery units across the state have faced closures in the past two decades. Eight rural hospitals in Georgia have shuttered in the past eight years. And that’s amid other stresses on rural and maternal health in Georgia, like the opioid crisis.
The biggest challenge is still insurance. Even though poor pregnant women are entitled to Medicaid coverage, that coverage is difficult to navigate, and under state law it comes with a firm expiration date. “Medicaid usually ends about six to eight weeks after the delivery,” Baker says. “But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has come out with a strong suggestion that we follow those patients for the entire year.” Baker estimates that after those six to eight weeks, she won’t see 90 percent of her patients until they’re pregnant again. In the dangerous medical crucible that is the first few weeks after childbirth, she estimates that some 30 percent of her patients won’t even make it to their first postpartum visit.
For Baker, the only solution is the one that’s at the center of the Georgia governor’s race: Medicaid expansion. “I feel like I’m kind of piecing things together here, and I would love to have the resources to do the things we need to do,” she told me. Because Medicaid expansion would offer health insurance to more low-income adults than the state’s current program, it would provide many residents of Thomaston with the first steady guarantee of coverage in decades. That would give them access to more regular care and reduce their own health-care costs. And it would give Baker’s patients year-round access to her services.
The Medicaid expansion would also signal that the state is serious about assisting Baker on the front lines of the crisis—and that it cares about her, too. “As a black woman, it is just really unacceptable to me that black women are more likely to die” than white women, Baker says. “I take it personally because I am a black woman and I would like to live if I should decide to have a baby.”
There are 130 miles of mostly rural highway between Savannah and Augusta. Speeding to loop ahead of Stacey Abrams’s bus tour, I passed cotton fields, gas stations selling boiled peanuts, and the occasional Confederate flag. I also passed through two counties with no obstetric care at all, drove by a medical center that almost shuttered last year amid a wave of rural-hospital closings, and drove by a hospital that closed its obstetric center in 2012.
Aboard the campaign bus, I told Abrams about that particular route near the Georgia–South Carolina state line. “One of the challenges in the state of Georgia is that we have a largely publicly financed health-care system,” she responded, referring to Medicaid. “If you’re in an urban area, you have private providers, but by and large, most of the medical provision of services comes from public providers: FQHCs [Federally Qualified Health Centers], county-based hospitals, and community hospitals that rely on public financing.”
It was hard to miss her wonkishness on the topic. She’s invested in the policy not just as a political matter but also with an expert’s interest. Abrams is a tax attorney by training, and one of her specialties was health-care finance. For a moment during our conversation—a fleeting moment—I was grateful for the loans I’d taken out to get a degree in health policy.
“From the very beginning,” Abrams continued, “I have been pushing the state of Georgia to expand Medicaid, because we are exactly the state that they were thinking about, a state with a low-wage population, with a high poverty rate, and with a deep reliance on public provision of health care. And the failure to do so has led to exacerbated levels of social and medical pathologies that we’ve had for years.”
I asked Abrams what she thought about the particular crisis I’d been trying to grapple with, and the ways in which Georgia’s health-care system uniquely disadvantages black women. As she told me, she’s had intimate experience with those disadvantages. Abrams explained how she decided to start paying for her parents’ insurance around 2005, after they faced a requirement to self-fund part of their medical care—including her father’s prostate-cancer treatment and expensive coverage for her mother.
Read: Reverse migration might turn Georgia blue.
“My mom has given birth to seven children. Her entire existence was a preexisting condition,” Abrams told me. “At that moment, I had to step up and take on that responsibility, because if my parents had been moved off of their private insurance into Medicaid, my mom and dad would’ve lost the health care that they needed.”
Vann R. Newkirk IIAs a candidate, Abrams has often relayed stories about deferring her tax bills and her struggle with student debt as a way to relate to voters. What’s clear, though, is how much health care—or, specifically, the lack of access to affordable health care—formed the foundation of those other problems, illustrating another way that Abrams’s own policies are informed by her life.
“For black women across this country, and especially in the state of Georgia, they’re being forced to make that decision still,” Abrams said, referring to the trade-offs many Americans make because of expensive health care. “These are moms who are being forced to go without health care so they can pay for food for their children. These are daughters who are taking in their parents because they know that that’s the only way that they can support their parents, [but then] they can’t take care of themselves. Black women have long been essential to the health care of our communities, either directly as health-care professionals or as providers simply because that’s what they do in the community.”
She gave me the pitch she’s been making to voters for months: “Medicaid expansion is a solution for that problem, and it is an atrocity that we are not accepting it now.”
Georgia is one of 17 states, including many in the Deep South, that have not adopted the Medicaid expansion, which is funded by a combination of state and federal money. In 2012, Republican Governor Nathan Deal announced that he wouldn’t expand the program, citing costs and his skepticism of the federal government’s ability to help states pay for it over the long term.
Neither of those concerns have been borne out in recent years: The federal government has kept its obligation to states that have expanded Medicaid, and there’s no sign that will change anytime soon. And analyses of state expansions have shown benefits for the states’ economies. But opposition to the reform has acquired a political significance since 2012 that goes beyond just concerns over the state budget.
In 2014, Deal supported HB 990, legislation that transferred the power to expand Medicaid from the governor’s office to the legislature, thus stripping future chief executives of the ability to move unilaterally on the issue. Though Deal has more recently warmed to the idea of a limited, restrictive Medicaid expansion similar to ones other Republican governors have approved, his would-be successor is wholly resistant.
[Read: Medicaid expansion’s troubled future]
Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate facing off against Abrams, has characterized the expansion as a costly enlargement of the federal government, arguing it would only increase premiums in the state and reduce access to quality care. It’s unclear whether Kemp would even be allowed to champion the cause on the campaign trail if he wanted to: HB 943, also passed during Deal’s tenure, bars state employees from the use of “moneys, human resources, or assets to advocate or intended to influence the citizens of this state” in support of a Medicaid expansion.
In its place, Kemp favors expanding an existing voluntary tax-credit plan for funding rural hospitals. He promised during the Republican primary to “work with the Trump administration to implement a Georgia-focused, free-market solution that enhances health-care coverage and reduces costs.”
The reality of the situation in Georgia has made that platform a difficult sell for Kemp. Baker’s poor patients are only a slice of the women in Georgia without adequate health care. Fifteen percent of women in Georgia are uninsured—the third-highest rate in the country. Almost a fifth don’t see doctors in any given year because of costs. Twenty-two percent don’t have personal doctors.
The health outcomes in the state are fairly predictable, given those numbers: Life expectancy for women in Georgia is almost two years less than the national average. Also, Georgia is one of the most dangerous places in the country to have a baby, with the fifth-highest infant-mortality rate among all states. Depending on which national surveillance system is used, it has either the highest or the second-highest rate of maternal mortality within the year after delivery.
A deeper look at the data shows it’s clear just how much racial disparities within Georgia drive its inclusion on so many ignoble lists. According to a 2018 joint report from Yale Law School and the Yale School of Public Health, in 2016, for every 100,000 births, 62 black women in Georgia died from pregnancy complications. That rate is much higher than that of white women in Georgia, for whom maternal mortality is 27 deaths per 100,000 births. The infant-mortality rate for babies born to black mothers in Georgia is 12.5 deaths per 1,000 births, compared with 5.5 deaths per 1,000 births for babies born to white mothers.
To put it all in context: If black Georgia were a separate country, it would be one of the riskiest places in the entire Western Hemisphere for new mothers and for infants. And according to the experts I spoke with, the situation is only worsening.
According to Natalie Hernandez, a professor at Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta who researches maternal and child health among women of color in Georgia, much of the crisis, both locally and nationally, is attributable to America’s legacy of racism. “When I look at Jim Crow laws and where a lot of these underlying racial policies have existed, that’s where you see these disparities,” Hernandez told me. At least on a surface level, the existing data appear to affirm that suspicion. Seven of the 10 states with the highest rates of maternal mortality have proportions of black residents that are higher than the national average. Of the 10 states with the highest concentrations of black people, eight also have top-10 infant-mortality rates.
“There’s still something so fundamentally different about the experience of a black woman in the South—particularly in Georgia—and how that translates to health outcomes,” Hernandez says. “What research is showing is this idea of [the effects of] stress and racism.” Contrary to some arguments that women simply aren’t accessing the right prenatal care, Hernandez says, “Women are going to their prenatal appointments, and they are accessing care. They’re also experiencing racial discrimination when they’re accessing that care … [adding] layers of stress that have been put on these women over and over again.
“Prenatal care cannot erase the decades and decades of stress that have been placed on these women,” she says.
Emerging research appears to show that the majority of black maternal deaths in Georgia don’t come during the prenatal or delivery stages—they come after delivery. That’s according to Angela Aina, the co-director of the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, a nonprofit that partnered with Yale on its groundbreaking report. A review from the Georgia Department of Public Health confirms that statistic.
The review also shows that more than half of all maternal deaths in the state are deaths of women who were on Medicaid—and who may have lost that Medicaid shortly after delivery.
The overall burden of maternal and infant mortality is low compared with mortality related to other causes. To wit, Georgia recorded 79 total pregnancy-related deaths in 2013, the latest year it reported this comprehensive metric. In the same year, the state had almost 900 drunk-driving–related fatalities.
But the issue has gained national attention and has helped mobilize voters, for two reasons. For one, these deaths are strong indicators of the overall dysfunction within any health-care system. A system that cannot safeguard the overall health of vulnerable people will tend toward spikes in deaths at the margins—in situations of extreme stress and duress, such as pregnancy and childbirth. There’s a reason the two statistics, for maternal and infant mortality, are such elemental indicators of the overall health of countries: Health infrastructure that fails at the main function for which health infrastructure exists—birthing healthy babies—can probably not be trusted for anything else.
But the second reason is more personal for black women in Georgia. It’s that so many women know people who’ve had fatal or near-fatal experiences with childbirth, even if they haven’t experienced it themselves. And many are burdened by financial problems stemming from severe health-care episodes unrelated to childbirth.
[Read: In the Georgia governor’s race, the game is black votes.]
According to Nikema Williams, a Democratic state senator and the state political director for Care in Action, a social-welfare nonprofit representing domestic workers that is canvassing for Abrams, the specific issue of maternal health has become a key part of the nonprofit’s messaging strategy among women of color who may not be likely voters.
“We are very intentional about reaching out to people who often feel unseen and unheard in elections,” Williams told me. In Care in Action’s door-knocking campaign, organizers have found anecdotally that the issue—and the goal of Medicaid expansion as a curative—has helped move these voters toward the polls. Opinion surveys in the state show that the Medicaid expansion is a unifying force in Georgia politics, as almost three-quarters of all voters, Republican and Democrat, favor the plan. In black communities especially, the ability to vote for such a policy appears to be a strong motivator, though the degree to which the issue has mobilized voters won’t become clear until after the election.
“This is something we can beat,” Williams told me.
In her group’s enthusiasm—in the intense focus on door-knocking campaigns and the strategy of turning out previously disengaged black voters—there are echoes of the 2017 Senate special election in Alabama. Unprecedented levels of voter mobilization in that state’s “Black Belt” proved to be the difference for the winning Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. And as is true of the Georgia race and the barrage of stories of last-minute voter purges by Kemp’s office, reports of the suppression of black votes characterized the weeks before Alabama’s election.
The Alabama race was a coming-out party of sorts for the political strength of machines built for and by black women. Since then, that emerging network has been critical in fielding a burgeoning class of black women as current and future candidates, and in fueling the ascendance of what could be—from Andrew Gillum in Florida to Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts—one of the most remarkable single classes of black politicians since Reconstruction.
But Georgia is a bit different from its western neighbor. In Alabama’s Senate race, the machinery created by black women, which drew down massive amounts of fund-raising for a time-intensive voter-engagement strategy, often did so with little regard for Jones himself. For the victorious coalition in that election, the race was more about reestablishing and flexing black power than about the promises of a particular Democratic politician.
In Georgia, however, Stacey Abrams is both a leader who arose from the kinds of institutions that were so pivotal in Alabama and a representative of the unique policy issues that face the black women who have now suddenly become kingmakers in the Deep South. And perhaps unlike the path many black politicians before her would have chosen, Abrams has not sought to minimize the role that her identity has played in her own candidacy.
“We live in a time where it is necessary to talk about race,” she told me. But “if it’s only a conversation about race, or only a conversation about gender, then I’m not doing anyone a good service. But I use it as a way to have a broader conversation about the issues that we face, because solving those issues means that we solve issues for everyone regardless of race and gender.”
For Abrams, that means attempting an alchemy that has rarely been tried in American history. It means taking a silent menace, one visited upon a disenfranchised minority in a continuation of America’s racial sins, and giving the people most affected by it a voice. And it means convincing people inclined to oppose her candidacy that Medicaid expansion is not only a cure for the literal ills of black women, but also one that would improve the lives of scores of low-income Georgians.
“My focus is on Georgia, but the reality is, Georgia matters to everyone,” Abrams told me. “If you change the leadership of Georgia, you change the South. If you change the South, you change the country.”
This week, Donald Trump clarified the stakes in the midterm elections. Speaking on behalf of the Republican Party, he urged his followers to back its congressional candidates at the ballot box in a demagogic video. It opens on a demented murderer speaking Spanish in court and segues to footage of the caravan of Honduran migrants entering Mexico, portraying them as barbarian hordes at the gates.
No responsible political actor would select and juxtapose those video images. No charitable or exculpatory account of its intent is even plausible. It was a naked effort to stoke bigotry and exploit ethnic anxieties.
And no Republican Party message is more prominent.
[Read: Stephen Miller’s biggest gamble yet]
If the GOP succeeds next week at the ballot box, politicians all over the country will conclude that they can advance their careers by vilifying minority groups, frightening voters predisposed to xenophobia, and dividing Americans. No incentive structure is more dangerous to a multiethnic nation. Politicians in other nations marshaling similar tactics have sparked sectarian violence, campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and civil war. Trump happens to preside over a country where such extreme outcomes are unlikely. But that does not change the character of his tactics or the moral obligation to stand against them.
I do not much like the Democratic Party. But I desperately want Republicans to conclude that the GOP harms rather than helps its prospects when it vilifies minorities, stokes the authoritarian impulses of its most frightened voters, and willfully divides Americans. Decisively defeating GOP candidates in the midterms is the surest way to send that message—while a Republican victory will encourage future campaign ads that even more closely resemble the work of D. W. Griffith.
[Read: Boycott the Republican party].
Don’t be complicit in what Ayn Rand once called “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” If voters reject today’s Republican tactics, they can bring about a future where they offer a non-odious alternative. A Democratic rout is the likeliest path to a GOP that doesn’t weaken America by inducing us to fear and hate one another. A divided country benefits Trump, and that is the country he will bring about with his rhetoric—until decent Republicans thwart his machinations. It is time to yell, “Stop!”
In May 2016, Ben Shapiro—arguably the most influential conservative Jewish pundit in America—did something admirable. He admitted he was wrong. “I’ve spent most of my career arguing that anti-Semitism in the United States is almost entirely a product of the political Left,” Shapiro wrote. “The anti-Semitism I’d heard about from my grandparents — the country-club anti-Semitism, the alleged white-supremacist leanings of rednecks from the backwoods—was a figment of the imagination, I figured. I figured wrong.”
Yes, he did. But after last week—in which a man in Florida sent a bomb to George Soros and a man in Pittsburgh shot up a synagogue because he believed the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was trying to “bring invaders that kill our people”—Jewish conservatives need to grapple with something even more uncomfortable. The question is no longer: Does anti-Semitism exist among American conservatives? It’s: Is anti-Semitism an inevitable byproduct of the nativist conservatism being championed by President Trump? The answer to that question is yes.
[Adam Serwer: Trump’s caravan hysteria led to this]
It is certainly possible to believe in lower levels of immigration and stricter immigration enforcement—as do my conservative Atlantic colleagues David Frum and Reihan Salam—without fueling anti-Semitism. But Trump isn’t just a restrictionist. He’s a dehumanizing, conspiratorial, apocalyptic restrictionist. He calls Latino immigrants “rapists” and “animals.” He says immigrants constitute “an invasion” that threatens America’s ability to “endure as a sovereign, independent nation.” He claims the Central American gang MS-13 has “literally taken over towns and cities of the United States.” He suggests Democrats are “openly encouraging many millions of illegal aliens” to vote and are giving “a lot of money” to “people to try to get to the border by Election Day.”
Trump’s nativism is logically contradictory. On the one hand, he depicts Latino immigrants as subhuman: “animals.” On the other, he describes them as so well-organized and potent that they can invade and conquer the United States. Reconciling this tension requires another enemy: an enemy that is not only evil but brilliant, brilliant enough to organize people who cannot organize themselves. For some Trump supporters—egged on of late by the president’s references to George Soros—that’s where Jews come in.
It’s an old story. Noah Strote, a historian at North Carolina State, notes that after World War I, France imported soldiers from its North and West African colonies to help occupy the Rhineland. Adolf Hitler depicted these non-white soldiers as a sexual threat, much as Trump depicts Mexican “rapists” today. But he also portrayed them as politically passive. The Africans hadn’t organized their invasion of Germany; Jews had done it for them. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that, “It was and is the Jews who bring the Negro to the Rhineland, always with the same concealed goal and with the clear goal of destroying, through bastardization, the white race they hate.”
[Read: Trump’s race-baiting could backfire in the midterms]
During the civil rights movement, white supremacists in the South made similar claims. “Segregationists believed that African Americans couldn’t possibly have the capacity to lead the civil rights movement,” observes Mark Bauman, the editor of the journal Southern Jewish history. “So it had to be the Jews and communists—the words were almost interchangeable: ‘Jewish communists.’” J. B Stoner, founder of the virulently racist National States’ Rights Party, argued that, “The negro is not the enemy. The Jew is THE enemy of our White Race and the Jew is using the negro in an effort to destroy the White Race that he so passionately hates.”
In South Africa, apartheid’s defenders deployed similar propaganda against Joe Slovo, the Yiddish-speaking leader of the African National Congress’ military wing. “To the South African government,” wrote Glenn Frankel, who covered South Africa for The Washington Post in the 1980s, “Slovo is Public Enemy Number One, the evil white mastermind … manipulating blacks inside his movement.”
A similar storyline—Jewish brains using black and brown bodies to destroy white Christian America—runs through the anti-immigrant hysteria that laid the foundation for Trumpism. In his book, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Kevin MacDonald—perhaps America’s preeminent pseudo-academic white nationalist—claims that Jews are responsible for opening America’s borders to non-whites. “Jewish organizations,” he writes, “have been able to have a vastly disproportionate effect on U.S. immigration policy because Jews as a group are highly organized, highly intelligent and politically astute.” Organized, intelligent, astute—and dedicated to helping “Latino activists” achieve their goal “of ‘reconquering’ the United States via immigration and high birth rates.” David Duke makes the point more crudely. “Jewish groups,” he declared in 2016, “lead the effort for Europe and America to take a catastrophic flood of non-European refugees/terrorists/rapists/criminals.”
[Eliot Cohen: The stench of violence]
As Thomas Chatterton Williams suggested last year in The New Yorker, “Jews will not replace us”—the phrase made infamous last year in Charlottesville—has its roots in the fear that native born whites will be replaced not by Jews but by immigrants. The replacers come from the third world thanks to Jews who orchestrate the process.
Sometimes the association is more subtle. The culprits are not Jews as a group but nefarious individuals who just happen to be Jews. In his 2001 book The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, Pat Buchanan fingers an unlikely group of suspects: Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School, who emigrated from interwar Germany to the United States. By depicting the traditional “Christian” and “capitalist” family as the incubator of fascism, Buchanan argues, these “Jewish and Marxist” intellectuals sapped Americans’ willingness to have children and to resist immigration from the developing world. Thus, Buchanan argues, “In the death of the West, the Frankfurt School must be held as a prime suspect.”
These days, the Jew most frequently depicted as secretly engineering the immigrant takeover of America is George Soros. (Full disclosure: His son, Alex Soros, is a friend who has donated to think tanks to support my work). Last fall, after a Hungarian parliamentarian declared it a “Christian duty to fight Satan’s Soros plan to bring migrants into Europe,” Iowa Representative Steve King responded, “It’s Soros’ plan for America, too.” Ann Coulter has claimed that “George Soros-inspired prosecutors” are allowing “illegals to plea [sic] guilty to some minor offense, to prevent them from being deported.” Alex Jones has called “billionaire globalist George Soros” one of the “driving forces behind the massive migrant caravan marching to the U.S. southern border.” On Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business, Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell recently said that the “Soros-occupied State Department” might be funding supporters of the caravan. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz last month tweeted a video supposedly showing people “giving cash 2 women + children 2 join the caravan and storm the US border.” Then he asked: “Soros?” Donald Trump Jr. retweeted his question.
Texas Representative Louie Gohmert has also suggested that “perhaps Soros and others, may be funding this” caravan. So has Trump himself. When the president denounced “globalists” in a speech last month, a man in the crowd responded by yelling “George Soros” and then “lock him up.” After which Trump smiled and repeated, “lock him up.”
[Matt Welch: Why the right loves to hate George Soros]
It’s possible to imagine a nativist politics—even a paranoid and dehumanizing one—that doesn’t target Jews. New York University historian Hasia Diner notes that the Know Nothing movement of the mid-19th century, which took aim at Catholic immigrants, mostly ignored Jews. In fact, Lewis Charles Levin, a Jewish congressman from Pennsylvania, was among the party’s leaders.
Willamette University historian Ellen Eisenberg told me that the xenophobic fervor surrounding the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II didn’t spawn much anti-Semitism either. The reason, she argues, is that American Jews—who supported Franklin Roosevelt and didn’t want to criticize any aspect of the war against Hitler—weren’t prominent defenders of Japanese rights. Nor were they prominent defenders of Catholic immigrants in the mid-19th century, when the American Jewish population was tiny.
The circumstances today, however, are vastly different. One reason hateful nativism so easily morphs into anti-Semitism in the Trump era is that today Jews really do disproportionately support immigration. The major American Jewish organizations overwhelmingly oppose Trump’s immigration policies. So do rank-and-file American Jews, according to several polls. Among whites, Jews were dramatically overrepresented in the civil rights movement too.
The segregationist anti-Semites of the mid-20th century and the nativist anti-Semites of today are wrong about Jews’ motives. Jews didn’t support civil rights then—and they don’t support immigrants’ rights now—because they want to subjugate white Christians. They’re just predisposed—because of their understanding of Jewish history—to identify with outsiders and fear ethnically and religiously exclusive definitions of Americanism. But people who demonize African Americans or Latino and Muslim immigrants notice that predisposition, and it leads them to demonize Jews too.
That’s why, in the Trump era, rising nativism and rising anti-Semitism go hand in hand. Before last week, Jewish conservatives might have been forgiven for ignoring this deadly pairing. Now there’s no excuse.
When Facebook removed Jo Brower’s fundraiser for disabled veterans just hours after approving it this September, she was surprised and confused. Brower’s nonprofit had previously published similar ads for their annual November bicycle ride in St. Petersburg, Florida. This year, Facebook ruled that the fundraiser was “related to politics or issues of national importance” and needed special authorization.
“I asked them to help me understand what part of it was political,” says Brower. “There was nothing political. They never got back to me.” Facebook refused her appeal and charged Brower for the ad. Now, Brower doubts she will advertise on Facebook again.
This year, online advertising platforms including Facebook, Google, and Twitter are reviewing millions of ads to protect American elections from unlawful influence and to disclose legitimate campaign activity. These platforms are also making mistakes. This election, Facebook has been accused of wrongly blocking ads for community centers, news articles, veterans pages, and food advertising.
If corporate political filters make enough mistakes, they could substantially impact American civic life. Public holidays, community centers, and news conversations knit together the civic fabric of democratic life, enabling Americans to understand each other and work together despite our differences. Each time a platform wrongly restricts a community announcement, this civic fabric weakens, with fewer people honoring American veterans, fewer relationships among neighbors, and less common understanding at a time of growing polarization.
How common are these mistakes and are they politically biased? To find out, our team of academics and U.S. citizens submitted hundreds of non-election ads to Facebook and Google, recorded their responses, and analyzed the results. Because platform election-advertising policies are so large and complex, we had to write a software program to direct our eight-person human audit team, which also included Ben Werdmuller, Jason Griffey, Chris Peterson, Scott Hale, and Nick Feamster.
Facebook removed Remember Honor Support’s nonprofit fundraiser ad this September. (J. Nathan Matias via Facebook)
By reviewing every ad before it’s published, tech firms are creating some of the largest and fastest policy-enforcement systems in human history. Last quarter, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, reported $28.5 billion in advertising revenue. Facebook reported earning $13 billion. According to Facebook’s transparency website, the company identified over 33,000 political ads per week in the site’s first two months. At most, political ads accounted for than 1 percent of Facebook’s quarterly advertising revenue, according to data from NYU researchers led by Laura Edelson and Damon McCoy.
If these public figures are correct, Facebook could be reviewing millions of ads per week for political content, even if only a small percentage of ads are related to the election. Google, which earns more than twice the ad revenue of Facebook, could be reviewing even more. While broadcasters and print publishers also review advertising content, digital ads are micro-targeted, A/B tested, published in real time, and continuously adjusted.
Where else is any organization making a similar number of judgments? The College Board only reviewed around 7 million SATs last year. Women receive roughly 25 million mammograms, and 25 million Americans were stopped by the police last year. In 2013, Google processed 4.5 million copyright takedown requests per week on average, but those were mostly automated complaints. Perhaps the only higher-volume detection system in American life is the TSA, which screens 6.2 million airport baggage items every day.
[Read: The secretive organization quietly spending millions on Facebook political ads]
Facebook detects political ads through machine-learning algorithms and human reviewers. According to a Facebook spokesperson, the company uses “automated, and in some cases, manual review to check the ads against Facebook’s Advertising Policies.” They reported that approximately 3,000-4,000 people currently review ads related to politics or issues.
People and algorithms often make mistakes, even when they make accurate decisions on average. Mammograms have false positives. The SAT doesn’t always predict college success. Police are sometimes biased, and copyright-enforcement bots also make mistakes. A 2016 study led by Stanford law professor Jennifer Urban found that 28 percent of attempts to remove online content for copyright violations are flawed in some way, potentially causing tens of millions of videos, tweets, and search results to be mistakenly censored every year.
When Facebook decided that Jo Brower’s charity fundraiser was an election-related ad, the mistake was influential. The company’s decision could have reduced the number of donations to wounded veterans. If Facebook and other platforms make enough of these mistakes at scale, they could meaningfully reduce participation in Veterans Day memorials and fundraisers across the country.
Even though Brower’s nonpartisan ad didn’t mention a candidate or election, it’s possible that Facebook interpreted her fundraiser as an ad about what the company calls “issues of national importance.” Campaign ads and issue ads are two central categories at the center of debates over advertising in American elections.
The Washington National Cathedral’s Veterans Day concert and Bush’s Beans burrito recipe were both considered election-related by Facebook. (J. Nathan Matias via Facebook)Platform policies toward campaign ads are shaped by U.S. legal definitions. Ads that are designed to influence the outcome of federal elections are regulated by the Federal Election Commission (FEC). The FEC enforces limits on campaign contributions, requires disclosure from larger donors, and prohibits anyone but U.S. citizens and green-card holders from supporting campaigns. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all require advertisers to seek authorization before they can publish federal campaign ads.
Issue ads are harder to define. “The Federal Election Act doesn’t recognize issue ads as a category,” according to Vivek Krishnamurthy, Counsel at Foley Hoag LLP and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School. “The distinction between ads that discuss public issues from ads that advocate for or against candidates is a line that comes from the First Amendment.” Because the First Amendment applies to government restrictions on speech, companies are free to create more restrictive practices.
While there’s no agreed-upon definition of issue advertising, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all added issue ads to their policies after learning of attempts by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) to influence the 2016 election. The IRA used online platforms to promote issues like Black Lives Matter, anti-Muslim sentiment, and LGBTQ rights. Each company now reviews every advertising attempt and requires advertisers to obtain authorization before publishing ads about “politics or issues of national importance” (Facebook) and “legislative issues of national importance” (Twitter). Google’s policies cover political-issue advocacy, and they announced in August that they were working on tools to detect issue ads and campaign ads in state elections.
These corporate policies filter who is allowed to publish election-related ads while also disclosing those funders to the public. If a platform decides that an ad is election-related, they require the advertiser to document that they are eligible to publish election ads. After platforms grant authorization, advertisers are allowed to publish the ads, and platforms disclose the funder. If the advertiser decides not to authorize or fails the process, the ads are not published and no record of the attempt is disclosed to the public.
[Read: Will Facebook’s new ad-transparency tools protect democracy?]
To test and compare mistaken enforcement by Google and Facebook, our research team wrote software to create ads that look like ones that Facebook has already mistakenly blocked. The software created product ads for music albums that share a name with election candidates. The software also created ads for national parks and Veterans Day parades that could be mistaken for issue ads. We then compared the differences in mistaken-enforcement rates for parks and parades versus products, left- or right-leaning mistakes, and federal versus state elections.
We also tested whether platforms mistakenly enforced their policies differently for U.S. citizens at home or abroad. Last year, then-Senator Al Franken criticized Facebook for accepting advertising payment in rubles, even though the FEC places no currency restrictions on campaign ads. One group of our ad posters were U.S. citizens using dollars within the United States. A second group of U.S. citizens posted from international internet locations with non-U.S. currencies.
Example non-election ads for parades, parks, and products that could be mistaken for right and left-leaning campaign ads and issue ads at federal and state levels. These ads are for illustration – the actual ads may have appeared on different pages. (J. Nathan Matias via Facebook)We posted a total of 477 ads to Facebook and Google from September 17 through October 10. Facebook prohibited 10 of our 238 ads (4 percent), citing its election policies. Google didn’t prohibit any of our 239 ads (our report includes full results and data). The following chart shows both platforms’ ad-publication rates for each combination of non-election ads: type (parks and parades or products), election level (state or federal), and the political leaning that a company might misinterpret (right or left).
J. Nathan MatiasMost of the ads that Facebook prohibited were for national parks or Veterans Day parades. One prohibited ad advertised a music album that shared a name with a candidate. Facebook prohibited 5 percent of our ads for Veterans Day gatherings. Facebook also prohibited 18 percent of national park ads linking to government websites. When we appealed some of these decisions, Facebook’s reviewers reversed them, confirming our belief that they were initially mistakes.
Maybe these mistakes aren’t so surprising. Overall, Facebook prohibited 11 percent of our park and parade ads and 1 percent of product ads that included a candidate name, a difference of 10 percentage points. Political ads often mention imagery and values common to many Americans. Machine-learning models designed to detect these political ads could easily learn these features and systematically prohibit information and ideas central to nonpartisan American civic life. Whatever the reason, the company prohibited fewer product ads.
While Facebook mistakenly prohibits some kinds of ads more than others, we did not discover evidence of political bias. Among Facebook ads, we did not find any statistically significant difference in political leaning, any difference between state or federal elections, or any differences based on the advertiser’s currency and internet location. We might have detected smaller differences with a larger sample size.
“As happens with any new process, we’re making mistakes as we learn,” said a Facebook spokesperson in response to our investigation. “These instances, however, are a small percentage of our efforts to bring more transparency to political and issue advertising.” The spokesperson stated that “We routinely evaluate ad review and take steps to improve the machine-learning model as well as our reviewer-training material.”
We’re not sure how to make sense of Google’s response to our ads. Google’s transparency report listed roughly 183,000 political ads from May 31 through October 15, less than one-fifth the rate of weekly Facebook ads reported by the NYU team. Maybe fewer campaigns are advertising on Google and YouTube, despite their larger market share. Maybe Google reports fewer political ads because their policies are less broad than Facebook’s. Google has expressed an intent to permit state campaign ads and political-issue ads “with restrictions,” but those restrictions may not yet be in place. Google may also have been less successful at detecting political advertising than Facebook, a question our research cannot answer.
[Read: Should Facebook ads be regulated like TV commercials?]
Whether Google’s policy enforcement is more narrow, more lax, or more accurate than Facebook’s, the company did correctly publish each of our non-election ads, in line with their own policies.
Advertising transparency could be good for elections. In the 2010 majority opinion for Citizens United, Justice Roberts argued that real-time online transparency of election advertising could help voters “give proper weight to different speakers and messages” and “hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.” Even if transparency does improve the integrity of elections, platforms will always make at least some mistakes. If mistakes are common enough, false positives like the ones we observed from Facebook could have influential side effects on important parts of American civic life.
In St. Petersburg Florida, with the bicycle fundraiser for wounded veterans just a few weeks away, Jo Brower is still frustrated with what seems like an accusation of partisanship from Facebook. “I’m also promoting it other ways. I have nothing to hide.” Local veterans groups and the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce have promoted the fundraiser, and some riders have already registered. Yet none of Jo’s other ideas can reach as many people as Facebook can.
Platforms have good reasons to protect democracies from illegitimate attempts to influence voters. Those protections also have a cost. Without care, the greatest collateral damage from these protections could be the nonpartisan communities and conversations that divided societies most desperately need.
RALEIGH, N.C.—On an unseasonably cool, gray morning in August, Martin Warf was getting a cool reception in a Wake County courtroom. Warf’s task was to convince Judge Becky Holt that the Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly was within its rights to strip a candidate for the state supreme court of his Republican affiliation on the November ballot.
This was a tough task. Chris Anglin, a former Democrat, had switched his registration to the GOP in June and then filed to run for the supreme court. In the past, he would have had to be a registered Republican for 90 days and run in a primary, but the General Assembly had eliminated the primary and the 90-day requirement. Now, frustrated that a man they accused of being a Democratic plant was on the ballot, legislators had passed a law saying he couldn’t run as a Republican because he hadn’t been a member of the party long enough. Anglin sued.
Warf had two big challenges. First, the legislature was trying to make the change well after the filing period for the race had ended. Second, Warf himself—representing the legislature in a lawsuit over the primaries—had stood before a federal judge months before and told her there was no need for a minimum time as a registered party member before filing. But that was before Anglin got into the race.
After a short hearing that August morning, Holt announced she was staying the law. It was a win for Anglin, but it was a win for Democrats, too, since his presence on the ballot was likely to dilute the Republican vote and help the Democratic favorite, Anita Earls, in her quest to unseat Justice Barbara Jackson, a Republican. For the General Assembly’s Republicans, it was just the latest defeat in the judicial system. Warf would be back in court later that week defending more of the legislature’s controversial moves.
Since 2010, when Republicans captured both houses of the North Carolina legislature for the first time since 1870, they’ve worked to reshape the state as an exemplar of modern conservatism, from tax cuts to stricter voting laws to the infamous transgender-bathroom bill—a radical change for a state that once prided itself on moderation, overseen by a permanent centrist Democratic majority. The Democrat Roy Cooper’s narrow capture of the governor’s office in 2016 has slowed but not stopped the process, in large part because the GOP retains a supermajority in the legislature, and that allows it to override Cooper’s vetoes.
Even as Democrats are expected to pick up seats in the legislature, the November election could solidify Republican power in the state. Few forecasters expect Democrats to take back either chamber—crafty redistricting means Republicans have a durable majority—but they stand a good chance of ending the supermajority and, with it, the veto overrides. However, Republicans are taking steps that would strengthen the legislature’s authority and therefore their own grip on the state. Voters are being asked to decide on six state-constitutional amendments. Even after being scaled back substantially following court battles, these amendments could change the balance of power between the governor and the legislature for decades to come, placing and preserving more authority in Republican hands. That has made the lead-up to the midterm elections acrimonious even by recent standards in the Old North State.
[Read: North Carolina’s ‘legislative coup’ is over, and Republicans won].
Not since a 1970 rewrite of the state constitution have there been so many amendments on the ballot. In order, they proceed more or less from least to most controversial. The first guarantees the right to hunt and fish. The second is a victims’-rights provision, based on the “Marsy’s Law” codified by several other states. The third caps the state income tax at 7 percent, a reduction from the current 10 percent. The fourth requires a photo ID to vote, resurrecting a provision of a voting law that was struck down by federal courts. The fifth moves most of the power to fill state judicial vacancies from the governor to the legislature. The sixth reconfigures the state ethics and election board, changing the structure and taking appointment power away from the governor.
“These amendments are an example of the way good governance should work. You want to govern based on what the people want,” Senator Paul Newton, a Republican from Mount Pleasant, near Charlotte, told me. “Really, I think we’re trying to do our duty as legislators to let the public decide. They may reject all or some of these amendments. They may embrace all of them, but we’ll never know unless the public votes.”
Democrats see something far more nefarious at work.
“North Carolina Republicans put a number of misleading constitutional amendments on the ballot and tried to rig the supreme-court race because they are afraid of losing power this November and losing their supermajority in the legislature,” says Robert Howard, a spokesman for the North Carolina Democratic Party.
Judge Holt’s ruling against the General Assembly in the Anglin case was no great shock. Not only did it seem dubious that the legislature could change the rules after the ballot was set, but judges have repeatedly blocked legislation passed by Republican lawmakers over the past eight years. In fact, the courtroom seems to be one of the few places North Carolina Democrats can come out on top.
Cooper has managed to push through a few of his policy priorities, but lawmakers can—and often have—ignored him and forced his hand. Even before he took office, Republicans called a special session to reduce the governor’s powers. (Their actions drew lawsuits not only from Cooper but also from his predecessor, the Republican Pat McCrory.) Since then, they have repeatedly overridden his veto, including on the state budget and on changes to the judicial system. The small rump faction of Democrats in the legislature has become experienced at delivering remarks lamenting partisanship and majoritarian rule. They have plenty of time to hone those speeches, because they’re often left out of the legislative process.
[Read: A federal judge’s ruling against North Carolina’s HB2]
That has left Democrats and progressive groups with only the courts as recourse. They haven’t won every battle, but Republicans have been stung by several prominent defeats. On October 16, a panel ruled that a prior expansion of the board of elections, also designed to dilute the governor’s control, was unconstitutional, though they stayed that ruling until after the election. Courts have repeatedly smacked down General Assembly–drawn voting districts, for both the state legislature and U.S. House, as unconstitutional efforts to help Republicans. A federal court struck down most of a 2013 law that required photo ID, cut early voting, and eliminated same-day voter registration.
The Republican cold streak in court is one possible explanation for why the General Assembly has been so devoted to changing the state’s judicial system—though it has been federal courts, rather than state courts, that have dealt the legislature its worst blows. But no matter lawmakers’ motivation, a broad swath of observers, from Democratic judges to a former Republican supreme-court justice, are unified in their horror.
“It’s a very methodical, systematic attack on the independence of the judiciary,” says Marcia Morey, a Democratic representative from Durham and a former chief district-court judge. “The sole intent is to have the Republican majority try to expand their power into the court system, electing more Republican judges.”
Over the course of several years, from 1996 to 2004, the legislature, then controlled by Democrats, changed elections at each level of the state system from partisan to nonpartisan. (This no doubt seemed like a safe move at a time when the Democratic Party still controlled the state.) After Democrats’ preferred candidate surprised a registered Republican in a 2016 state-supreme-court race, the GOP-led General Assembly reintroduced partisan elections for judgeships, bucking a national trend toward fewer partisan elections. Legislators say the change is positive, because it allows voters to have a better sense of the kind of judge they’re voting for.
That wasn’t all. The General Assembly also reduced the court of appeals by three seats, which Democrats charged was intended to prevent Cooper from making appointments that would create a Democratic majority on the court. (In a stunning rebuke of his own party, Judge Doug McCullough, a Republican, retired 36 days early, allowing Cooper to appoint his successor, in protest of the legislature’s move.) Judges were excluded from a pay raise that applied to other state workers. And the legislature curtailed judges’ discretion to waive court fees in criminal cases involving indigent defendants.
In the past year, the General Assembly also considered a broader shake-up of the system. Bills were proposed that would have redrawn judicial districts. As critics noted, one set of proposed boundaries closely mirrored the legislative districts that courts had thrown out as discriminatory, and a disproportionate number of African American judges were drawn into the same district, meaning one would be left without a seat. There was also a proposal to reduce judges’ terms from eight or four years, depending on the court, to two years. “Some would argue that we do have some activist judges, and the thought would be, if you’re going to act like a legislator, perhaps you should run like one,” Representative David Lewis, the chair of the rules committee, told WUNC.
Finally, the legislature considered a plan to change how judges are chosen. Judges at every level in North Carolina run for office, but when a vacancy occurs, the governor chooses a replacement; he or she then faces voters when the partial term expires. The General Assembly looked at other states’ systems and considered several different approaches, most of which would give legislators a greater role in the process. But the various changes were unpopular, and faced fierce criticism from across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, this year’s judicial primaries were canceled, on the basis that the General Assembly was considering changes to districts.
After the legislator who had been the public face of the judicial overhaul lost his GOP primary in May, the reorganization seemed to be on ice—until the end of the spring legislative session in June, when the General Assembly voted to place a constitutional amendment changing how vacancies are filled on the November ballot. Rather than allowing the governor to fill vacancies, a commission appointed by the chief justice of the state supreme court, the governor, and the General Assembly would recommend candidates to the General Assembly, which would send two finalists to the governor.
Because as many as one in five North Carolina judges first reaches the bench as a vacancy appointment, the stakes for the judiciary are high. Republicans note that good-government reformers have been calling for merit selection in judgeships for years. They also point to what they say are past abuses, such as when outgoing Democratic Governor Bev Perdue appointed three close aides, all without judicial experience, to the bench. (This is something you hear a lot in North Carolina lately: Whenever Republicans are accused of abusing their power, they point to abuses by Democrats during their long stint in control. The charge is as completely accurate—Democrats’ extensive corruption is one reason voters turned them out in favor of the GOP—as it is irrelevant, since saying the other guys abused their power doesn’t justify abuse of power.)
House Speaker Tim Moore confers with colleagues during a special session on constitutional amendments in July. (Gerry Broome / AP)But would the new system really solve the problem of politicizing the bench, or just shift it? No other state structures its judicial-selection system the way North Carolina would, so it’s hard to find a comparison. If the amendment is approved, judges will still eventually end up before voters, rather than in a pure merit system. And judges will still be appointed by politicians—just by a different set. But whereas the governor is elected statewide and therefore accountable to all voters, the legislature is elected locally. Since the General Assembly is controlled by Republicans and, because of both favorable districting and the state’s urban-rural divide, most likely will be for years to come, there’s a good chance that every candidate put to the governor, whether she is a Democrat or a Republican, will be a GOP pick.
“This gives them all political power,” says Jeff Jackson, a Democratic state senator from Charlotte. “If they lose the next five gubernatorial elections, the reins stay in their hands.”
There has also been widespread speculation in Raleigh for months that if the amendment passes, Republicans might try to pack courts to dilute or reverse Democratic advantages, just as they shrank the court of appeals. (Newton says he knows of no such plans.) Even without that, many observers worry that having the legislature involved in the process will taint the separation of powers between the branches of government.
“The General Assembly is passing the laws to be reviewed by the judges,” says John Wester, a Republican and a past president of the North Carolina Bar Association. “If the General Assembly chooses the judges, it’s hard to see how the public would have confidence in a judiciary chosen by those whose laws they are reviewing.”
A 2017 white paper from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law concluded that while there is limited comparison, available evidence “suggests that legislative appointments are unlikely to alleviate the problems associated with judicial elections, and may further undermine judicial independence and integrity in critical ways.”
Already, the tampering has come back to bite the General Assembly in at least one way. Before legislators canceled the judicial primaries earlier this year, candidates were required to have been registered with a party for 90 days before they filed for election. Without primaries to winnow out candidates, the onus was on the parties to coalesce around a single candidate and clear the field. This invited mischief. Democratic lawyers across the state received a postcard trying to recruit them to run for office; the cards were sent by a Republican operative.
[Read: The Supreme Court finds North Carolina’s racial gerrymandering unconstitutional.]
No Democrat decided to challenge Anita Earls, a longtime crusading progressive attorney who has led some of the more successful charges against the GOP’s moves from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which she founded. But Chris Anglin decided to run on the GOP line, much to the consternation of Republicans who are concerned he could dilute Justice Jackson’s vote and give Democrats a 5–2 edge on the court. Republicans howled that Anglin, an attorney in Raleigh with no judicial experience, was a fake candidate placed on the ballot by Democrats. It didn’t help much that his campaign consultant, Perry Woods, works for Democrats, nor that his attorney in challenging the General Assembly was John Burns, a prominent Raleigh Democrat and county commissioner.
The governor’s office and the North Carolina Democratic Party both denied any involvement in Anglin’s campaign and his decision to run. Anglin also told me he is not a Democratic plant and is running on his convictions. He noted that although he switched his registration to Republican in June, he’d been a registered Democrat only since 2012. He argues he’s defending traditional GOP values, but his critique does sound a lot like the Democratic critique of the General Assembly.
“I decided to run for supreme court because I wanted to give Republican voters an alternative candidate so that they could vote for someone who believes in separation of powers, and also that the judiciary should be a coequal and separate branch of government from the legislature,” he told me. “I don’t think the current incumbent encompasses those traditional Republican values that have become lost in the state.”
It’s hard to imagine there’s a large bloc of Republicans eager for a justice who toes the Democratic line. But even if just a few pull the lever for him, it could give Earls a leg up. Recent polls show Earls ahead of both Jackson and Anglin, with many voters undecided.
A couple of hours after Anglin’s hearing at the Wake County Courthouse, and a few blocks north, a motley collection of ex-governors was assembling at the Old State Capitol for a press conference. There was Jim Hunt, the venerable Democrat who is the longest-serving governor in state history; Jim Martin, the only two-term Republican governor in state history; Mike Easley, a Democrat convicted of a felony after leaving office for a baroque array of corruption scandals; Perdue; and Pat McCrory, the Republican who succeeded Perdue after a bitter campaign in 2012, and then lost an even bitterer campaign for reelection in 2016.
The group shared an uneasy jolliness—part collegiality born out of the shared privilege of running the state, part the half-natural, half-cultivated backslapping bonhomie of longtime pols. (Their entrance was slow, as each governor stopped to greet his or her favorite graying member of the press corps.) They also had a strange common purpose: opposing two of the six amendments on the November ballot.
“Never have five of us gotten together and stuck it to you on the same issue,” Easley quipped. The gathering was indeed unprecedented. But for all the jokes, the governors were deadly serious about the amendments.
“This is really about whether a few politicians in the legislature will increase their power at the expense of the people of North Carolina,” Hunt said in his distinguished drawl.
Of course the Democrats didn’t like the amendments. But neither did the Republicans.
“This is not about partisan politics. It’s about power politics, and it must be stopped,” Martin said. “It’s embarrassing to me, after a career devoted to building a healthier, more competitive two-party system in our state, that it’s a legislature controlled by my Republican Party that has hatched this scheme.”
But it was McCrory who was most fired up. He sounded almost like he was in campaign mode—there’s speculation he might try for a rematch with Cooper in 2020—but he was taking on his fellow Republicans. His feud with the lawmakers has roots: The legislature had often pushed him around as governor, which helped sink his reelection. He then joined with Martin and Hunt to file a successful suit against the General Assembly’s December 2016 “legislative coup.”
“Now that I’m out of office, I’m proud to join these other governors in continuing to fight. Not doing so would be pure political hypocrisy on my part,” he said. Then, addressing the legislators, he added: “If any of you want to take on the responsibilities of the governor, have the courage to run for it and win.”
[Read: North Carolina Republicans try to curtail the new Democratic governor’s power.]
Republican lawmakers dismiss the gubernatorial pushback, saying that beneath the veneer of bipartisanship, it’s really just the governors trying to defend executive power. The General Assembly is simply reasserting its authority, they say. The matter is not so simple as just a tug of war between the executive branch and the legislature. The Koch brothers–backed Americans for Prosperity has also announced its opposition to the judicial-appointments amendment.
But it is true that North Carolina has long been skeptical of executive power. Since the state’s first post–Revolutionary War constitution, which reflected early American fears of a strong ruler, the Old North State has limited the governor’s capabilities.
“We were trying to get away from a king … Anybody who’s a student of North Carolina history knows that the legislature was vested with the power in this state,” Newton says. In its post–Civil War constitution, judicial appointment power was given to the governor. But Democrats managed to overturn Reconstruction reforms at the convention of 1875 and return power to the legislature.
“There’s been a tug of war ever since,” Newton says. Indeed, the governor gained the veto only in 1996; North Carolina was the last state to give its chief executive that power. “This is not a here-and-now moment in history so much as it is a playing out of a long period of struggle between the governor and the legislature. I suspect it will continue long after we’ve gone.”
Over time, voters have opted to give the governor gradually more power, and they have the right to give it back to the legislature. Whether doing so is a good idea is a different question. H. Jefferson Powell, a professor at Duke Law School and a former official in the state and federal justice departments, has pushed back on some of the more panicked Democratic reactions to the amendments, viewing them as alarmist. Still, he told me there’s a strong small-c conservative case against them.
“The constitution is not a place to put talking points to the voter,” he says. “There’s no reason to believe the executive is too strong now. Don’t fix things that you don’t know are broken.”
Powell noted that the first three amendments—on hunting and fishing, victims’ rights, and income tax—seem designed largely to drive up turnout among Republican voters. But that doesn’t mean they won’t have real and lasting effects in the state. Take the income-tax question. The tax rate is currently below the proposed 7 percent bar, but other states that placed constitutional caps on the tax rate have sometimes found themselves frustrated that lawmakers are handcuffed from raising taxes when it’s useful to do so. There’s also no obvious urgent reason to reconfigure the board of elections, as another of the amendments would do—except that the old system gives majority control of the board to the governor’s party, and he is a Democrat. Republicans argue that a bipartisan board, with an equal number of members from each party, would be more equitable—though expanding the board from five members to eight also risks 4–4 deadlocks.
The photo-ID matter is even more fraught. North Carolina has been embroiled in a long fight over voting rights. Many states with Republican leadership have pursued stricter voting laws, but North Carolina has been especially aggressive. Almost immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which loosened federal restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination, the General Assembly pushed through a law widely described as the nation’s strictest. Advocates say that such laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but there’s no evidence that widespread fraud exists, nor that it sways elections. There is, however, evidence that such measures drive down turnout among minorities and other populations that tend to vote Democratic.
[Read: North Carolina’s deliberate disenfranchisement of black voters]
A federal appeals court ruled in 2016 that much of the law was unconstitutional; it found that suppressing the black vote was not a side effect but the very point. “In what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race—specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,” Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote.
Even without that law in place, the General Assembly has found ways to tinker with voting. Courts have also found that the districts it drew in 2011 for both U.S. House and state legislative races were racial gerrymanders. Twice this year, a court found that the replacement districts are unconstitutional partisan gerrymanders. (The U.S. Supreme Court will likely make the final decision there, and the court seems skeptical.) Republicans believe that with several states having recently passed voter-ID laws, and with the Supreme Court now more conservative, this is the chance to try again.
“We don’t want to disenfranchise anyone,” Newton says. “I’m in favor of making every effort we need to make sure legitimate voters have access to the polls. We should make that happen, and we will make that happen, but we need to make sure every voter is, in fact, permitted to vote.”
Meanwhile, the fate of the amendments themselves might depend partly on a law passed this summer that shortens early voting and has drawn criticism from local officials of both parties.
The process by which the amendments came about raises its own questions. They were introduced and approved in just two weeks, and Democrats complained that they were not consulted. Newton told me that a longer process was unnecessary, since so many of the issues had been circulating in Raleigh for years, and since the legislature had studied judicial reorganization in depth.
But Gerry Cohen, a Democratic lawyer who spent years working as a lawyer for the legislature, says that timeline was highly unusual.
“I drafted, like, 30 amendments over 37 years. Some of them laid out there for months for people to review them. These were reviewed by nobody,” Cohen says. “The last major rewrite [of the state constitution] was in the 1969 session. They had a two-year state-bar commission.”
In some cases, voters will have to decide on amendments without knowing exactly what they will mean in practice. The actual legislation implementing them won’t be written until after the vote, meaning that voters must, as Nancy Pelosi infamously said of the Affordable Care Act, pass the bill so they can find out what is in it. For example, it’s unclear what forms of ID would be acceptable for voting, which has been a contentious topic in other states. Newton says the process makes sense, since the General Assembly wouldn’t want to write the bills until it knows whether they’ll actually be relevant. But according to Cohen, this is a break with the past as well: By his calculation, 13 of the past 14 constitutional amendments that required implementing legislation had it passed in the same session.
If the amendments do pass, legislators will move fast. They’re scheduled to come into session on November 27—the very same day that election results are certified. Cohen and other Democrats speculate that Republicans are racing to beat the clock: If they lose their supermajority, they’ll need to pass any implementing legislation, get it vetoed, and override Cooper’s veto by December 20, or else the matter will get kicked to the incoming General Assembly.
Already, the hasty process has caused some hiccups. First, Republican leaders realized that, thanks to a law the General Assembly passed in 2016, the ballot captions for the amendments were set to be written by a committee controlled by Democrats. Worried that the committee would write captions that might persuade voters not to support the amendments, the General Assembly called a special session to strip the committee of that responsibility. (It was during the same special session that the legislature passed the bill targeting Anglin. Democrats claimed the session was itself unconstitutional.)
Instead, Republicans wrote politically slanted captions of their own. Cooper and other groups sued, saying the descriptions were misleading. A panel of judges agreed with them, throwing the judicial-vacancies and elections-board amendments off the ballot. The legislature then returned once more, writing new language for the two amendments and in the process significantly reducing the scope of the elections-board amendment; as written originally, it would have given the legislature control over dozens of additional appointments to state boards and commissions, but the new version applies only to the elections board. Further court challenges to the amendments have fallen short, though Democrats still say that they’re misleading and designed to deceive voters.
Despite the chaos that has attended the process, there’s a good chance that most or all of the amendments will pass. Rather than trying to differentiate among the provisions, Democrats have adopted the slogan “Nix All Six” in the lead-up to the vote. But the hunting-rights and victim’s-rights measures are likely to be popular. An October poll from Spectrum News found majority support for every amendment except the judicial-vacancies matter, though there are large numbers of undecideds for most of them, and it’s unclear how informed voters are about the amendments in general. National politics, Hurricane Florence, and a couple of contentious U.S. House elections have garnered a great deal of attention.
“It requires you to focus on six things,” Jeff Jackson, the Democratic senator, says. “It’s a real challenge 90 days from the election.”
Well versed or not, voters will make their decisions on November 6—both about the amendments themselves and about the Republican supermajority in the General Assembly. Those choices will set the ground rules for the next chapter of North Carolina’s power struggle, determining just how much power to give the Republican-led legislature. Whatever the results are, however, they are unlikely to end the Old North State’s turbulent decade.
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