On October 2, Jamal Khashoggi walked into Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul and was not seen publicly again. One month later, the Saudi journalist’s fate has been pieced together incrementally, through media leaks, Turkish official statements, and (oft-changing) Saudi government admissions.
We still don’t know much about what happened to Khashoggi. “In a way,” Neil Quilliam, a Middle East expert at Chatham House, told me, “it’s almost easier to say what we do know, because there are so few things.”
The vast majority of what is known about what allegedly happened to Khashoggi has come via unofficial channels—namely, through a series of leaks from Turkish sources to media outlets. The first such leak, alleging Khashoggi’s death, emerged days after he disappeared. Others soon followed, involving reports of a Saudi hit squad, gruesome audiotapes, and a Khashoggi decoy.
[Read: Turkey is treating the Khashoggi affair like it’s must-see TV]
Here’s a rundown of what the officials have said, what leaks have revealed, and what remains unknown.
What Officials Have Said
Turkish security footage shows Khashoggi entering the Saudi consulate on the afternoon of October 2, where his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, said he went to obtain paperwork for them to marry. Turkish authorities said that a group of 15 Saudi nationals then strangled Khashoggi at the consulate as part of a “planned operation,” which ended with his body being “dismembered and destroyed.”
Saudi Arabia’s account, which has undergone a series of revisions, offers a somewhat different story. Riyadh now says that Khashoggi was killed in the consulate as part of a “premeditated” attack, but the kingdom claims it was a “rogue operation” by members of the Saudi intelligence service. Riyadh said that it has fired five top officials and arrested 18 others for the murder, and has insisted that the royal family, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was not involved.
What Leaks Have Revealed
Unnamed Turkish officials told the media that audio recordings of Khashoggi’s interrogation and murder exist, capturing gruesome details about the duration of his detention and torture. The Turkish government hasn’t publicly released any such recordings, though it has been reported that CIA Director Gina Haspel heard the audio during her visit to Turkey last week.
A senior Turkish official told CNN that a Saudi national posing as Khashoggi was dispatched around Istanbul just hours after Khashoggi entered the consulate, in an apparent attempt to cover up his disappearance. The individual was captured on Turkish surveillance footage wearing glasses, a fake beard, and clothes identical to those worn by Khashoggi that day.
An unnamed Saudi official told Reuters that Khashoggi’s killers removed the body from the consulate by rolling it up in a rug and giving it to a “local cooperator” for disposal.
What We Don’t Know
Three main questions remain regarding what happened to Khashoggi. First, the whereabouts of his body are unknown.
Second, we don’t know who gave the order for Khashoggi to be killed. Was it a rogue operation, as the Saudis claim? Or did Mohammed bin Salman, the country’s de facto leader, play a role?
The answer to the second question will have profound implications for the third: What impact, if any, will Khashoggi’s death have on Saudi Arabia’s global standing? A number of its allies chose to boycott last month’s investment conference in Riyadh and suspended political visits to the kingdom. Some, including Germany and Austria, have called for halting Saudi arm sales. Others, such as the U.S. and France, have ruled this response out entirely.
Speaking at a memorial in London this week, Cengiz urged President Donald Trump and other world leaders not to assist in a “cover up” of what happened to her fiancée. “I want justice to be served,” she said. “Not only for those who murdered my beloved Jamal, but for those who organized it and gave the order for it.”
Though Saudi Arabia and Turkey are conducting a joint investigation into Khashoggi’s death, it’s unlikely to yield definitive answers about what happened to him, nor will it necessarily result in a prosecution. Saudi Arabia has already rejected Turkish demands that the suspects be extradited to Ankara for trial.
“There is a forming narrative that is being shaped between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and that’s symptomatic of them trying to come to some kind of agreement,” Quilliam said. “I don’t think we’re ever going to find out the definitive truth. It will be a sort of negotiated truth that both sides can sign up to.”
Hard-liners: President Donald Trump is looking to electrify his base with renewed anti-immigration fervor, releasing a racist ad on Thursday via Twitter and gesturing at an executive order on immigration to come next week. The GOP might need more than base voters to retain political control, though. What’s the long game of the close Trump adviser who’s at the root of some of this hard-line strategy? For those counting down: Five days to the U.S. midterm elections.
Fight for the Right: A consequential legal fight over voting rights is brewing in this tiny, predominantly white Texas county, where students at the historically black public university Prairie View A&M have alleged that the county’s early-voting plan uniquely restricts their options. The battle over voting rights here goes way back.
Give Me Space: There’s a big black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, with the weight of several million suns. Thanks to telescope data and some animation work, we can see what material getting sucked into a black hole might look like. Also: Do you give public transit a wide berth because you’re afraid of getting sick? Or do you think riding public transit has built up your general resistance to illness? Heading into flu season, here’s some real talk.
Snapshot
“Few figures in modern history have done more than Gingrich to lay the groundwork for Trump’s rise,” McKay Coppins writes in this profile of the former speaker of the House, photographed above by Amy Lombard. “During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat—replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism—that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction.”Evening ReadIn weighing the costs and benefits—and respective contributions to gridlock—of buses with fixed routes versus ride-shares like Uber and Lyft, Jarrett Walker comes down on the side of buses.
When you drive alone (or take Uber alone) in a gridlocked street or freeway, you are taking more than your fair share of the limited space. When stuck in traffic, you are blocking others from moving freely.
If cities want to move people faster than walking while allowing them to take up only their fair share of space, two options arise. One is to use a vehicle that’s not much bigger than the human body, such as bicycles and scooters. Those tools work well for certain people in particular circumstances, but not for everyone. The other option is to share the ride in a vehicle. If space is really scarce, that vehicle will have to carry lots of people. In most cases, riders will have to share a vehicle with strangers, people who are not traveling for the same purposes or even to the same places. That’s what public transit is.
Fixed public transit deploys large vehicles flowing along a set path, and riders gathering at stops to use them. That way, the vehicles can follow a fairly straight line, and they don’t need to stop once for every customer. That is what makes them worth walking to get to. It is one of the best ideas in the history of transportation.
And walking is key to it.
Let’s not reinvent the wheel—or public transit, Walker argues.
What Do You Know … About Global Affairs?1. Which of the following countries offer automatic citizenship to babies born within their borders? Canada, Germany, Mexico, the United Kingdom.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. High tides and strong winds brought unprecedented flooding of up to five feet in this Italian city in the past few days.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. The controversial Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., recently confirmed what scholars had long suspected: Artifacts it had been displaying as authentic fragments of the __________________ are likely forgeries.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: CanadA; Mexico / venice / Dead sea scrolls
Urban DevelopmentsOur partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares today’s top stories:
Gerrymandering! Urban-rural divides! Nativists! Feminists! This deliciously wonky interactive map of House election results since 1840 has it all.
In the world of trap music, Ko Wen-je is an unlikely newcomer. And yet here we are: The mayor of Taipei, Taiwan, just dropped his first music video, “Do Things Right.”
“You can track Washington’s development through this narrow lens of tunnels. The emergence of industrial technology, the push in the 19th century for sanitation, the mid-century interest in mass transit—it’s all there.” This interactive history of underground D.C. reveals the quirks of the city.
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In an address from the Roosevelt Room Thursday, President Donald Trump criticized the nation’s immigration laws, decried the Central American migrant caravan moving through Mexico, and announced that he’s “finalizing a plan” that would limit who could claim asylum.
“Migrants will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry,” Trump said. “Those who choose to break our laws and enter illegally will no longer be able to use meritless claims to gain entry into our country.”
The plan—which Trump suggested could come via an executive order next week—would likely face immediate legal challenges: U.S. and international law state that migrants have the right to apply for asylum once on U.S. soil. Trump’s address on Thursday fell short of describing how he’d circumvent those laws; nor did the president detail any other major policy changes. Instead, his remarks seemed designed to keep the spotlight on immigration, the issue he’s betting the midterms on.
Trump has escalated his attacks against Central American migrants in the final days of the campaign, dubbing the caravan an “invasion,” releasing a racist ad, and calling into question reports that those traveling have valid asylum claims.
Despite the president’s urgent tone, the migrant caravan is still about 1,000 miles away. And the majority of its members—estimated to be around 4,000 people, with other, smaller groups following behind—are reported to be women and children. Many are expected to present themselves to authorities to claim asylum, not evade capture.
Trump spent much of his address condemning “catch and release,” the practice of letting immigrants who’ve claimed asylum into the United States while they await asylum proceedings, so long as they’ve demonstrated a “credible fear” of returning to their home countries.
Trump said that migrants will no longer be released after being apprehended, but it’s unclear whether his edict has the force of policy. He didn’t explain how his administration would follow through beyond mounting tents. “We have thousands of tents. We have a lot of tents. We have a lot of everything. We are going to hold them right there,” he said. He falsely claimed that immigrants purposefully miss their scheduled court hearings after being released. According to a study by the American Immigration Council, over a 15-year period, 96 percent of asylum-seeking families went to their immigration-court hearings.
Trump’s address was preceded by a press release from the Department of Homeland Security that condemned “catch and release loopholes,” referring to existing asylum laws and the Flores Settlement Agreement, which places a limit on how long children can be held in immigration detention. The department cited these so-called loopholes as a reason for “a dramatic transformation in the population of those seeking to enter our country illegally.”
Indeed, there have been shifts in the migrant population: In fiscal-year 2018, 56 percent of the people apprehended at the southern border were from Central America, according to DHS data. In 2010, it was 10 percent. Deteriorating conditions in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala have contributed to the uptick of migrants journeying to the U.S.-Mexico border from the region.
Trump’s address Thursday was the latest in a broad administration effort to limit asylum. Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions drastically narrowed what the government considers grounds for asylum, barring victims of domestic abuse and gang violence from accessing the protections. “Asylum was never meant to alleviate all problems—even all serious problems—that people face every day all over the world,” he said in a June speech.
His remarks also came on the heels of the deployment of thousands of active-duty National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has repeatedly cited the military’s presence as a warning to those journeying to the border, prompting questions about whether troops are being used as a political tool ahead of next week’s elections, something Defense Secretary James Mattis denies.
Trump proclaimed Thursday that the number of troops could reach 15,000, far outnumbering the number of migrants expected to arrive. “We have already dispatched for the border the United States military, and they will do the job,” Trump said. “They are setting up right now and they are preparing. We hope nothing happens but if it does, we are totally prepared, greatest military anywhere in the world.”
What Trump doesn’t say is that the military is limited in what it can do on U.S. soil. Their time at the border will largely be spent assisting Customs and Border Patrol. This isn’t the first time troops have been deployed. Previous administrations have also sent them: Former President Barack Obama, for example, sent up to 1,200 Guard members to address drug and human trafficking. But in Trump’s mind, it may just be the show of force that counts. As my colleague David Graham reported earlier today, Trump appears to be doing everything he can to ensure his base turns out next Tuesday. His immigration address is yet another example of that effort.
Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey), Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2), and Olivia Paschal (@oliviacpaschal)
Today in 5 LinesIn a speech from the White House, President Trump announced that he will issue an executive order next week on immigration, and accused asylum seekers of making a “mockery” of immigration laws.
In a last-minute effort to turn out his base ahead of the midterms, Trump released a race-baiting ad about immigrants and crime.
Robert Bowers, the suspect in Saturday’s mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, pleaded not guilty to all 44 counts against him and requested a jury trial.
Billionaire Oprah Winfrey campaigned in support of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in Marietta, Georgia, but swatted down rumors of a 2020 presidential run.
In an interview, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman said he has Stage 1 cancer.
Today on The AtlanticThe President’s Closing Argument: In the final week before the midterm elections, Trump has warned of an immigrant “invasion” and released a racist ad. To understand this thinking, you have to understand the mind of a close adviser, Stephen Miller. (McKay Coppins)
Tolkien Knew About Power: What can The Lord of the Rings teach us about the Trump moment? “The height of wisdom is to fear [one’s] own drive for power,” writes Eliot A. Cohen.
A History of Voter Suppression: At one historically black public university in Waller County, Texas, black students fought tooth and nail for the right to vote throughout the 1970s. Now, students there allege they’re facing voter suppression again. (Vann R. Newkirk II and Adam Harris)
An Endangered Species: Ideologically moderate candidates are increasingly rare. However, these middle-of-the-road candidates still think they have a place in Congress. (Elaina Plott)
The Rise of Cyberterrorism: Experts have warned about the threat of a major cyberattack for years. Why hasn’t there been one yet? (Kathy Gilsinan)
Snapshot
Oprah Winfrey takes part in a town hall meeting with Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams ahead of the midterm election in Marietta, Georgia. (Chris Aluka Berry / Reuters)What We’re ReadingWhy So Confident?: Democratic party leaders seem sure that they’ll win the House, even though polls are tightening. Jessica Taylor explains why. (NPR)
A Real Let Down: President Trump has identified himself as a nationalist, but his first term in office has been disappointing for those who adhere to one specific meaning of the label, writes Michael Brendan Dougherty. (National Review)
The Upsetter, Upset: Tea Party conservative Dave Brat shocked the country when he upset House Majority Leader Eric Cantor four years ago in Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District. This year, he’s in the fight of his political life. (Tara Golshan, Vox)
Helping Himself Out: Some voters are calling Kansas’s new voter-ID law “a modern-day poll tax”—one that could help the man who created it, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, become governor. (Ari Berman, Mother Jones)
VisualizedFrom Abortion to Marijuana: Voters in 37 states will face 155 ballot questions on November 6. Here are some of them. (Kate Rabinowitz, The Washington Post)
Google employees around the globe walked out of their offices today to protest the way the company deals with sexual harassment. It was a well-meaning, but ultimately empty endeavor.
The walkout, which took place at 11 a.m. in all time zones, was prompted by a New York Times investigation last month that alleged that the company had mishandled sexual harassment for years to protect key executives. Google said that it has fired 48 employees for sexual harassment over the past two years.
But many of Google’s more than 85,000 employees want the company to do a lot more. One woman held a poster saying “What do I do at Google? I work hard every day so the company can afford $90,000,000 payouts to execs who sexually harass my coworkers.” Others held signs saying “Time’s up tech,” “Workers’ rights are women’s rights,” and “Not OK Google.” In Mountain View, California, more than 1,000 employees left their desks, according to CNN. In New York, walkout co-organizer Meredith Whittaker addressed the crowd via megaphone. “This is a movement,” she declared to cheers. “I’m here because what you read in the New York Times is a small sampling of the thousands of stories we all have ... the thousands of instances of abuse of power, discrimination, and harassment, and a pattern of unethical and thoughtless decision making that has marked this company for the last year ... This is it; time is up, and we’re just getting started.” The crowd subsequently broke into cheers of “Time is up.”
The first of many coordinated #GoogleWalkout protests has begun - this is at the firm’s office in Singapore. (Pic via https://t.co/h44RZYGGHV ) pic.twitter.com/QeFgmPbHnN
— Dave Lee (@DaveLeeBBC) November 1, 2018In a Thursday op-ed in The Cut, the walkout’s organizers outlined their demands: “All employees and contract workers across the company deserve to be safe ... We demand an end to the sexual harassment, discrimination, and the systemic racism that fuel this destructive culture,” they wrote.
The group and its supporters are advocating for five key changes. They want an end to forced arbitration in cases of harassment and discrimination; a commitment to end pay and opportunity inequity; a publicly disclosed sexual-harassment transparency report; a clear, uniform, and globally inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct safely and anonymously; and promotion of the chief diversity officer to answer directly to the CEO and make recommendations directly to the board of directors, along with the appointment of an employee representative to the board.
[Read: How women are harassed out of science]
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, sanctioned the walkout. In an email to employees on Tuesday, he wrote, “I understand the anger and disappointment that many of you feel. I feel it as well, and I am fully committed to making progress on an issue that has persisted for far too long in our society ... and, yes, here at Google, too ... In the meantime, Eileen [Naughton, the vice president of people operations] will make sure managers are aware of the activities planned for Thursday and that you have the support you need.”
We, Google employees and contractors, will walkout on November 1 at 11:10am to demand these five real changes. #googlewalkout pic.twitter.com/amgTxK3IYw
— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018Of course, not allowing the walkout would have only further sullied the company’s reputation, and taking a public stance against sexual harassment in a post #MeToo era is hardly revolutionary. If the company truly wants to address deeper issues of sexism and harassment, meeting the organizers’ list of demands would be a start. And if employees want to force the company’s hand, they need to go further than a company-sanctioned symbolic walkout.
Just weeks ago, Google was forced to drop out of the running for a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon after internal revolt. In August, employees also protested after it was revealed that Google was developing a censored search engine for China. In a letter speaking out against the proposed partnership, Google employees declared, “We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table.”
Not ok, Google. Sign making is underway in NYC! #GoogleWalkout pic.twitter.com/hMLKL0LHOz
— Google Walkout For Real Change (@GoogleWalkout) November 1, 2018Despite the fact that executives have repeatedly pledged to “do more” to work toward diversity, Google’s 2018 diversity report shows that the company is still overwhelmingly white and male. Without aggressive work from senior leaders, the corporate environment is unlikely to change. It’s telling that five out of the six organizers of today’s walkout were women and that the walkout originally began as a 200-person “women’s march.”
Mary Rinaldi, the founder of the Women’s Holding Company, a company aimed at helping female workers get legal advice, said that the PR attention the walkout received is a good thing, if interest can be sustained. “The #MeToo movement has uncovered all these things that have been happening in the shadows. It’s new for society to start accepting that this happens all the time; these aren’t one-off situations. The next step is to keep in the spotlight,” she said.
Risa B. Heller, a crisis-communication expert, is also optimistic about the walkout’s capacity to effect change. “These companies want to be a place where people want to work. They want people to be proud of working for them,” she said. “These kinds of actions certainly make the executives pay attention.”
But while a walkout may be a PR win, it isn’t really affecting Google’s business very much. “So far, #MeToo hasn’t really changed anything in the legal realm of many businesses. While we’ve gotten rid of a lot of terrible men, it hasn’t changed anything structurally,” said Ashish Prashar, a crisis-communication expert with experience in politics.
The Google walkout, in particular, has done a great job of raising awareness of company wrongdoings, but at the end of the day, Google is a for-profit corporation. The way to negotiate with a for-profit corporation isn’t through symbolism, but by jeopardizing profits.
“If women and men and anyone who supports these efforts had an actual strike, then you’d see lasting change,” Prashar said. “They need to say we’re not going to work unless these things actually change.” He also doesn’t see lasting changes coming from Google itself, or any other for-profit tech company for that matter. “It would be brilliant for businesses to do this [protect workers from sexual harassment and punish abusers], but to create a countrywide change, it’s going to require state and federal government to come in and change the laws too.”
As the costumes are put away, the decorations taken down, and candy wrappers gathered from every corner of the house, I thought it would be fun to take one last look at this year’s fun and creepy Halloween celebrations, with photographs from Canada, Turkey, the United States, China, Japan, Chile, England, Poland, and more. It’s only a matter of days before Christmas music will start to fill every public space.
With a few days left before the election, there’s an aroma of panic emanating from the White House. President Donald Trump appears to be trying everything he can to seize control of the news cycle and appeal to base voters with strident, xenophobic rhetoric.
That includes, on Thursday alone, the release of a race-baiting ad about immigrants and crime, and a scheduled speech at the White House in the afternoon, where Trump will reportedly discuss asylum for immigrants. Many members of a caravan working its way slowly toward the United States, and still hundreds of miles away, say they hope to apply for asylum.
The political play here is relatively simple to understand. As my colleague McKay Coppins writes, immigration hard-liners such as the White House senior adviser Stephen Miller see it not only as a midterm talking point, but also as part of a longer cultural battle. Predicting the results of the longer fight is a fool’s errand, but there are at least some reasons to believe that it might not be a perfectly potent technique for the midterms.
[Read: Trump’s closing argument for the midterms is dark and angry].
The ad has drawn immediate comparisons to the infamous “Willie Horton” spot that Republicans used to attack the Democrat Michael Dukakis in the 1988 election, though as the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse notes, it’s actually worse: The makers of the Horton ad were at least ashamed of inflaming racial tension, while the president is proudly trumpeting his. (It’s also not running on television anywhere. Instead, the Trump team is relying on word of mouth and media coverage to spread it, so that even writing critically turns critics into abettors.)
Fearmongering on immigration harks back, as I wrote last week, to Trump’s 2016 presidential run, in which immigration fears were central to his approach, beginning with the campaign kickoff, where he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
That was a highly effective strategy for winning over the Republican base, as demonstrated by Trump’s demolition of the rest of the GOP primary field. But it’s not clear that it’s a great strategy for the electorate as a whole. As The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel notes, immigration was a small part of Trump’s closing argument in November 2016, and perhaps not the decisive one.
After all, Trump had beaten the immigration drum throughout the campaign, and by mid-October, he seemed headed for a defeat in the election. His campaign was reeling from the Access Hollywood tape, but he’d also never been leading. Even his top advisers—even Trump himself—expected him to lose. Then came James Comey’s October 28 letter announcing the reopening of the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver and others have concluded, that letter likely lost the election for Clinton. Or, put another way, that letter—and not immigration rhetoric—won the election for Trump.
There’s not a great deal of public polling on Trump and the caravan specifically, but strong majorities consistently disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration, suggesting the issue isn’t a winner for him, even though some of those Americans might feel he’s not going far enough. Meanwhile, polling consistently finds strong support for more dovish immigration policies than Trump’s, including a path to citizenship for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. His hammering on immigration could also inflame Democrats, pushing more of them to the polls.
It seems just as likely that Trump is resorting to immigration at this stage because, even though the economy is strong, his signature policies, like a big tax cut, aren’t popular; because his health-care position is downright unpopular; and because, without Hillary Clinton in the mix, he doesn’t have an effective villain against whom he can campaign.
Just because it’s a desperation play doesn’t mean it won’t work. But if it does, it will do so not by persuading swing voters, but by driving as many Trump-supporting voters to the polls as possible, and neutralizing Democratic advantages on enthusiasm and turnout. The problem is that while Trump’s base remains devoted, it’s also slowly shrinking. Along with others, I have argued for months that Trump’s strategy of only appealing to his hardest-core supporters and not making any effort to expand his coalition is a dangerous strategy, since his base remains a small share of the electorate. The president’s decision to go all in on immigration in the last week of the midterms will provide a crucial test of whether the base is indeed insufficient—or whether he once more knows something the political class doesn’t.
Even as college students on the whole began to shun humanities majors over the past decade in favor of vocational majors in business and health, there was one group of holdouts: undergraduates at elite colleges and universities. That’s not the case anymore, and as a result, many colleges have become cheerleaders for their own humanities programs, launching promotional campaigns to make them more appealing to students.
As Benjamin Schmidt wrote in The Atlantic recently, humanities majors—which traditionally made up one-third of all degrees awarded at top liberal-arts colleges as recently as 2011—have fallen to well under a quarter. Meanwhile, at elite research universities the share of humanities degrees has dropped from 17 percent a decade ago to just 11 percent today.
[Read: The humanities are in crisis.]
“This wasn’t a gradual decline; it was more like a tidal wave,” says Brian C. Rosenberg, the president of Macalester College. The Minnesota campus, which is well known for its international-studies program, has “never been a science-first liberal-arts college,” Rosenberg said. But now 41 percent of its graduates complete a major in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field. That’s up from 27 percent only a decade ago.
The reasons for this national shift are many, but most academics attribute it mostly to the lingering effects of the Great Recession. One of the earliest memories for the generation entering college right now is of Americans losing their jobs and sometimes their homes. Financial security still weighs heavily on the minds of these students. Indeed, a long-running annual survey taken of new college freshman has found in the past decade that the No. 1 reason students say they go to college is to get a better job; for the 20 years before the recession hit in 2008, the top reason was to learn about things that interested them.
Unlike automakers, which can swiftly switch production lines when consumers start buying SUVs instead of sedans, colleges can’t adjust their faculty ranks as quickly in response to public demand. Often, schools wait for professors to retire to reassign those openings to disciplines with the greatest need. Even then, small schools might only recruit a handful of new faculty every year. When they hire, most colleges also need to keep a balance of professors across departments to teach introductory classes that are part of a core curriculum. Macalester, for instance, hired 11 full-time faculty members this year—four of them in computer science and statistics. “We have vacant positions in history and English, and we decided not to fill them,” Rosenberg says.
[Read: What can you do with a humanities Ph.D., anyway?]
With that pace of hiring, it’s nearly impossible for many colleges to keep up with increasing enrollments in popular majors while maintaining small classes. What’s more, faculty members hired for tenure-track positions who eventually earn tenure are essentially promised lifetime employment at the college. “When you put labor in position for 30 years, your ability to respond to future trends becomes really challenging,” says Raynard Kington, the president of Grinnell College, in Iowa. Grinnell expects 70 students to graduate with computer-science degrees this spring out of a class of around 400; four years ago, it graduated just 15 computer-science majors.
To avoid further slippage in humanities majors, elite colleges and universities have resorted to an all-out campaign to convince students that such degrees aren’t just tickets to jobs as bartenders and Starbucks baristas. Colleges are starting early with that push. Stanford University writes letters and sends brochures to top-notch high-school students with an interest in the humanities to encourage them to apply, says Debra Satz, the dean of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences. Prospective students can also take humanities classes at Stanford while still in high school.
What’s puzzling to the college officials I spoke to is that they say students’ interest in humanities majors remains high during the college-search process, according to what students indicate on their applications. Then something happens between when students apply and when they actually declare a major, usually in their sophomore year. Perhaps students’ intentions on their applications weren’t serious, but if they were, Satz says it’s critical that humanities courses in the freshman year capture their attention. At Stanford, she said introductory courses in the humanities are focused on “big ideas,” such as justice, ethics, and the environment, to appeal to students trying to choose their major.
“We have to make the offerings really good, really enriching,” Satz says. “Part of our challenge is when students see so many of their peers going into computer science.”
To help guide the course selection of incoming students, Grinnell sent a booklet to all freshmen this past summer that outlined the importance of a broad liberal-arts education. The college also added a session on the topic to orientation in advance of students meeting their academic advisers. Both initiatives, Kington said, were intended to encourage students to select courses across a range of academic disciplines, given that Grinnell lacks a traditional core curriculum with mandated requirements.
Macalester’s tactic has been to try to inject some humanities into STEM classes and some practical career training into the humanities. Last year, Rosenberg, the school’s president, brought the faculty together at a retreat to discuss the shifting balance of majors. One outcome was that faculty members were encouraged to pair together courses across academic disciplines so that, for example, a new class in social media might be a blend of computer science and philosophy. Professors in the humanities were also encouraged to give their students more career guidance than in the past, when many humanities students simply went to graduate school or law school after college.
“The typical English major is designed to get students to go to graduate school,” Rosenberg says. “We need to rethink the curriculum so that it’s more focused on what employers will immediately find attractive.”
Rosenberg was present when several presidents of elite colleges gathered last fall for a meeting in New York City. At our table during lunch, there was a debate about whether the changing distribution of majors was really a crisis. After all, at least at liberal-arts colleges, the humanities remain a central part of the curriculum, including for STEM majors. Indeed, Satz of Stanford says she’s less concerned about the 14 percent drop in humanities majors at the university over the past decade, and more focused on the 20 percent increase in enrollment in humanities courses.
“There’s only so much we can do to stem the tide in majors,” she says. “What I care about is that every student in engineering can think critically, can read carefully, and they can listen empathetically. That happens by taking courses in the humanities.”
Rosenberg, an English professor and Charles Dickens scholar by training, agrees. He says he doesn’t blame students for flocking to computer science and applied mathematics. Mathematical literacy and the ability to manipulate large data sets are becoming more critical in every job, including those the humanities traditionally trained, from journalists to sociologists. “We’re not giving students enough credit,” Rosenberg says. “They’re picking something that’s really interesting to them.”
Unless colleges in the United States want to follow the European model, where prospective students apply to specific degree programs instead of a given university, the choices of American students will likely always shift with the winds of employment. Some studies suggest that many of the tasks done by humans in STEM fields will be automated in the future; robots may well end up writing most programming and intelligent algorithms. So if elite colleges just wait long enough, perhaps the humanities will make a comeback as humans look for the kind of knowledge that helps them complement rather than compete with technology.
October, as it turns out, is not an optimal time to start sealing yourself into a tin can of humanity twice a day after years of riding the subway only occasionally.
I just got a new job at The Atlantic, and before that, I worked from home. Writing online doesn’t necessarily involve a lot of leaving the house, and most of the friends I see regularly live within walking distance of me, so for the past two years, I was, at most, a very occasional public-transit user. Because The Atlantic is an august establishment with an office and free snacks, starting this job meant I’d have to return to the subway-commute schedule that I abandoned in 2016.
Silently, I braced for the cold I feared that might bring, should my stay-at-home immune system not adjust quickly enough to its get-on-the-train future. And then, for a week, I took Amtraks and subways and shook hands with many incredibly kind strangers, all ready to welcome me into their professional lives.
Reader, I got a cold. And then I got this assignment.
[Read: Is gentrification the result of rich people’s quest for shorter commutes?]
The idea that public transportation will make you sick is an incredibly durable bit of pop-science wisdom, especially when you consider the relatively meager actual data on the topic, according to Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center. He says I was right that my newfound commute was a potential culprit, but not necessarily because of its newfoundness.
“I think it’s fair to say that in general, the flu and colds and other things are spread person to person,” Morse told me. “There’s no question that the more contact you have with people, the greater likelihood you are exposing yourself to infection. If you are a hermit and presumably have no contact with people, you are at very low risk.”
As with so many things in my past, leaving my house, in general, is probably where I went wrong. Before we get too finger-pointy at the subway, though, Morse cautions not to assume causation where mere correlation might be at hand. The main risk factor for contagion is proximity to other potentially sick people, no matter whether those people are on the train, in your office, or standing in line to get a lunchtime chopped salad just like you. So all those smiling faces, welcoming me to my new job with a firm handshake? One of them could have very easily been patient zero for my clogged sinuses, and how I got from my apartment to their cubicle or conference room wouldn’t have mattered at all. Cold and flu season is other people.
And in temperate regions like the northeastern United States, it really is a season—tropical and subtropical areas don’t experience the winter-specific cold and flu explosion that places with cold winter weather typically have, according to a 2016 study. So my big mistake might not have been getting on public transit or meeting my new coworkers, but instead, doing all that in the first chilly month of the year in New York. There have long been theories about why cold weather is a breeding ground for rhinovirus. It could be because you socialize more in close quarters when it’s cold out. A 2017 study from researchers at Yale University suggests the decreased temperature itself could be to blame. The study was conducted on mice, but it found that even a 7-degree dip in temperature was enough to suppress their natural immune response to infection.
[Read: Vaccine myth-busting can backfire]
If you’re feeling immunologically smug because you’ve been riding public transit to work every day for years and assume that’s built up your general resistance to illness, I hate to burst your bubble, but you have the same likelihood of coming down with the sniffles on any given day as anyone else who ventures along a similar path. People in this situation might be conflating their supposed resistance to the common cold with the hygiene hypothesis, according to Morse, which is the idea that allergic and autoimmune reactions are made worse when people are kept away from irritants, depriving their immune systems of the chance to build up a response. “The evidence on that is mixed,” Morse says. “And with colds and viruses, there are so many of them. If you ride the subway often, you’re likely to be exposed to more of them, and you may be getting colds more often.”
My two-year break from office work had not put me at an elevated risk for infection when I left the house—it had actually insulated me from a lot of small, daily potential exposures to illness. But now I have this job, which has been great so far, with the exception that getting to it requires me to star in my own low-budget remake of Contagion. Is there any way to fight back against the necessary health scourge of my own career, beyond becoming an independently wealthy and mysterious recluse? I spoke with Katherine Harmon, the senior director of category intelligence at the risk-management firm WorldAware, to see what she’d advise for both employers and employees looking to mitigate cold-weather risks. She told me to use hand sanitizer after I touch elevator buttons, and although I hadn’t ever really thought about how dirty those probably are, now I will think of nothing else for the rest of my life.
But according to Harmon, the biggest differences can be made by employers. “Making sure that people stay out an appropriate amount of time when they’re feeling ill is probably the single most important thing a company can do,” she says. And the best way to do that is for employers to let sick people take the time off they need and to let people work from home, in jobs where that’s feasible. (Lucky for me, I’m in one of those jobs.) “If somebody says they’re sick and they know they can work from home, there’s less of a risk of ‘presenteeism,’ which is when people who are sick come to work anyway because they’re obligated to be there,” says Harmon.
So if you want to stay healthy during cold and flu season and help others do the same, the answer is pretty simple: Stay home when you don’t feel well if at all possible, and bully (okay, “encourage”) your sniffly co-workers to do the same. You might not just be saving yourself, but also saving a woman on your train who doesn’t yet know the procedure to get permission to work from home at her new job.
Even Oscar Wilde, socialist and anarchist that he was, would likely bristle at the radical dysfunction of American politics today. Wilde famously preferred “everything in moderation, including moderation.” But 2018 may be the year that lawmakers and voters alike crystallize their preference for a slight spin on the playwright’s words: a Congress in which nothing is in moderation, except for moderation.
This shift has been some time coming. In the last midterm elections, in 2014, only about 4 percent of congressional candidates were ideologically moderate, according to data compiled by Danielle Thomsen, a political-science professor at UC Irvine, who categorized candidates by their campaign donors. The proportion of moderates on the campaign trail “has been steadily declining since the 1980s,” Thomsen told me. “It takes a lot of guts to run for Congress as a moderate in the current environment.”
This is not only because campaigns tend to favor personalities over policy goals and apocalyptic rhetoric over good-faith debate. It’s also because Congress itself disincentivizes reaching across the aisle. Work with a Democrat? Bid your perfect Heritage Action Scorecard farewell. Consider a GOP judicial nominee? Hope you weren’t too attached to that committee gavel.
It’s worth exploring, then, how moderate candidates today—however few they may be—manage to survive, and how they're pitching themselves in the final days of their midterm campaigns. The candidates and political strategists I've spoken with believe that constituencies that value compromise still exist, as well as voters who feel invested in issues rather than parties. Candidates have tailored their campaigns accordingly, focusing on local issues, largely uncontroversial national topics such as infrastructure, and as little talk of Donald Trump as possible. Call it the moderate playbook, whose fate in November could signal a new hope for bipartisanship—or affirm its extinction.
Harley Rouda is betting on that playbook to unseat a 28-year House incumbent. In Orange County, California, Rouda is challenging Dana Rohrabacher, the Kremlin-friendly Republican who’s been steadfast in his support for President Trump.
A liberal fantasy, Rouda is not. He’s a 56-year-old real-estate executive who donated to John Kasich’s presidential campaign and would rather not indulge in talk of impeachment.
He didn’t register as a Democrat until after the 2016 election; he’d been an Independent since 1997 and was a Republican before that.
He’s not the ideal conservative, either; he supports Medicare for all and free college tuition. But he’s still trying to attract conservatives to his campaign, which touts endorsements from local longtime Republicans. In one ad, a man wearing a palm-tree-emblazoned shirt lauds Rouda as “someone who can play to the middle, and bring us together.” It’s not unusual to see Republicans for Harley signs across Newport Beach and Balboa Island.
Rouda often refers to himself as “pro-business” and “pro-economy,” which have long been handy catchall descriptors for anything from regulatory relief to tax reform. It’s a smart move, one Democratic strategist told me, especially in Orange County, where pricey real estate and yacht-club-goers abound. “I have candidates create a list of what makes them different from a national Democrat,” said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of current involvement in midterm campaigns. “Often it’s that they served in the military or they run a business. That’s where a moderate campaign starts.”
Differentiating oneself from the national party is especially crucial in 2018, the source said, when candidates such as the self-described democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dominate media coverage of the left. “The key is to be able to tell voters what you’re not,” the strategist said. “If you can’t find the few specific things to separate yourself, you’re starting from a real deficit.”
So voters won’t see a candidate like Rouda, for example, hypothesizing about Russian collusion or debating the merits of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Instead, he’ll lament that two years into Trump’s presidency, no infrastructure package has reached the floor. “We’ve had Infrastructure Week every week for 50 weeks,” Rouda told me in a recent phone interview. In his view, this is an example of how “continued partisan bickering and extremism” can prevent even an issue with “great bipartisan support” from moving forward.
When we talked, Rouda was careful to tie his discussion of any issue back to his district. This seems like a small point, but as campaigns continue to drift away from the Tip O’Neill–favored dictum that all politics is local, it may be crucial for Rouda as a moderate. When the candidate talked about health care, he talked about how his opponent had voted multiple times to eliminate coverage for preexisting conditions, which he said affected 300,000 people under the age of 65 in his district. When he talked about the environment, he talked about the need to contain the jet noise and pollution from John Wayne Airport, in Santa Ana.
The challenges on the campaign trail are steep for House and Senate hopefuls alike. The race for Senator Bob Corker’s seat in Tennessee lays this bare. Like Rouda, Democrat Phil Bredesen is adhering to the moderate playbook in the hopes of besting an ardently pro-Trump Republican. Bredesen, a popular former governor of the state, is challenging Representative Marsha Blackburn. John Tanner, a former Tennessee congressman who founded the Blue Dog Coalition—a group of the House’s most conservative Democrats—told me that Bredesen is the Platonic ideal of a moderate: “financially responsible and socially tolerant.” Blackburn, for her part, blends her views entirely with Trump’s. When the president held a rally for her in Nashville earlier this year, she focused her entire speech on supporting his agenda.
Tanner, who retired from Congress in 2010, said the race’s close polling gives him hope that voters do want a return to the middle. “But oftentimes they aren’t presented with that model,” he said.
Bredesen may be the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, whose press office has flooded my inbox with statements about the ballooning federal deficit, offering a plan (in all caps) to balance the budget within six years. Federal borrowing was once conservatives’ cause célèbre. But by the time Republicans shuttled through a massive tax-cut package late last year, even amid projections of a huge spike in the deficit, the issue seemed to have lost its appeal. Nevertheless, as with infrastructure, it remains a topic unlikely to draw partisan ire one way or the other—making it a valuable talking point for a candidate like Bredesen.
These issues are what candidates like Bredesen talk about instead of talking about Trump. Bredesen has largely avoided national media—he declined to be interviewed for this story—and thus the news of the day. One notable exception was Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination: Bredesen ultimately sided with his party’s lone yea, fellow moderate Joe Manchin, who’s facing a tough reelection in West Virginia. "If the FBI report had something in it which was much more strongly corroborative of [Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault], I think that would be a different issue," Bredesen told local media. "But it didn't, and of course I didn't get a chance to see what was in it."
Voters are more likely to hear Bredesen urgently discussing Asian carp. The fish has invaded much of West Tennessee, starving out native species, and this has hit the state’s commercial-fishing industry hard. This summer, Bredesen announced his agenda to curb the population. His campaign, according to a spokeswoman, has sold “hundreds” of hats that say Cut the carp.
Much like noise pollution from John Wayne Airport, Asian carp hardly matches the current tabloidlike nature of national politics. But as Tanner put it, “That’s a proper role for a legislator, in a campaign. You’re not running against Trump; you’re running for the Senate.”
A handful of incumbents in both chambers and parties have also pitched themselves as moderates in the 2018 midterm cycle. Democratic Senators Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Donnelly, and Manchin come to mind, as well as Republican Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick, Will Hurd, and Dave Joyce. But Rouda and Bredesen are not moderate incumbents desperately trying to stay afloat; they’re first-time candidates for Congress. Both men decided that even in this hyper-partisan moment, the moderate playbook was worth the gamble.
Yet Rouda and Bredesen are something like unicorns in the 2018 cycle. There are so few other moderate first-time candidates out there, underscoring just how hard it is to persuade a middle-of-the-road-minded person to run for elected office.
“It’s just gotten so contentious,” former Illinois Republican Representative Bob Dold, a moderate who lost his seat in 2016, told me. “You’re getting millions of dollars being spent against you on negative ads, and most of them aren’t even true. A lot of people will just say, ‘No, thank you,’ to that.”
The Democratic strategist Peter Cari told me that both parties are struggling to convince would-be moderate candidates of a viable path to victory. “When the right thinks anyone who votes for compromise is a sellout, and Democrats think the same thing, it makes it tough to want to run,” he said. “Everyone’s scared to death, and with reason.”
The arc of the moderate campaign is long and bends toward failure. Almost everyone I interviewed for this article said that gerrymandering was the chief culprit. Every 10 years, after the federal census, both parties exploit the ability to redraw districts and virtually guarantee their side’s dominance for the decade to come. It’s the reason, for example, a Republican stronghold like Maryland’s Sixth District was able to turn bright blue in 2011 with a few clicks of a computer mouse.
The result, as Dold explained to me, is a system in which “the primary is the election.” When a party reigns in a district without question, the real contest takes place during the primary. Democrats will try to outrun one another from the ideological left; Republicans attempt to pitch themselves as the field’s most conservative choice. Candidates in both parties often end up pandering to their base’s most extreme impulses, knowing that they won’t need to temper their message in the general election.
“I don’t think people realize or fully understand the corrosive effect that 50 years of gerrymandering has had on the system,” John Tanner said. “Gerrymandering has driven people who hold elected office into the red or blue world, where their only political jeopardy is in the primary. Not only is there no incentive to work across party lines; there’s actually a disincentive.”
Tanner is among the few lawmakers who have actively worked to regulate gerrymandering. “I had a bill each of my last four terms to change it,” he said. “But I couldn’t.” Meaningful change is unlikely anytime soon. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to decide on the Maryland gerrymander’s constitutionality, sending the case back to a lower court on procedural grounds.
“This is the miserable system we’re stuck in,” Tanner concluded.
Duking it out in a primary, enduring waves of attack ads—that’s just getting to Congress. The challenges of the campaign trail are trivial compared with what moderates like Rouda and Bredesen would likely face in Washington itself.
Two of the most notable pieces of legislation in the past eight years—the Affordable Care Act and tax reform—passed the Senate without a single yea from the minority party. Kavanaugh’s confirmation process was a partisan bloodbath.
And ideological divisions within parties have become almost as fraught as cross-party relationships. A standoff between the House’s Republican leadership and the conservative Freedom Caucus is the rule, not the exception, for any legislative battle―preventing, for example, any progress on immigration reform. And as I reported last month, a group of House Democrats began pushing a measure that would make it more difficult for Nancy Pelosi to become speaker if her party takes the House—only to withdraw their petition when, at a caucus meeting a few days later, Pelosi herself showed up to address it.
Current lawmakers I spoke with expressed frustration with the gridlock. It’s an easy thing to pay lip service to. But representatives such as Tom Reed, a moderate New York Republican who watched as colleague after colleague announced his or her retirement this year—and who considered jumping ship himself—said they’re taking steps to ensure that the 116th Congress is different from past sessions.
Reed is the co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of centrist members that aims to achieve bipartisan consensus on major policies. Reed and his fellow co-chair, Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, formalized the 48-member coalition last year. The lawmakers are required to vote together on any bill that 75 percent of the caucus supports. Reed told me that when the group was developed informally in 2010, it had nearly 100 members. When he and Gottheimer introduced the consensus rule in 2017, the roster shrank by half.
Ahead of the midterm elections, 19 of the members have pledged not to vote for any speaker candidate who does not support a series of rules changes, such as forcing committees to send bills with more than 290 co-sponsors to the floor and making it easier for members to offer amendments to bills.
The proposed reforms are designed to shift power from the House majority leadership to more of the conference—and foster comity and cooperation in the process. “Unless leadership gives me the thumbs-up, I’m not allowed to get a bill to the floor. I’m not allowed to fail,” Reed said. “That frustration is shared widely.”
The Freedom Caucus blanched at a similar set of proposed changes in 2015, when Paul Ryan was up for the speaker post. Yet Reed said that he’s already succeeded in getting potential speaker candidates, including the ultraconservative Majority Whip Steve Scalise, to promise to support his group’s reforms this year. It’s a sign, perhaps, that the moderate caucus’s power could be growing. “I don’t want to be a bomb-thrower,” Reed told me. “I just want to be a member.”
The Senate is unlikely to consider similar changes—a smaller body means that legislators wield more power individually, and aren’t as hamstrung procedurally by leadership or a particular caucus. Yet whether senators are willing to break ranks is another question entirely; as Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle demonstrated, tribal fervor courses through the upper chamber as much as in the lower one.
Ultimately, November will be a test of whether moderate candidates still have a place in the American political system. If they do, this election will also test whether those candidates can stick to their centrist ideals. Will they strive to be a member, as Reed put it, or fall prey to the short-term promises of the bomb-throwers among them? The startling number of moderates who have chosen to retire in the past two years suggests that sticking to those ideals is too hard a task today. “The tragedy is that people who are being elected as slaves to one party or the other are just not able to govern,” Tanner said. “They can either resist or shove their agenda down someone else’s throat.”
Still, Bob Dold is optimistic that moderate lawmakers can be effective in Congress. “When I ran, we focused on accomplishments, working together, and being one of the most independent, bipartisan members of Congress,” he said. He told me that he was optimistic, too, that voters would ultimately reward such efforts at the ballot box.
He then paused for a few beats, realizing that losing his reelection in 2016 reflected just the opposite.
“I guess you can look at all that and say, ‘Yeah, but where did that land you?’”
Butch Otter, the outgoing Republican governor of Idaho, didn’t attract nearly as much attention for his big announcement on Tuesday as President Donald Trump did when he pledged to issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship.
But Otter’s endorsement of a ballot initiative to expand Medicaid in one of the nation’s most conservative states explains as much about the GOP’s situation in the 2018 midterm election as Trump’s legally implausible gambit; in fact, Otter’s move helps explain Trump’s.
In the final days of the midterm campaign, Trump and other Republicans are focusing their closing arguments on cultural confrontations, from immigration to the bitter confirmation fight over Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Otter’s announcement illuminates one key reason the party is placing so many chips on culture: GOP candidates appear to have lost faith that they can win the argument with voters over the key policies in their economic agenda, especially the longtime effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and the huge tax cut Trump signed late last year.
[Read: The GOP is suddenly playing defense on health care ]
“They are ending up on the culture war because we have blunted them on taxes and they can’t talk about health care,” Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin said. “So they are left with one card to play.”
Republican candidates are still claiming credit for the buoyant economy, and some polls show them holding a substantial advantage over Democrats regarding which party can best promote prosperity. But the specific Republican policy initiatives that most directly affect voters’ economic circumstances haven’t proven nearly as popular.
While Republicans first expected the tax cut to anchor their midterm campaign, the public reaction to it has soured over the election year. An early October CNBC survey found that while 54 percent of Americans believe that the law provided “a lot of” benefits to large corporations, and 52 percent think that it similarly benefited the wealthy, the share who believe that it helped other groups is much smaller: 15 percent saw such gains for small business, 11 percent for average taxpayers, and a measly 8 percent for themselves personally. In campaigns across the country, Democrats have directly attacked the tax cut as a giveaway to the wealthy that will eventually compel Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare.
The GOP’s relationship with the ACA is even more tenuous. For four consecutive elections, from 2010 through 2016, the vast majority of Republican candidates at every level ran on promises to repeal the ACA. But after Republicans gained unified control of Congress and the White House in 2016 and sought to repeal the law, they faced unexpected institutional and public resistance. Almost every major medical organization opposed repeal. And after years that saw more Americans opposing than backing the law, public opinion during the repeal fight tilted toward support, where it has remained ever since. In polling by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, individual elements of the law have proven even more popular.
Kaiser’s polling has found that nearly three-fifths of adults living in states that have not expanded Medicaid under the ACA support doing so. Even more emphatically, about three-fourths of all Americans back the law’s requirement that insurers cover patients with preexisting conditions at no surcharge.
[Adam Serwer: Trumpism is ‘identity politics’ for white people]
Eliminating those protections was not an ancillary part of the GOP’s repeal legislation. It was an expression of the bill’s core philosophical argument: that the ACA compelled younger, healthy people to buy more insurance than they needed to subsidize consumers who were older or had greater health needs. Undoing that subsidy—or, more technically, disaggregating the risk pool—was the GOP plan’s central mechanism for lowering insurance premiums for the young and healthy. But the price of that was always reducing the affordability and availability of coverage for those who are old and sick.
One unequivocal message of the 2018 campaign is that the public rejects this trade. That clear consensus has compelled backflips from Republicans. Perhaps no one has become more contorted than Representative Martha McSally, now the GOP’s Senate candidate in Arizona. According to multiple sources, McSally, a former Air Force fighter pilot, rallied her colleagues with Top Gun swagger just before the repeal vote: “Let’s get this f-ing thing done,” she declared as legislators moved toward the floor. Now, in her television advertising, she insists that she’s “leading the fight” to “force insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions.” To borrow from her military career, that would define “leading the fight” as flying in precisely the opposite direction from the target.
McSally has plenty of company in shifting course. Trump, despite all evidence to the contrary, regularly insists that Republicans are more committed than Democrats to protecting consumers with preexisting conditions, even as his administration has joined a lawsuit to invalidate the ACA’s provisions doing exactly that. And while some Republican gubernatorial nominees continue to oppose Medicaid expansion (most prominently, Ron DeSantis in Florida and Brian Kemp in Georgia), others are hedging against Democratic opponents or wholeheartedly embracing it. In Ohio, GOP nominee Mike DeWine, after questioning the state’s Medicaid expansion during a Republican primary, endorsed it once he reached the general election. In Idaho, Lieutenant Governor Brad Little, who’s running to succeed Otter, has dodged a position on the ballot initiative but has promised to respect the will of the voters.
The fizzling of the tax bill and the backlash on health care help explain the GOP’s turn toward cultural confrontation in the campaign’s final turn. An even larger factor may be Trump’s apparent belief that he forges his strongest connection to the party’s preponderantly white base when he speaks to its anxieties about cultural and demographic change.
[Jay Caruso: I’m not leaving the Republican party]
That instinct has manifested in a glut of polarizing cultural signals from Trump over the past few days. These include sending the military to the Southwest border to resist what he calls “an invasion” of a convoy of Central American migrants; the hastily floated pledge to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants; and eliminating the transgender legal category under Title IX, which bars gender discrimination in education. Running like a backbeat through this policy flurry has been Trump’s stout defense of Kavanaugh, who faced multiple allegations of sexual assault, and the president’s warnings that men have been unfairly targeted by the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment.
Individual Republicans have dissented from some elements of Trump’s cultural offensive. (Most notably, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Trump’s claim that he could end birthright citizenship through executive order.) But few Republicans are stepping off the train as Trump lurches even further to the right on immigration and other social issues. Even Ryan, while rejecting Trump’s means, didn’t express an opinion on his ends of terminating birthright citizenship. (That didn’t stop Trump from attacking him in a tweet on Wednesday.) Others, like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, loudly echoed Trump’s call. By contrast, when the GOP platform in 1996 endorsed ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, Bob Dole, as the party’s presidential nominee, publicly repudiated it.
All this follows the collapse of Republican skepticism on Trump’s border wall and the party’s turn toward opposing both illegal and legal immigration. Although proposed cuts in legal immigration didn’t pass Congress this year, about twice as many Senate Republicans supported it as they did in 1996, the last time Congress seriously debated the issue. Throughout the primary season, more mainstream Republican candidates fought off challenges from the Trump-inspired right by moving toward his racially infused nationalism, particularly through opposition to immigration.
Trump’s immigration-centered closing arguments show how thoroughly he believes that the GOP base is motivated not by rolling back government (through tax cuts or repealing the ACA) but by resisting cultural and demographic change. New national polling this week from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute supports his instinct. That survey asked Americans whether they believed it was mostly positive or negative for the nation that minority groups will reach a majority of the U.S. population by 2045. While nearly two-thirds of all Americans and four-fifths of Democrats said that the change was mostly positive, slightly more than three-fifths of Republicans described it as mostly negative.
One of Trump’s most profound effects on American politics has been widening existing divides and accelerating ongoing trends. Long before he arrived, the parties were undergoing an overlapping demographic and geographic realignment, with Democrats mobilizing a “coalition of transformation” centered on the voters and regions most comfortable with racial, cultural, and even economic change, and Republicans countering with a “coalition of restoration” centered on the groups and places most resistant to it.
[Read: How the Democrats lost their way on immigration]
As Trump more overtly identifies the GOP with racial resentments and anxieties, this election seems destined to harden the lines and widen the trench between those inimical coalitions. The GOP’s final message in 2018 shows that it is relying more than ever on the cultural grievances of blue-collar white America in order to amass the political power to pass an economic agenda aimed primarily at those in the upper income brackets.
And yet the GOP appears at far greater risk next week of losing upper-middle-class voters on cultural grounds than it does of losing working-class voters for economic reasons. The major exception is a few midwestern industrial states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio, where Democrats appear to be clawing back into contention among working-class whites.
Trump’s closing emphasis on culture may, in fact, represent a kind of triage for the GOP that effectively concedes large suburban losses in the House, but tries to protect more rural and blue-collar districts, as well as GOP Senate candidates in states fitting the latter description. “That’s not an unreasonable interpretation of it,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres said. Trump’s cultural messaging, he added, “may help in some rural blue-collar districts, but it sure doesn’t help in the suburban districts that are so important to help keep the House.”
This re-sorting will push the GOP even further toward Trump’s politics of racial and social backlash, because in next week’s election it may doom many of the moderate suburban House members who most resist his direction. After November, the GOP caucus in both congressional chambers will almost certainly tilt even further toward predominantly white, heavily blue-collar, and religiously traditional places where Trump’s insular messaging resonates. The paradox that the final stage of the 2018 election reveals is this: As more upscale voters who benefit from the GOP’s economic agenda flee Trump’s racially infused definition of the party, Republicans will become even more dependent on stoking the cultural grievances of their working-class base.
In Thailand, a small group of Hmong women lived in a rural village, far from the nearest town. They grew everything they ate, mostly rice and vegetables. They boiled most of their food, and they rarely consumed meat.
But then something happened to these Hmong women that shocked their systems, permanently altering, in just a short time, the course of their health—as well as the very germs that dwelled inside of them. They immigrated to the United States.
In their new homeland—Minneapolis—they began to eat more protein, sugar, and fat. They indulged, like most Americans do, in processed food. Within a generation, the Hmong women went from having an obesity rate of 5 percent to one of more than 30 percent.
That statistic reflects one of the most vexing things about the well-being of immigrants in the U.S.: Many people who come to the U.S. for a better life end up with worse health. Many different studies have now shown that the longer certain groups live in the U.S., the worse some of their health outcomes get, especially when it comes to obesity. One study found that after one year in America, just 8 percent of immigrants are obese, but among those who have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, the obesity rate is 19 percent.
Using stool samples and dietary surveys from Hmong women living in Minneapolis, researchers from the University of Minnesota decided to see if the gut microbiome—the colony of bacteria that dwells in our intestinal tract—might play a role in immigrants’ obesity rates. In addition to Hmong immigrants, they recruited a group of Karen women who had previously lived in a refugee camp in Thailand. There, they had foraged in a nearby forest for food and had also eaten primarily rice and vegetables.
[Read: Vegan YouTube stars are held to impossible standards.]
The researchers compared the gut microbiota of Hmong and Karen women still living in Thailand with the gut microbiota of three groups: Hmong and Karen women who had immigrated to the U.S., these immigrants’ American-born children, and white American controls. The researchers also followed one group of 19 Karen refugees from their time in Thailand through their move to the U.S., tracking the components of their microbiota during their first year in America. (They limited the study to women because substantially more Hmong women than men were immigrating to the U.S.)
After about nine months in the U.S., the researchers found, the immigrants’ gut microbiomes had began to “westernize.” The microbiomes became less diverse—teeming with fewer types of bacteria—which is often associated with obesity. “Having low diversity in your microbiome is almost universally a sign of bad health, across almost every disease that has been studied,” says Dan Knights, a computational microbiologist at the University of Minnesota and a co-author of the study, which was published Thursday in the journal Cell.
The immigrants’ microbes became less able to digest certain types of fiber, and they shifted from being dominated by a type of bacteria called Prevotella to one called Bacteroides. Their gut microbiota, in other words, came to resemble those of the white Americans who acted as the control. The microbiome changes were even more pronounced among obese participants and in second-generation immigrants who were born in the U.S.
CellWhile the fact that microbiomes change as people move into different types of societies was already known, “to watch it happen six to nine months after people moved is startling,” says Justin Sonnenburg, a Stanford microbiologist who was not involved with the study.
However, this paper only showed that there is a correlation between westernization of the microbiome and obesity, not that one causes the other. And that’s a key piece of the microbiome puzzle that scientists are still missing. We don’t know if eating a less-healthy diet makes you obese and changes your microbiome, or if it changes your microbiome so it makes you obese.
Kelly Swanson, a nutritionist at the University of Illinois, for one, says that while “the microbiota are important for health, I don’t blame the obesity on bacteria. There are other things driving the ship.”
There is some evidence that bacteria alone can spur weight gain. In 2013, when scientists took the gut bacteria from one fat human twin and one skinny twin and implanted them into mice, the mice that received the fat twin’s bacteria grew fat, while the skinny-twin mice stayed thin. What’s more, when the mice were housed together, they tended to eat one another’s poop. When that happened, the skinny-twin bacteria would invade and colonize the guts of the other mice, even though the other mice had already been given the fat-twin bacteria. Those invaded mice, in turn, would lose weight. This meant “lean” gut bacteria can sometimes invade and conquer “fat” bacteria, but not, in this case, the other way around.
Here’s the twist: In that experiment, it was Bacteroides, the same bacteria that ended up dominating the immigrants’ microbes, that did the colonizing and the tamping down of the “fat” bacteria. In other words, even though it’s been associated with various diseases, it looks like Bacteroides can, in some cases, be a good guy. “And that’s one of the million-dollar questions: Are these [microbiome] changes bad?” Sonnenburg says.
After all, it’s little surprise that our microbes might change with our diets. The Prevotella strains that were wiped out among the Hmong and Karen people were used for digesting foods like tamarind, palm, and coconut. “It makes sense that if people stopped eating those foods, the microbes that used to subsist on them would go away,” Knights says.
What’s more, the microbiomes of the immigrants seemed to change faster than the diets did: Even after they moved to the U.S., the immigrants ate 10 times more rice than the Americans. “That tells us there’s probably something else going on that we weren’t able to observe,” Knights says, such as exposure to medication or some other environmental change.
The researchers I spoke with praised the study, but they said we still need more like it. Alas, the subtle work of the microbiome is not as glaring as the processed foods that bombard Americans—new and old—at every turn.
With less than a week to go before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump is warning darkly of an imminent immigrant “invasion,” deploying thousands of troops to the U.S.-Mexico border, releasing a racist ad on Twitter, and threatening to issue an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship.
The president has, in pundit-speak, found his “closing argument” for the 2018 campaign season.
Indeed, many savvy observers in recent weeks have interpreted Trump’s efforts to inflame national tensions around immigration as a desperate, last-ditch ploy to save his party’s at-risk congressional majorities. But while the president himself may be acting on some mix of impulse and improv, the roots of the strategy go deeper—and its architects in the West Wing are looking far beyond the current election cycle.
To understand the thinking behind Trump’s gambit, it is necessary to spend a few minutes inside the head of Stephen Miller, the 33-year-old speechwriter and senior policy adviser to the president. A fierce immigration hawk who’s championed a right-wing nationalist agenda, Miller is Trump’s most trusted adviser on immigration, and he is constantly looking for new ways to push his policy priorities into the national spotlight. Earlier this year, it was reported that Miller was leading an effort within the administration to crack down on immigrants in the run-up to the midterms. And as Politico reported Wednesday, Trump’s latest string of provocations—from the immigrant-caravan scaremongering to the likely unconstitutional executive order—represents a “dream come true” for Miller.
[Read: Trump’s right-hand troll]
In recent months, Miller has remained firmly planted behind the scenes, having perhaps realized that his glowering supervillain persona doesn’t make him the most effective spokesman. But when I interviewed him at length in his West Wing office last March, he was all too happy to extol the political advantages of his boss’s strident immigration platform.
Americans “were quote-unquote warned by Hillary Clinton that if they elected Donald Trump, he would enforce an extremely tough immigration policy, crack down on illegal immigration, deport people who were here illegally, improve our vetting and screening, and all these other things,” Miller told me. “And many people replied to that by voting for Donald Trump.”
According to Miller, Trump benefits politically any time Americans are focused on immigration—no matter how bad the headlines, no matter how bleak the polls, no matter how big the controversy. “You have one party that’s in favor of open borders, and you have one party that wants to secure the border,” he told The New York Times earlier this year. “And all day long the American people are going to side with the party that wants to secure the border. And not by a little bit. Not 55–45. 60–40. 70–30. 80–20. I’m talking 90–10 on that.”
Even setting aside the hyperbole, this view of the electorate is debatable. (Voters seem to have given Trump mixed reviews on his handling of the caravan, for example.) But it’s still worth understanding how Miller lays out his political calculus. While he may be a committed ideologue, he works for and with a lot of Republicans who are guided more by opportunism than by ironclad conviction when it comes to immigration. The long-term relevance of his sharply nativist politics within the GOP will depend in part on the Miller faction’s ability to keep selling it as a winning strategy (even in the face of evidence to the contrary).
Back when we spoke in March, Miller’s approach was to couch his restrictionist immigration views in a grander, gauzier vision of American nationalism—an idea he believes is destined to win out in the 21st century.
“The future of the Republican Party should be tapping into … the feeling of belonging and meaning and pride that comes with being part of this whole ‘America First’ movement,” he told me. “There’s something really beautiful about people from all different walks of life … who are bound together by this big idea about American identity, and American unity, and American interests.”
Continuing in concern-troll mode, Miller said, “I think one of the big challenges facing modern liberalism is that there’s not a great emotional appeal to an international identity, like a citizen-of-the-world identity.”
I prodded him to expound.
“Look, the current nation-state model is the product of thousands of years of political, social, and cultural evolution,” Miller said. “I mean, it was only recently, in like the last few decades, that people have tried to create an organizing principle larger than the nation-state.” The desire to root for your own native country is “intrinsic” to human nature, he told me. “You see that flag, you sing the national anthem, or you hear your team wins the gold medal … it creates a kind of pride in you that is really hard to translate.”
One of Trump’s most “brilliant” moves during the campaign, Miller said, was doubling down on his America First slogan despite strong objections from Democrats. When I noted that many of those early objections had to do with the slogan’s historically anti-Semitic roots—which go back to World War II—Miller waved away the argument as “completely insincere.” What they really disliked, he insisted, was Trump’s national populism.
[Read: A short history of “America First”]
In an attempt to prove his point, he extended a challenge: “Find today your most liberal friend, and ask them this question: Who has more of a right to a job in America—a U.S. citizen, or an illegal immigrant? And if they don’t say U.S. citizen like that”—Miller snapped his fingers—“then that means on some philosophical level they find the idea of America First objectionable.”
Miller made a point of distinguishing the worldview he’d been describing from the “white nationalism” he’s often accused of espousing. “It doesn’t matter where that citizen comes from, where their family comes from,” he insisted (a claim undermined by Trump’s support for ending birthright citizenship). “But the idea of having official membership in the nation-state, and therefore that state has an obligation to protect you”—that was the big idea he believed voters would keep coming back for. Voters feel that connection at a visceral level, Miller suggested, and in the end they would always side with a president offering that appeal.
Americans will find out next week if Trump’s cynical bet on caravan conspiracy theories will pay off at the polls. But regardless of what happens on Election Day, Miller and his nativist allies in the GOP aren’t about to let up. For them, this isn’t a “closing argument”—it’s just the beginning.
Bohemian Rhapsody starts in medias res, on the eve of one of Queen’s biggest concerts: the band’s legendary 1985 set at Live Aid. The film then cuts back in time and progresses through an abbreviated history of the group. There’s a young Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) being tutted at by his disapproving parents for making music rather than pursuing a sensible career. There’s the ornery record-label exec (Mike Myers) yelling that their new single will never be a hit. At one point, the band starts fighting in the studio and it seems like everything is about to unravel—until John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) stuns the room into silence by spontaneously writing the bass line to “Another One Bites the Dust.”
In short, Bohemian Rhapsody isn’t just prone to music-biopic clichés—it’s practically a monument to them, a greatest-hits collection of every narrative shortcut one can possibly take in summarizing a legendary act’s rise to fame. The biopic views creative inspiration as little more than a neat plot twist, and believes personal adversity can be shuffled around within the timeline to best suit a three-act structure. Mercury was diagnosed as HIV-positive in 1987, and Live Aid took place two years earlier, but in Bohemian Rhapsody the former happens before the latter, just because it’s more dramatic that way.
[Read: The deeper significance of Bryan Singer’s firing from “Bohemian Rhapsody.”]
Other music biographies have compressed and fiddled with history to create a more triumphant narrative, of course. But there’s something about the finessed storytelling of Bohemian Rhapsody that feels particularly craven—perhaps because Mercury died in 1991 at the age of 45 due to AIDS-related bronchopneumonia. According to industry reporting, the surviving members of the band signed off on the movie as a PG-13–rated “celebration” of the band that wouldn’t dwell on drug use or Mercury’s death. Accordingly, the director Bryan Singer’s film was designed to be varnished and uncontroversial, lauding Mercury’s status as a boundary-pusher without pushing any boundaries itself.
Queen’s extensive catalog of songs is impressive enough to rescue the movie from total failure. Any time the band is onstage—whether during re-creations of its early days as a student band or in a 20-minute sequence at Live Aid—Bohemian Rhapsody hums with a little energy. It’s always obvious that Malek and his co-stars are lip-synching along to a highly produced track (the vocals are a bizarre mix of Mercury himself, an imitator, and Malek), but there’s at least some effort to reproduce Queen’s appeal as a band that could fill an entire stadium with its music. At the theater where I saw the film, the seats rumbled appreciatively to every iconic bass riff.
That arena-rock power informs one of the few scenes in the film that stuck with me, in which the guitarist Brian May (Gwilym Lee) lines his bandmates up and has them clap along to “We Will Rock You,” pitching it as a song that lets the audience become members of the band. It’s one of the only times that Bohemian Rhapsody, which was written by the biopic veterans Anthony McCarten (Darkest Hour) and Peter Morgan (The Queen), dramatizes the songwriting process in an interesting way, trying to unpack what made Queen such an enduring act for its generation.
Most of the time, Mercury’s songwriting jaunts are just flashes of magic, ideas that strike like thunderbolts from origins unknown. When the fictional EMI executive Ray Foster (played by Myers in an ironic nod to his Queen-loving role in Wayne’s World) asks the singer, in frustration, just what’s with all the “Galileo”s in the song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Mercury offers a proud shrug. He knows the song will be a hit, because the movie’s audience knows it. In every scene of the movie, history is being made, though there’s rarely any explanation of how.
Physically, Malek does a tremendous job trying to capture what was special about Mercury as a performer. He oozes charisma onstage, perfectly matching Mercury’s particular habit for strutting joyfully while wielding half of his microphone stand. When Malek isn’t singing, though, his work feels too caught up in imitation; for one, he’s saddled with a truly unfortunate pair of fake front teeth the size of dinner plates. The rest of the cast (also including Lucy Boynton as Mercury’s longtime friend Mary Austin and Ben Hardy as the drummer Roger Taylor) have nothing to do beyond occasionally saluting the protagonist’s genius. A period of friction for the band is largely blamed on Mercury’s one-time manager Paul Prenter (Allen Leech), and is resolved with the same tiresome simplicity that powers the whole plot.
Bohemian Rhapsody is credited to Singer, though he was fired by Fox during production and replaced by Dexter Fletcher (who is given an executive-producer credit). There was a time when Singer was one of the most exciting talents in Hollywood—he made the innovative thriller The Usual Suspects and practically invented the modern superhero film with X-Men and Superman Returns. But whatever distinguished him then is entirely missing now. There’s just no life here, in a film that should be overflowing with it, and no character, even though it’s a tribute to one of the greatest personalities in musical history.
What is the telos––the purpose, end, or goal––of the university? In a thought-provoking 2016 lecture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that the answer ought to be “truth,” but that lately, more of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as a second or alternative telos. While acknowledging that those goals are not always at odds, he argued that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable,” and he urged academia to affirm the primacy of truth-seeking.
A recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes the same conflict, but implies that it sometimes ought to be resolved in the other direction.
Its author, Nikki Usher, asks, “Should we still cite the scholarship of serial harassers and sexists?” It is “a bind that we have yet to account for,” she argues, “how the process of building on academic work itself burnishes the reputations of people whose scholarship is good and sometimes even foundational, but whose characters are awful. In the case of a sexist jerk, you are often left without recourse: Cite him, or look like you don’t know what you’re talking about to reviewers and readers.”
[Conor Friedersdorf: How a professor was punished for an act of citizenship]
Usher notes that peer reviewers once asked her to cite the work of a professor whose scholarship was substantively relevant, but who has “been fairly awful toward me and other women—although just a sexist jerk, not a sexual harasser.”
Declaring herself unsure about what to do, she concludes that “the best strategy” may be a “somewhat sketchy” one suggested by her friend: “Do what the editor wanted so that when he sent the revised manuscript back to reviewers, they would see I had followed their instructions and added the requisite citations. Then ... when I got the manuscript back before final publication, surreptitiously remove the citations.”
Why not simply cite the work?
For those men whose academic sexism hasn’t risen to the level of actionable correction, and very likely won’t — while they continue ignoring female scholars and belittling their work on a daily basis — their reputation overall will remain clean. A serial sexist is unlikely to cite the work of female scholars, but if he is a predominant voice in your field or subfield, there is no way for you to avoid having to continue to build his academic reputation through citations, even if you would like to avoid doing so … We have not tackled the question of how scholarship — in journal articles and books — amplifies the reputation and credibility of people who do not deserve that recognition.
One implication of this argument is that scholarly recognition should hinge not only on a scholar’s contribution to advancing human knowledge, or his utility to present and future scholars, but on his character.
[Read: The coddling of the American mind ‘is speeding up]’
The consequences of that mind-set could be far-reaching. Usher writes:
Consider the case of the Nobel-Prize-winning scientist James Watson, who, with Francis Crick, is credited with discovering the structure of DNA, and led the Human Genome Project. For years Watson was revered. Then in 2007, he publicly took issue with the idea that all races have equal intelligence: Watson told a British newspaper that people “who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”
Watson is now known as a notorious sexist and racist who failed to acknowledge the research contributions of his colleague, Rosalind Franklin. But we haven’t stopped citing or mentioning Watson and Crick because, well, DNA.
Is that a problem? Usher doesn’t commit, but adds:
In the present-day creative arts, at least, reputations suffer by exclusion, such as removing the artwork of a serial harasser from public display (sometimes only temporarily) or no longer choosing to include poems by outed sexual harassers in various best-of collections.
That may not be the best tack to take, but it is at least an acknowledgement that scholars’ questionable behavior needs to be raised as a factor in their reputation, even if their work itself is good.
Workplace administrators rightfully care about a scholar’s behavior; they need to look out for the welfare of colleagues and students. But should writers who merely cite that scholar’s ideas also care about such things?
I don’t think so. Neither do a great many academics, who make no effort in their scholarship to acknowledge the moral faults of the people that they cite. In fact, they make no assumptions or judgments whatsoever about their character.
Last week, the University of Chicago’s Brian Leiter offered a lengthy rebuttal to the “don’t cite them” view in The Chronicle. He makes clear that the argument is spreading:
After John Searle, the Berkeley philosopher of language, was sued for sexual harassment, Jennifer Saul, a philosopher of language and feminist activist at the University of Sheffield in Britain, suggested that, “If you can avoid teaching/discussing [Searle’s work], that may be the best strategy.” Zachary Furste, a media-studies scholar, taught a class at the University of Southern California in which students read work by the literary theorist Avital Ronell — sued by a former graduate student for sexual and other harassment — but said if he taught the class in the future, “I haven’t really settled whether I will keep it.” James Sterba, a philosopher at the University of Notre Dame, responded to allegations of sexual misconduct against Thomas Pogge, a political philosopher at Yale University, by declaring he would no longer include Pogge’s work in graduate classes: “You don’t need him. He carries too much baggage — he doesn’t have to be cited anymore. … He’s a negative image and we don’t need that. Maybe if he was Einstein we’d have to cite him, but he’s not.”Leiter goes on to remind readers that foundational scholars in modern philosophy were anti-Semites and even Nazis. What’s an academic to do?
His answer is simple:
Insofar as you aim to contribute to scholarship in your discipline, cite work that is relevant regardless of the author’s misdeeds. Otherwise you are not doing scholarship but something else … Scholarly citation has only two purposes in a discipline:
To acknowledge a prior contribution to knowledge on which your work depends. To serve as an epistemic authority for a claim relevant to your own contribution to knowledge. (By epistemic authority I mean simply another scholar’s research that is invoked to establish the reliability or truth of some other claim on which your work depends.)In each case, citation has its purpose — ensuring the integrity of the scholarly discipline in question. Failure to cite because of a scholar’s misconduct — whether for being a Nazi or a sexual harasser — betrays the entire scholarly enterprise that justifies the existence of universities and the protection of academic freedom... You should not — under any circumstances — adjust your citation practices to punish scholars for bad behavior… researchers or teachers who let moral indignation interfere with scholarly judgment do betray the core purposes of the university and so open themselves to professional repercussions.
In other words, he argues that truth is the scholar’s telos, not social justice.
In a sense, academics have long pondered the degree to which social justice concerns should affect their scholarship. The ethical implications of Nazi experiments on human subjects have been debated since the 1940s. Institutional review boards reject proposed efforts at truth-seeking all the time on the grounds that a given approach is unjust.
Still, I’m baffled by this debate. The problematic behavior at issue in Usher’s and Leiter’s examples isn’t a part of the scholarship itself, as was the case for Nazi experimentation. More important, the ostensible social justice gains are meager and are vastly outweighed by obvious costs.
[Read: The coddling of the American mind]
Usher replied to Leiter in the comments section of his Chronicle essay. She writes: “I suppose what I’m saying is no, you can’t avoid Watson, but perhaps there’s a footnote to alert freshman undergrads about his intellectual history.” She adds, “In the case of folks who are simply respected because people know them from various conferences or have high-output but are otherwise nothing special, it’s my sense that alternative citations can be found that say the same thing.”
But no substantive imperative to cite people based on their social cachet exists. And the “intellectual history” footnote system could easily go wrong.
Consequences might include:
the (further) politicization of scholarship as academics disagree about what constitutes morally objectionable behavior and how it ought to affect citations; the new burden of researching the personal lives of scholars one cites; disingenuous virtue-signaling and citation call-out culture; bad actors who take advantage of the shift from substantive standards to subjective moral judgments to withhold credit from good scholars; and increased opacity in the profession as academics remove citations to scholars who influenced their work, making it harder to follow their arguments.What if Usher’s suggestion were applied beyond academia?
If the poetry editor Usher alludes to in her original essay deprives the world of an excellent poem on moral grounds, or insists on noting the poet’s character flaws, then that editor communicates that he doesn’t quite believe in his field’s importance. The community of cancer researchers wouldn’t withhold a breakthrough because the academic who achieved it is a jerk in the cafeteria.
Lots of people recognized for giving the world something of great value were bad people. What’s the point in denying their contributions to their field, perhaps the only good that they ever offered others? Truth, not social justice, is the morally superior telos for academia.
When young children are playing on smartphones, many parents have low expectations for what’s on the screen: bright colors, loud noises, a general lack of any greater moral lesson. A study released earlier this week, unfortunately, adds to that list: It found that the most frequently downloaded apps aimed at children ages 5 and under—even those categorized as “educational” and even ones that cost money—contain loads of advertising.
After testing 135 apps, the researchers, most of whom are affiliated with the University of Michigan, expressed concern about the “manipulative and disruptive methods” that advertisers and app makers were using to influence very young children. The main types of marketing the researchers encountered were “commercial characters” (that is, characters from toys or cartoons being featured in a game), videos interrupting game play, and nudges to rate the app, make an in-app purchase, or promote the app on social media. And about a quarter of the free apps had regular old banner ads, some of which were pushing things that clearly weren’t intended for the 5-and-under crowd: a shopping app, information about bipolar disorder, help with tax prep.
“I think the targeting of children in this way, and the manipulative ways in which they do it, is really abominable,” says Mara Einstein, the chair of media studies at Queens College and the author of Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know. Her main concern is that young children have difficulty recognizing what’s an ad and what isn’t. She says that among marketers, this understanding is “really standard stuff, and the fact that it’s not being applied in the app space is pretty disturbing.”
Read: The dangers of distracted parenting
Another issue she raised is that ads on phones are something that kids generally encounter on their own, without any parental guidance. “There are plenty of parents that use the TV as a babysitter as well, but there was at least the option to sit down with your kid and say, ‘Well, what do you think about that?’” Einstein says. Little faces staring into little screens, though, are usually unsupervised, which “doesn’t give a whole lot of opportunity for the parent to look at this with the kid and know what’s going on.”
The Federal Communications Commission regulates ads that run on TV during children’s shows, but it has no such rules for ads directed toward children online or within apps. One practice that’s banned by the FCC in TV ads is “host selling,” which happens when a character from a show pitches a product during that show’s commercial breaks. The researchers noted that some of what they’d seen in children’s apps was very similar to host selling: Some characters steered players toward making in-app purchases or buying the paid version of an app, occasionally making emotional pleas or expressing disapproval through the screen. (In one app for kids as young as 6, an onscreen character can shake his head and cry when a child declines to purchase a mini game for $1.99.)
These negative reactions from characters can pressure children to spend, and the underlying concern, says Amy Jordan, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers, is that many kids aren’t yet capable of fully understanding other people’s motives for making certain requests. She told me that it isn’t until around age 6 or 7, give or take a year in either direction, that kids develop the ability to think critically about what an advertiser might want from them.
The FCC does have regulations, but much of the policing of advertisers comes, Jordan says, when there’s public outcry or after a particularly damning research report comes out. Many other countries regulate advertisers more tightly. “On balance, there is probably a greater recognition [in the U.S.] of the free-speech rights of the commercial broadcasters and an unwillingness to interfere with those rights,” she says. “In other countries, there’s more of a sense of the obligations of people who make media to recognize the sensitivities and the vulnerabilities of children.” Jordan notes that in Denmark, ads can’t be aired in the middle of children’s programming, but instead can only bookend it.
I asked her what her dream regulations for children’s advertisements would look like. “If I were queen,” she said, “I would ban advertising to very young children—that would be children ages about 6 and under. And I would be careful about the kinds of products that are advertised to children between 6 and 12, so that unhealthy products aren’t advertised to them, and at the same time, throughout the childhood years, I would invest as a policy maker in initiatives to provide more media literacy.”
There is a bigger-picture perspective to consider on the bombardment of advertising that kids face in apps. Regulating smartphone advertising would be one step to take, but there is still the question of what it is that the ads are distracting kids from in the first place—often the “enrichment” an app is providing kids can be questionable. The authors of a 2015 paper noted that many apps considered “educational” didn’t teach in the way that children actually learn; the researchers wrote that children exposed to this sea of unregulated apps are the subjects of “a vast, unplanned experiment.” Given how few adults are able to resist the attention-sucking powers of app designers and advertisers, how can kids possibly stand a chance?
When my grandfather died last fall, it fell to my sisters and me to sort through the books and papers in his home in East Tennessee. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, my grandmother a mathematician, and among their novels and magazines were reams of scientific publications. In the wood-paneled study, we passed around great sheaves of papers for sorting, filling the air with dust.
My youngest sister put a pile of yellowing papers in front of me, and I started to leaf through the typewritten letters and scholarly articles. Then my eyes fell on the words fundamental breakthrough, spectacular, and revolutionary. Letters from some of the biggest names in physics fell out of the folders, in correspondence going back to 1979.
In this stack, I found, was evidence of a mystery. My grandfather had a theory, one that he believed to be among the most important work of his career. And it had never been published.
My grandparents had arrived in the low green hills of East Tennessee with their young daughter, my mother, in 1960. The town of Oak Ridge had been rebuilt from the ground up for military research, like Los Alamos, New Mexico, and Hanford, Washington. Together these secret cities became key sites in the Manhattan Project, the push to develop the first atomic bomb. But by the time Francis and Claire Perey came to town, peace had turned the facility into the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There they rammed neutrons into the centers of atoms for a living.
In the 1960s and ’70s, they published paper after paper describing the probabilities of various outcomes of their collision experiments—how often a neutron would veer left or right or another direction, how often the atom would emit another particle, and other possibilities. These seem to have been happy years: Their son was born, and their work was well received, cited many times by other scientists.
When I knew them, Francis and Claire were no longer at the lab; during my childhood, my mother would invite them for a month-long visit at Christmastime. Francis was a man of consuming obsessions. One year in the mid-’90s, it was a card game whose simple rules hid deep mathematical truths; another, it was a demonstration, using a chair-back and a length of cord, of the strangeness of quantum mechanics. He had eyebrows like wiry caterpillars, and a constant look of delayed revelation. He wore a single, boldly checked blazer for nearly every occasion, and he often went around with two pairs of glasses balanced on his forehead—one for close reading, one for distance—and his mouth slightly ajar. My dad used to say, half-wonderingly, half-jokingly: “He’s about to utter a theory of everything.”
Indeed, as a child, I’d heard murmurings among the adults that Francis had an idea of some sort. I had never understood what it was, and looking through these papers, I still could not make sense of it. The theory seemed to deal with the fundamental question of where probabilities come from, as well as a specialized subfield of mathematics and even quantum mechanics. To understand my grandfather’s grand obsession, I had to go into the foundations of physics, and to the heart of the stories we tell about science. What was Francis on to?
I always knew there was something weird about Francis. He seemed poorly acquainted with the physical world, despite having built a full-size sailboat by hand (he named it after Évariste Galois, a French mathematician who invented an important branch of modern math before dying in a duel). When our school bus dropped us off in the afternoons, he would come right up to the bus door and stand almost against it, much too close, unnerving the driver. It was often hard to get him to talk at dinner. But ask him about the history of Paris, for instance, or solo sailboat races, and he could go on for an hour, making nutty little jokes along the way. It must be because he is a physicist, I thought.
Francis’s oddness put him in good company. The image of the scientist as a maverick, the wild thinker with his eyes on the horizon, seeing something that no one has seen before, has a romance that’s hard to deny. So many colorful details, from Albert Einstein’s distinctive coiffure to Marie Curie’s mournful gaze to Richard Feynman’s bongo playing, suggest that eccentricity is part of staring at the fundamental nature of the universe.
And it isn’t all caricature: When psychologists compare scientists and nonscientists on broad personality traits, they find notable differences. Scientists tend to score higher than average on openness to new experiences, writes the psychologist Gregory Feist in his book The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind. Science appeals to certain kinds of people: They want to work on their own; they have a sense of direction. They are interested in new ideas.
Highly regarded researchers have an even more pronounced form of these tendencies. “More creative scientists are more confident, open, dominant, independent, and introverted than their less creative peers,” Feist writes, although it isn’t clear whether this is a cause or an effect of their success; it’s probably a mixture of both. Feist, a psychology professor at San José State University, once interviewed more than 100 eminent researchers, many of them members of the National Academy of Sciences. The most prominent among them were also the most hostile, as rated by assistants who listened to the recordings of Feist’s interviews without knowing the subjects’ identities. Succeeding in science seems to require a degree of pigheadedness. “It takes a real belief that one has something special to offer and that one has a way of doing things that is better than most others,” Feist writes.
In addition to being notably more assertive and confident, the most creative scientists are much less interested in following rules. Coming up with something really novel and profound requires both a rush of insight and a leap of faith. It is risky trying to do something new.
Imagine a tossed coin spinning in the air. The likelihood that it will land faceup seems obvious: 50 percent. But why? You might have been taught that if you throw a coin 100 times and keep track of which sides you get, the data will show that it falls on heads half the time. This is called a frequentist interpretation of probability—and it’s just one of six interpretations listed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
The frequentist interpretation works well for situations that can be repeated indefinitely. But there are many situations that cannot, and yet we make decisions about probability in those all the same. Do we believe in something because we’ve seen it happen 1,000 times before? Or is our belief an extrapolation about the nature of the system, whether it is human behavior or a coin toss? The more you think about it, the stranger it seems that we don’t exactly know the answer.
Quantum mechanics is mainly a way to calculate the likelihood of one thing, rather than another thing, happening next, says Christopher Fuchs, a quantum theorist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Niels Bohr and Einstein had a fiery public debate in the late 1920s that hinged on what might seem like a simple question: Is something uncertain at the quantum level because we don’t have enough information, or because it is fundamentally unknowable?
LIVIA CIVESBohr was of the latter opinion, but Einstein was skeptical. He spent the rest of his life working to see whether a theory that didn’t involve this baffling form of uncertainty could replicate the predictions of quantum mechanics. But the kind of theory Einstein preferred turns out to be unlikely to work, as the physicist John Stewart Bell showed in a 1964 theorem. In the following decades, other scientists conducted experiments that corroborated Bell’s ideas, which remain key to standard theories in quantum mechanics today.
Meanwhile, a revolution in probability was brewing. In the ’70s, Edwin Thompson Jaynes, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was spreading the idea that probability is based on a form of inference. In the most basic sense, this just means you take what you know and from that draw certain logical conclusions about what’s likely to happen next. But Jaynes was especially interested in situations where it seemed, at first glance, that there was not enough information to make a prediction. Take the example of a die with an unknown number of sides, each of which has an equal chance of falling up. What, in this situation, is the chance of rolling a one?
This may seem like an impossible question—but it’s the kind of thing that scientists must deal with constantly when they work with measurements laced with unknown errors, or when they must take tiny amounts of data about, say, rain-forest species diversity and extrapolate to the rest of the planet. In such cases, the question is how you decide to handle something whose exact details are a mystery to you. Using beautifully sophisticated math, Jaynes demonstrated that thinking of probabilities in a particular way—as a description of our own knowledge and ignorance—can lead to surprising and powerful tools for physics.
In Francis’s belongings, there was a copy of the landmark 1973 article in which Jaynes solved a classic problem in probability known as Bertrand’s paradox. Using Jaynes’s ideas, you could solve that paradox and likely others in a way that made sense. But there was one problem, known as the water-and-wine paradox, that Jaynes couldn’t solve. This, I believe, was where the seed of Francis’s ideas was planted.
There is no way to know exactly when Francis’s eureka moment came. But it must have been before 1980. In May of that year, a paper of Francis’s was being honored as a classic. In his acknowledgment, he writes modestly that this old paper doesn’t contain truly new ideas, just inferences drawn from what was already known. Indeed, he says, inference is at the heart of his current, still-unpublished work, too. The work involves an idea long overlooked in the study of probability. “Although most scientists today do not know this formal theory, they have heard of it, I am sure, without fully realizing what it was,” he writes, enigmatically. “I hope the above comments will be stimulating.”
He does get a letter from at least one intrigued reader, and in 1981, when he starts passing around a draft of his paper, an excited flurry of correspondence arrives. The physicist F. H. Fröhner replies that he’s been expecting Francis’s blockbuster ever since the two discussed Jaynes the previous summer. Richard T. Cox, an important figure in the study of probability, writes that he has a feeling that “what you have written is extremely thoughtful and basic and may become a landmark,” though he is not able to understand all of it. A description of the paper “sounded very interesting indeed, and I very much want to include it,” writes Roger D. Rosenkrantz, a mathematician and philosopher at Dartmouth putting together a special issue of a journal called Synthese.
Francis, convinced of the work’s importance, submits it instead to one of the most prestigious journals in all of science, Nature. It is rejected, he later reports, the same day it is received. Undaunted, in the spring he mails out another volley of drafts and submits the paper to another journal. This time, an anonymous reviewer, or referee, weighs in. And this time, the feedback is clear:
Incomprehensible … if there is any core of actual results anywhere in this incredible work, it is hidden completely from me by the page after page of maddeningly repetitious philosophical froth ... No purpose could be served by publishing the work in its present form, because I do not think there is one reader in the world who could make sense of it.
Shocked, Francis wonders, Have I not made the discovery clear? “I will try, within the limits of decency, to communicate the great excitement of having achieved what is to me a synthesis of the sort that I believe is the goal of science,” he writes to Cox in some anxiety after receiving the notice. It is in fact not the first time he has gotten a negative reaction; he has already told another correspondent that colleagues at the lab are not able to follow him. “I would never have written this paper had I thought anyone would find it absurd,” he confesses. In a moment of bravado, he writes to another colleague, “I have more exciting things to do than argue with a referee.”
But his increasingly agitated letters are met with more confusion. “Your ideas are certainly novel—and correspondingly difficult to grasp,” writes Bell himself, he of the 1964 theorem, in longhand scrawl on a single sheet of paper from Geneva. Another rejection of another version of the paper arrives in the mail. “A vague essay … I can find no substantial relation to Bell’s Theorem,” one reviewer writes. And yet it is clear that Francis thinks this paper has something profound to say.
In this period of turbulence he persists in keeping records. On the list of about 70 people he’s sent the paper to, including at least one Nobel laureate, 17 are colleagues at the Oak Ridge National Lab. Next to their names in blue ink, he has written their responses. Most say, “I do not understand it.” Others say, “Not my field,” or “I am too busy,” or “A useless theory.” Next to my grandmother’s name is written simply, “I trust you.” The response of one of his bosses displays no such tolerance: Next to his name is written, “A waste of time—salary frozen.”
Things come to a head by the summer of 1982, when Francis writes to a distinguished colleague at Boston University, begging to be invited to give a seminar. He has worked on nothing else for the past four years, and if he does not get some sign from outside the lab that his idea has merit, he will soon be fired. No one else would have to come to the seminar; they could just discuss it together—please let him know.
There is, in the end, no seminar. The respectable physicist has gone astray.
The mavericks of science make the best stories. Many profound insights began as heresies, their proponents mocked, degraded, or ignored. Birds are descended from dinosaurs, argued the American paleontologist John Ostrom, a kooky and unpopular claim when he made it in the 1970s. Earth orbits the sun, Copernicus asserted. In our cells live the descendants of bacteria, Lynn Margulis said. One interpretation of quantum mechanics is that there are many worlds, Hugh Everett proposed, and it was decades before anyone agreed. It’s almost like first you must be outcast for an idea before you can be applauded for it.
In his famous 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn writes that science tends to be fundamentally resistant to change. “Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties,” he writes, because they conflict with the received wisdom on which fields are built. Such tales of misunderstood genius are satisfying, righteous—almost expected, even among scientists. When I first began to ask other physicists to take a look at what my grandfather was working on, I was surprised by how many entertained the idea, before even looking at it, that he was on to something.
Not every maverick has a shortcut to the truth, however. The Nobel laureate Linus Pauling promulgated the idea later in his career that large doses of vitamin C could treat cancer. Lynn Margulis, who was right about the bacterial origins of mitochondria, supported the idea that butterflies and caterpillars were different species. Even Einstein could be thought of as a failed rebel, says Dean Keith Simonton, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “Thinking that he had emerged victorious, he tried to devise a non-quantum theory of everything, and just miserably failed,” Simonton says. And of course there are mavericks on the fringes of science, people who, though they have no training, believe they have solved fundamental problems.
Margaret Wertheim, a science writer who wrote a book about fringe physics, told me about the Talk to a Scientist service, which people can pay to have someone try to answer their questions. For $50 per 20 minutes, you can, if you so desire, chat about your new theory.
Intrigued, I wrote to Talk to a Scientist’s founder, a physicist named Sabine Hossenfelder, who connected me with one of the service’s experts on quantum foundations in Oxford. He was cordial and polite, and he had in fact been one of the graduate students of the colleague at Boston University, the one who declined to host the seminar more than 30 years ago. Over the course of several days, I sent him abstracts, letters, a cornucopia of records relating to Francis’s idea. He wrote that he recognized what Francis was talking about—although as an experimentalist rather than a theorist, Francis was not experienced in the area of physics he had become so interested in, and didn’t know the right terms. I confided that in reading these letters, I could see the pain and uncertainty of a researcher drifting out of the mainstream. He wrote back, yes—it was like that for him, too.
What? I stepped back and Googled him, and found that he had been, at one point, affiliated with the University of Oxford. He had been associated with a number of institutions. But some years ago, he fell into heresy after arguing that Bell’s theorem was incorrect. The backlash had been significant, the whole spectacle quite ugly, unfurling across physics blogs and in online forums as well as in university administrators’ offices. My quest to learn about my grandfather’s crackpot theory, if that’s what it was, had led me to another outsider.
Perhaps the same things that make someone interested in being a scientist make that person vulnerable, in some cases, to going over the edge. Gregory Feist tells the story of one National Academy of Sciences member he interviewed in 1990. They met at his beautiful lab at the University of California, Berkeley. “He was kind of a big deal in immunology,” Feist recalled when we spoke on the phone. “I was naive … I didn’t know his story.”
He was talking about Peter Duesberg, who believed that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. “There was a part of me that thought, Wouldn’t that be fascinating if that were true, if he were right?” Feist says. Three years earlier, when Duesberg first proposed the idea, researchers were just zeroing in on the virus as a definitive cause. But by 1990, the scientific consensus had solidified, and Duesberg, who would not give up, was starting to be ostracized. “Once he stopped listening to the evidence … he stopped being a scientist, to be honest,” Feist says. “There’s a fine line between being a maverick scientist and being a little bit lost.”
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.
There are many reasons to suppose that Francis may not, in fact, have discovered some fundamental truth. But perhaps he saw something glinting up there, above the tangled mess of human science, that was to him profoundly beautiful. “I just keep thinking,” my father said, “that that must have been what he was experiencing.”
The water-and-wine paradox—the one Jaynes did not solve—involves a theoretical glass containing a mixture of wine and water. The exact quantity of each liquid is unknown; your task is to determine how likely it is that the ratio of wine to water is within a certain range. You swiftly arrive at a reasonable-sounding answer. But when you repeat the problem from the angle of water to wine instead, you get another, equally valid-seeming answer, one that’s completely different from the first. There is no clear way to decide which is right; that’s where Francis’s idea came in.
“Your grandfather was suggesting a criterion for saying that one of these choices was actually more reasonable than the other one,” Sean Carroll, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, told me. Then he suggested I get in touch with Harry Crane.
In the autumn of the year after my grandfather died, I spoke to Crane, a statistician at Rutgers University who studies probability theory and the logic of personal belief. He told me that from looking at a paper Francis wrote about the water-and-wine paradox, he could see the shape of his unborn idea. At this point I had long since put aside any hopes that the idea was something big, something misunderstood but brilliant. But I wanted, so many years after it first turned things upside down in Francis’s life, to know what he had seen.
Francis Perey (Courtesy of Veronique Greenwood)The criterion Francis was working on, Crane said, is deceptively simple. In a later paper, Francis uses the example of a coin on a table to describe how the concept works. Let’s say the coin is covered by a sheet of paper. You don’t know which side is up, because it’s covered. But you do know that if it is heads, it’s only a 180-degree turn from being tails, and vice versa. You can think of all the separate states that a system can be in—heads, tails, half wine, three-quarters water—and all the different ways it can be manipulated. The coin can’t bend; the water can’t suddenly change to wine partway through the process. If you require that your calculation of the probability respects these relationships—there is a mathematical way to do this—there will be only one right answer.
In essence, what he thought he’d found was a way in which probabilities arose naturally, a way in which they could be derived from the basic laws of the physical world rather than deduced from experiments. And he thought this should apply in the quantum world as well. It was both as simple, and as grandiose, as that. All the other papers, down through the years, involve elaborations of this main idea.
Now, such ideas hinge on technical details. And it isn’t clear whether those details are correct (as well, quantum and classical probabilities operate so differently that such a claim raises many eyebrows). In fact, from some of the letters and notes in Francis’s papers, I am inclined to think that he may have made a mistake, somewhere down in the numbers, and had been so enamored of the idea that he couldn’t let it go.
But Crane is curious about what would have happened, so many decades ago, if the idea hadn’t been blocked at every turn. “Let’s think of an alternative universe in which the first time he submitted this same exact idea, it got accepted and published,” Crane says. It might have been ignored by everyone, or maybe even criticized publicly, and discarded. Maybe it would have been enough for Francis, though, to have it out there. His long, slow, ultimately fruitless attempt to make the idea clear and publish it seems to be evidence of a kind of turning inward, a fixation on this unimpartible vision. Even ideas that are wrong may somewhere down the road lead to something, Crane says, if they can be put out into the open. Francis seems to have been caught in a purgatory of being unable to put the idea into the world and being unable to leave it alone.
Crane, who is the cofounder of Researchers.One, a nonprofit publishing platform, sees this as a failure of the scientific-publishing system. (Recently, he made Francis’s work available for public review on the Researchers.One website.) But I wonder if it isn’t more a failure—on the part of Francis himself, and maybe on the part of those of us who tell stories about science—of the recognition of the limits of inspiration. “Just because you have an epiphany doesn’t mean it’s going to be true,” says Gregory Feist. “That’s the starting point of science, that great insight. It’s not the end.”
At the memorial service we held for Francis, on the edge of the Tennessee River, an old friend of my grandparents’ sat in a folding chair and recounted what my grandmother Claire had told her once when asked about Francis’s theory. “She said, ‘Well, in physics there’s something called the Uncertainty Principle. And he is convinced that there is certainty.’
“I don’t think it quite concluded in the way he hoped it would,” the friend told us. “But he was excited about it all the same.” Having been married to a scientist herself, she said that one of the great pleasures was witnessing this passion for ideas.
“I have never enjoyed doing physics so much,” Francis wrote to Cox in 1982. In the end, that joy would have to be enough.
Flanked by his wife, his national-security adviser, and the head of the Mossad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a surprise visit last week to Oman and met with its leader, Sultan Qaboos bin Said.
Beyond the headline is a stunningly paradoxical trend line: The most significant period of Israeli-Arab de facto cooperation since the last real peace process, in the 1990s, is now taking place without one. Netanyahu and his right-wing government are reversing the notion that only peace with the Palestinians can ensure Israel’s acceptance into an angry and hostile Arab world. The Arab street may still oppose Israel, but Arab leaders clearly don’t.
Netanyahu isn’t the first Israeli prime minister to meet Qaboos at home. Yitzhak Rabin had that honor in 1994. And while the current spate of Israeli-Arab activity is nowhere near the salad days of the 1990s in the wake of the Oslo Accords, the extent of Israeli contacts both above and below the table are impressive, especially because it’s the hard-line Netanyahu running the show and not the moderate Rabin.
[Read: The real dispute driving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ]
Netanyahu has long boasted of secret Israeli relations and cooperation with Gulf states, telling the Knesset as recently as last week how “Israel and other Arab countries are closer than they ever were before.” And while he tends to exaggerate, consider the following.
On Sunday, Sports and Culture Minister Miri Regev—one of the Netanyahu cabinet’s most vocal critics of the Palestinians—became the first senior Israeli official to visit Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque. The same day, after years of being forbidden to display national symbols at Gulf sporting events, the Israeli national anthem played when the Israeli judo team won a gold medal at the International Judo Federation’s Grand Slam in Abu Dhabi. Next week, Intelligence and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz will visit Oman and Communications Minister Ayoob Kara will visit Abu Dhabi. An Israeli gymnastics team is also currently competing in Qatar.
These moments of soft diplomacy appear to be bearing fruit for Israel’s foreign-policy agenda. After Netanyahu’s visit, Oman’s foreign minister stated, “Israel is a state present in the region, and we all understand this. The world is also aware of this fact.” Bahrain’s foreign minister expressed support for Oman’s role in trying to catalyze Israeli-Palestinian peace, and his Saudi Arabian counterpart declared that the peace process was key to normalizing relations.
[Peter Beinart: Trump’s new cold war]
The biggest prize for Israel is, indeed, a relationship with Saudi Arabia — a goal that has been pushed and encouraged by Donald Trump’s administration, particularly the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who’s established a close tie with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, widely known as MbS. Hurdles include King Salman’s desire to ensure that his impulsive son doesn’t give too much to the Israelis too soon and MbS’s alleged involvement in the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which might lead him to cut a lower profile internationally. But there are signs that the Saudis are giving up their old hard-line opposition to Israel. When Trump moved the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Saudi Arabia had a decidedly low-key reaction; Saudi Arabia opened its air space to Air India’s commercial flights to Israel; an unofficial Saudi delegation visited Israel to push the Arab Peace Initiative; and it’s been reported that the Israelis are selling the Saudis millions in surveillance equipment, and even assisting MbS with his security.
Something is clearly happening.
The Arab world’s new openness to Israel is driven in part by increasing impatience and annoyance with the Palestinians. The record of Arab-state betrayal and conflict with the Palestine Liberation Organization is well known. Indeed, with the exception of Egypt, every Arab state that shares common borders with Israel has fought bloody battles with the Palestinian national movement. Today the Saudis and Egyptians are frustrated with a weak Mahmoud Abbas and worried about Hamas. The silence of the Arab world in the face of recent Israeli-Hamas confrontations in Gaza, including the last major conflict, in 2014, which claimed more than 2,000 Palestinian lives, was deafening.
[Graeme Wood: In Europe, speech is an alienable right]
Add to this the Arab states’ fear of Iran and Sunni jihadists, and a desire to please the Trump administration—and suddenly it’s obvious that Israel and its neighbors are bound by common interests.
Tensions, of course, remain. Last week, Jordan’s King Abdullah—under domestic pressure as a result of Netanyahu’s policies toward the Palestinians—announced that he would terminate two land leases with Israel agreed to in their 1994 peace treaty. But even this problem may in the end be worked out in subsequent negotiations.
The upshot of all of this isn’t that the Arab world is moving at breakneck speed to desert the Palestinians, or to fully normalize ties with Israel. But Netanyahu appears to be dealing with an Arab world ready to engage incrementally with Israel despite that fact that a peace deal is not forthcoming. In a volatile and combustible Middle East, the prime minister should enjoy his thaw while it lasts.
Contrary to what its name suggests, the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not an empty void. It’s a piece of space that weighs as much as several million suns. Here, gravity reigns, and it is relentless; the black hole tugs inexorably at anything that gets too close—a cloud of cosmic dust, an entire star the size of our sun—and swallows it. Nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole’s maw, which means astronomers on Earth, watching the meal from afar, can’t see it.
Astronomers know that the black hole is there because they can observe what’s happening around it. With telescopes, they have captured the chaotic conditions around a seemingly empty spot in space. Stars whip around at extraordinary speeds. Gas and dust accumulate into a rotating disk that glows brightly as it moves. Streams of powerful radiation and energetic particles erupt from this disk and surge into space.
This pinwheel of cosmic matter at the heart of the galaxy can be difficult for us layfolk to fathom. But we don’t have to rely on our imagination.
Astronomers on Wednesday reported new telescope observations of the environment around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, named Sagittarius A* (pronounced “a-star”), and they transformed the data into a lively animation:
The video is positively ghostly. Clumps of gas swirl around the black hole, traveling at about 30 percent of the speed of light.
Astronomers collected the data for the visualization using an instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, located in the deserts of northern Chile. The instrument, appropriately named GRAVITY, detected flares of infrared radiation coming from the disk surrounding Sagittarius A*. The researchers believe the bursts originated very close to the black hole, in an incredibly tumultuous region known as the innermost stable orbit. Here, cosmic material is slung around violently, but it remains far away enough that it can circle the black hole safely without getting sucked into the darkness.
If the thought of orbiting a monstrous, star-gobbling black hole spooks you, don’t worry. Earth, located about two-thirds out from the center of the Milky Way, is at a very safe distance. The planet is in no danger of being consumed and wiped off the face of the universe.
But like everything else in the galaxy, it has long been subject to the black hole’s whims. When black holes belch radiation into space, the outflow can heat surrounding gas so much that it prevents the gas from cooling. If cosmic dust can’t cool, it can’t condense to form individual, brand-new stars, including ones like our sun. Scientists suspect that the fates of galaxies—whether they produce new stars or stop altogether—rest with the supermassive black holes at their centers.
But if the thought of the Milky Way’s black hole eating all by its lonesome makes you sad, or if you’re rather offended that black holes are routinely described as monsters, don’t worry about that either. Sagittarius A* has plenty of friends. Some astronomers predict that as many as 10,000 smaller black holes reside near the center of the galaxy.
In Waller County, Texas, a 40,000-strong exurb to the northwest of Houston, early voting is simple. Texas law mandates that the county maintain a main voting site, located in the county seat of Hempstead, that is open for at least five hours every day from Monday, October 22, to Friday, November 2.
During those two weeks, satellite centers provide voting hours farther out in the county. Residents in the towns of Brookshire and Waller, two of the larger places in Waller County, have multiple days to cast a ballot in both the first and second week of early voting. As guided by state law, the early-voting plans in Waller County are intended to both maximize a finite pool of resources and ensure that most of the voters in the county have at least some convenient entry points for early voting that can fit into their schedule.
All of that applies so long as you aren’t a black college student, according to a lawsuit filed last week in a U.S. district court by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The suit, brought on behalf of several students at Prairie View A&M University, alleges that the county shortchanges students with a local early-voting plan that uniquely constrains their choices, offering only three days of on-campus early voting in the second week.*
[Read: Voter suppression is warping democracy.]
With a week of early voting left, and when early-voting returns have been massive across the board, the legal drama in obscure Waller County might seem insignificant. But in a country where disenfranchisement has become perhaps the dominant theme of the 2018 election cycle, the local battle is both instructive and representative. The fight for the ballot for Prairie View A&M students has mirrored the long saga of voting rights in America. The drama there during this election is both a microcosm of a larger canon of dramas around voter suppression today and a reminder of the history that brought the country to this moment.
The basic demographic problem in Waller County is easy to sum up. Waller County is mostly white. Prairie View is a predominantly black school, founded as the state flagship for black students in 1876. The university has always been a locus of tension for the surrounding community, and even current students attest that those tensions affect the way they are seen and treated any time they step off campus. “Though we are just one campus, the population is big,” says Damon Johnson, a sophomore from Houston. “The community is it’s own way, and they’re kinda predominantly white. And us young black people coming in, I don’t feel like we get the same chances. We’re not treated the same. The laws are uneven for us.”
[Read: Sandra Bland and the history of racism in Waller County]
For Johnson, voting provides a chance to challenge that uneven treatment. This year is Johnson’s first federal election, but like many other students at Prairie View A&M, he rents an apartment within walking distance from campus, and doesn’t have a car. He relies on the campus shuttle for most things outside of walking distance. That means his most viable location for voting early is the one that was originally the most limited in the county: the student center, which offers three eight-hour sessions.
Johnson joined the lawsuit against Waller County, which alleges that the plan in place constitutes intentional suppression of young black voters. It contends that the constriction of early-voting hours in the city of Prairie View—in which Prairie View A&M is located—disproportionately targets the biggest population of black voters in the county (more than half of the black people of age to vote live in the city). The plaintiffs claim the plan to open early voting on campus from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on designated days doesn’t meet the needs of students, many of whom are in class or otherwise occupied during the workday. They also claim that the county commissioners, a bipartisan group, approved the plan without meaningful input from the Prairie View community.
Waller County election officials have denied these claims. In a statement to The Atlantic through a lawyer, Trey Duhon, the Waller County judge, stressed that the county has worked hard to protect student voting rights. “Waller County vehemently denies the allegations that it acted to disenfranchise or limit the opportunities for electoral participation of any of its citizens,” Duhon said. “Rather, the county has, at all times, worked to allocate its limited resources in a manner that best provides all voters a fair opportunity to vote early if they so choose.” The county also maintains that people with objections to the early-voting plan had opportunities to challenge the plan before the election.
Even so, facing public pressure, Waller County officials have agreed with at least part of the complaint, and have since expanded options moderately—allowing an extra day of off-campus voting in Prairie View this past Sunday and expanding hours at the on-campus polling location.**
Still, with the general election just a week away and with Texas a key battleground for a critical Senate seat, the plaintiffs think the remedy—with half of the early-voting returns already in—is too little, too late. “The county commissioners put the onus purely on communities’ members and students to read a notice and know about this and then weigh in,” says Leah Aden, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s deputy director of litigation, “instead of you doing something proactively because you know the history.”
That history is particularly important here. Prairie View has been the center of a long fight over voting rights that stretches back to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the expansion of the right to vote to 18-year-olds with the Twenty-Sixth Amendment in 1971. Taken in tandem, the two gave the majority of student bodies at HBCUs the right to vote, a development that entirely changed the dynamics of the handful of HBCUs located in predominantly white areas. In Waller County, local officials tried their best to keep black students from disrupting white hegemony.
“In 1972, students tried to vote here,” says Frank Jackson, a former mayor of Prairie View and now an administrator within the Texas A&M University system. “The county elections administrator said they’re not residents of Waller County, so they’re not allowed to vote.” County officials attempted to force students to meet property-tax requirements in order to vote, and students sued. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1979, in Symm v. United States, the Court struck down the county’s requirements. Not only did the decision allow Prairie View A&M students the right to vote, it’s also the basis for allowing all students to vote where they attend college.
But that wasn’t the end of it. The four decades since that decision have been a mess of lawsuits, and of both subtle and more brazen plans to dilute the voting strength of Prairie View’s mostly black student body. Even the current early-voting controversy isn’t a particularly new one. In 2003, when a student ran for a commissioner’s seat, the county responded by curtailing early voting during spring break. In 2008, in defiance of concerns from the Justice Department and citing cost constraints, Waller County cut all of the early-voting sites in and near Prairie View. According to Jackson, the tensions have been fueled both by a state and national directive among conservatives to dilute black votes in majority-white areas and by a saga of local control, with students demanding more resources and more representation.
It’s that history that continues to motivate students. And they continue the long-running fight against Waller County with the blessing of their alma mater. “Our ability to fund more aid is not crystal clear,” says Tim Sams, Prairie View’s vice president for student affairs. “So we have supported their efforts to do this.”
For the university, the lawsuit today connects students to a deep history that’s a source of pride for alumni. “It’s fair to say that our students tend to have some understanding about the history around Prairie View students and voting in general,” Sams says. “And that they step into that story—that narrative—as Prairie View students who are part of a long-standing battle to gain equal voting rights and experiences … They want, in this moment, not only to continue that legacy, but to bring it to an end such that students in the future don’t have to go through this.”
Posterity is the word in Prairie View. According to Aden, one of the main goals of the lawsuit isn’t just bringing parity to early voting today, but ending the constant tension between the county and the school. “It seeks changes really for the future because these issues keep coming up, and they concede that there’s no parity,” Aden says. “The lawsuit seeks reform.”
For Johnson, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the long-term hopes are somehow both marginal and meaningful. “My hope is that eventually we’ll get to a period to where we’re allowed all the days of early voting,” Johnson says. “Why not have my voice heard and be a representative for people who aren’t having their voice heard?”
*This article originally misstated the number of early-voting days on Prairie View’s campus. **This article originally stated that the extra day of early voting was at the on-campus location. We regret the errors.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 5 finale of House of Cards.
House of Cards will be remembered as the first streaming-TV success, an Obama-era fable turned eerily apt under Donald Trump, and—after sexual-harassment allegations against Kevin Spacey on set and off—an emblem for pop culture given an asterisk by #MeToo. But it also stands as an oil-and-vinegar showcase in acting. Spacey played the amoral politician Frank Underwood as a swamp-dwelling Foghorn Leghorn, clucking and strutting with blood on his feathers. Meanwhile, the Beltway players and rumpled journalists of the ensemble nailed the depressive poise expected in a David Fincher production: murmuring gravely, shrugging coyly, and conveying they knew more than they displayed and felt even less. Amid—against—this pageant of muted competence, Frank snarled in the name of lust.
Robin Wright’s Claire Underwood was Frank’s partner, but she also epitomized the show’s quieter brand of menace. Enigmatic and careful, she hungered for power just as much as he did, yet her pursuit of it never felt frantic. Thus, in the rare moments when she broke her facade—or knifed someone without even doing so—the results were a special kind of terrifying. Great credit should go to Wright, and the show’s writers, for locating complexity beneath the pat description “icy” that so often gets applied to powerful women. Without Frank’s close-talking heat, though, does Cards simply become a tundra?
This is one of the questions submerged in the final batch of episodes. A ridiculous chain of events saw Season 5 end with a scandal-tainted Frank resigning from the presidency so that Claire—his wife and V.P.—could rule as he amassed power in the private sector. In the real world, scandal has removed Spacey himself from public life, and (Spoiler) thus Cards resumes with Frank simply dead from supposedly natural causes. The widowing of Claire opens up a plot mystery (natural causes? really?), injects shivers of horror (imagine The Tell-Tale Heart in the East Wing), and intensifies the symbolic significance of what would have already been a timely counterfactual about the first female president (Claire at one point frets she’s been “emasculated” by enemies).
[Read: The Kevin Spacey allegations, through the lens of power]
Yet the most striking shift, at first glance, is indeed the aesthetic one caused by a sudden dearth of histrionics. Scenes unfold with wan smiles and inscrutable sighs volleyed between Claire and the other sphinxlike principals, such as the delicately formidable adviser Jane Davis (Patricia Clarkson), the unstoppable fixer Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), and the vice president Mark Usher (Campbell Scott), whose matter-of-fact deadpan disguises divided loyalties. The performances are excellent, maybe better than ever before. But Cards has always been a show whose plot contortions could confuse and whose incremental intrigue could bore, and those problems are worse now that everyone seems to be whispering.
There are interesting ideas at play, though. Cards introduces the new troublemakers Annette and Bill Shepherd (Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear), sibling industrialists clearly meant to suggest the Koch brothers. As Claire’s close friend from way back, Annette allows the show to riff darkly on themes of sisterhood (flashbacks depict young Claire with the haunted air of Sharp Objects). Bill, meanwhile, ruthlessly pursues what appears to be an earnest conservative agenda, which is a rare thing to see in this bizarrely post-ideology show. As Claire struggles against his attempted string-pulling, Bill resorts to brutishness and intimidation, and there are times when he inadvertently evokes Frank’s physicality.
Their clash makes for an explicit battle of the sexes, and the first female president arrives in the Oval Office like an organ in a host body that wants to reject it. The season opens with the Secret Service gruesomely describing death threats against the president that are arriving at a rate her husband never experienced. As she takes the reins, the forces arrayed against her try to hold her to Frank’s promises, accuse her of dithering, and, more than anything, marvel at her shiftiness. Unlike with Frank, “you never know” where you “stand” with her, complains former Underwood Press Secretary Sean Jeffries (Korey Jackson). “I don’t know whether or not she’s a person, or just playing the part of one,” Bill says.
It’s not really a spoiler to say that Claire has been underestimated—who would expect otherwise? The subtle pull of the otherwise drab first few hours, in fact, comes from the suspicion that she’s willfully stoking people’s biases (“It’s either a good thing or a bad thing,” she says to a frenemy’s request for her opinion, making like Karen from Veep). Unfortunately, it isn’t until more than halfway through the eight-episode season that Claire’s big plan becomes clear. When it does, it involves Wright making a hammy, malevolent parody of gendered expectations, brilliantly puncturing the gunmetal patina that’s fallen upon the show and helping bury the memory of Frank’s excesses. The plot surely must hurl toward doom, but a deeper tragedy is suggested: if only this woman never had to hide her true self.
Conservatives in distress turn to ancient texts. In the current circumstance, those of us of a Hebraic cast reach for the prophet Isaiah in his darker moods, or the even fiercer denunciations of Amos. Devout Christians despairing of a society in full malodorous rot look to The Rule of St. Benedict. Classicists might pick up a volume of Seneca, sighing wistfully as they contemplate the philosopher’s fate at the hands of his mad pupil, Emperor Nero, who, unlike President Donald Trump, at least played a musical instrument competently. A more twisted few will reach for Machiavelli. For those undergoing real tests of the soul, however, the place to go is J. R. R. Tolkien’s modern epic, The Lord of the Rings.
This thought is triggered by a recent column by Ross Douthat, one of the small-but-doughty band of conservatives ensconced in a safe space in the high tower of The New York Times. After dismissing some of those conservatives he no longer agrees with as “converts and apostates,” he urges his readers to turn instead to those “thinkers and writers who basically accept the populist turn, and whose goal is to supply coherence and intellectual ballast, to purge populism of its bigotries and inject good policy instead.”
[Read: J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” still matters 80 years later]
It is a more measured version of a larger phenomenon: erstwhile NeverTrumpers who wryly describe themselves as “OccasionalTrumpers,” or who attempt to cleanse themselves of the stain of having signed letters denouncing candidate Trump by praising President Trump’s achievements and his crudely framed, rough-hewn wisdom, deploring his language but applauding at least some of his deeds. It is the temptation to accommodate oneself to the nature of the times, as Machiavelli would have put it, and to ally—cautiously but definitely—with the Power that is rather than the principles that were.
And that is where Tolkien comes in. His masterwork—the six books in three volumes, not the movies with their unfortunate elisions, occasional campiness and spectacular computer-generated images—addresses many themes relevant to our age, not least of which is that temptation.
At the beginning of Book II, elves, men, and dwarfs have gathered at Rivendell, home of Lord Elrond. There they debate what to do about the ring of the Dark Lord, Sauron, which has by a curious chance fallen into the possession of the hobbit Frodo. Toward the end of their deliberations they hear a report from Gandalf, the wizard who had befriended Frodo, and who had been taken prisoner by Saruman, the most senior wizard of his order, and escaped. Saruman had learned that the Ring had fallen into the possession of the hobbit, and he wanted Gandalf to help him get it. Gandalf reports Saruman’s pitch as follows.
[David Frum: The Republican party moves beyond hypocrisy]
“A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves or dying Númenor. This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means.”
And there you have it. Ally with the rising power (Sauron is making his ashen, desolate homeland, Mordor, great again) and use your wisdom to contain and guide it. Your old friends and allies are fools or weaklings. Go along with the inevitable, and you may shape the new world; oppose it, and you will simply fail and perish.
Gandalf does not fall into the Saruman trap. He knows, for one thing, that only one hand at a time can wield the ring, but more important, he knows—for Frodo has already offered the Ring to him—that the temptation to do good would get the better of him. It would start well and end ill, because the power of the Ring is corrupt. Later on in the book, the elven queen Galadriel similarly rejects Frodo’s desperate offer to rid himself of his burden for the same reason. Both Gandalf and Galadriel cannot be sure that the alternative course—have Frodo attempt to destroy the Ring by hurling it into a volcano—will succeed. In fact, they know that the overwhelming odds are that it will fail, with ghastly consequences. And they know that even if that desperate venture succeeds, it means the end of the world they have known, and their own permanent exile from Middle Earth. And they accept both possibilities.
Saruman, on the other hand, goes from bad to worse. He eats himself out with ambition, he commits extraordinary cruelties, and he ends up a mean, twisted, and impotent refugee whose lone follower loathes him. His infatuation with power has ruined a being once wise and beneficent.
[Peter Beinart:] Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt
The temptation of intellectuals is often this: the urge to influence the mighty because they lack the skills or the lineage or the luck to rule themselves. At the moment, despite all the investigations and scandals, the stumbles and desertions, Trump and the political party that has succumbed to his bullying and his appeal look like power, at least if you are a conservative thinker. And after several generations of conservative intellectuals coming to think that their job is to shape policy rather than simply articulate truth and outline the consequences of decisions or actions, a future of permanent exile from influence looks unacceptably bleak.
The stakes are not nearly as high for conservative thinkers as they were for the inhabitants of Middle Earth, but the basic idea is worth pondering. Some of them wish to walk back their condemnation of Trump, the animosities that he magnifies and upon which he feeds, the prejudices upon which he plays and the norms he delightedly subverts. They do so not because their original judgments have been proved unjust—far from it—but because, weary of unyielding opposition, they would like to shape things, or at least to hold communion with those who are in the room where the deals are done. But as Gandalf and Galadriel could teach them, the height of wisdom is to fear their own drive for power, to fight the fight in a darkening world even if it looks likely to end in failure, and, above all, to choose to remain their better selves.
“The FBI assesses the cyberterrorism threat to the U.S. to be rapidly expanding,” said one law-enforcement official, testifying before Congress. “Terrorist groups will either develop or hire hackers, particularly for the purpose of complementing large physical attacks with cyber attacks.”
That assessment was made nearly 15 years ago. In the meantime, a generation of tech-savvy jihadists has exploited the internet to attract recruits, share bomb-making expertise, and incite violence. Yet they haven’t managed to pull off the devastating cyberattacks that experts have long feared.
With just days left before Americans go to the polls for midterm elections, it is worth considering: Why not?
“I’m as puzzled as you are,” said Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director from 2004 to 2008. “These folks are not cyberdumb.”
“They use the web and show a great deal of sophistication in how they use it, for many purposes,” he added. “But they have not yet used it to create either digital or physical destruction. Others have.”
[Read: Writing the rules of cyberwar]
Officials have never really stopped warning about the potential for destructive cyberattacks. As recently as last month, the U.S. government was warning that “foreign actors” including Russia, China, and Iran could try to meddle in the midterms—in a possible reprise of Russia’s internet-enabled attack on the 2016 presidential election.
With threats like those in mind, this fall the administration released what it billed as “the first fully articulated cyber strategy in 15 years.” But as more countries, and organizations, gain access to destructive online tools, the nightmare scenario of entire cities suddenly going dark, or rogue actors gaining control of weapons systems, doesn’t seem far-fetched. And the chaos and possible destruction that could result is just the sort of outcome a terrorist might seek to inflict.
Three main barriers are likely preventing this. For one, cyberattacks can lack the kind of drama and immediate physical carnage that terrorists seek. Identifying the specific perpetrator of a cyberattack can also be difficult, meaning terrorists might have trouble reaping the propaganda benefits of clear attribution. Finally, and most simply, it’s possible that they just can’t pull it off.
[Read: How democracies lose in cyberwar]
“Terrorists don’t want to just create random problems for the world. They want [to create] specific types of problems, that cause certain types of fear and terror, that garner certain media attention, that galvanize followers,” said Joshua Geltzer, who served as the senior director for counterterrorism on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “Some data being deleted or ... ransomware locking the hospital out of its files, it’s not the same as those videos from 9/11.”
Then there is the question of attribution and propaganda value. When cyberweapons are deployed, proving who used them can be tough—and that can be unappealing from a terrorist’s perspective. Part of the point of a terrorist attack is the ability to credibly claim it, to spread fear by creating the impression of the ability to strike anywhere at any time. When attribution is murky, the psychological effect of a clear public claim is diminished.
The most powerful likely barrier, though, is also the simplest. For all the Islamic State’s much-vaunted technical sophistication, the skills needed to tweet and edit videos are a far cry from those needed to hack.
“ISIS and al-Qaeda, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t hit the send key” if they had the equivalent of a cyberweapon of mass destruction, “especially when they’re on the ropes like they are in some areas,” said David Petraeus, who served as CIA director from 2011 to 2012.
Indeed, Donald Trump’s administration has publicly warned that ISIS may find “virtual safe havens” as its physical territory shrinks. “Let’s remember that these are groups whose members are willing to blow themselves up to take us with them,” Petraeus said. “I don’t know how you deter an enemy like that from using whatever capability they might develop.”
The biggest cyberattacks so far attributed to ISIS have caused little real-world damage. In one instance in 2015, attackers calling themselves “CyberCaliphate” briefly took control of the Twitter and YouTube accounts of United States Central Command, which oversees U.S. military operations in the Middle East, posting threats and pro-ISIS messages. More serious was the 2015 case of Ardit Ferizi, a Kosovo citizen who pleaded guilty to stealing the personal information of more than 1,000 U.S. service members and federal employees and then providing them to an ISIS propagandist, who duly posted them on the internet with instructions to attack.
“It wasn’t as if they were staying away from this domain,” said Nicholas Rasmussen, who was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until late 2017. “It’s just that it seemed their capability was limited to kind of the low-end stuff—what we thought of as harassment activity, as opposed to truly destructive activity.”
In this, they differ from state actors such as Russia—which in 2007 nearly crippled portions of Estonia’s digital infrastructure, including its biggest bank—or North Korea, which the U.S. has accused of stealing more than $80 million by hacking Bangladesh’s central bank.
“We drew a pretty sharp distinction when I was still in government between what state actors were capable of and what terrorist actors were capable of,” Rasmussen said. “And, speaking personally, it was just increasingly hard to understand why that divide hadn’t been crossed.”
[Read: Trump’s cyber-appeasement policy might encourage more hacks]
Still, crippling critical infrastructure is difficult. One thing that protects an electrical grid, for example, is the complexity of the systems that comprise it, said Robert M. Lee, who founded and runs the industrial-cybersecurity company Dragos, and who helped investigate a 2015 Russian hack that shut down part of Ukraine’s power grid.
“When we think of a single power plant, it’s not that complex, and so having an effect on one power plant is entirely doable in a way that’s easier than people realize,” he said. “But when you talk about a portion of a grid, you’re talking about hundreds of utilities and power sites—now you’re talking about an overall complex system.”
With the near-disappearance of the Islamic State’s caliphate, Hayden and others have warned that terrorists will be looking to innovate and experiment, and no one knows what that will look like. Cybertools developed by sophisticated state actors can escape into the public realm—the WannaCry ransomware attack, which locked users out of computers around the world in 2017, is believed to have been carried out by North Korea with tools stolen from the NSA. Groups like Hezbollah—a proxy for Iran, which has sophisticated cybertools of its own—could receive support in the form of cyberweapons.
Officials may well warn about the possibility of a major cyberterror event for another 15 years with no incident. In congressional testimony this month, Kirstjen Nielsen, who heads the Department of Homeland Security, warned: “DHS was founded 15 years ago to prevent another 9/11, but I believe an attack of that magnitude today is now more likely to reach us online.”
Like Russia’s cyberattack on the 2016 U.S. elections, if—or when—the attack comes, it may ultimately take a form no one has predicted.
O fundamento emocional da política conhecida como Brexit – abreviação de “Britain Exit”, a saída do Reino Unido da União Europeia – não é uma obsessão nacional por detalhes de política comercial. Não há debates apaixonados nos bares por toda parte sobre as tarifas aduaneiras.
Para a maior parte das pessoas, o Brexit diz respeito a algo muito mais visceral: a identidade nacional. A percepção de uma necessidade de “retomar o controle” sobre as fronteiras do Reino Unido e limitar drasticamente o volume de estrangeiros com permissão para residir e trabalhar no país foi referendada por uma pequena maioria dos eleitores na votação de 2016. Para os nacionalistas, o Brexit é uma escolha simples de se retirar de um bloco econômico que efetivamente elimina as fronteiras entre os estados-membros ao exigir a livre movimentação de pessoas, bens e serviços.
O que poucos apoiadores do Brexit na ilha da Grã-Bretanha perceberam naquele momento, porém, é que seu país, o Reino Unido da Grã-Bretanha e Irlanda do Norte, só tem uma fronteira terrestre com a União Europeia, e é uma fronteira altamente contestada: a linha que divide a Irlanda e foi imposta pelo Império Britânico há um século. Nos últimos vinte anos, foi fácil esquecer o caos e a destruição que a imposição dessa fronteira causou, pois a participação conjunta na UE facilitou a celebração de um acordo de paz que interrompeu o derramamento de sangue na Irlanda do Norte e eliminou a necessidade de controle alfandegário e imigratório ao longo da “linha da maldade”, como apelidou um escritor irlandês.
Foto: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
A despeito de toda a discussão sobre a saída do Reino Unido, porém, é importante compreender que o Brexit foi uma decisão preponderantemente da Inglaterra: 87% dos votos a favor da saída foram obtidos na Inglaterra, e dois terços das pessoas que se consideram mais inglesas que britânicas votaram pela saída.
Enquanto os ingleses faziam uma campanha baseada na nostalgia do Império Britânico que outrora foi seu domínio, a maioria dos eleitores em dois outros integrantes do Reino Unido – Escócia e Irlanda do Norte – votou contra o Brexit, abrindo espaço para que um deles, ou ambos, em algum momento decidissem abandonar a união.
O principal apoio ao Brexit – assim como o apoio ao Partido Conservador do Reino Unido – vem da Inglaterra, o que ajuda a explicar por que as negociações com a UE sobre a saída do Reino Unido chegaram a um impasse a respeito de uma questão que até recentemente os nacionalistas ingleses pareciam ter esquecido: o conflito suspenso, mas ainda em aberto, na primeira colônia inglesa, a Irlanda.
Se os governantes ingleses não tivessem embarcado no processo centenário de colonização da Irlanda, ou não tivessem imposto a divisão da ilha em 1921, para criar um enclave leal onde os colonizadores protestantes britânicos prevalecessem sobre os nativos católicos irlandeses, a saída do Reino Unido da UE, envolvendo apenas Inglaterra, Escócia e País de Gales, seria uma questão relativamente simples.
Na situação atual, porém, a primeira-ministra Theresa May está encurralada em negociações complexas sobre a forma de retirar todo o Reino Unido da união aduaneira e de mercado único da Europa sem comprometer a frágil paz existente na Irlanda. Os postos alfandegários e de imigração, que os nacionalistas ingleses consideram apenas uma inconveniência que vale a pena tolerar para viver em uma sociedade menos multicultural, exigiriam uma infraestrutura de fronteira na antiga linha divisória da Irlanda. Isso causaria uma avalanche de dores de cabeça para as pessoas e empresas na Irlanda, e praticamente asseguraria o retorno da violência.
No Seminário Anual sobre Crime Organizado Internacional, realizado no ano passado na Irlanda, chefes de polícia de ambos os lados do país alertaram que “quanto mais infraestrutura na fronteira, mais oportunidades são criadas” para a violência praticada por dissidentes políticos e ex-paramilitares já envolvidos em contrabando.
Ao contrário de vários entusiastas do Brexit em seu partido, a primeira-ministra parece ao menos ter consciência de que o Reino Unido tem uma responsabilidade legal e moral, nos termos do acordo de paz de 1998, de evitar a carnificina que provavelmente decorreria de qualquer tentativa de dividir novamente a Irlanda e reinstaurar a fronteira.
Theresa May também está de mãos atadas porque a União Europeia, que leva a sério seu papel na prevenção de conflitos no continente, reiterou que sequer iniciará a discussão sobre uma futura relação comercial com o Reino Unido até que a primeira-ministra assine um acordo de saída assegurando que a fronteira com a Irlanda permanecerá aberta.
Esse acordo, porém, é mais simples na teoria que na prática, porque a lógica do Brexit e da União Europeia exige uma fronteira externa fechada.
Há ainda o problema de que a íngreme linha divisória de quase 500km, definida pelo governo britânico em 1921 como fronteira da nova província da Irlanda do Norte, não é de forma alguma uma fronteira natural. Não existe cadeia de montanhas ou curso d’água que divida a Irlanda em duas partes: há apenas uma linha em um mapa, desenhada às pressas pela retirada de funcionários públicos coloniais. Essa estratégia foi posteriormente denominada “dividir e abandonar” por Penderel Moon, um agente colonial britânico envolvido na divisão igualmente mal planejada da Índia, feita pelo império em 1947. (Quatro décadas depois, o vice-rei britânico que supervisionou a sangrenta divisão da Índia, Louis Mountbatten, foi morto pelo IRA enquanto passava férias na Irlanda.)
A linha divisória de 1921, que criou a nova província da Irlanda do Norte, controlada pela Grã-Bretanha, ao longo de antigas fronteiras de condado que atualmente passam sobre campos, cidades e casas, também foi desenhada a serviço de uma descarada trapaça eleitoral em grande escala. Era uma nova linha traçada no mapa-múndi para dividir ao meio uma nação insular, de tal forma que o poder colonial em retirada pudesse assegurar que os descendentes dos colonizadores controlariam o enclave onde se tornariam maioria.
Essa divisão deu origem a décadas de violência política e terrorismo na Irlanda do Norte e na Grã-Bretanha, período que ficou conhecido, num eufemismo tipicamente irlandês, como “the Troubles” [os Problemas]. Durante esse período, mais de 3.500 pessoas foram mortas, direitos civis básicos e o devido processo legal foram suspensos, e o Exército Britânico construiu torres de vigilância e pontos de controle e destruiu centenas de estradas, pontes e vias rurais para controlar o fluxo de pessoas e bens entre as duas parte da Irlanda.
É impossível para qualquer um que tenha crescido à sombra daquela fronteira – eu passava as férias de verão na infância visitando a família da minha mãe em ambos os lados – esquecer o impacto emocional das horas desperdiçadas na espera em um dos poucos pontos de travessia autorizados, os encontros tensos com soldados armados nos pontos de controle altamente fortificados do Exército Britânico. E no entanto, nas duas últimas décadas, sob os auspícios da UE, os pontos de controle alfandegários e de segurança foram removidos, e a fronteira entre as duas jurisdições da ilha se tornou tão pouco perceptível quanto a linha divisória entre dois estados da federação. É como o desaparecimento de uma cicatriz.
Foto: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Observando da Irlanda as discussões sobre o Brexit, Denis Bradley, jornalista e ex-vice-presidente do conselho de polícia do Serviço Policial da Irlanda do Norte, comentou que o Reino Unido e a UE subestimaram a determinação do povo irlandês que sofreu anos de violência para tolerar uma fronteira. “A Fronteira não precisa de solução, porque já está resolvida”, escreveu Bradley no jornal Irish Times.
“Vinte e pouco anos atrás a fronteira da Irlanda desapareceu”, ele explicou. “Os antigos postos alfandegários já tinham desaparecido há muito tempo, e então, um belo dia, o Exército Britânico levantou acampamento e voltou para casa. A maior parte das pessoas sentiu que um peso saía dos ombros – pessoas que haviam vivido na sombra daquela presença estavam, pela primeira vez, livres da inconveniência e da cicatriz na paisagem. Desde então elas vivem com essa liberdade, que consideram boa e justa, e não têm qualquer intenção de abrir mão dela.”
“A questão da fronteira da Irlanda precisa ser separada da esfera econômica e analisada no contexto dos direitos fundamentais”, escreveu no ano passado Eoin McNamee, roteirista e romancista que cresceu atravessando a fronteira para chegar à escola. “Theresa May pode insistir que seu país irá deixar a União Europeia. A UE pode determinar as condições que desejar. Mas nenhuma delas pode determinar ou insistir que uma linha da maldade seja novamente traçada sobre esta ilha.”
A realidade daquela época, lembrou McNamee a seus leitores, eram “estradas esburacadas, corpos despejados em sacos plásticos pretos, torres de vigilância, igrejas cravejadas de balas, casas cravejadas de balas. Era à noite que se sentia completamente o impacto, ao dirigir por estradas desertas atravessando regiões misteriosas, onde não havia nada além da vigilância e das más intenções.”
Conversei com McNamee em Londres na semana passada. “A economia não é a questão-chave”, ele me disse. A divisão, segundo ele, era “um equívoco moral, no mesmo sentido em que o Muro de Berlim era um equívoco moral, uma afronta à civilização”. Uma década depois da remoção da infraestrutura de fronteira, na sequência do acordo de paz, quando o tecido da cicatriz já havia começado a se recuperar, McNamee se recorda da súbita pergunta de seu irmão: “Aquilo tudo foi um sonho?”
Foto: John Giles/PA Images via Getty Images
A insistência do Reino Unido ou da UE na divisão da Irlanda, diz hoje McNamee, seria como dizer aos alemães que é preciso reconstruir o Muro de Berlim. “O que acontece não é só que as pessoas não querem – e elas não querem – mas elas não podem mais voltar a isso.”
Ou, como definiu recentemente o comediante irlandês Andrew Maxwell, ao ser indagado sobre uma solução para a questão da fronteira irlandesa: “Não é a fronteira irlandesa – é a fronteira britânica na Irlanda. A fronteira irlandesa é a praia.”
Em dissonância com os nacionalistas pró-Brexit do partido Conservador a que pertence, May parece estar desesperada para obter algum tipo de acordo que permita a todo o Reino Unido se manter o mais perto possível da UE, não apenas para evitar a volta do derramamento de sangue na Irlanda do Norte, mas também para proteger a indústria britânica. Por essa razão, no começo das negociações sobre os termos da saída do Reino Unido, May parecia disposta a aceitar uma oferta da UE para proteger a paz na Irlanda do Norte concedendo à região um status especial depois do Brexit, que permitiria que permanecesse tanto no Reino Unido quanto na união aduaneira e de mercado único da Europa. Isso tornaria desnecessário estabelecer pontos de controle de bens e pessoas para a travessia de ida ou de volta para a Irlanda.
Embora May tenha concordado em princípio com essa alternativa no final do ano passado – pelo menos como um “anteparo” que entraria em vigor apenas caso o Reino Unido não consiga negociar uma futura relação comercial com a UE estreita o suficiente para tornar desnecessários os controles de fronteira – ela agora não tem mais força política para convencer o restante de seu partido a acompanhá-la.
Talvez seja ainda mais relevante que, sem maioria parlamentar desde sua desastrosa decisão de convocar eleições gerais antecipadas no ano passado, a primeira-ministra também precise do apoio de 10 parlamentares norte-irlandeses do Partido Unionista Democrático (DUP), um grupo de fundamentalistas cristãos que fez campanha a favor do Brexit, mas contra o acordo de paz de 1998. Embora o DUP concorde da boca para fora com a ideia de manter a fronteira aberta, eles ameaçaram derrubar o governo de Theresa May caso ela tome qualquer iniciativa para aceitar o status especial da região, que possa envolver controle alfandegário sobre os bens que entram e saem da Grã-Bretanha. A líder do partido, Arlene Foster, descreveu recentemente sua oposição a uma tal concessão como um alerta “vermelho-sangue“.
As discussões intermitentes e arrastadas sobre o Brexit criaram uma profunda exasperação, compartilhada por apoiadores e oponentes da política. No final de junho, quando se completaram dois anos desde que o Reino Unido votou pela saída da União Europeia, e ainda sem sinal do que isso representaria na prática, um ator inglês de novelas manifestou seu descontentamento. “Quem sabe alguma coisa do Brexit? Ninguém tem a menor ideia do que seja o Brexit”, disse o ator Danny Dyer ao estupefato anfitrião Piers Morgan, durante um programa de entrevistas na televisão.
“Ninguém sabe o que é”, acrescentou Dyer, e a câmera cortou para os outros convidados, Pamela Anderson e Jeremy Corbyn. “É uma charada louca que ninguém sabe do que se trata”.
Holy shit the only person left talking sense on Brexit is *squints* Danny fucking Dyerpic.twitter.com/3kBIIa82Tp
— James Felton (@JimMFelton) 28 de junho de 2018
James Felton: “Caramba, a única pessoa dizendo algo com sentido sobre o Brexit é (apertando os olhos) o maldito Danny Dyer”.
O clipe viralizou em grande parte porque Dyer, em seguida, chamou o ex-primeiro-ministro David Cameron de “idiota” por ter convocado o plebiscito e “dado o fora” para aproveitar sua aposentadoria “na Europa, em Nice, de pernas para o ar” depois que seu lado restou vencido. Mas o ator também manifestou uma frustração compartilhada pelos milhões de britânicos que votaram pela decisão de deixar a UE, e então descobriram que seus líderes não tinham nenhum plano sobre a forma de fazê-lo.
A razão para a demora é que Theresa May, a sucessora de Cameron, vem tentando solucionar uma charada que pode não ter resposta. Permanece, no entanto, o fato de que, mais de dois anos depois de assumir o poder com a vaga promessa de que “Brexit significa Brexit”, a primeira-ministra ainda não demonstrou exatamente que tipo de relação futura ela deseja ter com a UE, ou como pretende ao mesmo tempo ter o completo controle das fronteiras do país e não ameaçar a paz na Irlanda.
Ela havia inicialmente prometido realizar duas coisas. Em primeiro lugar, a ruptura completa com a Europa que a extrema direita anti-imigração de seu partido exige – uma saída tanto da união aduaneira quanto do mercado único europeu. Em segundo lugar, prometeu negociar uma futura relação comercial com os membros remanescentes da UE, para satisfazer a ala moderada dos Conservadores, que se preocupam com a possibilidade de que a saída da união aduaneira e do mercado único possa destruir a economia do país, profundamente entrelaçada à do restante da Europa.
Mas é uma terceira questão que está se mostrando a mais problemática: Theresa May está presa à sua promessa de encontrar uma forma de remover o Reino Unido integralmente da UE sem colocar em xeque a frágil situação de paz ao longo da fronteira anteriormente contestada e militarizada.
Em um recente tweet endereçado ao líder da campanha do Brexit, Boris Johnson, Patrick Kielty, um comediante da Irlanda do Norte cujo pai foi morto por atiradores paramilitares durante o período de conflito, explicou que a UE era um componente essencial da “magia oculta” do acordo de paz por meio do qual se assegurou ao grupo majoritariamente protestante dos “Unionistas que a Irlanda do Norte permaneceria parte do Reino Unido até que a maioria votasse em contrário”, e no qual “a fronteira foi removida e a ilha foi religada”, de tal forma que os irlandeses católicos “Nacionalistas poderiam fingir que já viviam numa Irlanda Unificada”.
“Alguns desses nacionalistas aceitaram então fazer parte do Reino Unido, uma vez que sua vida no dia a dia era essencialmente irlandesa”, prosseguiu Kielty. “Esse plano astucioso foi apresentado para nós sob o argumento de que todos éramos parte da UE, e que a obsessão pela nacionalidade era coisa do tempo da última Guerra Mundial”.
Ao remover a UE desse feitiço, os políticos pró-Brexit “abriram uma caixa de Pandora para a Irlanda do Norte”, ele acrescentou. “É uma das razões pelas quais a maioria das pessoas [na Irlanda do Norte] votou por permanecer na UE”.
Especialistas como R. Daniel Kelemen, professor de Direito e Ciência Política na Universidade Rutgers, tentaram alertar Theresa May para o fato de que só há uma forma de manter todas as suas três promessas: “pensamento mágico”.
You really need to look at this. It is impossible to keep all three promises you’ve made. Accept reality and choose. pic.twitter.com/mxgrucuzSZ
— R. Daniel Kelemen (@rdanielkelemen) 13 de maio de 2018
Theresa May: “O caminho que estou seguindo é o caminho para dar ao povo o Brexit pelo qual votaram. Precisarei de seu auxílio e suporte para chegar até lá. E o que prometo em troca é simples: não irei desapontá-los”.
Daniel Kelemen: “Você realmente precisa abrir os olhos para isso. É impossível cumprir todas as três promessas que você fez. Aceite a realidade e escolha.”
Círculo rosa: Promessa 1: Sair da União Aduaneira e Mercado Único
Círculo verde: Promessa 2: Sem fronteira entre Irlanda do Norte e Grã-Bretanha
Círculo roxo: Promessa 3: Sem fronteira entre Irlanda e Irlanda do Norte
Opção A: Descumpre a promessa ao DUP. Fronteira no Mar da Irlanda. Reunificação irlandesa a longo prazo.
Opção B: Descumpre a promessa à Irlanda/UE. Violar o Acordo de Belfast com fronteira na Irlanda. Irlanda veta o Acordo de Saída, possibilidade de desastre do Brexit.
Opção C: Descumpre as promessas aos ultra-Brexit do gabinete. Brexit Leve. Brexiteers se revoltam. May é removida.
Opção D: Totalmente impossível. Pensamento mágico, Unicórnios, etc.
Fonte: R. Daniel Kelemen, Universidade Rutgers
Determinada a prosseguir a despeito de tudo, Theresa May continuou a apresentar propostas que não satisfazem ninguém e que despertam o receio de que o Reino Unido possa esgotar o prazo para obter um acordo antes que sua qualidade de membro da UE chegue ao fim, às 23h do dia 29 de março de 2019. Caso isso aconteça, o chamado Brexit Sem Acordo poderia perturbar tudo, do fluxo de alimentos e medicamentos para dentro do país às viagens aéreas para fora.
A shocked cabinet was today told no-deal Brexit may force government to own or operate lorry ferries, because freight through Dover and Channel Tunnel could fall 85% and we’d run out of vital goods, food and medicine https://t.co/gbFn5wsDxH
— Robert Peston (@Peston) 23 de outubro de 2018
Robert Peston: “Um gabinete em choque foi informado hoje de que um Brexit sem acordo poderia forçar o governo a deter a propriedade ou operar barcas, porque a travessia por Dover ou pelo Túnel do Canal poderia cair 85%, e ficaríamos sem bens essenciais, comida e medicamentos.”
Brexit has become like a declaration of war on ourselves. Emergency ships will be chartered for food and medicine if we leave the EU with no deal. But at least when we’re using ration books and running out of drugs, we’ll have taken back control.https://t.co/Kf6Pw4nzPf
— David Lammy (@DavidLammy) 23 de outubro de 2018
David Lammy: “O Brexit se tornou uma espécie de declaração de guerra a nós mesmos. Navios de emergência precisarão ser afretados para transportar comida e medicamentos se sairmos da UE sem um acordo. Mas pelo menos, quando estivermos fazendo contabilidade de racionamento e ficando sem remédios, teremos de volta o controle.”
Isso levou a pedidos da UE para que a primeira-ministra simplesmente adotasse o plano de emergência com o qual havia concordado no ano passado, que daria status especial à Irlanda do Norte depois do Brexit. Sofrendo pressão para atender à linha dura dentro de seu próprio partido e ao DUP, Theresa May rejeitou agressivamente, como uma tentativa de dividir seu país ao meio, o mesmo plano que havia aceitado em dezembro, ignorando o fato de que a Irlanda do Norte só existe porque a Grã-Bretanha dividiu a Irlanda ao meio em 1921.
Como apontou o ex-assessor de May, Matthew O’Toole, na revista The Spectator do mês passado, o que a primeira-ministra não reconhece é que o acordo de paz assinado em Belfast, na Sexta-Feira Santa, em 1998 já deu aos cidadãos norte-irlandeses direitos especiais que os manterão mais próximos da UE depois do Brexit. Em decorrência do acordo de paz, todos os cidadãos da Irlanda do Norte têm direito a passaportes irlandeses e do Reino Unido, o que significa que, depois do Brexit, essa poderá ser uma região de um país não membro inteiramente povoada por cidadãos da UE. O Acordo da Sexta-Feira Santa (ou Acordo de Belfast) também deu à região permissão para se separar do Reino Unido e se reunir à República da Irlanda, caso uma maioria de eleitores aprove a mudança em um plebiscito. O’Toole conclui que, então, “é a única parte do Reino Unido onde os cidadãos têm, ao mesmo tempo, direito permanente à cidadania da UE e um caminho formal de retorno à participação na UE por meio de um futuro plebiscito sobre a união da Irlanda”.
Independentemente de qual seja o resultado das negociações, muitos observadores irlandeses têm demonstrado espanto diante da tranquilidade com que suas preocupações sobre os impactos de uma nova divisão da Irlanda vêm sendo desprezadas pelo governo de Theresa May e pelos representantes da linha dura, autodenominados “Brexiteers”, que empurram seu partido para a direita.
May steering the Titantic straight for the iceberg. Speech almost completely at odds with reality.
— Karl Whelan (@WhelanKarl) 21 de setembro de 2018
Karl Whelan: “May conduzindo o Titantic (sic) diretamente para o iceberg. Discurso quase totalmente dissociado da realidade.”
You do get the sense that HMG has never taken Ireland seriously and that this condescension, once widespread but essentially an anachronism in today’s UK, may be the fatal flaw that drives their country over the no deal cliff https://t.co/JCBO280gvV
— Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke (@kevinhorourke) 20 de setembro de 2018
Kevin O’Rourke: “Você tem a sensação de que HMG [o governo britânico, “Her Majesty’s Government”] nunca levou a Irlanda a sério, e que essa condescendência, que já foi disseminada, mas hoje é anacrônica no Reino Unido, pode ser o erro fatal que empurrará o país para o abismo sem acordo.”
Simon Usherwood: “Macron chuta cachorro morto depois do equívoco de May no café da manhã do Brexit”
Oh, sorry … excuse me … apologies … am I in your way? … whoops, I … though … now I think of it … you did put me here to be in the way … sorry and now … I’m in your way … you have to admit … that’s kind of funny … no, you’re right it’s not … sorry I can’t
— The Irish Border (@BorderIrish) 14 de outubro de 2018
A Fronteira Irlandesa: “Oh, desculpe… Com licença… perdão… estou no seu caminho?… ops, eu… mas… pensando bem… você me colocou aqui para ficar no caminho… desculpe e agora… que estou no seu caminho… você tem que admitir… que é meio engraçado… não, você está certo, não é… desculpe, não consigo”
Um dos líderes da facção arquiconservadora, Jacob Rees-Mogg, vem consistentemente minimizando o risco de caos caso o Reino Unido despenque para fora da UE sem obter um acordo. Ele atraiu indignação especialmente na Irlanda do Norte, onde a maioria votou contra o Brexit, por dizer que não via necessidade de visitar a fronteira irlandesa de quase 500km, que poderá ser fechada depois do Brexit para evitar que os produtos britânicos sejam contrabandeados para a UE.
Rees-Mogg defendeu que recebe dos membros do DUP, cujo objetivo é manter a Irlanda do Norte dentro do Reino Unido, todas as informações de que precisa sobre a fronteira. Nenhum desses parlamentares norte-irlandeses, no entanto, efetivamente representa as comunidades na linha da fronteira com a Irlanda, que votaram decididamente contra o Brexit no plebiscito de 2016.
The DUP (whose 10 seats in the UK Parliament, from just 36% of the vote, are shaded red) act as if they have a veto over all proposals to keep the Irish border open, but they do not represent a single constituent who actually lives on the border. (Green areas voted Sinn Fein) pic.twitter.com/EMQBN64l4Z
— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) 3 de dezembro de 2017
Robert Mackey: “O DUP (cujas 10 cadeiras no Parlamento do Reino Unido, com apenas 36% dos votos, estão em vermelho) age como se tivesse poder de veto sobre todas as propostas de manter aberta a fronteira da Irlanda, mas não representa um único eleitor que efetivamente resida na fronteira. (As áreas em verde votaram no Sinn Fein)”
“Ele é um ótimo exemplo do casulo onde vivem os fervorosos Brexiteers – ele não sabe nada a respeito da fronteira com a Irlanda, ele não está interessado nisso”, declarou recentemente Deirdre Heenan, professora de ciência política na Universidade de Ulster, referindo-se a Rees-Mogg. “O sujeito vive em negação; vive em algum tipo de terra dos sonhos onde, depois do Brexit, vamos retornar a um Reino Unido grandioso e imperialista.”
Em meados desse ano, começou a circular um vídeo onde Rees-Mogg admitia, de forma indireta, que o Brexit poderia exigir a retomada dos controles de fronteira praticados durante os 30 anos da guerra civil na Irlanda do Norte.
“Haveria a possibilidade, como existiu durante o período “the Troubles”, de inspecionarmos as pessoas”, disse Rees-Mogg em um seminário. “Não se trata de uma fronteira que todo mundo precisa atravessar todos os dias, mas é claro que, por razões de segurança, durante o período de conflito nós mantivemos bastante vigilância sobre a fronteira, para tentar impedir o tráfico de armas e coisas assim”.
O parlamentar Conservador – que parecia preocupado apenas com a prevenção contra a entrada de imigrantes europeus no Reino Unido pela Irlanda do Norte – aparentemente não tinha ciência do quanto essas buscas eram intrusivas e irritantes. Ao longo das três décadas que antecederam o acordo de paz de 1998 na Irlanda do Norte, que deu a todos os residentes o direito de portar tanto o passaporte irlandês quanto o do Reino Unido, a maior parte das estradas que atravessam a fronteira foram fechadas pelo Exército Britânico, e todos os carros que atravessavam eram inspecionados nos pontos de controle altamente fortificados, primeiro por soldados armados, depois por agentes alfandegários.
O ministro das Relações Exteriores da Irlanda, Simon Coveney, reagiu horrorizado à ignorância do político Conservador sobre o traumático e sangrento passado recente da Irlanda do Norte. “É difícil acreditar que um político de alto escalão esteja tão mal informado sobre a Irlanda e sobre os aspectos políticos da questão da fronteira irlandesa no Brexit a ponto de fazer tais comentários”, observou Coveney no Twitter. “Deixamos o período ‘the Troubles’ para trás, por meio dos esforços sinceros de muitos, e é assim que pretendemos permanecer.”
No mês passado, houve uma resposta mais poética, mas igualmente contundente a Rees-Mogg e a outros que minimizaram o perigo de restaurar a fronteira fechada, por parte do roteirista norte-irlandês Clare Dwyer Hogg e do ator natural de Belfast Stephen Rea, em um poético artigo de opinião para o jornal Financial Times, filmado na fronteira.
“Jacob Rees-Mogg, você está certo. Você não precisa visitar o Norte da Irlanda para compreender a fronteira – você precisa ter vivido aqui”, diz Rea, de pé sobre a fronteira. “Nós vivemos aqui, e estamos segurando a respiração de novo.”
Foto do Título: Além dos pontos de controle fortificados nas travessias de fronteira, o Exército Britânico também realizava inspeções in loco nos veículos no território da Irlanda do Norte, como esta, em 1969, durante as décadas da guerra civil que ficou conhecida como “the Troubles”.
The post O Reino Unido precisa se redimir pela divisão da Irlanda para dar seguimento às negociações do Brexit appeared first on The Intercept.
Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican with a long history of white supremacist views, erupted in anger on Thursday when asked by a constituent to explain how his anti-immigrant ideology differed from the beliefs of the white supremacist terrorist who killed 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last week.
The heated exchange, which was captured on video, began with Kaleb Van Fosson, an Iowa State University student who lives in King’s district, asking his representative about the apparent similarity between his own claim that “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,” and the Pittsburgh gunman’s anti-immigrant statements.
Steve King blows up at questioner who pressed him on the Pittsburgh massacre #IA04 pic.twitter.com/7sFQyY9fOW
— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) November 1, 2018
“The terrorist who committed this crime, he was quoted as saying, ‘they bring invaders in that kill our people, I can’t sit back and watch our people get slaughtered,'” Van Fosson said. “You, Steve King, have been quoted as saying, ‘we can’t restore our civilization with other peoples babies.’ You and the shooter both share an ideology that is fundamentally anti-immigration.”
Before he could finish his question, the student was interrupted by King. “No, don’t you do that. Do not associate me with that shooter,” King said. “I knew you were an ambusher when you walked in the room, but there is no basis for that, and you get no question, and you get no answer.”
“I’m not an ambusher,” Van Fosson replied. “I was about to ask you, what distinguishes your ideology –” he said, before King cut in again, saying, “No, you’re done. We don’t play these games here in Iowa. No, you’re done. You crossed the line. It’s not tolerable to accuse me to be associated with a guy that shot 11 people in Pittsburgh. I am a person who has stood with Israel from the beginning — the length of that nation, is the length of my life — and I have been with them all along and I will not answer your question and I will not listen to another word from you.”
“If you don’t have a white supremacist worldview, then why did you travel to Austria and meet with a white supremacist organization?” Van Fosson interjected.
“This is over if you don’t stop talking,” King said, turning to the moderator. “This is over if they don’t stop talking, I’m leaving.”
The moderator then cut off the exchange, saying, “I think he’s given his answer. His answer is his answer.”
“But do you identify as a white supremacist?” Van Fosson asked.
“Stop it!” King yelled, his voice breaking.
“Then why did you meet with a white supremacist organization in Austria?” his constituent asked.
“You’re done!” King barked. “I want to ask whoever is guarding this door to lead this man out of the room,” the congressman said, despite the fact that the event was open to anyone who, like Van Fosson, had registered and paid $15 to attend.
Van Fosson, an Iowa State junior studying political science, then departed to join a group of about 70 protesters outside the event from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, a group that had asked for King to be barred from the Des Moines Partnership candidates forum because of his clearly articulated white supremacist views.
“I’m not working for any campaign,” Van Fosson said in an interview after the event. “I’m a voter who lives in his district and I think it’s important for people to talk to their representative.” The student added that this was the second time that he had attempted to ask King about his anti-immigrant views. Last week, he said, he had attended an event in rural Iowa and “walked up to him very politely,” afterwards, only to be forced away by the candidate’s son and two other people. He was perhaps blocked on that occasion from asking the congressman any questions, Van Fosson speculated, because he didn’t look like he was a resident of the rural area, and because he was accompanied by a person of color.
King holds what is usually considered an extremely safe Republican seat, although one recent poll has shown his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten, just a point behind.
King, who holds an outsized influence on national politics because of his prominence in the state where presidential nominating campaigns begin, has faced new scrutiny since he met with members of a nationalist Austrian party founded by former members of the Nazi SS. The congressman also telling a news site associated with the party that that “Western civilization is on the decline” and has a well-established track record of racist views. In 2016, he stunned a television panel by claiming, during a live broadcast, that there was nothing wrong with the lack of diversity at the Republican National Convention since, he said, members of other races had contributed relatively little to human civilization.
“This ‘old white people’ business does get a little tired,” King said at the time. “I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”
When he was asked by the host Chris Hayes if he was really arguing that other races had contributed less “than white people,’ King said yes, he meant less “than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world.” In his interview with the far-right Austrian website, King proudly recounted the 2016 exchange, saying, “The video of this went viral because I defended Western civilization on national television.”
At another point in the forum in Des Moines on Thursday, King was confronted by an audience member who asked how he could support forcing immigrants to speak English when his own German-speaking grandmother had lived in the United States for more than three decades without learning the language.
In addition to his trip to Austria, King has been criticized by his own party for his recent endorsement of Faith Goldy, a candidate for Toronto mayor who recited a white supremacist oath and was featured in a neo-Nazi podcast around the time of the racist riots in Charlottesville.
On Thursday, King attacked The Washington Post for reporting on his trip to Austria and offered a defense of the Austrian Freedom Party, saying that even though it was founded by a former member of the Nazi SS, that individual had been quickly replaced by someone else. The party’s second leader, King did not explain, was also a former Nazi.
For his part, King seemed proud of his conduct at the candidate forum, sharing video on social networks of himself calling for his constituent to be ejected and asserting that his support for Israel made it impossible for him to be an extreme nationalist who would discriminate against people based on their race, ethnicity or religion.
Leftist Media Lies have reached Peak Insanity and compared me to the evil Pittsburgh murderer of 11 Jews! Here is my reaction. https://t.co/ocOlnS0Zbg
— Steve King (@SteveKingIA) November 1, 2018
The post White Supremacist Steve King Won’t Answer Question About His White Supremacist Views appeared first on The Intercept.
O caminho de Jair Bolsonaro à presidência foi marcado por uma profusão de impropérios e um desprezo tosco pelas instituições democráticas. O Supremo Tribunal Federal não passou despercebido à metralhadora engasgada da extrema-direita. Agora, seu papel está prestes a ser remodelado. No olho do furacão, o Brasil.
Desde sua instalação em 1891, o STF foi responsável por julgamentos históricos. Mas seu protagonismo aumentou exponencialmente com o transmissão ao vivo das decisões do Plenário, a partir de 2002. Ministros, então juízes, se tornaram estrelas e passaram a encher a boca para ler seus votos, muitos deles quilométricos e maçantes. Rompantes vergonhosos e arroubos de botequim se transformaram em rotina entre os membros da Corte. A população, mesmo embasbacada pelo juridiquês, passou a assistir à TV Justiça para ver o circo pegar fogo.
Nós apenas não percebíamos que isso vinha acontecendo, mas a função contramajoritária – de defender os direitos das minorias, frear os excessos do Estado e, muitas vezes, decidir contra a opinião pública – do Tribunal foi enfraquecida na surdina, entre a poeira das togas e o café morno servido no Salão Branco. De guardião da Constituição, o STF passou a se preocupar com o sentimento social – expressão perigosa utilizada pelo ministro Luís Roberto Barroso ao reescrever, sob o argumento da inconstitucionalidade, o Decreto de Michel Temer que concedeu indulto natalino em 2017.
O Supremo até que vinha bem na defesa dos direitos fundamentais – a eterna batalha entre o núcleo duro do indivíduo x a intervenção do Estado. Estabeleceu conceitos importantes para a compreensão do crime de racismo, declarou o entulho autoritário condensado na Lei de Imprensa incompatível com a Constituição de 1988, descriminalizou a antecipação terapêutica de partos de fetos anencefálicos e permitiu as pesquisas com células-tronco.
A guinada veio com o julgamento do Mensalão, a famigerada Ação Penal 470, que escancarou os bastidores da corrupção sistêmica e, ao mesmo tempo, alçou o STF a um pedestal para o qual não estava preparado e com o qual não soube lidar enquanto instituição.
Agora, com Bolsonaro eleito e já planejando a transição do poder, o STF está acuado.Nas intermináveis sessões televisionadas, entre um chilique e outra do ministro Joaquim Barbosa, o Supremo julgou com a faca no pescoço uma denúncia de proporções inimagináveis, pela qual a procuradoria-geral da República pedia a cabeça de figurões da política brasileira.
O STF não estava acostumado à tamanha visibilidade, mas gostou e mandou para a cadeia o alto escalão da República.
Então veio a Operação Lava Jato, que não se limitou ao Supremo Tribunal Federal e envolveu outros juízes e cortes – dentre eles Sérgio Moro e o Tribunal Regional Federal da 4ª Região. Mas o Supremo, às vezes equidistante, sempre esteve lá, altivo e pronto a reexaminar as decisões de outras instâncias. E, nesse meio tempo, instigado pela função requentada de juiz criminal, concedeu autorização para a execução de penas de prisão antes do final do processo, o que foi reafirmado no julgamento do habeas corpus de Lula, em um momento crucial e delicado da política brasileira.
Agora, com Bolsonaro eleito e já planejando a transição do poder, o STF está acuado, entre outras, pela declaração debochada de que, para fechá-lo, “basta um soldado e um cabo”, e precisa definir a sua pauta enquanto órgão de cúpula do Poder Judiciário: encampar a agenda de um governante avesso à reafirmação de garantias democráticas inegociáveis ou assumir o protagonismo de instituição responsável por frear os excessos estatais.
O dilema da Suprema Corte já tem data. O presidente eleito pretende aumentar o número de juízes de 11 para 21. Quer, a fórceps, “colocar lá dez do nível do Sérgio Moro, para poder termos a maioria lá dentro”.
Como, para Bolsonaro, o Supremo não passa de uma marionete e uma massa de manobra, resta descobrir se o guardião da Constituição vai permanecer na zona de conforto ou honrar a toga. Logo saberemos se temos juízes na nossa devastada Berlim.
The post O STF é a oposição natural de Bolsonaro. Ou o tribunal vai permitir ataques aos direitos civis? appeared first on The Intercept.
Certa vez, a escritora Ana Maria Gonçalves me disse que novembro é o mês em que ela mais trabalha. Muitos convites de palestras, bate-papos e seminários. Cruza o país de cabo a rabo. Outro dia, encontrei o empreendedor e comunicador Raull Santiago, e ele me disse que está cansado de ser convidado para falar sobre favela, violência, morte de jovens negros. Que é muito mais do que isso. Mas ser negro e morar no Complexo do Alemão, na percepção de muitos, o reduz.
Novembro, mês da consciência negra, é a época de muitas “histórias de superação” na imprensa. Mas não se vê, com a mesma dedicação, pessoas negras ocupando lugares em histórias de uma outra forma: como fontes ou especialistas, por exemplo. A história das pessoas negras é de horror por um lado, mas também é de vitória e resistência. A história dos negros brasileiros é a história do Brasil. E a história negra não cabe em 30 dias – deveria, na verdade, se diluir nos outros 365.
Pensando nisso, perguntei no Twitter e no Facebook quem são as pessoas negras admiradas pelas pessoas e por que. A ideia foi estender a excelente iniciativa Entreviste um negro. O resultado foi uma lista com 129 nomes, com atuações em áreas que eu inclusive tive que pesquisar para entender melhor. É o caso da Nadia Ayad, por exemplo, bioengenheira que ganhou um prêmio internacional ao desenvolver um mecanismo de filtragem e um sistema de dessalinização de água, fazendo com que se torne potável a partir do uso de grafeno.
Também fiquei fascinada com a história grandiosa de Oswaldo Luiz Alves. O nanotecnólogo, professor titular de química da Unicamp, desenvolve materiais para aplicação em problemas ambientais: ecomateriais e desenvolvimento de sistemas para filtragem e isolamento, com mais de 30 patentes registradas e incontáveis prêmios.
São pessoas como Ayad e Alves, com trajetórias excepcionais, que compõem a nossa lista. Muitos dos profissionais citados se formaram e especializaram para abordar a temática de raça – se preciso for. Mas o compilado preparado pelo Intercept tem especialistas em criptomoedas, ciência política, transparência, corrupção, direito, moda, neurociências, publicidade, economia, cinema e medicina, entre muitos outros temas.
Porque negros têm mais assunto do negritude. Bora dar espaço para eles serem o que são?
Confira:
The post Uma lista para 365 dias de consciência negra appeared first on The Intercept.
BP has been bullish about putting a price on carbon. The oil giant was one of six companies to call on governments around the world to adopt a global price on carbon in the lead-up to the Paris climate talks in 2015. Toward that end, it’s part of the Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, as well as a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council, or CLC, which hopes to place a $40-per-ton price on carbon in the U.S.
The company even has a whole webpage devoted to the topic. “We believe that carbon pricing provides the right incentives for everyone — energy producers and consumers alike — to play their part in reducing emissions,” the page reads.
So why is BP spending $13 million to defeat a measure to set a carbon price in Washington state?
The “Carbon Emissions Fee Measure,” known as ballot Initiative 1631, would leverage a $15 fee on every ton of carbon dioxide produced in the state, to be scaled up by $2 per ton every year until maxing out at around $55 in 2035, depending on inflation. Revenue from the fee would be invested in building up low-carbon infrastructure, forestry programs, and green jobs. The initiative would also set an overall goal of reducing emissions by 2035 to 40 percent below what they were in 2014. If that target isn’t reached, the price will continue to rise.
This would be the first statewide carbon tax-like measure in the country and a bellwether for climate policy nationwide, flanked with potential wins on other climate-focused ballot initiatives in Arizona (to increase the state’s renewable portfolio standard) and Nevada (to prohibit electric utility monopolies). Another measure to ban new drilling within a half-mile of homes and schools in Colorado has provoked industry pushback as well, as the state’s oil and gas industry champions its own countermeasure, a constitutional amendment that would allow them to sue state governments over any regulations that infringe on their profits.
With talk of a Green New Deal circulating among left-leaning and insurgent candidates at the federal level, I-1613 — a product of the state’s climate and environmental justice groups, which have emphasized job creation — is one of several ballot initiatives that could send a signal to D.C. as to what types of climate proposals are likely to gain steam once Democrats are able to push through legislation. In no other state, though, is the industry fighting a policy it theoretically supports.
Overall, the oil industry has spent over $28 million to stop I-1631 — making it the most expensive Washington statewide ballot initiative in history — and is blanketing airwaves with ads urging voters to reject it. In a letter to state Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon, BP Cherry Point refinery manager Robert K. Allendorfer explained his company’s opposition. After enumerating BP’s commitment to fighting climate change and to a “well-designed carbon pricing framework,” Allendorfer’s missive — sent to The Intercept by BP spokesperson Jason Ryan — lays out a three-point bill of particulars as to precisely what’s so wrong with I-1631.
In his first and third points, Allendorfer does not reveal much. Some climate hawks may even agree with his first gripe: that I-1631, which would cover about 80 percent of the state’s emissions, will exempt some of the state’s largest industrial polluters, particularly those that are most exposed to international trade like Boeing. The third includes vague, boilerplate language on how passing I-1631 would make “creating a successful carbon pricing program much more difficult.”
But it’s the second reason that makes clear the real difference between the oil and gas industry’s vision for a carbon price and what’s on the ballot in Washington. I-1631 “would fail to preempt other state and local carbon regulations,” Allendorfer wrote, meaning that it would not also peel away environmental standards or infringe on state agencies’ ability to enforce them as an olive branch to industry. As such, the measure would “thereby [jeopardize] thousands of Washington jobs.” In the following paragraph, Allendorfer noted that BP supports more than 9,600 jobs in the state, as if to issue a thinly veiled threat: It’d be a shame if something happened to them.
The CLC proposal for a $40-per-ton price for carbon that BP supports — though far higher than the $15-per-ton starting fee in I-1631 — would kneecap the federal government’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. In a recent op-ed, former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and CLC Executive Director Ted Halstead admitted that the plan is based on a series of concessions. Those “grand bargains,” they wrote, include “trading a robust and rising carbon price for regulatory relief. … Its effectiveness in reducing emissions justifies the phase-out of other carbon regulations that are far more intrusive.” Conveniently, for the industry at least, the CLC proposal would also exempt fossil fuel companies from climate liability lawsuits, like the one New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood recently brought against Exxon Mobil, another founding CLC member and member of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, which has thrown $1 million into the fight against I-1631.
Yellen and Halstead’s stated goal is to rein in carbon emissions even past the target set by the Paris agreement, but there’s little reason to suspect a market-based measure like a carbon tax could effectively do that on its own. Even the CLC’s higher price still falls well below the prices already factored into the climate models compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent report laying out pathways to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, which range from $135 to $5,500. “Market-based instruments are, in our view, a necessary condition that allow you to have decisions made in an efficient way,” John Roome, senior director for climate change at the World Bank, told me this summer when asked about the European Union’s Emissions Trading System. “But they’re generally not sufficient. So you cannot just rely on market-based mechanisms by themselves.” He noted, however, that different governments should select their own balance of market-based and regulatory measures.
Even I-1631’s ultimate price of $55 per ton is modest relative to the potential climate catastrophe we face, but this is a fact that the measure’s backers, including Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, are honest about. To them, I-1631’s potential to reduce emissions lies in the sizable investments it would fund for green infrastructure, scaling up renewables and other low-carbon efforts. All of the revenue generated by the fee — around $1 billion per year, all told — would be invested in green projects, allocated into three buckets: “clean air and clean energy” (70 percent of funds), “clean water and healthy forests” (25 percent), and “healthy communities” (5 percent). Within those categories, there are significant funds set aside for job creation, to help transition workers out of the fossil fuel industry, for projects approved by the state’s indigenous communities, and to help mitigate any financial burden of the fee on low-income energy consumers. The campaign website features a detailed map of projects around the state that revenue could be put toward.
I-1631 would also create a new statewide body to oversee progress toward meeting the overall emissions reduction goal. The Public Oversight Board would comprise 42 members appointed by the governor. Fifteen of them would have voting power, while nine members representing stakeholders from each of the three funding buckets would play advisory roles. The board would be similar to the California Air Resources Board, which has significant authority under the state’s climate legislation to spearhead emissions reductions and has been credited with much of the state’s progress on that front. (For more details on the mechanics behind I-1631, David Roberts at Vox and Kristin Eberhard of the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, a think tank, have each written useful explainers.)
The stakes for I-1631 are high, as this is the third time in two years that the state will decide whether to pass some sort of price on carbon. The first opportunity came in 2016, when voters overwhelmingly voted down Initiative 732, a so-called revenue-neutral tax of $15 per ton of carbon that would have scaled up more quickly and eventually topped out at $100 a ton. Industry largely sat out that fight, pouring just $260,000 into an opposition campaign. The groups backing I-1631 and several national groups mounted a more sizable opposition, citing (among other things) I-732’s lack of attention to and consultation with Washington’s progressive and environmental justice groups. Rather than using revenue to fund investments in communities around the state, that measure would have cut sales taxes and bolstered the state’s working families tax rebate. The second attempt at a carbon price came in March, when an Inslee-backed carbon-pricing bill failed to make it through the legislature, withdrawn after lawmakers realized that it would fall short of passing by “one or two” votes.
Photo: Ted S. Warren/AP
BP isn’t alone in its apparently conflicting climate views. The Western States Petroleum Association, a regional oil and gas lobby known as WSPA, advocated for and has repeatedly praised the newest iteration of California’s cap-and-trade system, which passed in 2017 with ample input from WSPA. Owing to that, that measure does pre-empt local regulations on refineries. Rather than having to pay directly for their emissions, the cap-and-trade system further allows industrial polluters to either buy up offsets from various green projects around the country — funding emissions reductions elsewhere to theoretically balance out their own — or trade credits with other companies. Last weekend, WSPA president Catherine Reheis-Boyd praised that measure as a “blueprint for the rest of the world to follow to fight climate change.” But in Washington state, WSPA sat out the fight over the last carbon-pricing initiative, I-732, refusing to take an official position.
“The better path to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in the state is to reject this ill-conceived initiative,” WSPA media relations manager Kara Siepmann said of I-1631 by email, “and for interested parties to work together on a market-based program that provides real GHG reductions with cost certainty.” She also cited a study from the Koch Brothers-linked Washington Policy Center, which found that I-1631 would raise costs on consumers and industry.
Alongside BP, Koch Industries has been one of the biggest donors to the opposition campaign. Other industry opponents include with Phillips 66, Andeavor (formerly Tesoro), and Valero.
“Yes on 1631,” the broad coalition of groups campaigning for the initiative, has raised $15 million, with support from billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates. But the campaign is cash-strapped compared to the opposition, to which industry groups have given more than $28 million.
The campaign has relied less on six-figure donations than on the enormous coalition of climate and environmental justice groups, tribal nations, labor unions, and businesses that worked together to draft the initiative and get it on the ballot. In the last several months, coalition members — organized principally by the Alliance for Jobs and Clean Energy — have been knocking doors, phone banking, and holding public events to get the word out and compel Washingtonians to get to the polls. On Wednesday, supporters of the campaign delivered “awards” to various oil companies around the world — from Houston to Washington, D.C. to London — that have fought I-1631.
I-1631 backers feel more hopeful than they have the last two times around, though no outcome is certain — particularly with the gargantuan amount of corporate cash pouring into the election. A Crosscut/Elway Poll from October found 57 percent of likely voters support the measure, as well as 50 percent of those polled overall. Whatever the outcome, Washington’s climate fight has already carried a lessons for those interested in seeing progressive climate policies passed elsewhere: If you want to get a sense of how much of a threat a given plan will pose to the world’s biggest polluters, looking at who’s funding the opposition might be a good place to start.
The post BP Claims to Support Taxing Carbon, but It’s Spending $13 Million Against an Initiative That Would Do Just That appeared first on The Intercept.
The California charter school lobby is testing its influence in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, turning an election for a somewhat obscure statewide position into a notably expensive battle.
More than $50 million has flown into the contest between two Democrats for a nonpartisan office with little statutory power. For perspective, this is more money raised than in any U.S. House race this cycle and most Senate races, not to mention every other race in California, save for the governor’s.
The race, largely understood as a proxy war for the future of California charter schools, is the second attempt by the state’s charter school lobby to demonstrate its influence this election cycle. The candidates, Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond, both insist that the race is about far more than charters, which currently enroll 10 percent of the state’s 6.2 million public school students, though they admit that they hold different visions for the publicly funded, privately managed schools. That’s something their funders also acutely recognize.
Tuck, a second-time candidate for the position who has never held elected office, has received endorsements from the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and the San Diego Union Tribune, among others. He’s is backed by the charter school movement, which has spent close to $30 million in support of his campaign. Three individuals alone — real estate developer Bill Bloomfield, Gap co-founder Doris Fisher, and venture capitalist Arthur Rock — have given a combined $11 million.
Tuck’s campaign has also raised over $5 million, something he says challenges the notion that he’s bought and paid for by the charter lobby, which did not directly give money to his campaign. “People focus on the independent expenditures, but I go the opposite way. We’ve raised money from over 4,000 individuals in direct contributions, ranging from high income to low income, people who support charters to people who oppose them, and everything in between,” he said. “People backing me just believe public schools aren’t working for all.”
Thurmond, a state assembly member representing a city in the San Francisco Bay Area, previously worked as a teacher, a social worker, a city council member, and a school board member. Thurmond has support of The Sac Bee and Los Angeles Times, the state Democratic Party, the California Teachers Association and other unions. He has raised close to $16 million. The California Teachers Association is Thurmond’s biggest supporter, donating $8 million to his campaign.
The charter school lobby’s interest in Tuck is not surprising. He served as the first president of the Los Angeles-based charter school network, Green Dot, and then became a founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a city-district collaboration focused on turning around low-performing public schools. He also serves on the board of Parent Revolution, a school choice advocacy group.
In an interview, Tuck said the amount of money being spent on the race is refreshing and an appropriate change for a state that has deprioritized public education. “There are 19 million registered voters in California, so when you take a step back, that really boils down to about $2 per voter, which doesn’t seem like an obnoxious amount of money,” he said. “I do think it’s good that we finally have a lot of resources focused on education in a statewide race. In California, it takes a lot of resources to communicate.” He pointed out that not one question was asked about education in the only debate for California’s gubernatorial race.
Thurmond, despite also pulling in millions of dollars, was more critical of the influx of money. “I really wish the amount of money being spent on this race was being provided to states and school districts to educate our kids,” he said. “I think it’s a waste. That money should be going to close the achievement gap, I’d rather see it go there.” He also lambasted the billionaires who “are spending lots of money to support [Tuck] and denigrating me and the kids that I served in a low-income district. They think they know more than the educators, and I know many of those billionaires have strong feelings against teacher unions.”
The California Charter School Association — a formidable force in state politics — is aware that this election is an important chance to show its influence has staying power. The lobby is backed by a few key repeat players—including billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — and has flexed its financial muscles in recent years, spending more than the teacher unions, which have historically dominated education politics. As EdSource reported, in 2015 and 2016 the California Teachers Association donated $4.3 million to candidates and political committees, while the charter association spent more than $17 million on state and local candidates.
In 2015, for example, the charter lobby spent more than $2 million to elect Ref Rodriguez to the Los Angeles school board, making him the first charter school operator to join the board. In 2017, education reform advocates won three more seats, giving the board a slim pro-charter majority for the first time ever. The 2017 races were the most expensive school board races in U.S. history, with the charter lobby spending $9.7 million to elect its candidates, next to the union’s $5.2 million.
An undated photo provided by the Los Angeles Unified School District of Ref Rodriguez.
Photo: Los Angeles Unified School District via AP
The charter movement’s victory was short-lived, however. Last September, Rodriguez was criminally charged with money laundering during his 2015 campaign. This past summer, Rodriguez pleaded guilty to conspiracy and resigned from the board — an embarrassing debacle for charter advocates, and one that leaves the school board’s balance of power once again up in the air. A special election to fill his seat is set for March.
Charter advocates faced another big defeat this year when they spent $23 million backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor. It was the largest independent expenditure effort for a gubernatorial primary in California’s history, and despite the flurry of attack ads, Gavin Newsom won the contest easily. The next governor is expected to play a major role in shaping state charter school policy, and many observers felt the charter lobby overplayed its hand by attacking Newsom so much.
California’s outgoing governor, Jerry Brown, was supported by the teachers union throughout his tenure, but he’s largely avoided placing stricter rules on charters and has steered clear of debates about their long-term future in the state. (Last month, however, Brown signed a bill, co-authored by Thurmond, that would ban for-profit charter schools. He had vetoed similar legislation in 2015, which was opposed at the time by the California Charter School Association. The association supported the bill this time around.)
Compared to the governor, the State Superintendent for Public Instruction commands far less power over education policy, but has an influential soapbox that many expect will be important as California charts its future on public education. The outgoing state superintendent, Tom Torlakson, has spoken out about the need to retool some of the state’s charter school authorization policies.
Reached for comment, the California Charter School Association referred questions to EdVoice, a separate pro-charter organization said to be handling media for the state superintendent race. EdVoice did not return multiple requests for comment.
The race has gotten more heated in the weeks leading up to Election Day, with EdVoice funding an attack ad against Thurmond that focused on his time serving as a school board member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District. The ad misleadingly suggested that Thurmond had been sued personally by the American Civil Liberties Union and reprimanded by the Obama administration. “Tony Thurmond failed the students he was supposed to help,” it states.
In 2012, the ACLU sued the district over its school facilities, and Thurmond, as a board member, was a named defendant in the suit. The ad, however, does not mention that four other board members were also sued, as were the superintendent and the associate superintendent. In 2013, the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights released a report finding that West Contra Costa had failed to promptly respond to the sexual harassment of students, though Thurmond was not a board member at this time. He said his campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter in response to the ad.
The California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus chair also issued a statement in response to the ad, calling it an exploitation of the #MeToo movement, while the California NAACP sent a letter to Tuck calling him out for “using lies and fake news to smear prominent leaders of color.”
The Thurmond campaign, for its part, has been running its own misleading ad, calling Tuck a “former Wall Street banker” and a “paid backer of charter schools,” who is “backed by Donald Trump’s education adviser and financed by the same billionaires behind Betsy DeVos.” The adviser referenced in the ad is Bill Evers, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who wrote an op-ed in support of Tuck in September and served on Trump’s education transition team. But the ad zooms in on a picture of DeVos, confusing viewers into thinking that the education secretary herself endorsed Tuck
Tuck sent his own cease-and-desist letter to the Thurmond campaign, calling its ad dishonest for implying that he was backed by DeVos and that he was on the charter movement’s payroll.
Tuck told The Intercept that his campaign is weighing whether to sue for libel but that it would be an expensive endeavor, and they would have to prove that the ad had long-term damage. “We’re still actively investigating it, and if I could sue knowing it wouldn’t cost us $50,000, I would do it tomorrow,” he said. “It’s just the financial calculation, but we shouldn’t normalize lying being OK.”
Assembly Member Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond, at a debate hosted by the Sacramento Press Club in Sacramento, Calif., on Sept. 11, 2018.
Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
In terms of education policy, Tuck and Thurmond’s visions have some broad similarities. They both speak passionately about ending the achievement gap and better serving the state’s neediest children. They both condemn the fact that California ranks 44th in the nation on K-12 education, according to the U.S. News & World Report, and they both want to increase state funding for schools, address the state’s teacher shortage, and expand prekindergarten.
But their visions for charter school growth are substantially different. While Tuck said ineffective charter schools should be shut down more quickly and that there needs to be “really strong accountability and transparency” for the schools, he supports opening more charters in neighborhoods where traditional public schools are producing low academic results. “I don’t think we should stop charter schools on the state level,” he added, alluding to a fierce ongoing debate over whether the state should step in to curb charter expansion.
Tuck stressed that, despite his support for charters, “the vast majority of the focus has to be on traditional public schools because that’s where the majority of the kids are.” He said his opponent has called for a “moratorium” on charters — a term Thurmond strongly contests. He prefers the word “pause.”
Thurmond, for his part, said he does not want to limit the ability to open a new charter “that has merit” but that the state must be more “intentional” about charter growth. “As a legislator, I think we have to ask ourselves, where is the tipping point at which we hurt the entire public?” he said. A study on the impact of charter schools, including “the good, the bad, and from the standpoint of what we can afford — how much more we can handle,” would be useful, he said.
Tuck is skeptical of using financial impact measures as a reason to halt new charters. “Finance should be a focus in every decision, but I don’t believe that if charters take additional kids, that would impede your ability to provide a quality education,” he said. “It would only have an impact if you don’t change your behavior at all.”
Marshall Tuck at a debate hosted by the Sacramento Press Club in Sacramento, Calif., on Sept. 11, 2018.
Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
With less than a week until the election, the two candidates will continue to battle it out over their qualifications to lead California’s schools. Thurmond has the more weighty endorsements, but Tuck is outspending his opponent more than 2 to 1.
A poll released Wednesday by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found Tuck leading Thurmond 48 percent to 36 percent, with Tuck’s advantage “underpinned by the strong backing of Republicans” and a majority of Democrats supporting Thurmond. Independent voters in the poll backed Tuck 5 to 3, while 16 percent of likely voters remain undecided.
While Thurmond points to his tenure in politics as proof of his experience and readiness for the job, Tuck has cast him as a career politician who won’t buck the status quo. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction “has been held for the last quarter century by politicians,” Tuck told the San Francisco Chronicle. “You can’t solve these problems with a bunch of bureaucrats in Sacramento.”
“I am proud to be a politician and a public servant,” said Thurmond. “The state superintendent has to work with the governor and legislature, and I have a record of doing just that. I love my job, and I could stay in the assembly if I wanted to, but I want my political legacy to be about helping kids.”
Correction: Thursday, November 1, 2018
This story originally reported that Thurmond’s ad aired in response to Tuck’s, but it was produced prior to it.
The post How the Charter School Wars Turned an Obscure Race Into California’s Second Most Expensive Election appeared first on The Intercept.
As the nation tunes into election results next Tuesday night, they may end up seeing a few spots of blue in an unusual place — smack dab in the middle of America’s heartland.
In both Kansas and Oklahoma, the GOP’s hold on its governors’ mansions is in peril, as polling has tightened and the elections in these states are now considered toss-ups. Alongside these two heartland states, Democrats are running competitive races for governor in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio, meaning that the splotch of blue could become a broad swath running across the middle of the country. In addition to various local issues, redistricting in these states after the 2020 Census will be heavily dependent on the outcome of state-level and legislative races. Control of the governorships also has significant implications for the 2020 presidential contest.
Kansas and Oklahoma, for their part, have something in common: Republicans have dominated statewide offices since 2011, and they have broken the states they were charged with governing.
In Oklahoma, GOP Gov. Mary Fallin, who was elected as part of a 2010 tea party wave, made cutting taxes a priority.
But in 2014, Oklahoma saw a collapse in oil revenues, which also decimated much of the state’s remaining income. The impact on basic services was severe. In 2017, the Washington Post reported that out of 513 school districts, 96 eliminated either Monday or Friday classes because they could only afford to send children to school four days a week.
Fallin has taken a beating in the polls and over the summer was named the least popular governor in the entire country, with an approval rating of 19 percent. She is term-limited, and the Republicans chose businessman Kevin Stitt to be their 2018 nominee for governor, facing off with Democrat Drew Edmondson, the state’s former attorney general.
It remains to be seen whether Stitt can overcome Fallin’s unpopularity, but there are signs that the Republican Party’s brand is damaged. Democrats at the legislative level have swept special elections since Trump’s 2016 win, and a wave of teacher protests led to the defeat of several Republican incumbent lawmakers in their party primaries. Polling on the race has been sparse, but what does exist shows a narrow single-digit lead by Stitt. Last week, Cook Political Report moved Oklahoma into its toss-up category.
David Blatt, the director of the Oklahoma Policy Institute and a longtime observer of state politics, told The Intercept that most political watchers believe the race will be close. “It definitely does look like a tight race,” he said. He pointed to a set of issues that the Democratic candidate is using to motivate voters. “Edmondson has tried to make it all about the record under the Republican government under the last eight years … particularly cuts that we saw in education and education funding shortages,” Blatt said. “He’s also talked a fair deal about health care and the need to expand Medicaid.”
In neighboring Kansas, the race is considered to be even closer. Republican gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach has maintained a slim 1 point lead over Democrat Laura Kelly in the last couple months of polling.
Like in Oklahoma, Kansas’s then-Republican Gov. Sam Brownback sharply cut taxes, straining the state’s budget for many basic services. Since then, the legislature has raised taxes as moderate factions within the state GOP battled conservatives in Brownback’s mold.
Burdett Loomis of the University of Kansas told The Intercept that Brownback’s legacy continues to hang over the state’s politics.
“He left us with unpopular policies, lots of reductions in revenues because of tax cuts. … [I]n 2016, the voters basically rejected this and brought in a bunch of moderate Republicans and Democrats into the legislature,” he said. “But Brownback is overhanging the election in the person of Kris Kobach.”
Incumbent GOP Gov. Jeff Colyer, widely seen as moderate, was likely a more electable candidate for the Republicans. But Kobach — an ally of President Donald Trump who has made his name backing strict right-wing measures on voter ID and immigration — narrowly defeated Colyer in the August primary.
Kobach and the approach he represents are so unpopular in Kansas that the only thing keeping him competitive is an independent drawing votes away from the Democrat — businessman Greg Orman is pulling around 8 or 9 points in polling.
Another difference in the race is that Kelly has a strong fundraising lead over Kobach. The Wichita Eagle reports that Kelly has out-raised Kobach by nearly $1 million since the end of July, while Kobach has just $61,000 left. Edmondson, on the other hand, has consistently lagged behind Stitt in fundraising.
Kansas briefly burst onto the national radar in April 2017, during a special election that was supposed to be a sleeper. But Democrat James Thompson wound up making his race for a Wichita congressional seat against Rep. Ron Estes close — he lost by 7 points — and the two face a rematch in November.
Brandi Calvert, a real estate agent from Wichita who organized the city’s Women’s March, is volunteering for Thompson again. She said that the campaign and allied organizers have registered tens of thousands of new voters in Sedgwick County alone. She noted that every living former governor — Democrat and Republican — has endorsed the Democrat. “It’s just wild high energy here,” she said.
The post Kansas and Oklahoma May Deliver Surprise Victories for Democrats on Election Day appeared first on The Intercept.
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The midterm elections are almost here and there’s a specter of the loyal, committed Trump voter haunting them. Two years ago, in 2016, angry, white, working-class voters in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin pulled the lever for Trump as a way of expressing their anger over economic injustice — and a populist blue-collar wave swept the billionaire property mogul into office. But a range of studies published since then from political scientists, economists, and pollsters have found that it was racial resentment and cultural anxiety — not economic anxiety — on the part of white voters that got Donald Trump into the Oval Office. In his new book, “Identity Crisis: the 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America,” political scientist John Sides marshals extensive evidence to show that it was white identity, anti-immigrant, and anti-Muslim sentiment that best predicted support for Trump, while economic anxiety played a much smaller role. Briahna Joy Gray, The Intercept’s senior politics editor, differs, arguing that economic anxiety was white, working-class voters’ primary motivation. They join Mehdi Hasan in D.C. to debate their opposing views on the 2016 elections.
Transcript coming soon.
Studies mentioned in this podcast:
Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote
Diana C. Mutz, April 2018
Beyond Economics: Fears of Cultural Displacement Pushed the White Working Class to Trump
PRRI/The Atlantic, May 2017
Explaining Nationalist Political Views: The Case of Donald Trump
Gallup, August 2016
More ‘warmth’ for Trump among GOP voters concerned by immigrants, diversity
Pew Research Center, June 2016
Top image: Then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses supporters in Dallas, Texas, on Sept. 14, 2015, and in Akron, Ohio, on Aug. 22, 2016.
The post The Midterms Are Days Away. What Will Drive Trump Voters: Race or Class? appeared first on The Intercept.
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