Segundo um alto executivo da Royal Dutch Shell, a petrolífera teria ajudado a redigir o acordo climático de Paris.
A empresa, porém, é também a nona maior emissora mundial de gases do efeito estufa.
O executivo David Hone, consultor-chefe de mudanças climáticas da Shell, fez seus comentários na conferência internacional sobre mudanças climáticas, a COP 24, na última sexta-feira. Hone falou com sinceridade sobre o tamanho da influência que sua empresa teve na redação do Acordo de Paris, por meio de seu envolvimento com a Associação Internacional de Comércio de Emissões, a Ieta.
O Acordo é a peça central da conferência na Polônia, que se encerra no próximo dia 14, onde os delegados estão tentando elaborar um regulamento para sua implementação. A Ieta é uma organização de lobby corporativo que tem entre seus associados empresas produtoras de combustíveis fósseis, e que defende “soluções climáticas de mercado” até mesmo nas discussões sobre clima na ONU.
A julgar pelo que ele conta, esse envolvimento foi incrivelmente bem-sucedido. “Conduzimos por quatro anos um processo para que a necessidade do comércio de unidades de carbono fosse parte do Acordo de Paris. Podemos ficar com parte do mérito pela simples inclusão do Artigo 6 [do Acordo de Paris]”, disse Hone em um evento paralelo do Ieta no centro de conferências de Katowice, na Polônia. “Nós elaboramos uma proposta inicial. Muitos elementos dessa proposta inicial constam do Acordo de Paris. Depois preparamos uma outra proposta para o regulamento, e percebemos que alguns elementos apareceram no texto.”
Jesse Bragg, diretor de comunicação da organização Corporate Accountability [Responsabilidade Corporativa], comentou: “De certa forma, sou bastante grato à Shell pela honestidade com relação a algo que os ativistas vêm dizendo há muito tempo: que as próprias empresas responsáveis pela crise estão na mesa de negociações redigindo as pretensas soluções para nos tirar dela.”
Pelas regras da Convenção-Quadro das Nações Unidas sobre a Mudança do Clima, apenas agentes estatais podem negociar oficialmente sobre o texto dos acordos climáticos, incluindo o Acordo de Paris. Sindicatos, organizações de sociedade civil e empresas podem ser observadores do processo.
Hone acrescentou que vem “conversando com algumas delegações” e que “a posição [da União Europeia] não é muito diferente do ponto de vista da Shell”.
O Artigo 6, o dispositivo pelo qual a Shell quer levar crédito, destaca os mercados de carbono como uma das principais formas pelas quais as empresas de petróleo e outros grandes poluidores poderiam conter suas emissões, permitindo-lhe adquirir créditos pela redução de emissões em outros locais em vez de reduzi-las diretamente. Esses sistemas estão cercados de controvérsias e, essencialmente, não contribuem em nada para reduzir os impactos locais da extração.
O Artigo 6 trata da mitigação, e do que agentes governamentais e não governamentais farão para mitigar as emissões, de acordo com a “Contribuição Nacionalmente Determinada” de cada país. A maior parte do artigo dispõe sobre os chamados mecanismos de mercado – sistemas de comércio de emissões – que permitem a cooperação internacional. Apenas uma parte do artigo diz respeito a mecanismos fora de mercado, que permanecem indefinidos.
Então por que a Shell está tão envolvida com os mecanismos de mercado?
Num mundo ideal para a Shell e outros produtores de combustíveis fósseis, esses seriam os únicos mecanismos governamentais de mitigação em discussão. “O melhor para um sistema ‘cap-and-trade’ (sistema pelo qual as empresas podem comprar e vender permissões para emitir gases além do limite estabelecido em lei) é que não existam políticas concorrentes (…) Se você realmente quer que funcione da forma mais eficiente possível”, disse Hone depois da sessão, referindo-se aos sistemas de comércio de emissões em geral. “Mas suspeito que esteja sendo um pouco idealista.”
Essa opinião é coerente com os posicionamentos que a Shell e as demais empresas de petróleo adotaram em relação aos mecanismos de precificação do carbono, que várias delas enxergam como um veículo para afastar outras restrições (por exemplo, as regulações) sobre suas operações. Um representante da BP me contou no mês passado que a principal razão pela qual a empresa gastou 13 milhões de dólares para derrubar uma taxa sobre carbono no estado de Washington foi que ela “não prevaleceria sobre outras regulações locais e estaduais sobre o tema”, numa lógica semelhante à adotada na proposta do Climate Leadership Council [Conselho de Liderança Climática, uma organização de viés conservador e empresarial] para um tributo sobre carbono nos EUA.
Não é tão coerente, porém, com o mais recente relatório do Painel Intergovernamental sobre Mudanças Climáticas, que destaca a necessidade de reduzir 45% das emissões de carbono até 2030, para tentar eliminá-las até a metade do século. Caso não ocorra um monumental aumento de escala das chamadas medidas de emissão negativa – uma série de tecnologias quase não testadas e proibitivamente caras, tais como a captura e o armazenamento de carbono – o uso de petróleo e de gás (o ganha-pão da Shell) precisará ser reduzido em 87% e 74%, respectivamente.
A fumaça da ShellPhilip Jakpor, chefe de mídia e campanhas da organização Environmental Rights Action [Ação pelos Direitos Ambientais] no delta do Rio Níger, já viu de perto os efeitos dos negócios de petróleo e gás da Shell. A empresa opera cerca de 200 queimadores de gás (os “flares”) na região, ardendo 24 horas por dia, a despeito de sua presença ali já ter sido repetidamente declarada ilegal. Jakpor conta que, em razão disso, as comunidades vizinhas precisam lidar com alergias de pele, problemas respiratórios e perturbação da agricultura e da pesca. Há anos elas vêm lutando contra a Shell para acabar com a prática. “A Shell está sufocando essas comunidades à base de gás”, ele me contou. A empresa agora quer poder vender créditos de carbono para construir a infraestrutura de contenção.
“A comunidade não quer que eles ganhem dinheiro com isso, o que a comunidade quer é que eles parem com a queima do gás”, acrescentou Jakpor. Ele é signatário, juntamente com 366 organizações em 129 países, do documento People’s Demands for Climate Justice [Exigências Populares para a Justiça Climática], que exige uma eliminação gradativa dos combustíveis fósseis e rejeita vários dispositivos que a Shell e outras empresas estão pressionando para incluir no Artigo 6.
‘Não chegaremos a emissões zero’, diz o executivo.“Já dissemos diversas vezes que a solução está nos mecanismos fora de mercado. Somos contra a mercantilização do meio ambiente. Se permitirmos isso, até o ar que respiramos será transformado em mercadoria. A saída para isso é acabar com a extração dos combustíveis fósseis, e não queremos empresas como a Shell e seus comparsas se infiltrando por toda parte para influenciar a discussão”, disse ele.
Para a Shell, isso é pedir demais. “Não chegaremos a emissões zero” até 2070, Hone me disse. “Não vejo como isso possa acontecer. Talvez zero emissão líquida, mas não zero emissão E você chega a zero emissão líquida porque há remoções de grande escala sendo feitas” – por meio da emissão negativa.
“Eles precisam que nós achemos impossível”, declarou Bragg. “Eles precisam que nós achemos que precisamos dessas soluções falsas, perigosas e sem comprovação para sair da crise. Só é impossível se a Shell e as demais estiverem redigindo as regras por meio das quais vamos tratar da crise climática. Não é impossível se deixarmos a ciência guiar nossa tomada de decisão, sem permitir que a indústria dos combustíveis fósseis sequestre a formulação de políticas.”
Tradução: Deborah Leão
The post Executivo da Shell revela influência da empresa no Acordo de Paris appeared first on The Intercept.
Nós fazemos um jornalismo sem medo e sem amarras no Intercept. Lutamos por transparência e enfrentamos os poderosos, não importa quem sejam. Nossos repórteres investigam governos, corporações e indivíduos com total liberdade. Este tipo de trabalho exige dedicação, habilidade, fontes — e recursos também.
Em 2019 nós não queremos apenas dar continuidade ao nosso trabalho. Queremos ir mais longe, investir ainda mais em grandes reportagens, expandir a redação e realizar pautas em todo o país. O Brasil estará sob um novo governo e nós não queremos dar um dia de sossego aos poderosos. E para revelar para o mundo tudo que está acontecendo, precisamos do seu apoio.
Quem nos acompanha sabe que o Brasil vive um momento em que a democracia e os cidadãos estão sob ataque. Enquanto a grande mídia demite jornalistas, evita críticas ao governo e ignora questões importantes para o país, o jornalismo independente pode fazer a diferença. É por isso que o Intercept precisa da sua ajuda para contar ao mundo o que está acontecendo no Brasil.
Este é um chamado para nossos leitores. Torne-se um apoiador recorrente do Intercept e nos ajude a ir mais longe. Você pode contribuir com R$ 25, R$ 50, R$ 100 ou mais e pode compartilhar essa mensagem com seus amigos, lembrando a importância do nosso trabalho. Toda colaboração é importante.
Nós ficamos impressionados com o tamanho do apoio dos nossos leitores na campanha para financiar a cobertura das eleições – uma das mais bem-sucedidas da história do jornalismo independente brasileiro. E isso nos encorajou a criar esta campanha recorrente.
Enquanto os grandes jornais estão demitindo jornalistas, queremos contratar mais e mostrar um caminho novo e mais revigorante para o jornalismo. Temos uma única meta: causar o maior impacto possível. E sem o apoio da nossa comunidade, não acontecerá.
Vem com a gente. Seu apoio é essencial para que nosso jornalismo continue independente, feroz e cada vez mais presente.
Nós prometemos não te decepcionar.
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Opponents of Donald Trump’s travel ban have a chance to chip away at it this week by challenging the way it’s been implemented. If they’re successful, Trump will have only his own administration to blame.
The argument that a group of plaintiffs is making is straightforward: Because the travel ban was upheld, individuals impacted by it can only enter the United States through a waiver system that was said to be a safeguard against arbitrarily keeping people out of the country. Yet the administration has done next to nothing to set the waiver system up, which suggests that a total ban of Muslim travelers from the targeted countries was indeed the original intent.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ban, known as Presidential Proclamation 9645, in June. The proclamation allows for waivers for foreign nationals who establish that the government’s denial of a visa would cause them undue hardship, and that their entry would not threaten the national security or public safety of the United States, and would be in the national interest. The proclamation called on the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to “adopt guidance addressing circumstances in which waivers may be appropriate.” The proclamation also lists a number of such circumstances. For example, a waiver would be appropriate for an individual who is a student in the United States, has significant business obligations in the country, or is coming to visit or reside with a close family member.
The government has not only failed to provide any meaningful guidance on the waiver, according to an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration, but it is also not providing any meaningful consideration of an applicant’s eligibility for a waiver. Within days of the proclamation going into effect, scores of visa applications were denied. Many applicants whose applications were denied at their interviews were told that their eligibility for a waiver would not be considered. At least one consulate explicitly told applicants not to submit any documents in support of a waiver application. “Applicants are thus at a loss for what to do,” the lawsuit reads.
For these reasons, the plaintiffs argue, the government has violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which prohibits federal action that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.”
The process, or lack of it, makes it impossible for individuals who should seemingly be exempt from the ban to get permission to travel to the United States. The plaintiffs are asking the court to order the Trump administration to retract all the visa denials it issued under the ban and give those individuals the chance to apply for a waiver. The court should also order the State and Homeland Security departments to issue clear guidelines on the waiver process, including by letting applicants know what type of documents they should submit to apply for a waiver. Those applications should be weighed on a case-by-case basis, as the language of the proclamation requires, the plaintiffs charge.
The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California will on Thursday hear arguments in the case, known as Emami v. Nielsen. It was brought by Muslim Advocates, Lotfi Legal, the Immigrant Advocacy and Litigation Center, and Public Counsel against the Homeland Security and State departments. The class-action lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of 36 plaintiffs of Iranian, Libyan, Somali, Syrian, and Yemeni backgrounds, covers nationals of the five countries included in all three iterations of the travel ban.
The crux of the arguments raised in round two of the travel ban fight are procedural, but the plaintiffs also argue that the lack of a waiver process violates the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The blanket denials of visas to applicants from the targeted countries, combined with Trump’s statements regarding his intent for instituting a travel ban “makes clear that Defendants are targeting individuals for discriminatory treatment based on their country of origin or nationality, without any lawful justification,” the complaint reads. (In Hawaii v. Trump, the Supreme Court upheld the travel ban without deciding on the merits of the constitutional claims raised.)
“It goes to the heart of the question of whether this ban is actually intended to advance national security or whether it’s intended to shut Muslims out of the United States.”“This is a case fundamentally about a government putting forth two completely contradictory statements,” said Sirine Shebaya, an attorney at Muslim Advocates who will be arguing the case in federal court. Trump, in his proclamation, made a somewhat binding statement that each individual applicant will be assessed against certain criteria for a waiver, but at the same time, the government has prevented individuals from having a way to make that demonstration, Shebaya explained. “I think it goes to the heart of the question of whether this ban is actually intended to advance national security or whether it’s intended to shut Muslims out of the United States.”
Between December 8, 2017, and April 30, 2018, the government issued waivers to the ban in only 2 percent of all cases, according to State Department data. The numbers went up in the months after the ban was upheld, but it’s still unclear how many people remain stuck in processing. If it’s any indication, though, Muslim Advocates clients remain in bureaucratic limbo. And even in cases where the waiver was approved, Shebaya said, there’s no way to know whether the visa was ultimately issued.
The government, in its motion to dismiss, largely defended itself against the claims in the lawsuit by referring to the doctrine of consular nonreviewability, which means that a discretionary decision made by a consular officer cannot be appealed. The defendants also argue that the proclamation does not create individually enforceable rights that can be litigated in court. They point to Hawaii v. Trump, in which the majority of the Supreme Court cited the case-by-case waiver provision in its decision to uphold the ban. The plaintiffs counter that merely announcing the intent to create a waiver process is not the same thing as actually creating one.
In his dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that there is evidence that the government is not applying the terms of the proclamation as written, supporting the inference that the proclamation is a “Muslim ban” and not a “security-based ban.” In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor went even further. “Ultimately, what began as a policy explicitly ‘calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ has since morphed into a ‘Proclamation’ putatively based on national-security concerns,” she wrote, referring to Trump’s December 2015 statement that many point to as the genesis of the travel ban. “But this new window dressing cannot conceal an unassailable fact: the words of the President and his advisers create the strong perception that the Proclamation is contaminated by impermissible discriminatory animus against Islam and its followers.”
The plaintiffs in the Muslim Advocates lawsuit fit into a number of the 10 circumstances Trump laid out in his proclamation under which a waiver might be appropriate. The scenarios described in the lawsuit demonstrate the arbitrary manner in which the government is dealing with what is supposed to be individualized consideration for a waiver grant.
Najib Adi, for example, is a Virginia-based dentist who has been unable to visit his native Syria since the start of the 2011 uprising. His dad died in 2014, and Adi was unable to attend the funeral. Now, he’s trying to bring his 70-year-old mother to live with him. She had an interview for an immigrant visa at the U.S. Consulate in Amman, Jordan, in December 2017, where she was told she’d be considered for a waiver. She is still waiting for an answer. Ismail Alghazali is a U.S. citizen of Yemeni origin who is currently stuck in Djibouti with his wife and infant child. At his wife’s January 2018 interview for a visa to the United States, her application was automatically denied and she was told she wouldn’t be considered for a waiver. She was never told that she could demonstrate her eligibility for a waiver under the proclamation.
“What it means for a lot of these families is there’s a great deal of confusion and ambiguity,” said Debbie Almontaser, a New-York based Yemeni-American activist. “They’ll come to the Yemeni American Merchants Association and say, ‘My family member needs a waiver, can you help us complete the waiver?’ And for us to stand there in front of them and say, ‘We’ll be happy to help you, but there’s no form or application,’ … they’ll look at us like we don’t know what we’re talking about.”
The Yemeni American Merchants Association, which Almontaser co-founded in the wake of the travel ban, has teamed up with a lawyer who’s trying to help Yemeni families in New York bring their loved ones to the United States. Different people they’ve worked with have had radically different experiences, depending on the consulate at which they’re applying for a visa, Almontaser said. In some cases, the consular officers have asked applicants for proof that they meet the waiver criteria, and in other cases, they’ve said they’ll review existing visa application information. “The confusion is causing people a lot of anxiety, and it’s also giving people a lot of false hope of what the government wants,” she added.
Chris Richardson, a former consular officer who submitted an affidavit in support of the Muslim Advocates litigation, said the government was hiding behind the doctrine of consular nonreviewability. Diplomats like himself, he said, were not actually empowered to exercise discretion in issuing waivers.
“I think that the Muslim ban itself became the template for all the other things that came after it.”“If there was an actual waiver process, then consular officers themselves would’ve had total discretion in terms of issuing the visa to anyone they wanted,” said Richardson, who resigned from his diplomatic outpost in Madrid in March of this year. He said in his affidavit that it was his understanding that no one was to be eligible to apply for a visa waiver, and that consular officers were not allowed to exercise discretion to grant a waiver. Instead, they’d have to ask officials in Washington, who’d be empowered to make a final determination.
“You wouldn’t put up nondiscretionary hurdles in there unless you were trying to discourage people from giving waivers,” Richardson told The Intercept.
“I think that the Muslim ban itself became the template for all the other things that came after it,” Richardson said. Trump “realized with the Muslim ban that if you do something outrageous at first, and then you get the government to modify it to make it seem less bad, people will forget. People won’t care anymore. People will let it go.”
The post Donald Trump’s Travel Ban Faces a New Day in Court appeared first on The Intercept.
Era muita perversidade informar ou insinuar no começo de dezembro de 1968 que o presidente Arthur da Costa e Silva se preparava para editar um quinto ato institucional. É o que dizia o ditador. Ele se queixava de notícias “infundadas e até maldosas”, publicou a Folha de S. Paulo. Os quatro primeiros atos, baixados pela ditadura, espingardearam a Constituição de 1946. A Carta sucessora, talhada pelo regime inaugurado com a deposição de João Goulart, vigorava desde 15 de março de 1967, data da posse do marechal entronizado sem voto popular.
A especulação decorria da bronca das Forças Armadas e seus sócios civis com um discurso de Márcio Moreira Alves. Em setembro, o deputado de 32 anos praguejara contra a violenta invasão da Universidade de Brasília por militares e policiais.
Condimentara o protesto com diatribes como apelar às famílias para vetar a participação dos alunos nos desfiles colegiais no Dia da Independência. Estimulou as namoradas a não dançar com cadetes e jovens oficiais. Pueril, a bravata não oferecia perigo, e a imunidade parlamentar legalmente a autorizava. A zanga com ela constituiria pretexto para tolher ainda mais as liberdades.
O governo pedira licença à Câmara para processar Moreira Alves. Na noite de 4 de dezembro, Costa e Silva conversou por hora e meia em Brasília com figurões do partido chapa-branca da ditadura, a Aliança Renovadora Nacional. Assegurou-lhes, conforme o Jornal do Brasil: “A nação pode continuar tranquila, porque o governo não pensa em medidas de exceção e resolverá todos os problemas dentro das leis e da Constituição”.
O presidente renovou o chororô sobre as conjecturas em torno do AI-5: “São exploração nascida certamente de elementos interessados em criar problemas para o governo, perturbando a ordem do país”.
A Folha relatou a alegação do ditador aos correligionários arenistas: “A atual Constituição atribuiu ao governo uma soma de poderes suficientes para enfrentar qualquer contestação ao regime, e por isso não precisamos adotar medidas excepcionais ou de exceção”.
O Globo reiterou: “O Marechal Costa e Silva declarou aos líderes que a nação pode continuar tranquila porque o governo não pensa em medidas de exceção”. Também em 4 de dezembro, o Exército divulgou nota reconhecendo que “a Câmara dos Deputados é soberana nas suas decisões”.
Bolsonaro ameaça a democraciaDali a nove dias, quando já caíra a noite da sexta-feira 13 de dezembro, a ditadura pariu no Palácio Laranjeiras o Ato Institucional nº 5 (na véspera, a Câmara se negara a entregar a cabeça do deputado Marcito).
A novidade suspendeu a garantia de habeas corpus em casos de “crimes políticos”. Permitiu ao presidente, sem apreciação da Justiça, decretar o recesso do Congresso e das demais casas legislativas, suspender direitos políticos e cassar mandatos eletivos. Depois da quartelada de 1964, foi o movimento institucional mais truculento do poder.
Evidenciou-se que a palavra de Costa e Silva merecia tanto crédito quanto, no século vindouro, a de um presidente eleito que proclama a permanência do Ministério do Trabalho antes de extingui-lo.
No dia 14 de dezembro, foram em cana o ex-presidente Juscelino Kubitschek e o antigo governador Carlos Lacerda. JK topara votar no marechal Castello Branco na eleição farsesca, do Congresso ferido e acossado, em 9 de abril de 1964. Arauto mais ruidoso do golpe em 1º de abril, Lacerda passara à oposição.
Protagonistas da luta contra a ditadura, que se estenderia até 1985, o cardeal Paulo Evaristo Arns e o deputado Ulysses Guimarães tinham apoiado a derrubada de Jango. Bem como a Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil e o Correio da Manhã, diário que não sobreviveria ao cerco da ditadura. Muita gente aprovou o golpe porque pensava que, sem Jango, o Brasil melhoraria. Ocorreu o contrário, em matéria de democracia e condições de vida das pessoas mais vulneráveis (Castello aplicou um arrocho impiedoso).
A partir de 1º de janeiro de 2019, haverá um governo dominado por nostálgicos da ditadura.Almas bem-intencionadas festejaram a preferência dos golpistas pelo militar cearense, que seria um “legalista”, um “moderado”. Como ditador, Castello aboliu a eleição direta para presidente, todos os partidos políticos e a Constituição elaborada por representantes dos cidadãos em 1946.
Houve quem elucubrasse que o autoritarismo batera no teto, portanto Costa e Silva não o agravaria. Então 1968 chegou.
O AI-5 seria o fundo do poço repressivo, supuseram alguns. Sobreveio o crescimento da matança de oposicionistas. Um novo golpe dentro do golpe impediu o vice-presidente Pedro Aleixo de assumir após o afastamento de Costa e Silva por doença. Em 1977, o ditador Ernesto Geisel fabricou o Pacote de Abril. Entre outros liberticídios, como fechar o Congresso, criava um monstro que ganhou o apelido de senador biônico. Tal aberração seria escolhida por iluminados, sem se submeter ao sufrágio universal. Os biônicos proporcionaram maioria à Arena no Senado.
A partir de 1º de janeiro de 2019, haverá um governo dominado por nostálgicos da ditadura. A política econômica do superministro Paulo Guedes beberá nas mesmas fontes da equipe de Castello Branco comandada por Otávio Gouveia de Bulhões, ministro da Fazenda, e Roberto Campos, do Planejamento. Como selo involuntário de vínculo histórico, o economista Roberto Campos Neto, descendente de quem o nome denuncia, presidirá o Banco Central.
O Brasil de hoje, salve-salve, não é uma ditadura. O de 1968 era. Se Jair Bolsonaro impuser a plataforma que cultiva há três décadas, seu governo provocará estragos ou mesmo aniquilará a democracia.
Em 13 de dezembro de 1968, Costa e Silva e seus consortes tornaram a ditadura ainda mais cruel e antidemocrática. Cinquenta anos depois, na noite desta quinta-feira, a principal lição do AI-5 para o país de 2018 está na cara: tudo pode piorar.
The post A principal lição do AI-5 está na cara: tudo pode piorar appeared first on The Intercept.
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Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin are attempting a pre-emptive coup against the incoming Democratic administration after the defeat of right-wing darling Scott Walker. This week on Intercepted: Hillary Clinton famously did not set foot in Wisconsin during the 2016 campaign and Donald Trump won the state, but buried within that narrative is a deeper story about how Wisconsin was transformed from a progressive bastion into a right-wing laboratory. Dan Kaufman, author of “The Fall of Wisconsin: Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics,” digs into the history, analyzes the latest Republican conspiracy and lays out why we all should study the Wisconsin model. Longtime criminal justice reporters Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith talk about their gripping new true crime podcast Murderville, which tells the story of a series of grisly killings in a small Georgia town and the man they believe has been wrongly imprisoned. Canadian hip-hop artist and host of Netflix’s “Hip-Hop Evolution” Shad talks about his roots, class warfare, and his imaginative new album, “A Short Story About a War.”
Transcript coming soon.
Correction: December 12, 2018, 1:45 p.m.
In a previous version of this episode, guest Dan Kaufman referred to the Supreme Court case Buckley v. Valeo. Kaufman misidentified “Buckley” as William F. Buckley, the late conservative commentator, when the name in fact refers to James L. Buckley, a politician, jurist, and William’s older brother. This section of the discussion has been removed.
The post Supreme Injustices: a Legislative Coup in Wisconsin and a Wrongful Conviction in Georgia appeared first on The Intercept.
War Refugees: The Trump administration’s new position on a protected group of Vietnamese immigrants—many of whom fled to the U.S. during the Vietnam War—now leaves them vulnerable to deportation. Returning to a policy it retreated from back in August, the White House is reinterpreting a 2008 agreement that had prevented the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the U.S. before 1995, when Washington and Hanoi officially reestablished diplomatic relations after the Vietnam War.
Ongoing: Michael Cohen, ex-lawyer and ex-loyalist to President Donald Trump, has been sentenced to three years in prison. The Cohen saga began this April with an FBI raid on his home, and has now led to Cohen implicating the president in criminal misconduct. In North Carolina, a closely contested U.S. House race is under national scrutiny over charges of absentee-ballot fraud, and one remedy may be an unprecedented revote. And across the pond, British Prime Minister Theresa May, amid never-ending talks over how exactly to execute Britain’s exit from the European Union, has survived a no-confidence vote.
Snapshot
“For women’s-rights advocates, sexist authoritarians pose a conundrum,” writes Peter Beinart. “Defeating them requires empowering women. Yet the more empowered women become, the more right-wing autocrats depict that empowerment as an assault on the natural political order.” Read on. (Illustration by Edmon de Haro)Evening ReadMusic-streaming service Spotify has delighted users with its Wrapped tool, unveiling to people their personal music-listening history of the past year. Such recaps rely on massive amounts of personal data from users, yet Spotify has mostly escaped the backlash faced by its peers (ahem, Facebook):
Spotify is cool and innocuous, and so is Spotify Wrapped. It’s a year-end package of low-stakes personal data, focused on you, for you—as Instagram-ready as the feature’s design is, only on the last of nine screens do you see an option to “share” the results on social media. Benjamin Johnson, an advertising professor at the University of Florida who researches how we selectively share our music tastes to influence self-presentation, says that Spotify has managed to avoid the “creepiness factor” by granting a maximum amount of user control over what someone’s network sees of their listening history. As a result, Johnson says, a person reviewing Wrapped results “feels the control in that moment before they take the screenshot, where they can decide, Is this going to make me look good? or Does this reflect the story that I want to tell about myself?”
Though it presents as a less creepy company, Spotify has still amassed a surprising cache of personal information on its users.
What Do You Know … About Science, Technology, and Health?1. Recent research has found that the male túngara frogs that have adapted to urban environments differ significantly from their forest-dwelling kin on this characteristic.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
2. This blogging platform announced recently that it would be banning all “adult content,” a blunt move that’s caused some outcry over what some see as a dwindling number of safe spaces online for many sexual subcultures.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
3. This rare but alarming polio-like illness spiked in the U.S. in 2018, and its surges seem to be on a biennial schedule.
Scroll down for the answer, or find it here.
Answers: mating calls / tumblr / acute flaccid myelitis, or AFM
Looking for our daily mini crossword? Try your hand at it here—the puzzle gets more difficult through the week.
Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Email Shan Wang at swang@theatlantic.com
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Written by Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) and Madeleine Carlisle (@maddiecarlisle2)
Today in 5 LinesMichael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime former lawyer, was sentenced to three years in prison after being convicted of tax evasion, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress. In a prepared statement, Cohen said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”
The Senate passed a resolution demanding an end to the U.S. military’s support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. But when passing a consequential $867 billion farm deal, House Republicans tucked in an unrelated provision to prevent a floor vote on the war in Yemen, blocking its path to passing in the House.
Dozens of former state and federal judges called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to stop making immigration arrests at courthouses.
About 20 percent fewer new people have signed up for insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act ahead of a Saturday deadline, compared with this time last year, according to a status report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Republicans and Democrats appear to be headed toward a do-over election in North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District, where the November election was rocked by claims of fraud.
Today on The AtlanticRigging Democracy: Nationwide demographic shifts mean that the Republican Party is slowly turning into the party of the minority. But the GOP is finding ways to retain power. (Vann R. Newkirk II)
A War on Women: The rise of authoritarianism around the world has been propelled by promises to reverse feminists’ gains made in the past decades, argues Peter Beinart.
Compromised: As he exits public office, Paul Ryan leaves behind a legacy of capitulating to many Trumpian policies that went against his own beliefs. (Dick Polman)
An Unlikely Coalition?: Many conservative Christian leaders support Trump’s push for criminal-justice reform, but black and progressive clergy members are hesitant to support him, even on such a nonpartisan issue. (Emma Green)
Snapshot
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, leaves federal court after his sentencing in New York. (Craig Ruttle / AP)What We’re ReadingDemocracy on the Move: President Trump describes the migrant caravan traveling toward the U.S. border as a “lawless” group. But along the way, the migrants have elected officials, built a public-safety council, and even set up their own press shop. (Jesus Rodriguez, Politico)
What Happened to the Mooch?: More than two dozen senior officials have left the Trump administration in the last two years. Here’s where they’ve ended up. (Brittany Shepherd, Washingtonian)
Points for Authenticity: President Trump came out looking better than both Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker designee Nancy Pelosi after their live-streamed argument on Tuesday, argues Matt Lewis. (Daily Beast)
We’re always looking for ways to improve The Politics & Policy Daily. Concerns, comments, questions, typos? Let us know anytime here.
LONDON—For more than two years, British Prime Minister Theresa May has had to balance European Union negotiators, an opposition Labour Party intent on toppling her government, and dozens of rebellious parliamentary colleagues. So when she vowed on Wednesday to fight a no-confidence vote against her “with everything I’ve got,” it was par for the course.
May has earned a reputation for soldiering on in the face of innumerable crises, and for maintaining stability not because of her strength, but in spite of it.
On Wednesday night, that stability proved enduring. With the support of 200 lawmakers within her Conservative Party, May avoided an attempt to end her tenure as the party’s leader—and with it, her premiership. The outcome was a two-tier victory of sorts for the prime minister: Not only did she garner enough support to continue fighting for her proposed Brexit deal, but she also secured immunity from further such leadership challenges in the foreseeable future. Under Conservative Party rules, May cannot face another no-confidence vote for another year.
That May has survived this long is due in large part to Brexit. Throughout the negotiations, she has framed herself as the only one capable of delivering on the result of the referendum to leave the European Union by negotiating a deal that is in the country’s national interest.
Speaking outside Downing Street on Wednesday morning, May warned that a leadership challenge just months before Britain is due to leave the bloc wouldn’t overcome the parliamentary deadlock that prompted her to call off a key vote on her proposed Brexit deal earlier this week, nor would it ensure Britain’s timely exit at the end of March. “Weeks spent tearing ourselves apart will only create more division just as we should be standing together to serve our country,” May said of a potential leadership contest to replace her. “None of that would be in the national interest.”
But her survival is also emblematic of her dogged resilience in the face of what has seemingly been a perpetual state of crisis. From the loss of her party’s governing majority after an ill-fated general election in 2017 to the slew of cabinet resignations and parliamentary deadlocks that have rocked her government since, profound weakness—yet surprising stability—has come to define her premiership.
[Read: The incredible staying power of Theresa May]
And while her resilience hasn’t necessarily translated into national popularity, it has won her a grudging respect among political friends and foes alike. Tony Blair, the former Labour prime minister, described May as “a pretty reasonable person surrounded by a lot of unreasonable people.” Sarah Vine, a Daily Mail columnist whose husband Michael Gove was a one-time leadership rival to May, praised the prime minister for showing “true grit” in the face of Brexit’s challenges.
European leaders have been similarly sympathetic. “People have consistently underestimated the mettle and courage of Prime Minister May,” Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said last month of her handling of the Irish border issue, which remains a point of contention for ardent Brexiteers. European Council President Donald Tusk, who was among the fiercest critics of May’s so-called Chequers deal for Brexit, said he was nonetheless a “true admirer” of the prime minister.
“It’s hard not to admire her doggedness,” Sam Stopp, a former Labour councilor in London, told me. “Whether you agree with her or not, I think most people in the country seem to think that whatever her flaws, she is genuinely trying to do the right thing and cares passionately about public service. People admire that.”
Good will alone isn’t the only reason May is still standing. Crucial to her survival thus far has been that there is no clear favorite within the Conservative Party to replace her, let alone one with a viable alternative to her Brexit proposal. Stopp said even if there were such a leader, they likely wouldn’t want to succeed May now.
“She is there because it’s a poison chalice, and it’s a terrible time to be prime minister,” he said. “Her greatest strength—the reason why she has persevered as long as she has—is that actually none of her rivals would want to be steering the ship right now. They would much rather let her deal with the mess and then take over afterwards.”
[Read: Brexit crisis. Theresa May in trouble. Rinse. Repeat.]
Though May’s victory assures she will carry on as prime minister for now, it came at a cost—and a deadline: Lawmakers said that in exchange for their support, May offered assurances that she would not intend to lead the party into the next general election, which is due to take place in 2022.
Until then, May faces the looming challenge of getting her Brexit deal through parliament. While the vote has secured her leadership for the next year, it hasn’t changed the parliamentary deadlock, nor is it likely to sway the EU to reopen negotiations.
“I’m pleased to have received the backing of my colleagues in tonight’s ballot,” May said of the result outside Downing Street on Wednesday night, noting that while she was grateful to have secured the majority needed, “a significant number of colleagues did cast a vote against me and I have listened to what they said.”
She has heard them, but whether Britain leaves the EU with or without a deal will depend on whether she is able to persuade them.
In White Right: Meeting the Enemy, the filmmaker Deeyah Khan, a Muslim woman of color, recounts a television interview she gave during the summer of 2016. “The fact of the matter is that the U.K. is never going to be white again,” she told the BBC. “Similarly, our parents who have left Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and other Muslim countries, for them to think that they can reestablish those countries and the lives that they had there over here—it’s not gonna happen. We’re together going to have to find out: What does it mean to build a society that includes all of us?” A deluge of hate mail quickly followed.
Rather than silence her, the threats provoked her to go out and meet “the kind of people who sent me this abuse … to get behind the hatred and the extremist ideology to find out what they are really like as human beings.”
What follows is a tense hour of film. The filmmaker managed to secure exclusive access to white-supremacist groups at pivotal moments before and during their infamous march on Charlottesville, Virginia, and she elicited remarkable statements during her interviews with racists.
In one scene in the film, she takes out a photograph of herself, age 6, grimacing during an anti-racism march. “People that represent what you represent made a 6-year-old child feel hated and unwanted and unwelcome and ugly,” she tells one white-supremacist leader as they sit across from each other in a hotel room. “The movement that you are a part of has this type of real-life effect on people like me. How does that make you feel?”
He squirms and swallows. “Uncomfortable,” he finally answers. In the discussion that follows, she presses him to confront the full reality of where his actions invariably lead. A similarly intense interview unfolds in the mountains of Tennessee at a neo-Nazi training camp.
What interested me as much as the film was an interview with Khan just released on Sam Harris’s podcast in which she looks back at her interactions with white supremacists—an interview that sounded the same themes as the Washington Post article “The White Flight of Derek Black” and the fascinating story of the black jazz musician Daryl Davis, who decided that he was going to interview and engage various members of the Ku Klux Klan.
In both of those stories, anti-racists departed from the conventional wisdom that bigots are best excoriated and shunned (if not punched and kicked); engaged prominent, hard-core racists; and managed through civil interactions to persuade some of them to renounce their beliefs.
Khan described similar results from her efforts to combat both jihadism and white-supremacist extremism—an outcome that she didn’t expect.
“I’ve had experiences of racism most of my life,” she said. “As a result, I’ve been an anti-racist, anti-fascist campaigner for most of my life. I’ve done everything that you would imagine. I’ve gone to anti-fascist protests. I’ve shouted at these guys. I have flipped them off. I have thrown stuff at them. I’ve done all of that. And none of that really did anything.”
Judging and condemning jihadists and white supremacists “feels great,” she declared, but yields little. “I made the film to try to understand why people do the things that they do,” she said, “so the fact that some of them started using words like friends for me, the fact that we were able to build a real relationship, was absolutely shocking to me and confusing and something I never would’ve expected. If you would’ve told me a year ago that I was going to be friends with people like this, my God, I would have laughed at you at first. And then, second, I think I would’ve been offended that you think I would do that.”
As it turns out, a few fraught friendships that grew out of her conversations caused some people in deplorable organizations to leave them. About a man who ultimately told her, “I’ve left the group. I’ve left the ideology. And I’m so sorry. The hate was eating me from the inside,” she said:
It tells me that we can’t really afford to give up on people––people like him. You know, he has a massive swastika tattoo, a Klan tattoo, he’s utterly committed to his cause, and today he’s left. In the film he says, “But I’m never going to break bread with a Jew,” and two or three weeks ago I heard that’s exactly what he’s done. And he’s having his tattoo removed.
So there is hope. I’m not saying let’s hug a Nazi and everything is going to be fine. But what I’ve learned is that … no-platforming these people and just completely rejecting them, I think, feeds into their story of victimhood, as if they are speaking some sort of forbidden truth. And I think if anything, we need to expose racism. We need to challenge it.
We need to confront it rather than just allowing it to marinade in its own kind of madness … The judgment and self-righteousness for holding the right opinions and having the correct politics, I think, is just counterproductive … It actually adds to the problem and adds to people’s radicalization rather than not. In speaking to the jihadis that left and to former violent neo-Nazis in this film, what struck me after the fact is that what interrupted people’s hatred and ideology is for someone who represents the other in their eyes to treat them with dignity.
While powerful, Khan’s conclusions aren’t necessarily correct. Perhaps she undervalues the effectiveness of stigma against the far right. Or perhaps the successes of Daryl Davis, Derek Black’s friends, and Deeyah Khan are anomalies. Even if their approach to anti-racism is effective, perhaps it cannot scale, as very few people possess the inclination, let alone the courage and patience, to engage extremists as they do.
Then again, perhaps theirs is the most effective way to combat bigotry. That possibility, bolstered by evidence they can marshal for specific conversions, makes me lament that there are those who want to wield stigma not only against virulent white supremacists—as I still do, too—but also against fellow anti-racists who take a different approach to the problem.
Fighting bigotry by engaging the most odious bigots is more demanding and less comfortable than doing so by denunciation—so much so that it isn’t something one can justly ask of anyone. It may also be the single most significant way that some anti-racists can bring about positive change in this realm, a comparative advantage that would be better celebrated for its fruits than stigmatized as soft on extremism.
NEW YORK — With his teary-eyed and grim-faced family arrayed behind him, Michael Cohen laid claim to his freedom in a federal courtroom here on Wednesday morning. Not from incarceration, of course—Donald Trump’s former longtime lawyer, fixer, and foot soldier knew he was soon headed to prison after he pleaded guilty to what a federal judge called “a veritable smorgasbord of fraudulent conduct.”
No, the 52-year-old Cohen was declaring his formal, surely irrevocable liberty from the clutches of the president of the United States.
“Today,” he told Judge William H. Pauley III in a deep, steady voice, “is the day I am getting my freedom back.”
“I have been living,” Cohen continued, “in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I admired.”
[Read: Three remarkable things about Michael Cohen’s plea]
In beseeching the court for a measure of mercy, Cohen sought to unburden himself from what he called a “blind loyalty” that led him down “a path of darkness.” “I felt it was my duty to cover up for his dirty deeds,” he told the court.
He apologized to just about everyone. First to his family: “I know I have let them all down,” he said, choking up for the only time as he read his typed statement from a sheet of paper. And then, to the “people of the United States” for his cooperation in crimes that were intended, he said, to sway the 2016 presidential election for Trump: “You deserve to know the truth,” he told the public, “and lying to you was unjust.”
Officially, the president is “Individual 1” in the legal documents that accompany Cohen’s guilty plea. But Trump was unmasked again and again during the hour-long sentencing that took place inside the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan. Cohen’s attorney, Guy Petrillo, characterized the president, and his animosity toward the dual investigations that brought down his client, as a threatening presence hovering over Cohen’s every decision in the case. “He came forward to offer evidence against the most powerful person in our country,” Petrillo told the court.
Cohen, wearing a black suit and light-blue tie, entered the courtroom about 45 minutes before the sentencing hearing began. His family—including his mother and wheelchair-bound father, his two siblings, and his two teenage children—were already seated, dressed in funereal black. The packed wooden pews included dozens of reporters, as well as Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels’s lawyer and the Trump antagonist, who took one of the final remaining seats as a member of the public.
[Read: Did Trump advise Michael Cohen to lie to Congress?]
Cohen’s plea deal was complicated by the fact that federal prosecutors offered differing views about his level of cooperation. Lawyers for Special Counsel Robert Mueller praised Cohen for his assistance in their investigation into Russian interference in the election, while lawyers for the Southern District of New York faulted Cohen for his refusal to sign an agreement pledging his full cooperation.
Petrillo cited the “barrage of attacks” that Trump has leveled on Cohen, as well as unspecified threats to himself and his family, as reasons this was “not a standard case of cooperation” with the government. And he suggested that the precarious future of Mueller’s probe was a factor in Cohen’s decision not to sign a formal agreement with federal prosecutors. “He knew that the president might shut down the investigation,” Petrillo told the court, “and he knew there might come a time when he might appear in court and there would be no special counsel to stand up for him.”
Cohen’s invocation of the president, however, was far more personal. He referenced Trump’s comments calling him “a rat” and his tweets mocking him as weak. “My departure as a loyal soldier to the president bears a very hefty price,” he said. Cohen acknowledged that, in a way, the president was right.
“My weakness,” he said, “can be characterized as a blind loyalty to Donald Trump.”
Cohen assured the court that he was willing to cooperate further with the government, but did not want to sign an agreement that would drag his case on for years and years and subject his family to the public’s continued glare. “I have chosen this unorthodox path because the sooner I can serve this sentence, the sooner I can return to my family,” Cohen said.
Cohen is far from the first criminal to make an abject apology in pursuit of leniency, or even to claim that he committed his crimes while in thrall to a powerful, wealthy person. Yet few, if any, have implicated the sitting president in such consequential misdeeds.
Pauley appeared to be unmoved by Cohen’s statement. He made little reference to Cohen’s relationship to the president in delivering the sentence, instead emphasizing the serious nature of his crimes and what he called the “acute need” to send a message of deterrence. “Somewhere along the way, Mr. Cohen appears to have lost his moral compass,” Pauley said. “The magnitude, breadth, and duration of his criminal conduct requires serious deterrence.” The judge said that in particular, Cohen’s admission of a campaign-finance violation and lying to Congress “implicates a far more insidious harm to our democratic institutions.”
Cohen did not react as Pauley sentenced him to three years in prison and ordered him to pay nearly $2 million in restitution and fines. Cohen’s children broke down in tears, and he consoled them as he made his way out of the courtroom. Avenatti raced out of the courthouse and down to a bank of microphones outside, which were set up for Cohen and federal prosecutors. “Michael Cohen is neither a hero nor a patriot,” he shouted. “Michael Cohen was sentenced today. Donald Trump is next.”
For his part, Cohen did not speak to reporters, declining the opportunity to send a message to the president from whom he claimed to have broken free. He is scheduled to report to federal prison on March 6—trading one form of incarceration for another.
Yesterday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before the House Judiciary Committee. The topic was Google’s control of information, thanks to its eponymous search engine, its power over online advertising and commerce, and its Android operating system, which runs most of the world’s smartphones.
Pichai had declined an invitation to testify about on Russian meddling in U.S. elections before September’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, where both Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had appeared, and where senators shot barbs at the empty chair Google would have occupied during that hearing. The House appearance offered the company and its CEO an opportunity to appear engaged with American policy.
The results were poor. As my colleague Alexis Madrigal reported, Pichai was consistently unable to respond to congressional questions, even struggling to explain the basics of how Google’s search engine or Android’s location services operated. Lawmakers didn’t fare much better, posing mostly general queries that didn’t get to the heart of Google’s stranglehold on data. In particular, Republicans asked, over and over again, if Google’s search products were biased against conservatives. Pichai’s responses, variations of the phrase “non-partisan,” failed to parry many of these attacks.
Such accusations have become commonplace during the last year of Congressional inquiries of the tech sector. This time, Democrats attempted to defang them, sometimes even if it meant burning through their time for more substantive questions.
[Read: What Google’s CEO couldn’t explain to Congress]
For Democrats weary of Republicans banging the drum of bias, a highlight of the Pichai hearing came from Ted Lieu, a Democrat from Southern California. Lieu first boasted greater technical knowledge than his fellow committee members (“I feel like I have to educate some of my colleagues in how it works”), establishing that no secret labor force existed to up or downgrade specific search terms, like the names of individual congresspersons.
Then he performed a live demonstration, walking through a live Google News search for Congressman Steve King. The first result, he reported, was from ABC News. “It says, ‘Steve King's 'racist' immigration talk prompts calls for congressional censure,’” Lieu reported. “That’s a negative article.” Lieu again offered Pichai the opportunity to affirm that a group of Google programmers don’t insure that when someone searches for “Steve King,” a negative article pops up. “We are trying to reflect what is currently newsworthy, what is currently being discussed,” Pichai responded.
Lieu pounced. “Let me just conclude here by stating the obvious. If you want positive search results, do positive things. If you don’t want negative search results, don’t do negative things. To some of my colleagues across the aisle, if you’re getting bad press articles, and bad search results, don’t blame Google or Facebook or Twitter. Consider blaming yourself.”
It was an electrifying performance. When King got around to his questioning, he pressed the issue of a “built-in bias” against conservatives, an attack that felt more toothless after Lieu made an example of him. And in the aftermath of a relatively uneventful and ungratifying session of testimony, Lieu managed exactly the outcome he had predicted. A Google News result for his name, this morning, yields headlines that buff his prowess and power: “Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu tears into Republican colleagues”; “Rep. Ted Lieu to GOP Colleagues: ‘Consider Blaming Yourself’ For Negative Google Results”; “Dem knocks GOP colleagues: Blame 'yourself' for unfavorable Google search results.” The proof is in the pudding.
But in truth, Lieu’s enjoinder came at a cost to the hearing and, ultimately, to the American people his committee was meant to serve in convening it. Lieu managed to score a political victory over King and the GOP, to be sure. But in the process, he implicitly endorsed the algorithmic methods Google uses to surface content. The idea that righteous deeds yield more and higher search results is a sentiment that Google would certainly find agreeable. Whatever Google’s doing, Lieu implied, it’s the right thing, because it produces the results that you see.
[Read: For Google, everything is a popularity contest]
But it’s not truth or righteousness that results in better placement. It’s popularity. Google’s system treats inbound links as recommendations. The more recommendations a website or media outlet has, the more other material on those sites rise to the top of results. That doesn’t make the site or the content more trustworthy; it just makes it more popular. A focus on automated surfacing of popular content, rather than a manual curation of what’s correct, necessary, or valuable, can amplify more extreme ideas.
That state of affairs has been well documented on Google’s sister company YouTube, where extremism multiplies its effects. But it also happens on a more mundane level, every day, as news outlets shrink in number and technology companies steer readers and viewers to the most enticing material. The very fact that the hearing so overemphasized political posturing from both sides underscores the positive effect of talking points and quips no matter the political persuasion of those who utter them. Lieu is no exception. He portrayed his live-search performance as righteous, when in fact it was mostly theatrical. That theatricality helped it gain attention, and that attention in turn helped raise his status amid the vast murk of data that produce search results at the hands of Google’s algorithm. Google is calling the shots—not by pulling the strings, but by building the computer systems that do the string-pulling.
And that very state of affairs was supposed to be the purpose of the hearing. The House Judiciary Committee was supposed to dig into the implications of that power. Instead, the lawmakers that comprise it turned the session into a contest to game it. Skewering the Republican opposition by celebrating the implicit virtue of Google's search algorithm might help Ted Lieu’s reputation, temporarily, in the public’s imagination—as served up by Google search, of course. But does it help democracy? There are no winners here—except for Google, whose power over information remains intact, while those who would put checks on it trade barbs to raise their rankings in its results.
Updated at 4:22 p.m.
The Trump administration is resuming its efforts to deport certain protected Vietnamese immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades—many of them having fled the country during the Vietnam War.
This is the latest move in the president’s long record of prioritizing harsh immigration and asylum restrictions, and one that’s sure to raise eyebrows—the White House had hesitantly backed off the plan in August before reversing course. In essence, the administration has now decided that Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the country before the establishment of diplomatic ties between the United States and Vietnam are subject to standard immigration law—meaning they are all eligible for deportation.
The new stance mirrors White House efforts to clamp down on immigration writ large, a frequent complaint of the president’s on the campaign trail and one he links to a litany of ills in the United States.
[Read: Another blow against refugees]
The administration last year began pursuing the deportation of many long-term immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries who the administration alleges are “violent criminal aliens.” But Washington and Hanoi have a unique 2008 agreement that specifically bars the deportation of Vietnamese people who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995—the date the two former foes reestablished diplomatic relations following the Vietnam War.
The White House unilaterally reinterpreted the agreement in the spring of 2017 to exempt people convicted of crimes from its protections, allowing the administration to send back a small number of pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants, a policy it retreated from this past August. Last week, however, a spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Hanoi said the American government was again reversing course.
Washington now believes that the 2008 agreement fails to protect pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants from deportation, the spokesperson, who asked not to be identified by name because of embassy procedures, told The Atlantic.
“The United States and Vietnam signed a bilateral agreement on removals in 2008 that establishes procedures for deporting Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States after July 12, 1995, and are subject to final orders of removal,” the spokesperson said. “While the procedures associated with this specific agreement do not apply to Vietnamese citizens who arrived in the United States before July 12, 1995, it does not explicitly preclude the removal of pre-1995 cases.”
The about-turn came as a State Department spokesperson confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security had met with representatives of the Vietnamese embassy in Washington, D.C., but declined to provide details of when the talks took place or what was discussed.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for DHS said: “We have 5,000 convicted criminal aliens from Vietnam with final orders of removal—these are non-citizens who during previous administrations were arrested, convicted, and ultimately ordered removed by a federal immigration judge. It’s a priority of this administration to remove criminal aliens to their home country.”
Spokespeople for the Vietnamese embassy did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
But the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, said in a statement that the purpose of the meeting was to change the 2008 agreement. That deal had initially been set to last for five years, and was to be automatically extended every three years unless either party opted out. Under those rules, it was set to renew next month. Since 1998, final removal orders have been issued for more than 9,000 Vietnamese nationals.
When it first decided to reinterpret the 2008 deal, Donald Trump’s administration argued that only pre-1995 arrivals with criminal convictions were exempt from the agreement’s protection and eligible for deportation. Vietnam initially conceded and accepted some of those immigrants before stiffening its resistance; about a dozen Vietnamese immigrants ended up being deported from the United States. The August decision to change course, reported to a California court in October, appeared to put such moves at least temporarily on ice, but the latest shift leaves the fate of a larger number of Vietnamese immigrants in doubt. Now all pre-1995 arrivals are exempt from the 2008 agreement’s protection.
[Read: The U.S. used to criticize countries that didn’t allow their citizens to leave.]
Many pre-1995 arrivals, all of whom were previously protected under the 2008 agreement by both the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, were refugees from the Vietnam War. Some are the children of those who once allied with American and South Vietnamese forces, an attribute that renders them undesirable to the current regime in Hanoi, which imputes anti-regime beliefs to the children of those who opposed North Vietnam. This anti-Communist constituency includes minorities such as the children of the American-allied Montagnards, who are persecuted in Vietnam for both their ethnicity and Christian religion.
The Trump administration’s move reflects an entirely new reading of the agreement, according to Ted Osius, who served as the United States ambassador to Vietnam from December 2014 through October 2018. Osius said that while he was in office, the 2008 agreement was accepted by all involved parties as banning the deportation of all pre-1995 Vietnamese immigrants.
“We understood that the agreement barred the deportation of pre-1995 Vietnamese. Both governments—and the Vietnamese-American community—interpreted it that way,” Osius told The Atlantic in an email. The State Department, he added, had explained this to both the White House and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
News of the Trump administration’s renewed hard line quickly made the rounds on Vietnamese American social media, with advocacy groups warning of potentially increased deportations.
“Forty-three years ago, a lot of the Southeast Asian communities and Vietnamese communities fled their countries and their homeland due to the war, which the U.S. was involved in, fleeing for their safety and the safety of their families,” said Kevin Lam, the organizing director of the Asian American Resource Workshop, an advocacy group. “The U.S. would do well to remember that.”
DURHAM, N.C.—It’s rare that there’s bipartisan agreement on anything in North Carolina politics today. It’s even stranger that a closely contested election rocked by claims of fraud would be the instigator.
But there’s an emerging consensus among Republicans and Democrats that the contested election in the Ninth Congressional District, tainted by sordid revelations, ought to have a do-over, the first the Old North State has ever seen.
On Tuesday, leading members of both parties said they believed there should probably be a new election. Neither side gets to choose: The decision rests with the North Carolina State Board of Elections, a group that includes members of both parties and one unaffiliated member; it has said it will hold a hearing by December 21. But there’s growing momentum for a new election.
“My opinion at this point is the level of taint has called the result so into question, based on the numerous irregularities, that if anyone objectively looks at this, a new election is needed,” said Michael Bitzer, a professor of politics and history at Catawba College who has followed the case closely since the start.
[Read: There’s finally a persuasive case of election fraud, and Republicans don’t care]
The race between the Republican Mark Harris and the Democrat Dan McCready was closely watched ahead of the election, with Democrats hopeful they could flip the seat, currently held by Representative Robert Pittenger, whom Harris defeated in the GOP primary. But McCready conceded the day after the election, and though unofficial totals showed Harris with a slim 905-vote lead, the election seemed to be over.
But that was dramatically overturned when the NCSBE met in November and declined to certify the results of the election. Affidavits and reporting turned up evidence of widespread, significant fraud in Bladen County, a southeastern county that’s part of the Ninth Congressional District. McCrae Dowless, a veteran political operative who was subcontracted to do voter-turnout work for the Harris campaign, requested nearly 600 absentee ballots. According to claims, Dowless had a team of workers who went around collecting ballots, some of them incomplete, from voters—a violation of state law. Hundreds of absentee ballots that were requested were never turned in, raising questions about ballot destruction. On Tuesday, WECT obtained an affidavit of a man who says he saw Dowless with hundreds of completed ballots.
Dowless, a convicted felon, had previously come under scrutiny for past election work. During a 2016 hearing about a fraud complaint he himself had filed, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The former executive director of the NCSBE, Gary Bartlett, told me that the board had previously investigated fraud issues in Bladen County and referred them to prosecutors. Dowless did not return calls for comment.
Harris has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge of Dowless’s methods. His campaign owes Red Dome Consulting, which hired Dowless, more than $40,000 for work in Bladen County.
Although the alleged scale of the fraud is large, the idea that the board of elections would order a do-over seemed initially remote. Though it has ordered local elections to be rerun, there’s never been a mulligan on a U.S. House race in the state.
Yet what began as a remote possibility has become ever more likely over the past two weeks. Harris has been practically silent since the fraud claims came to light, but in a December 7 video, he said that if the amount of fraud could have tipped the election, he’d support a do-over.
On Monday, The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer reported that a witness said Bladen County officials had counted early votes ahead of Election Day—a violation of state rules—and had allowed outsiders to see them. Knowing early-vote totals could give a campaign crucial intelligence to inform Election Day tactics.
That was apparently enough to sway state Republican officials. In the early days of the news, Dallas Woodhouse, the executive director of the North Carolina GOP, insisted that Harris’s victory be certified and that any investigation could follow. But on Tuesday, Woodhouse said that if it was true that early-vote totals had leaked, there must be another election.
“All of the choices are bad, with a lot of innocent victims,” he told Spectrum News. Notably, he declined to say whether Harris would be a viable candidate in a new election if anyone on his campaign was aware of what Dowless was doing. Robin Hayes, the chairman of the North Carolina GOP, also said the allegation of early-vote sharing, if true, warranted a new election.
[Read: The midterms could permanently change North Carolina]
A spokesman for Phil Berger, the Senate president pro tempore and the state’s most powerful Republican, said Berger would support a new election if the facts warranted it. On Tuesday in Raleigh, legislators briefly considered a provision that would have required a fresh primary election if a new general election was ordered, though the measure was dropped. The fraud claims have raised new questions about the GOP primary, in which Harris upset Pittenger. Harris won a surprisingly high portion of Bladen absentee ballots in that race as well. Berger’s spokesman said the legislature believed that if the primary was tainted, as well as the general election, the NCSBE already had the power to order a new primary as well.
Democrats find themselves in the unusual position of agreeing with Republicans, at least on the big picture. On Tuesday, in the course of a press conference lambasting Harris for not answering questions about Dowless, the North Carolina Democratic Party chairman, Wayne Goodwin, also endorsed a new election.
“I welcome what appears to be a change of heart by the North Carolina Republican Party,” he said. “I do welcome them if the Republicans now believe a new general election is warranted. I believe that it is, based on all that I’ve seen and heard.”
In a video released last week, McCready withdrew his concession and called on Harris to explain what he knew about any fraud.
The NCSBE, as well as prosecutors in Wake County, home to Raleigh, is investigating fraud. The state board could still certify the election, even if it finds fraud, but can order a new election either because fraud might have affected the results or simply because it believes that fraud taints the legitimacy of a race. Even if the NCSBE certifies, the U.S. House has the final decision on whether to seat members. Representative Steny Hoyer, the No. 2 leader of the incoming majority Democrats, has said Harris should not be seated until the facts are known.
Meanwhile, an early-winter snowstorm across the state has slowed but not stopped the flow of new information about fraud. Allegations have now spread to neighboring Robeson County, and there’s no telling whether more could be on the way.
Even before this race, there were allegations of fraud in Bladen County against candidates and operatives of both parties, and both Democrats and Republicans outside the county regarded it as a semi-lawless zone. Whatever effect election fraud might have had on the Harris-McCready race, it’s clear that the problem didn’t begin there.
Republicans in the state legislature have called for a bipartisan inquiry into election fraud across the state. (They also this week passed a voter-ID bill, which Democratic Governor Roy Cooper is expected to veto; the GOP is expected to override the veto.) Democrats say the NCSBE should be allowed to conduct its inquiry without political interference. Nonetheless, the emerging consensus on a do-over election is a surprising and significant development.
“I hate to be cynical, but if this was a long-standing issue, there was certainly bipartisanship in corruptive influence, and perhaps there is now bipartisanship to address the corruptive influence,” Michael Bitzer, the politics and history professor, said.
President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday, just days after directly implicating Trump in a felony stemming from hush-money payments to two women made just weeks before the 2016 election.
The sentencing marked the culmination of a months-long saga that began in April with a dramatic FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office and ended with Trump’s most loyal lieutenant and fixer—who once said he would take a bullet for his boss—turning against the president and implicating him directly in criminal misconduct. In Manhattan federal court on Wednesday, Cohen apologized to his family and to “the people of the United States.”
“Today is the day that I am getting my freedom back,” he said in a prepared statement. “I have been living in a personal and mental incarceration ever since the day that I accepted the offer to work for a real-estate mogul whose business acumen I deeply admired.” He said that his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him “to take a path of darkness instead of light.”
The sentencing also revealed how Cohen, who had been hoping for leniency, given his assistance in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and his partial cooperation with the Southern District of New York, may have miscalculated. Cooperation “does not wipe the slate clean,” Judge William H. Pauley said on Wednesday, adding that “a significant term of imprisonment” for Cohen was justified. Cohen was also hit with a forfeiture of $500,000, restitution of $1.4 million, and two $50,000 fines.
New York prosecutors had recommended last week that Cohen serve up to four years in prison for crimes including tax evasion, false bank statements, campaign-finance violations, and lying to Congress—a recommendation that Cohen’s lawyer Guy Petrillo called “strident” and “unfair” in Wednesday’s hearing. But Judge Pauley accused Cohen of being motivated by “personal greed” and thriving on “access to wealthy and powerful people.” Each of his crimes was “sophisticated,” Pauley said, and “standing alone, warrant considerable punishment.” He ordered Cohen to surrender on March 6, 2019, at which point he will be taken to the Otisville Correctional Facility in New York State.
The recommendation by the Southern District of New York surprised Cohen’s legal team, Cohen’s former lawyer Lanny Davis told The Atlantic, given how starkly it contrasted with a concurrent filing issued by Mueller, who is investigating Trump’s campaign for potentially conspiring with Russia in 2016. Mueller wrote last week that Cohen had provided the special counsel “with useful information concerning certain discrete Russia-related matters core to its investigation,” in addition to details about Trump’s pursuit of a Trump Tower deal in Moscow during the election. Jeannie Rhee, a prosecutor in Mueller’s office, echoed that conclusion in court on Wednesday. “Mr. Cohen has sought to tell us the truth,” she said, while remaining tight-lipped about the ongoing investigation.
Cohen’s sentence is a warning to anyone caught up in the Mueller probe who declines to cooperate with prosecutors. Whereas Mueller’s team credited Cohen with his eventual assistance—while pointing out that he was not initially forthcoming—New York prosecutors recommended that Cohen serve prison time owing in part to his “affirmative decision” not to cooperate fully with the Southern District. He was not willing to discuss “other criminal uncharged conduct, if any, in his past,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo, and that was a deal breaker. Nicolas Roos, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted Cohen in the Southern District, asserted that allowing Cohen to engage in “selective cooperation” would “send the wrong message” that such behavior is rewarded. Cohen said he chose not to enter into a full cooperation agreement because “the sooner I am sentenced, the sooner I can return to my family.”
“I don’t need a cooperation agreement in place to do the right thing,” Cohen said. But Pauley, the judge, said, “Our system of justice would be less robust without the use of cooperating agreements with law enforcement.”
Davis, who decided after Cohen’s sentencing that his job as Cohen’s lawyer was done, called the difference in tone between the Mueller and Southern District memos “the tale of two prosecutors.” “It’s the difference between Mueller looking at the big picture—how Cohen has cooperated on issues core to the investigation into a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia—versus the Southern District, which is not telling the full story,” Davis said. (The Southern District did not return a request for comment on Davis’s allegation.) He pointed to a detail mentioned by Petrillo in his sentencing memo filed last week—namely, that “Michael was notified through counsel” of the government’s decision to charge him “only three or four days” before the charges were filed.
But Cohen had the opportunity to cooperate fully even after he was charged, said Daniel Goldman, the former deputy chief of the Organized Crime Unit in the Southern District of New York, or SDNY. “Cohen’s refusal to cooperate fully is why he’s in this situation, not because SDNY chose to charge him before they met with him,” Goldman said. “If he wanted to avoid jail, he likely could have if he had fully cooperated.”
Cohen’s lawyers also believe that New York prosecutors should have given him more credit for helping them potentially catch a far bigger fish: Donald Trump. “He offered evidence against the most powerful person in our country,” Petrillo said on Wednesday. “He did so not knowing what the results would be.” New York prosecutors acknowledged that Cohen implicated Trump directly in the campaign-finance violations stemming from hush-money payments he made to the adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford—a.k.a. Stormy Daniels—and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal at the height of the election. The women had been planning to reveal that they’d had affairs with Trump more than a decade ago, which he denies. But Roos said on Wednesday that Cohen’s role in the campaign-finance violations was particularly “serious because of the tremendous societal costs,” and “in committing these crimes, Cohen has eroded faith in the electoral process.”
Minutes after Cohen was sentenced, the Southern District announced that it had reached a non-prosecution agreement with American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer. AMI admitted to working “in concert” with Trump’s campaign to pay McDougal $150,000 “in order to ensure” that she did not publicize damaging allegations about Trump before the election, prosecutors said. “AMI further admitted that its principal purpose in making the payment was to suppress the woman’s story so as to prevent it from influencing the election,” they added.
AMI’s cooperation with prosecutors, which is ongoing, could be particularly damaging to the president. After initially denying he had any knowledge of the payments, Trump now says the payments did not constitute a campaign contribution and that it’s Cohen’s “liability” if he made a mistake. But AMI’s admission that they made the payment to prevent a scandal from derailing Trump’s candidacy undercuts his recent claim that the payments were “a simple private transaction.” Two other Trump associates who were involved in the payments—the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, and the CEO of American Media, David Pecker—were given immunity to testify about the scheme over the summer.
Cohen still poses a significant threat to the president in the investigation into a potential conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia. He has taken Mueller deep inside the Trump Organization, describing how he helped Trump pursue a real-estate deal in Russia well into the election campaign, and provided the first in-court evidence that Trump may have been compromised by Russia while President Vladimir Putin was waging a direct attack on the United States. Cohen has committed to continuing his cooperation with Mueller, even after being sentenced in the Southern District, according to the special counsel’s filing. Trump has called Cohen a “weak person” who made up “stories” to get a “deal” with Mueller, but he’s also been lashing out against the Mueller probe more than ever. “Bob Mueller (who is a much different man than people think) and his out of control band of Angry Democrats, don’t want the truth, they only want lies,” he tweeted last week. “The truth is very bad for their mission!”
Way back in June, my cousin and I joined the pilgrimage of people who came of age in the mid-aughts trekking to New York City to see the musical adaptation of Mean Girls on Broadway. Though we were definitely going ironically, I believe that familiarity with the material is crucial to appreciating any theatrical performance, so on our drive up, I cranked the campy, sugared soundtrack on repeat until our ears were ringing. We listened to it again on the way back, and again the next day, and then I was immensely sick of it.
And then, last week, I and more than 83 million other Spotify users were treated to this year’s release of the music-streaming service’s annual Wrapped tool, which provides users with an animated slideshow breakdown of their individual listening history for the year. For example, mine told me that I listened to “non-mainstream music 90 percent more than the average Spotify user.” That is, my most played album of 2018 was the Mean Girls soundtrack, streamed for a total of four hours.
People love Spotify Wrapped. We love the stories that the thousands of hours of music we listened to this year tell about us. We love the embarrassing revelation of a guilty pleasure, or the reinforcement of a cultivated musical identity when the bands at the top of the list match the T-shirt collection in our drawers. If you use social media, you’ve almost certainly seen people you know posting screencapped portions of their Wrapped results alongside some highly enthused observation: Their top five artists “so perfectly encapsulated” them. Their data were thrown out of whack after they fell asleep one too many times listening to artists with names like White Noise for Baby Sleep. A friend texted me that “seeing top songs on Spotify Wrapped is like seeing an old best friend that you lost touch with.”
It’s apropos, then, that Spotify added an astrological component to this year’s Wrapped, telling some which astrological signs they listened to most this year. (A recurring combination was Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez, both Cancers.) The way Spotify touts the arrival of Wrapped results—“Find out everything there is to know about how you listened in 2018!”—is like stepping into a psychic’s parlor. We all want to know ourselves, and Spotify promises us an organized dredge of tea leaves, our true selves represented cleanly by the five songs we never even realized we listened to that much, each brightly colored slide a portrait of a complete and unique person—“because,” as the feature’s introduction reads, “no one else listened exactly like you.” Users read so much meaning into their results that Spotify’s Twitter support account has been inundated with angry replies from people convinced that their 2018 chart-toppers were incorrect or unfair.
[Read: Your DNA is not your culture]
Spotify Wrapped is a masterful coup of free advertising and an impressive display of consumer trust at a moment when our faith in tech companies is historically low. After all, to assemble your end-of-year hits playlist, the platform requires detailed information about everything you do and everything you hear when you use a platform many of us spend more time inside than any other. In 2016, the average Spotify user listened to roughly 2.5 hours of audio a day. That’s a colossal amount of data. In a year when other tech giants were taken to task by the government, the market, and the public for their privacy practices, it’s hard to imagine anyone would respond with such enthusiasm if Facebook, Twitter, or Google started sending out annual summaries of everything they’ve got on us.
That’s largely because Spotify feels different. Aside from some disputes over royalties that haven’t significantly hindered the company’s growth, Spotify is outwardly tame. The platform doesn’t have a comments section, and it got rid of messaging in 2017. Aside from a few second-order connectivity features—namely, the ability to stream and add to other users’ playlists and see what your friends are currently listening to—Spotify is a solitary experience, not a social network. Its personalized machine-curated playlists are a much-loved feature. And as personal as it is, music is less private than a chat history or cache of photos.
“The average music listener often uses music as a sort of aural wallpaper,” says Robert Prey, a media-studies professor at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. “It’s in the background and it’s not that important. It’s fun, and so people don’t take it as seriously.” In a November 2017 paper, the Swedish media scholar Patrick Vonderau coined the term Spotify effect to describe the way the platform has downplayed its market impact while emphasizing its clever design and fun, user-facing features. Spotify’s achievement, the paper concluded, was “the company’s ability to fold markets into each other: to make disappear an aggressive financial growth strategy and business set-up based on ad-tech engineering by creating an aura of Nordic cool and public benefit around its use of music.”
Spotify is cool and innocuous, and so is Spotify Wrapped. It’s a year-end package of low-stakes personal data, focused on you, for you—as Instagram-ready as the feature’s design is, only on the last of nine screens do you see an option to “share” the results on social media. Benjamin Johnson, an advertising professor at the University of Florida who researches how we selectively share our music tastes to influence self-presentation, says that Spotify has managed to avoid the “creepiness factor” by granting a maximum amount of user control over what someone’s network sees of their listening history. As a result, Johnson says, a person reviewing Wrapped results “feels the control in that moment before they take the screenshot, where they can decide, Is this going to make me look good? or Does this reflect the story that I want to tell about myself?”
Of course, just because it doesn’t feel that way doesn’t mean Spotify isn’t collecting a ton of valuable personal information. “We find that there’s incredible detail in the data,” Prey says. “There’s all this information: everything from what brand of headphones you’re listening to the music on, to if the volume was changed within songs, whether or not you resize the app’s windows.” In May, a Bank of England project found that it was possible to capture subtleties in peoples’ moods and preferences based on their Spotify listening patterns and other data.
For this reason, Prey is concerned that Spotify may become a prime example of what he calls “function creep.” Spotify’s data collection may remain stored away in the cloud, Prey wrote in a 2016 study, “or it may one day migrate out, as previously undetermined uses for correlating music taste with some other aspect of our lives are discovered. For example, data collected for the purpose of recommending music may be found to deliver a reliable predictor of financial solvency, IQ, or relationship status. What if a taste for early ’90s Nu Metal indicates a higher propensity to default on a debt repayment?” In other words, Spotify itself may have no real reason for tracking when you adjust the size of your app’s window, and you might not care that it does so—but should an opportunity to monetize that information arise, the company already has it. “As people say,” Prey quips, “data is the new oil.” (Spotify declined to comment on the record for this story.) Ultimately, the popularity of Wrapped may reveal more about our love for music—and occasionally, our inability to resist the charm of a catchy show tune—than it does about our protectiveness over our data.
In recent years, many of America’s urban schools have improved significantly. A 2016 report from the Urban Institute found that while all the country’s public-school students improved in the decade starting in 2005, the gain for those in large cities was double that of the U.S. average; the advances are especially pronounced in kids’ reading scores. With these strides, the achievement gap between city districts and their suburban and rural counterparts closed by roughly a third during that same period.
In some cases, the gap is all but nonexistent. Take, for example, Chicago, which in the late 1980s was notoriously deemed the country’s “worst school system” by then-Education Secretary William J. Bennett. A number of recent studies have shown that while standardized-test scores across Illinois have been flattening for the past decade or so, achievement in Chicago’s public-school district (CPS) has been steadily rising.
In fact, data from 11,000 school districts studied by Stanford researchers last year suggest that CPS ranks first in the nation for academic growth, and state statistics show that its students’ college-attendance rates are steadily improving, too: Sixty-five percent of the district’s 2018 graduates enrolled in college within a year after getting their diploma, compared with an average of 75 percent across the state. CPS students’ college-going prospects still fall toward the bottom when compared with those in most nearby districts, but they’re far from the worst—and the Stanford researchers’ findings around future growth in CPS indicate that its students’ postsecondary-achievement levels are poised to continue improving.
But middle-class, white parents tend to make assumptions otherwise—and research suggests that those assumptions are the result of racial biases. A recent study in the journal City & Community based on survey data out of eight metropolitan areas in the U.S. suggests that residents—including, presumably, parents—frequently harbor negative associations with the term urban and, by extension, “inner-city” communities and institutions, such as schools. To them, these words may connote scenes of educational dysfunction—rows of decrepit classrooms, for example, each stocked with an overworked teacher and a cluster of indignant teens, almost all of them poor students of color.
By contrast, the study pointed to evidence that the term suburban tends to elicit images of productivity and well-being among white parents. Of course, these stereotypes that white, middle-class parents harbor aren’t simply about population density, but about race, with urban standing in for predominantly black or Latino. A number of studies have shown that white parents tend to select schools with lower proportions of black students, regardless of school quality.
“We know that these terms, which might seem like they are neutral descriptions of physical spaces, are not neutral,” says Shelley Kimelberg, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo who co-authored the study with the Wichita State University sociology professor Chase Billingham. “They reflect people’s lived experiences and the social environment.” According to Kimelberg, the influence an individual’s personal experiences have in shaping how she defines the term urban contributes to a feedback loop, cementing “the idea that urban equals bad school and suburban equals good school.”
In their study, Kimelberg and Billingham analyzed data from a survey of residents in metropolitan areas across the U.S. When controlling for other factors, every one-point increase in whites’ perception of their neighborhood’s school quality was associated with a 15 percent decrease in the odds that they would describe their area as “urban.” The same effect was not evident among people of color.
Jack Schneider, a historian who studies education, has described this as “a gap in perceptions,” pointing as one example to public-opinion polls finding that while parents consistently give high marks to their own neighborhood schools, they also tend to report a lack of confidence in U.S. public education as a whole.
One of the most glaring manifestations of this gap, Schneider has argued, is the stigma against urban schools. Not only do stereotypes fail to acknowledge the variation within these districts, as Kimelberg’s study highlights, but they also place too much emphasis on test-score data, which, as Schneider has shown, provide a flawed illustration of school quality. For example, one 2006 study found that a majority (60 percent) of the variance in students’ test scores is attributable to kids’ lives outside of the classroom—where they live and with whom. The quality of instruction, including things like teacher characteristics, had little bearing on exam performance. Other research has found that the quality of one’s schooling plays a very limited role in determining whether she climbs up the economic ladder later in life.
Yet the stigma persists, and the tragedy of all this is that the stigma itself is a key reason educational inequality remains. Despite signs of a reversal in the white flight that crippled urban school districts following desegregation orders tracing back to the late 1960s and ’70s, research suggests that the country is seeing a new iteration of income-based housing segregation driven almost exclusively by affluent families with children. By moving to certain neighborhoods in pursuit of what they perceive to be good schools and to flee what they perceive to be bad ones, they contribute to school-funding inequalities by taking resources and social capital with them.
Read: Reviving a hollowed-out school
Chicago Public Schools, where close to nine in 10 students are black or Latino, offers a case study for these trends. The district has in recent years engaged in earnest efforts to attract middle-class families—launching International Baccalaureate programs at a slew of high schools, for example, and building new schools in white neighborhoods.
And, perhaps in part as a result, a body of scholarship corroborates the turnaround narrative that district officials have—sometimes suspiciously—long been touting. For example: CPS students, no matter the demographic subgroup, generally perform better than their peers in other Illinois school districts. These results are partly attributable to the district’s rising graduation rates and scores on the ACT college-entrance exam, but they also owe themselves to growing poverty and racial diversity in suburban school districts—a trend that Kimbelberg highlighted when reflecting on the outdated or otherwise flawed assumptions that seem to inform people’s mental associations with the words suburban and urban.
Despite these changes, CPS has struggled to generate a critical mass of middle-class parents interested in its public schools—at least beyond those schools where students need a certain test score to get in. While reporting by WBEZ shows that the rate of families in Chicago who choose to send their children to their neighborhood school has declined, the trend is particularly evident among white families. Just half of Chicago’s white, school-age children attend the city’s public schools, compared with about 80 percent of their black counterparts, according to a 2014 report by WBEZ; the remainder attend other types of schools, like charters, magnets, or private institutions.
This dynamic, which is seen in urban areas across the country that give parents significant choice over where to send their kids to school, has been found to exacerbate educational stratification and racial segregation. The result is that even when urban districts improve a little, they struggle to improve a lot. And yet another generation passes through an education system defined by its unevenness and its racial divides.
It was not so long ago—only 108 years, within a great-grandma’s memory—that a person’s eyes first beheld the South Pole. When Roald Amundsen made it to the bottom of the world in 1911, it marked a new chapter in the human story. Our curious, inventive, and adaptable species, born on the sunny savanna, had reached that last spot of remote desolation on our home planet.
Little did we know that less than a century later, the hustle and bustle of our society would alter that ancient landscape forever.
The pristine environments at both poles of the Earth are changing, perhaps irreversibly, according to a new pair of federal studies. On Monday, a new NASA report warned that ancient glaciers in Antarctica are “waking up” and beginning to dump ice into the sea, which could eventually raise sea levels.
The following day, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its new Arctic Report Card, which finds that the top of the world is also thawing, melting, and breaking down. The Arctic is undergoing a period of “record and near-record warmth unlike any period on record,” the report says.
Emily Osborne, a scientist who leads Arctic research at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, repeated this warning while speaking at a major geoscience conference on Tuesday. “The Arctic is experiencing the most unprecedented transition in human history,” she said.
The finding at the bottom of the world is in some ways the most shocking. Antarctica is split into two massive ice sheets, the East and the West. Researchers have long considered the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to be less worrisome: Though it contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by 173 feet, it sits at a high enough altitude to withstand the first century or so of warming.
The new finding may complicate that conclusion. Using a new database of global ice movements, NASA scientists found that several glaciers in the East Antarctic Ice Sheet are quickening their march toward the sea. Since 2008, a set of glaciers that feed Vincennes Bay—which is due south of Australia—lost about nine feet of overall height. Their speed has also increased, suggesting that these glaciers are dumping more ice into the ocean than researchers previously expected.
The Vincennes Bay glaciers are important because they block the inland Aurora and Wilkes ice basins from tumbling into the sea. If both basins collapsed, they could raise sea levels by 92 feet. “Taken together, they’re about four Greenlands [worth of sea-level rise],” said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at NASA, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union on Monday.
[Read: The pond at the North Pole]
Alex Gardner, another glaciologist at NASA, said that warming oceans—and not just a warming climate overall—seemed to be causing the decline in glacier levels. Some of the fastest-collapsing glaciers in the world—such as the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland—are primarily giving way because of warm ocean waters wearing at their icy fronts.
Both researchers said that existing models of sea-level rise may not account for these changes. “We weren’t expecting it because we never knew it was happening,” Walker said. “This isn’t new; it started happening 10 years ago. We just couldn’t see it.”
A reindeer herder stops with two animals in north-central Russia. Reindeer and caribou populations have fallen by more than 56 percent worldwide since the 1980s, according to a new federal study. (Sergei Karpukhin / Reuters)Not that the other end of the world is doing much better. NOAA’s new Arctic Report Card—an annual analysis, now in its 13th edition—finds that the world’s Far North is going through a tremendous upheaval. The report says that the catastrophic effects of climate change now wreak mayhem in every season of the year.
In the winter, when the Arctic Ocean has historically frozen into an enormous skating rink, sea ice now struggles to form at all. 2018 was the second-worst year on record for sea ice, the report says. The Arctic is now so warm that it hemorrhages ice even at the coldest, darkest time of the year: “During two weeks in February—normally the most important weeks for sea-ice growth in the year—the Bering Sea actually lost an area of ice the size of Idaho,” said Don Perovich, a geophysicist at Dartmouth, on Tuesday.
In the spring, the sea ice vanishes early, allowing algae blooms to envelop the open ocean. One warm-water species of algae produces toxins that trigger a disease called paralytic shellfish poisoning when absorbed by shellfish and then eaten by humans. Toxins in a single animal can kill a person in as little as two hours, according to the Alaska Division of Public Health. There is no antidote.
Cases of paralytic shellfish poisoning have increased sevenfold in Alaska over the past 40 years, the new report finds. Seals, walruses, and whales have also been killed by the disease.
Finally, in the summer, temperatures soar. In August, huge swaths of the Arctic Ocean surface measured 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. Ice now almost never makes it through the summer: Less than 1 percent of sea ice in 2018 formed more than four years ago. When scientists began tracking that figure back in the 1980s, one-sixth of all sea ice was at least four years old.
Animal life is cratering in response to these year-round changes. Caribou and reindeer herds have lost more than half their animals since the 1980s, said Howard Epstein, a professor at the University of Virginia. About 4.7 million caribou and reindeer roamed the tundra a few decades ago. Only 2.1 million do so today.
Meanwhile, micro-plastics—tiny shards of plastic from bottle caps, fishing gear, and the filters of cigarette butts—are pouring into the region. “The Arctic Ocean has a higher concentration of micro-plastics than any other global basin in the world,” said Karen Frey, a professor at Clark University. “All roads in the global ocean-circulation system lead to the Arctic.”
All these dire federal scientific reports might seem like they would prompt a federal governmental response. Tim Gallaudet, the interim administrator of NOAA and a retired rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, was on hand to provide it. He hailed President Donald Trump’s signing of the Save Our Seas Act, a law to combat micro-plastic pollution that Congress passed unanimously in October. He also hailed the White House’s support for NOAA Arctic research.
But he did not endorse any attempt to fight climate change. “The data is the data. Changes are occurring,” he said. “What we need to do is adapt to those changes—and we can adapt as a country effectively by better understanding and improving our predictions.”
Asked whether he or any other senior NOAA official had talked to the president about climate change, he admitted he had not, and did not acknowledge any other efforts. “No,” he said. “I personally have not briefed the president on climate change.”
In 2014, as summer transitioned into fall, many of Riley Bove’s friends, colleagues, and family members came down with a particularly nasty cold. People were off sick from work, and kids were staying home from school, so when Bove’s 4-year-old son, Luca, developed some breathing problems, she wasn’t especially concerned. But a few days later, Luca’s symptoms took a strange turn. When he tried getting out of bed, his head flopped back down on his pillow. When he tried to grab a cup, his arm was weak.
Bove, a neurologist at the University of California at San Francisco, took Luca to a pediatrician, who dismissed the weakness as just another sign of his infection. But in the evening, when Luca failed to improve, Bove sent a video of his strained movements to a friend who works in pediatric immunology. The friend said the symptoms looked exactly like those of AFM.
AFM, or acute flaccid myelitis, is a rare, polio-like illness that affects about one in a million people, mostly young children. Luca’s story is typical: Patients get cold-like symptoms that, within a week or so, progress to paralysis. Some kids lose control of their limbs. Others, like Luca, became paralyzed from head to toe, needing a ventilator to breathe and a feeding tube to eat. The cause of these symptoms is still unclear, but a common virus known as EVD-68 remains the most likely suspect.
AFM isn’t new, but it rose to prominence (and gained its name) in 2014 when it afflicted 120 people in the United States—a record number. Doctors wondered whether that was a freak occurrence, but the condition came back in 2016, affecting 149 additional patients. And this year, it returned again, with 158 confirmed cases and more under investigation. The disease now seems to run on a biennial schedule, and although the third wave peaked in mid-fall, scientists, clinicians, and parents are anxiously looking ahead to a likely fourth surge in 2020.
[Read: The main suspect behind an ominous spike in a polio-like illness]
Unlike many seasonal illnesses, which come, sicken, and leave without long-term consequences, AFM means lasting (if not lifelong) disability for those it touches. And that community grows with every new wave: A Facebook group for parents of children with AFM, which formed in January 2015, has swelled to more than 600 members.
“We dread late summer,” wrote Bove in a recent opinion piece, co-authored with two other parents of children with AFM. “We grieve those final days when our still-normal children climbed their last playground structures or took their last runs down the block or their last independent breaths. We relive the trauma of the hospitalization, when at night we kissed our brave children, not knowing whether they would awaken stable, intubated, or unable to ever walk again. In addition, we fear the coming wave of new bewildered parents.”
But Bove says that something was different this year. In 2014 and 2016, the affected families were still getting to grips with this strange and unfamiliar condition. “This year, when we saw many new parents join the Facebook group, it was like: Not this time!” she says. “It really galvanized the parent community to become more outspoken in their advocacy. They’ve plastered the news with stories.” In no small part because of their efforts, awareness of AFM has soared, including within the medical community. “We’re seeing a very appropriate amount of increased attention,” says Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado.
That matters because AFM is still rare, and often misdiagnosed. Despite how dramatic the later symptoms can be, they still might be easily mistaken for other paralytic illnesses. When I spoke to Priya Duggal from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health earlier this week, she had just heard from a family whose child might have been misdiagnosed with the autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. “They live in a rural area in a state that doesn’t see a lot of AFM cases,” she says. “They’d seen multiple neurologists, and no one had even suggested it. It was only because of a press story that they now think that their kid has AFM.”
Meanwhile, the earlier signs of AFM can be so innocuous that they’ve often been dismissed—as they were with Luca. “A lot of parents were told all kinds of things,” Bove says. “That it’s [in their children’s heads], or that it’s because of their fever, or even that a dad had broken the kid’s arm!” Bove and her co-authors write in their op-ed that clinicians aren’t even checking to see whether children can raise all their limbs, let alone performing more complex medical scans.
“We’re trying to get across to clinicians that if you see a child with limb weakness, in the right season, do an MRI of their spine or a lumbar puncture, in consultation with a neurological specialist,” says Messacar.
Diagnostic delays have confounded the search for the disease’s cause. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hasn’t been able to detect the most probable culprit—EVD-68—in the bodily fluids of every patient. But, as I’ve reported before, that might be because doctors are collecting the wrong fluids, or because they’re collecting fluids too late, at a time when the consequences of infection linger but the virus itself has disappeared. If wary clinicians can collect a slew of tissue samples—spinal fluid, nasal swabs, stool, and more—when patients first arrive in their offices, rather than days or weeks later, it might become much easier to confirm what’s behind AFM.
Faster diagnoses would also be a huge boon to parents, many of whom have been bounced from one provider to another before their paralyzed children are properly diagnosed and treated. “We still don’t know if those delays were medically relevant,” says Bove, “but they were very relevant in terms of the parents’ trust in the system.”
[Read: How misinfodemics spread disease]
That trust can also falter when it comes to decisions about treatments. Some families have faced a kind of weary resignation from their physicians: “Their kids have spinal injuries, and they’ll get back what they get back,” says Bove. But early and frequent rehabilitative therapies have, in some cases, made a big difference. Luca, for example, is back in school; he can run around with his friends, even though his arms and neck are still weak. Others haven’t been so lucky, and full recoveries are still uncommon. But Bove says that most children have made gains of some kind, and continue to do so over years. “The message should be one of cautious hope,” she says.
This year has also been a unifying one for scientists and clinicians who have dealt with AFM. In September, Carlos Pardo-Villamizar from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine convened a working group of medical colleagues, and they now run weekly conference calls to discuss the disease. They’re putting plans in place for which tissue samples to collect, creating guidelines for treating patients, and readying clinical trials to work out which treatments work best. When the next wave hits in 2020, if not earlier, they’ll be ready.
The CDC has also convened an AFM task force with similar goals (and some of the same participants). To support the agency’s efforts, Kirsten Gillibrand, the Democratic senator from New York, has asked Congress to approve a substantial amount of emergency funding—just as it did for the Zika virus in 2017.
“No parent would say that AFM is more important than all the other conditions that children face,” says Bove. “Sickle cell and type 1 diabetes affect even more children. But the fear is that AFM could get bigger, which is why parents want more attention now. Before polio affected tens of thousands of kids, it affected hundreds.”
Since the dawn of the 21st century, there have been six different Spider-Man movies, and that’s not including a spate of spin-offs, franchise crossovers, and already planned sequels. Three talented actors (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland) have played the role, making the web-slinging superhero this generation’s James Bond—a mantle solemnly passed from handsome 20-something to handsome 20-something. The world doesn’t really need another Spider-Man movie, which is exactly what makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse such an unexpected delight: Here’s the latest entry in a fully saturated genre that somehow, through sheer creative gumption, does something new.
First, it’s an animated film that smartly uses the visual language of comic books to have its heroes move in ways that couldn’t be accomplished in live action, even with an expansive budget. Second, Into the Spider-Verse exists outside of any other Marvel continuity, so it doesn’t have to worry about setting up several sequels or referencing past editions. And lastly, it’s produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who’ve long specialized in translating unwieldy-sounding projects into likable blockbusters, such as The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street.
Lord and Miller aren’t the film’s directors (though Lord co-scripted); that credit goes to Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. But the duo’s anarchic fingerprints are all over this movie, which plucks various Spider-men and Spider-women from multiple dimensions and brings them crashing into the life of Miles Morales (voiced by Shameik Moore), an Afro Latino teenager who finds himself blessed with spider-powers. A comic-book character created by Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli in 2011, Miles was a refreshing take on the hero that clicked with audiences; his film counterpart is sure to do the same.
Though Into the Spider-Verse is an origin tale, it takes care to avoid tiresome backstory tropes. Yes, Miles gets bitten by a magic arachnid, and yes, he has to come to grips with his wall-crawling powers. But the film refracts and satirizes that process through its phantasmagoric visuals (which beautifully blend two-dimensional comic-book art with three-dimensional movie art) and its delightfully vast ensemble. Each version of Spider-Man knows that with great power comes great responsibility, but that message can be translated in a thousand ways.
[Read: “Spider-Man: Homecoming” is one of the best superhero movies in years.]
In Into the Spider-Verse, Miles finds himself in the middle of a pitched battle between the classic Peter Parker Spider-Man (Chris Pine) and his longtime enemy the Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), who is animated as a gigantic 10-foot cinderblock of a person. Kingpin is tooling around with a machine that opens portals to other dimensions; it goes haywire, kills off Peter Parker, and belches out various alternate iterations of him into the world, including a sad-sack 40-something version voiced by Jake Johnson. This new Peter takes Miles under his wing and tries to train him for the Spider-Man role, but quickly enough the lessons start to flow in both directions.
Alongside Johnson’s beer-bellied Peter Parker, there’s Spider-Woman (a cool-headed, teenage Gwen Stacy voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), Spider-Man Noir (a black-and-white ’30s throwback voiced by Nicolas Cage), Peni Parker (a Japanese student, voiced by Kimiko Glenn, with a futuristic robot in tow), and Spider-Ham (a cartoon pig-person voiced by John Mulaney). Each is given a distinct visual style: Spider-Ham is straight out of Looney Tunes, conjuring giant wooden mallets seemingly from nowhere, while Peni Parker has stepped out of an anime world and Spider-Man Noir is constantly followed by howling winds and rain.
Watching all of these characters clash alongside Miles is endlessly entertaining, and the directors manage to make each visual approach co-exist organically within the same frame. The voice ensemble—which also includes Brian Tyree Henry as Miles’s straitlaced policeman dad and Mahershala Ali as his sketchy but charismatic uncle—imbues every character with a specific personality. Johnson, in particular, is a revelation, bringing the spirit of his disaffected-slacker character in New Girl to a superpowered hero who knows the basics of do-goodism but who long ago lost his passion for his work.
As Miles, Peter, and the gang work to take on the Kingpin and restore all of the characters to their rightful dimension, Peter relearns how to have fun, helped along by a script that’s overflowing with mad energy. Into the Spider-Verse should feel like a brand exercise gone wrong, a corporate mandate to sell different kinds of Spider-toys to willing kids. Instead, it’s a film that every other comic-book movie needs to take notes from, one that’s exuberant, inventive, and thrilled by heroism in a way that many of these films forget to be. No doubt it will suffer the same fate as its brethren and spawn sequel after sequel. But for now its ingenuity is something to be championed.
Edmon de HaroWhen Americans look abroad these days, they see Donald Trumps everywhere: In Brazil, whose new president, Jair Bolsonaro, endorses torture, threatens to pull out of the Paris climate-change agreement, and suggests that his country was better off under military rule. In the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte has overseen the extrajudicial killing of thousands of alleged drug dealers and threatened to impose martial law nationwide. In Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has quashed the free press, enriched his cronies, and stoked fear and hatred of refugees. In Poland, whose Law and Justice Party has undermined the independence of the supreme court. Even in Italy, whose leaders demonize immigrants, bash the European Union, and pal around with Steve Bannon.
But the more you examine global Trumpism, the more it challenges the story lines that dominate conversation in the United States. Ask commentators to explain the earthquake that has hit American politics since 2016, and they’ll likely say one of two things. First, that it’s a scream of rage from a working class made downwardly mobile by globalization. Second, that it’s a backlash by white Christians who fear losing power to immigrants and racial and religious minorities.
Yet these theories don’t travel well. Downward mobility? As Anne Applebaum pointed out in this magazine just a few months ago, “Poland’s economy has been the most consistently successful in Europe over the past quarter century. Even after the global financial collapse in 2008, the country saw no recession.” In the years leading up to Duterte’s surprise 2016 victory, the Philippines experienced what the scholar Nicole Curato has called “phenomenal economic growth.” The racial-and-religious-backlash theory leaves a lot unexplained, too. Immigration played little role in Duterte’s ascent, or in Bolsonaro’s. Despite his history of anti-black comments, preelection polls showed Bolsonaro winning among black and mixed-race Brazilians. Racism has been even less central to Duterte’s appeal.
The problem with both American-born story lines is that authoritarian nationalism is rising in a diverse set of countries. Some are mired in recession; others are booming. Some are consumed by fears of immigration; others are not. But besides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.
To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, it’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.” This political hierarchy appeared natural—as natural as adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Women’s empowerment ruptures this order. “Youths oppress My people, and women rule over them,” laments Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible. “My people, your leaders mislead you.”
Because male dominance is deeply linked to political legitimacy, many revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries have used the specter of women’s power to discredit the regime they sought to overthrow. Then, once in power themselves, they have validated their authority by reducing women’s rights. In a 1995 paper, Arthur Gilbert and James Cole of the University of Denver observed that French revolutionaries made Marie Antoinette a symbol of the immorality of the ancien régime and that Iranian revolutionaries did the same to Princess Ashraf, the “unveiled and powerful” sister of the shah. After toppling the monarchy, the French revolutionaries banned women from holding senior teaching positions and inheriting property. Ayatollah Khamenei made it a crime for women to speak on the radio or appear unveiled in public.
Some of the revolutions of the Arab Spring followed a similar course. In their book, The Hillary Doctrine, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl note that when the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi replaced the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Morsi quickly announced that he would abolish the quota guaranteeing women’s seats in parliament, overturn a ban on female circumcision, and make it harder for women to divorce an abusive husband. After Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster, the first law that Libya’s new government repealed was the one banning polygamy.
Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, Orbán, and their ilk aren’t revolutionaries. But they, too, use gender to discredit one political order and validate another. Each describes the regime that preceded him as illegitimate: Trump claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and thus wasn’t eligible to be president under the Constitution. Bolsonaro and Duterte accused previous governments of tolerating unacceptable levels of crime. Poland’s Law and Justice Party claimed that its predecessors were beholden to Russia and the European Union.
In each case, Trump and his ideological cousins tied their predecessor’s illegitimacy to women’s power. And in each case, their efforts to denigrate and subordinate women cemented—for their supporters—the belief that the nation, having been turned upside down, was being turned right-side up.
It’s easy to see how this worked for Trump. He made Hillary Clinton—the first woman ever nominated for president by a major party—the personification of America’s corrupt political system. But rather than credibly promise to cleanse America of corrupting financial interests, he promised his supporters—the majority of whom told pollsters that America had grown “too soft and feminine”—a government cleansed of the corruption of one particular villainess.
Outside Trump rallies, vendors sold T-shirts showing Trump as a bare-chested boxer towering over a suggestively posed Clinton. trump 2016. finally someone with balls read one pin. Declared another: don’t be a pussy. Vote for Trump in 2016. Inside the rallies, crowds chanted “Lock her up,” a taunt never directed at Trump’s male primary rivals. Again and again, Trump responded to women who challenged him politically—Fox News’s Megyn Kelly, his rival presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren—by calling them ugly. After his second debate with Clinton, he observed that she had “walked in front of me,” and “believe me, I wasn’t impressed.” The implication was clear: No matter how high a woman ascends, she’s ultimately just a body whose value is determined by men.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / GettyCommentators sometimes describe Trump’s alliance with the Christian right as incongruous given his libertine history. But whatever their differences when it comes to the proper behavior of men, Trump and his evangelical backers are united by a common desire to constrain the behavior of women. That alliance was consecrated during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when Republicans raged against Judiciary Committee Democrats for supposedly degrading the Senate by orchestrating a public hearing for Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault. At a rally, Trump took aim at Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, whom he called “another beauty”—at which point the crowd began chanting “Lock her up.”
To Brazilians, Filipinos, Hungarians, Italians, and Poles, this should all sound strikingly familiar. Bolsonaro, who ran for Brazilian president in 2018 against a backdrop of economic collapse (in 2016, Brazil’s economy contracted by more than 3 percent), political scandals (the jailing of a former president followed by the impeachment and removal of his successor), and rampant crime (in 2017, Brazil suffered almost 64,000 murders, close to twice as many as the United States and Europe combined), promised to return his country to its supposedly glorious past. “We want a Brazil that is similar to the one we had 40, 50 years ago,” he declared—even though 40 and 50 years ago, Brazil was a military dictatorship.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro linked this counterrevolution to a counterrevolution against uppity women. When, as a legislator, he voted to impeach Brazil’s first female president, Dilma Rousseff—who had been tortured by Brazil’s military rulers in the early 1970s—he dedicated the vote to one of that regime’s most infamous torturers. In 2015, he told a Brazilian congresswoman, “I would not rape you, because you are not worthy of it.” Crowds at Bolsonaro rallies chanted that they would feed dog food to feminists. And, like Trump, Bolsonaro has intense support from his country’s growing population of evangelicals, who appreciate his fervent opposition to abortion and gay rights.
In the Philippines, Duterte didn’t have an economic or corruption crisis to help him delegitimize the political order. But he used fear of drugs to depict the Philippines, in Nicole Curato’s words, as “a nation on the brink of disaster.” Like Bolsonaro, Duterte promised to restore the law and order his country had supposedly enjoyed during its autocratic past. A few months after taking office, he buried the remains of the longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos, with military honors, in Manila’s Cemetery of Heroes.
Also like Bolsonaro, Duterte has threatened violence against women. In 2017, he informed Filipino soldiers that because he had declared martial law on the island of Mindanao, they could each rape up to three women with impunity. In 2018, he told soldiers to shoot female rebels “in the vagina,” because that would render them “useless.”
Duterte’s anti-feminist crusade—like Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s—has also featured the ritualized humiliation of powerful women. When Senator Leila de Lima demanded an investigation into Duterte’s drug war, he vowed to “make her cry.” The government then detained de Lima on drug-trafficking charges and leaked evidence supposedly proving, in Duterte’s words, that she was “screwing her driver” like she was “screwing the nation.” A congressman who would later become Duterte’s spokesman joked that de Lima wanted to be detained at an army base “because there are many men there.” Not even Duterte’s female vice president, Leni Robredo—a member of a rival political party—has escaped his taunts. At a public event in 2016, he noted gleefully that the skirts she wore to cabinet meetings were “shorter than usual.”
One can see parallels in Italy, whose deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, a Steve Bannon ally noted for his authoritarian tendencies, in 2016 compared the female president of the lower house of parliament to an inflated sex doll. The Italian government is promoting a law that critics say would eliminate child support, and a government spokesperson said forthcoming legislation would prosecute women who accuse their husbands of domestic violence if the husbands are not convicted.
Not all of the new authoritarians are this flamboyant. But they all link the new political order they seek to create to a more subordinate and traditional role for women. Orbán, who has accused his predecessors of permitting immigrants and Roma to undermine Hungary’s identity, has proposed “a comprehensive agreement with Hungarian women” to bear more children. He promotes debt-free education for women, but only if they have at least three children.
For its part, Poland’s autocratic government has run ads urging Poles to “breed like rabbits” and banned over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill. In late 2017, after Polish women protested draconian new restrictions on abortion, the government raided the offices of women’s groups.
For women’s-rights advocates, these sexist authoritarians pose a conundrum. Defeating them requires empowering women. Yet the more empowered women become, the more right-wing autocrats depict that empowerment as an assault on the natural political order. It’s no coincidence that Bolsonaro and Duterte are fervent critics of female former presidents, or that women were among Duterte’s and Trump’s principal opponents. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations inspired women protesters to fill the U.S. Senate. Yet images of women yelling at male senators probably helped Republicans keep the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections. Assisted by the record number of Democratic women elected this fall, Nancy Pelosi will likely become speaker of the House again this January. But Pelosi herself has long been a convenient target for Republicans made anxious by the specter of feminist power.
Over the long term, defeating the new authoritarians requires more than empowering women politically. It requires normalizing their empowerment so autocrats can’t turn women leaders and protesters into symbols of political perversity. And that requires confronting the underlying reason many men—and some women—view women’s political power as unnatural: because it subverts the hierarchy they see in the home.
“The first [gender] difference that individuals notice,” Valerie Hudson told me, “is the difference between sexes in one’s own home. That establishes the first political order, the nature of how things should be in the country.” It is no surprise, therefore, that authoritarians often succeed when women—especially feminist women—threaten male dominance of public life in countries where men still reign in private.
Compare the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland with the countries of northern Europe, where women’s political power has become more normal. In 2017, women made up 48 percent of Iceland’s parliament. In Sweden, the share was 44 percent; in Finland, 42 percent; and in Norway, 40 percent. In the countries that have recently elected gender-backlash authoritarians, the rates are lower, ranging from Italy’s 31 percent to Hungary’s 10 percent. This doesn’t mean a Nordic Orbán or Bolsonaro is impossible: Northern Europe has its own far-right parties. But it’s harder for those parties to use gender to delegitimize the existing political order, because women’s political empowerment no longer appears illegitimate.
It no longer appears illegitimate, in large measure, because gender equality has become more normalized in the home. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published the amount of time per day that women and men spent doing unpaid household chores such as cleaning, shopping, and child care. If you calculate the gender gap in each country, a pattern emerges. There is a striking correlation between countries where women and men behave more equally in the home and countries where women are more equally represented in government. Take Sweden, 44 percent of whose parliamentarians are women. There, the gap between the amount of housework done by men and that done by women is less than an hour a day. In the U.S., where women will soon make up roughly 23 percent of Congress, the housework gender gap is an hour and a half. In Hungary, where women account for 10 percent of parliament, it is well over two hours.
Women looking to unseat Trump or Bolsonaro in the next election may find little comfort in the Nordic example. Family dynamics change not year by year, but generation by generation. Nonetheless, the new authoritarianism underscores the importance of an old feminist mantra: The personal is political. Foster women’s equality in the home, and you may save democracy itself.
This article appears in the January/February 2019 print edition with the headline “The Global Backlash Against Women.”
Long-stalled legislation on sentencing reform may squeeze through Congress in the last few weeks of this session. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced on Tuesday that the Senate will take up the FIRST STEP Act, which would create some flexibility around sentencing and release for certain inmates held in federal prisons. President Donald Trump has been a major backer of the bill—“Go for it Mitch!” he tweeted on Friday. Successful legislation would be a major bipartisan victory for the White House.
Along the way, one group in particular has been pushing for passage of these reforms: Trump’s circle of evangelical advisers, who helped inspire the bill. White, conservative Christian leaders are now in a position to help deliver a bipartisan compromise that could soften thousands of people’s sentences, largely those for drug-related offenses. Their African American and liberal counterparts, meanwhile, have felt conflicted about collaborating with the administration, even on a topic they care about deeply.
This wonkish sentencing-reform legislation has become a case study in the tensions among Christians in the Trump era. While religious leaders on both sides of the political spectrum care about this issue, they fundamentally disagree on whether to boycott or cooperate with this administration, and whether incremental victories on racialized issues will actually further the mission of the Church in the long term.
[Read: Mitch McConnell appears to be killing bipartisan sentencing reform.]
From time to time, the president invites a close group of influential Christian leaders to dine with him in the White House. These gatherings mostly offer a chance for selfies and mutual adoration. But they also give pastors the chance to float ideas past the president. The beginnings of the FIRST STEP Act came about during a conversation at one such dinner, according to Religion News Service. Jentezen Franklin, a Georgia megachurch pastor, told me that Trump’s advisers started talking to him about this issue before he was even elected.
A bill incorporating some of these ideas was introduced in May 2018. But even with resoundingly positive support in the House—it passed by a vote of 360–59—it lost momentum in the Senate, and appeared to be dead. Major Republican losses in the November election made the prospect of passage seem even dimmer in the next Congress.
So prominent evangelical leaders began agitating for the bill to get a second life. Franklin told me he recently held a call with pastors in Kentucky, asking them to reach out to McConnell about the importance of this bill. Ralph Reed, a Christian political operative, tweeted his support for the legislation, winning a “second” from Jack Graham, an influential conservative megachurch pastor in Texas. The president shared an op-ed praising the bill from Paula White, a Florida megachurch pastor, on Facebook. “We can’t forget the debt that offenders owe society,” she wrote, “but, with Christian love in our hearts, we can provide the tools they need to work towards their own redemption.”
At least on the surface, it’s not intuitive that conservative evangelicals would be champions of criminal-justice reform. But the evangelical movement has a long history with prison reform, said Aaron Griffith, a postdoctoral research associate at Washington University in St. Louis. In the late-18th and early-19th centuries, evangelical reformers agitated for more humane criminal punishments and helped construct penitentiaries in places such as New York and Pennsylvania. In the 20th century, prison ministries became a popular method of evangelization.
[Read: How Trump is remaking evangelicalism]
During the peak years of the religious right, the face of this kind of outreach was Chuck Colson, a former Nixon-administration official who went to prison in association with the Watergate scandal. After a dramatic conversion to Christianity, Colson created the Prison Fellowship, an influential ministry for prisoners and their families that advocates for criminal-justice reform.
Colson made “criminal-justice issues safe for evangelical conservatives,” Griffith said. He readily admitted the flaws in the Nixon-era appeals to law and order, which laid a foundation for the mass incarceration of low-level drug offenders. But he made this critique in conservative terms. “He’s talking about prisons and the … carceral state as a problem with big government,” Griffith said. “He’s saying there is no bigger government entity than this complex, bureaucratic mess.”
Conservative religious leaders like Colson saw prisoners as a natural audience for outreach ministries “because prisons are theoretically supposed to be spaces of personal transformation,” Griffith said. An opportunity to help people remake their life fits neatly into the idiom of evangelicalism, which is focused on personal salvation. This logic has been clear in evangelical leaders’ recent calls for Congress to act on the FIRST STEP Act: Reed called it “a first step to a redemptive justice system.”
[Read: Trump’s evangelical allies really didn’t like Jeff Sessions.]
Other Christian clergy have been wary of Trump’s push for reform, however. They are skeptical that working with the president on anything, even an issue they care about, will be helpful to the people they serve. In August, Trump hosted a meeting of “inner-city pastors”—mostly black leaders from charismatic or Pentecostal-leaning churches—to talk about criminal-justice issues. “I went because I believe I was sent,” said John Gray, a South Carolina pastor, on CNN. “Alignment, or even speaking, does not mean agreement. Dialogue does not mean agreement. Sitting at the table does not mean agreement.”
Many prominent black clergy disagreed. The meeting prompted an immediate backlash, including a letter of condemnation signed by a range of denominational leaders. “It was unsettling and upsetting to witness the meeting with you, our moral leaders, and one of the most amoral persons to ever occupy the White House in the name of discussing prison reform,” they wrote.
One of the signatories of that letter, Traci Blackmon, an executive minister for the United Church of Christ (UCC) and the pastor of a UCC church near Ferguson, Missouri, said she is still skeptical about what the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are trying to accomplish with this bill. “This is coming without any analysis, any confession, any acknowledgment of how we got where we are right now,” she said. “The reason that we have such large numbers of … caged people is not rooted in crime. It’s rooted in hate.”
This seems to be the greatest source of progressive clergy’s skepticism about the proposed reforms: They don’t believe the president is committed to fighting the deeper structural problems that have led the United States to have the highest incarceration rate in the world, including racist policing and rhetoric that demonizes black men.
“I would say that you have to be extremely cautious [of] the way that an administration that is actively driven by white nationalism is using [this] issue,” said Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a North Carolina evangelical pastor who works with the Reverend William Barber on the Poor People’s Campaign. “I don’t think it can be a kind of photo op that people show up for, and celebrate, in a way that doesn’t address the much broader issues that aren’t included in an act like that.”
The bill is limited in what it aims to accomplish. It only applies to the federal prison system, which accounts for less than 10 percent of incarcerated people in the United States. Among that population, only a fraction would be affected by this legislation: It offers relief to people convicted of harsh crack-related sentences prior to 2010, curbs certain mandatory minimum sentences, and offers expanded early-release opportunities for good behavior. The bill also formalizes a Bureau of Prisons policy that all but bans the use of restraints on pregnant women.
The legislation has united some religious figures who have been critical of the president. Russell Moore, the head of the political arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, has advocated the bill’s passage for months, and the progressive evangelical leader Jim Wallis has written of his support. Despite his objections to the president, even Wilson-Hartgrove said he would be glad to see the bill passed.
But Blackmon said she does not support even this incremental legislation. Ultimately, she said, it matters that the mostly white, conservative Christian figures who have pushed for it are not embedded in the communities most affected by America’s criminal-justice system. Even the handful of black leaders involved are not credible, she said: “Don’t buy in to the illusion that because someone with black skin is in the room, the needs of the black community are in the room.”
If the FIRST STEP Act makes it through the Senate—which is definitely not guaranteed amid a packed end-of-year docket—it will ratify the influence of Trump’s evangelical leaders. Their victory would also ratify the bet they have made: It’s worth it to take meetings with the president and support his policies, they argue. Their power and influence can produce real change.
In a different political era, this effort might have also signaled the rise of a new kind of evangelical political coalition, one that’s not exclusively focused on culture-war issues and that expends political capital in contentious policy areas such as criminal-justice reform. “So many times, evangelicals are known for what they’re against. They’re against abortion; they’re against gay marriage,” Franklin said. “We also are just as much for justice.”
But under Trump, even bipartisan consensus is fraught with division, and this is especially true within American Christianity. Where some clergy see an opportunity to work with the president to produce good, others feel morally bound to stay away.
As he readies his escape from the wreckage wrought by the blue wave, Paul Ryan is patting himself on the back for a job well done. During an exit interview on November 30, the lame-duck House speaker and Republican leader declared: “I’d say we became a pretty good governing party … I think history is going to be very good to this majority.”
His self-assessment is not universally shared. The ex-Republican strategist Steve Schmidt, who rarely minces words, likely spoke for many when he shared this perspective last April, on the day Ryan announced that he would bail in December: “Paul Ryan’s monument will be the putrid and smoldering ruins of the Republican Party and conservative movement that he betrayed with his complicity and cowardice. He lacked the guts to stand for decency and the wisdom to confront the threat of Trumpism.”
Ryan himself concedes that his farewell tour—a public-service award, the unveiling of a portrait in the House—has been bittersweet. An avowed budget-deficit hawk over the span of his 20-year career (“We owe the American people a responsible balanced budget,” he said in 2013), he’s now expressing “regret” that the budget deficit will balloon to $1 trillion a year by 2020, thanks largely to the massive tax-cut law he championed with President Donald Trump.
[Read: Born a decade too late]
An avowed supporter of immigration reform, especially for immigrants brought to America as children (in January 2017, he told a “Dreamer”: “If you’re worried about some deportation force knocking on your door this year, don’t worry about that”), he stood by while Trump ended protections for Dreamers and cracked down on immigrants via executive actions. And even with one foot out the door, Ryan is indulging Trump’s obsession with a border wall (as are 63 percent of grassroots Republicans), telling The Washington Post that Trump “thinks the issue of border security is a winner … Look, I just see it as the right thing to do.”
And the avowed critic of Trump (whom he declined to endorse until the virtual eve of the 2016 GOP convention) has spent most of the past two years in rhetorical lockdown. He has refused to rebuke the divisive tweets and comments that have alienated swing voters and suburban Republicans, as vividly evidenced by the midterm results. Ryan’s brand of conservatism—inspired by, among others, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp—was meant to be upbeat and aspirational, not racist and nativist. But he held his tongue and forged one of the strangest bedfellow pacts in political history (his own confidants reportedly called it “Paul’s deal with the devil”), fueled by the tantalizing opportunity of all-Republican rule.
[Read: The man who killed Republican reform]
The result of this Faustian bargain was that Ryan became willfully oblivious about the president’s relentless pronouncements on Twitter. Indeed, he confessed his strategy at the comedic Al Smith dinner in October 2017: “Every morning, I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets that I’ll have to pretend that I did not see later on.” That wink at the audience was played for laughs, but it confirmed that Ryan was fully aware of his role as aider and abettor.
Granted, Ryan was trapped by political circumstances beyond his control. He didn’t foresee or endorse Trump’s populist uprising; he would’ve preferred virtually anyone else in the White House. At one point, during the 2016 campaign, he even called one Trump tweet “a textbook definition of a racist comment.” But as speaker, he ultimately had to bend to the will of Republican voters. Working with Trump was a practical necessity.
But marching in lockstep and turning a blind eye were his choices. Congress was designed to hold the executive branch accountable, and what most infuriates Ryan’s critics is his failure to provide even a modicum of oversight—particularly in the realm of intelligence. Most notably, Ryan refused to rein in Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who evinced little interest in probing links between the Trump team and Russia. (Last summer, in fact, Nunes told a fund-raising audience that if Special Counsel Robert Mueller won’t clear the president, “we’re the only ones.”)
[Read: Paul Ryan makes his exit.]
Ryan, in his own defense, saw his role as mitigating damage. He suggested, in a summer 2018 interview, that Trump could’ve been worse if he hadn’t been in the room: “I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, ‘I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy. I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal.’” When asked to specify a tragedy, he replied: “No, I don’t want to do that.”
His detractors don’t buy his defense. Norman Ornstein, the nonpartisan Washington analyst who has tracked Congress since the 1970s, tells me that Ryan’s “encouragement and protection of Devin Nunes as he tried mightily to sabotage the Russia investigation is a serious black mark”—but that his accountability deficit is far deeper: “Under his aegis, there was no oversight either of corruption or misdeeds by Trump, his family, his staff and his Cabinet … no hearings on the Puerto Rico hurricane disaster, child separation, budget cuts to the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] leaving us more vulnerable to pandemics, or any other examples of failures in governance. And his biggest legacy will be the ballooning debt burden that will make it difficult to get us out of the next recession, and will be a burden for the country for many decades.”
In recent days, he has also declined to hold his fellow Republicans in Wisconsin accountable. His friend Scott Walker lost his bid for a third gubernatorial term, but legislative Republicans in Ryan’s home state have spurned the peaceful transfer of power. Last week, in a lame-duck session, they passed measures to hamper the powers of the incoming Democratic governor—an unprecedented move that prompted Sheldon Lubar, a prominent Republican businessman and donor, to point out that the power curb “ignores the will of the majority of Wisconsin voters.” Ryan has yet to utter a word; a spokesman told the press last week, “I don’t have anything for you.”
It was clear, when Ryan announced his retirement back in April, that he foresaw a day of reckoning. The blue wave was building, fueled by a grassroots thirst for checks and balances; Trump’s baggage would clearly be on the ballot; and some of Ryan’s most cherished dreams—cutting Social Security and Medicare entitlements, repealing and replacing Obamacare—were destined to die. So he did what politicians often do in dire circumstances: He simply declared victory. He lauded what he saw as his signature achievement as speaker, a “major reform of the tax code for the first time in 36 years, which has already had a huge success for this country.”
Fiscal experts have long pointed out that tilting tax cuts to the highest earners and flooding new red ink on the budget ledger do not constitute “a huge success.” But even now, in the waning days of his tenure, Ryan is still touting the tax-cut law, insisting that it was a great issue on the midterm-campaign trail. The polls said otherwise; Gallup reported in October that only 39 percent of Americans supported the law, and Republicans scaled back their ads about it. Nevertheless, on November 30, when the Post asked Ryan why the law didn’t sell well during the midterms, he replied: “It actually did, in many ways. We pushed it hard from the House … When we had the opportunity to talk about [it], it was spectacular … Good story to tell.”
It is merely a story he tells himself—just as his claim that House Republicans were “a pretty good governing party” is a story he tells himself. In truth, he leaves Congress after his Republican brethren were drowned in the biggest blue wave since 1974. He leaves Congress with his conservative ideals in tatters. He leaves Congress having consoled himself, as he remarked on December 3, “that in a democracy, sometimes you fall short.”
There’s no greater evidence of the passage of time than the Republican Party’s autopsy report on its failed 2012 election cycle. “By the year 2050 we’ll be a majority-minority country and in both 2008 and 2012 President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority groups,” former Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus said at a 2013 press conference announcing the report.
The document itself essentially admits both to the fact that the Republican Party was a party of white men, and that the only way to compete would be to neutralize the “demographic destiny” of Democrats, embracing immigration reform and becoming a true multiracial and multiethnic “big tent.” It’s a strikingly candid report. It reads like speculative fiction today.
But around the same time, darker clouds appeared on the horizon. The RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote an influential series on “missing white voters” rebutting the demographic arguments of the GOP report, saying that Republicans could still build a reliable coalition solely by picking up more “downscale white voters,” and reversing its movement toward immigration reform.
[Read: Voter suppression is the new old normal]
In 2014, while Republicans deliberated internally over whether to allow an immigration-reform package through the House, a group of pollsters—including the current White House adviser Kellyanne Conway—released findings indicating that an anti-immigration message could serve as a GOP base-builder. These findings became the underpinnings of the strategy that brought President Donald Trump to the White House, while also cementing the GOP as a white man’s party—the party of the minority.
That strategy is newly relevant now, as the Republican Party looks to complete lame-duck-session power grabs in state legislatures in Wisconsin and Michigan, preemptively stripping power away from incoming Democratic governors. Those moves are characterized by Democrats as brazen and unprecedented “coups” by a party that was soundly beaten in the midterms but, through anti-democratic means, has managed to exert undue power.
But those midwestern power grabs are not necessarily shocking or unpredictable. Rather, they are an extension of the underlying strategy that had already been the major organizing principle of the GOP even as Priebus wrote his report. For decades, the Republican Party prepared to keep power even as it represented a coalition that became the minority. Now, the plan is in full effect.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when this became the destiny of the Republican Party. One could go all the way back to when the 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater broke the Democratic stranglehold on the Jim Crow South, picking up Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas on an anti-civil-rights agenda, initiating the proto “southern strategy” and sparking a realignment of white conservatism with the GOP. Or the story could start just a year later, when the Voting Rights Act ushered in the first era of anything resembling true democracy in the country’s history, and also set in motion an anti-voting-rights insurgency in the South.
Closer still, the gerrymandering and geographic polarization that have become so critical to modern Republican plans might not have been possible without the “white flight” in the 1960s and ’70s associated with that conservatism, and with the nascence of white suburban evangelicals as a political force under Ronald Reagan. The deep partisan differences creating unbridgeable policy divides in swing states might not have been so deep without the scorched-earth politics of the 1990s, and the power of technocratic tinkering at the margins of elections and voting rights might not have been so apparent without the infamous presidential election in Florida in 2000.
[Adam Serwer: America’s problem isn’t tribalism—it’s racism]
Even nearer to the modern moment, perhaps Wisconsin and Michigan are the end results of a chain of events that only became inevitable with the dawn of technologically sophisticated GOP redistricting campaigns in 2000 and 2010, with the reality-warping corporate bonanza of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, or with 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder, which defanged federal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act.
Any one of these moments could be a viable starting point for assessing just what happened in the 2018 election, when Republicans lost the popular-vote margins at just about every level of politics, but still managed to limit Democratic power in some meaningful ways. There’s Wisconsin, where—relying on surging turnout across the board, and a spike in black and Latino voters—the Democratic challenger Tony Evers defeated the GOP incumbent Scott Walker to claim the governor’s mansion. Republican state legislators moved quickly to handcuff Evers’s office.
After the Republican Robin Vos, the speaker of the Wisconsin Statehouse, said that “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority,” the legislature moved to limit the governor’s power to administer the government or be involved in lawsuits without legislative approval. Evers is reportedly not confident that direct pressure on Walker will convince the outgoing governor to veto the lame-duck bills, although Democrats in the state have threatened litigation of their own.
As my colleague Russell Berman reports, Michigan is on a similar path as Wisconsin. “The Michigan GOP proposals did not go as far and were not moving quite as fast as those in Wisconsin,” Berman writes, “but they would similarly shift power to intervene in litigation from the governor’s and attorney general’s offices to the legislature, where Republicans maintain a majority.”
Both of these legislative power plays appear to take inspiration from North Carolina, where in 2016 the state legislature moved to sharply curtail the governor’s power to make appointments and exert control over elections law after the Democratic candidate, Roy Cooper, won the election.
That Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina have even reached this point is a reflection on their status as true battleground states, where nothing short of a war over the very shape of American democracy has been waged for the last two decades. All three have been critical states in field-testing tactics that can preserve Republican advantages, even as their tent grows smaller and smaller.
Perhaps chief among those strategies has been political redistricting, and Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Michigan have been bound to one another over the past few years by an intense national battle over racial and political gerrymandering. With the help of the GOP’s REDMAP project in 2010, a wave election for Republicans was converted into unprecedented control over the decennial redistricting process.
[Read: Climate change is already damaging American democracy ]
The maps drawn by Republican majorities in politically competitive states preserved clear advantages for the GOP, often through mechanisms that federal courts found purposefully diluted the votes of people of color and thus violated the Voting Rights Act. Courts were active in striking down those racial gerrymanders in state legislative and congressional maps. But when it came to parties pursuing naked advantages by targeting voters by their parties instead, the Supreme Court demurred on so-called partisan gerrymanders in North Carolina and Wisconsin, although the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did block a partisan gerrymander from Republicans there.
In Michigan, where a ballot initiative that would replace the current partisan redistricting process with an independent commission passed with 61 percent of the votes in November, a new federal lawsuit alleging that Republicans created a “durable partisan gerrymander” for several elections will proceed to trial soon.
The results of such gerrymanders appear undeniable. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, and North Carolina, Democrats won 54, 53, and 51 percent of the overall votes for state houses of representatives, respectively, but only picked up 45, 47, and 45 percent of the seats. In Wisconsin, the situation is perhaps even more extreme. Evers won by 1 percent of the popular vote, but only won in 36 of the state’s 99 legislative assembly districts. Assuming that a preference for Evers roughly correlates with a Democratic voter, it means that the shape of the assembly districts confers at least a 20-seat majority to Republicans in the legislature alone. Republicans won a 27-seat majority this fall.
Gerrymandering is not the only thing at work here. Those who downplay the importance of gerrymandering point to the “big sort” hypothesis promoted by the journalist Bill Bishop in his eponymous 2008 book. As that theory goes, increased spatial “self-sorting” over time between liberal and conservative voters has created widening geographic boundaries between Republicans and Democrats, boundaries that necessitate gerrymanders and lock most of the Democratic voting strength in a few districts in every state.
But it’s possible that much of what is believed to be self-sorting could be a mirage, and could be shaped by discrimination and housing segregation. As Richard Rothstein, the author of The Color of Law, told Slate in 2017: “Racial polarization partly contributed to Donald Trump’s victory and it is attributable to residential segregation.” That is to say: In the end, it comes back to race.
That’s a key point when considering what it takes to build a party that is now de facto based on a single racial identity. With the hopes of a robust interracial coalition all but abandoned, ensuring political advantage must necessarily entail securing racial advantages, too. That means benefiting from voter suppression, and implementing voter-ID policies and other voting laws that “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision,” as a federal judge once said about North Carolina’s voter-ID law. It means chasing the specter of “voter fraud,” and embracing a national strategy that in just about every case decreases the size of the electorate.
The Constitution and the Founding Fathers intended for anti-democratic institutions to counterbalance the will of the majority—with the subtext being that those anti-democratic institutions also protected racial dominion and the rights of slaveholders. Winning with a narrowing voter base of white conservatives means embracing and expanding those institutions, and often to the same effect.
[Read: The Republicans’ midwest ‘power grab’]
It’s unclear how viable this iteration of the GOP grand strategy is. The “blue wave” of 2018 also served as a reminder of the contemporary popular wisdom that high-turnout elections favor Democrats, and provided evidence of significant mobilizations of low-turnout populations in some states. There’s even evidence that the drumbeat of allegations of voter suppression and ballot discrepancies in places like Georgia can motivate voters of color to turn out at higher rates. In all, it would seem there’s something of a hard limit to how small and homogenous of a voting base the GOP can put together and still hope to hold the islands of power at key positions in swing states that have held up its policy-making dominance for the past two decades.
But, as Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina show, power is not easily conceded, and the stakes aren’t likely to get lower in the future. If the Republican Party is in a long retreat—and that’s far from certain—the withdrawal will likely be scorched-earth.
“I was jealous. Your beauty, your bravery, your motherhood. You seemed to surpass me in every way.”
That’s Elizabeth I, queen of England, meeting her cousin Mary I for the first and only time, in one of the climactic moments of the new movie Mary Queen of Scots. The scene is a strange one for several reasons, the first being its fanciful fabrication—the two queens, in reality, never met in person—but another being the film’s use of the imagined meeting as a chance to flip its own script. Mary, her throne and her life in jeopardy after one of the schemes against her finally proved effective, is asking her cousin for protection; she is begging for her life. And yet it is Elizabeth, in this scene as in so many others in the movie, who is presented as pitiable. The English monarch has a massive army and extensive political power, yes, but Mary is prettier. And Mary is a mother. And so: You seemed to surpass me in every way.
Mary Queen of Scots sells itself as an explicitly feminist film, grafting a 21st-century sensibility onto a 16th-century story. It features Mary uttering lines like “Many times you have said I cannot do what I have done.” It presents several scenes of the eponymous queen clad in armor, straddling a steed, leading her troops into battle. A little bit Brave, a little bit Braveheart: the red-haired Scot, tall and proud and inherently regal, carried through by her own steely strength. “BOW TO NO ONE,” the movie’s poster puts it.
Elizabeth, however, proves a complication to this historically flexible feminism. And she does that precisely through the confession she makes—of her own alleged inadequacy—to her fellow queen: your motherhood. Mary Queen of Scots is most immediately a political drama, loosely based on true events; on another level, though—a far more unsettling level—it is a film about pregnancy, and the way the fickle workings of human bodies can bend the course of history. Would either queen marry? Would either bear a child? You could read the film’s abiding interest in those questions as an empathetic exploration of the paradox that both queens, in life, really did navigate: Marry, and potentially gain an heir—but also risk being usurped by your husband; or remain single, avoiding the risk of usurpation … but ensuring the death of your dynasty. The personal is political, rendered in the most intimate, and consequential, of ways.
That reading, though, would be generous. What makes Mary Queen of Scots remarkable, as a specimen of the 21st century, is the moral judgment it layers onto the procreative demands of monarchy. Mary, the historical figure, married and had a child; Elizabeth, the historical figure, did neither. The film takes those blunt facts and finds pliant meaning in them, determining that each choice reveals something holistically true about who the queens were, as people. Historical accounts of Mary’s personality, given the weaponized rumors that swirled around her reign, conflict; here, though, Mary, who chose marriage and motherhood, is presented as warm and kind and nurturing and sexual and, above all, feminine. Elizabeth, meanwhile, the virgin queen? “I am more man than woman now,” she tells her cousin. “This world has made me so.”
In that sense, Mary Queen of Scots does deliver on its promise of modernity: It manages to tap into ongoing anxieties that lurk, still, just below the cheerful surface of things, around pregnancy and fertility and motherhood. Here is a movie that assumes its characters’ maternal status to be a reflection of their personalities, their political fitness, their overall characters—a movie that suggests, based on a loose reading of history, that motherhood is implicitly feminine and its absence is implicitly not. The film’s fusty castles echo with whispers of the ways the American culture of the current moment, so proud of its progress, comes to similar conclusions: The woman who is a mother is to be congratulated; the woman who is not is to be pitied.
At roughly the same time that Mary Queen of Scots began screening in theaters, the Slate podcast Decoder Ring released an episode exploring the phenomenon of “Sad Jen”: a tale, told in the tabloids but also in American pop culture more broadly, of the ongoing struggles of Jennifer Aniston. The sadness of Sad Jen, the story goes, is made manifest not in her long and successful career—there is very little tragedy to be mined in that—but rather in the quiet spaces of her personal life. Sad Jen is sad, the storytellers have concluded, because of Brad—and specifically because of Pitt’s relationship with Angelina Jolie, who would become a mother to six children. It wasn’t just the jilting that made Sad Jen sad, the tabloids’ tale went; it was the fact that, in his departure, Brad had robbed her of motherhood itself.
#TeamAniston, #TeamJolie, all the assumed animosities, all the manufactured jealousies: Add some corsets, and the whole thing looks a lot like the romanticized rivalry between Mary and Elizabeth. Here is the childless woman, her sadness assumed and insisted upon, her situation treated as a reason for sympathy but also as a cautionary tale. That Aniston has said, repeatedly, that her purported sadness is untrue—“We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child,” she wrote in an essay in 2016—has made no difference. Her protestations, in fact, have only fueled the myth: Poor Jen is so sad that she can’t even recognize her own sadness. (How sad.)
Sad Jen, as the meme’s subject knows all too well, is a stubborn tautology: The idea perseveres, Slate’s Willa Paskin posits in Decoder Ring, because readers, in fact, want Jen to be sad. They are invested in the maternal status of Jennifer Aniston because pregnancy, still, remains laden with symbolism and, with it, expectation. Aniston is powerful and rich and privileged in pretty much every way a person can be (her fame has been deemed so expansive, apparently, that she has been asked to serve as a spokesperson for water itself); the logic of Sad Jen, however, cares very little about any of that. It cares only about pregnancy. It treats her childlessness less as a choice she has made for herself—an option made available to her by technological advancement and political progress and the hard work of those who have insisted that bodily autonomy is the foundation of other kinds of freedom—and more as a loss that has been inflicted upon her. Potential, squandered. Darwin, snubbed. Femininity, unfulfilled. Sad.
Mary Queen of Scots, the plucky prestige drama, ends up amplifying those ideas: Its Elizabeth functions in large part as an avatar of maternal absence. Just after Mary gives birth to James—the son who would go on to inherit the thrones of both Scotland and England—the camera lingers on the Scottish queen, spent but proud, blood splattered before her splayed legs; the scene then cuts to Elizabeth, in her own cold court, her legs angled in a similar fashion, a craft project—flowers, folded of crimson paper—spread out between them. Empty artistry, the movie suggests, where a child might have been. At another point, Elizabeth sees a newborn foal, teetering on its spindly legs. She glances at her shadow on the ground. She billows her gown to give the shadow a swollen midsection. She gazes in quiet wonderment: the shape, once again, of things that will never be.
There’s so much more in this vein. Mary, empowered by motherhood; Elizabeth, lessened by its absence. The message is unmistakable and cutting. Mary Queen of Scots, over the course of its run time, portrays a beheading and a disemboweling and a strangulation and myriad other acts of gory violence; there was only one moment of the movie, however, that, in my screening, drew a gasp of horrified indignation from the audience. It was when Mary, speaking of Elizabeth, delivered this line: “I shall be the woman she is not. I shall produce an heir, unlike her barren self.”
It is worth asking why barren remains such a shocking rebuke. It is worth wondering why the phrase childless woman is considered, still, to have an aura of sadness, and why the phrase childless man barely exists at all. Earlier this year, the writer Glynnis MacNicol published a memoir, No One Tells You This, about the freedoms of being over 40, single, and childless. Some of the reviews of the book struck a subtly skeptical tone: She couldn’t really be happy. Won’t she regret it later? As MacNicol told The Washington Post: “We don’t understand how to talk about women’s lives as fulfilling unless we incorporate babies or weddings. [There are] no stories about women over the age of 40, really, where they aren’t primarily accessories in their own lives or support systems.”
That is changing. But it is changing very slowly. One of the shifts is coming from efforts, in pop culture and beyond, to emphasize motherhood as something that is, for all its wonders and joys, also a matter of practicality. Kate Pearson’s story line in the just-concluded third season of This Is Us—she and her husband, Toby, struggled with fertility, finally deciding to try IVF—treated pregnancy not as a soft miracle, but as a medical reality. Michelle Obama’s recently released memoir, Becoming, highlights similar struggles that the former first lady and her husband overcame: a revelation that will very likely help to eradicate long-standing taboos around discussions of fertility. Recent works of pop culture—Jane the Virgin, Better Things, I Feel Bad, Ali Wong’s Hard Knock Wife, and many others—have also found mordant humor in the quotidian challenges of parenting, demystifying both its hardships and its rewards. (The central incident referenced in the title of the Amazon show Catastrophe is, yep, an unplanned pregnancy.) And Hollywood has been newly illuminating the pitfalls of treating women as the sum of their reproductive capacities: There’s a reason The Handmaid’s Tale, the fiction of uncanny dystopia, has struck such a powerful cultural nerve.
But there the tabloids remain, fascinated with—capitalizing on—the pregnant bodies of famous women. Us Weekly, one of the more dignified of the group, features a collection, “bump watch,” whose sole purpose is the stalking and sharing of celebrity midriffs. (“Pregnant Emily Blunt, Chrissy Teigen, and Other Pregnant Stars Bring Bumps to Oscars,” the magazine reported a couple of years ago, treating the bumps in question as, effectively, fashion accessories.) A Google search for “meghan markle baby bump”—the Duchess of Sussex announced her pregnancy less than two months ago—currently yields 51,600,000 results. One of them is a slideshow from Hello! magazine, inviting viewers to “See How Meghan Markle’s Baby Bump Has Grown.”
The Da Vinci Code, in its own work of feminist revisionism, posited that the Holy Grail is in fact the preserved body of Mary Magdalene—specifically, her uterus, the chalice of legend made manifest. The womanly body, as a vessel waiting to be filled, as something by turns accommodating and incomplete—as something that, on some level, belongs to everyone: It’s an idea that carries on, in its way, in every supermarket tabloid that invites readers to join in its easy voyeurisms, and in every published picture of Meghan Markle’s midsection, and in every moment that finds a stranger touching a pregnant woman’s belly without her permission. It’s a notion that remains alive, as well, from the other side of things, every time a magazine or a sitcom or an Oscar-fodder historical drama sees a woman who is childless and assumes that she must be, fundamentally, Sad.
The other day, in the checkout aisle, I happened to see the latest issue of Star magazine. “Brad & Jen,” its cover lines went: “MEET OUR BABY!” The cover featured a copy of a sonogram, and a perfunctory picture of Pitt, and a quote: “‘We never gave up hope.’” Its focus, however, was a picture of Jennifer Aniston, clad in a dark dress with an A-line skirt, her right hand on her hip, her left hand grazing her stomach. In the photo the editors had selected to announce her alleged pregnancy on her behalf, Sad Jen looked, finally, Happy. She also looked unmistakably triumphant.
Live from the Oval Office, President Donald Trump sparred with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Tuesday as Vice President Mike Pence stared into the middle distance. Although the subject at hand was the border wall, the headlines were all about aggressive body language and raised voices. It was an extraordinary event—a public tussle in a setting associated with decorum. But the conversion of the Oval Office into a soundstage was long in the making.
Decades ago, Newt Gingrich divined that chaos was more telegenic than governing. He set the pattern that led to the spectacle of the most powerful people in politics bickering in full view of cameras.
Gingrich first won election to represent Georgia’s Sixth District in 1978, right as cable news was taking form: C-SPAN went on the air on March 19, 1979, and CNN launched on June 1, 1980. The Georgian was ambitious, and he wanted to stir things up. But he had little interest in committee work or legislation, and the Republican Party—in the minority—had little interest in bomb-throwing. Cable television offered Gingrich a tremendous opportunity. He realized that even though he was junior, he could command the airwaves if he gave the cameras some sizzle.
[Read: Trump’s reality show in the Oval Office]
At the time—and to this day—lawmakers would deliver “special order” speeches after the House had completed its legislative business, often for the purpose of entering items into the official record. C-SPAN filmed these generally dull, non-newsmaking events. Gingrich figured they didn’t have to be dull and non-newsmaking.
On the evening of May 8, 1984, when most legislators had already left Capitol Hill, Gingrich and his colleagues in the caucus he’d formed, the Conservative Opportunity Society, went to work. They co-opted the special-order system to read, one by one, from a lengthy report on foreign policy that criticized Democrats for having pulled back from military spending since Vietnam. The report characterized Democrats as left-wing radicals and naive peaceniks who were putting the nation in danger.
The speeches were pure theater. Other than the handful of people speaking, the House chamber was pretty much empty—but that wasn’t obvious on television. Rules adopted in 1977 stipulated that cameras could focus only on the upper body of the person delivering a speech (to avoid embarrassing members who might be caught picking their nose or schmoozing). Viewers on C-SPAN believed that Democrats had no response to the charges.
Initially, Democrats dismissed the stunt as amateurish and ineffective. Indeed, Speaker Tip O’Neill, the old-school Democrat from Massachusetts, believed that Gingrich and his followers would only help Democrats by exposing the lowness of the GOP. The entire operation was a “sham,” he said.
[Read: Congresswoman, interrupted]
But Gingrich kept it up, night after night, focusing on the hot-button issue of Nicaragua and the Democrats’ move to limit the Reagan administration’s assistance to the anti-leftist Contras. When Gingrich and his comrade Robert Walker went after Representative Eddie Boland, the author of the Nicaragua amendments, O’Neill lost his cool. “The camera focused on Gingrich, and anybody watching at home would have thought that Eddie was sitting there, listening to all of this,” O’Neill recalled. The speaker was so mad that he violated the rules of the House by instructing the cameraman to pan to the empty chamber so that viewers could see that this was all a ruse.
On May 15, regular order totally broke down when O’Neill dropped his gavel, handed control of the chamber to Representative Joe Moakley, and walked down to the podium. With his face blistering red, O’Neill asked: “Will the gentleman yield?” Gingrich finally stopped speaking. O’Neill then reprimanded him: “You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.”
Gingrich was absolutely thrilled. O’Neill had taken the bait. That was the point: to create conflict. The Republican Trent Lott demanded that O’Neill’s comments be struck from the Congressional Record since rules prohibited personal attacks. The parliamentarian William Brown agreed with Lott, and Moakley was forced to order that his leader’s words be removed from the record and issued a rebuke. O’Neill “looked back at me and just shook his head,” Moakley later said. “Boy, he could have killed me.”
O’Neill was humiliated; he was the first speaker to be rebuked for his remarks since 1798. But Republicans didn’t stop there. They launched a full-scale attack on O’Neill, depicting him as a ruthless autocrat. His actions damaged “the House as an institution,” complained the normally low-key Republican Representative Dick Cheney.
[Read: The man who broke politics]
While the entire televised fight hurt working relations among Democrats and Republican, it made for great television. Gingrich, who bragged that he was “famous” after what the press called “Camscam,” explained to reporters that the “No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights.” He said that “when you give them confrontations, you get attention.” Even Brian Lamb, the reserved founder of C-SPAN, admitted that “we’ve never had any more visibility than this … It’s been on the front pages of every newspaper in this country.”
The Camscam episode was but one example of how Gingrich mastered the medium of cable television early on; he understood, instinctively, that chaos plays better in front of the cameras than order. The serious business of government, negotiating agreements and passing legislation, makes for boring stories. Good old-fashioned fights, verbal or otherwise, attract eyeballs.
President Trump lives—and thrives—in the world Gingrich made. But there’s a difference between getting attention and solving problems, and politicians who are good at getting attention are not necessarily good at solving problems. Gingrich certainly was not. Trump, who boasted on Wednesday that he would be “proud to shut down the government,” isn’t either.
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